As the state continues multiyear marathon discussions on rules for what residents in wildfire hazard zones must do to make the first five feet from their houses — an area dubbed “Zone Zero” — ember-resistant, the Los Angeles City Council voted Tuesday to start creating its own version of the regulations that is more lenient than most proposals currently favored in Sacramento.

Critics of Zone Zero, who are worried about the financial burden and labor required to comply as well as the detrimental impacts to urban ecosystems, have been particularly vocal in Los Angeles. However, wildfire safety advocates worry the measures endorsed by L.A.’s City Council will do little to prevent homes from burning.

“My motion is to get advice from local experts, from the Fire Department, to actually put something in place that makes sense, that’s rooted in science,” said City Councilmember John Lee, who put forth the motion. “Sacramento, unfortunately, doesn’t consult with the largest city in the state — the largest area that deals with wildfires — and so, this is our way of sending a message.”

Tony Andersen — executive officer of the state’s Board of Forestry and Fire Protection, which is in charge of creating the regulations — has repeatedly stressed the board’s commitment to incorporating L.A.’s feedback. Over the last year, the board hosted a contentious public meeting in Pasadena, walking tours with L.A. residents and numerous virtual workshops and hearings.

With the state long past its original Jan. 1, 2023, deadline to complete the regulations, several cities around the state have taken the matter into their own hands and adopted regulations ahead of the state, including Berkeley and San Diego.

“With the lack of guidance from the State Board of Forestry and Fire Protection, the City is left in a precarious position as it strives to protect residents, property, and the landscape that creates the City of Los Angeles,” the L.A. City Council motion states.

However, unlike San Diego and Berkeley, whose regulations more or less match the strictest options the state Board of Forestry is considering, Los Angeles is pushing for a more lenient approach.

The statewide regulations, once adopted, are expected to override any local versions that are significantly more lenient.

The Zone Zero regulations apply only to rural areas where the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection responds to fires and urban areas that Cal Fire has determined have “very high” fire hazard. In L.A., that includes significant portions of Silver Lake, Echo Park, Brentwood and Pacific Palisades.

Fire experts and L.A. residents are generally fine with many of the measures within the state’s Zone Zero draft regulations, such as the requirement that there be no wooden or combustible fences or outbuildings within the first five feet of a home. Then there are some measures already required under previous wildfire regulations — such as removing dead vegetation like twigs and leaves, from the ground, roof and gutters — that are not under debate.

However, other new measures introduced by the state have generated controversy, especially in Los Angeles. The disputes have mainly centered around what to do about trees and other living vegetation, like shrubs and grass.

The state is considering two options for trees: One would require residents to trim branches within five feet of a house’s walls and roof; the other does not. Both require keeping trees well-maintained and at least 10 feet from chimneys.

On vegetation, the state is considering options for Zone Zero ranging from banning virtually all vegetation beyond small potted plants to just maintaining the regulations already on the books, which allow nearly all healthy vegetation.

Lee’s motion instructs the Los Angeles Fire Department to create regulations in line with the most lenient options that allow healthy vegetation and do not require the removal of tree limbs within five feet of a house. It is unclear whether LAFD will complete the process before the Board of Forestry considers finalized statewide regulations, which it expects to do midyear.

The motion follows a pointed report from LAFD and the city’s Community Forest Advisory Committee that argued the Board of Forestry’s draft regulations stepped beyond the intentions of the 2020 law creating Zone Zero, would undermine the city’s biodiversity goals and could result in the loss of up to 18% of the urban tree canopy in some neighborhoods.

The board has not decided which approach it will adopt statewide, but fire safety advocates worry that the lenient options championed by L.A. do little to protect vulnerable homes from wildfire.

Recent studies into fire mechanics have generally found that the intense heat from wildfire can quickly dry out these plants, making them susceptible to ignition from embers, flames and radiant heat. And anything next to a house that can burn risks taking the house with it.

Another recent study that looked at five major wildfires in California from the last decade, not including the 2025 Eaton and Palisades fires, found that 20% of homes with significant vegetation in Zone Zero survived, compared to 37% of homes that had cleared the vegetation.

Dr. Arnold Gilberg’s sunny consultation room sits just off Wilshire Boulevard. Natural light spills onto a wooden floor, his houndstooth-upholstered armchair, the low-slung couch draped with a colorful Guatemalan blanket.

