What’s happening today?

The City Council signed off on bans of a couple of bad-for-you items. One was an effort to stop nitrous oxide from being sold and distributed at cannabis and tobacco shops. That ban has been championed by Imelda Padilla. The other ban that moved forward would prohibit the manufacture and installation of imitation stone products that contain tiny crystalline silica particles that cause silicosis, an incurable lung disease, and this ban has been championed by Council member Eunisses Hernandez.

The Transportation Committee this morning also sent ahead a proposal to change the duties of the Board of Transportation Commissioners, which recently has been entangled in a legal case related to the long-stalled Venice Dell affordable housing project. While the proposal may appear Venice Dell-coded, the author of it, Eunisses Hernandez, said that she wanted the changes – which would remove the ability of the Transportation Commission to advise on city parking lots that are being used for homeless housing and shelter – because a couple of her own affordable housing projects, namely the Marigold and Grace Villas, were inexplicably blocked from being taken up at the commission.

There were a couple of LA City Council committee meetings this afternoon, one on the city’s committee that focuses on city arts programs, its parks and other such amenities. The arts and parks panel’s meeting at 2 pm had on its agenda grant funding for subsidized preschool services at the city’s parks facilities; a proposed rock garden project at Lafayette Park in the MacArthur Park area; a preschool program agreement at Cheviot Hills Recreation Center; and an animal intervention services agreement at the North Central Animal Services Center that may include financial help with vet services, spay and neutering, boarding, training, emotional support animal assessments.

The panel was also looking to dive into Recreation and Parks’ 700-page 2025 Park Needs Assessment, which gives an overview of the condition and inventory of the city’s parks resources, and offers some ideas for further investment. City Council members have also seemed preoccupied with hardening the closure of parks facilities, especially at night, and at this meeting, the panel was set to discuss a motion that would essentially close Branford Park in Arleta at sunset, hours earlier than the default closing time of 10:30 p.m.. And there’s a motion that calls for solidifying the city’s park closure program, which has waxed and mostly waned depending on the availability of staffing.

Also of note is a report from Recreation and Parks that relates to what officials in that department hope to do about public art works at parks facilities that were installed “without RAP’s permission and/or Board approval” over the years, outside of the usual formal process. Sometimes this happens when groups that lease city park facilities install artwork. FYI, the Board of Recreation and Parks Commissioners adopted a “public art policy” in 2024 that lays out the process for approving temporary public art installations, and some artworks made have been put in before that.

At the LA City Council’s Housing Housing Committee’s meeting at 2 p.m. ,the agenda included the appointment of Antonio Gallo, a divorce attorney and owner of Boyle Heights restaurant Casa Fina, to the Rent Adjustment Commission; loan agreements for affordable housing projects Strong Residence and Harmony Place Apartments; and a motion that’s seeking a look into the Measure ULA’s exemption of nonprofits from the so-called ‘mansion’ transfer tax, specifically around including nonprofits created to purchase to purchase property in that carve-out.

There’s also a motion by Katy Yaroslavsky that proposes to hold off on charging developers the community impact fees until later, as a way to encourage developers to build condos rather than rental housing. Yaroslavsky’s motion says developers may shy away from building condos because it tends to cost more than rental housing, and one thing that drives up costs, she says, are municipal benefit fees (think the affordable housing linkage fee, and the Quimby, park and the subdivision mapping fees). And why is it better to build more condos? She says condos give people an opportunity to own property, which renting does not. The motion proposes timing the payment of those fees to when the certificate of occupancy is issued, which is after the project is completed. The files for this motion includes a letter from Abundant Housing LA stating support for this type of policy change, with the group’s executive director, Azeen Khanmalek writing that “Councilmember Yaroslavsky has highlighted the unfair disparity between the high costs developers pay to build a for-sale project compared to those associated with building a rental one.”

Also, because it’s Clean Air Day, local transportation agencies, including Metro and LADOT, are providing free rides.

What just happened?

LAMC 41.18 a humiliation tool used on the unhoused community, or a tool for engagement?

A proposal to expand the city’s anti-camping law, LAMC 41.18, did not make it past the Public Safety Committee, at least for now. The meeting room at City Hall’s fourth floor committee meeting room was packed as numerous people, many involved with LACAN, Stop LAPD Spying Coalition and other groups showed up to oppose the proposal, which calls for no longer requiring council approval to create anti-camping zones, as well as to automatically prohibit homeless encampments around fire stations, post offices, and police stations by designating those areas as “sensitive” zones, much like schools and daycares.

Several of the people who spoke at public comment were formerly unhoused and have been the target of such laws as LAMC 41.18, which is by no means the only law used around the city of LA. One of the speakers, who identified themselves as Matthew, told the panel that “nearly all homeless people want housing as long as it’s safe, habitable and dignified.” He added that “expanding LAMC 41.18 will not help anyone find housing.” Rather, he said, “we have seen these laws used and abused to humiliate us.”

Sonja Verdugo, an organizer with Ground Game LA who is formerly unhoused, raised the point that people like her are rarely if ever consulted when such laws are implemented. “How can you make decisions for people you haven’t even spoken to?” she asked the committee.

Three people – Nithya Raman, Hugo Soto-Martinez and Curren Price – on the five-person panel led and backed motions that put the proposal on pause, saying the issue needed more study. Council member Traci Park urged for advancing the motion, though, saying there was no need to study it any further. She was joined by John Lee, in voting against delaying the proposal.

Lee appeared to open up about his personal life amid Tuesday’s discussion on the matter. He said that he and his wife have had trouble getting a relative to respond to their entreaties to be housed. Lee represents one of the more conservative districts in the city of Los Angeles (where the role of police tends to be seen in a more positive “tough love” kind of light — although, as always, not by everyone there), and he said that he views this law enforcement approach as a “tool for engagement.”

Although the law, and others like it, have been wielded in Lee’s district, including with the help of funding from the council’s discretionary funds — possibly in an effort to “save lives” as Lee framed it on Tuesday — not a few of the people who stopped to be interviewed by The LA Reporter over the years, even while they endured encampment sweeps or were ordered to move along by law enforcement, have nevertheless died.

And finally…

Some news broke (reported by Noah Goldberg of the LA Times) on Tuesday that the police officers union, the Los Angeles Police Protective League, was planning to formally oppose Measure FD, which is a sales tax that would raise money for the Los Angeles city fire department.

What’s happening today?

The LA County Board of Supervisors is meeting at 9:30 a.m., and they are scheduled to take up a discussion of policies related to data centers, as well as the recent proposed federal rule to change how people are counted in the U.S. Census that includes no longer counting of the immigrants residing here. The National League of Cities published a background on the proposed rule, and you can read it here in the Federal Register. Supervisor Holly Mitchell has requested postponement of an item on artificial intelligence that was scheduled on this agenda.

The Los Angeles City Council’s public safety committee is taking up at its 2 p.m. meeting a proposal to broaden the 41.18 anti-camping law, a proposed renewal of a contractor that dismantles RVs, and a report on a virtual reality training program for police officers.

A few other meetings… The LA City Council’s agenda at its 10 a.m. meeting includes draft ordinances that would carry out updates to the community plans for the Harbor Gateway and Wilmington-Harbor City areas. You can also look up the community plans on the Planning department website here. The Los Angeles City Board of Fire Commissioners was set to hear, at its 9 a.m. meeting, a proposal on expanding the definition of sensitive areas that would be off-limits to homeless encampments — under the anti-camping ordinance, LAMC 41.18 — to include fire stations. An oversight committee on LA city’s affordable housing linkage fee is was set to meet at 9 a.m. and taking up the 2025-2026 expenditure plan that was adopted by the City Council. LA city’s Board of Police Commissioners is taking up at its 9:30 a.m. meeting some proposed changes to the LAPD’s vehicle hold policies, and a donation of a horse to LAPD’s mounted unit. And the Los Angeles City Council’s budget committee is meeting at 2 p.m. and their agenda includes an item that is mostly about cameras along bus lanes, but that also includes a mention of the transportation department’s use policy for Automated License Plate Readers.

What just happened?

Mayor Bass provides parallel statements to Trump’s call for a foreign government to attack LA – one serious, the other short and sweet

Mayor Karen Bass issued a couple of statements on Monday, in reaction to President Donald Trump calling on Iran to attack Los Angeles, as well as San Diego. From her office account, she provided a sober response to Trump’s statements, saying that “his statements against our city are dangerous and could potentially compromise our safety.” She reminded the president that his role “is to protect the country, not to actively threaten it and encourage attacks on American lives” and she addressed Angelenos by saying that “in the face of irresponsible threats… we know how to stand together and protect our city.” In her campaign account, Bass provided a more visceral response, stating simply, “Keep LA out of your damn mouth” in a quote tweet of a clip of Trump’s statements.

A couple more things… Memo Torres of LA Taco says there has been a spike in ICE raids. And Nithya Raman’s campaign appears to have deleted a video in which she joins the host in saying, “only you can stop fascist liars.” In the video, Raman is shown answering a question about what can be done to “de-fascistize” the LAPD, especially when it comes to immigrants. She says in the video that she believes that there should be a “culture shift” in the department and she also says she does not think LAPD chief Jim McDonnell has met the moment.

What’s happening today?

It’s voting — and ballot processing — time! Not only are ballots coming to people’s mailboxes today, the LA County Registrar-Recorders is also permitted to begin processing ballots now. For the rest of us looking to figure out our ballots and what to do with them, this “make a plan to vote” page, put together by county election officials, includes ballot drop-off and vote center locators, a ballot tracker tool, an online sample ballot and other tools.

Curious what types of lawsuits are being filed against the city? The LA city claims board, made up of appointed commissioners, is meeting this afternoon to take up numerous trip-and-fall, traffic collision, and other claims. Many of these will likely make their way to the City Council in the near future.

What just happened?

A dramatic broadening of LA city’s anti-camping 41.18 law headed to a Tuesday committee hearing

Get ready for a showdown on a 2025 motion by some LA City Council members to ramp up the anti-camping ordinance, LAMC 41.18. That motion just got scheduled for the Public Safety Committee meeting on Tuesday. The motion calls for making it a blanket ban, rather than one that needs to be created through a council resolution. The motion also calls for more places where unhoused people could get pushed along by police, such as fire stations, post offices, police stations and high-fire severity zones. Opponents of efforts to criminalize homelessness have begun putting out a call to action for people to write in, and some public comment has started coming in. The motion also has support letters, from 2025, from neighborhood councils in the Pacific Palisades, Studio City, Arleta, and South Robertson, while Los Feliz’s neighborhood council weighed in with a rare resolution against it, at that time. The motion has also been referred to the newly reconfigured Homelessness and Health Committee, although there is no date for the item.

A big swing to Raman among Latino voters explained as the result of November election attracting more young people and renters

The LA Times and Berkeley IGS released a poll on Friday that shows Council member Nithya Raman is up by 24 percentage points above Mayor Karen Bass, which is a dramatic swing from when Bass was thought to have the edge with Latinos back in the primary. Friday’s article in the LA Times by Noah Goldberg and Itzel Luna also includes plenty of context about efforts by both campaigns to court Latino voters.

The pollster, Mark DiCamillo, explained the wide swing by saying that the November election is expected to have an electorate that skews younger, and that includes more renters, which Raman tends to do well with. Latinos above 50 preferred Bass, with a 10% difference separating the two candidates, but it’s much more dramatic with other Latino voters. Not only did younger Latinos prefer Raman, the gap was wide, with Raman claiming the preference of 60% of them, to Bass’s 9%. Polling can vary though, and the Times notes that the Latino Community Foundation did a poll last month that found that Bass was mostly viewed favorability, which is in contrast to this new Berkeley poll, which found that Bass was mostly viewed unfavorably by Latinos.

As extreme heat waves blanket Los Angeles all summer, Raman ad on creating more shade and planting more trees hits home

Nithya Raman released an advertisement on Friday about how hot it is in LA and how she plans to build lots of shade structures at bus stops and 100,000 more trees. While social media algorithms can skew things, some of the effusively positive response to the ad that The LA Reporter glimpsed is quite a turnabout from when the LA Times editorial board felt comfortable noting —about 13 years ago — that many had thought Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s idea to plan a million trees was a “goofball idea.” By the way, the point of the editorial was that even if Villaraigosa got only halfway to that sensational goal, there were many good reasons for having aimed high to push for more trees to be planted. So they described it as a “glass half-full” situation, rather than “half-empty,” an intriguing framing — come to think of it — for when we see politicians hitch themselves to what may sound like out-of-reach goals.

A few more notes on the mayor’s race: Karen Bass announced an endorsement from the Pilipino Action Center on Friday. And on Saturday, Nithya Raman shared her plan for the first 100 days if she is elected mayor, just as people are getting their ballots in the mail (video from Eric Levai). Also on Saturday, Bass did a meet-and-greet with Jane Fonda, according to Alex Stack, with Bass’s campaign. Both Bass and Raman spoke – at different times – at the KBLA 1050 Radio candidate forum on Saturday. That all-day forum turned out to be the place to be if you wanted to hear from numerous candidates in-person. You can still catch up on it here. LA City Attorney candidates John McKinney and Marissa Roy took part, as did LA County Sheriff candidates Robert Luna and Alex Villanueva. Candidate for governor Xavier Becerra was exception to the in-person showings, as he was there via Zoom, while people got to hear from his opponent Steve Hilton in person. And also, there’s a petition going around among DSA-LA members calling for their organization to re-examine their endorsement of Raman, and to “invalidate” that endorsement, saying that their latest endorsement process did not entail asking Raman directly about her position related to BDS, during the recent endorsement round (she had stated her opposition to BDS in an earlier questionnaire she’d filled out for a City Council race).

LA County’s Hahn and Mitchell tackled the ‘28-day shuffle,’ and unnecessary restrictions on homeless families

In her Friday newsletter, LA County Supervisor Janice Hahn highlighted a motion she co-authored with Supervisor Holly Mitchell that calls for making it easier to get homeless families housed, as well as tackle the notorious 28-day shuffle problem at motels that requires people to relocate frequently – a practice that has been understood as a method of preventing people from establishing legal tenancy.

But people rarely are able to get housed quickly, much less within 28 days, and Hahn’s press release from earlier in the week highlighted the circumstances of a family who had to move across town to do that 28-day shuffle. The family includes four children whose father just suffered a heart attack and whose mother has epilepsy. Hahn’s release said she met the family while commuting on the Silver Line.

The motion includes a request for a report-back in 60 days that recommends “changes to County policies, contracts, or provider requirements that may reduce unnecessary displacement or disruption for participants, while addressing operational considerations and protecting the County, providers, and hotel and motel owners from unintended legal or financial liability, consistent with legal guidance from County Counsel.”

Hahn and Mitchell’s motion also tries to tackle restrictions on the housing that families can get placed into. It states that “current housing matching practices may unnecessarily limit opportunities for small families to access one bedroom units when such placements would otherwise comply with occupancy standards and program requirements.” The motion is calling for more flexibility on these restrictions so that they “could reduce the time families spend waiting for permanent housing.”

