Meet Eunisses Hernandez — the progressive, permissive councilwoman raking in far extra money than the typical Angeleno annually, plus gold-plated advantages — at the same time as MacArthur Park, the historic coronary heart of her district, rots right into a fentanyl-soaked nightmare.
The Submit spent the final week contained in the park, witnessing and reporting on open-air drug use, pipe smoking, hand-to-hand offers and city-funded paraphernalia — needles, crack pipes and meals handouts — being distributed in broad daylight. That scene now defines the park.
Hernandez had a chance to make good along with her district Thursday at a packed public assembly with the very constituents pressured to stay with the results of her insurance policies … and she or he was a no-show.
MacArthur Park mother and father have been there. Neighborhood residents have been there. Native small enterprise house owners have been there. However she wasn’t there.
“I must introduce somebody to you,” challenger Maria “Lou” Calanche informed the group, hoisting a life-size cardboard cutout of Hernandez. “That is our present council member — who’s MIA.” The room erupted in laughter.
“This district is just too essential for a no-show,” Calanche mentioned. “She’s skipped three in-person debates. In the meantime, encampments have swallowed our streets. Mother and father can’t even take their youngsters to the park — there’s human waste on the swings.”
“We want motion,” she mentioned. “Not a cardboard council member who refuses to indicate up.”
Then got here the intestine punch.
“She makes $250,000 a yr,” Calanche mentioned. “The least she will do is present up. It’s her job. She’s being paid for it. That is unhappy. And we’d like change.”
In interviews with native enterprise house owners, longtime residents and group members, the message was constant: the chaos isn’t random. It’s the results of deliberate political decisions — who say the blame lies squarely within the lap of Hernandez.
Former Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva, who’s now operating to reclaim his outdated job, says what’s occurring at MacArthur Park isn’t unintentional — it’s ideological.
“The political institution in Los Angeles is so tangled up of their ideology that they refuse legislation enforcement,” Villanueva informed The Submit. “When you’ve got an absence of legislation and order, all the pieces follows — drug trafficking, intercourse trafficking. It’s embarrassing.”
“This experiment has failed,” Villanueva mentioned. “And the individuals dwelling there are those paying for it.”
“There’s this concept that there’s a proper to have medication,” mentioned Rick Caruso, a Los Angeles actual property developer and former mayoral candidate. “I don’t agree with that … This can be a public park meant for households.”
Caruso, identified for reworking run-down components of Los Angeles into family-friendly locations and, over the previous yr, serving to Palisades residents and companies navigate crimson tape by means of non-public–public partnerships backed by an group he based, mentioned MacArthur Park’s collapse wasn’t inevitable.
“We’ve created a drug haven,” Caruso mentioned. “This has destroyed the small impartial companies within the space.”
Simply months earlier than Hernandez took workplace in December 2022, then-Councilman Gil Cedillo had poured greater than $1.2 million into reclaiming MacArthur Park.
Crews restored the grounds, re-sodded trampled areas, cleaned the lake perimeter and reopened youngsters’s play areas. Cedillo’s plan referred to as for normal LAPD beat patrols, lively park-ranger enforcement, regulated merchandising and each day programming to carry households again.
Hernandez opposed the trouble from the beginning — protesting contained in the park, denouncing fencing and urging individuals to not go away as the town tried shifting homeless residents into housing. Sources say she even handed out meals throughout key moments to encourage individuals to remain.
As soon as she took workplace, enforcement collapsed.
Caruso mentioned the results now ripple far past the park.
He famous that Langer’s Deli, a metropolis landmark close to MacArthur Park, now closes early as a result of the world turns into too harmful after darkish.
Data obtained by The Submit present Fireplace Station 11, which covers MacArthur Park, has logged 1,385 overdoses this yr, practically 4 a day. Final yr, it was the busiest firehouse in America.
“These women and men in that fireside station change into exhausted,” Caruso mentioned. “The exhaustion stage and psychological fatigue is excessive.””
Dying data reviewed by The Submit present each recorded loss of life tied to incidents in and round MacArthur Park over the previous two years was brought on by fentanyl, methamphetamine, or a deadly mixture of exhausting medication.
“Once you let a spot like this fester, individuals die,” Villanueva mentioned.
Hernandez, 35, entered workplace with backing from criminal-justice reform teams and the Democratic Socialists of America, and received a Los Angeles Occasions endorsement.
The Occasions praised her as a “visionary and pragmatic organizer,” crediting her with serving to block new jail building, pushing community-based mental-health remedy, and supporting Measure J, which redirects no less than 10% of county income into social applications. A person lights a pipe on the park’s walkway — the identical stretch as soon as utilized by households heading to the lake.
What the endorsement glossed over: Hernandez had by no means run a metropolis division, by no means managed a municipal funds, and by no means overseen public-safety operations.
“She’s by no means needed to construct operational relationships throughout businesses,” mentioned Lou Calanche, a nonprofit chief and council candidate operating in opposition to her. “That have issues.”
Since taking workplace, Hernandez has voted in opposition to the town funds twice, attacking proposed LAPD funding will increase at the same time as violent crime, drug exercise and emergency calls surged throughout her district. She has opposed the town’s anti-camping legislation saying they’ve “failed,” a stance that coincided with encampments quickly increasing throughout Westlake, Pico-Union and the corridors surrounding MacArthur Park.
She additionally voted in opposition to making a devoted copper-wire theft activity drive — at the same time as the town was hemorrhaging tens of tens of millions of {dollars} from rampant thefts that plunged neighborhoods into darkness and crippled site visitors lights. The duty drive later recovered greater than $10 million in stolen wire after her “no” vote didn’t cease it.
In 2023, Hernandez redirected $250,000 meant for scholarships into needle distribution and safer-smoking kits within the MacArthur Park space.
Metropolis data present tens of hundreds of syringes and crack-pipe kits have been distributed below applications she supported — with far fewer collected, leaving neighbors to complain about discarded paraphernalia littering sidewalks, storefronts and park grounds.
In the meantime, the town poured roughly $27 million throughout her tenure into makes an attempt to stabilize MacArthur Park — by means of outreach, sanitation, rangers, public-safety deployments and infrastructure work.
The outcomes have been the other of stabilization.
By fall 2025, the disaster had grown so extreme the town permitted a $2.3 million perimeter fence — a pointy reversal for a councilwoman who had lengthy opposed fencing as “criminalization.”
“If the fence had gone up when Cedillo completed the refurbishment, we might have saved $30 million and nonetheless had a park,” mentioned challenger Raul Claros.
Caruso mentioned the injury is citywide — and self-inflicted.
“It’s an entire waste of cash and it’s a unfavorable influence on the town as an entire that we enable one thing like this,” he mentioned. “We’ve created a drug haven. It’s a silly concept.”
The Submit has repeatedly requested Hernandez for remark.
