What’s happening today?

There’s a bit of a fight going on over a housing project on the site of the Woodland Hills Country Club that could be taking place at today’s City Council meeting, with housing advocates saying that project needs to be handled through the city’s administrative planning process, and the council member for the area, Bob Blumenfield, trying to get the decision to be made by the City Council members.

And the Measure G task force will be meeting twice today to talk about the elected County Executive position (basically, get ready for an election in 2028 for a mayor-type leader at the County, which currently is led by a board of supervisors). The first meeting is at 12 p.m. and the second is at 5 p.m. The earlier meeting can be attended remotely and in person, while the evening one is only in person and is done in a roundtable format that is supposed to allow community members to be able to participate.

What just happened?

Turns out the fake poll was the product of a very online politics nerd, at least based on what he told The Guardian

The Guardian tracked down the 21-year-old recent college graduate who put out the fake poll that managed to get picked up by the California Post, a few online social media accounts, and then the Karen Bass campaign.

The LA Times’ Noah Goldberg had reported on Monday that the poll was fake. Sahil Prakash, the young man who was behind the fake poll, told the Guardian that he made the website for Median Strategies, the polling firm that claimed the fake poll, using artificial intelligence.

This revelation is not that far off from what USC professor Christian Grose predicted would be the case, with Grose telling the LA Times that he caught the vibe that this could be a stunt by a 23-year-old politics nerd type who likes to go on social media.

Mayor Karen Bass calls for a “quick resolution” on the Paramount Warner Brothers merger

There has been a divide lately on whether the lawsuit by state attorney generals, led by California’s Rob Bonta, to challenge the Paramount merger with Warner Brothers Discovery should be settled or be fought in court, and it now it looks like Mayor Karen Bass is calling for a “swift resolution” on the deal, which many are taking to mean she is siding with those who want to see a settlement.

As for Bonta, he has been saying that he’s focused on continuing with the litigation, according to Politico. Bass’ official statement on Thursday was that the “ongoing disputes over the proposed merger have stalled filming in our city — it’s time for all parties to come to table. Any resolution must put the long-term stability of LA-based entertainment jobs, productions and investments first. This is not about taking sides. This is about fighting for Los Angeles’ talented and unparalleled creative workforce.”

In the Hollywood Reporter article by Katie Kilkenny, Bass’s press office seems to be arguing that the mayor is also calling for Bonta to get a trial started sooner, not necessarily for a settlement.

LA County officials just released a report detailing their projections that the merger would lead to big job losses. Meanwhile, Paramount has been demanding that the attorney generals fighting the merger post up a bond to go toward the “ticking fees” that Paramount agreed to pay if the merger didn’t go through by September. And The Intercept today reported that an “astroturf” group, called Neighbor for Strong Communities, has been texting people to get more support for the merger.

Hay is being made about Nithya Raman hiring an ad firm that worked for Graham Platner (and Zohran Mamdani). Raman says she did it because she wants to win.

Nithya Raman’s campaign is planning to hire Fight Agency, the political ad agency that helped boost Zohran Mamdani into office. There’s been some controversy with that, though, as the firm worked for Graham Platner, who had been running to represent Maine in the U.S. Senate until dropping out after reporting on sexual assault accusations against him came out. Fight Agency also works for various other progressive and DSA candidates, and Raman’s campaign, as well as Fight Agency representatives, have pointed to interest from Bass’s side to also retain Fight Agency.

During Wednesday’s debate, Raman was asked about her plans to work with Fight Agency, and she responded that she aimed to win the race. “I wanted to make sure we were hiring good people to make our ads,“ she said. Raman quickly followed that up with some parries; among them was to point to Mayor Karen Bass having had a close adviser who was at the same time working for Lineage, which operates the massive cold storage warehouse that caught fire in Boyle Heights in June (Bass has said she’s stopped working with that adviser).

Mayor Karen Bass’s disrespect for street vendors gets the headline, rather than an attempt to fear-monger about unhoused people

Mayor Karen Bass’s response to a question about street vending during the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Association debate, that was not very sympathetic to the street vendor, seems to have lit a fire under LA Times political columnist Gustavo Arellano, a veritable expert on taco culture who’s written books and numerous columns about the popular, multi-faceted street food. Arellano wrote a scathing assessment of Bass during Wednesday night’s debate that described her overall performance as “career suicide,” which has in turn prompted Raman’s campaign folks to go ham on it.

While some had been projecting that fear-mongering about our unhoused neighbors could be wielded as a political weapon in the mayoral race, Bass’s taco comment may have legs too. You can actually catch the whole exchange on street vending here. It’s a good, broad reflection of the state of the policy and politics around the subject — as various neighborhoods, such as those in the San Fernando Valley (but also in many other neighborhoods), as well as from the brick-and-mortar faction of the culinary world, can still be quite resistant to street vending.

What’s happening today?

LA county officials will be taking up a presentation on the effects of a merger between Paramount and Warner Brothers during a Workforce and Economic Development Cluster meeting at 2:30 p.m. County officials on Wednesday released a report that projects big job losses if the merger were to happen.

What just happened?

How Karen Bass and Nithya Raman handled LA’s housing politics at the Sherman Oaks mayoral debate

At the end of Wednesday night’s mayoral debate hosted by Sherman Oaks Homeowners Association, I caught the tail end of a conversation in which a woman carrying a Karen Bass sign explained to a man in a Carpenters polo her position that single-family housing in Los Angeles needed to be protected.

That man – who is part of the Carpenters union that recently endorsed Nithya Raman – responded that the problem for him, though, was that this meant that his children wouldn’t be able to afford to stay in Los Angeles. They then wrapped up their conversation cordially and went their separate ways.

That conversation mirrored one of the big differences between the two mayoral candidates over the course of the debate, which was largely organized by the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Association, a group with a long history of painstaking advocacy against increasing building density. Bass’s stances align with SOHA’s, and Raman is more predisposed to pushing back against slow growth policies and supports more housing to be built.

But there appeared to be another difference during the debate, which was held at the Sherman Oaks East Valley Adult Center, that revolved around how each candidate interacted with the homeowner group, which has had a significant influence on LA’s politics.

“What I learned from you all when I was running – what the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Association does, I think, is a model for other places in the city – [is] you do not want high rises in your single family streets,” Karen Bass told the older, mostly white audience in the room, many of whom are members of the homeowners association. A line like this tends to unlock a happy purr from a group with SOHA’s bent — and Bass had also doused that statement with flattery.

Meanwhile, Raman – who tends to diverge from SOHA’s stances – tried to widen the aperture. Whenever she was asked about how she would protect single-family homes against efforts that have led to those being “eviscerated” under SB79, she responded that the city has not been putting in the work – such as changing the zoning and planning policies – to ensure that state lawmakers stay out of their business.

“The attacks on single-family homes will continue to come the longer this city shies away from its responsibility to build,” Raman said. “We should go up there [to Sacramento] and tell them how we want to accommodate more neighbors in this city. How do we want to solve our housing shortage? And if we take it seriously, they’ll take us seriously. Right now, they’re not taking us seriously.”

The full debate is now posted on SOHA’s YouTube page.

So did Nithya Raman fall into a trap set up by the 41.18 vote?

Mike Trujillo, a political consultant who favors Mayor Karen Bass in the mayor’s race, has recently been describing Council member Hugo Soto-Martinez’s motions to rescind his district’s 41.18 zones, as an intentional trap for Bass’s opponent Nithya Raman.

“I humbly thank Hugo Soto Martinez for setting up a vote so the entire world can watch how Nithya Raman votes to allow homeless encampments back at these sites, 3rd degree chess here,” Trujillo wrote last week. And on the morning of the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Association debate Wednesday, Trujillo wrote that “Hugo had a job to do, forcing Nithya Raman to be on the RECORD re-opening an unmitigated disaster of more homeless encampments.”

So did Raman fall into the trap during Wednesday’s debate? About 20 minutes in, Fox 11 newsman Phil Shuman, who was serving as debate moderator, took up the vote on Soto-Martinez’s motion, asking Raman, “Under what scenario is it not safer for our children, for ourselves, to move crazed drug-addicts away from schools?”

Raman responded that this was a “scenario where they’re not on the street at all. And that’s the solution that I’ve been pushing for.”

Raman said that the 41.18 resolutions, which set up anti-encampment zones, “at its most effective, uses scarcity resources to move an encampment 500 feet down the block. I think we can do better.” She said that city resources could be used instead to “end homelessness.”

Raman then pointed to the steep drop in homelessness in her district, as captured by the annual homeless count, saying that “we reduced street homelessness by 49% over the past few years that I’ve been in office” and that RVs and tents have been reduced by 70% as evidence that “this is possible to do.”

“But we have to have a bigger imagination than thinking that the best that we can do in Los Angeles is to think about which block an encampment should be on,” Raman said. “We should be removing encampments from our streets completely.”

By the way, Soto-Martinez, who carried those motions to rescind the anti-encampment zones in his 13th council district, is in the same progressive voting bloc as Raman, but maintained his endorsement for Bass when Raman entered the race. Some have made a big deal out of the fact that Raman doesn’t have the support of even her progressive colleagues.

Traci Park mistakes a lefty Abolish 41.18 campaign as DSA-led

Whether feigned or genuine, there seems to be a tendency to conflate every lefty or progressive group with one another. Council member Traci Park – who earlier this week voted against Council member Hugo Soto-Martinez’s motions to rescind his predecessor’s 41.18 anti-encampment zones – characterized “Abolish 41.18” as a campaign led by DSA. But that is not the case, according to one of those groups.

“When the DSA shows you what they are, believe them,” Park had written as part of a post that shared slides from Mutual Aid Union LA, which is calling for more progressive council members to repeal pre-existing zones, and for the council to repeal 41.18 entirely. Park was among the council members who sees the 41.18 law as beneficial, rather than harmful.

“Hey Karen, we’re glad you could take time out of your busy schedule tormenting poor people to confuse us with DSA, a group that is in no way affiliated with this campaign,” says a post from LA Street Care, one of the groups involved in the campaign, to set the record straight. “One question tho: Why are you crashing out over our demand that the city actually house people?”

In the original slides, Mutual Aid Union LA is described as a “direct action-based network of autonomous mutual aid organizations.”

What’s happening today?

They are calling it the Great Debate. Will it live up to that promise? Mayor Karen Bass and City Council member Nithya Raman are back for another rumble tonight on the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Association’s debate stage. The last time, there were fireworks.

This Sherman Oaks Homeowners Association debate, which starts at 7 p.m., is co-sponsored by the Sherman Oaks Neighborhood Council and the Sherman Oaks/Encino Chamber of Commerce. The in-person reservations are sold out, and they are recommending people arrive early to get good seats. Doors are set to open at 6 p.m. You can also view the debate through a Zoom stream or listen in via LAist. And you can catch up on the debate later on their YouTube page, which also features an trove of past interviews with elected officials and debates.

What just happened?

More than four years later, a progressive makes good on his campaign promise to rescind 41.18 anti-encampment zones

Council member Hugo Soto-Martinez has finally fulfilled a campaign promise to get rid of the 41.18 anti-encampment zones that his predecessor, Mitch O’Farrell, set up back in 2021, in the 13th council district. Even though it took some time for things to get to this point, Soto-Martinez ended up getting pretty easy support for rescinding those zones — although the attitude from many of his colleagues appeared to be along the lines of, “Be my guest, it’s your district, and your problem.”

All of the council members present – except for Imelda Padilla, Monica Rodriguez and Traci Park – voted to support Soto-Martinez’s motion. Bob Blumenfield, a West Valley council member, voted in favor, but he had also made a point of saying that doesn’t mean he opposes 41.18.

Some council members rely on the prohibition to address encampments, which can have the effect of then pushing unhoused people to other areas. But other council members have actually opted to avoid using the law enforcement tool to address encampments. For example, Nithya Raman has not set up any 41.18 zones, and she is now touting a 54% drop in homelessness in her district. Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson also hasn’t set up any such zones in his South Los Angeles district. He said on Tuesday that this was “because of the particularity of my community.”

“Sending the police to give people tickets in my community almost always makes the thing worse,” Harris-Dawson said. “Whether it’s drugs or speeding or whatever – it just has never worked, and so for me, it doesn’t make any sense. In other parts of the city, I’ve seen it work and work in a way that’s effective.”

Tuesday’ meeting ended up offering up one of the more substantive conversations on 41.18 that the council has had in a while, even though the body has had several progressives on it for quite some time now. The progressive bloc does consistently, though quietly, vote against 41.18 zone resolutions by colleagues. With Tuesday’s vote, Soto-Martinez spoke at length about his stance against using the 41.18 enforcement tool.

Although rarely commented on by city leaders, 41.18 zones have drawn plenty of public comment, usually in opposition to them. A recent vote by Raman against Council member Traci Park’s motion to set up 41.18 zones impressed an activist enough that she shouted out, “Nithya, you got my vote!”

Now the pressure is on from a coalition of mutual aid groups to get other progressives to remove 41.18 zones. They’re hoping to get Council member Eunisses Hernandez to remove zones set up by Gil Cedillo, the previous council member that she ousted, and to get Council member Ysabel Jurado to remove the zones set up by Kevin de Leon.

Be sure to read Phoenix Tso’s complete report on Tuesday’s vote at LA Public Press.

Nithya Raman accuses mayoral candidate opponent of halting needed street safety project in Griffith Park

Nithya Raman on Tuesday accused Mayor Karen Bass of taking the extraordinary step of intervening to stop a street safety project on Forest Lawn Drive that had been three years in the making and set to start construction in June.

“Normally, mayors defer to the council members for these types of projects in their district, so this intervention was unusual,” Raman said at a news conference on Tuesday that she held almost a week after a fatal car crash on Forest Lawn Drive. Spectrum News 1 posted up two clips from the news conference. Mayor Karen Bass’s campaign gave Spectrum News 1 a statement that points to opposition to the street safety project from “ local businesses, faith leaders, and community members.”

The project first came about primarily due to concerns over earlier car crashes, including another fatal crash in 2022, according to Streets for All, a transportation advocacy group that has endorsed Raman and runs a political action arm that is working to elect Raman. Streets for All’s write-up in May on the history of the project offers links to the April letter that Mayor Bass sent to state legislators, and a memo the mayor issued on May 7 to LADOT telling staff to stop work on the project.

