LA Squawk Box for Thursday, May 21, 2026
Mayor Karen Bass says she's got more work to do firing department officials, Nithya Raman releases fire recovery plan, plan to switch LA's election to ranked choice heads to Rules today, and more.
What’s happening today?
The City Council’s Rules committee will be discussing charter reform related to ethics and elections. One recommendation calls for switching LA’s voting process to ranked-choice voting. Another would allow the Ethics Commission to directly place ethics-related measures onto the ballot, which is something that San Francisco’s ethics commission can do. This last recommendation comes after ethics and lobbying reform packages have died on the vine after they were submitted to the City Council. Other recommendations include giving city officials the option to lower the voting age to 16 or expand voting to noncitizens, for school board and city elections (meeting stream, agenda).
Today is the deadline for LA city and school board election candidates to report fundraising and spending reports, which shows donors that have given to campaigns over the last month, and how those campaigns have been spending their money. The reports are expected to trickle onto the LA city ethics website over the course of the day.
What just happened?
Mayor Karen Bass, pointing blame at former Fire Chief Crowley, hints at further leadership shakeups at City Hall if she is re-elected
“I’m the mayor, the buck stops with me,” Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass told the audience at a San Fernando Valley candidate forum Thursday, just before saying she fired then-L.A. Fire Department Chief Kristin Crowley, in the wake of the January 2025 wildfires, to address deficiences in how the city responded to the disaster.
“At the end of the day, I’m the one that’s responsible,” Bass told Spectrum News anchor Alex Cohen, who was conducting interviews at the San Fernando Valley Chamber’s candidate forum. Cohen interviewed four mayoral candidates separately, each for 20 minutes.
Bass then said that the way she handled the moment was by swapping out fire department leadership. “What I did immediately, though, is change the leadership in the fire department, and not just the chief, but also many other members of leadership, and how we are approaching the rebuilding,” Bass said. Bass was responding to a question from Cohen about what steps have been taken “to make sure that at any moment, no matter what the issue is, you have all the accurate information that you need” and “what percentage, if any, of the blame do you feel for not being here in that moment?”
The subject touches a particularly vulnerable spot for Bass, one that is putting her ability to be re-elected into question. The now-former fire chief, Crowley, has alleged that her dismissal was retaliation from a mayor who’s aim was to shift blame.
At around this point of Bass’s candidate interview, someone from the audience got up and shouted, “You altered the after-action report,” before walking out of the gathering hall at Los Angeles Valley College, where the forum was taking place.
That person appeared to be referencing an LA Times story from February in which sources who were confidants of the mayor told reporters that Bass had directed changes to soften the findings of a report examining the city’s response to the wildfires.
Bass was out of town when the the wildfires broke out on Jan. 7, 2025, and she was gone for many days afterward, as the flames consumed entire communities, including the Pacific Palisades, a neighborhood within the borders of the city of Los Angeles, and AltaDena in unincorporated Los Angeles County, which is overseen by a five-person Board of Supervisors.
Bass explained that she was out of town as the result of a “widely covered” invitation by President Joe Biden to her to go to Ghana. “It was absolutely horrific to be away when my city needed me,” she said.
In February, Crowley filed a lawsuit accusing Bass of “falsely claiming” that she wasn’t aware of the high winds that were “nationally anticipated” before she left town, and that she didn’t know about the fire department budget cuts that fire officials had warned in the weeks and months before would restrict their ability to tackle fires.
“These false statements were not mistakes but part of a deliberate strategy to divert scrutiny from Bass’ decisions and to avoid accountability,” the lawsuit alleged. Both confidants told the Times that they were prepared to testify under oath if the matter were to be taken up in a legal proceeding.
When the questions moved on to what Bass would do to improve the pace of housing getting permitted and built, the mayor also said she would clean house in department leadership, framing it as the “change” she would bring about at City Hall if re-elected.
“I am in charge of all of the city departments, and we have needed to change a number of the leaders, and I have done that,” Bass said. “Now, I haven’t done it necessarily in a public way. I don’t see why I would destroy somebody’s lifelong reputation, but we have made many leadership changes within City Hall, and I will continue to do that.”
Bass told Cohen there is “much more to do,” and that there will be “additional leadership changes.”
Wednesday’s candidate forum conversation, in addition to touching a political vulnerability of the mayor’s, also highlights one of the significant powers the mayor wields at LA City Hall. While the LA mayor is generally perceived as being “weak” in comparison the City Council, the LA mayor has authority over the hiring and firing of general managers at city departments.
