LA Squawk Box for Friday, June 5, 2026

City Attorney irritates with $4.5M request to cover 'in-the-red' outside counsel costs, Trump fans LA election fraud theories, and Streetsblog LA editor says the city is avoiding ADA requirements.

What’s happening today?

Just another Friday at LA City Hall? The LA City Council is meeting at 10 a.m., taking up a short agenda that includes setting the salary for the new Animal Services general manager. Before that the Rules committee met at 9 a.m., but it was on issues other than charter reform, including city stances on a variety of legislation in other jurisdictions. And at 2 p.m., the Civil Rights committee is taking up some appointments to commissions, as well as the appointment of Abigail Marquez as the permanent general manager of the Community Investment Department.

The slow trickle election results continues: The LA County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk is going through outstanding ballots and posting up another update on the election results between 4 p.m. and 5 p.m. today.

What just happened?

‘In-the-red” outside counsel costs irritate LA city leaders on the budget committee: The City Attorney’s Office is “in the red” by at least $4.5 million due to cases being handled by “outside counsel.” On Thursday, the Budget and Finance Committee recommended that part of those costs be covered using $950,000 in surplus dollars from in-house city attorneys retiring. This direction was made in response to a funding request from the City Attorney’s Office for much more than that. At Thursday’s meeting, the budget chair, Katy Yaroslavsky, expressed concern that they seemed to be continually caught off-guard by such outside counsel spending, saying it has felt as though the City Attorney’s Office had gone beyond what was budgeted, and now they’ve come back asking for forgiveness and requesting more funds.

Meanwhile, City Council member Eunisses Hernandez pressed City Attorney staff about what they were doing to hire in-house attorneys to bring down the cost of retaining outside counsel. Barak Vaughn, with the City Attorney’s Office, told Hernandez that they were in the middle of preparing a report on how they were going to hire lawyers in order to “greatly reduce both outside counsel and… the 90 plus cases that all of our litigators are carrying.”

The fate of the mayor’s race still unclear as Thursday’s ballot count update cuts Raman’s distance from second place down to 6%: It is still unclear who will face off against Mayor Karen Bass in a runoff for the mayor’s seat in November’s general election. Council member Nithya Raman is very slowly shaving away the distance between her and Spencer Pratt, who now sits at 2nd place, in the mayor’s race. Raman would be out of the running for mayor if she doesn’t get into second spot, ahead of Pratt, at the end of the days long tallying of remaining ballots cast in the city of Los Angeles. Some are anticipating that this switch in standings is still possible, based on the assumption that later ballots tend to be from voters who favor progressive or Democratic candidates over Republican or conservative candidates. That assumption seemed to be holding, as Raman’s share of the votes in the added ballots has increased over the last few results updates, while Pratt’s share has plummetted. And the turnout is anticipated to be higher than in the last election where the mayor’s seat was on the ballot, but it’s not totally clear how many ballots is actually left to count and if the remaining pool of uncounted ballots leaves enough room for a switch-up to occur. Since the process of counting numerous ballots can take some time, some have filling up their time getting busy in the spreadsheets, to project out the various scenarios around Raman overtaking Pratt — even though in reality none of this changes whatever was already decided when polls closed at 8 p.m. on Tuesday.

President Donald Trump fans flames of election fraud theories around LA election: After every election in Los Angeles, there is a bunch of griping over the slowness of the election results counting process. But this year, the conversation around this got politically heightened, as those pulling for Pratt to be mayor alleged this slow process was a vehicle for election rigging. These theories got fanned by President Donald Trump, who in an unsubstantiated post on Truth Social, claimed that there was “big cheating” going on in the LA mayor’s and California governor’s race. The long wait is actually built into the process, and is a way to make voting accessible to more voters. The Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk waits seven days for mail-in ballots, postmarked by election day, to arrive. There was some discussions about cutting down the time for the counting process by removing this seven-day wait, but many defended this by saying that this wait is worth the increase to voter participation.

Streetsblog LA editor writes that city’s street repaving avoids streets with sidewalks, which also allows for skirting accessibility requirements: It appears that the city has switched to mostly repaving streets without sidewalks, which also happens to be mostly in the city’s wealthier neighborhoods. In a piece reprinted in Mar Vista Voice, Joe Linton, editor of Streetsblog LA, writes that he was able to determine that this shift has happened, and he points to how this would allow the city to avoid needing to do the sidewalk curb ramps that are required under accessibility laws and Measure HLA, which requires the city to follow its Mobility Plan adopted in 2015. Linton, FYI, is a litigant against the city, as allowed for under that measure.