A few more things…

What’s the harm of an unreliable poll? USC political science professor Christian Grose tells LA Times reporter Ben Wieder that polling can drive election outcomes, and “favorable polls lead to more fundraising. There’s a bandwagon effect.” After a poll on the LA mayor’s race turned out to be fake, LA Times’s Ben Wieder puts a wider lens on the challenges faced by pollsters that might affect how accurate they are. Wieder points to a 2024 Pew report that says polling of people under 30 and Latino adults may not accurately capture their attitudes. Wieder also speaks to experts who say when an incentive is offered, such as cash, to get people to participate in surveys, that can also lead to unreliable results. And pollsters are still struggling with changes in how people communicate. With few people answering their phones, pollsters have to find people to respond via email and text messaging. And with new polling companies, it can be hard to tell if what is put out is reliable.

Parriva has rolled out a series of articles on LA city’s 9th District race that includes profiles of each of the two candidates, Jose Ugarte and Estuardo Mazariegos, who are facing off in the runoff race. The profiles are by Reynoldo Mena, who was previously editorial director at several Spanish-language publications in Southern California, including Excelsior, Hoy and La Opinión.

LA Council member Curren Price says he just got done leading his last jobs committee meeting, after serving as chair of various versions of the committee for 13 years. Price was recently reassigned to chair the Government Efficiency, Innovation and Audits instead, as he finishes out the last few months before his final term ends in December. And he’s now passing the torch onto Council member Hugo Soto-Martinez, who is set to be the committee’s new chair at the end of the month. This last meeting included a hearing on a proposal to expand worker protections, and in the past the committee has worked on issues such as raising the minimum wage, a guaranteed basic income, the Olympics wage, the hotel living wage and measure called “ban the box” that prohibits employers from asking about a job candidate’s criminal history.

Alejandra Molina at Boyle Heights Beat details a St. John’s Community Health report that says serious health problems they found among people who went to their health clinic in recent weeks can be connected to exposure to toxic smoke and chemicals. Molina had previously written about community and South Coast AQMD testing that found ammonia was in the air weeks after the fire. And Capital and Main’s Robin Urevich recently dug into fire department logs to learn more about the presence of ammonia in Boyle Heights after the fire.

Lineage announced on Tuesday that they are nearly finished with removing bulk food waste from their burned Boyle Heights warehouse, and they’re starting on a more complicated phase to remove food waste in harder-to-reach areas of their warehouse. They explained that they’re going to need to remove “loose food waste” stored in 40 miles of shelving that are arranged six stories high. Workers will be climbing up the shelves to remove the waste, they said, because heavy equipment won’t be able to get to much of it. You can read their latest Aug. 18 update here.

What’s happening today?

“Ever heard of Municipal code section 41.18?” asks a post by Council member Hugo Soto-Martinez’s office on Instagram

The Los Angeles City Council is set to take up Soto-Martinez’s motions to rescind 41.18 zones prohibiting homeless encampments in his City Council district that were set up by the predecessor he ousted to get into office, Mitch O’Farrell. That law had drawn relatively strong pushback from the public several years ago, and it seemed popular enough to oppose at the time. But these days, maybe not as much. And so it now seems like a miracle that these motions are even going up for a vote today. You can see the motions here, and here.

Back in 2021, while Soto-Martinez was running for office to oust and replace O’Farrell in the 13th council district, the then-aspiring council member had taken city leaders to task for their support of 41.18. He had even described that law as having “everything to do with politics.” The law was akin to “stop and frisk,” Soto-Martinez’s social media thread said, and it reminded him of the “broken windows” theory of policing that he also described as “another failed strategy.” Soto-Martinez, and other progressives at the time, readily spoke out against the law, calling it cruel and violent.

Since then, advocates have pushed Soto-Martinez to make good on his campaign promises. But in the lead-up to Tuesday’s scheduling of his motion to lift O’Farrell’s 41.18 zones – and to remove the pricey metal signs put up to give people notice about the prohibition – Soto-Martinez is muted about the fact that there is even a vote happening today. Before that, Soto-Martinez had announced the motions his council office had produced, using his personal, campaign accounts, like on Bluesky and Instagram.

And months before that, he had been skittish about personally commenting on the matter when activists did some polite flyering outside of an event where he was getting an award for his office’s work on housing and homelessness. Soto-Martinez had declined an opportunity to respond to a softball question from me to get a reaction to those flyers, and instead questioned me on whether I had purchased tickets to the awards event (organizers, who were themselves sympathetic to the concerns of the advocates, and who were impressed especially by his work on housing, had given me permission to be there).

At that event, one of the activists, Roxy, told me that “there’s a lot of people who don’t know that the sweeps are happening or are aware of the extent of harm, and so trying to activate people on what the problem is and where pressure is needed to make things better, is a lot of the work.”

What just happened?

Nithya Raman joins rally of people who want Lineage cold storage out of Boyle Heights

Since the big fire at the Lineage cold storage facility back in June, community people and groups like Eastside Padres Contra la Privatización, ACCE and the United Teachers Los Angeles have gathered several times over the past several weeks to demand that Lineage leave the area entirely. The warehouse is a hulking presence next to the homey, residential neighborhood that’s right across the street from it. Talk about being able to look into your neighbors’ back yard!

On Monday, one sitting council member who is actively running for mayor, Nithya Raman, stood scrunched up with community members and representatives from all those groups, surrounded by news cameras, and LAPD trailer that happened to be parked there at the end of the street, and against a backdrop of misters set up alongside the clean-up area to try to lessen the multi-faceted stench coming from the burned warehouse. Neighborhood teachers talked about the toll on their students, who have been pent up indoors all summer, and the generations of learning disabilities that they have seen from students living in neighborhoods that are adjacent to industry and freeways.

When Raman went up to speak to the line of TV news camera people and sweaty reporters, she said she was there to amplify two things those groups and community people wanted:

“First, Lineage should not be allowed to reopen this warehouse. And after this warehouse is cleared, we — the city must do everything in its power, not just to hold Lineage accountable and to protect this community, but to make sure that this becomes a safe space for the people who live here.

“Second, we need a full and transparent investigation into Lineage’s actions and the city’s handling of this disaster. Boyle Heights residents deserve answers about what was released into the air, when officials knew about it, what residents were told, whether the monitoring was adequate, and why families are still fighting for basic, basic things.”

This all comes after Mayor Karen Bass held a community forum last Thursday to give an update on the Lineage cleanup deadline. Bass did not attend that meeting in person. Instead, she Zoomed into the Lou Costello Community Center, where it was being held. Boyle Heights Beat reported from the community forum and interviewed the frustrated community members.

A few more things…

Los Angeles Magazine’s Michele McPhee reports that Airbnb recently paid $3 million for the services of Martin Ludlow, a former City Council member who had been wrapped up in an earlier era of scandals, to help them garner support in the community for their Save our Services campaign, which promoted loosening city regulations on vacation rentals as a way to raise revenue for LA city services. Ludlow preceded Herb Wesson on the City Council, having left his council seat early to lead the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, only to plead guilty to conspiring to embezzle union funds a year after that. Now Ludlow is in the middle of a fresh scandal, after a much-anticipated jazz festival that was supposed to be headlined by John Legend and Janelle Monae got cancelled on the day it was supposed to start. LA Material’s Julia Wick reported on that unraveling.

Karen Bass posted a video of a pothole not getting fixed, as a way to promote the city’s 311 system. This obscured the fact that the next day, the pothole did get fixed. Still, this stunt rang false to some like Alissa Walker who pointed to a massive pothole that she had submitted to 311 months ago that had yet to be filled.

As Soto-Martinez works to rescind 41.18, City Attorney candidate John McKinney has put out an ad that’s supportive of 41.18 and criticizes his opponent, Marissa Roy, a progressive. McKinney’s campaign also reports they raised $150K. Even though the last major filing says McKinney raised $3,000, that was as of the end of June. That period doesn’t cover an additional month and a half, and McKinney’s campaign says they’ve actually covered more ground since then, receiving as much as $150,000 in donations, ranging from $5 to $1,800.

Mayor Karen Bass relied on a fake poll to boost her campaign. That poll, put out by an entity called Median Strategies, announced on Monday that they were withdrawing the poll, saying that it was put out as part of an “experiment,” after LA Times reporter Noah Goldberg repeatedly reached out to them to ask about it. Median Strategies’ statement on their website described what they were doing as a “social experiment,” but some are now speculating it could have easily been a way to either intervene in an election or influence prediction markets. California Post, which took the poll as real and reported on it last week, ended up replacing their article with one about the fact that it was bogus, but they did not appear to have issued a correction.

What’s happening today?

Today is supposed to be the deadline for Lineage to complete the cleanup of their warehouse that caught fire on June 17. Mayor Karen Bass had given Lineage 45 days, and those days are up. But Lineage says that’s not so. As Bass, and City Council member Ysabel Jurado, took the company to task for missing the Friday deadline, Lineage representatives said that they were counting the 45 days starting from when the site was turned back over to them. That means that for them, it’s still day 37 of meeting the deadline, leaving them another week left to complete the cleanup. The full Lineage response on the deadline is on this page.

The City Council is meeting today and taking up a late scheduled motion by Council member Heather Hutt to intervene on a planning commission’s decision on permits to allow public dancing, and for alcohol to be sold and served up at a Koreatown banquet hall. The relatively short regular agenda includes items related to buying up Caltrans property for use by the parks department; the use of some city surplus property; the use of a parking lot in Little Tokyo for the 2028 Olympics; a lease agreement for a CD10 field office; an environmental study to allow the city to take over a property in San Pedro on Gaffey that includes a shooting range and ballfields; a development agreement for a downtown property on Flower, 7th and Hope streets; an appeal of a private high school project in CD5; and a renter protection grant from LACAHSA.

What just happened?

City Attorney’s Office’s dangling of mystery legal advice leads to another delay for the Venice Dell

The developers of the Venice Dell affordable housing project just experienced yet another delay, after the Board of Transportation Commissioners got enticed into hearing the tea from the City Attorney's Office on the project. The Mayor’s Office had sent the commission a letter telling them that the court has ordered that they rescind an earlier decision that ended up blocking the already long-delayed Venice Dell project. The developers, and a longtime advocate and resident of Venice, had taken to public comment to say that the delay was costing people’s lives, because the project, if it had been built earlier, would have housed people who are now unhoused in its planned 120 units.

While the mayor’s office’s representative, Anna Hovasapian, stood by the stance in their letter to the board that they wanted them to follow the court order – that came about as a result of a lawsuit by the developers – to rescind their order. But the offer of some mysterious and “important legal advice” from the City Attorney’s Office’s representative ended up being too hard for the board to pass up.

The advice would need to be delivered in a closed session, away from the eyes and ears of the public, according to John Heath, an attorney working under City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto. He told the committee on Thursday, “This office has important legal advice to share… I would encourage you to schedule a full session, at the first practicable opportunity to enable us to provide you with a detailed briefing on this pending litigation, and the significant impact it could have on the city.”

Presumably the commission would now be scheduling a special meeting, with notice given that the board would be going into closed session to hear that advice.

Federal Judge David O. Carter, saying that Angelenos will die if the federal government suspends LA’s homeless services funding, orders a halt to those plans

LA’s bedraggled homeless services agency, LAHSA, was able to secure a preliminary injunction to prevent the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development from suspending funding from their agency, at least for the time being.

And David O. Carter, the judge on the case, didn’t hold back on his opinions about HUD’s decision to suspend funding, calling it “rash.” Carter also threw the blame back onto HUD, writing that he has “no intention of discouraging investigations of fraud. But it can’t be denied that there have been years of inaction by HUD.”

Carter’s order, laid out in a 28-page ruling, grants a pause requested by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, which goes by LAHSA for short and is a joint powers authority that has long handled the federal funds used to provide homeless services to people in Los Angeles, including in the overwhelming majority of the cities within the county.

Carter described the federal housing department’s move to suspend funding for LAHSA as “rash,” also writing that it would “significantly harm the public interest,” including leading to people dying.

“Inevitably, this suspension will result in deaths among the homeless and the displacement of over 11,000 unhoused individuals onto the streets and into the neighborhoods of Los Angeles,” Carter wrote in his order. “HUD needed to consider reasonable alternatives when it abruptly decided that the bill for LASHA’s dysfunction had come due.”

This is a transitional period for the agency, especially after the county pulled funding from local taxes to use toward standing up a separate county homeless services agency. Meanwhile, the city of Los Angeles, the other major partner in the LAHSA joint powers authority, needs more time to figure out what it will do on that front. City leaders have bristled at the likelihood of the county growing its power in deciding how homeless services are apportioned.

What’s happening today?

The Venice Dell project is back on the agenda today, this time with the Board of Transportation Commissioners. That committee meets at 10 a.m. and will be taking up Mayor Karen Bass’s June 26, 2026 letter — sent because of a court order — telling the commission to “vacate” a decision to deny the use of a city parking lot, Lot 731, for affordable housing.

Boyle Heights Beat reports that Mayor Karen Bass will be holding a community meeting today to give an update on the post-Lineage fire cleanup at the Lou Costello Jr. Recreation Center. This is happening a day before the end of Bass’s 45-day deadline for the company to get the site cleaned up.

What just happened?

Former labor ally to Karen Bass just plunked down a big chunk of change to support her potential ouster, Nithya Raman

Estamos con Nithya for Mayor of LA 2026 is the name of a committee that just got $3 million from The Western States Regional Council of Carpenters. The labor group previously endorsed Bass, but said things soured when she failed to deliver for their members working construction. The filing for that contribution was posted to the Ethics Commission website on Wednesday. Meanwhile, a committee called Unidos con Karen Bass for Mayor 2026 just got a $5,000 donation from a former LA City Council member, Cynthia Miscikowski, who served 35 years on the body.

A few other recent tidbits from the filings: Thrive PAC donated $1,000 to Curren Price’s former staffer Jose Ugarte’s bid to replace his recent employer as the council member of the 9th City Council District. Ugarte is in a runoff with community organizer Estuardo Mazariegos. Marissa Roy, a deputy state attorney who is going up against deputy district attorney John McKinney, in the City Attorny’s race just got $1,800 from the Western State Regional Council of Carpenters.