And in recent weeks, the mayor’s power, and the council’s weaknesses around what goes on at city departments was highlighted in a couple of motions by City Council members. Council member Ysabel Jurado, for example, pointed to the fact that unlike the mayor, the City Council cannot dismiss general managers. Jurado’s motion proposes giving the council the ability to do that if its members can gather up 2/3rds of their colleagues to fire department heads.
Another motion, authored by Monica Rodriguez, points to the LA mayor’s ability to unilaterally issue executive orders that can often refocus departmental officials priorities, resulting in “mixed messages that confuse City department heads and Angelenos.” Rodriguez proposes that the council be able to veto such directives, also through a process of gathering votes of at least 2/3rds of the council.
As a final note, according to this interview with Raphe Sonenshein (who helped develop the current city charter and wrote a guide for the League of Women Voters of Greater Los Angeles on the structure of LA city government), the description of the LA mayor as weak is an exaggeration. The perception that the LA mayor is weak stems more from the fact that unlike with the New York mayor, the LA mayor isn’t also in charge of the school district and she doesn’t control what goes on in Los Angeles County government. Additionally, the LA mayor is stronger than in governments where mayors are actually weak, because they are a member of the City Council, filling a position that gets rotated periodically, and often functioning more as a meeting facilitator.
Nithya Raman releases a Palisades fire recovery plan, that includes pointed criticisms of current mayor
Meanwhile, Bass’s challenger, Nithya Raman, took the opportunity earlier Wednesday to roll out her plan for Palisades fire recovery, that hurls some strong criticisms at the current mayor, stating that “the immediate aftermath was dysfunctional, and the rebuilding effort has been indefensibly slow.”
“It has been nearly 17 months since the fires, and there is still no plan for rebuilding and no one in charge,” the preamble to Raman’s plan says. Under the plan that Raman puts forth, there would be a “recovery district” that is tied to funding generated from property taxes assessed as properties are built, and that won’t take money away from other city needs.
The mayor’s office should be strongly backing but this, but isn’t, Raman’s plan says. There also hasn’t been a anyone in charge of fire recovery efforts. The plan also highlighted a need to restore the economically diverse community of people who lived in the Pacific Palisades before the fire, and also to bring back small businesses and “ensure they are not replaced by generic corporate brands that change the character of this community.” She also points to a need for fire response that isn’t just focused on the fire department but also on other departments like public works, transportation, city planning, emergency management and the city’s water an power utility department.
Bass swings at opponent, Raman during Politico summit interview
Mayor Karen Bass came prepared with a sharpened arsenal of criticisms for Raman during Politico’s The California Agenda summit, where she was interviewed by politics reporter Melanie Mason. Politico has a summary of that portion of the interview here.
Bass was asked about what Mason called a “fascinating” debate put on by the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Association, in which the mayor took verbal swings throughout at Raman, a City Council person and former ally who had once endorsed her. By way of an explanation for that lively debate, Bass repeated to Mason on Wednesday that she expects more out of Raman who has been at City Hall “twice as long as I have.” She added in her response Wednesday that she thinks Raman has “struggled because she doesn’t know how to build relationships with her colleagues on council.” This comes after Bass announced endorsements by Raman’s fellow colleagues in the City Council’s progressive bloc.
Bass also took credit for the reduction in homelessness that Raman has touted in her district saying, “a significant percentage of that is my work that was Inside Safe,” a signature encampment clearing initiative Bass launched at the start of her time as mayor.
And Bass spoke on charter reform, saying she’s “not really happy” with it. Raman incidentally is one of the major champions of the current charter reform process.
Bass also touted her deal-making abilities, saying she was not only called in to avert a strike by LAUSD workers several weeks ago, but also brought in during the last few days amid a battle between labor and business groups over a $30 tourism wage that LA city had adopted last year.
At the San Fernando Valley candidate forum later that afternoon, Raman, asked about her progressive colleagues siding with her opponent, pointed to the fact that while she didn’t get endorsed by members of the council when she was first elected, she was still able to build good relationships with them.
A few more things to read …
While mayoral candidates participated in a San Fernando Valley candidate forum on Wednesday, mayoral candidate and former The Hills cast-member Spencer Pratt held a block party in Karen Bass’s former stomping grounds in South LA, in an area that was in the Congressional district she represented. The LA Times’ Sandra McDonald reports that Pratt declined interviews with news media, just as he did at another event in Sherman Oaks the day before. The LA Times has a profile of Pratt’s candidacy out today.
Reporter Taylor Lorenz provides a fascinating look at the role of influencers in the LA mayoral elections, in her publication User Mag, where she writes that influencers are benefiting and profiting off of the engagement and exposure that comes with covering a high-profile candidate.
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