Fires led this freshman lawmaker to take on big banks

Assemblymember John Harabedian’s Pasadena district went up in flames shortly after his swearing-in.

SACRAMENTO, California — Assemblymember John Harabedian was only a few weeks into his first term when the Eaton fire sparked in his Pasadena district. The Democrat, the two-term mayor of Sierra Madre who replaced former Assemblymember Chris Holden, pivoted to focus on his community’s immediate demands for relief. The bills he has introduced are speeding through policy committees right now, including two urgency measures that have him tussling with big banks and that passed appropriations this week. The measures, AB 238 and AB 493, would require lenders to pause mortgage payments for borrowers who lost their homes in the Palisades and Eaton fires and give the interest earned on insurance payouts held in escrow to homeowners. He talked with POLITICO about his quick pivot to wildfire policy and the model he wants to set for other communities recovering from natural disasters. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. How did you envision your first year in the Assembly? What plans have you put on pause because of the fires? I imagined my first year of being really policy-driven and district-driven, at the same time pushing big measures on things like affordability, housing, energy, resilience and things touching upon health care and education. However, when a natural disaster like the Eaton fire happens in your district, you reprioritize and retool and focus more surgically, narrowly on recovery. I think that largely, we are actually still working within the policy areas that really drove me to run for this office and really compel me to do the work every day, but they’re just obviously very much focused on the Eaton fire, the Palisades fire and fire resiliency and recovery generally. What sort of issues have you had the most intense crash course in? I think the emergency response at this level is something that I don’t think anyone has their arms fully wrapped around, even being a local mayor and a council member and overseeing a fire department and police department and working with L.A. county and different departments that do this. Seeing how emergency response and disaster response and recovery happens at this level is a steep learning curve. Folks who have been in this area for decades have said that this was unprecedented. They haven’t seen anything like it. We don’t see Gov. Gavin Newsom getting involved in the Legislature this early too often, and one of your bills, AB 493, has him as a sponsor. How did that happen? We had been given a lot of feedback from people in the district, that one, they were upset because their insurance payouts were not coming quick enough, and the banks were holding on to them for unnecessarily long periods of time, and that’s something that we have to work on. But two, that not only were they holding on to them, but they weren’t getting paid any interest on that delay, but the banks were able to earn it. We were sharing stories about what was going on in the field, and it was a collaborative approach, so I want to give him and his team a lot of credit because they were pushing it. You’re definitely taking on big banks and lenders with the mortgage forbearance bill. Did you ever think that would be your cause in the wake of a natural disaster? I never thought that I would have to do this. I was hoping that the banks, financial institutions could come to a mutually agreed solution that giving forbearance and delay on those payments were actually good for everyone. But it became evident that many of our residents who are going through this were not getting that relief and actually were being denied forbearances and were experiencing negative consequences for even trying to seek forbearances, like negative credit rating reporting. It’s not enough, but hopefully this will actually be a model to use for other communities that go through this, because I will say that many of my colleagues have noted that their communities, when they went through floods, fires, etc., … didn’t get this, and there’s a bit of remorse about that, but I think this is our job. Our job is to jump in, and where you’re going against the banks, the insurance companies, health care companies, whoever it is, we’ve got to fight for every inch so that people get the relief. The bill is just for the Los Angeles fires. Why not pass these types of policies for all communities recovering from natural disasters going forward? We’re very focused, hyper-focused on giving immediate relief for victims because we’re talking to them every day. We live with them. These are our neighbors and my family members. And I do think that we need to kind of balance short-term goals with medium- and long-term goals. If you’re trying to do everything all at once, I think that could slow down the immediate relief that’s needed. What are your big concerns going forward about recovery? Mental health is a huge issue. Every kind of pool of data from surveys that have been done across multiple organizations have shown that the number one issue that the communities feeling that are affected by these fires are real instability with their mental and emotional health, whether it’s PTSD, anxiety, sleepless nights. For those who are in the bucket of fully losing their house, I think that there is a lot of consternation about how long the cleanup and how long the rebuild is going to take, with permitting, with the real supply and demand problem with labor and supplies and costs, and so I do think having a Marshall Plan like response for rebuild is a huge concern. And then the third one, beyond just the rebuild, there’s a lot of folks who are displaced from their homes. There’s a lot of worry about the long-term physical and public health effects of moving back into the community, whether it’s water, soil, air and just getting clear answers on whether their elderly parents, their kids themselves, are actually safe to move back into the community. What will year two look like for you in Sacramento? I think that realistically, year two to 10 to 12, there will always be a focus on wildfire recovery and rebuilding Altadena, and I just think that it will probably become a, hopefully over time, a smaller silo of my work, but I think that we will continue to push for generational changing legislation, really smart energy policy that provide my kids, my three sons under the age of 10, with a clean, affordable energy system that doesn’t destroy our Earth. And real progress on housing — affordable housing, middle-class housing — so that my boys and the next generation can actually live here. Those are all the things that really inspired me to run for local office and then run for this office, and I keep pushing on that.