After Nithya Raman’s removal from leadership spots, colleagues on council lash out; Congress member gives Raman her vote of confidence

Nithya Raman’s colleague on the City Council, Imelda Padilla, has been pretty explicitly expressing her dislike of the Bass challenger on social media this week. In a response to Raman’s post about being removed from her leadership position as chair of the Housing and Homelessness Committee (which also got split into two committees), Padilla’s account — writing in the first person — said that during the months she served on that committee under Raman’s “leadership were the most unproductive time I’ve had on council.”

“You ran it like a lecture hall at a university, not a place of government decision-making,” the comment said. “You were removed because of your inability to lead and get things done. The homeless crisis does not need a chair that is all talk and no action.”

Then on Thursday morning, a third person voice came online, responding to those who had came into the chat to back up Raman, wrote that “Padilla has been unhappy with Raman since her attempt to go after gardeners and their leatblowrers [sic], and when she tried to ban BBQs. Both would have highly negatively impacted members of CM Padillas community. Thus, it would be irresponsible for Padilla not to speak truth to the horrible type of Mayor Nithya would be.”

Padilla actually had already voiced her strong dislike of Raman a few months ago. In a June episode of the Scottie and FRNDS podcast featuring an interview with Padilla, the council member let out the sentiment that she thought Raman “is the worst coworker I’ve ever had.” At first she didn’t name the coworker, but later she identifyied that coworker as Raman. “God knows I tried to get to know her, get to work with her, but it was just never productive,” she said. “There was a major encampment between our communities and if it wasn’t for Mayor Bass that encampment on her side bordering me would have never been taken care of.”

Padilla also said in the podcast that she has held rallies for Bass. And a little earlier in the episode, Padilla mentioned that she was one of the mayor’s appointees to the Metro board, which makes major decisions around public transportation in LA County. That reveal elicited an impressed, “daaaang” from the podcast host. Padilla said she had thrown her name into the hat to be on that board, and she expressed her appreciation for Bass appointing her to the Metro board: “Thank you, Mayor Karen Bass.”

And it wasn’t just Padilla. A major member of the council also wasn’t shy in lashing out at Raman. Council President Harris-Dawson told Noah Goldberg of the LA Times that he felt that Raman saying her removal from the Housing and Homelessness Committee was political punishment was “sad and pathetic frankly… it was sad to see her ambition get the best of her, for her to spin a cunningly devised falsehood.”

While Raman was getting flack from both Padilla and Harris-Dawson, a member of Congress, Laura Friedman, put out a lengthy thread supporting Raman, after she was removed from the Housing and Homelessness Committee. In that post, Friedman shared her experience while serving on the state Assembly of Raman reaching out to partner on clearing an encampment that was on state property. “Nithya and her team were exceptional partners,” Friedman wrote. “They showed up consistently, worked across agencies, and were personally involved in connecting people experiencing homelessness with services rather than simply treating them as a cleanup problem.”

Another major thing happened… An agreement that would put LA city’s taxpayers on the hook for any financial overages of hosting the 2028 Olympics got approved by the City Council on Wednesday, with four members voting against it. Alissa Walker of Torched was there to cover that vote, and notes that not only does Controller Kenneth Mejia oppose a contract that makes taxpayers responsible for any of the costs, City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto had said pretty much the same months ago.

What’s happening today?

An agreement that lays out how much money taxpayers will be putting into hosting the 2028 Olympics – in terms of city services – is getting taken up by the City Council today. That agreement is called the Enhanced City Resources Master Agreement. And there are several dozen items on the agenda related to lawsuit settlements, including one by someone who worked with an LA city unit that conducts CARE+ sweeps. A panel of top LA leaders were also holding a special “executive” meeting this morning to discuss labor negotiations with LADWP workers, airport police and park rangers.

What just happened?

Political or not, Raman loses leadership roles on two of her favorite policy areas: Council member Nithya Raman officially lost her seat as chair of a committee that steers homelessness policy, and she was not assigned at all to the housing committee. Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson released his new committee assignments, which the City Clerk has posted here. Raman has accused the council president of political motivations for booting her out of the chair seat. Harris-Dawson insisted in an interview with KNX that this was not so. Raman now chairs a mish-mosh committee that encompasses civil rights, immigration and neighborhood councils. Also, the new committee assignments don’t go into effect until Aug. 31.

Raman had chaired a committee that combined both housing and homelessness. Now those topics are split into two committees. The three-person housing committee will be chaired by Imelda Padilla, and also will include Traci Park and Ysabel Jurado. The new five-member homelessness committee, which will also take on health-related topics, will be chaired by Jurado, and vice chaired by Tim McOsker. The three other members of this committee will be Raman, Bob Blumenfield and Padilla.

The Los Angeles City Council first set up a dedicated committee to discuss and set policy on the homelessness crisis in 2015 — the first in recent memory at least. An ad hoc committee on homelessness was created in June 2015, followed by a permanent committee co-chaired by Jose Huizar and Marqueece Harris-Dawson that started meeting a couple months later. You can actually listen to the co-chairs’ bright-eyed and bushy-tailed opening remarks at the inaugural Aug. 16, 2015 meeting of the Homelessness and Poverty Committee in this recording posted by the City Clerk here. Some trivia: Back in 2015, the homeless count led to an estimate that the number of people who were experiencing homelessness was 25,686 on a given night. Now that figure is around 45,000, give or take.

Anti-encampment zones on their way out? Hugo Soto-Martinez just introduced motions to rescind several of the 41.18 zones set up in his district by his predecessor, Mitch O’Farrell, that make it illegal to set up encampments. For the past year or so, dozens of mutual aid groups and advocates had been reminding Soto-Martinez that he’d promised to do away with those 41.18 zones when he ran for office. When Soto-Martinez didn’t respond, they called on comedians to pull out of a comedy fundraiser for him. Several comedians and a band that was going to play at that fundraiser told The LA Reporter that they were indeed joining the boycott of Soto-Martinez’s fundraiser. You can read Soto-Martinez’s motions to rescind many of the zones. The original motions by O’Farrell from 2021 identified a threat to public health and safety as the reason for setting up the zones. Zones set up for that reason technically expire in a year, although that detail may not be widely known. Soto-Martinez’s motion to “rescind” those zones does call for looking at how signage posted up about the prohibitions could be removed. You can find Soto-Martinez’s motions, both with seconds from Council President Harris-Dawson, here and here.

LA City Council tries out a new (for them) tech upgrade called a Google Drive folder: And for those who give public comment at City Council meetings, you can now finally see a digital copy of amendments of motions and resolutions on the agenda. The direct link to the folder for those motions is here, and you can find it by going to the meeting calendar page and clicking on the yellow button at the bottom of the page. This doesn’t include the motions that get taken up at a future meeting. You can subscribe to those motions here.

What’s happening today?

LA Council’s plum committee spots to be handed out; Nithya Raman could lose longtime homelessness and housing chair position

The LA City Council is meeting today and will take up a new committee structure and schedule. The most dramatic shift in the structure is the splitting of the Housing and Homelessness Committee into two. That committee held its last meeting last week, and it’s chaired by Nithya Raman, who is running for mayor and challenging the re-election of the current mayor Karen Bass. The assignments have not been announced yet, but Noah Goldberg of the LA Times reports that Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson, an ally of Mayor Bass, is not expected to assign Nithya Raman as chair of the Housing and Homelessness Committee. Nithya Raman released a statement on Monday alleging political motivations are driving the anticipated assignments.

What else is on the City Council agenda: There is also a long slate of ad hoc committees included in the proposed committee structure, including an ad hoc committee on the Lineage warehouse fire in Boyle Heights. The agenda for the council meeting also includes items to temporarily prohibit smoke a vape shops in the 15th Council District, the renaming of the intersection of Temple and Figueroa as Little Manila Square (changing it from the existing name America is in the Heart, which is named after a well-known book by Carlos Bulosan, a Filipino American poet, author and activist), homeless outreach services in CD10, approvals for the restoration of Walker’s Cafe in San Pedro, and a contract with Boingo Wireless for wifi at LAX.

LA county pilot to free up Department of Mental Health psychiatric response mobile unit

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors is scheduled to consider a pilot program to give more ER doctors the ability to do 5150 evaluations that lead to involuntary hospitalizations, as a way to relieve the load on the Department of Mental Health’s psychiatric mobile units and shorten their response to crises in the community. The mobile units respond in-person to 24,000 calls. Meanwhile, about 15% to 20% of requests originate from the ER, even though mobile units are actually more geared to responding to community-based incidents, such as to people’s homes or public areas. The Department of Mental Health has been trying to shorten their response times has been through improving their dispatch process, as well as setting up hiring bonuses to staff the teams better. And since the ER calls tend to get short shrift as well, from their teams, as well as slows their response time down, the motions’ authors are proposing to get more doctors trained up to do 5150 evaluations in at least five more hospitals by the end of the year. Here’s how the motion by Janice Hahn and Lindsey Horvath describes the overall policy landscape: “… DMH is working to identify how it can better support individuals experiencing a mental health crisis who end up in ERs, without sacrificing rapid emergency response for those in the community in need of help. Recently, the state legislature passed Assembly Bill 416, amending the LPS [Lanterman Petris-Short] Act to allow County behavioral health directors to include ER physicians as one of the practice disciplines eligible to be authorized by the County to conduct 5150 evaluations. This would enable ER physicians at non-LPS designated facilities to write 5150 applications to involuntarily hospitalize individuals without relying on PMRT.”

Supes will also take up partnership on Pomona fairgrounds revamp

Supervisors are also set to take up a contract with the Fairplex to partner on a redevelopment of the 487-acre fairgrounds, known for hosting the annual LA County Fair. There is also a proposed $1.7 million settlement in a lawsuit against the Sheriff’s Department by Aaron Glazier, who accused the department’s deputies of unlawful arrest and detainment in Bellflower on Jan. 29, 2018. There is a settlement of $1.7 million in a case in a lawsuit by a Deputy District Attorney, Amy Pentz, against then-DA George Gascon, alleging retaliation. Pentz’s lawsuit said a close adviser to Gascon had waited to announce that their office was not pursuing criminal charges in an excessive use case under the tenure of Sheriff Alex Villanueva, who was running for re-election at the time.

LAPD oversight board to take up Chief Jim McDonnell’s ‘after-action’ on 2025 federal ICE protests

The Board of Police Commissioners is set to take up a 60-page “after-action” report from LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell on the police department’s response to the “federal ICE protests” in 2025. The League of Women Voters of Greater Los Angeles submitted a public comment that took issue with McDonnell’s characterization of the protests as “citywide,” rather than mostly in downtown Los Angeles. They noted that this echos “the messaging that came out of the White House, which was contrary to the information shared by the Mayor, the Police Chief, and the Sheriff during several press conferences that incidents took place within a one-mile radius of downtown Los Angeles, as well as a couple of other areas of the City, e.g. Paramount and L.A. Harbor. Most of Los Angeles did not experience wide-scale protests requiring LAPD response.” They also say McDonnell’s characterization of some of what was happening as “rioting” was a bit overblown. They wrote that “‘rioting’ connotes serious violence,” and yet arrest records from the protests that they point to “show that 79% were for failure to disperse, 6% for curfew violations, 6% for looting, vandalism, or trespassing. 3.6% were arrested for violence against police officers. Perhaps a better word choice, rather than ‘rioting’, would be ‘at times, conditions rose to the level of vandalism and violence against police officers.’” Police commissioners are also set to take up amendments to increase the LAPD’s contract with Metro, to cover costs of providing law enforcement services along the three new stations on the D Line that opened in May. This includes a contract amendment that covers increased costs of $1M that includes the addition stops on the D Line for the last fiscal year, from March 1, until Jume 30. This includes covering the platform in the city of Beverly Hills. An operating agreement with the city of Beverly Hills says that the LAPD will provide law enforcement “solely below ground,” which includes stairs, elevators, platforms and rail lines” at the stations. And there is also an amendment related to increase costs for a full-year. This amendment increases the contract by nearly $120M to cover this year, starting from July 1 until next June 30, to include the D Line extension into Beverly Hills.

What just happened?

Curren Price ordered on Aug. 7 to stand trial

The District Attorney’s corruption case against LA City Council member Curren Price ought to be moving forward finally, after Price’s legal team worked to avoid that just failed. But according to journalist Stephen Oduntan, the judge didn’t seem too impressed by District Attorney Nathan Hochman’s case against Price. “It’s not a great case,” Judge Larry Paul Fidler said. On Monday, Hochman announced the judge’s decision, although reporting by Oduntan at LA Focus included the intriguing comment from the judge. Oduntan spoke to Rickey Ivie, an attorney not involved in the case, who said that such decisions are largely procedural, and that the overwhelming majority of the time these motions are denied. Hochman, meanwhile, described the judge’s decision as showing that the DA’s public integrity division “presented ample evidence to hold Price to answer for 12 public corruption felonies,” and Hochman said they “look forward to setting a trial date and proving these charges beyond a reasonable doubt to a jury.”

LA city candidates are now reporting donations above $1,000 within 24-hours.

The start of the reporting period for such donations was last Wednesday, and can be viewed on the Ethics Commission’s elections totals page. Since then, City Attorney candidate John McKinney has posted a $1,000 donation from former District Attorney Jackie Lacey (who has endorsed him). In the 3rd City Council District race to replace Bob Blumenfield, who is termed out, candidate Tim Gaspar posted a donation from Thomas Safran, an affordable housing developer. In the 9th District City Council race to replace the termed-out Current Price, Estuardo Mazariegos received a donation from civil rights attorney Carol Sobel, while his opponent Jose Ugarte received a donation from a former ethics commissioner Ana Dahan. Donations have of course been flowing in for both Nithya Raman and Karen Bass in the mayor’s race.

What’s happening today?

The task force that was set up to guide Measure G’s implementation is holding the first in what is expected to be a series of cram sessions this month to tackle one of the more politically interesting changes that voters approved – which is to create what could be an immensely powerful elected figure rivaling the LA mayor. The elected county executive role that was created under Measure G will replace the County CEO role that’s now appointed. The elected version of this role has been compared to that of a mayor, but countywide, and given that tensions between the city of LA and the county can get heated, things could get interesting.

The meeting is set to start at 1 p.m., and will take place at downtown’s Hall of Administration, in Room 381B (Instructions to attend the meeting remotely is in the agenda). According to the agenda, the main entree appears to be a presentation from a subcommittee that had already been meeting to discuss the role. The presentation is billed as an “initial analysis of the potential structure and executive functions of the future Office of the Los Angeles County Executive.”

