Future of Work Session Two: Clarifying Conflicts
October 6, 2026
Future of Work Session Two: Clarifying Conflicts
October 6, 2026
There is much to learn from the September 3rd Future of Work Webinar hosted by the Economic and Workforce Development division of Pasadena City College (PCC EWD). This panel of thoughtful, articulate professionals was forthright in sharing their biggest headaches and most pressing concerns about the ongoing rebuild and recovery effort after the 2025 LA wildfires.
Each of the four panelists brought a unique perspective on how they and their agencies have experienced the challenges of the reconstruction process. And those challenges are notable and concerning. They are:
Carolina Romo, Director, Construction & Asset Management Division, Los Angeles County Development Authority (LACDA),
Erica Alexis, Founder & CEO, Bridgeline Development and Construction;
Ben Garcia, Executive Director, LA/OC Apprenticeship Readiness Fund,
An Overarching Theme: “Not Enough … “
Even after 18 months of dedicated attention to the rebuild and recovery process, the vast majority of the work needed to repair the Altadena and Eaton fire-affected communities remains undone. Despite everyone’s best efforts, many barriers are now emerging from the proverbial smoke; understanding and addressing them quickly and effectively will move the entire recovery process forward faster.
These gaps are not surprising:
- Money – Several different financial support streams were triggered when the flames erupted. Homeowner, renter, commercial, business, and other insurance forms came immediately into play. Non-profit resources, community-based programs, and State-designated disaster funds became available. Federal resources also arrived, filling the community pot enough to start the recovery process. After a year and a half, however, those resources are dwindling significantly well before the need for them is eliminated.
- Communication – The cacophony of voices is, apparently, overwhelming. Each individual person – business or home owner, real estate developer, public agency, etc. – has an equally individual perspective on what and how things should be done. It’s been difficult to move toward any true ‘community goal’ because there is no single, defined ‘leader’ organization to coordinate among them.
- Collaboration – From a similar but distinctly different perspective, collaborating for the best outcome is also challenging because there is no universally accepted ‘vision of success’ to unify the recovery participants. Instead, subsectors pursue their particular goal sets without including others, even when those others are clearly relevant to the recovery effort as a whole.
While these challenges continue to interfere with meaningful gains in the current recovery process, they are also informing changes in behaviors and expectations that will be advantageous as the process moves forward.
An Overarching Theme: The “Learn as You Go” Process
That the panelists could articulate these issues so succinctly is a testament to how far they’ve come since they entered this effort. As a group, they identified not just where gaps and failures were happening, but they also offered suggestions as to how to address those types of emergency situations more effectively in the future.
Perhaps the biggest lesson coming from their conversation (on how to address a multi-million-dollar, whole community, all-consuming disaster) is this:
Establish Then Pursue a Recovery Strategy
Two critical, foundational avenues of repair emerged on the first day, according to the panel: Infrastructure and Environment. The environmental damage was overwhelming and posed serious health and safety risks. The loss of infrastructure assets to the fires severely impeded most immediate recovery options. However, even though addressing both concerns was critical, the processes needed to repair one often conflicted with the recovery effort of the other. Having worked their way through the confusion, the panel was emphatic that developing an optimized recovery strategy first was critical, one that included as many responders and trades as possible. Such collaboration would clarify optimal strategies to address these conflicts as early as possible in the pre-recovery process.
The Issue: Clarify Priorities
The initial challenge was determining which crisis to address first: infrastructure failures or environmental threats. It turns out ‘both’ was the answer:
- More than 9,000 structures were destroyed across the 14,000-square-foot fire area, which meant there were more than 9,000 ways to approach the repair process. In some cases, environmental threats were primary and needed remediation before turning attention to infrastructure concerns. In other cases, the opposite was true. The biggest problem was the lack of an overarching view or strategy to determine priorities at each site.
The Issue: Lack of Communication Among Responders
- Without an early expert assessment detailing how each community might benefit from a more strategic, all-encompassing response, homeowners, contractors, agency representatives, etc., were going it alone on a case-by-case basis, which was neither efficient nor economically viable in the long run.
- There was no single, identified entity ‘overseeing’ the unfolding recovery evolution, no person or agency following progress across private and public recovery projects.
- It wasn’t long before the overarching impact of that lack of oversight became apparent: the recovery of the public spaces – parks, schools, commercial sites – was as critical as the rebuild and recovery of privately owned homes and business buildings, yet there was no collaboration among construction teams to determine where overlaps were occurring or, when they did, what to do about them.
This lack of comprehensive oversight may also have inadvertently led to inconsistent remediation of environmental threats (toxins, frailties, etc.) in both private and public locations. And without intentional removal of these concerns, their toxic or hazardous realities may still remain in place in the affected community. The long-term concern is that these hidden or unknown issues will remain a threat to the community and cause even more or worse havoc with or without a future disaster to trigger them.
The Issue: No Agreement on Functional Strategies
Even when there was agreement that environmental elements were a priority, recovery entities struggled to establish a consistent process for addressing those concerns.
- The variety, size, and nature of each individual environmental concern essentially set it apart from all the others. Hillside sites differed distinctly from flatland locations, for example, so distinctions between the two often hampered the remediation progress on both.
- This concern was exacerbated by multiple agencies working within the same systems. One particularly aggravating challenge: of the 11 water utilities in existence within the LA fire footprint, eight were involved in the Eaton fire alone. In some cases, people were trying to navigate the activities of several of those utilities at the same time.
The Lessons Learned
Despite the challenges they faced individually, these professionals are using what they learned to develop an optimized, overarching recovery strategy that will inform their recovery activities going forward here, and in the future, should a similar disaster occur. Further, this analysis of the September 3rd discussion only scratches the surface of their insights. Further discussions will advance their strategizing even more and offer the opportunity to plan a faster, more effective recovery strategy for any entity affected by a disaster like LA’s 2025 wildfires.
The goal of the PCC EWD Future of Work webinars is to improve connections and collaboration among the region’s many EWD sector participants. Their focus on the LA wildfire recovery effort is providing critical insights and lessons on how the whole region can move beyond the damage. The third installment of this year’s Future of Work Webinars is Thursday, October 29, from 10 am to noon PST. Registration is open now.
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