Green Dreams or Broken Pipes: Angelenos Sound Off on the City's Net-Zero Gamble

Los Angeles has committed to carbon neutrality by 2035 under its Green New Deal for Los Angeles, but the gap between that pledge and the city's crumbling infrastructure is becoming impossible to ignore. As City Council prepares to vote on the next two-year capital budget before August, community members across the city are pushing back — not against the goal, but against a timeline they call financially reckless.

The stakes are unusually high right now. The 2028 Olympics are 24 months away. Mayor Karen Bass is still managing an ongoing housing emergency declaration she signed in January 2023. And the Department of Water and Power faces a projected $4.2 billion infrastructure deficit over the next decade, according to its own long-range planning documents. Spending priorities that might have seemed abstract two years ago are now a direct budget fight happening inside City Hall and on neighborhood streets simultaneously.

Voices From the Ground

In Boyle Heights, longtime residents near the 6th Street Bridge corridor say they feel caught between two versions of a city that hasn't asked them which one they want. The neighborhood has seen air quality improvements since LADWP began transitioning two natural gas peaker plants — including the Scattergood Generating Station in El Segundo — toward battery storage, but residents on Cesar Chavez Avenue say the construction disruption and rising electricity rates are hitting hardest in the zip codes least able to absorb them.

A small restaurant owner on Vermont Avenue in East Hollywood said her monthly LADWP bill climbed from roughly $480 in early 2024 to more than $710 by this spring, a jump she connects directly to rate increases the utility pushed through to fund grid upgrades. She hasn't hired a second line cook she said she needed because of it.

On the Westside, in Mar Vista, a block captain with the Mar Vista Community Council said residents there broadly support electrification mandates — the neighborhood has one of the highest rates of rooftop solar adoption in the city — but worry that the city is front-loading costs onto ratepayers while delaying critical water main replacements. Several mains in the Mar Vista and Palms areas date to the 1930s, according to public DWP maintenance records.

The Budget Math That Won't Work Itself Out

The Los Angeles City Budget for fiscal year 2025-26 allocated approximately $820 million to infrastructure, a figure critics from the Reason Foundation and the Los Angeles Business Council alike have called inadequate given deferred maintenance backlogs estimated at over $8 billion citywide. The Bureau of Street Services alone says it would need $4.6 billion just to bring all city roads to acceptable condition.

Climate advocates, including the group Climate Resolve based in Lincoln Heights, argue the framing of net-zero versus infrastructure is a false choice. They point to federal Inflation Reduction Act dollars — roughly $700 million in IRA-linked funding the city and county have collectively pursued since 2022 — as proof that green investment can simultaneously modernize aging systems. The argument has merit on paper. Whether the permitting capacity and contractor workforce exist to spend that money before the 2028 Olympic deadline is a separate and more uncomfortable question.

The Los Angeles Department of Transportation is simultaneously trying to complete 28 miles of new bus rapid transit lanes by 2028, while Metro's Purple Line extension through Wilshire Boulevard is already over budget and running behind its revised schedule. Every construction crew and every yard of conduit is a resource being competed for.

The City Council's Budget and Finance Committee is scheduled to hold public comment hearings through mid-July at City Hall, Room 340. Community members in South LA, the San Fernando Valley, and the Harbor area have organized separately through neighborhood councils to submit formal testimony. For residents who feel the city is spending toward an aspirational future while their street floods every February and their power bills climb every quarter, that hearing room may be the only place the tradeoff gets named out loud.