Right now, the appointed County CEO is more akin to LA city’s CAO. They serve a kind of city manager-style role that is nevertheless still quite powerful because they have their hands deeply in the county’s financial matters on a day to day basis, not only in terms of departmental budgets, but also in terms of real estate transactions. The CEO’s office is also the behind-the-scenes coordinator of municipal style services for unincorporated areas where residents don’t have their own city officials to reach out to, something that isn’t exactly widely known.

What just happened?

The South Coast AQMD hearing board approved an order of abatement to Lineage that contained more than 90 conditions that the company needs to follow strictly. Among them are orders for Lineage to move out at least 8.8 million pounds of food waste each week and to not let food waste sit around for any longer than 30 minutes while it is being moved. They also ordered Lineage to contain odors, such as enclosing “freezer 1” and to create a notification process to tell people about truck routes and anything else they need to know. The case documents can be found here.

Carol Adelkoff, the CEO of 1736 Family Crisis Center — a nonprofit that runs domestic violence shelters in Orange County and Los Angeles — was paid $1.6 million in salary and vacation over the last two years, according to tax filings, reports Audrey McGlinchy of the LA Times. Adelkorff also lives in Hawaii. McGlinchy also reports that the nonprofit has received at least $25 million from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority since 2021, and 94% of its revenue comes from public dollars.

404 Media reports on a trend of cities switching to Axon, after dumping Flock, for technology that allows them to collect license plate data. Based on a recent report from the Office of the Inspector General, which is the official watchdog of the LAPD, the department collects “automated license plate reader” data through the Axon dash cams that are installed in the department’s 1,500 police cars. Axon’s storage system doesn’t actually provide the ability to search that data though, so they partnered with Flock to provide LAPD with the ability to do that. OIG said more info was needed on any agreement between Flock and Axon. But the 404 article does say that Axon and Flock are not actually on good terms, and appeared to have had a public falling out last year. And they outlet also reports that Axon has a different system than Flock does. While Flock’s system is nationwide, Axon does not put the data on a nationwide system, and so it’s much more closed. FYI, the LAPD uses Axon for its body cams, tasers and in-car cameras (which are the dash cams). The LAPD recently let their Flock contract expire, as they try to negotiate a new one, but police officials told the Board of Police Commissioners recently that those cameras are still recording.

The South Coast AQMD hearing on the Lineage warehouse odor violations ran seven hours long yesterday, with the board hearing from more than 90 people speaking at public comment. The board ended up delaying the presentations from South Coast AQMD regulatory officials who are seeking an order of abatement to be issued, and from Lineage, to today. After that the the board is expected to make a decision. The meeting started at 9:30 a.m., with the webcast being streamed here.

What just happened?

Air quality regulators heard from more than 90 people about odors from Lineage warehouse that caught fire in June

At Wednesday’s South Coast AQMD hearing on the Lineage odor case, people spoke about the stress and the harmful effects of having to endure the odors emanating from the spoiled food that was in the warehouse when it caught fire on June 17.

One woman, wearing an InnerCity Struggle shirt, said that having to shut her windows to avoid the odor, while already dealing with not having access to power and water at her home, has been “quite a stressful situation.”

“I’m nobody to demand, but yet I do demand,” she said. “Do something for the community, for the families, for the children.”

LA Mayor Karen Bass had earlier called into the meeting to give her comment remotely, demanding an order with strong provisions, including maximum financial penalties. And LA Council member Ysabel Jurado, who represents the 14th City Council District where the warehouse is located, appeared in person to urge that the board issue an order that will yield “meaningful accountability” from the company. She questioned whether even the maximum financial penalties will mean much to a company that has substantial resources at its disposal. “What does $1,000 to $75,000 in penalties per day mean to a multi-billion dollar company and the largest warehouse logistics operation in the world?” Jurado asked.

Boyle Heights Beat, along with City News Service and Spectrum News, covered the hours-long public comment marathon session taking place in the packed South Coast AQMD’s Diamond Bar hearing room on Wednesday. The LA Times yesterday also highlighted the $80 million to $100 million cost estimate for remediating the effects of the fire. Those figures were contained in Lineage’s presentation slide prepared for the hearing. That slide also included a goal by the company to remove all of the food waste from the facility by next week.

LA city leaders bristle at county officials’ offer to take lead role managing homeless services data

LA city’s distrust of the county, which just pulled funding from a joint homeless services agency to set up their own separate homeless services department, was on full display at Wednesday’s Housing & Homelessness Committee meeting. That committee’s members, including Nithya Raman, raised worries about the city losing access to case management data that they believe is important for accountability, and for ensuring their unhoused constituents get services.

One member of that committee, Council member Tim McOsker, was especially incensed about a recent move by LA county to assume a lead role over that data. He even accused the county of denying shelter to people because they were from coming from within the city of LA. “We have a county agency that’s declared war on homeless people,” McOsker said. “They think they’re hurting the city. What they are doing is missing their mission.”

This unexpected complication around case management data stems from the federal government’s effort to suspend funding to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, the main agency providing homeless services. One of the fallouts of the federal government’s move is that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development recently sent a letter to the local “Continuum of Care” board — which oversees the local use of those federal dollars — telling the board that they were non-compliant and needed to take remedial action, such as designating a new lead agency or a new collaborative to apply for federal funds. In response to that, LA county officials offered to temporarily be the lead agency, which would include assuming ownership of case data entered into a system called HMIS. And it was THAT move that appears to have ruffled the feathers of LA city leaders and officials.

Raman, meanwhile, said on Wednesday that people who participate in the city’s programs get short shrift on mental health services – which are the domain of LA County, which operates the Department of Mental Health. “They [the county] have a process through which people are supposed to go from interim shelter beds to high acuity mental health beds and to rehab beds,” Raman said. “Very few people from our shelters ever move to high acuity beds. Very few.”

She said that the lack of data makes it difficult to demand services be provided to LA city residents, saying that “when we ask for data on mental health support, how many people are getting it, it’s very hard to get it. When we ask for data on anything from the county, it’s very hard to get.”

The city only relatively recently gained access to case management data, after a tortuous effort trying to get it from the existing agency, LAHSA, according to Council member Ysabel Jurado.

“We had a joint-powers authority… with LAHSA, and even then it was a struggle to get data and clear answers,” Jurado said. “And for the past two years we were trying to get metrics to drive better outcomes. And now you’re saying that as long as we have strong legal contracts that are in place in order to share that information, then we should be able to get it.”

But Jurado said she was skeptical. “Just from experience from my short time here, that’s not promising considering it may be with a new party, and it’s starting a new relationship all over again… it really makes the work that has been done null and void.”

These remarks came as LAHSA officials were scheduled to appear in court on Thursday to lay out their case to a judge for why HUD’s suspension should be blocked. In July, the federal judge had ordered a pause to the suspension to review the case.

Businesses, residents tired of delays in Crenshaw revitalization, demand relief from Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson

Businesses and residents along Crenshaw Boulevard in Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson’s 8th City Council District are not too happy about the construction delays in a big project he spearheaded to bring public art, park space and storefront makeovers to a 1.3 mile stretch of the street that follows the K Line between the Hyde Park and Leimert Park stations. The highly anticipated project, dubbed Destination Crenshaw, is set to be anchored by Sankofa Park, which will feature a public amphitheater and gathering area. But the project has dragged on a bit longer than anticipated. That park for example, had been slate to open by 2023, but is now possibly opening later this year.

There was a community meeting held last week for businesses and residents to air their concerns, and a week later on Wednesday, some of them sent Harris-Dawson a letter requesting that the business interruption and resident relief funds be set up, and for their council member to provide some straight answers. The Destination Crenshaw project was originally slated to begin in 2019, but did not break ground until 2020. They have also missed their original projected completion date of 2024.

Harris-Dawson, who did not attend the meeting, provided only a statement acknowledging that it was important that “our neighbors to know and feel that this project is for them and to build a prosperous future.”

Businesses have closed, residents are blocked off from their own driveways, seniors have had to walk long distances to get to their homes and streets are often left without lighting at night, according to the letter sent to Harris-Dawson and signed by residents and businesses, including KBLA Talk Radio 1580.

“The burden of the unexplained delays should not rest on the shoulders of the Crenshaw Corridor Community, which acted in good faith and supported this historic project,” the letter said.

Some of the headaches aired were reported in this story by CBS’s Lauren Pozen, including the frustrations of a veterinarian who’s parking lot was closed off, forcing his customers to park blocks away when bringing in their pets.

The owner of the KBLA radio station, Tavis Smiley, organized last week’s community meeting, and the letter is also shared on the front page of KBLA Talk Radio’s website. There is also a link on their page to fill out a form for an accountability tracker, and an “FAQ” in which they posed a series of questions that include, “Why was neither CD 8 Councilman Marqueece Harris-Dawson nor his staff in attendance at the recent KBLA Talk 1580/Bethesda Temple Church town hall meeting? Why is he doing media interviews but not reporting to the people who live and work in this community? The folks who have been harmed by his indecisions.”

Isaiah Murtaugh Barish of LA Local reported recently that the delay in the project was due to the withdrawal of federal funds, but with some new funding just identified, construction kicked back up in April, raising hope that the park would be done this year. Steven Sharp of Urbanize LA has a rundown of that return of construction activity, noting that earth movers had shown up “at numerous sites along Crenshaw Boulevard between Slauson Avenue and Leimert Park.”

LA Sentinel, which recently published a story that centered more on the nearing completion of the project, describes Harris-Dawson as “the founder of Destination Crenshaw,” and reports that Harris-Dawson “raised private funds to seed the project and has organized his peers at all levels of government to provide additional funding to complete the project before the People Mover and K-Line connects LAX and the world to Crenshaw Boulevard.”

The 1.3 mile span of Crenshaw that is in the project is expected to feature 10 pocket parks and more than 100 art pieces, in what is essentially going to be an outdoor art museum, with works by muralists and gallery artists such as Kehinde Wiley, Alison Saar, Charles Dixon, Toons One, members of the United to Inspire Collective and Rocking the Nation Crew.

Heather Aubry, daughter of a well-regarded activist, gets a glowing LA City Council sign-off to join Board of Police Commissioners

Heather Aubry, who recently wrapped up a 30-plus year stint in the City Attorney’s Office – and who is the daughter of the late Larry Aubry, a well-regarded South Los Angeles activist – was confirmed by the LA City Council on Wednesday to sit on the Board of Police Commissioners, which sets policy and oversees the Los Angeles Police Department. Aubry will fill a seat left vacant when Teresa Sánchez-Gordon, who was the board’s president, resigned after stepping down abruptly from her leadership role.

Aubry in her remarks to the City Council highlighted three issues that she gathered were top priorities for the council members, which were police brutality (referred to as “use-of-force” in police department lingo), pre-textual stops, and the retention and recruitment of LAPD officers.

Notably, several members of the council were simply beside themselves to be getting the honor of confirming Aubry, as they sent her off to the politically fraught Board of Police Commissioner mines. Council member Heather Hutt said that she has known the Aubry family “for decades and decades, and I know that you’re rooted in Los Angeles… I believe that you will bring your best mind to the table when you’re making decisions for our public safety.” Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson, meanwhile, pointed to his admiration for Aubry’s father, saying that this confirmation gave him the opportunity to “brag on your father.” Aubry, who led major labor and civil rights organizations, was nicknamed the “godfather of South Central Los Angeles.” Harris-Dawson noted that getting to confirm his daughter felt like “full-circle” because “I really do believe the first time I went to the police commission, or came downtown to protest LAPD, I think your dad was one of the ones leading the protest.”

Lineage will be giving a progress report on their post-fire clean-up effort to the South Coast AQMD hearing board today. The agency enforces air quality rules, and has issued multiple citations to the company over the strong odors, mostly due to the spoiled food, emanating from the cold storage warehouse after it was damaged in the fire. The company’s presentation slides include one that says they have a goal of removing all of the bulk food waste from the Boyle Heights cleanup site by next week. The company had said on Tuesday that they have at this point removed 80% of food waste from the facility. You can catch the hearing here, starting at 9:30 a.m. The meeting is being held at the agency’s Diamond Bar headquarters, and you can find meeting materials, including for the Lineage hearing, here.

In a new episode of the Governance Matters podcast out today, LA politics and governance expert Raphe Sonenshein hosts a chat with me and Jim Newton, author and former LA Times reporter, about what it is like to cover charter reform, past and present. It seems frustrations about how long it’s taking for LA city leaders to act on council expansion is widely shared. We also discussed changes in Los Angeles’s media lanscape, and what that might mean for news coverage of politics and our local government.

What just happened?

LA City Council member Ysabel Jurado motions to block Lineage rebuild; Mayor Karen Bass calls on Lineage shareholders to apply pressure

Lineage’s South Coast AQMD hearing today comes a day after Council member Ysabel Jurado released a package of motions addressing the ongoing post-fire issues of odors and pests at the Lineage warehouse. In the package is a motion that calls for blocking the rebuild of the Lineage warehouse, at least until investigations and other analysis is completed on the fire and its aftermath. The motion also calls for a wider reaching measure that would put a temporary pause — through adopting what is called an “interim control ordinance” — on cold storage projects near residential communities. There are a total of seven motions in this set, and they can be found gathered together in this folder created by Jurado’s office. But that folder won’t let you follow the progress of the motions. The City Clerk keeps a database where you can track what happens to the different motions, and that “council file management system” can be found here.

And Mayor Karen Bass on Tuesday issued an “open letter” to shareholders of Lineage to call on them to put pressure on the company. Bass writes that “shareholders should expect the company’s response to reflect urgency, transparency, accountability, and the financial commitment necessary to restore the community that has borne the consequences of this crisis. The people of Boyle Heights deserve nothing less.”

More time given to negotiate enviro groups’ appeal of Scattergood power plant project

Amid a big turnout by build trade unions and members of the IBEW union, which represents LADWP workers, the City Council voted to request that LADWP wrap-up settlement discussions within 45 days on a “modernization” of the Scattergood power plant aimed at transitioning it to hydrogen energy.

Andrea Vega, of Food & Water Watch, had urged the council to give them more time to negotiate with LADWP on the appeal. The group is among several environmental groups have filed an appeal on the project. A lawyer for Communities for a Better Environment, also told the council on Tuesday that he believes the project will be converted to methane gas without a viable pathway to hydrogen power. And the Mar Vista Neighborhood Council has submitted a community impact statement saying they feel the environmental impact study that was conducted on the project was inadequate, and the neighborhood council urged the council to accept the environmental groups’ appeal of the power plant project.