LA city’s Hernandez touts ‘care-first’ programs at MacArthur Park

LA City Council member Eunisses Hernandez gives an update on MacArthur Park, in her latest newsletter, stating that the city has spent $27 million on “care-first investments” there. Those cover “peace ambassadors,” clean teams that come out daily, and an overdose and street medicine team. They are also planning youth programming, culture and arts events, lighting and other infrastructure upgrades. She also says they are expanding the street medicine team, putting in a health hub, and doing free programming year round at the band shell. This update comes as, earlier last week, the Recreation and Parks Commission took up proposed fencing around MacArthur Park’s north and south portions. Parks officials say this will allow the city to keep the area closed off during evening hours and their report said that they have had fewer issues of vandalism at nearby Lafayette Park, compared to at MacArthur Park – and Lafayette Park had just gotten fencing put in.

A few more things…

The LA Times has a packed LA On the Record newsletter issue on Saturday in which they pick apart some recent dustups over campaign and election related things, including Bass campaign pointing out that Raman missed a Jewish Heritage Month presentation. They also take up an ad put out by Streets for All, which supports Raman, that lashed out at the city’s high trash fees – except that Raman hadn’t actually voted against a recent big increase to those fees (which was explained at the time as making up for years of the city subsidizing trash pickup for single-family residences, and a was one method of trying to address severe budget crisis). The ad ended up stirring up a hornet’s nest, as it was actually a pet issue of one of Raman’s biggest critics on the City Council, Monica Rodriguez. Unsurprisingly, Rodriguez was not shy about pointing out that she was one of two votes against the fee increase, and she told the Times that Raman hasn’t spoken up about any concerns she might have had about the fee increase.

An LA Material investigation into bogus street-sweeping citations has led to a motion from City Council members to look into the matter. And they also took a look at who may be interested in running for Nithya Raman’s Fourth District City Council seat, if Raman ends up becoming mayor.

Political reporter Jon Regardie has a good piece in Golden State, featuring a chat with Council member Monica Rodriguez, about one somewhat obscure item on the ballot for LA city voters – which is that Measure EE includes a provision that would remove a requirement that the City Council meet three times a week. Rodriguez wrote an argument opposing that measure, but the general mood on council has been that less time spent at meetings was better. Some of the current members of the City Council, including Katy Yaroslavsky, have complained openly about the meeting frequency, saying that it takes away from time doing work in their districts. It’s probably something that many people working in office can relate to — but at what cost could this change be? Regardie brings up the notorious lengthiness, and arduousness, of sitting through LA County’s once-a-week meetings, which has been known to take up an entire day for people attending. City Hall watchdog Rob Quan, of Unrig LA — who has usually been a lone voice highlighting efforts by City Council members over the years to reduce the number of meetings and what the public might lose from that — recently explained to the LA Times that such reductions in the public’s ability to have access to city elected officials needed to be made up for in other ways — but he also said he was skeptical that anything would be done to offset any reductions to the meetings that might happen.

What’s happening today?

LA city invited to join a fight against ballooning liabilities costs

At the Los Angeles City Council’s rules committee this morning, they delayed discussion of a formal invitation to LA to a coalition that’s trying to change the rules around damage claims filed against public entities. The City Attorney writes that LA city has been invited to join League of California Cities’s Tort Reform Coalition includes 81 other California cities, as well as Long Beach, Pasadena, Glendale, Downey, Sacramento and Riverside. The chair, Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson, said the issue would be continued to a later date that hasn’t been determined yet.

The coalition points to recent data from the California Association of Joint Powers Authorities that says liability costs “have tripled in the last seven years” and that costs could go up by another 70 percent by next fiscal year. The League of California Cities says this is not sustainable, and it’s “unfair to taxpayers” since liabilities would direct away funding from classrooms, fire stations, roads, mental health services, and the essential programs Californians depend on every day.” The data that the League cited can be found here. The Controller has a dashboard listing the payouts the city has made in lawsuits against the city.

LA County’s mental health beds weigh heavy on the minds of LA city leaders

The rules committee sent forward a resolution in which the city would take a position that calls for LA County to “adhere to the agreement of the LA Alliance Memorandum of Understanding that requires the County to assist those individuals with severe mental illness transition from City-funded interim housing sites into the County-operated systems of care, including bed placements.”

One of the pet peeves that city leaders have highlighted lately has been the availability of mental health beds for people in the city of Los Angeles, with Council member Nithya Raman specifically citing this issue at a committee meeting in August. City leaders at that meeting, especially Tim McOsker, worry that without having access to data about how services are delivered, it would be difficult to ensure people in the city are getting their share of services.

A few more items today…

Later this morning, the City Council is meeting, and they’re taking up a contract with the nonprofit The Wall Las Memorias to maintain the AIDS Memorial at Lincoln Park. In the afternoon at 1 p.m., a task force created by budget chair Katy Yaroslavsky, is getting a presentation from the risk management division of the City Administrative Officer in which they are expected to talk about “current initiatives to address budget challenges” and recommendations for what they think the task force could further research. And in the 15th City Council District, mom and pop storefronts on an additional stretch of Pacific Boulevard could be getting an economic lift, under a proposal to expand the existing JEDI zone in that area (JEDI is short for Jobs and Economic Incentives, and it’s a five-year program to assist job-creating businesses there, including through improving facades, microloans, permit fee reductions and other support. That item is getting taken up by the City Council’s jobs committee at 2 p.m., since council approval is needed in order to set up these zones.

What just happened?

Sales tax rates went up yesterday, but they vary depending on which city you are in. You can peruse the state’s chart. The tax rates are going up as a lawsuit was filed this week by the Libertarian Party to halt the Measure ER sales tax increase to raise revenue for LA County health services. The lawsuit holds up the county from receiving that revenue for the time being.

What is an influencer account without some intra-influencer drama? It’s what we live for. And with political influencers being all the rage now, we’re getting some of that in this LA Times article, by Ben Wieder, in which we find out that an ethics complaint filed by a couple of influencers against LA mayor’s race candidate, Nithya Raman, was funded by the campaign for her opponent, Mayor Karen Bass. Meta-data pulled from the PDF of the complaint filing showed that it was prepared for the influencers by Kaufman Legal Group, which works for Bass. It looks like a “pot calling the kettle black” situation.” Adam Conover, whose support of Raman was the target of the Bass-friendly influencers, responded to all this with a post that declares, “every accusation is a confession.”

What’s happening today?

Hot topic MacArthur Park fencing on the Rec and Parks agenda today, but there’s also the iconic Griffith Park planetarium projector, tennis court improvements, and an outdoor performing arts center

The Recreation and Parks Commission is meeting at Pan Pacific Recreation Center this morning, and among the items on their agenda is the proposed installation of a green “wrought iron perimeter fencing” around both the north and south sections of MacArthur Park. Given the prominence of this park, this has unsurprisingly become a hot topic, with some urging the city not to move ahead with this. The department’s report (which contains drawings, more detail and maps) points to more maintenance and repairs needed at MacArthur Park, compared with Lafayette Park nearby that has fencing. “The damages and vandalism are typically occurring overnight when the park is closed,” the report says, and by installing this perimeter fence, the department will get “greater flexibility in managing park hours, improve oversight during off-hours, and support long-term stewardship of this important public space.”

There’s also a maintenance contract on the agenda for the Universarium Mix Model 555 Star projector used in the Griffith Observatory’s Samuel Oschin Planetarium. This model was purchased by the Friends of the Observatory in 2000 when the Griffith Observatory got a big renovation done, then transferred to the city in 2005. The files before the commission say that the maker of the projector, Zeiss, is the only one that can maintain it, so that’s the contract before them. The report even adds, “failure to properly service and repair the projector would place a multi-million dollar instrument at the heart of the Griffith Observatory experience at risk.”

There’s also an item seeking more funding for the Griffith Park outdoor performing art center, to pay for an accessible pathway that ended up needing to be longer than anticipated.

Also on the agenda are tennis court improvements at Northridge Recreation Center, playground improvements at Bronson Canyon playground, and a new gymnasium at the Studio City Recreation Center.

What just happened?

Blast from LA’s secessionist past ‘community boroughs’ idea could be revived: Council member Tim McOsker, who chairs the new Ad Hoc Committee on Charter Review, reached back into the past to call for reviving a previously spiked proposal to create a “community boroughs” system in Los Angeles. McOsker authored a motion on Wednesday that calls for re-opening an expired file from 2002 for a motion authored by then-Council member Wendy Greuel and seconded by then-council members Janice Hahn, Tom LaBonge, Dennis Zine and Jan Perry. One iteration of that proposal at the time envisioned a ballot measure that would “establish a community borough system which shall increase local autonomy and decision-making by granting community boroughs authority over local issues, including but not limited to local budgeting, land use and delivery of services, while the citywide government shall continue to have authority over issues of citywide concern. The system of community boroughs shall augment the City’s neighborhood council system and provide for coordination between neighborhood councils and their corresponding boroughs.” [Late add: Find the new council file for McOsker’s motion here. H/T Jacob Wasserman!]

That 2002 proposal came at a time when secession by the San Fernando Valley and Hollywood was a major concern – although interestingly, the neighborhood councils that this proposal cites had already been viewed as a way to quash those secessionist urges. The secessionist efforts ultimately failed.

Racism in the LAPD is a ‘herpes virus’? Libor Jany offers a look at racism within an LAPD that has changed its racial makeup to better reflect Los Angeles’s population. He offers up some perspectives, including a survey that indicated pervasive defensiveness amongst the officer ranks over efforts to address racism in the department, as well as an eye-catching comment from noted Connie Rice, a civil rights lawyer, who says that “racism is like the herpes virus in the body of the LAPD.” Jany is reflecting on this topic shortly after a whistleblower officer, Daniel Flores, was initially charged by the District Attorney with eavesdropping before those charges were dropped amid public outcry. The role of racism in the department could also be relevant amid an effort by LA city leaders to push for restrictions on the department’s use of pretextual stops, which has been used historically as part of law enforcement racial profiling practices.

The vibes are off between LA city leaders and LA28: LA City Council members seemed especially testy about LA28, the coordinating committee for the upcoming 2028 Olympics, at Wednesday’s ad hoc committee on the “major event” headed our way. One City Council member, Katy Yaroslavsky, even questioned city staffers about whether the vague contracting details LA28 has given the city might constitute a breach of contract. Steve Reid of Southern California News Group picked on Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson seeming bad mood, picking out his comment that the off-vibes between the city and the LA28 committee paints a “troubling picture.” While staffers didn’t go as far as the council members did, City Administrative Officer Matt Szabo told the committee that they’re in “dispute resolution” with LA28, Reid reports. James Rainey of the LA Times also provides some context about the clouds brewing over the “partners.”

A libertarian lawsuit puts a stop to Measure ER, maybe until January 2027? The Libertarian Party and a private citizen have sued to put a pause on Measure ER, a half-cent sales tax to fund healthcare services in LA County, reports Steve Scauzillo of Southern California News Group. The lawsuit argues that the sales tax would lead to some cities’ tax limits getting exceeded, but that’s something that could be worked-around through state legislative action. Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill to allow cities to exceed the limit, similar to what was done for Measure A, which generates sales tax revenue for homeless services. Scauzillo writes that “at best, the monies would be delayed until Jan. 1, 2027, when AB1768 takes effect, according to the lawsuit.”

Medical helicopter crashes near Catalina, killing two: A medevac helicopter went down as it was taking off from Catalina Island, killing two people while one person was missing. You can find County Supervisor Janice Hahn’s post about that here. There is also some broadcast news coverage here. This comes a couple weeks after another helicopter crash tragedy in Chatsworth that killed three people.

Streetsblog LA explains pedestrian headstart crossings, as LA city transportation officials report reaches City Council: Joe Linton of Streetsblog LA offers an explainer of “leading pedestrian interval,” wonky words for those street crossing lights that give pedestrians a head start to walk across the street before cars are allowed to also move across the intersection. Just last month, in September, the LA Department of Transportation submitted a report responding to an earlier 2023 motion by several City Council members for more information about this pedestrian safety measure. You can track that report, which does not appear to be scheduled for a committee meeting just yet. The issue has generated some interest from neighborhood councils in Westwood and Studio City. Westwood’s neighborhood council expressed support for the item, while Studio City’s neighborhood councils were wary, writing in their community impact statement that “all motor vehicle users must be part of the total transportation equation and not be punished for private motor vehicle use as a means to force them into the current inadequate public transportation system.”

What’s happening today?

LA city leaders told not to waste the public’s time on charter reform, in latest ‘charter review’ endeavor

LA city leaders were back at it with yet another attempt at revamping the city charter, but they encountered wary members of the public on Wednesday who said they did not want their time wasted again.

At the first meeting of the Ad Hoc Committee on Charter Review, Jason Enright, an organizer with LA Forward, told the panel’s members — who are City Council members — that volunteers took many hours out of their lives to attend and speak at earlier meetings of their predecessors on Charter Reform Commission and subsequent meetings on the matter. Many of them pushed for things like police accountability and expanding the City Council to make the panel more responsive to people. There is some mistrust that this panel had been truly set up to accomplish anything real, he told them.

“We just really want to make sure that you are going to take this all seriously,” Enright said. “There’s a perception among the public that there were a lot of items that were sort of kicked down the road to be killed… and it seems like for political reasons, this committee was created as an effort to kill those reforms [such as police accountability and council expansion]. We’re looking at all of you to prove that public perception wrong.”

The Ad Hoc Comittee on Charter Review, which is tasked with reviewing proposals to place on the November 2028 ballot, had planned to take up a number of topics at its 8:30 a.m. meeting today, but they were allotted only an hour and a half to meet before they needed to clear out for the City Council meeting at 10 a.m. The first hour or so was devoted to hearing public comment, many similar to that of Enright’s, in which people urged the panel to take up specific issues – such as lowering the voting age, police accountability, and implementing ranked choice voting – but also urged the panel to do serious work on those proposals this time around.

Kay Hartman, who had chaired a committee of neighborhood council members that read the 52,000 page charter word-for-word and red-lined changes to it before presenting their proposal to the prior charter reform panel, the Charter Reform Commission, noted in her comment that city leaders only ended up making one small change to capitalize the words Neighborhood Council in the charter, while promising to make other changes in the ordinance, which doesn’t require going to voters to make happen.

“Council member [Nithya] Raman said we should keep track of the items that could be handled by ordinances,” Hartman said. “Did you?”

The committee also heard some opening remarks from each council member, before then hearing a presentation from governance expert and scholar Raphe Sonenshein on the last round of major charter reform changes made in the late 1990s. Sonenshein was executive director of one of two commissions set up in the late 1990s that developed the current language of the charter that voters approved. After that, the ad hoc committee ran out of time and had to turn the room over to the full 15-member City Council to meet. You can catch the full ad hoc committee meeting here.

What just happened?

LA County budget adjusted up to $54.2 billion — that’s bigger than the budget of many states, and LA city too

The LA County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday adopted changes that adjusted this year’s budget to $54.2 billion, which is more than three times the size of the $14.85 billion budget that LA city adopted earlier this year. But some people still think LA city is a much bigger deal, according to LA County Supervisor Hilda Solis, who chairs a five-member elected body that leads the county government.