The Beverly Hills psychiatrist has been seeing patients for more than 60 years, both in rooms like this and at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where he has been an attending physician since the 1960s.

He treats wildly famous celebrities and people with no fame at all. He sees patients without much money and some who could probably buy his whole office building and not miss the cash.

Gilberg, 89, has treated enough people in Hollywood, and advised so many directors and actors on character psychology, that his likeness shows up in films the way people float through one another’s dreams.

The Nancy Meyers film “It’s Complicated” briefly features a psychiatrist character with an Airedale terrier — a doppelganger of Belle, Gilberg’s dog who sat in on sessions until her death in 2018, looking back and forth between doctor and patient like a Wimbledon spectator.

“If you were making a movie, he would be central casting for a Philip Roth‑esque kind of psychiatrist,” said John Burnham, a longtime Hollywood talent agent who was Gilberg’s patient for decades starting in his 20s. “He’s always curious and interested. He gave good advice.”

Since Gilberg opened his practice in 1965, psychiatry and psychotherapy have gone from highly stigmatized secrets to something people acknowledge in award show acceptance speeches. His longtime prescriptions of fresh food, sunshine, regular exercise and meditation are now widely accepted building blocks of health, and are no longer the sole province of ditzy L.A. hippies.

He’s watched people, himself included, grow wiser and more accepting of the many ways there are to live. He’s also watched people grow lonelier and more rigid in their political beliefs.

On a recent afternoon, Gilbert sat for a conversation with The Times at the glass-topped desk in his consultation room, framed by a wall full of degrees. At his elbow was a stack of copies of his first book, “The Myth of Aging: A Prescription for Emotional and Physical Well-Being,” which comes out Tuesday.

In just more than 200 pages, the book contains everything Gilberg wishes he could tell the many people who will never make it into his office. After a lifetime of listening, the doctor is ready to talk.

Gilberg moved to Los Angeles in 1961 for an internship at what is now Los Angeles General Medical Center. He did his residency at Mount Sinai Hospital (later Cedars-Sinai) with the famed Hungarian American psychoanalyst Dr. Franz Alexander.

Among his fellow disciples of Sigmund Freud, Alexander was a bit of an outlier. He balked at Freud’s insistence that patients needed years of near-daily sessions on an analyst’s couch, arguing that an hour or two a week in a comfortable chair could do just as much good. He believed patients’ psychological problems stemmed more often from difficulties in their current personal relationships than from dark twists in their sexual development.

Not all of Alexander’s theories have aged well, Gilberg said — repressed emotions do not cause asthma, to name one since-debunked idea. But Gilberg is the last living person to have trained with Alexander directly and has retained some of his mentor’s willingness to go against the herd.

If you walk into Gilberg’s office demanding an antidepressant prescription, for example, he will suggest you go elsewhere. Psychiatric medication is appropriate for some mental conditions, he said, but he prefers that patients first try to fix any depressing situations in their lives.

He has counseled patients to care for their bodies long before “wellness” was a cultural buzzword. It’s not that he forces them to adopt regimens of exercise and healthy eating, exactly, but if they don’t, they’re going to hear about it.

“They know how I feel about all this stuff,” he said.

He tells many new patients to start with a 10-session limit. If they haven’t made any progress after 10 visits, he reasons, there’s a good chance he’s not the right doctor for them. If he is, he’ll see them as long as they need.

One patient first came to see him at 19 and returned regularly until her death a few years ago at the age of 79.

“He’s had patients that he’s taken care of over the span, and families that have come back to him over time,” said Dr. Itai Danovitch, who chairs the psychiatry department at Cedars-Sinai. “It’s one of the benefits of being an incredibly thoughtful clinician.”

Not long after opening his private practice in 1965, Gilberg was contacted by a prominent Beverly Hills couple seeking care for their son. The treatment went well, Gilberg said, and the satisfied family passed his name to several well-connected friends.

As a result, over the years his practice has included many names you’d recognize right away (no, he will not tell you who) alongside people who live quite regular lives.

They all have the same concerns, Gilberg says: Their relationships. Their children. Their purpose in life and their place in the world. Whatever you achieve in life, it appears, your worries remain largely the same.

When it’s appropriate, Gilberg is willing to share that his own life has had bumps and detours.

He was born in Chicago in 1936, the middle of three boys. His mother was a homemaker and his father worked in scrap metal. Money was always tight. Gilberg spent a lot of time with his paternal grandparents, who lived nearby with their adult daughter, Belle.