Meanwhile, representatives of labor groups urged the council to approve the project. Brian D’Arcy, the former business manager for the IBEW local representing LADWP, even made an appearance to support the Scattergood project. “I feel like I’m in the scene from Godfather 3 — I’m pulled back in,” he told the council. “This is just silliness. Scattergood was needed six years ago before I retired. I thought we reached some kind of agreement politically, even though there are no real political ramifications to it.”

Council member Hugo Soto-Martinez had recused himself from the discussion and the vote on the Scattergood matter. A recent Form 700 disclosure of economic interest Soto-Martinez filed shows he has stock in a hydrogen fuel cell company.

A few more things…

The LA City Council approved a new set of 41.18 zones in Council member Traci Park’s district, setting up areas in Venice where people will be prohibited from setting up encampments. Four of the 15 members voted against the measure, however, including Council member Nithya Raman, who is running for mayor. Those members typically oppose measures that make being homeless a crime.

The LA City Council’s Housing and Homelessness Committee would be split in two, under a proposed committee structure submitted on Tuesday by Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson and Council member Bob Blumenfield. The committee is now chaired by Council member Nithya Raman. Any new committee assignments would be decided by the council president.

The Council’s Rules committee advanced a motion to create an Ad Hoc Committee on Charter Review, which was expected to begin meeting this month. The committee still needs to be voted on by the full City Council before it’s officially set up. Issues that didn’t make it to the November ballot, such as council expansion, could conceivably be taken up by this new committee.

Mark your calendars for a series of deep-dive meetings on the elected county executive, starting with one scheduled for this Friday at the LA County Hall of Administration in Room 140 A and B.

The Los Angeles City Council is returning from recess, and there are several items to boost LA city leaders’ ability to target unhoused people in their community. Traci Park has a resolution to set up more zones where encampments would be prohibited under LAMC 41.18 (there is an effort to oppose this), and both Council members Imelda Padilla and Monica Rodriguez are looking to step up CARE+ sweeps of encampments in each of their east San Fernando Valley districts by allocating funds to cover overtime hours for city workers. And a motion by Council members Curren Price and Heather Hutt to upgrade LA Sanitation’s CARE operations at encampments into CARE+ sweeps is scheduled for today’s meeting, although it appears that motion had already been approved at a meeting from before the recess.

Connor Sheets of the LA Times covers an effort by Martin Luther King Jr. Community Hospital in South LA to change how the county divvies out funding from Measure B, approved in 2002 to fund trauma care — just as this issue is getting taken up at today’s LA County Board of Supervisors meeting. The hospital’s officials argue that more well-off hospitals continue to receive the funding, under an existing formula, while their hospital, a private hospital that opened in 2015, filling in after the closure of LA County’s Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center, has struggled, even though they serve an underserved community. They receive the remaining funding from Measure B, after the main pot of funds are put into other hospitals. Cedars-Sinai which opposes a shift in funding says they are concerned this would affect the the trauma system. There has recently been some activity especially in LA County Supervisor Holly Mitchell’s office to introduce legislation to re-examine the funding formula. City News Service’s Jose Herrera wrote about MLK’s effort, over a month ago.

What just happened?

In the mayor’s race, Mayor Karen Bass and Council member Nithya Raman are bringing their game

Nithya Raman just snatched up a major labor endorsement from the Western States Carpenters, a construction trade union that had backed Mayor Karen Bass in 2022, when she was battling Rick Caruso. In the earlier race, union members canvassed for Bass, and the union’s PAC poured in millions of dollars in outside spending to get Bass elected that first time around.

Pete Rodriguez, a top official at the Carpenters union, told The LA Reporter on Monday that “we’ve always gone with the incumbent,” so for the union to depart from that, and go for Bass’s opponent in this round “is a really big deal.”

Rodriguez pointed to Bass’s executive directive streamlining the construction of affordable housing as a reason for backing Raman this time. He said they were disappointed by a lack of provisions in the directive to nudge developers to use union labor.

At the Sylmar training center where Raman announced the endorsement, trainees and union members were already wearing t-shirts emblazoned with bright yellow logos that declared the Carpenters’ support for Raman. They also held up signs supporting Raman. Those signs carried a line at the bottom saying that the ads were paid for by Building a Stronger California, sponsored by the Western Regional Council of Carpenters.

Meanwhile, Bass out-raised Raman, as of the end of June, in the first major campaign fundraising report of the election cycle. Bass drew more than $500,000 from donors in just the first month. Bass also received a big chunk from the matching funds program – more than $675,000. Raman raised $170,000, and received more than $576,000 in matching funds.

Here’s what’s happening in the four LA city runoff races, in terms of campaign finance

Friday was the deadline for LA city campaign committees to file their half-year reports. This includes how much LA city candidates who are now headed to a runoff in November raised (and spent) in June, the first three to four weeks of this general election cycle, after polls closed in the primary on June 2. Results were not settled and were essentially still being tabulated for about a week in early June, and it hadn’t been clear Nithya Raman had overtaken Spencer Pratt to land in second place, which advanced her to the runoff, until June 8.

• In the mayor’s race, in which Bass out-raised Raman, Bass reported raising $511,687.22 and spending $43,852.93. She has received $675,368 in matching funds. Raman reported raising $172,926.55 and spending $34,297.89. She received $576,189.56 in matching funds.

• In the City Attorney’s race, Marissa Roy out-raised her opponent John McKinney. McKinney, who brings a more moderate platform, reported raising $3,000 and spending $3,107.15. It doesn’t show that he’s received matching funds, but he appears to be participating in the matching funds program. Roy, a progressive candidate, reported raising $73,766 and spending $1,223.24. She received $131,800 in matching funds.

• In the 3rd District race, Tim Gaspar out-raised Barri Worth Girvan. Gaspar reported raising $180,701 and spending $6,907.18. He has received $47,200 in matching funds. Girvan reported raising $31,456 and spending zero dollars. She has received $47,200.00 in matching funds.

• In the 9th District race, Jose Ugarte out-raised Estuardo Mazariegos. Mazariegos, reported raising $5,396 and spending zero dollars. He has received $47,200 in matching funds. Ugarte reported raising $35,154 and spending $2,460.06. He has received $47,200 in matching funds.

While the next major reporting deadline is Sept. 24, candidates will also need to report contributions above $1,000 starting tomorrow, Aug. 5, within 24 hours of receiving the funds.

Community organizers, Eastside groups again demand that Lineage get out of town, while Mayor Bass orders a pause on Lineage’s rebuild plans

ACCE, Eastside UTLA, and Eastside Padres Contra la Privatización held a rally on Friday to demand that Lineage leave their community. They issued demands that include permanently closing the Lineage warehouse, getting a transparent environmental investigation and a complete site cleanup, immediate housing relief, and transparency around the emergency funding. And they want Lineage and other responsible parties held accountable. The rally was covered by Boyle Heights Beat and Spectrum.

Mayor Karen Bass, who had previously been noncommittal about whether she would oppose Lineage’s rebuild, on Friday issued an executive order that calls for city departments not to process Lineage’s rebuilding plans. The rebuild plans would be held off until a couple of city departments – Planning, and Building and Safety – report back on Lineage’s rebuild plans. And Bass is requesting that the City Council adopt a temporary pause on large cold storage facilities near residential areas and places where there are “sensitive uses.” Council member Ysabel Jurado is anticipated to carry a motion during Tuesday’s meeting.

A few more things…

District Attorney Nathan Hochman charges an officer, who filed a lawsuit alleging racism, with illegally recording his coworkers. Mark Ridley Thomas’s conviction is upheld in his bribery case, with Edvard Petterson of Courthouse News writing that Ridley-Thomas’s lawyer Alyssa Bell says they are exploring “options for en banc review.” Ridley-Thomas, who was sentenced to serve 3.5 years in prison, is out on bail while he appeals his case. Nithya Raman does an interview with New Yorker editor David Remnick, who tries to pin down her “ideology.” Raman discusses advocating for changes to Measure ULA, the transfer tax on high-value properties, which led to criticism from her allies. She tells Remnick that she believes market-rate housing is important (Raman discussed this at greater length in an interview with Mike Bonin back in April). She says she is not anti-market. Rather, she is against exploitation within the capitalist system. She says she supports “big government” around issues like homelessness, and that she believes government money should be spent to address that issue.

LA city candidates heading into the November general election have until the end of today to report how much money they’ve raised as of June 30. The report actually covers a six-month span, and is called a semi-annual report, but it includes just the first three or so weeks of the November general election cycle. While many of the city races were settled in the primary, the LA city mayor and city attorney’s races have runoffs in November, and two of the council district races also got extended into November. Those council contests are the 3rd district race between Tim Gaspar and Barri Worth Girvan in the southwest San Fernando Valley area now represented by Council member Bob Blumenfield, and the 9th district race between Estuardo Mazariegos and Jose Ugarte in South Los Angeles area now represented by Council member Curren Price. The semi-annual reports give a sense of whether the campaigns are getting off to a good start or not, but it’s early days, with more than 90 days left until Nov. 3, when polls close. The campaign finance reports are post here. It’s like a little health check.

Be lazy today. Speaking of health, the LA County Department of Public Health issued an “ozone advisory” today, saying that the South Coast Air Quality Management District thinks that with the ozone hanging a bit too low over the next few days, the smog will be bad amid the latest heat wave bearing down on Southern California. Public health officials are recommending people to not engage in vigorous physical activity, to stay indoors and to keep the windows closed, and to in general take it easier on yourself. They suggest going to hang out at the library, mall or wherever else there is air conditioning. They also advise to not use up too much energy, including not blasting your own air-conditioning, or doing anything that contributes to the smog, such as operating a gas-powered lawnmower until at least the evening.

What just happened?

Iconic bridge serving the Port of Los Angeles could be put to pasture

The Vincent Thomas Bridge, which opened in at the Port of Los Angeles San Pedro in 1963, generates nostalgic feelings for people, so an agreement with Caltrans to look at replacing it could be a “painful” undertaking for the San Pedro community, according to Donna Littlejohn, the longtime South Bay reporter at the Daily Breeze.

Ships are typically taller now and many can’t pass under the Vincent Thomas Bridge. It’s estimated about 40% of the ships are too tall for this bridge. Littlejohn reports that while it’s still possible officials will decide to make modifications to the bridge instead, but she noted that they sounded much more gung-ho about replacing the bridge, during a Thursday news conference in which Mayor Karen Bass joined Port of LA and Caltrans officials to announce an MOU that starts the process to study what to do about the conundrum of a bridge that’s slung too low for our times.

Meanwhile, the Port of Long Beach appeared to have started keeping up with the movement of time, and aready put an older bridge, the Gerald Desmond Bridge, to pasture, and replaced it with the Long Beach International Bridge that opened in 2020. As for the future of the Vincent Thomas, things are still in the early stages, because officials have yet to begin formally researching what to do, conducting the community meetings and identifying the all-important funding for the project.

A few more things… The fire that broke out at a Vernon warehouse on Thursday, near where the Lineage fire was, ended up getting put out just a few hours later. City News Service reports that attorneys for the city of Los Angeles are pushing back against an effort by attorneys to initiate a retrial on a lawsuit by the family of a girl killed in 2021 by an LAPD officer at the Burlington Coat Factory in North Hollywood. Unrig LA flags early campaign filings in the City Attorney’s race showing that Marissa Roy had a bigger haul than opponent John McKinney, as things get going in the runoff election. And the LA City Sanitation Department conducted a sweep on Thursday at Venice Boulevard and Glendon in Palms, reports Palms Unhoused Mutual Aid.

The official watchdog of the Los Angeles Police Department will hold an online “listening session” at 4 p.m. to take public input on LAPD’s use and oversight of digital surveillance tech to gather license plate information. This data allows the LAPD to track individual vehicles traveling around the city. Many have described this tech as creepy, and there are worries (stemming from reporting on Flock in particular) that federal government officials may have access to them. But several communities around Los Angeles seem to want them enough that they have donated them to the LAPD to try out, even though it then results in maintenance and operating costs. Some council offices like those of Traci Park and John Lee have even put their district’s discretionary funds into providing this surveillance capability for the police stations covering their districts.

The police department uses “automated license plate reader” tech provided by Flock and Motorola, as well as Axon to a certain extent, according to a July 10, 2026 Office of Inspector General report that was presented to the Board of Police Commissioners on July 14. By “to an extent,” I mean that Axon — which has contracts for LAPD’s tasers, body-worn cameras and in-car cameras — partners with Flock to allow police officials to search license-plate data picked up using Axon’s cameras, which are installed in more than 1,800 police cars — not where you typically imagine automated license plate reader tech to also be used. Flock’s cameras are usually depicted as being set up on stationary poles.

Meanwhile, the LAPD has indeed allowed their direct contract with Flock to expire, as was reported a few weeks ago by several publications, but police department officials had assured the Board of Police Commissioners at that July 14 meeting that the Flock-operated cameras installed around the city are still picking up footage, which means that footage and date will be available to them once their contract with Flock gets renewed. LAPD officials are in the midst of negotiating a new contract, and a draft of that contract was included in the Office of Inspector General’s report, starting on page 22. You can join the Zoom call conducted by the Office of the Inspector General here.

What just happened?

The Los Angeles Police Department has stopped posting public records online, according to a UCLA research that Libor Jany at the LA Times, in a story published Wednesday. The records — which often include recordings of dispatch calls and text messages from top LAPD officials — were being posted onto NextRequest, an online public records request management system used by several LA city departments and elected offices. UCLA professor Nicholas Shapiro, who leads a multidisciplinary team of UCLA researchers called Carceral Ecologies that studies the environmental effects of the prison system, had been tracking the records and noticed they were no longer being posted as of April. Meanwhile, Jany also reports in the story, the LAPD chief, Jim McDonnell has lamented at a recent Board of Police Commissioners meeting that they have had trouble keeping up with records requests because they do not have enough staffing.

Boyle Heights Beat’s Andrew Lopez writes about a recent community engagement effort that found that East Los Angeles residents overwhelmingly want a stronger voice in LA county government through a local community council. The engagement was being conducted by a group called LEEAF (short for Los Angeles Economic Equity Accelerator & Fellowship), and their conclusion came from summarizing conversations with 300 participants and 200 written comments. Some ideas they heard from participants included setting up either an elected or advisory local council, with the elected one seen as a step toward independence, and more control over the local Sheriff’s station. LEEAF’s interim report can be found here, and the full report is set to be submitted to LA County officials, after holding a couple more community meetings in August scheduled for the 8th and the 15th.

