Before Taking Office, L.A.’s Mayor Said She Would Not Go Abroad

After the first rally in her campaign for mayor of Los Angeles in 2021, Karen Bass spoke candidly about what she saw as a potential drawback to the job — a lack of world travel and involvement in global affairs.

Ms. Bass was accustomed to circling the globe as a Democratic member of Congress and of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and had spent decades working on U.S.-Africa relations. It was one of the most absorbing parts of her political career, she told The New York Times in an interview on Oct. 17, 2021, at her home in the Baldwin Vista neighborhood of Los Angeles.

“I went to Africa every couple of months, all the time,” she said, adding, “The idea of leaving that, especially the international work and the Africa work, I was like, ‘Mmm, I don’t think I want to do that.’”

She ultimately decided that she did, telling The Times that if she was elected mayor, “not only would I of course live here, but I also would not travel internationally — the only places I would go would be D.C., Sacramento, San Francisco and New York, in relation to L.A.”

That pledge has been spectacularly broken.

When a cascade of deadly and destructive wildfires erupted across the Los Angeles region on Tuesday, the mayor was on her way home from Ghana in West Africa, where she had attended the inauguration of a new president.

It was not her first trip abroad as mayor. A review of her public daily schedule for the past year shows that Ms. Bass has traveled out of the country at city expense at least four other times in recent months before the Ghana visit — once to Mexico for the inauguration of President Claudia Sheinbaum and three times to France for the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris.

Her broken promise to cut off overseas travel and her busy international schedule since becoming mayor in December 2022 scarcely registered with the public before the wildfires, and Los Angeles voters accepted — and in some cases even welcomed — the mayor’s identity not just as a municipal leader but also as a Washington-style global player. Now, though, her decision to leave the country at a time when the National Weather Service was warning of “extreme fire weather conditions” has set off a political crisis for Ms. Bass.

Rivals have lashed out. Liberal supporters whose homes burned down have become outraged critics. An online petition demanding her immediate resignation has attracted more than 100,000 signatures. MAGA Republicans and their allies have swarmed social media, amplifying and exploiting the anger.

Firefighters, whose union endorsed her opponent, Rick Caruso, in the mayoral race, have accused her of slashing fire department funding, an inaccurate and misleading assertion. Kristin M. Crowley, the city’s fire chief, when pressed by a reporter for a local Fox News affiliate, conceded that she felt the Fire Department had been failed by city government.

The fallout is threatening Ms. Bass’s ability to lead as the city confronts a long road to recovery from one of the most sweeping disasters in the history of Southern California, as well as a staggering mandate to prepare for the 2028 Olympic Games. Rebuilding from the 1992 Los Angeles riots took decades.

“I think being out of state and not at her post when the crisis broke out is fairly devastating for her,” said Rob Stutzman, a Republican political consultant who was an aide to former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. “This is the biggest disaster in Los Angeles since the Watts riots. You have one job as mayor. It’s to be here and be leading. This wasn’t unpredictable, like an earthquake.”

Mayor Bass did not personally respond to multiple requests for comment.

Zach Seidl, her spokesman, said that the mayor is “laser focused on ongoing response and recovery efforts.” Of her 2021 remarks about travel, he said: “In light of the Olympics coming, that the city owns and operates the nation’s largest international trade hub, and that a third of Angelenos were born abroad, this was, of course, a miscommunication — mayors of Los Angeles routinely travel internationally.”

At news conferences, Ms. Bass, 71, has repeatedly acknowledged the city’s grief and anger, and urged residents to “lock arms” and “reject those who seek to divide us.” She has promised that after the fires are extinguished, “we will have a full accounting of what worked and, especially, what did not.”

On Wednesday, soon after her return, she said she had made the trip at the request of the Biden administration, that she had been in “constant contact” with local, federal and county officials after the fires broke out, and that she took a military flight to get back as quickly as possible.

“I was on the phone, on the plane, almost every hour of the flight,” she told reporters at a news conference, where she stood surrounded by emergency officials. “So although I was not physically here, I was in contact with many of the individuals that are standing here throughout the entire time. When my flight landed, I immediately went to the fire zone and saw what happened in Pacific Palisades.”

Known for her collaborative style, Ms. Bass has deep roots in Los Angeles and a deep well of trust among the city’s mostly liberal voters. Her handling of crises before the wildfires had largely been applauded, including a series of mudslides and winter floods last year and the swift restoration of a section of Interstate 10 in 2023 after it was severely damaged by fire. Her acceptance of the Olympic flag during one of the trips to France, as the first Black woman to represent a host city, was widely regarded as history-making, and her domestic travel often produced results that benefited her city.