“Our budget is phenomenal and people quite honestly don’t understand,” Solis said at Tuesday’s board meeting. “ They think the city [of Los Angeles] is larger than we are. They still do. They think that. But our budget is $54 billion.”

The under-estimation of LA County’s size didn’t stop there. “People say, ‘Well, aren’t you just a commissioner?’” Solis continued. “I go, ‘Depends on who you’re talking to, because our budget is bigger than so many states – 42. And I like to brag and say that my colleagues – all women by the way, that blows them away, still blows them away – we represent, each, 2 million people. And I laugh because many U.S. senators have less than 670,000 people in their jurisdiction.”

Solis said all this just before she and her colleagues adopted a series of changes to the budget they had already approved in June for this fiscal year, from July 1 until next June 30. This budget has been hampered not only by an avalanche of sexual assault related lawsuits that were filed under AB 218 (a bill that lengthened the statute of limitations to allowed people to file assault claims later than usual), but also the Trump Administration’s ongoing cutbacks and restrictions on health and social safety net services. But some also noted that the budget had grown quite a bit while they were themselves serving on the board, with some such as Supervisor Janice Hahn noting that the budget was around $30 billion when she first started serving in her seat in 2017.

As Solis reflected on the size of the county’s budget Tuesday, she is also in the midst of running to fill a Congressional seat this November representing the 38th District that was redrawn along with others in California, under Proposition 50, which aims to give Democrats a leg up in Congress. Solis had the opportunity to run for another term on the Board of Supervisors, but opted against it in order to take on representing the redrawn Congressional seat. (Maria Elena Durazo, a state Senator who has also been a prominent labor leader, won the election in June to replace Solis.) Supporters of the Proposition 50 district redrawing plan have described it as an “opportunity to fight back against the Republican cuts to healthcare, the rising cost of living under tariffs, and the cruel abductions and forced removals of immigrants.”

According to County CEO Joe Nicchitta, LA County’s supplemental budget changes that went before the board on Tuesday are part of the “final” phase of the county’s annual budget routine, and it comes “after we have closed the books on our last fiscal year.” This is an opportunity to budget in any additional dollars that went unspent the prior year or to allocate any new funds from federal state and other sources, he said. This is a chance to “make new investments and approve department requests that were deferred in earlier budget phases,” he said. Some major funding adjustments recommended, and adopted, on Tuesday, included money for public defenders, the closure of men’s central jail, rent relief programs and homeless services

The budget that the board adopted increases what they had planned in June to spend, by $3.9 billion, to the now $54.2 billion. Nicchitta said that increase includes $2 billion in one-time funds that were unspent in the previous year. There are also several hundred million more dollars from state, federal and other sources, as well as from belt-tightening measures they have been doing over the last year. He noted though that this is not a “typical year,” largely referencing the strains from the AB 218 sexual assault legal claims and the Trump Administration’s policies that directly affect LA County services. Even with the additional funds, Nicchitta and others noted that there are still many unmet needs in the county’s departments, which he says have been are under “intense” financial restraints.

The supervisors on Tuesday approved the recommended adjustments as Nicchitta and other departments presented them without making any major amendments. Anyone interested in reviewing what they were presented with and then adopted, can read this report from the CEO’s Office, and get an “at-a-glance” overview of the supplemental budget adjustments here. The slides Nicchitta used on Tuesday are here.

A few other things…

LA mayoral candidates Nithya Raman and Karen Bass’s responses on the topic of the Gaza genocide and the BDS movement at the 2026 Jewish Los Angeles Mayoral Forum set LA politics watchers abuzz Tuesday night. It was the most prominent discussion of the topic in the LA mayor’s race, which is for a seat that isn’t normally associated with policy that affects Israel and Palestine. But the issue is still personally important to many community members who vote in local elections. Raman reiterated her acknowledgment of Israel’s actions in Gaza as a genocide, something she originally stated on a live stream with Hasan Piker. Bass meanwhile, said she does not view what’s been happening in Gaza as a genocide, while noting that she grew up in the Jewish community and saying she went to “Jewish schools.” Her friends, she says, have parents and grandparents who are Holocaust survivors. And Raman responded to a question about the BDS movement, which calls for boycotting and disinvesting in interests in Israel, by saying she supports it as a form of protest. Louis Keene, a correspondent with The Forward, shared some of the key responses, with video showing how the audience responded, throughout the night. You can view the entirety of the mayoral forum here.

The Board of Supervisors on Tuesday voted to confirm the Governance Reform Task Force’s appointment of Michael Woo to be among the three initial members of what will eventually be the county’s new 7-person Ethics Commission. Woo is a former LA City Council member who happened to have been part of the effort to place a ballot measure that created LA city’s Ethics Commission in 1990.

City Attorney candidate Marissa Roy, known for running trivia game nights, rolled that talent into raising money for her campaign during a trivia night at Lawless Brewery in North Hollywood on Tuesday night.

What’s happening today?

Police commissioners take up RV dismantling contract, pretextual stops and robot dogs

The Board of Police Commissioners is meeting today and they’re taking up a one-year renewal of a contract with SA Recycling, which dismantles RVs as part of a program that the city says complements its homeless encampment sweeping program, CARE+. Meanwhile, advocates have recently documented CARE+ sanitation workers conducting towing operations at Penmar Park where RV residents live, including one on Sept. 17, in which the owner of the van arrived just as workers were starting to pry open his van door. “Luckily he was able to jumpstart his van, and they didn’t take his dogs,” narrates Peggy Lee Kennedy, who operates Venice Justice Committee, a citation clinic (Kennedy has also conducted a survey of Westside RV dwellers who have cited law enforcement, private security companies and vigilantes as the top source of harassment for them).

At that recent Penmar Park operation, Kennedy also documented someone who she said was also filming the operation. She described this person as someone who operates a YouTube page. “He thinks he knows it all,” she said of this person, even though, in her estimation, “he’s kind of a dick.”

The panel is also taking up the big topic of pretextual stops, via an inspector general report on the LAPD’s 2022 policy on this practice. Earlier this year, the LA City Council urged the board to prohibit officers from using minor violations as a pretext for pulling people over, to help them track down people for more serious violations. While the practice has been considered discriminatory — with community and advocacy groups argue the consequences outweigh any benefits — many LAPD officials have continued to maintain that it aids their investigations. The written public comment submitted for this meeting include those from ACLU Southern California and the League of Women Voters, Community Coalition, People for Mobility Justice and Catalyst California that urge the Board of Police Commissioners to ban such pretextual stops.

Also on police commissioners’ plate today is a report by LAPD officials on the use of “Quadruped Unmanned Ground Vehicle,” which are also often referred to as “robot dogs.”

LA county leaders to take some big budget votes; also taking up ethics panel appointment, and a better way to understand who is homeless in LA county and where they’re homeless

The LA County Board of Supervisors is taking up the final major phase of this year’s budgeting process, with some possible votes today on a series of adjustments to a spending plan earlier this year. The LA County CEO has summarized the proposed changes in a report and is set to make a presentation at today’s meeting — rhe budget items on what is known as the “supplemental budget” are 89 through 95 on the agenda. Some of the other items in that group are recommendations from the director of Homeless Services and Housing on the affordable housing program, and recommendations by Public Health and Health Services department officials.

Other items to watch at today’s meeting is the Governance Reform Task Force’s nomination of Michael Woo to the county’s new Ethics Commission and a presentation on earthquake preparedness.

And there is a motion that calls for a more comprehensive analysis of the homelessness crisis than what the annual “point-in-time” homeless count has been able to provide. That motion states that “the annual Point-in-Time Count is an important regional, state, and federal measure of homelessness, but it is designed to provide a point-in-time snapshot rather than a complete explanation of the conditions driving changes in individual communities. It may not fully capture neighborhood-level conditions, seasonal patterns, changes in the number of unsheltered dwellings, or the operational factors affecting inflow into homelessness and exits to permanent housing. Supervisorial District and city-level figures also require careful interpretation because estimates for unsheltered people residing in dwellings are not calculated at every geographic level.”

The motion says that a “comprehensive countywide review of homeless count results, over multiple years, together with available administrative and system performance data is needed. Such a review could examine changing economic conditions, housing affordability, migration patterns, outreach capacity, shelter and interim housing availability, service utilization, permanent housing placement rates, and other factors that may contribute to increases or decreases in sheltered and unsheltered homelessness.”

What just happened?

Authors Jenan Matari and Nora Lester Murad have sued the city of LA, after their LA Public Library talk last December — planned as part of a Read Palestine Week program — was cancelled by library officials. Sam Levin of The Guardian reports that their lawsuit accuses the city of “free speech violations, discrimination and breach of contract.” The LA Reporter (which publishes this newsletter), covered the cancellation of the event, and a letter staffers circulated seeking an apology from library administration, including to the teen patrons who had helped plan the event. Library patrons, including Palestinian Americans, gave public comment at a Library Commission meeting in Feb., along with both authors Matari and Murad, to protest the cancellation. One person called the cancellation a “frightening precedent.” The ACLU Southern California and the National Coalition Against Censorship have also written to library officials raising their own concerns.

Chris Modrzejewski, who helps head up a prominent lobbying firm, M Strategic Communications, was seriously injured earlier this month, and his 24-year-old son, Jack Modrzejewski, was arrested on suspicion of being intoxicated and ramming a Ford Bronco into his father, reports Clara Harter of the LA Times. The firm that Modrzejewski helps lead was recently retained by the cold storage warehouse company Lineage, after a June 17 fire at their Boyle Heights facility. Mrodzejewski has an extensive lobbying record at LA City Hall. He was also policy director in Richard Riordan’s mayoral administration in the latter part of the 1990s. The Times article says that the younger Modrzejewski’s LinkedIn biography (which does not load up when clicked) lists him as working for LA28, the committee coordinating the 2028 Olympics.

LA Podcast offers up an informative chat about the big sweeping changes happening in LA County government, featuring journalist Robert Greene of Los Angeles Rules, which focuses on local governance. Greene, who has been following the implementation of the voter approved Measure G very closely, was part of the editorial board of the LA Times for many years, and before that, while at the Metropolitan News-Enterprise, he wrote a column called Charterama that followed Los Angeles city’s charter reform process from 1996 until 2000.

What’s happening today?

The CD11 Coalition for Human Rights, which advocates for the interests of unhoused people in the 11th LA city council district (you can also check out their analysis, done with UCLA researchers, on CARE+ spending in that district), says they’re seeking donations of “rain ponchos, tarps, tents, replacement sleeping bags or other gear.” They’re asking that people send a “Venmo to @VeniceJustice or email cd11forhumanrights@gmail.com for other donation arrangements.”

The group says they’re concerned about whether adequate services will be available for unhoused people, during this so-called “super” El Niño season. In particular, they are making a push to get public officials to ensure that they are “opening easy to reach local Recreation Centers for 24 hour access to unhoused people in every area of Los Angeles during extreme weather events. This includes rain, heat, or fires!” They also put out the word to regular Angelenos around the county to “make your own emergency weather drive and very publicly let everyone, including your city and county representatives, know that LA needs to step up during extreme weather events.”

Some public officials might be already making some moves, around this matter. Los Angeles City Council member Ysabel Jurado last Tuesday authored a motion that calls for a report in 21 days on how the city is preparing to assist unhoused people during the El Niño season, and it’s been referred to the committee that she now chairs, which is the Homelessness and Health Committee. According to Jurado’s motion, “amidst other environmental emergencies, Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority and other governmental agencies have worked to rehouse unsheltered people, but there was still a significant delay in setting up temporary shelters and bringing people indoors.” And on the county side, The LA Reporter was told by the LA County CEO’s office that officials from their Department of Homeless Services and Housing took part in an Aug. 18 meeting of the Emergency Management Council focused on preparing for the El Niño season.

What just happened?

Yet another attempt at tackling LA’s persistent illegal trash dumping problems

One of the motions put out by City Council members last week makes yet another go at a longstanding problem of illegal trash dumping in Los Angeles. Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson, along with co-authors Imelda Padilla and Curren Price, suggest that enforcement could be helped by improving their technological capabilities.

Illegal dumping was something that Padilla’s predecessor, Nury Martinez, focused on, when she operated a strike team of her own staff to supplement the citywide work that the Bureau of Sanitation was already supposed to be carrying out. The issue is at least a couple decades old, going back to a 2008 investigation by LA Times investigative reporter Robert J. Lopez.

And City Controller Ron Galperin’s office in 2021 put out a report identifying this as a problem that needed to be addressed, writing at the time that “in recent years, as illegal dumping service requests have climbed, the City has put more resources into PROW [Public Right-of-Way] cleanup efforts spearheaded by the Bureau of Sanitation (LASAN). But even with funding for new cleanup crews and equipment, LASAN is struggling to keep up with the high demand for services.”

Also, LA City Council members want to get more details on evictions at single-room occupancy residences, and the city’s inventory of interim housing beds: A couple of other interesting motions to track including Council member Ysabel Jurado’s motion on getting a better understanding of eviction proceedings at single-room-occupancy residents. Jurado’s motion calls for report backs on “procedures and legal requirements related to residential eviction proceedings, or actions, including those occurring at Single Room Occupancy buildings. This report should outline what role, if any, the Police Department has in these proceedings, and specifically its coordination, if any, with the County Sheriff’s Department.”

And there’s a motion that calls for taking stock of the interim housing “beds” in Los Angeles. This motion notes that “the City has invested its local dollars as well as funding from State and federal resources to build an inventory of interim beds to serve unhoused people in Los Angeles.” Those beds were created as part of various programs, and they name a few of them: “Roadmap Plan and A Bridge Home Program, Tiny Home Villages, Inside Safe motel and hotel placements, and beds created under the LA Alliance Settlement Agreement program.”

The motion also notes that “the County of Los Angeles (County), including their Department of Mental Health (DMH), Department of Health Services’ (DHS) Housing for Health, and the Department of Homeless Services and Housing, regularly places clients into city-supported beds. If the City builds its own homelessness system and behavioral health department, the County’s placement options could be impacted.”

A few other things…

Golden State has a page, that will continue to be updated, that rounds up their recommendations on the state’s 14 ballot propositions.

Ruth of Roofless examines Mayor Karen Bass and Nithya Raman’s homelessness track record.

The evacuation orders in La Verne — put in place after a solar farm battery caught fire and a second battery overheated — were lifted last Friday. La Verne Daily News’s Staci Baird reports that officials are now working to remove the damaged batteries and investigating what happened at the solar farm that powers the Metropolitan Water District’s water treatment plant.

Alissa Walker of Torched reports that Rick Cole, a former staffer in Controller Kenneth Mejia’s office, would be leading Nithya Raman’s transition team, should Raman win the race for LA mayor. Cole is a council member in Pasadena, and has served in a variety of administrations in LA city and other cities, including as a budget adviser to former LA mayor Eric Garcetti.