The progressive group, LA Forward, has endorsed Nithya Raman in the contentious mayor’s race, over Mayor Karen Bass. They said that that there was a “record-breaking turnout” of LA Forward members who cast ballots to decide on who to endorse, with 90% of their members choosing Raman. They pointed to Raman’s support of a citywide unarmed crisis response system (which creates an alternate team to send out on calls normally directed to the LAPD via 911 calls), her co-authoring of a sanctuary city ordinance, and for championing good governance reforms. They also cited her efforts to tack climate change through policy that promotes more electrification in building regulations, and her work on creating more “transportation and mobility options.” The group educates community members on how to advocate for progressive issues, regularly holds events around the city to get people civically engaged on specifically local LA city and county issues, and they do teach-ins on major political issues such as the elected County Executive in LA County. They’ve also lobbied elected officials on many issues.

A new political profile of Nithya Raman in Vanity Fair by Maxwell Adler seeks to reframe the conversation around the Los Angeles mayor’s race. Raman’s candidacy gets frequently conflated with Zohran Mamdani’s Democratic Socialist fueled victory in New York’s mayoral race, but Adler points to the fact that Raman’s relationship with DSA has been “fractured.” This contrasts with conservative talking points that paint her as a communist, and Adler’s opening to his piece seems to capture this half-hearted engagement with reality through an anecdote about a bicyclist who, during a recent CicLAvia event, shouted “hell no to communism” as he rode up on Raman, but then neglected to stop and talk to her. Adler gets Raman to admit her relatively light touch alignment with the DSA, telling him she hadn’t joined the group out of a “deep ideological drive.” Raman said that she does “really care about issues and they were the only political organization in LA talking about renters’ rights, the only one.” Raman actually received a healthy skewering at a meeting of the Democratic Socialists’ of America-Los Angeles in March, but not quite to the degree of her opponent, Mayor Karen Bass, whose name elicited loud and ready boos at that meeting. Bass is also described often as a progressive, and she gets painted with the same blunt brush of being a communist by many in conservative circles, even though she’s also been described as abandoning her past leanings, especially after she earned the endorsement of the police officers union. That Democratic Socialist of America meeting had actually been partly held to decide if the group wanted to throw their limited capacity into the mayor’s race during the primary, but many at the meeting worried that Raman, who was framed as a “viable” progressive pick, would take resources away from getting others on their endorsed slate who were running in City Council races, and in the City Attorney’s race, which happened to be the Los Angeles chapter’s first-ever foray into a citywide race.

There is a labor proposal being made that would impose involuntary overtime on firefighters. A public hearing was held today during a special Board of Fire Commissioners meeting. A couple meetings ago, Fire Department Chief Jaime Moore had reported that the department was experiencing a staffing shortage that recently led to closing down fire engines and truck companies.

What just happened?

Public officials react with concern to news that Lineage wants to rebuild the cold storage facility in Boyle Heights

In the middle of Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting, Supervisor Lindsey Horvath flagged the news broken by LA Material that a building permit has been filed with the city of Los Angeles to rebuild the Lineage cold storage warehouse that burned last month. Mayor Karen Bass called this a “slap in the face” and said she was revising an executive directive to reflect the concerns about the cleanup process. Lineage has been cited multiple times by the South Coast Air Quality Management District, and they began receiving citations from the Department of Public Health last Thursday, July 23, for “unsanitary and nuisance conditions” related to the rodents and pests at the site, following that department’s visit on July 15 that resulted in this inspection report. In an update on Wednesday, the health department said that they have issued six citations, with each citation leading to $500 per day fines until the violations are corrected. Council member Ysabel Jurado called the application for permits “outrageous” and said that “at this time, I have no intention of supporting Lineage rebuilding at this site.” And County Supervisor Hilda Solis has issued a statement saying she opposes the rebuilding effort “while residents are still waiting for transparency, accountability and meaningful action.” During their meeting earlier in the day, Solis had said that the local permitting agencies needed to take a “strong look” at the rebuild application. Lineage, meanwhile, assured that their permit application ”will not impact or distract us from the important work of cleanup.”

A few more things…

The LA Times’s Melissa Gomez has an overview of the runoff election taking place to fill Council member Curren Price’s 9th District, pointing to the historic shift in demographics in that district from one that was once predominantly Black to now Latino.

LAist’s Jordan Rynning reports on the latest in a disciplinary case against the well-known evictions attorney Dennis Block, who was charged in January for improper fees charged to clients, representing both the landlord and the tenant and signing off on an Ai generated court document. Rynning reports that Block has agreed to serve one-year of probation.

Steve Scauzillo with the LA Daily News reports on the Board of Supervisors approving a resolution to place a measure to correct a repeal of the Measure J on November’s ballot. That measure also includes language to give the county’s new Ethics Commission more independence.

The Los Angeles Police Department is requesting sign-off on buying more vehicle for the upcoming Olympics. The Los Angeles Police Department is requesting 300 more patrol vehicles and authorization of $13 million financing for non-patrol vehicles for the upcoming Olympics.

And the video just posted of a panel I moderated at the neighborhood councils’ Budget Day event back in June 27, and there were some fireworks. The panel consisted of Council member Bob Blumenfield, former Deputy Controller Rick Cole and Assistant City Administrative Officer Ben Ceja, and the lively exchanges happened after I raised the topics of the role of the chief financial officer in the city, and later, the growing trend of departments wanting their budgets protected from LA’s leaders who are technically the ones directing where funding goes. The chief example of this protected budget trend has been a charter amendment measure on the ballot in November that seeks to double the protected budget for the city’s recreation and parks department. The poor condition of the parks are frequently talked about: LA’s parks have dropped in ranking to the lowest its ever been, even LA City Council’s budget chair admits the department is “wildly” underfunded, the city has had to close its park hours on Sundays, and the general manager of the department says that even though they’re getting inundated with requests from council offices, “the simple fact of the matter is it’s breaking the backs of out staff.”

Port officials for Long Beach and Los Angeles are sharing a progress update , at 10 a.m., on their “clean air action plan,” which is their roadmap to reducing emissions to zero, all the while being mindful of the jobs, at the ports. The update should include details on how the clean truck program, the clean marine fuels feasibility assessment and workforce assessment are doing.

The LA County Board of Supervisors will be deciding today on whether to ask voters in November about creating an independent seven-person Ethics Commission that has the power to enforce ethics and campaign finance laws. The measure would also aim to fix a screw-up that repealed an earlier, voter-approved measure, Measure J, which sets aside LA county money for community-based services as alternatives to jailing people. You can read more about how the commission would be appointed, what powers it has, and other details in the resolution to place the issue on the ballot here.

Last week, LA city’s police commission meeting got cancelled after the board’s executive director said they couldn’t get their mics working. Today, they’re meeting again, starting at 9:30 a.m., with an agenda that includes reports from LAPD officials, along with the independent watchdog of the department, on incidents involving federal immigration officials. The topic of federal immigration enforcement, which the board asked for regular updates on, had originally been scheduled for last week’s meeting. There’s also an item to clarify that officers need to have their body cameras on when around federal immigration officials. Another postponed item that is crammed into this agenda is a big report sharing survey results from sworn women officers, who are not always the best treated people on the LAPD workforce.

The Santa Monica City Council tonight is taking up a big change to how they shelter and house people, which includes replacing an existing shelter, known as SaMoShel, with what they’re calling a “continuum” that involves an “interim” motel shelter at Palm Motel to be operated by People Concern. That plan also includes putting out a request for information to find “non-congregate housing options” in and around Santa Monica that would then replace SaMoShel. The council’s report says one of their key goals is to “preserve” an existing program at the Palm Motel: “LA County is planning to defund the program currently operating at the site, and rather than lose that resource, staff proposes bringing the facility under city control.” They say the motel would serve participants of the city’s program, “with the city (and not LA County) determining placements, services, security, and good neighbor policies.” There’s also an effort to preserve SaMoShel, too, and they are seeking help getting letters to the council by noon today. The Santa Monica City Council’s meeting starts at 5:30 p.m.

What just happened?

A tale of two governance reform efforts in LA county and city

Veteran political journalist Robert Greene has a CalMatters opinion piece comparing the messier but more sweeping LA County governance reform effort underway, and the overly careful one that just sputtered in the city of Los Angeles despite getting more press coverage. Greene would know about the press coverage because he’s basically the only reporter, and sometimes the only audience member, at county governance reform task force meetings.

And Greene echos one thing that some have been saying about LA city’s reforms having a role in the November elections. Even though there were no major reforms that came out of LA city’s charter reform efforts, the “relative puniness” of the reforms that will go before voters “may in fact exacerbate anger at City Hall’s perceived resistance to change and play a role in the run-off campaigns of Bass and challenger Nithya Raman.”

A few weeks ago, Council member Eunisses Hernandez had hinted at how her colleagues’ decision not to move forward on some major charter reform would backfire. Even though Raman is on the City Council, her entrance into the race earlier this year has been framed by some as a betrayal of her political loyalties to the mayor. Meanwhile, the president of the City Council is a close ally of Mayor Karen Bass, who meanwhile has not been a fan of the city’s charter reform process.

See how various communities stacked up in the latest homeless count, but take it with a grain of salt (i.e. don’t get politically bamboozled)

The results of the homeless count conducted back in January were released last Friday, and LAHSA officials are blaming the increase in homelessness to a pause on placements into a short-term housing program that uses so-called “time-limited” vouchers that last for one or two years. This program has faced some challenges because some people housed using these vouchers who aren’t able to afford rent after they run out, end up needing to figure out where to go after the year or two ends. There have also recently been some efforts to improve the outcomes of this program.

You can check out how different communities, cities, county supervisorial districts and LA council districts stacked up on this dashboard, although LAHSA officials warned that “the count is an estimate best interpreted as a snapshot of homelessness at the regional level. It is not as useful for measuring neighborhood-level homelessness.” The count results are primarily supposed to be used to determine how much homeless funding a geographic region gets. Yet there is an uncontainable urge for many to use it as a political yardstick, anyway, despite the relatively rudimentary level of data that’s gleaned from the volunteer count. Council member Nithya Raman, who chairs the council’s Housing and Homelessness Committee, was able to declare a steep drop in unsheltered homelessness in her own district, something that she can take along with her on the campaign trail as she challenges Mayor Karen Bass in the mayor’s race runoff in November.

Mural on the side of Pasadena temple defaced with swastikas

A mural put up in May on the side of a Jewish temple in Pasadena was recently defaced, with people discovering last Friday that someone had spray-painted swastikas and an anti-Zionist message, “Zionism is not welcome.” The incident drew condemnation from local elected officials, and it also got a reaction from the executive director of the LA chapter of CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Hussam Ayloush, who said that “blaming and harassing Jewish community members for the actions of the Israeli government is antisemitic, immoral, and ignorant.” The mural shows yellow poppy, butterfly and peacock painted in a stain-glass style, and it is dedicated to the community’s effort to rebuild in the wake of the Eaton Fire. The Pasadena Star News’s David Wilson and Anissa Rivera write that the artist has vowed to restore it. Julia Grinblat, a temple member, told the Star News that her 13-year-old daughter helped with painting the mural and she doesn’t know how to answer her daughter’s questions about “why these people hate us.”

Federal DOJ want to drop their case against union leader, a year after arresting him during the first day of protests against ICE raids in LA last summer

Federal prosecutors with the Department of Justice filed a motion on Monday, July 27, to dismiss their case against Service Employees International Union-United Service Workers West President David Huerta, ahead of a scheduled trial date next month in August. Huerta was arrested on June 6, last summer, during a protest following an ICE raid at Ambiance in downtown LA’s fashion district. That raid was the first day of the latest ramped-up campaign of federal immigration enforcement under Trump featuring aggressive masked agents driving around town in unmarked cars, grabbing people off of streets. Political leaders, activists, union members and others quickly rallied around Huerta, a well-respected union leader who led LA’s historic janitor strikes in the 1990s, demanding his release, with California senators Adam Schiff and Alex Padilla sending letters to DHS and DOJ demanding a review of the arrest. There have been numerous other arrests of protesters, and many of the cases have not stood up.

The initial felony count of conspiracy to impede an officer that federal prosecutors filed against Huerta was later lowered to a misdemeanor charge of obstruction, resistance or opposition of a federal officer. Laurie Levenson told Brittny Mejia of the LA Times, that it would have been difficult for prosecutors to convince a jury, due to the video footage that showed Huerta was “just protesting.”

The DOJ put out a statement saying that Huerta has “agreed to accept responsibility for his actions” and that he has been complying with his “pretrial release terms” and not engaging in the “same obstructive behavior” that their office had filed criminal charges on. Huerta’s attorneys meanwhile hit back saying that the case showed that federal prosecutors were willing to hold criminal charges over a labor leader and then walk away when the charge “couldn’t survive scrutiny.“

And a few more things…

LA on the Record, the LA Times local politics newsletter, has been tracking three different metrics to measure the effectiveness of LA City Council members, and shared their results in their Saturday newsletter. Those yardsticks were meeting, attendance, committee assignments, and number of legislation.

LA Material has a piece from Hayes Davenport on the notorious Ghost Town Security, a private security company that many on the westside use to keep unhoused people out of neighborhoods. According to a UCLA report on a survey of RV residents on the westside, “there are unofficial parking rules that vehicle residents abide by, such as staying off streets with single-family homes and away from businesses protected by security groups like Ghost Town Security that use illegal practices of intimidation. For example, one participant was harassed by a Ghost Town Security employee to move from in front of a business, despite being legally parked there.” Harassment from housed neighbors was the second most common answer to the westside-focused survey, just behind what RV residents cited as their top source of harassment — the police or sheriff.

And Suhauna Hussain of the LA Times has a piece on Culver City leaders pushing back against a proposed In-and-Out, mostly due to its car-based business model. Despite the iconic nature of drive-through restaurants in Southern California, there appears to be very little academic attention to them despite their obvious role in transportation policy. Hussain found a professor who studies transportation, who co-wrote a study of driver-throughs that’s now being peer-reviewed, and he says that they can take away from the important social aspects of dining in a restaurant. Another expert that studied COVID-19 drive-throughs, described the car queues as “pollution hot spots.”

