Meet Eunisses Hernandez — the progressive, permissive councilwoman raking in far more money than the average Angeleno each year, plus gold-plated benefits — even as MacArthur Park, the historic heart of her district, rots into a fentanyl-soaked nightmare.
The Post spent the last week inside the park, witnessing and reporting on open-air drug use, pipe smoking, hand-to-hand deals and city-funded paraphernalia — needles, crack pipes and food handouts — being distributed in broad daylight. That scene now defines the park.
Hernandez, who makes $240,000 a year, had an opportunity to make nice with her district Thursday at a packed public meeting with the very constituents forced to live with the consequences of her policies … and she was a no-show.
MacArthur Park parents were there. Neighborhood residents were there. Local small business owners were there. But she wasn’t there.
“I need to introduce someone to you,” challenger Maria “Lou” Calanche told the crowd, hoisting a life-size cardboard cutout of Hernandez. “This is our current council member — who’s MIA.” The room erupted in laughter.
“This district is too important for a no-show,” Calanche said. “She’s skipped three in-person debates. Meanwhile, encampments have swallowed our streets. Parents can’t even take their kids to the park — there’s human waste on the swings.”
“We need action,” she said. “Not a cardboard council member who refuses to show up.”
Then came the gut punch.
“She makes $250,000 a year,” Calanche said. “The least she can do is show up. It’s her job. She’s being paid for it. This is sad. And we need change.”
In interviews with local business owners, longtime residents and community members, the message was consistent: the chaos isn’t random. It’s the result of deliberate political choices — who say the blame lies squarely in the lap of Hernandez.
Former Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva, who is now running to reclaim his old job, says what’s happening at MacArthur Park isn’t accidental — it’s ideological.
“The political establishment in Los Angeles is so knotted up in their ideology that they refuse law enforcement,” Villanueva told The Post. “When you have an absence of law and order, everything follows — drug trafficking, sex trafficking. It’s embarrassing.”
“This experiment has failed,” Villanueva said. “And the people living there are the ones paying for it.”
“There’s this idea that there’s a right to have drugs,” said Rick Caruso, a Los Angeles real estate developer and former mayoral candidate. “I don’t agree with that … This is a public park intended for families.”
Caruso, known for transforming run-down parts of Los Angeles into family-friendly destinations and, over the past year, helping Palisades residents and businesses navigate red tape through private–public partnerships backed by an organization he founded, said MacArthur Park’s collapse wasn’t inevitable.
“We’ve created a drug haven,” Caruso said. “This has destroyed the small independent businesses in the area.”
Just months before Hernandez took office in December 2022, then-Councilman Gil Cedillo had poured more than $1.2 million into reclaiming MacArthur Park.
Crews restored the grounds, re-sodded trampled areas, cleaned the lake perimeter and reopened children’s play spaces. Cedillo’s plan called for regular LAPD beat patrols, active park-ranger enforcement, regulated vending and daily programming to bring families back.
Hernandez opposed the effort from the start — protesting inside the park, denouncing fencing and urging people not to leave as the city tried moving homeless residents into housing. Sources say she even handed out food during key moments to encourage people to stay.
Once she took office, enforcement collapsed.
Caruso said the consequences now ripple far beyond the park.
He noted that Langer’s Deli, a city landmark near MacArthur Park, now closes early because the area becomes too dangerous after dark.
Records obtained by The Post show Fire Station 11, which covers MacArthur Park, has logged 1,385 overdoses this year, nearly four a day. Last year, it was the busiest firehouse in America.
“Those men and women in that fire station become exhausted,” Caruso said. “The exhaustion level and mental fatigue is extreme.””
Death records reviewed by The Post show every recorded death tied to incidents in and around MacArthur Park over the past two years was caused by fentanyl, methamphetamine, or a lethal mix of hard drugs.
“When you let a place like this fester, people die,” Villanueva said.
Hernandez, 35, entered office with backing from criminal-justice reform groups and the Democratic Socialists of America, and won a Los Angeles Times endorsement.
The Times praised her as a “visionary and pragmatic organizer,” crediting her with helping block new jail construction, pushing community-based mental-health treatment, and supporting Measure J, which redirects at least 10% of county revenue into social programs. A user lights a pipe on the park’s walkway — the same stretch once used by families heading to the lake.
What the endorsement glossed over: Hernandez had never run a city department, never managed a municipal budget, and never overseen public-safety operations.
“She’s never had to build operational relationships across agencies,” said Calanche. “That experience matters.”
Since taking office, Hernandez has voted against the city budget twice, attacking proposed LAPD funding increases even as violent crime, drug activity and emergency calls surged across her district. She has opposed the city’s anti-camping law saying they have “failed,” a stance that coincided with encampments rapidly expanding across Westlake, Pico-Union and the corridors surrounding MacArthur Park.
She also voted against creating a dedicated copper-wire theft task force — even as the city was hemorrhaging tens of millions of dollars from rampant thefts that plunged neighborhoods into darkness and crippled traffic lights. The task force later recovered more than $10 million in stolen wire after her “no” vote failed to stop it.
In 2023, Hernandez redirected $250,000 intended for scholarships into needle distribution and safer-smoking kits in the MacArthur Park area.
City records show tens of thousands of syringes and crack-pipe kits were distributed under programs she supported — with far fewer collected, leaving neighbors to complain about discarded paraphernalia littering sidewalks, storefronts and park grounds.
Meanwhile, the city poured roughly $27 million during her tenure into attempts to stabilize MacArthur Park — through outreach, sanitation, rangers, public-safety deployments and infrastructure work.
The results were the opposite of stabilization.
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By fall 2025, the crisis had grown so severe the city approved a $2.3 million perimeter fence — a sharp reversal for a councilwoman who had long opposed fencing as “criminalization.”
“If the fence had gone up when Cedillo finished the refurbishment, we would have saved $30 million and still had a park,” said challenger Raul Claros.
Caruso said the damage is citywide — and self-inflicted.31
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“It’s a complete waste of money and it’s a negative impact on the city as a whole that we allow something like this,” he said. “We’ve created a drug haven. It’s a foolish idea.”
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