And a poll co-sponsored by the LA Times gave Marissa Roy a 10-point lead over her opponent John McKinney, in the LA City Attorney’s race. The newspaper’s “LA on the Record” politics newsletter this weekend also features a tour through Nithya Raman’s DSA-LA questionnaire.

What just happened?

$11 million jury award among the largest for fatal LAPD officer shootings, as Mayor Bass orders a review of police response to mental health crises

A jury awarded $11 million to the family of Wilver Blanco, who LAPD officers killed while he was experiencing a mental health episode, reports Libor Jany of the LA Times. Blanco’s family had argued in their lawsuit that the police could have done more to “de-escalate the encounter, including through the use of less-lethal weapons, such as a 40mm projectile launcher.”

Jany also explains that such jury awards can get lowered if they’re appealed and “any potential settlement still would need approval from city leaders.” As it stands, the $11 million is as large of a number as it looks to most of us – it’s one of the bigger payout amounts from a police shooting, Jany writes. He cites that the largest amount in recent years was a $24 million payout to the family of a Navy vet who was killed by police in 2017.

The news about the settlement came out on the same day that Mayor Karen Bass issued Executive Directive 21, which orders a review of how the LAPD responds to calls involving a mental health crisis.

It calls for “an independent and comprehensive evaluation of LAPD uses of force and custodial arrests that result in death or serious bodily injury that may have involved individuals experiencing mental or behavioral health crises.”

But this issue didn’t suddenly become a big deal this week. It is something that has long been identified as an area of concern, going even further back than this 2024 analysis by Robert Garrova of LAist that found that a third of LAPD shootings since 2017 involved someone who was experiencing a mental health crisis.

That article references LAPD reports that already talks about how they do train officers in de-escalation. And it features City Council member Eunisses Hernandez speaking out about a lack of funding for an alternative way of responding to people who are in a mental health episode.

Hernandez told LAist in a statement that “we continue to see that alternate crisis response teams are not funded at the levels needed to support Angelenos experiencing mental health crises. We will continue to see these preventable shootings unless we invest in community based mental health services and alternate crisis response teams at the scale needed at both the city and county level.”

Bass’s new directive also references a lack of funding, and it includes language that says “decades of systemic disinvestment in mental and behavioral health services have created a severe shortage of care, leaving individuals in acute crisis with virtually nowhere to turn. As a result, individuals with untreated mental illness or behavioral health crises too often experience repeated encounters with law enforcement, or cycle between the streets, emergency rooms, and detention facilities and eventually end up in the criminal justice system.”

The LAPD’s mental health crisis is also a subject that LA City Controller Kenneth Mejia has studied. His office issued a report in October 2025 detailing the results of their audit of the LAPD’s mental health unit, known officially as SMART. One of the larger conclusions they made was that on those teams, clinicians tended to play second fiddle to officers who called the shots. And alongside the push to find funding for unarmed crisis response models, the LAPD is also expected to try to secure more funding for its own units.

Mejia’s report states that “LAPD constantly requests additional funding for more SMART units to respond to mental health calls. However, if LAPD continues to relegate SMART to a secondary and supportive role instead of a lead role during mental health calls, there will be no mitigation against use of force and deadly outcomes.”

The Los Angeles City Council earlier this week also touched on the alternative model that Hernandez, who provided the statement to LAist in 2024, champions. The council forwarded along a couple of motions related to building out an alternative system, which is now currently more in a pilot stage, called the Unarmed Model of Crisis Response. Hernandez commented on the fact that one motion relates to the use of settlement fund stemming out of the opioid crisis to pay for this alternate model.

“I’m grateful for that work and the innovation around using dollars that are coming from a lawsuit that came about because people were getting rich off selling opioids that started the opioid crisis and bringing that back to support our community,” Hernandez said. “I’m grateful for that innovation … so I hope that you all can support these so that we can continue to build out and beef up our public safety ecosystem by increasing our unarmed crisis response system to be citywide and full capacity.”

A few more things…

In a filing covering a recent 80 day span, from July 1 until Sept. 19, Mayor Karen Bass raised more than Nithya Raman, but Raman has the most money on hand in the last month before poll close on Nov. 3, and with ballots getting mailed out in just two weeks, on Oct. 5. The heavy lifting, for both candidates, has been done by public matching funds, with Raman maxing out with $1.5 million in such funds, and Bass now with just under $1 million. Bass has gone through more funds than Raman. Her campaign spent $1.39 million, while Raman has spent $706,714. Raman’s campaign, notably, hauled in $60,000 on a single night just before the deadline on Sept. 19, during a Dungeons and Dragons-themed fundraiser featuring comedian Brennan Lee Mulligan.

The LA Times has a story about how the recent Berkeley poll, which gives Raman a staggering 11 point lead, puts pressure on the Bass campaign to go negative. It explores how polling functions in an election contest, with some commenters they consulted saying that it can make it more difficult for Bass to convince donors to put more money into her campaign. Polls can be inaccurate or may not be truly reflective of what voters really will do, but they nevertheless hold sway over the tactics that campaigns feel like they have to employ to stay in the game.

Steve Scauzillo of Southern California News Group reports on a motion approved by the Metro board to perform a comprehensive audit of repairs of Metrolink trains and potential safety issues related to that. The rail agency is seeing reduced ridership that’s contributed to a budget shortfall.

What’s happening today?

Tuesday’s lithium battery explosion at a Metropolitan Water District plant still has parts of La Verne under an evac order; Robot dogs used to get air samples

“News you can trust, because I live here.” That’s the tagline of Staci Baird, who publishes La Verne Daily News, and who has been doing around-the-clock reporting on a lithium battery fire that broke out on Tuesday at a solar farm at the Metropolitan Water District’s F.E. Weymouth Water Treatment Plant. The initial battery fire was put out, but a second battery has been overheating, which means mandatory evacuations have continued for the last three days. Baird offered a live-stream of a 4 p.m. news conference conducted by LA Verne officials earlier today. The LA Reporter was pitching in today with some reporting on the incident, and was told by a Battalion Chief (who retired in 2019 from LA County Fire) doing PIO duty for La Verne Fire, that each of the two battery units in question is similar in size to that of a Winnebago RV.

During that news conference, a La Verne official mentioned that the Metropolitan Water District has been using robot dogs, by getting them to walk up to the batteries to take air samples. The smoke that comes from the lithium batteries is toxic, fire officials say, which is why even though they haven’t detected the smoke leaving MWD’s property, they have issued orders for residents to leave, and for businesses to close, in the event that the situation does go “broken arrow.” MWD also had to fly in some experts from out of town to help firefighters deal with the incident. They could not attend the news conference to field questions this afternoon because they were needed at the plant.

For those who mainly follow my LA city coverage and other communities around or near that area, and may not know exactly where the city of La Verne is, it is near San Dimas, home of the Raging Waters water park, and the cities of Claremont and Pomona, which is where you have the Fairplex that hosts the LA County Fair. You can get to that area, thereabouts, by taking the Pomona-bound A Line from Union Station.

A couple more things…

Speaking of the A Line, Metro sent around a press release today about its latest ridership numbers from August, and that particular line’s ridership is up 14.3% to 2,106,929 boardings. The overall ridership on Metro’s trains and buses in August was 26,565,486, which is 5% more than last August, according to the report Metro officials sent to reporters. They also play up the fact that the numbers indicate more people are riding Metro for leisure than they used to, ascertained by looking at the increased ridership on the weekends. You can also see their ridership data here.

And for those tracking the LA city elections, a new raft of campaign fundraising data is being posted to the LA City Ethics Commission website by today’s midnight deadline for campaigns, when they’re required to report both spending and fundraising from a recent 80 day span from July 1 until September 19. A strategist for Mayor Karen Bass’s campaign for re-election told POLITICO to watch for a haul of around $2 million to be posted today. Half of that is public matching funds dollars. Meanwhile, the campaign for Bass’ challenger, Nithya Raman, maxed out on the amount of matching funds a few days ago, and they now have $1.5 million already posted from matching funds alone. It now remains to be seen where the two line up in terms of bigger pocketed donors.

What just happened?

LA county and city officials are now vying to lead homeless services delivery, and tomorrow is the deadline for the two government entities to send in their applications. Governance expert Raphe Sonenshein, who has been a longtime observer of LA city and county politics, shared some thoughts on this with The LA Reporter (that’s me), and described the city and county as having an “uncomfortable relationship” since the 1990s, on the topic of homelessness. The two have even sued each other a few times over the years, he said.

The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, which is a joint powers authority between the city and county, had been the glue holding the two sides together for the last three decades. And according to Sonenshein, that agency has often been “scapegoated by both sides.” But now that this joint powers agency has opted to give up its lead role in the matter, what does it all mean and where do things go from here?

He says that no matter what happens, the two parties actually really need each other, in order to succeed at tackling homelessness. “Homelessness has two parts, one of which falls largely within the city’s role, which is providing housing,” Sonenshein says. He notes that the city has “great sway on land-use,” while also providing “basic services to the city as a whole, including police, fire, housing, and street maintenance.”

The county meanwhile focuses on social services, which is just as important when tackling homelessness, Sonenshein said. [He also says the county provides services in the form of “law enforcement through the sheriff for unincorporated territory and cities that contract with the county.”]

“The problem is that the city is unlikely to become a social service provider and the county will not be happy constructing neighborhood support for, or overcoming opposition, to building more housing,” he said. “So they kind of need each other.”

Keeping that relationship going was something that Mayor Karen Bass emphasized as soon as she assumed office in 2022. Sonenshein said that her emphasis on this relationship was a good thing.

“For the first two years of the Bass mayoralty a state of good feelings helped make progress,” he said, also explaining that “when the city and county are aligned, homelessness governance makes good things possible.”

Sonenshein also shed some light on the cultural differences between the two governmental bodies that can sometimes be the source of the unease between the two sides

“The city and county governments sometimes look at each other skeptically,” he said. “Some county people consider their government to be better managed and less ‘noisy’ than the city government. Some city people say the county does not get held directly accountable by the people for failures the way that city officials visibly do.”

A bonus point that Sonenshein made was that even as LAHSA may be fading into the sunset, there are other agencies that could serve as a shared table.

“One new place for common work is the Los Angeles County Affordable Housing Solutions agency (LACAHSA) which has governing representation from both county and city,” he said. “I remain, as ever, hopeful.”

What’s happening today?

Raman holds a massive lead in new LA Times poll, but opponent Bass’s team calls it an ‘outlier’

A new, rather eye-popping, poll by Berkeley IGS and the LA Times shows a massive lead for Nithya Raman in the mayor’s race ahead of the incumbent, Mayor Karen Bass. This poll was done in essentially the last few days, from last Tuesday, Sept. 15 until this past Sunday, Sept. 20. It showed 39% of survey respondents saying they would vote for Raman, and 28% would vote for Bass.

The 33% that were undecided is actually unusual for this many days before an election (and ballots start being mailed out on Oct. 5), pollster Mark DiCamillo told the Times. The poll might help answer a big question around who Pratt voters prefer, and it seems they like Bass a bit more than Raman. Still, those voters aren’t the be all and end all of the undecided respondents. Some of those undecided people didn’t vote in the primary, and those queried in the survey were a group that preferred Raman more than Bass.

Bass’s campaign diagnosed this latest polling as an “outlier,” though, and even pointed out how an earlier poll during the primary wasn’t exactly spot-on. The campaign argued that a poll that’s done online can “struggle” to get things right. Alex Stack, spokesperson for the Bass campaign, stated that “one outlier poll which got the June primary wrong isn’t reflective of the energy we see when talking to voters every day and what every other poll indicates – this is going to be a close race. Our campaign is continuing to do our job: contrasting Mayor Bass’ record of delivering results on housing, public safety, and neighborhood investment with Nithya Raman’s out-of-step views on allowing encampments near schools and failing to show up for her constituents.”

What just happened?

​​On Tuesday, UCLA academics hosted a panel conversation on “the intersections of transportation and homelessness.” Yes, I know. Quite the hot topic. But the encouraging thing about this conversation is that the panelists included “Ruth,” a journalist who lived outside and in public for a number of years, at a spot in Studio City near a bike path. You might know Ruth better by her longtime moniker, “Rooflesser.”

Given that it’s rare for these types of conversations to include the perspective of someone who is personally unhoused, someone took the opportunity to directly ask Ruth to share with the listeners (many of whom work at transportation agencies) the reason she chose to live next to the bike path. It turns out it had not been so much of a choice, as it was the result of a series of events, many of them touched off by the actions of government entities.

Ruth explained that a “bureaucratic” lapse in funds several years ago led to her needing to find a place to live. She had been in “bridge” housing, one that she was sharing with more than a dozen other people. On the day she lost the housing, Ruth said she needed to go to work, and naturally she wanted to have a place to return to after clocking out. She did find such a spot. It was under a bridge behind Campbell Hall High School in Studio City. “I went from living in a ‘bridge’ home to an actual bridge,” Ruth remarked.

Ruth further explained that the location “had three walls and a roof, which felt more like housing than anything else that I could find. And there were people that were nice and it was in a good neighborhood.”

But Caltrans, which had jurisdiction over that spot, began conducting sweeps – and then, those sweeps began happening every day, Ruth said.

“The sweeps… chased us along the freeway corridor, and when I got where I stayed for many years, it was a bike path that was not really open and wasn’t connected to anything, and I was on a useless hillside,” she said.

So Ruth lived for many years on the hillside, which was between that bike path and a parking lot. She painted the picture in the style that she often uses, which was jurisdictionally: “It was a county easement, and it had a steep incline, but part of it was flat.”

Ruth said she wasn’t intending to live there for a long time, “but that was one of the only places that the police didn’t – the sanitation workers and Caltrans – didn’t seem to interfere with us.” She also explained she developed an abscess following a stint at a shelter – one that, she explained, was “traumatizing” to live in.

Ruth closed her response by referencing some legal provisions she’d consulted to figure out whether she could live next to that bike path. “I felt like I had a right to be there,” she said. “It was constitutionally protected because it was on the LA River, which is supposed to be a shared, public natural resource, because it’s a navigable body of water.

“The public is supposed to be able to access it at any time,” she explained. “So, I felt like if I had a right to be anywhere in public, it would be there. I was on the tree line, which should be part of the frontage or title lands or whatever the constitutional language is.”

Ruth then said she hoped that helped clarify things for listeners. She also apologized for the length of her response.

A quick note, also. It is rare for Ruth to be open to sharing so much detail about the “outside” spot where she lives. And that might be a reflection of the fact that she recently shared she is “roofless no more.” She says she has worked out a way to get housed in the last couple of weeks, ever since she became fed up by continued sweeps. She had rented a U-Haul and set up a Bureau of Homelessness Oversight and Accountability (clearly “mock” and satirical for those who need to be sure) outside of the district office of her City Council member, Nithya Raman, who is running for mayor. Raman’s staffer came out that day with water and some sunscreen and spent a few hours getting grilled by Ruth, who told me at the time that it almost seemed like some progress was being made as they began to talk through some misunderstandings.