Homeless count numbers are officially released today, after some had been wondering when it was coming out. It turns out homelessness saw an uptick this year, after the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority that does that count posted decreases in the last two years. Sources informed The LA Times prior to today’s release, and the news was framed by that publication as a political setback for Mayor Karen Bass.

The figures reported by the Times — 3.4% increase overall (which includes people living in shelters and outside), and 7.9% for people who are unsheltered — appears to exactly erase the wins Bass had touted the previous year. Last year the results happened to have shown a 3.4% drop in overall homelessness, with a 7.9% decrease of people who are unsheltered.

While the homeless count is done to help calculate how much federal funding is provided to a geographic area for homelessness services, it is also used as a measurement tool for how well local electeds are doing. And we often see the results released for LA County, which has 88 cities and unincorporated areas, and for the city of LA, which is the largest city in the county. Also, not all 88 cities in LA County are part of the same “continuum of care” agency — known as the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority — that applies for the federal HUD funding. Three cities — Pasadena, Long Beach and Glendale — each conduct their own count and apply for the funding separately. But the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority that we’re more used to hearing about reaches out to those cities to include their data into the overall countywide count results that they release.

These homeless count results are often released in June or July, and have also come out in late May. Last year, for some reason, some preliminary number for just the number of people estimated to be living outside — not including people in shelters — were released especially early, in the month of March. The figures of people who are in shelters but are still defined as being homeless, are usually not estimates, as LAHSA has the shelters report the actual number of people staying there.

What just happened?

LA County Board of Supervisors vote to put $28 million toward closing Men’s Central Jail

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors just approved a motion to put an additional $28 million into a five plan aimed at closing Men’s Central Jail this past Tuesday. There have long been well document issues of inhumane conditions at the jail that county officials acknowledge and readily cite. This was why the Board of Supervisors had actually indicated their support for closing the jail numerous years ago. It’s just that this latest investment appears to be the first time LA county leaders have put actual funding toward advancing this closure plan. The motion, authored by Supervisor Janice Hahn, calls for the County CEO to identify those funds and to include it in the supplemental budget proposal that’s due this fall.

But the county officials who head up the jail closure team also told the board on Tuesday that they don’t think the current actions that they’re taking will actually lead to the closure of the jail in the oft-referenced five year span — at least not without building another facility to take on some of the people that would otherwise go to Men’s Central Jail. They also stated this conclusion in their latest quarterly report, in which they wrote that the current steps the county has laid out won’t lead to jail closure “within five years without a replacement.”

“That does not diminish their importance,” the report read. “The county should still fund and implement these actions because they are foundational to justice system reform and to any viable pathway to closure.”

There are seven “required actions” that county officials have taken onto their plates to reduce the number of people being held each day at Men’s Central Jail. The county officials who make up the so-called Jail Closure Implementation Team do a bit of analysis and estimating to figure out how many people would get diverted from the jails, from taking those required actions, and that’s how they arrived at the conclusion that they wouldn’t be able to close the jail in five years. Advocates, however, question this pessimism, and say that county officials are limiting themselves and leaving many important community-focused measures, that have been studied and developed over the years, on the table, and not funding them adequately.

Just under 50% of people in jails on a given day typically haven’t been convicted or sentenced, but are awaiting decisions, and that where many feel there are ways to reduce the number of people in the jail and then close it. For example, many of the people are eligible for diversion programs, but there isn’t staffing at the courthouse their case is being taken up at. Some may also be in the midst of months long waits to get mental health assessments, which can then help judges, as well as public defenders and prosecutors, work out what other programs, aside from jail, might actually make more sense.

One of the seven “required actions” that the county just approved more funding for would place a “psychiatric social worker,” working for the Public Defenders’ Office, at court houses to interview and assess people. One psychiatric social worker was just hired this year to work out of the Clara Shortridge Foltz courthouse in downtown Los Angeles that has a high volume of cases. So far that worker has assessed 197 people since late January, when they first started, and at least 100 people have been released from custody as of late May. The time it took for people to get assessed, under this Public Defender HEAL (short for Holistic Early Assessment and Linkage) program, was cut from a 66-day average to 19 days. This program is listed as the second action in the April 17 and July 10 quarterly reports from the Jail Closure Implementation Team.

And it’s in such programs and others, not even included in the required actions now in the plan, that much progress can be made to close the jail, according to advocates. Janet Asante, campaign lead for the JusticeLA Coalition that pushed for the $28 million in funding, said that one of the most significant things left out of the jail closure teams’ plan is an “independent pretrial services agency” that’s handled by the county’s community-based, non-law enforcement led public safety programs, known as JCOD (short for Justice, Care and Opportunities Department).

During Tuesday’s discussion, Supervisor Janice Hahn asked county staffers about the progress of such an independent pretrial services agency, remarking that her district staffers seem to feel that this program isn’t as “robust” as it should be. She also described this program as a significant opportunity to reduce the number of people in jail and get the county closer to closing the jail.

County CEO Joe Nicchitta responded to Hahn saying that pretrial services are available at three courthouses — Lancaster, Airport and Compton — but added that the program has “been unable to expand beyond these sites due to the limitations of funding.”

Nicchitta said that one of the issues is that the county needs to transition from a “model” for pretrial services that’s led by the probation department, and go to one that’s led by JCOD, the agency that’s focused on removing law enforcement’s role. He told the board on Tuesday that his office is in discussions with the heads of the two agencies, to get “that model unstuck” and “there are some barriers there, but… I don’t see those as insurmountable.” FYI, JCOD happens to also be located within the County CEO’s Office that Nicchitta leads.

When Hahn asked if funding has moved from probation to JCOD, and after Nicchitta said that it hadn’t, Hahn responded, “That’s a problem.”

Nicchitta explained that when it comes to that funding, they are still working out what is “appropriate to move and what people are appropriate to move with the funding,” and he noted that “the different departments having different views on that.”

Hahn leaned on Nicchitta a bit in response, telling him she wanted him to “to see if you can figure out how to unstick this piece of it — ‘cause … a pretty big piece, in my opinion — of jail closure — is pretrial.”

If you wish to dig a little deeper, additional programs that county officials have spent time exploring are scattered across various reports, including a 2021 report from the County CEO’s Office on comprehensive studies of the jail system done by the JFA Institute and the 2021 “final report” by a Jail Closure Workgroup. The Care First Jails Last report and another report known as the Sequential Intercept Model are two others that county officials often reference. There’s also another study being done by New York University that the head of the jail closure implementation team, Wilford Pinkney, teased on Tuesday. Supervisors said they wanted to know a bit more about that study in the next update about the closure plan in a few months.

Have you been wondering about the elected mayoral figure to lead LA County government? The Measure G task force set to dive into that in August

A task force set up to implement the voter-approved Measure G, which made sweeping changes to LA County government, is wading into the thorny area of creating a centralized, elected leader of LA County government. That was among the numerous changes under the measure, which also expanded the Board of Supervisors from five to nine members, and set up an independent ethics commission.

The creation of the elected County Executive position under Measure G — in turn eliminating the appointed County CEO position — has been a politically touchy subject. It takes a behind-the-scenes job that many people don’t really know about, and potentially puts it out into the political arena, where it will have a higher profile role for voters to consider. This new, elected role was even cited by former County CEO Fesia Davenport as damaging to her reputation, resulting in a $2 million settlement payout last year to Davenport. She later resigned in March “to focus on my health and wellness.”

At Wednesday’s meeting of the Governance Reform Task Force, which is a team of appointed people who are overseeing Measure G implementation, one of its members, Derek Hsieh, called this new position “controversial,” and adding that he thought it was “expensive, and expansive.” Hsieh is also chair of the Coalition of County Unions, and he is also executive director of ALADS, which is the Association of Los Angeles Deputy Sheriffs. Not all members of the board are movers and shakers, necessarily in the political arena. There is one member, more steeped in the music and tech industries, who joked that the time she allots to attending these rather obscure civically-minded task force meetings, as “basically a weird hobby I have.”

The appointed County CEO looms large for many advocates familiar with LA County government, especially those who look closely at how the county spends taxpayer money, because this role plays a central role in working with departments to lead the development of budget proposals. And it employs 560 county workers, including several “strategic” ones that bring together important policies such as changing how people look at public safety. But it is also largely an obscure office.

One of the task force members even voiced surprise that the County CEO’s office leads a department that steers municipal services for unincorporated areas. Julia Mockeridge told the panel of County CEO officials who were presenting to them on Wednesday night that “as a member of unincorporated Los Angeles County, I’m actually very surprised to learn that the CEO has a team that deals with unincorporated areas. As a resident of unincorporated East LA, I would not have ever thought to go to the CEO’s office for help with my services.”

Jeramy Gray, from the County CEO’s Office, responded that their office serves more of a “strategic coordination” role on services for unincorporated areas, “so you wouldn’t necessarily see the CEO as the public facing, prevailing service provider of that service. But we are typically behind the scenes coordinating with various departments across multiple departments to ensure that services are, in fact, delivered.” Some of the county CEO officials acknowledged they don’t focus that much on branding their office in that public of a way.

During the meeting, there was much back and forth and worry expressed over whether there would be enough opportunity to discuss this touchy subject out in the open and to have enough engagement with stakeholders. But it turned out that Sara Sadhwani, another task force member who is on a committee that’s looking specifically at the elected county executive position, said their committee had already been cooking up plans to schedule a trio of eight-hour long cram sessions in August. Those meetings would take place ahead their task force making some final decisions on the role on Aug. 26, and at another meeting in early September. The first of that deep dive meeting should be on Aug. 7, followed by two more on the 17th and the 21st, according to Sadhwani.

At least 199 people have applied to be on the county’s new Ethics Commission

The county’s Governance Reform Task Force has also been getting the word out about the county’s deadline for this Sunday, July 26, for people to apply to be on the county’s new Ethics Commission, which was also included in Measure G. And during Wednesday’s meeting, the task force got an update that 199 people had applied to be on the commission. There is expected to be a measure on November’s ballot to change the county charter to allow for the commission to function in a more independent capacity.

A few more things …

Residents around the Lineage warehouse that caught fire last month are dealing with not only odors and the usual pests, but the arrival of an unusual bright green colored species of flies.

Mayor Karen Bass, as chair of the Metro Board, delivered a “state of the agency” from the regional transit agency on Tuesday. Some key milestones for Metro has been the opening of the A Line extension to Pomona, and of course the three new stops on the D Line that extends from mid-city to Beverly Hills. Later in the week, the Metro board advanced some proposals to include seats on the board that would represent Metro riders, including someone who is themself a rider or is at least an advocate, according to Kavish Harjai of LAist.

It turns out that the lawsuit filed last week by the City Attorney’s Office was the first ever filed using the Tenant Anti-Harassment Ordinance, ever since the law was first created back in 2021, and then strengthened in late 2024. The lawsuit, filed against a landlord that the City Attorney’s Office is accusing of trying to evict people at a Historic South-Central apartment because their rent was too low. Council member Nithya Raman, who chairs the city’s Housing and Homelessness Committee, spoke at the celebration of this milestone. Raman is also running for mayor.

The First Amendment Coalition and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression just told the LA City Council that they will sue if they continue to ban people’s use of the words and variations of the words “cunt” and the N word. The press release quotes none other than Stacey Segarra-Bohlinger, known for singing her public comment at City Council meetings to the tunes of popular songs, and who was dinged for using the word “cunt” in a comment criticizing the ban. “We can’t let the city council set such a dark precedent,” Segarra-Bohlinger said. “While I don’t condone the use of slurs or epithets to insult or dehumanize others, I strongly oppose any infringement on the right of the public to speak freely, and that includes using strong language when it feels necessary.”

There was supposed to be Los Angeles Board of Police Commission meeting on Tuesday, but it got canceled after board officials said their mics didn’t work. A prior meeting had been delayed to 11 a.m., due to technical issues, but this time around, they didn’t stick around as long to get the issue fixed. Photojournalist Martin Romero was in the room to capture the board’s executive director, Django Sibley, saying that the mics weren’t working and that meant they couldn’t hold the meeting.

LA Material’s Julia Wick, who recently broke the news that longtime City Hall comms veteran Yusef Robb was volunteering for Mayor Karen Bass while working for Lineage during the fire at the company’s Boyle Heights warehouse, was back this week reporting that Robb was also in an internal WhatsApp chat at that time. And on Friday, the LA Times’s Noah Goldberg reports that this chat is set to auto-delete messages after 24 hours.

A Step to Freedom, a nonprofit that grew quickly and receives public funding, has spent $1.7 million on contracts with companies by its CEO, Kenya Croom, according to an investigation by the LA Times’s Andrew Khouri and Alene Tchekmedyian.

Council member Nithya Raman who is running for mayor, just got another $136,633 in matching funds, which candidates can qualify for by receiving small dollar donations. That brings Raman’s matching funds total in the runoff with Mayor Karen Bass to $511,707.56 (This was tracked by Unrig LA) In the 9th District race, where there is a runoff between Estuardo Mazariegos and Jose Ugarte, Mazariegos has received $47,200, and in the City Attorney’s race runoff between John McKinney and Marissa Roy, Roy has received $131,800.00. These can all be tracked on LA city’s Ethics Commission’s election totals website here.

And finally, Mayor Karen Bass just shared that she got an endorsement City Council member Katy Yaroslavsky, who represents the 5th Districts, which includes westside communities. This represents a continued edge Bass has over her opponent, Raman, who is a member of the City Council but has not gotten any endorsements from her colleagues, and it makes not a lot of waves in terms of a council member stepping out to join Raman in potentially challenging the status quo. Raman though recently scored the endorsement of City Controller Kenneth Mejia, who just won a second term in a landslide during the primary, despite having an opponent backed by the LA County Democratic Party.

Another heat warning this week — plus fire danger and dangerous surfs at the beach

Temperatures are supposed to reach 100 degrees Fahrenheit above during yet another heat wave starting today, with the extreme heat warning expected to last until next Monday. Those hoping to escape the heat at the beach, though, will need to be on alert for the dangerous surf that the waning tropical storm, Elida, is expected to bring to our beaches. The LA Times takes some time to trace the contours of this heat wave, reporting that we should expect the heat to persist into the night. The heat wave is thought to be influenced by an ongoing marine heat wave, which actually isn’t related to the anticipated El Niño season, something that isn’t expected to start until the fall. The LA Times, citing the National Centers for Environmental Information, reports that the first half of the years was the hottest since 1895, for California. That’s been the case for other states as well, according to Zachary Labe, a scientist with the Climate Central, who points to human-caused climate change as what’s driving this continual hot weather.

