Hernandez needs to fix MacArthur Park, not attack media

City Councilwoman Eunisses Hernandez needs to take action and fix MacArthur Park — now. She needs to accept responsibility, and be accountable to the people who elected her in Los Angeles’ Council District 1.

As The Post has reported, MacArthur Park “has erupted into LA’s fentanyl Ground Zero — a collapsing, chaos-soaked war zone.” There are homeless people everywhere, and crime that spills onto the surrounding streets.

The people of the working-class neighborhood — residents and business alike — are suffering the most.

Curiously, Hernandez failed to show up for a local community meeting earlier this month to address the problems in the park.

Residents say that her evasive behavior has become a pattern.

Hernandez, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, was first elected in 2022.

Since then, she has done little for the working people of her district — and her voting record is shocking.

Hernandez voted against two city budgets that would have increased police resources — even as Council District 1 was swamped by a crime wave.

She also voted against a city ordinance to fight rampant catalytic converter theft — a crime that cripples cars in driveways, leaving working people stranded in their homes.

Hernandez also voted against a task force that targeted copper wire theft — and which later turned up more than $10 million of the stolen metal.

She fought against anti-camping laws, the only was that desperate residents have left to keep squatters from occupying the sidewalks or living on the streets in RVs.

And she backed a program to hand out free needles and pipes to drug addicts in the parks, which attracted more junkies and more crime.

The list goes on.

Hernandez even opposed fences around the park — until she flip-flopped and finally backed a $2.3 million fence.

Hernandez also opposed efforts by her predecessor to clean up MacArthur Park. She led protests inside the park and reportedly urged homeless people to resist efforts to move them.

And the result of her inaction is that MacArthur Park is a no-go zone — a public space that has been taken over by drug users.

The law-abiding, tax-paying residents of Los Angeles have lost their park because politicians like Hernandez have failed them — and that is not right.

It is our park — not the pols’, and not the junkies’.

We have reported repeatedly on this park and its appaling state because it matters — and because it needs to be fixed.

We want to put pressure on politicians like Hernandez to act. That appears to have upset her.

Perhaps she is not used to it — and that is why, in desperation, she decided to launch into an expletive-filled rant against The Post.

She would not respond to more than a dozen requests for comment but did decide to go on social media to claim our stories about the poor state of the park and her inaction were: “fat phobic”.

Her accusation is a pathetic attempt to evade accountability for her own voting record.

Nothing in The Post’s reporting referred to Hernandez’s size or gender, and we note Hernandez didn’t point to any mistakes in our reporting. Instead, she just claimed that we are guilty of some kind of obscure prejudice.

Would she say the same to the members of her own district, who are demanding action?

Evidently, the answer is yes. 

One blogged about “a broader pattern in which Hernandez responds to criticism of her performance by deflecting and reframing the narrative—allegedly accusing critics of misogyny, transphobia, fat-phobia, or ‘attacking women,’ rather than addressing the substance of their concerns.”

“Several community members claim that similar accusations have been made against them after they publicly questioned Hernandez’s record,” the post continued.

Hernandez also claims that “billionaires” want to remove her from office.

Ironically, she was put there, in part, by billionaires. 

Donor Patty Quillin, who is married to former Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, joined billionaire heiress Liz Simons in contributing to Hernandez’s campaign for City Council in 2022. (None of them actually lives in Los Angeles.)

Hernandez won their support in spite of — or perhaps because of — her calls to abolish the police. 

More recently, she urged violent protesters to start “escalating” their tactics against federal immigration officials in the city. 

Meanwhile, MacArthur Park — a historic site, and one of the few recreation spots in the inner city — suffers for a lack of policing and basic hygiene.

That is the only issue that matters.

One would think that a “democratic socialist” would want working families in LA to have access to some kind of green space. Maybe not the kind of leisure property her donors enjoy in the wealthy suburbs of Silicon Valley, but at least a few clean blades of grass.

Instead, Hernandez has insulted the people she is supposed to represent, and the reporters telling the truth about her record. 

Falsely accusing journalists — and constituents — of prejudice is inexcusable. 

The only “fat” that matters is Hernandez’s annual salary of nearly a quarter of a million dollars. 

The Post is here to hold her accountable — to make sure that Hernandez, or whoever represents Council District 1, earns every penny.

Joel Pollak is The California Post’s Opinion Editor. The California Post, a sister publication to The New York Post, will be launching early in 2026.