LA city leaders worried about losing control of homeless services, but staffers say the city is “uniquely positioned” to understand the crisis

There was handwringing by LA city leaders on Tuesday about losing control over how homeless services are delivered, after the joint powers authority, through which the city and county have long ruled the roost, is dismantled. The city and the county, and potentially others, are expected to compete to hold lead roles on service delivery. Some City Council members on Tuesday raised fears they would lose control of the city’s “beds,” which many council members have helped to set up in their districts, and lamented losing further access to mental health services, if LA County obtains a lead role on homeless services. But Council member Bob Blumenfield wagered that the county is likely to win the contest, and says the only thing they can do now is to be more engaged with the county, if that entity is indeed taking up the mantle. Meanwhile, Council member Eunisses Hernandez raised some doubts that the city could handle homeless service delivery when it already struggles to provide basic city services in a timely manner. The city is nevertheless expected to forge ahead with its application. Meg Barclay, the deputy CAO (formerly the city’s “homelessness czar” who went off to Seattle for a few years where she led their homeless services department), assured Hernandez that she believed the city was putting together a strong application. “The city as a municipality is uniquely positioned to understand the needs of the other municipalities in the continuum,” Barclay said, referencing the “continuum of care” moniker that is given to any entity that holds the leadership roles. While the roles could be rather expansive for a single city to hold – they could potentially have control of the case management system, HMIS, that contains information about the cases of people living in another city – LA city’s population of homeless constituents typically make up around 60% of those throughout the county.

A few more things…

The Los Angeles Fire Department announced the results of their investigation into the Lineage cold storage fire, and while they say the cause remains undetermined, they learned that the fire originated on the roof next to a section of the solar panels. Council member Ysabel Jurado, who authored a motion that calls for withholding Lineage’s rebuild permit while the investigation was ongoing, quickly put out a statement on Tuesday saying that the results of the probe is unsatisfactory, especially for residents of Boyle Heights, which means she still opposes letting the company’s permit through the gate. Lineage, which has long contended that the solar panel caused the fire, seized on the investigation’s findings though, putting out a statement on Tuesday saying they proved what they had been saying all along. The company recently sued the solar panel company, Altus Power, which hit back at Lineage by pointing to the findings as hardly settling the matter, since the cause is undetermined.

Nithya Raman’s mayoral campaign hit the maximum in matching funds that they can possibly receive in the general election, which is $1.5 million. She beat Bass to the punch, which recently hauled in a few hundred thousand dollars to get to just under $1 million. Matching funds are provided to campaigns for the small dollar donations they receive from people who live within the city or the district – and Raman has pointed to this as an edge that’s needed for someone like herself who hasn’t been part of the traditional politics world in Los Angeles.

You can catch up on Karen Bass’s portion of the mayoral forum put on by the Muslim Public Affairs Council, here. It was held Tuesday night. Nithya Raman’s conversation with MPACPresident Salam Al-Marayati, from Sunday, Aug. 30, can be viewed here.

What’s happening today?

LA city’s Board of Police Commissioners is taking up a three-month, no-cost pilot contract with Axon to do license plate surveillance cameras on lightpoles, similar to that of Flock. That contract was previously put on last week’s agenda, but was then rescheduled to today’s meeting. It’s now paired with renewals of LAPD’s other agreements with Axon related to body-worn cameras, police car dash-cams and tasers are also getting taken up. Police commissioners last week discussed ALPR (automated license plate reader) cameras as part of a “comprehensive” presentation on police technology.

The Los Angeles City Council is meeting today, and their agenda includes a few items related to how homeless services are delivered in Los Angeles. The question of who heads up homeless services in LA is now up in the air, after the three-decade old joint powers authority, the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, opted to step down from those lead roles last week. Those roles include managing a database – called HMIS – that holds each unhoused person’s paperwork and case worker notes related to housing applications and services (although an important thing to note about this responsibility is that unhoused people themselves have experienced delays in viewing their own case files within this system, something that would be considered unacceptable if those delays happened with an individual’s medical files, for example). The three other lead roles include managing the criteria for how people are matched to housing and services (called the Coordinated Entry System), conducting a homeless count that’s used to apply for funding, and finally, taking on the role of actually applying for the federal dollars from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development that has long funded a good portion of homeless services. Los Angeles County’s new Department of Homeless Services and Housing is planning to apply to take on those leadership roles, as is the city of Los Angeles.

The City Council is also expected to take up an item that tees off the application process for $460 million in funding for affordable housing, both new construction and preserving existing housing. A portion of the funds come from Measure A, a sales tax that funds affordable housing (and homeless services), but the lions share – $324 million of it – comes from Measure ULA, the tax that’s applied to the sale or transfer of high value property. This is the second year that this funding program, known as Homes for LA (or H4LA, for short) is being offered. The funding round is expected to conclude next April with the awarding of the grants to projects. Last year’s $360 million in funding went to projects that aimed to build approximately 1,500 new units and preserve another around 3,700 existing affordable housing units.

Also of note is that the City Council is voting on four of Mayor Karen Bass’s appointments to the city’s Climate Emergency Mobilization Commission today. The commission hasn’t had a meeting since 2024, just a few months before Bass proposed in 2025 to cut the Climate Emergency Mobilization Department, which this commission oversees. Ultimately the department was saved, but Bass then quietly fired the original department head and then appointed her replacement, but very quietly. When asked about that at a recent mayoral forum, Bass said that her goal all along was to revamp the climate emergency department so it could be more effective. One of the groups that hosted the environmental forum, the League of Conservation Voters, ultimately went with endorsing Bass’s opponent in the mayor’s race, Nithya Raman, this weekend, although other groups such as the Sierra Club have yet to announce endorsements.

What just happened?

Raman’s League of Conservation Voters’s support dates back to her first run for City Council

Nithya Raman, while at Lewis MacAdams Riverfront Park in Frogtown on Saturday, unveiled the League of Conservation Voters’s endorsement. Raman, who had little institutional support when she ran for City Council in 2020 – when she ultimately denied then-City Council member David Ryu a second term – spoke a bit off the cuff, after the presser portion mostly concluded, about what it meant to have gotten that environmental organization’s support back then. Those remarks were mostly addressed to members of that group, which she said “was one of the few organizations that endorsed someone who was running against an incumbent here in the city of Los Angeles in 2020. It was one of my proudest endorsements that I received at that time, and to receive it again in this mayoral race is really – it makes me very emotional today.”

Mayor Bass’s political allies rally around her after a tough week

And later that same, nice day, at another park nearby, Mayor Karen Bass’s allies – many who have worked with her for years – gathered around her at the end of a tough campaign week, during which an article had come out in a major media outlet pointing to flagging energy around her re-election bid, and her challenger released favorable internal polling even as her own campaign declined to do so (a possible indication that the latest results might not have been favorable). Dignitaries of labor, immigrant rights activism, and two LA City Council members not only stumped for Bass at the “Latinos con Bass” carne asada volunteer appreciation event held at Ernest E. Debs Park in Montecito Heights, but also took pains to remind whoever was listening of what Bass has done for the community over the years, and why they were now at her side. One of the more powerful among the group (aside from Maria Elena Durazo who is mentor to a few others there) was the chair of the Los Angeles County Democratic Party, Mark Ramos, who described Bass as the party’s “endorsed candidate… no challenges, no qualms, no question.” As with the rally the weekend prior, at the headquarters of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor (another powerful ally to have at election time), Ramos and others took exception to Council member Nithya Raman’s decision to challenge Bass, framing Raman’s entry into the race as opportunism. “Donald Trump has made it hard to be the mayor of Los Angeles,” Ramos said. “So instead of standing in solidarity and making sure Los Angeles is fighting for every single damn penny it deserves, somebody sees an opening and runs through that door and says, ‘I want to be mayor.’ That’s not how this works… What we do is we stand together in solidarity against tyrants like Donald Trump. We don’t look for opportunities.” [Corrected the park’s name to Ernest E. Debs. Eugene is obviously a much different, much more socialist, political figure, compared to Ernest, who was a council member and LA County supervisor]

A few more things…

Attorney generals and Paramount have settled a lawsuit that was blocking a merger with Warner Bros. Discovery. Also, the Writers Guild of America, says they have settled too, and that one of the agreements they secured was that no writers will be laid off for five years, according to a statement shared by Daniel Miller of POLITICO.

Gov. Gavin Newsom has declared a state of emergency around the El Niño weather pattern, which raises temperatures around the Pacific Ocean and may lead to more and stronger storms. The declaration focuses state resources into responding to the weather events, and loosens some competitive bidding requirements in order to speed up getting to work when needed.

A financial health check for the LA city election campaigns is coming soon. Saturday night was the fundraising deadline for an 80-day period from July 1 until Sept. 19. Now campaigns have until Thursday midnight to post their disclosures of the money they raised and spent. The numbers are posted here on the City Ethics Commission’s election totals page. As we get closer to the Nov. 3 election day, we’ll get more frequent disclosures, with the next one coming in just under a month, and the one after that in 10 days. Any donations above $1,000 are already supposed to be disclosed by campaigns within 24 hours though.

And with Nithya Raman’s campaign, watch for many of the under-$1,000 donations to be reported for around the time of a Sept. 19 fundraiser done in the Dungeons and Dragons style. Raman’s campaign strategist referenced a big haul that night, declaring it the “largest grassroots fundraiser” of the general election (for that campaign).

An independent expenditure committee that’s mostly funded by the LA city police officers’ union, the Los Angeles Police Protective League, rolled out a series of ads opposing Raman’s campaign, including a 30-second television spot on Friday that takes aim at Raman’s positions around encampments. Opposing law enforcement approaches to encampments has been a standard position taken by progressives, and continues to be, but such attacks are also meant to act as a kind of poison or weapon used against progressive candidates. Raman, to her credit, sounded unfazed by the television ad, telling reporters at a presser on Friday that in her district she gets people indoors “for good, not just moving people down the block,” likely referencing the fact that the default law-enforcement approaches to encampments that’s deployed in much of the city just shifts people around. Anyway, after that, the police officers union threw in a couple hundred thousand more, and on Sunday, rolled out a website, DSAVoterInfo.com, that targets Raman’s Democratic Socialists of America support.

LA County Young Democrats put out a statement on Friday saying they are suspending their endorsement of Jimmy Gomez for Congressional District 34, in response to allegations of sexual misconduct (which Gomez has denied). Gomez is running for re-election, and faces a challenge from Angela Gonzales Torres.

Last Friday’s LA City Council motions include one by Katy Yaroslavsky that calls for ways to encourage developers to build more condos rather than rental properties, and a motion by Tim McOsker in which he wants to know what’s going on with delays with a port worker training center project. And you can catch up on the Ad Hoc Committee for Boyle Heights Fire Recovery’s discussion, here, on Council member Ysabel Jurado’s motion calling for suspending CARE+ encampment sweeps during environmental emergencies, such as the Lineage warehouse fire.

Jim Newton’s piece in LA Material Monday goes into this idea — that’s been popularized lately, and that has been rather pivotal in the fight between Nithya Raman and Karen Bass — that the mayor of Los Angeles is more powerful than City Council members, even though that’s not really the case.

What’s happening today?

Nithya Raman is courting LA’s Latino voters today with a “Latinos con Nithya” rally at La Cita, in downtown Los Angeles, where she is sharing her plans around housing, small business, and immigration. She also announced an endorsement by LAUSD Board member Rocio Rivas, who was just re-elected to serve LAUSD families in the 2nd district, which covers several Eastside Los Angeles neighborhoods like El Sereno, Boyle Heights, Echo Park and Highland Park.

The Los Angeles City Council is holding its regular 10 a.m. Friday meeting. Those usually start with some presentations, which can push the official agenda back a bit. Their main business today includes voting on whether to confirm Mayor Karen Bass’s reappointments of people to the commissions for the El Pueblo and Cultural Affairs departments, and to the House LA Citizens Oversight Committee, which oversees Measure ULA dollars. An item on a major issue today is a motion on setting aside funding for City Council offices to expand a program that moves people from RV encampments. Council member Monica Rodriguez’s motion on her RV to Home program, which was piloted in her district in the northeast San Fernando Valley, says that Rodriguez’s council office “moved 198 people to permanent supportive housing, an additional 202 into interim housing,” and that they “removed 192 RVs from the street.” Another item on an important issue is a motion by Council member Tim McOsker that asks about what can be disclosed about a feasibility study related to the Jones Chemicals plant in the Harbor Gateway Area that has been the subject of concern for people living nearby. The agenda also includes a motion by Council member Adrin Nazarian to get regular verbal reports on film permitting, a critical topic for many people’s livelihoods in Los Angeles. A couple of historic landmark applications are also up today, including one for an apartment named after and owned by a popular in her day (and some say, she ought to be better known today) silent film star, Norma Talmadge.

A few LA City Council members will be sticking around at City Hall this afternoon. Some will take part in the Jobs Committee at 2 p.m., where they’re taking up a healthy neighborhood market program in Council member Tim McOsker’s 15th District, a program to help legacy businesses such as small restaurants survive, and a couple items on how the Hollywood Walk of Fame Public Amenities Program is monitored. The motion on the legacy business protection efforts points to a study by UCLA and KIWA that says challenges faced by small restaurants include “high operating costs, limited access to business resources, and unfair labor practices like low wages, tip theft, and wage violations. These structural barriers restrict economic mobility and make it difficult for small business owners to offer competitive wages or remain in operation.

There is also an ad hoc committee meeting on the Lineage fire in Boyle Heights, at 2 p.m., that includes the creation of an environmental justice commission, “bulky item pick up, street sweeping and power washing, and dead animal removal in the public right of way” in Boyle Heights, and proposed policy to suspend sweeps of homeless encampments during emergencies that are done under the CARE+ program. On the last issue, the Bureau of Sanitation (also known as LA Sanitation), sent back a report this week explaining that City Council offices, on a case-by-case level, have always had the ability to suspend sweeps. Sanitation officials said that they could add language to make suspending sweeps during environmental emergencies more automatic.

They explained that there is an existing process in use since 2019 for City Council offices to “adjust CARE+ services, including, but not limited to, suspending, downgrading, postponing, or rescheduling CARE+ operations at the direction of the respective Council Office,” which offers flexibility to respond to “environmental emergencies, disasters, extreme weather events, or other emergency conditions affecting a specific area, Council District (CD), or the City as a whole.” Council offices can make changes up to the day of the operation, the report also says. Sanitation officials also note that “this operational flexibility provides each CD with full authority to modify its respective schedule as local conditions change or dictate.”

Gustavo Arellano of the Los Angeles Times has a column out today that wades into a touchy conflict that centers around the Barrio Run Club announcing a 5K run through Leimert Park that uses the words “taking over” in their promotion of the event. The 5K was later relocated, but Arellano goes into how the shifting demographics in South Los Angeles, and the divisive politics this can generate, might cause strong reactions. “This is a city where neighborhood displacement — whether by gentrification, government or natural disaster — is as commonplace and messy as the bloom of jacarandas. Few communities have weathered those forces more than Black L.A.,” Arellano writes.