Cannabis shop enforcement, women in the LAPD, and police response to federal immigration enforcement… are all on the Board of Police Commissioners’ agenda

The LA city police commission is meeting today, and should be hearing reports on any federal immigration enforcement actions. They’re also taking up some revisions to how LAPD responds to such incidences, including one that would clarify that police officers need to turn on their body cameras when responding to a potential immigration enforcement action, not just when there is a radio call, and try to get the supervising federal immigration official to identify themselves. An inspector general report that the police commission is taking up today also includes the results of a survey results that showed women, much more so than their male colleagues, felt like there was sexual harassment and gender discrimination happening in their workplace. The gap was pretty wide. They also disagreed significantly around how confident they were that that reports of sexual harassment are taken seriously. And the department points to scarce funding as a reason it’s been difficult to staff an enforcement unit that goes after “illegal” cannabis businesses, which is something that LA leaders have been asking about because they’re concerned that such unlicensed operations are hurting efforts to keep legal cannabis shops — a source of tax revenue — in business.

What just happened?

Lineage told not to stink up the place while removing the rotting food from their warehouse

The post-Lineage fire, fridge clean-out has been quite the headache for the neighborhood. As trucks filled with decomposing food rumble through Boyle Heights and unincorporated East Los Angeles streets, air quality regulators are demanding that the company makes sure that the unrefrigerated meat and seafood that have been rotting at the warehouse are loaded more gently into trucks, to avoid them crashing down and spraying the stink all over. They’re also calling for the decomposing food waste to be loaded closer to the building, and the company to be more mindful of the wind so as to cut the odor off from being carried by any wind tunnels, particularly down Indiana Street.

And of course, there are concerns about the pests that are being attracted to the rotting food, including rats and flies. There was an estimated 85 million pounds being stored at the warehouse when it caught fire June 17. So far the company has reported removing at least 1,500 tons of waste, most of rotting food. That translates to just under 3 million pounds of rotting food removed thus far, leaving behind still a huge mound of it.

The odor citations were issued by South Coast Air Quality Management District, and were from July 12 until July 18, for strong odors. They cite SQAQMD’s 402 rule, and the state’s health code, 41700, and each of the notices say its “for discharging such quantities of air contaminants to cause injury, detriment, nuisance or annoyance to a considerable number of persons.” The recommendations that SCAQMD made can be found in the last few pages of their July 17 letter, and includes a recommendation that the company makes sure to reduce the “drop height” between the loader bucket and the truck.

Meanwhile, LA City Council member Ysabel Jurado had set a deadline for Lineage executives to provide a corrective action report on the odors by Monday. While Jurado’s office says they got some updates, the response was incomplete. Lineage has basically asked for an extension to respond more fully by next week. She says residents deserve to know if the measures the company has been taking is doing any good.

According to Jurado’s office, the company shared at a community meeting on Monday that 1,630 tons of waste have been removed, 1,329 of it food wastes. That’s nearly 600 truckloads, they said. The company also said they were using physical barriers, disinfectants, deodorizers and air scrubbers. The company is also setting up bait traps for pests, but the contractor they brought in told them that’s ultimately not going to do much as long as the waste remains.

Also, Boyle Heights Beat’s Isaac Vargas dug into Chill Build’s role in the aftermath of the Lineage fire. Chill Build is the company that actually owns the warehouse that Lineage operates out of, and in their first statement issued since the fire, they pointed to Lineage as being “responsible for all aspects of maintaining and repairing the facility” and for “the recovery efforts, communicating with residents, and reporting progress directly to city and county regulators.” Vargas also reports that Chill Build was meeting with Building and Safety officials early on. Apparently though, they haven’t been communicating as much with the area’s City Council representative, Ysabel Jurado, who called on the company to be at the table as well. And Vargas talks to experts who say that the “tangle” of involved parties is typical of warehouse fires, making efforts to hold parties accountable a complicated matter.

A few more things…

After the big water main in West Hollywood broke — sending out what amounted to 17 million gallons of water — more water pipes burst last week in Venice. Meanwhile, work continues on fixing the West Hollywood trunk.

Renters whose utility bills are calculated using a formula, rather than on individual usage, say their bills are getting out of control. LA city’s housing Department last December recommended outlawing the practice by landlords, known as Ratio Utility Billing or RUBS for short, just for rent-controlled buildings, but tenants hit with such bills have been organizing around this say this ban needs to apply to buildings. Phoenix Tso just wrote about this at LA Public Press.

These days, the refrain that LA is broken is repeated often, and it refers to the poor condition of our streets and public areas. But Angelenos, including public officials, do care deeply about our public infrastructure — we’re just not getting much opportunity to take stock and look at the big picture, according to Jessica Meaney, executive director of Investing in Place, who writes in a new piece that the latest charter reform ballot measure in November to deal with how LA handles our public infrastructure project is part of a long history of public officials pointing out how LA’s fragmented way of doing our public infrastructure projects leads to us reacting to short-term emergencies. To avoid that constant cycle of playing catch-up, she writes, the city should be stepping back to see what needs to be done and carrying out a thought-through, prioritized plan: “It meant understanding what the city owned, assessing its condition, weighing competing priorities across departments and council districts, and connecting those decisions to long-term budgets and operations. Setting that direction ultimately belongs to the Mayor, but no Mayor can do it alone. It requires the operational capacity to make and carry out those decisions over time. For decades, Los Angeles had not built that citywide capacity.” Meaney also voices an unexpected benefit of having a well-cared-for public space, and it’s that it offers a feeling of freedom. “I’ve always loved the everyday public realm: Sidewalks, parks, libraries, bus stops, street trees, and neighborhood streets are where life happens,” Meaney writes. “Long before I knew anything about Capital Infrastructure Programs or city budgets, I loved the feeling of moving through a city and the freedom that came with it. Over time, I came to understand that freedom isn’t accidental. It depends on thousands of decisions about how we design, build, fund, and care for the places we share.”

There is a quick meeting of the Measure G task force, to look at the ballot language of a measure to create an independent Ethics Commission, which was included as a requirement under Measure G. The meeting is at 12 p.m., and it’s both in-person and online.

What just happened?

Summer doldrums are setting in, with LA city leaders on recess this month. But wait, check this action out!

The personal account for Council member Monica Rodriguez really got into it with commenters under an Instagram social media post announcing City Controller Kenneth Mejia’s endorsement of Council member Nithya Raman for mayor. The operator of the account, which referred to Council member Monica Rodriguez in the third person, posted multiple times in a back and forth with other commenters, after seeking to poke holes in Raman’s voting record. It eventually devolved into people looking up Rodriguez’s own voting record and finding instances when Rodriguez flip-flopped or sat out on votes. A few of the comments in response to Rodriguez’s comments highlighted that council members have been on a recess, with one person writing, “it’s nice to see you using your council recess productively to……argue with LA voters on your future mayoral campaign account?”

An LA DWP water main in West Hollywood burst

The pipe burst at around 4 a.m., creating a sinkhole that sent water gushing through the streets in West Hollywood. The water was not turned off until several hours later. The water pipe belongs to the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, which provides water primarily to the city of Los Angeles, but also to other communities like West Hollywood, a city that’s separate from the city of Los Angeles. The latest update from the LADWP can be found here, while yesterday’s is here. Mayor Karen Bass’s office also sent out something about the water pipe bursting.

The pipe in question is more than a 100 years old, originally installed in 1916. It is set to be replaced in 2031, although a report from 2019 by the Office of Public Accountability said that contracting delays have gotten in the way of replacing pipes, according to the LA Times. A 2014 analysis by the LA Times found that officials had given a “C” grade to almost half of the trunk lines, and highlighted those in the Hollywood Hills as particularly concerning because they were older and under more pressure since they operate at higher pressure and is therefore more prone to leaks. The LA Times database can be found here.

City Controller Kenneth Mejia put up a PSA post about how people can file claiims, as well as some relevant data and history about LADWP trunk replacement. County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath also shared information about how people can file claims.

Also, the San Andreas Fault has been scarily quiet. Experts say this means it could be ready to blow. The LA Times’s Rong-Gong Lin, who has been on the earthquake beat for years, gives an update about how seismologists are looking at this possible precursor to the Big One.

Popular LA Controller Kenneth Mejia endorses City Council member Nithya Raman

LA City Controller Kenneth Mejia, who just scored a decisive win in the primary against a challenger backed by the LA Democratic Party, is lending his political heft to Council member Nithya Raman, as she tries to deny Mayor Karen Bass a second term.

Raman announced the endorsement from Mejia Thursday morning, after teasing it the day before as “significant.” Indeed, traditional wisdom makes the endorsement a bit unusual. Even colleagues on the City Council who typically align with Raman’s politics and who are considered Democratic Socialists, have lined up behind the current mayor, Karen Bass. So Mejia’s support of one City Hall colleague over the most powerful official at City Hall sticks out.

And to get this bit out of the way, while Mejia is mistaken often for being a Democratic Socialist, he isn’t actually a member of that group, although he is friendly with many of them and has leant them his support on many occasions.

In his endorsement video, Mejia highlighted his early and often criticism of a labor contract that gave LAPD raises that the city ended up struggling to afford, saying that the reaction from others at City Hall when he did that, including a spokesperson for Mayor Bass, was to mock him for doing that. Raman, sliding up next to him, states in the video that she voted against the police officers’ contract.

Meanwhile, Mejia may see an ally in Raman if she does win in November. Even though Mejia has impressive returns at the election polls, he has also had a tough time of it within City Hall, where he has seen his office’s budget get cut down into the marrow and their ability to audit the performance of city services reduced. Raman says in the video that if she is elected mayor, she would support the controller’s office by fully funding it.

LA Materials’ Matt Hamilton and ABC7’s Josh Haskell were at today’s news conference to announce the endorsement.

What just happened?

Voters will go to the polls to elect a County CEO and four more board supes in a few years, thanks to Measure G. But how do they hold those officials accountable?

When voters passed Measure G in 2024 as a way to make LA County government more accountable, they brought about sweeping changes, such as expanding the Board of Supervisors from five to nine members, and setting up a central elected representative, similar to a mayor, called the County CEO.

But how do we measure whether these powerful elected officials, and other county officials, are even doing a good job of delivering services?

According to Raphe Sonenshein, executive director of the Haynes Foundation, LA county constituents might find useful a performance metric tool to measure outcomes. This is why the foundation announced they’re putting in a big sum, $1.5 million, to fund a USC research team that will go out to consult people in the community to get their thoughts on what it means for county government to be serving them well. They’ll also talk to county officials about that. The researchers are then supposed to incorporate the feedback into the performance measuring tools they create using the grant. Those tools would add to the performance metric system the county government is currently already developing.

The changes from Measure G will likely make LA County government more prominent on the minds of Angelenos, and because of this, Sonenshein said, “people are going to be asking more about outcomes.” The researchers’ work is expected to take 18 months, and ideally will be completed in time before we get an elected CEO in 2028, and the four additional members on the Board of Supervisors in 2032, he said.

The funds are coming out of a pot of funds called The Haynes Foundation Fund for Los Angeles Public Policy Research, which the Haynes Foundation set up at California Community Foundation. And the grant is going to a research team led by two professors, David Brady and Jared Nathan Schachner, who teach out the university’s Department of Real Estate Development. Brady spends much of his time looking into questions around poverty, racial inequality, social policy, health, and immigration. Schachner is a sociologist who studies how urban social infrastructures determines inequality. They’ll be working with the teams at LABarometer, which is part of the Center for Economic and Social Research, and the Neighborhood Data for Social Change at USC Lusk Center.

While the changes from Measure G might seem like new ideas, many were actually part of a report written 50 years ago by a citizen commission that had also been supported by the Haynes Foundation, and this latest involvement is actually part of a much longer history of shaping LA’s governance and civics institutions. The philanthropic foundation was set up by and named after what Sonenshein described as “LA’s first civic power couple.” John Randolph Haynes was a medical doctor who helped write an earlier version of the LA city charter, and Dora Haynes was a feminist and suffragist who helped found local chapters of the League of Women Voters.

A few more things…

Sammy Roth of Climate Colored Glasses shares the under-the-radar news that Mayor Karen Bass has already named a new “chief heat officer.” The role of this official is something that those who are focused on the climate change crisis are keyed in on, but it was not something that the mayor’s office advertised, even though it is big enough news to be shouted out on at least a medium-heighted rooftop. Roth, after hearing word about it, had to reach out to Bass’s office to confirm that indeed they’d named Daniela Simunovic, who was previously working at the state air quality regulatory agency, the California Air Resources Board, to replace the previous chief heat officer, Marta Seguar.

Supervisor Janice Hahn says she’s planning to introduce a motion next week to create a “metro rider” seat on the Metro board. The motion would call for working with a community advisory council, community organizations and others to create a process for selecting a rider representative, and to layout the staffing and resources that would be needed so that the board member can fully participate on the Metro board. Hahn says the motion is set to be introduced at the July 23 Metro board meeting.

The Department of Cultural Affairs is getting $10.1 million from the Bezos Earth Fund to update the Watts Tower Arts Center Campus, according to an announcement sent out by Mayor Bass. It’s supposed to add 30,000 square feet of park space to the campus. The campus was closed in June and reopened this month, with renovation ongoing. Here are some renderings of the planned work, will include more shade, landscaping, walking paths, seating areas and interactive art. There are also spaces for programming and performances as well as gatherings. There will also be LED lighting, drinking fountains and bike racks. Here is the website for the Watts Tower Art Center Campus that lists out a timeline for the renovations, which they say will take until 2028 to complete.

The LA City Attorney’s Office just filed a lawsuit against a landlord of an eight-unit apartment complex in Historic South-Central, alleging that they harassed their tenants. The complaint filed against the landlord states that “On October 29, 2025 — a mere five days after purchasing the Property — defendant demanded that all tenants at the [roperty surrender their units no later than March 2026, and served at least five rental units with written eviction notices. Defendant admitted to the tenants and the Los Angeles Housing Department (“LAHD”) that he made this demand and served these eviction notices because, in defendant’s view, current rents are too low.”