The house was a formative place for Gilberg. He was especially close to his grandfather — a rabbi in Poland who built a successful career in waste management after immigrating to the U.S. — and to his Aunt Belle.

Disabled after a childhood accident, Belle spent most of her time indoors, radiating a sadness that even at the age of 4 made Gilberg worry for her safety.

“It’s one of the things that brought me into medicine, and then ultimately psychiatry,” Gilberg said. “I felt very, very close to her.”

He and his first wife raised two children in Beverly Hills. Jay Gilberg is now a real estate developer and Dr. Susanne Gilberg-Lenz is an obstetrician-gynecologist (and the other half of the only father-daughter pair of physicians at Cedars-Sinai).

The marriage ended when he was in his 40s, and though the split was painful, he said, it helped him better understand the kind of losses his patients experienced.

He found love again in his 70s with Gloria Lushing-Gilberg. The couple share 16 grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren. They married four years ago, after nearly two decades together.

“As a psychoanalyst or psychiatrist ages, we have the ability, through our own life experiences, to be more understanding and more aware,” he said.

It’s part of what keeps him going. Though he has reduced his hours considerably, he isn’t ready to retire. He has stayed as active as he advises his patients to be, both personally (he was ordained as a rabbi several years ago) and professionally.

For all the strides society has made during the course of his career toward acceptance and inclusivity, he also sees that patients are lonelier than they used to be. They spend less time with friends and family, have a harder time finding partners.

We’re isolated and suffering for it, he said, as individuals and as a society. People still need care.

Unlike a lot of titles on the self-help shelves, Gilberg’s book promises no sly little hack to happiness, no “you’ve-been-thinking-about-this-all-wrong” twist.

After 60 years working with Hollywood stars and regular Angelenos, Gilberg is ready to share what he’s learned with the world.

(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

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His prescriptions run along deceptively simple lines: Care for your health. Say thank you. Choose to let go of harmless slights and petty conflicts. Find people you belong with, and stop holding yourself and others to impossibly high standards.

“People have the capacity to self-heal, and I have become a firm believer in that. Not everyone needs to be in therapy for 10 years to figure it out,” he said. “A lot of this is inside yourself. You have an opportunity to overcome the things and obstacles that are in you, and you can do it.”

So what is “it”? What does it mean to live a good life?

Gilberg considered the question, hands clasped beneath his chin, the traffic outside humming expectantly.

“It means that the person has been able to look at themselves,” he said, “and feel somewhat happy about their existence.”

The best any of us can hope for is to be … somewhat happy?

Correct, Gilberg said. “A somewhat happy existence, off and on, which is normal. And hopefully, if the person wants to pursue that, some kind of a personal relationship.”

As it turns out, there is no housing in happiness. You can visit, but nobody really lives there. The happiest people know that. They live in OK neighborhoods that are not perfect but could be worse. They try to be nice to the neighbors. The house is a mess a lot of the time. They still let people in.

Somewhat happy, sometimes, with someone else to talk to.

It is that simple. It is that hard.

In a remarkable reversal, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is expected to announce that the Federal Emergency Management Agency will pay for soil testing for lead at 100 homes that were destroyed by the Eaton fire and cleaned up by federal disaster workers.

The forthcoming announcement would mark an about-face for FEMA officials, who repeatedly resisted calls to test properties for toxic substances after federal contractors finished removing fire debris. The new testing initiative follows reporting by The Times that workers repeatedly violated cleanup protocols, possibly leaving fire contaminants behind or moving them into unwanted areas, according to federal reports.

The EPA plan, presented to a small group of environmental experts and community members on Jan. 5, said the agency would randomly select 100 sites from the 5,600 homes that had burned down in the Eaton fire and where the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers oversaw the removal of ash, debris and a layer of soil. The soil samples would be collected near the surface and about 6 inches below ground.

Sampling is expected to begin next week, with test results published in April.

During the Jan. 5 presentation, some attendees questioned whether the testing would meaningfully assess whether properties are safe to rebuild on.

Local environmental health advocates worry the EPA testing is designed only to justify FEMA’s decision not to undertake comprehensive soil testing, instead of providing real relief to their communities.