What just happened?

Mayor Karen Bass points to her efforts to stand up to Trump’s ICE raids with a new re-election campaign video out this week about how she responded to immigration officials conducting a raid at MacArthur Park. In the short and succinct video, Bass says, “When someone comes after your family, you don’t hesitate. You stand up. You fight. So when Trump sent ICE to MacArthur Park, I met them there, looked them in the eye, and told them to get out. And they did.” Los Angeles has been seen as a testing ground for the Trump Administration, and in January, Bass was featured in Nation magazine as one of the political figures who was fighting back against Trump’s anti-immigrant policies.

Mayor Karen Bass has some catching up to do on matching funds. Since her challenger, Council member Nithya Raman broke $1 million in matching funds a few weeks back, Mayor Karen Bass appears to finally have gotten in some progress on that front. Bass recently posted $303,072 in additional matching funds, to reach a total of $978,440. Bass’s team appears to have been hard at work to get in those small dollar donations, including posting a video last month. But Bass’s team has to be sweating a bit. Raman’s team happens to include a very proficient compliance person on matching funds. Given the nearly three weeks that has passed since the last posting of matching funds for Raman, there’s potentially more loaded up by now that will boost her matching fund total soon enough. One of the things about matching small dollar donations is that it’s supposed to encourage candidates to ALSO care about the little guys – so while it might seem to some as not being a good use of public dollars, it’s a way for the average person’s donations, which might not seem much compared to the people (or companies and groups) with deeper pockets, to figure a bit more prominently on the minds of anyone who’s potentially headed into powerful elected offices.

Some pedestrian safety, immigration and e-bike safety policy items hit the council files this week. LA city’s Department of Transportation just submitted a ”report-back” on a 2023 motion by Bob Blumenfield, Nithya Raman and Eunisses Hernandez calling for the city to improve pedestrian safety when they’re crossing the street, including looking into giving pedestrians more of a head start when crossing the street. The report recommends that the City Council instruct staff “to update its guidelines for signal operations, Leading Pedestrian Intervals, scramble crosswalks, and No Turn on Red restrictions and report back once these guidelines are updated.” The LA City Attorney’s Office just submitted an ordinance related to ED17, which aims to protect immigrants amid the Trump Administration’s raids, and the city’s Chief Legislation Analyst has sent back a report on legislation related to ebike etc safety.

A couple of commission appointments were withdrawn this week, both after people in the public spoke up about those appointees. They include Mayor Karen Bass’s appointment of Pacific Crest Realty owner Daniel Tenenbaum, to the Housing Authority for the City of Los Angeles. Mitch Kamin, who is Bass’s chief of staff, submitted a brief letter notifying the council they were withdrawing Tenenbaum from further consideration. The group, Strategic Actions for a Just Economy (SAJE), had sent a letter in late August raising “serious concerns” and citing among other issues, Tenenbaum’s “longstanding leadership role within the California Apartment Association.”

The other withdrawal was of City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto’s appointment of Dena Bloom to the City Ethics Commission. This came after a City Hall watchdog, Rob Quan of Unrig LA, spoke in public comment at Tuesday’s City Council meeting about Bloom being listed as a “major donor” in a state disclosure, which would make her ineligible for the position, under the 2024 voter-approved Charter Amendment ER. Less than an hour after the comment, the Council President announced they were postponing the item for a week, but that might not be necessary. Just two days later, the City Attorney’s Office forwarded the City Council a letter from Bloom herself, saying that while it was an “honor” to have been appointed, that she was withdrawing her name for consideration. Interestingly, Feldstein Soto had personally spoken at a committee meeting just before Tuesday’s City Council vote on Bloom’s appointment to lend extra support for her nominee for the Ethics role.

What’s happening today?

The Leadership Table for Regional Homeless Alignment, an advisory board that looks at aligning efforts to tackle homelessness regionally, is meeting at 1 p.m. They’re set to discuss a spending plan for Measure A revenue that’s generated from local sales tax to fund homeless services. This committee is an advisory version of another board, called the Executive Committee for Regional Homelessness Alignment, and it has a range people on it, including the head of the Central City Association, the Los Angeles police chief, as well as people from the homeless service provider sector, the general manager of LA city’s housing department and the head of LA county’s homeless services department.

LA city’s Recreation and Parks Commission is meeting in Venice, at Penmar Recreation Center, at 9:30 a.m. today. Their agenda includes a proposal to purchase or transfer properties in South Los Angeles to build more park facilities and a bike lane project at Westwood Park, where the Bad News Bear Baseball Field is located.

And LA city’s Cultural Heritage Commission is meeting this morning to consider historic landmark applications for an apartment building that appeared in the movie Sunset Boulevard and a flashy, mid-century modern Cadillac showroom in the San Fernando Valley.

What just happened?

Michael Woo, who helped set up LA city Ethics Commission, nominated to new LA County ethics panel

After deliberating for about six hours, the Measure G task force settled on nominating Michael Woo, a former LA City Council member who played an instrumental role in setting up LA city’s Ethics Commission, to serve on LA County’s new Ethics Commission. That ethics panel will eventually have seven members.

Woo, who says he is “officially retired,” recounted to the task force on Wednesday that when he told a former colleague on the LA City Council that he was headed down to the Hall of Administration to interview for a seat on the new LA County Ethics Commission, “she responded instantly with an email saying, ‘Are you out of your mind?’ Meaning, why would you want to do that?”

As he reflected on this reaction, Woo told the task force members that the job they were interviewing people for that day might require someone who can go into it with their eyes wide open. And it would require a certain degree of toughness.

“Apart from the noble sentiments that you have heard, and, in some cases, expressed during today’s meeting, I harbor no illusions that the work ahead will be at that level of nobility,” Woo said. “There’s a lot of detail work, minutiae. Being involved in implementing ethics enforcement is a thankless task. It invites scrutiny, and dare I say, it invites allegations of hypocrisy, and other kinds of personal criticism that may be leveled at the individuals who you choose to serve on this commission.”

Woo then said he was willing to “risk this exposure, because, as I said in the beginning of my statement, because we’re here at the beginning of the process, at a time when important decisions are gonna be made, formative decisions, ensuring that the Ethics Commission will get off on the right foot.”

As it happens, Woo chaired a committee on the LA City Council that wrangled together a 1990 ballot measure, called Proposition H, which was approved by voters and that set up LA city’s Ethics Commission.

If Woo’s nomination is approved by the Board of Supervisors, he is expected to join two others who were approved earlier this week – Amanda Susskind and Wilma A. Franco. And these three would then nominate the four remaining members of the new commission.

The task force interviewed Woo and five other candidates on Wednesday. The panel deliberated for about six hours, and came out at around 10:30 p.m. to announce their 9-2 vote to nominate Woo. Governance Reform Task Force meeting recordings are usually posted up here. They go up fairly quickly, and should be there soon, if it isn’t there already.

[Late add] Robert Greene, who was at the lengthy meeting on Wednesday, wrote about the appointment in Los Angeles Rules. You can read it here.

A few more things…

Mayor Karen Bass and Council member Nithya Raman, who are dueling for the Los Angeles mayor’s seat, are sharing their plans for addressing homelessness at a forum spread out between Wednesday and Thursday that’s hosted by KTLA and Hope the Mission.

LA County Supervisor Janice Hahn took exception to the House of Representatives voting Tuesday night to block California’s rules to control pollution at the seaports. The regulation requires ships to cut their engines when docked, to avoid the harmful, polluting emissions that come from idling ships. You can track the legislation here. Hahn says she has been fighting for such regulations since her time on the LA City Council. Clean air at the ports consumed much of Hahn’s terms on the city Council. The Clean Air Action Plan for the Long Beach and Los Angeles ports was adopted in 2006 early on in her time on the council, followed by an update in 2006 that featured “shore power” goals, which aimed to give ships a way to stay powered up by plugging into an electrical outlet when docked. Hahn sent around a statement on Wednesday saying that “Congressional Republicans are trying to roll back decades of efforts we have made here in Los Angeles to protect our port communities from the pollution that ships spew when they are docked. These members of Congress do not breathe the air we do in San Pedro, Wilmington, and Long Beach. Their children do not have asthma from this dirty air. Their family members do not have cancer because of diesel fumes from container ships. I urge our US Senators to block this harmful bill.”

The LA City Council on Wednesday approved Genesis LA to manage a $102 million Measure ULA grant program that’s aimed at preserving existing affordable housing by helping people pay for upgrades. Genesis LA was involved in a similar program at the LA County level that focused on community land trusts, which are ownership cooperatives that preserves land for the public good and tries to take it out of the speculative market. They also approved Ysabel Jurado’s package of motions on the Lineage cold storage warehouse fire in Boyle Heights, including a motion that calls for withholding rebuild permit applications by the company.

The NBC4 news chopper that went down during coverage of a fatal traffic crash in Chatsworth was owned by a company with a business address at Whiteman Airport, according to this LA Times story. They also quote experts who say that the position of the helicopter could have made it difficult for the pilot to execute a safety maneuver in response to its rotors stopping, which they speculate may have been what happened based on the video footage showing the last moments of the helicopter. The story also says a third victim of the crash was on the ground, along with the pilot and reporter in the helicopter. The driver of the SUV that crashed into the Metro 166 Line bus was arrested. Two passengers of the bus were killed. A community vigil is being held in Chatsworth tonight at St. John Eudes Parish.

What’s happening today?

LA County’s new Ethics Commission starts to come together, with two members appointed, and six applicants to be interviewed

LA County’s Governance Reform Task Force, which is carrying out a variety of governance reforms approved by voters under Measure G, will be interviewing candidates for LA County’s new, seven-person Ethics Commission. The meeting starts at 1 p.m.

The task force appoints one of the three initial commissioners (with that responsibility shifting to the elected County Executive in 2029). The chair of the Board of Supervisors and the County Assessor appoint the two other initial three members. Those commissioners then appoint the remaining four.

Michael Woo, a former LA City Council member who was involved in developing the ethics laws for the city of LA, and Jeffery Daar, a former president of LA city’s Ethics Commission, are among the applicants for the task force’s appointment. The applicants also include Sean McMorris, a program manager at California Common Cause and member of the San Gabriel Planning Commission. Carla Fuentes, who recently completed a stint on LA city’s Charter Reform Commission, is also an applicant. The task force will also be interviewing applicants Maria Williams-Slaughter, a former Public Works director for Carson who has served on various boards at Long Beach Unified and Cal State Long Beach, and Leticia Casillas Sanchez, who now serves on Pomona’s Citizen Oversight Committee and chaired that city’s independent redistricting commission.

Also, the Board of Supervisors yesterday approved LA County Assessor Jeffrey Prang’s appointment of Amanda Susskind to the LA County’s Ethics Commission. Prang released a statement to The LA Reporter saying that Susskind “has extensive experience in public finance, financial management and oversight of audit functions, making her exceptionally well qualified to serve on the Los Angeles County Ethics Commission.

“The appointment of the Commission’s inaugural members is an important milestone in implementing Measure G and establishing independent ethics oversight within the County,” Prang’s statement read. “I am confident that Ms. Susskind will serve the County well and make a valuable contribution to the work of the Ethics Commission.”

Susskind’s application, which Prang’s office also provided, says that she served as a lawyer for the county, and also as a city attorney for small cities. Susskind has also served on LA County’s commissions for parks and housing, and the California Coastal Commission, which she said gave her experience with adhering to ethics rules and reporting requirements.

[Late add] The Board also approved the chair’s appointment to the Ethics Commission, Wilma A. Franco.

A few more things…

The Los Angeles City Council is meeting this morning, and they’re taking up a contract with Genesis LA to administer a program that preserves existing affordable housing by repairing them. Genesis LA worked on a similar program at LA County focused on community land trusts. Also on the agenda are items to increase admission fees at the LA Zoo (this is a second reading of the ordinance), motions related to the Lineage fire, including one that calls for withholding the cold storage company’s rebuild permit, the reappointment of Rasha Shields to the LAPD commission, a street medicine contract with Healthcare in Action in Council District 4 (represented by Nithya Raman), some motions on El Niño prep, and an item related to financing for affordable housing at the St. George Hotel, where LA Community Action Network has lately been organizing low-income residents who were being moved out.

Also, a variety of LA city council committees and LA County “clusters” are meeting, including the LA City Council’s Transportation Committee, which took up street sweeping related parking citations, and Dash route bus lane enforcement. The committee also took up an oversized vehicle parking ban in the 12th City Council district represented by City Council member John Lee, a ban on heavy and long vehicles in the 15th City Council District represented by Council member Tim McOsker, both of which Council member Eunisses Hernandez voted against. The committee also moved forward on a motion on bike and ebike pathways at LA parks. The LA mayor, City Council leadership and city management staff also met this morning to discuss labor negotiations with the LADWP worker union, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), Local 18.

What just happened?

Mayor Karen Bass goes to Chatsworth following Metro bus and NBC4 chopper crash

“This is a heartbreaking night for our city, and my thoughts and prayers are first and foremost with the families and the loved ones that we lost today,” LA Mayor Karen Bass said at a news conference following a fatal NBC4 news helicopter crash that happened during coverage of a crash between an SUV and a Metro bus in Chatsworth, also involving fatalities.

Bass was there along with Board Supervisor Lindsey Horvath and LA City Council member John Lee. You can watch that news conference here.

While there were some gripes about Mayor Karen Bass posting about appearing at the scene, it is expected of elected leaders to be present at significant crisis events. Questions would have been raised if she had been absent. Additionally, political consultant Mike Trujillo provided some context about Bass’s background as a physician’s assistant, as well as the fact that she lost her daughter in a freeway crash in 2006.

Padillo pulls Home Depot sponsorship of El Grito event

Imelda Padillo led the El Grito event that commemorates the start of the Mexican War of Independence. In the lead up to the event, Padillo was called out for Home Depot being listed as a sponsor LA’s El Grito event. She responded on Tuesday saying that they have rescinded the sponsorship. “​​Given the hurt & trauma this partner erupts due to the ICE raids the Federal Government performs so intentionally at their sites; I sincerely apologize for the distress caused by featuring the company. We have rescinded their partnership for this event,” Padilla’s Instagram post said. Izzy Ramirez of LA Taco has a story on this.

LA city Ethics Commission nom in limbo, after watchdog raises questions about her eligibility

The Los Angeles City Council on Tuesday postponed the appointment of Dena Bloom to the Ethics Commission, after Rob Quan of Unrig LA called in during public comment to raise some questions about whether she was eligible for the role, since she is listed by the state as a major donor. Quan pointed to the charter amendments approved by voters in 2024 that prohibits people who qualified as a major donor within the last year to serve on LA city’s Ethics Commission. “I just do wonder why we reform the charter, if we’re not going to follow it,” Quan said.

The City Council ended up continuing the appointment of Bloom to later, with Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson noting that “there needs to be greater clarity on the charter’s requirements for political donations… none of those things seem to be particularly clear to the City Attorney’s Office and the Clerk’s Office at this time.”

Interestingly, Bloom was appointed by City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto, who had personally gone to the rules committee earlier the same morning to speak in support of her nominee.