In late April, she led a bipartisan delegation of mayors to Washington, D.C. There, she successfully lobbied federal leaders to expand veterans’ eligibility for housing vouchers, a change that is expected to be instrumental in addressing homelessness in Los Angeles and across the U.S.

But her travel — both domestically and internationally — has at times complicated her handling of civic emergencies. Her trip to Ghana was not the first time she was out of town when crises and news events big and small broke out.

During that late April trip to Washington, pro-Palestinian protests at U.C.L.A. turned violent. She cut the trip short and flew back on May 1, issuing statements along the way to reassure residents.

While she was in France for the closing ceremony of the Olympics in August, Gov. Gavin Newsom showed up at a mid-city underpass to make the point that local governments needed to do more to clear homeless encampments. While she was in Paris for the Paralympic Games in September, the National Weather Service issued an excessive heat warning for Los Angeles, with 117-degree forecasts. Power outages forced the cancellation of a show at the Hollywood Bowl.

None of those trips generated complaints. The U.C.L.A. protests were handled by a number of jurisdictions, and Los Angeles is scheduled to host the 2028 Olympic Games.

Municipal governance, like many other lines of work, has become increasingly mobile. Computers, cellphones and video conferencing let elected leaders operate remotely, and chains of command specify who is in charge when an official is out of town or out of the state.

The mayor’s office issued her public schedule for Saturday, Jan. 4, shortly after midnight that day, saying that President Biden had asked her to help represent the United States at the Jan. 7 inauguration ceremonies in Ghana. Ms. Bass left later Saturday morning. Marqueece Harris-Dawson, the president of the Los Angeles City Council and a mayoral mentee, became acting mayor once she was gone.

The National Weather Service’s Los Angeles office began telegraphing increasingly dire messages about heavy winds on Sunday. A red flag warning about fire danger that was issued Sunday was upgraded Monday to a “particularly dangerous situation” warning, only the fifth time the agency had ever issued such a warning for Los Angeles.

“HEADS UP!!! A LIFE-THREATENING, DESTRUCTIVE, Widespread Windstorm is expected,” the agency posted on X Monday, saying that winds could reach 100 m.p.h and would hit places that were not usually affected.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, as fires raged, Mr. Harris-Dawson, the acting mayor, said he received minute-by-minute briefings from the heads of different agencies, including those overseeing law enforcement, fire, water and transportation. He addressed the public at news conferences as the city’s top elected official. He filled in for Ms. Bass at the city’s emergency operations center. He gave approval for the city to declare a state of emergency.

Mr. Harris-Dawson added that Ms. Bass was listening to the briefings, too, and participated in the decision-making, despite the eight-hour time difference between California and Ghana. She could make phone calls even while flying home because she was on a military plane, which was available to her because she was on a diplomatic mission, he said.

“It wasn’t like I’m in a room and I have to make this decision,” Mr. Harris-Dawson said. “I’m the acting mayor, and the elected mayor is on the phone, and she’s getting the same information I’m getting. It was really much more a collaboration than standing up a temporary mayor.”

Mr. Harris-Dawson said that he spoke to Ms. Bass by phone on Monday, when it was becoming clear that wind speeds could reach 100 m.p.h. “That’s when, in the conversations with the mayor, she was like, ‘I’m coming home right away, as soon as I could get there,’” he said.

James Hahn, who was mayor of Los Angeles from 2001 to 2005, was in Washington when the Sept. 11 terror attacks struck. He could not return to Los Angeles for several days because flights were grounded, but even so, he was criticized for years for being absent from the city. It became a talking point used by his opponents when he ran for re-election and was defeated.

“There was no human being who got back to the West Coast faster than I did,” Mr. Hahn said in an interview. “I was on the first plane that was in the air. It was 60 hours — I timed it — but you would’ve thought I was gone for two weeks instead of two days.”

Mr. Hahn, now a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge in Santa Monica, said the impression still lingers. “To this day,” he said, “people think I took my sweet time getting back to L.A.”

Mr. Hahn said Mayor Bass’s response to the crisis had impressed him. He pointed out that by the time she got back to the city, a state of emergency had already been declared.

“This was an unprecedented event,” he said. “People don’t want to accept that, and I understand they’re in pain. People have lost everything. People have lost their lives. And the first reaction is, ‘Whose fault is this?’ And I think the first reaction should be, ‘How do we help the people who’ve lost everything?’”

Thomas Fuller and Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs contributed reporting.