“The EPA’s plan to run a study that retroactively validates a limited soil-removal response after the L.A. Fires is deeply concerning, especially when there is ample independent data indicating contamination persists beyond what was addressed,” said Jane Lawton Potelle, executive director of the grassroots environmental health group Eaton Fire Residents United, in a statement. “The hard truth is that meaningful contamination recovery still has not been funded or delivered by the federal government or the State of California.“

The EPA’s proposed approach is narrower than soil-testing efforts for previous fires in California. Although lead is one of the most common and dangerous contaminants left behind after fires, federal and state disaster officials have traditionally tested soil for 17 toxic metals, including cancer-causing arsenic and toxic mercury.

The EPA plan also calls for taking soil from 30 different parts of each cleanup area and combining them into one singular representative sample. That method doesn’t align with California’s soil-testing policy and could obscure “hot spots” of contamination on a property.

“If you don’t want to find a high number [of contaminants], you take a lot of samples and you mix them together,” said Andrew Whelton, a Purdue University professor who researches natural disasters.

“Based on the experimental design of [the EPA plan], I do not understand the purpose of what they’re doing, because it is not meant to determine if the properties are safe or not,” Whelton added.

For nearly a year, FEMA refused to pay for soil testing, insisting it was time-consuming, costly and unnecessary. FEMA, along with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, maintained that removing ash, debris and a layer of soil would be enough to rid properties of toxic substances.

Federal officials insisted any lingering contamination on properties likely predated the fire and was caused by decades’ worth of pollution from cars and industry.

Daisy Rosas Vargas, a chemist and soil scientist with SoilWise, a local soil health and landscaping consulting business, was skeptical that the EPA’s testing, now a year after the fire, could meaningfully distinguish fire-related contamination supposedly on the surface from any legacy contamination deeper underground.

Historic fire data showed about 20% of properties still contain toxic substances above California’s benchmarks for residential properties.

What’s more, a trove of federal reports obtained by The Times revealed federal contractors repeatedly deviated from their cleanup plans for the January 2025 fires, possibly leaving dozens of properties with toxic ash and debris.

FEMA hired inspectors to observe the cleanup process and document any issues; the resulting reports say, in some cases, that workers sprayed contaminated pool water on properties, walked through recently clean properties with dirty boot covers and mixed clean and contaminated soil by using improper equipment.

In one of the most egregious violations, an inspector noted that an official with Environmental Chemical Corp., the primary contractor hired to oversee debris removal in the Eaton and Palisades fires, ordered a work crew to dump ash and debris onto a neighboring property.

A spokesperson for the Army Corps said “all deficiencies logged by” federal inspectors were “addressed and corrected.”

“Our robust quality assurance program was staffed with hundreds of quality assurance inspectors and engineers,” the spokesperson said. “The deficiencies that were identified in the article were corrected immediately or before Final Sign Off.”

The agency did not provide any details about how workers resolved the alleged illegal dumping, or any other deficiencies.

Numerous soil-testing efforts had already found contamination above state standards. Los Angeles Times journalists launched a soil-testing project and published the first evidence that fire-destroyed homes in the Eaton fire still contained elevated levels of soil contamination, even after federal cleanup workers finished removing debris.

Los Angeles County and UCLA-led soil testing initiatives also found elevated levels of contaminants at Army Corps-cleared properties.

EPA officials said the agency would share soil-testing results with property owners, in addition to Los Angeles County and state agencies. However, they did not say whether they intended to remove another layer of soil if lead levels exceed state and federal standards.

After hearing about the EPA plan, Jessica Handy, one of the co-founders of the Dena Soil Project, a grassroots coalition focused on providing soil testing and other aid to those impacted by the Eaton fire, questioned the value of such testing without a commitment to cleanup. “If it does show that there’s still contaminants, what is the solution?” asked Handy, a Pasadena native. “We’re at risk of losing more community members because they’re afraid that they’re going to expose themselves, their families, their pets, their elders.”

U.S. Rep. Judy Chu (D-Monterey Park), who previously called on federal disaster agencies to provide comprehensive soil testing for fire victims, sent an email to her constituents last week saying she is “seeking assurance that they take action if the results of their testing find contamination.”

The Army Corps and its contractors initially aimed to demobilize by Jan. 8, 2026, the one-year anniversary of the fires, but federal cleanup efforts finished much earlier than expected. Federal cleanup workers removed fire debris from the final home enrolled in the federal program in Los Angeles’ Pacific Palisades in early September.

Federal and state officials hailed the Army Corps efforts as the fastest major cleanup in modern American history.

As of Monday afternoon, FEMA and the EPA have not responded to questions sent by The Times regarding specifics of the testing plan.