A few more things…

The LAHSA commission decided against applying to lead local homeless services, after being the lead for more than three decades. Both the city and the county are likely to apply for that role, and a statement released by LAHSA explained that this was so that they would not compete with their “founding partners,” and that doing so “would only fracture regional collaboration during an already complex time.”

For those who like to dig into the money behind politics, Social Movement Support Lab on Tuesday released The California Oligarchs Index, which tracks the top financial backers in state politics, in particular, 99 groups that have spent $5.8 billion. They include “the billionaires, corporations, corporate advocacy groups, and law enforcement organizations that exert enormous influence over the lives of California residents, undermine our democracy, and are the primary opponents to creating healthier, safer, and more equitable communities across the state,” the website says.

Mayor Karen Bass skipped out on a congressional hearing on Tuesday probing LA’s homeless services system, upsetting federal leaders and officials, according to Nick Gerda of LAist. Bass was instead appearing with Rick Caruso – her electoral opponent in 2022 – at the groundbreaking of the new Pacific Palisades Recreation Center, which replaces the one that was destroyed in the 2025 wildfires. Reporters asked Caruso about who he planned to endorse, but he declined to provide anything definitive. The question of who the Pacific Palisades would end up voting for – after most of the community voting for Spencer Pratt in the primary – has been a closely watched one amid the heated race between Bass and challenger, Council member Nithya Raman.

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors held off on making a decision over Supervisor Holly Mitchell’s motion aimed at holding the Sheriff Department’s deputy gangs accountable, reports Steve Scauzillo of the Los Angeles Daily News. The issue was held for 45 days so that the County CEO could report back on whether “meet and confer” with labor unions was needed. Four supervisors out of five voted to delay the issue, with Mitchell the only one voting against the delay. Scauzillo writes that Mitchell’s original “would launch an inquiry into the Sheriff’s Department in order to create a list of deputy gangs, their names, accompanying insignias and tattoos and from what stations the members work.” You can also check out Cerise Castle’s thread on the meeting here.

What’s happening today?

Los Angeles Police Department officials say they want to try out Axon automated license plate reader cameras mounted on light posts. This comes after a contract with Flock ran out earlier this year. The Board of Police Commissioners is set to take up a three-month “no-cost” contract with Axon at its 9:30 a.m. meeting today. According to that contract, the LAPD would own the data that the Axon cameras pick up. Axon already logs license plate reader data for the LAPD through dashboard cameras on 1,500 police vehicles. There has been a trend lately of cities dumping Flock, but switching over to Axon instead.

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors is set to take up Supervisor Holly Mitchell’s motion calling for creating a way to identify law enforcement gangs in the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department. The motion, which is on the board’s Tuesday 9:30. a.m. agenda, says that “courts, independent oversight bodies, and investigative journalists have documented incidents in which membership in these deputy gangs were associated with unlawful uses of force, falsification of reports, witness intimidation, retaliation against whistleblowers, and targeted harassment of Black and Latino community members.” There are 27 known deputy gangs identified within the Sheriff’s Department, the motion says, but as recently as late 2025, Sheriff’s department officials say they have not identified any group that qualifies as a law enforcement gang. Mitchell’s motion calls for creating criteria for identifying such gangs “based on patterns of conduct, shared identifiers, logos and other evidence and information,” and for reports – both confidential and public – to come back in 120 days (or four months).

What just happened?

Mayor Karen Bass shows off labor support, defends LA Convention Center project against critique from Nithya Raman

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass responded on Saturday to Council member Nithya Raman’s latest volleys, which included a critique of the Los Angeles Convention Center expansion project that Bass worked to push through. Raman launched a website on Thursday that reminds people of other city expenses that the $100 million or so a year that’s set to go into the spendy renovation of the conference facility could have paid for. Bass said during a pre-canvassing rally at the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor headquarters that the convention center project will create jobs, and her message seemed to be that Raman was not just coming from Bass, she was also attacking working people.

“You can’t say you support working people if you’re against the Convention Center,” Bass said. The unions at the rally included unions supporting city workers, and non-faculty workers at Los Angeles Unified School District. It was also an opportunity for Bass to show off her own extensive support from labor, after Raman recently unveiled endorsements from the Western States Regional Council of Carpenters and Unite Here Local 11. State Sen. Maria Elena Durazo, a former president of Unite Here Local 11, kicked off the rally for Bass, though.

Saturday’s pre-canvass rally was also being held for City Attorney candidate Marissa Roy, who is endorsed by the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor.

A few more things…

Much ado over LAHSA: While some fuss was made over Mayor Karen Bass saying she was stepping down from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority’s oversight commission, the LA Times’s David Zahniser, writing in Saturday’s LA on the Record, notes that the agency’s days “are numbered,” and that Bass is following in the footsteps of Lindsey Horvath and Kathryn Barger, two other elected officials who also appointed themselves to the panel (Bass was the remaining elected official on that board). The difference with Bass stepping down is that she is in the midst of a tough re-election campaign, and every move she makes can bring greater scrutiny. Meanwhile, county officials have pulled funding from the agency, and are now also seeking to take control of case management responsibilities that LAHSA currently holds. LA city officials are also taking steps to pull away.

Guerilla crosswalk painted: Jonathan Hale, who has been conducting guerilla crosswalk painting operations, just completed one in Hollywood, after taking to public comment last week to criticize Mayor Karen Bass for not moving faster. Hale says people can help with more such operations by signing up to volunteer with People’s Vision Zero.

Motions and Reports: The LA City Council motions from Friday can be found here. They include a motion by Council member Tim McOsker that moves several thousand dollars around to help with completing a big renovation of the Warner Grand Theatre. // Council member Eunisses Hernandez put out a resolution calling for the city to take an official stance to support a bill awaiting signing by Gov. Gavin Newsom that would prohibit public dollars from being used on private detention facilities. // Hernandez also has a motion to accept federal dollars to tackle extreme heat through cool pavement and shade projects. // There’s also a resolution from Council member Heather Hutt and John Lee, with a second from Adrin Nazarian, seeking official city support for state legislation that creates a zone around places of worship where protesters would not be allowed to approach congregants or block people from entering or exiting. // The Bureau of Sanitation submitted their report on water quality testing related to the Lineage warehouse fire. They found that while there was increased levels of mercury, the main concern was elevated levels of bacteria. Sanitation officials write that “bacteria were measured at levels that are consistent with levels associated with raw sewage, likely a reflection of the copious amounts of decaying food material that began showing up in the runoff.” They also touched on the matter of the dead fish in the Los Angeles river, but said they did not collect any of the dead fish for analysis nor look at any necropsy reports. They noted that they had earlier said in their report that “as a result of the natural decaying process, the oxygen levels in the runoff could become depleted, making the water uninhabitable for fish. They also wrote that “toxic by-products from decay, including ammonia, can also be acutely toxic to aquatic life; however, LASAN did not measure ammonia in the runoff or in the Los Angeles River. By the time LASAN staff were aware of this potential concern, the diversion of runoff to the sewer system had already been established.”

What just happened?

‘This woman has guts,’ a gutsy former LA City Hall veteran says of Nithya Raman in endorsement

“Simply put, Nithya is fiscally responsible, she’s independent and she’s courageous,” Laura Chick, a well-regarded former LA City Controller known for her feisty and outspoken style, said Thursday as she announced her endorsement of Council member Nithya Raman for mayor. “This woman has guts.”

Chick appeared with Raman in Encino at the Balboa Sports Center, where they unveiled a digital billboard truck skewering a spendy, Los Angeles Convention Center expansion project that received significant backing from Raman’s opponent, Mayor Karen Bass. The project had been approved amid warnings from the city’s top financial advisers that this was financially risky. Raman was one of two people who voted against the project, with others stating that the project was worth the risk to rejuvenate LA’s economy. The other was Katy Yaroslavsky, the chair of the budget committee.

Chick said she was endorsing Raman because of her votes against the convention center project, as well as a separate $1 billion city employee labor contract, “despite enormous pressure by powerful players at City Hall.” Although Chick did not initially name that labor contract, Raman voted against a Los Angeles police officer contract that is set to cost the city nearly $1 billion over four years.

After the news conference, Chick did end up focusing on that contract. She told The LA Reporter that what stood out to her was Raman’s approach toward public safety spending, which contrasted with that of people who she characterized as “irresponsibly” calling for defunding the police department.

Chick said that Raman “stood up and said no, ‘I’m not voting for a $1 billion package we can’t afford to pay police more, but I care about police and I want a different kind of LAPD. I don’t want to send police out on frivolous calls. We can train other safety workers. I want more 911 call agents to be handling calls.’ All of the things she was suggesting to me were common sense, real solutions.”

The focus of the news conference and endorsement has some relevance to the state of play in the mayoral election. The police officers’ union’s political action committee spent heavily to attack Raman during the primary, having endorsed her opponent Karen Bass.

Meanwhile, the LA Convention Center, which Raman’s campaign has characterized as a boondoggle, was championed by Mayor Karen Bass. That project was also heavily backed by IBEW Local 11 and Los Angeles/Orange Counties Building and Construction Trades Council – two groups that are now funding an independent expenditures committee that came out on Tuesday with an ad attacking Raman. IBEW Local 11, which represents LA DWP workers, put in $250,000 into the committee, and the building trades group put in $50,000.

Also lined up behind Raman’s opponent, Bass, is the Central City Association, an influential downtown business group. They also were big on the LA Convention Center expansion. Thus, Raman’s campaign played up a common San Fernando Valley voter sentiment of feeling cut off from downtown Los Angeles, where the main building of the LA city government is located.

“As both a City Council member and controller, I always did what I could to ensure the Valley got its fair share of services and investment,” said Chick, who in addition to serving two terms as controller, also served just as many terms as a City Council member representing west San Fernando Valley neighborhoods, including Encino.

Lineage sues company that owns the solar panels that they blame for the fire at their Boyle Heights cold storage warehouse

Lineage has now sued the owner of the solar panels atop their building, accusing Altus Power, as well as a few other companies, of causing the conflagration at their cold storage warehouse in Boyle Heights by ignoring safety measures. Lineage’s president, Greg Lehmkuhl, put the blame squarely on the solar array, and insisted in a prepared statement on Sept. 10 that “cold storage is not a risk to communities – it is an essential service that lowers food costs, expands food access and creates jobs.” Lineage continues to face pushback on an application they submitted in July to rebuild their facility.

The companies have been at odds with each other from the beginning, with Lineage saying the fire was started because of repair work that was being done on the solar panels, and Altus Power saying that the investigation into the cause of the fire was still ongoing. That tussling continues under this lawsuit. LA Local’s Christopher Damien’s received a response from Los Palos, a subsidiary of Altus Power, saying that Lineage’s complaint is “riddled with misinformation in a blatant attempt to deflect blame for their role in this matter, including any damage caused by the release of substances from the warehouse, not the solar panel.”

Lineage meanwhile faces a threat of a lawsuit from community groups that posted a 60-day notice saying they planned to sue over the release of information about chemicals released from their facility during the fire. Lineage has been under scrutiny over the possible release of ammonia, something that Lineage (along with the LA Fire Department) has said was addressed by removing the chemical from the site at the start of the fire.

Unhoused journalist sets up homelessness oversight bureau, with a message that sweeps cause ‘real damage to… the trust between citizens and the city’

An unhoused journalist, Rooflesser – complying with what she estimates is a 10th sweep notice, one that was issued for a day that saw temperatures reach 91 degrees – has set up a “bureau of homelessness accountability and oversight” outside LA City Council member Nithya Raman’s Valley district office. Rooflesser is a constituent of Raman’s and has been critical of her elected representative’s response to her concerns over the sweeps, which have lately grown more frequent.

In a video she recorded about the endeavor, Rooflesser said that she was “at Ventura and Ethel tabling for the Bureau of Homelessness Oversight and Accountability outside Nithya Raman’s office because I’m being swept today for the 9th or 10th time this year — I’m very, very tired.

“And I want some answers about some burning questions I have about the homelessness industrial complex in the city of Los Angeles. For example, I would like to know if mortality tracking is being done… I’ll be out here for as long as it takes to figure out where I’m allowed to be and learn more about the system that is supposed to be housing people, but seems to just be taking our shit over and over and over and over again.”

The sweeps are done under a law that’s specific to LA city parks, as opposed to the more popularly known 41.18 law, and the LA Sanitation street cleaning operations that are carried out under the name CARE+.

On Thursday, Raman’s homelessness deputy stepped outside with sunscreen and water bottles, and spent some time getting grilled by Rooflesser. Meanwhile, Celeste, who was Rooflesser’s tabling partner, touted to The LA Reporter the cost-effectiveness of their “bureau,” which she said was set up with no money at all.

“The Bureau of Homelessness responds to the voters,” Celeste said. “Even though we think we’re so fixated on this topic here in LA, we really are so detached from it… We need to start holding the city accountable for the disruption [caused by sweeps]. This causes real damage to the city and the trust between citizens and the city, when people are at risk of losing their homes that they rely on.”

Raman’s office sent The LA Reporter a statement, in response to questions on the frequency of the sweeps, saying that “the frequency and scale of the cleanups that take place” at the spot Rooflesser stays at “are driven by the conditions on the ground, including fire hazards, heavy debris, and public health and safety concerns.”

The statement also says that their office has worked to “minimize the impact” of those operations by working with the Los Angeles Conservation Corps and service providers to offer support.

And one more thing…

LA Times’s might diminished to a ‘simplistic plea’: Golden State’s Mariel Garza, who famously defected from the LA Times after its billionaire publisher Patrick Soon-Shiong blocked the editorial board from endorsing Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election, is exactly the person you’d want a reaction from on the LA Times endorsing against Proposition 40, a one-time billionaire tax.

And Garza, whose departure touched off an exodus of other members of the paper’s editorial board, has indeed delivered a scathing critique of the piece. She starts off with problems with craft, writing that the endorsement “reads like something drafted by a campaign comms contractor.”

But she ultimately arrives at a more upsetting conclusion, which is that “after a year and a half of immigration raids, Proposition 50 redistricting, Spencer Pratt’s mayoral run and a June 2 primary that all but decided the state’s next governor, this is the topic that moved The Times ‘editorial board’ to end its silence? A simplistic plea to spare the state’s billionaires, including the one who owns the company, from a one-time 5% tax?”

What’s happening today?

Powerful political figure to be taken up by Measure G task force this afternoon, as some worry their access to LA County government could be weakened

The task force that’s guiding the implementation of Measure G is set to make some decisions today around the role of a newly created elected leader in Los Angeles County government. This elected political figure could have widespread power over many social safety-net departments such as the Department of Public Health, as well as the LA County Sheriff’s Department. The county government also oversees municipal services in unincorporated pockets of the county, such as unincorporated East Los Angeles. You can find the agenda for their 5 p.m. meeting, including reports detailing the discussion so far, here.

On this topic, journalist Robert Greene has a piece out this week at Los Angeles Rules, that looks at a recent meeting in which groups representing cities throughout the county, and community organizers who have been trying to make the political process fairer to more people in Los Angeles, shared similar worries that the progress they’ve made building their relationship and knowledge around a county government led by a board of supervisors, could be weakened with the incoming elected County Executive.

Greene writes that those sometimes politically divergent players are “concerned that the Measure G requirement to create an elected county executive with direct authority over most county departments will break the access to the county that they have gained through studying the intricacies of a county system with the Board of Supervisors in charge, and through the relationships they have developed with each supervisor and their staffs.”

Some of the community organizers, for example, have had success in 2019 and 2020 in getting to the Board of Supervisors “to scrap a new jail, make anti-racism a priority in all county programs, and send voters Measure J, a charter amendment that requires a spending floor for alternatives to incarceration, including employment, training, mental healthcare, and other programs,” Greene writes.

A ‘no-cost Olympics’ could turn into a ‘very expensive Olympics’ due to LAPD vehicle requests, an LA council member says

The LA City Council signed off today on authorizing $13 million in debt to finance 107 LAPD vehicles to use for the 2028 Olympics, but Council member Eunisses Hernandez said this could be the start of potentially more costs for the city, amounting to as much as $44 million, despite the Games initially being advertised as being no-cost for taxpayers.

Hernandez, who was one of three council members who opposed authorizing the $13 million in vehicle financing today, said it could just be the first of several expenditures that could turn “a no-cost Olympics” into a “very expensive Olympics.”

“You cannot tell Angelenos you are getting a no-cost Olympics, then come back expense-by-expense, and tell us the city has to pay because the Olympics are coming,” Hernandez said, before urging all of her colleagues to reject saddling themselves with the $13 million in debt. All of the council members present ended up voting to move ahead with it, with the exception of Hernandez, Ysabel Jurado and Nithya Raman. Council members Bob Blumenfield, John Lee, Monica Rodriguez and Hugo Soto-Martinez were absent for the vote.

The funding for the vehicles that got approved for financing today had already been approved during the LA city leaders’ budget process earlier this year. Those vehicles will be used to “support investigations, special operations, event logistics, event management, and incident response across the venues, and are operational tools rather than transportation assets,” according to a July report by LAPD officials.

LA leaders appear to be waiting and seeing if requests for an additional 300 LAPD vehicles – whether they end up being patrol or emergency response SUVs – that could ultimately raise the costs to $44 million can be reimbursed by state or federal agencies or even LA 28, the privately run coordinating committee for the 2028 Olympics. For now, LA 28 has told the city that they haven’t set aside any funding for law enforcement in their budget, although city officials are saying that might be worked out eventually through the venue services agreements that still need to be negotiated and inked with LA 28.

Council member Katy Yaroslavsky, who chairs the Budget and Finance Committee, said at an Aug. 18 committee meeting that she wanted to see if the governor would declare a state of emergency in order to release state funding to purchase those vehicles. There was also discussion around whether they could argue that the federal government would need to reimburse them, after the Secret Service recently told the vehicles that the vehicles are necessary to counter drone activity during the games.

As LA leaders fuss over LAPD vehicles, some elderly Chinatown residents scold them for spending public funds on the wrong things

That vote to have the city carry $13 million in debt to pay for LAPD vehicles for the 2028 Olympics was also the focus of a group of mostly elderly Chinatown tenants, who took to LA City Hall today urge them not to throw money at such things as LAPD vehicles, but to instead direct available funds toward low-income tenants who are facing rent increases.

“We work so hard for the majority of our lives, and to be able to peacefully have a place to sleep at night is something that is becoming increasingly more impossible,” one Chinatown resident told the City Council during public comment today through a translator standing beside him.

Many tenants have been saying for months now that the existing rents at their Chinatown buildings are already more than they can currently handle, and they are expecting further increases due to policy decisions by local leaders, as soon as this fall. The group is carrying out a “Raise Income, Not Rent” campaign that they launched earlier this year to get their local representatives on the City Council and in city government to advocate for them, including at the state level where legislative changes need to be made to address their concerns. Today, they said in a press release from the volunteer organizing group, CCEDLA, that “rather than set aside a $13 million budget proposal for the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), Chinatown tenants demand that elected officials:

“1. Find a long term solution to protect all tenants, including: a reform of the regulations to cap rent increases for affordable units, and include provisions that limit what landlords can charge for utilities and other fees.

2. Issue a rent freeze for all affordable housing until a long term solution is found.

3. Immediate rental assistance to cover the upcoming rent increases and keep low income tenants housed in all affordable units.”

What just happened?

There was a candidate forum between Council District 3 candidates Tim Gaspar and Barri Worth Girvan last night. For now, you can view an archived livestream of it here, although I’ll be asking about a possible recording of the Zoom stream. If they have it, I”ll share it.

What’s happening today?

LA leaders to talk super El Niño prep as weather service projects miserable humidity

The National Weather Service said over the weekend that the recent rainfall will make the humidity in Los Angeles “MUCH more miserable.” The Los Angeles Times has a rundown of the high humidity and high temperature weather conditions, and they include a warning that beach surfs will be high, making trips to the shore to cool off inadvisable. LA leaders today are discussing the super El Niño season that’s believed to be making the weather conditions worse than they would have been. They’ll be doing this in the Los Angeles City Council’s Public Committee meeting at 2 p.m., during which three El Niño motions related to hillside properties, general preparations and recovery will be in the queue.

Guerilla crosswalk painter says he’s done waiting and will paint a Hollywood crosswalk this weekend

A public commenter who said he was arrested for painting a crosswalk last year fired some shots at Mayor Karen Bass during public comment at today’s Los Angeles City Council meeting, saying that she is overdue on implementing street safety measures. He also said he’s held off on doing the guerilla crosswalk painting operations because of the promised measure, but all bets are off now. He now says that he plans to resume the guerilla operations this weekend by painting crosswalks at a Hollywood intersection that Hale noted was in a Council District represented by Hugo Soto-Martinez.

“We’re painting crosswalks this Saturday at the corner of Lexington and Sycamore,” the commenter said. “Mr. Soto Martinez, that is in your district. All of you are invited, and we’re asking for your help in urging the mayor to make our streets safer for all by recommitting to Vision Zero.”

The commenter name-checking Soto-Martinez is interesting. Despite being aligned politically on the progressive end of the City Council with Raman, Soto-Martinez has maintained his endorsement of Bass. Unrig LA has a clip of the comment here. You can also listen to the comment with this time-stamped link for today’s City Council meeting video.

By the way, guerilla crosswalk painting in Los Angeles has been happening quietly for some years now. Maylin Tu wrote about it in 2025 in this piece about the Crosswalk Collective, which has been sneaking in crosswalk painting operations in various neighborhoods around Los Angeles.

A few more things…

Raman says she wants to do five upcoming debates by major television stations, but her opponent Mayor Karen Bass has declined all but one: Nithya Raman’s campaign revealed that they have agreed to five mayoral debates, but Mayor Karen Bass has declined all but one hosted by NBC4 on Oct. 13. Raman is now urging Bass to agree to more debates. Raman says the other debates are hosted by CBS 2 and KNX, ABC 7 and Univision 34, KTLA 5, and CNN.

“Los Angeles residents are confronting enormous challenges: homelessness, housing costs, public safety, affordability, deteriorating infrastructure and basic city services that too often fail to deliver,” Raman says in a statement sent around today. “They deserve a serious, substantive and transparent conversation about the candidates’ records, their competing ideas and the choices facing this city.”

The mayor’s race has yet to have a big televised debate in the runoff phase that’s set to be decided this November. While it provided a rollicking (and revealing) back-and-forth between candidates, the most recent debate hosted by the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Association was criticized by some for having modest visual production value unbefitting of a major city mayoral race (although others like myself defended its down-home neighborhood vibes).

Meanwhile, Karen Bass’s campaign continues to poke at Raman with accusations that she doesn’t have great relationships with City Council colleagues: This time they highlight on their new No Show Nithya account (and a press release) an interview Traci Park did on The John Kobylt Show in which she takes exception with Raman’s recent moves at doing outreach to the Pacific Palisades community as part of her mayoral campaign. Park accuses Raman of having ignored the crisis prior to running for mayor, and she says that Raman “has never said a word, never asked a question, never once offered to help. Never.”

For what it’s worth, LA City Council files show that Raman authored at least three motions related to the 2025 wildfires, and seconded several more, including one by Council member Adrin Nazarian that calls for an examination of how LADWP prepared for and responded for the wind event and Jan. 7, 2025 wildfires, and another by Council member Monica Rodriguez that called for getting a report on the cost of repairs for city property damages in the wildfires.

Debate alert for LA City Council’s 3rd district race in the west San Fernando Valley: Speak of debates with a neighborhood vibe, I will be moderating one tonight, at 7 p.m. that’s taking place right next to a bowling alley. It will be between Tim Gaspar and Barri Worth Girvan, who are running to represent a west San Fernando Valley district on the Los Angeles City Council. Whoever wins will pick up the baton from outgoing and termed out City Council member Bob Blumenfield. The debate is hosted by the Winnetka Neighborhood Council, at 7 p.m., next to Winnetka Bowl at 20122 Vanowen St.

Researcher dishes up some quirky history about a noisy rooster and more about a Lincoln Heights home that just got approved by the City Council as a historic landmark: While the City Council took up some big topics, such as the Fair Work Week ordinance, street takeovers, the reappointment of Jenny Chavez to the Board of Public Works, and a motion on Oceanwide Plaza project (better known as the graffiti tower, LA’s grandest abandoned building and graffiti gallery), there was also a motion to designate a 1912 Mission Revival home in Lincoln Heights as a local historic landmark that contains a few quirky tidbits about its history. The researcher appeared to have found a 1935 news article about a neighbor suing the Bilderrains due to their noisy pet rooster, Banty. The Bilderrains won their lawsuit by citing zoning laws, but Banty vanished shortly thereafter. There was also a quick mention of this in an online article. And for many decades of the home’s life, it was in the family of asparagus farmer Poy Ton Kwong, who helped found the Chinese Asparagus Society.

What just happened?

Alissa Walker lays out in her latest Torched column why the Unite Here Local 11’s endorsement of Nithya Raman over Karen Bass is especially intriguing and cuts the heart of some of LA City Hall’s most heated political battles – such as an Olympic Wage campaign that raises the minimum wage for hospitality workers, and the fight over Airbnb and short-term rental rules in Los Angeles.

Lineage announced this past Saturday that they have completed their cleanup of food waste in Freezer 1 at their Boyle Heights warehouse. This was also confirmed by air quality regulators at the South Coast Air Quality Management District. An independent board at the district had issued an order in early August that called for cleaning out the freezer, with an anticipated completion time of mid August, as part of 90 conditions that Lineage needed to meet.

What’s happening today?

Super El Niño-fueled hurricanes on the minds of local leaders

Keep an eye on the sky, and the surfers, this Labor Day weekend, as Hurricane Marie and other storms hang around the Pacific Ocean amid a super El Niño season. Daniel Swain is one go-to scientist who is watching things closely and doing live commentary on YouTube about this exceptional weather. The LA Times’s Hayley Smith looks at what the science says about the link between the super El Niño and climate change.

As for what local government officials are doing, earlier this week, the LA County Board of Supervisors got a report about emergency preparations, and have a newsletter people can sign-up for to get tips for preparing for El Niño. And the LA City Council recently submitted several motions on the super El Niño. They include this one calling for a report on preparations, another that focuses on hillside property owners, and a third one on rainstorm recovery. Those motions are scheduled for next Tuesday’s Los Angeles City Council meeting.

Lineage fire committee to talk water quality and warehouse rebuild

The LA City Council’s committee dedicated to the topic of the Lineage warehouse fire in June is finally meeting today. The Ad Hoc Committee for Boyle Heights Fire Recovery should be getting an update from LA sanitation officials about the water quality testing they did on stormwater runoff after the Lineage warehouse fire in Boyle Heights. Two other motions on the agenda call for pausing the process on Lineage’s rebuild application and raising the penalties for violations and noncompliance of building regulations.

Hollywood Walk of Fame applications, El Pueblo and 2025 disrupted water service on LA City Council agenda

The LA City Council is voting on a process for getting stars installed on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. The council’s approval is no longer needed for placing the stars on the Walk of Fame, a local historic landmark, and the vote today is on a process for the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce that involves submitting applications to install the stars to the Board of Public Works for approval. These changes were proposed after questions were raised by an activist, Andrew Rudick, about the procedure used for placing stars, such as for Donald Trump, and after there was confusion over how stars could be removed.

There is an item on the maintenance and sustainability of El Pueblo de Los Angeles, a historic park that is considered the “birthplace” of the city, but is also where Olvera Street’s marketplace vendors have been struggling, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic, and several of the multi-generational legacy businesses have closed shop.

The agenda also includes an after-action report completed last December on water service in Granada Hills and Porter Ranch getting disrupted or affected for about a week in August 2025, when a valve controlling water flow broke during repair work at a pump station connected to a 10 million gallon water tank called the Susana Tank.

Karen Bass campaign accepted improper donations from Bakewell and others

The LA Times’s David Zahniser has a story out today about Mayor Karen Bass needing to return $9,700 in improper donations to her re-election campaign from Danny Bakewell Sr. and others who had inked a $525,000 contract with her office. The City Ethics process does allow for some warning that certain people shouldn’t be donating to a campaign contract, and in this and likely the overwhelming majority of other cases, the contract package includes a form that specifically lists Bakewell and others as prohibited contributors who may not contribute to Bass’s campaign.

What just happened?

Mayoral forum offers a side-by-side on Bass and Raman’s environmental platforms

Mayor Karen Bass and Council member Nithya Raman shared their perspectives on the environment at Thursday evening’s educational mayoral forum at Los Angeles Trade Tech College.

Bass gave an update on the status of the climate mobilization bureau at City Hall, which has shrunk a bit after she had proposed cutting it entirely. Bass now says that she is trying to revamp it. She also indicated her reluctance to have data centers come into the city (even though data centers are already in Los Angeles). And she discussed her background in community organizing and said there needed to be more emphasis on environmental justice. Bass also said that the reason she had dismissed concerns about the air quality early on during the Lineage warehouse fire was because she was basing it off of information she got from air quality officials.

Raman also brought up the climate office, saying that Bass had defunded it and that an important “heat” officer position was only restored after outcry from activists. Raman noted that extreme heat is a phenomenon that has “quieter” effects, but affects more people. She said that one of the inequities people face in Los Angeles is very little tree coverage to offer shade in areas that are predominantly Black and Brown. One of the obstacles to getting more trees planted, Raman said, was the lack of funding for the city’s urban forestry departments. Raman also said that she wants to make sure that the four people she would get to appoint to the Metro board ride public transit regularly – and she noted that since the majority of transit riders actually take the bus, she would fight to increase bus frequency and important bus routes to be restored and maintained.

Ramen released an expanded climate platform on Thursday, ahead of the forum. Bass has some information about her accomplishments around the environment under the “Green L.A.” heading here, and her office touted a revamped Climate Action Plan earlier this year.