LA Squawk Box for Friday, May 22, 2026

LA leaders ready for fight over the Board of Public Works, LA city candidates weigh in on charter reform, Traci Park says no to budget citing cuts for encampment sweeps, and more.

What’s happening today?

There’s a short agenda for the LA City Council that includes another vote on the budget revisions approved Thursday.

What just happened?

LA leaders looking to improve city service delivery ready for political fight over the public works department

LA City Council’s Rules committee on Thursday took up the politically thorny topic of taking away the powers of the Board of Public Works, and handing it to a director of public works instead.

While almost every other city department — with the most prominent exception being the police department — is led by a general manager, the city’s public works duties are supervised by a Board of Public Works, an appointed city commission made up of five members each serving full-time and paid a six-figure salary of between $143K and $215K, based on the latest budget numbers.

The board leads some of the city’s most important departments handling LA’s basic services, including trash pick-up, tree-trimming, street improvement projects, bus shelters, the construction of public infrastructure and street lights.

But the last time someone picked a fight with the Board of Public Works’ authority, it did not go well. There actually is already supposed to be a director of public works in the charter. But after that director butt heads with the board many years ago, city leaders got rid of and disempowered the position, through an option available in the charter allowing them to do this by ordinance, which means they didn’t have to go to the voters to make that change.

Challenges to the Board of Public Works has faced strong resistence as recently as last year when a proposal to eliminate this board had been entertained by the Charter Reform Commission. Labor groups and those supporting labor showed up in droves to a commission meeting to oppose the idea, which the panel then quickly dropped. The commission ultimately presented a “compromise” idea that proposed having a director, while also keeping the board in place. The commission’s chair, Raymond Meza, said the topic was a “contentious subject.” (The preservation of the board might have some allies on the City Council, like Monica Rodriguez, who is a former member of the board).

Now though, as LA leaders face mounting dissatisfaction from constituents over how basic city services are delivered — including complaints that street lights are frequently broken and take too long to get fixed, and that streets are in poor condition — they are looking to make changes on how management of these duties are structured, pointing the blame at there being too many cooks in the kitchen. The management of such basic city services is gummed up, some say, because it is scattered across different departments, each working under different goals and instructions. And LA city leaders trying to respond to constituent needs say that figuring out how to get services delivered often turns into a big research project.

And last week, some Council members appeared to be getting into fighting stance. They expressed concerns that it would make no sense to ask voters to decide on what is essentially a half-step proposal like the one that the Charter Reform Commission handed them that would land the city back into its current quandary. The compromise essentially calls for setting up a situation of having both a director and a board, essentially two bosses at once, be in charge of basic city services and public infrastructure maintenance.

“We are here to solve a problem, not to compromise,” Raman said in response to Meza during the earlier meeting.

One way city leaders have proposed to fix things is to centralize how things are coordinated by assigning a “director of public works” to replace the Board of Public Workers. One member of the Rules committee, City Council member Katy Yaroslavsky, who used to work as an LA county staffer, recently pointed to how the county’s department is led by a director, which has worked well for them.

That discussion was continued to Thursday’s Rules committee meeting. And reflecting the politically sensitive nature of the discussion, Yaroslavsky seemed tentative about raising the topic — noting as they were about to give instructions on Thursday to the Chief Legislative Analyst to research and report back to them on the topic, that “I didn’t want to wade into that right now.”

But Raman, who had previously balked at sending a compromise ballot measure to voters, requested that legislative staff report back on removing language in the charter that enshrines the Board of Public Works’s current duties and responsibilities.

She said that keeping both the director and the board will continue to create conflict, and asked the staffers report back on “what will to change [in order] for us to wrangle real changes.”

A few more things from Thursday …

Fair Rep LA on Thursday released their candidate survey responses on charter reform. The group, which has closely followed the charter reform process (including making it easier for people to keep track of what is going on by recording video and providing notes on he commission meetings), obtained answers from mayoral, controller, attorney and city council candidates.

The Los Angeles City Council approved revisions to the mayor’s proposed budget, with a 12-1 vote. Council member Traci Park cast the dissenting vote, explaining that there was not enough funding for the fire department and cuts to encampment sweeps funding. The council kept most of the mayor’s budget intact, but they scrounged around and did find some extra cash in the seat cushions for some things like expanding unarmed crisis response teams, and for deportation defense. They also added some police overtime dollars for encampment sweeps.

Candidates in LA city elections shared how much money they fundraised and what they spent money on. You can peruse the filings here. It’s kind of a way to check on the health of the campaigns in the last couple weeks before polls close. It’s right about now that campaigns usually plan to spend the most on advertising. Among the mayoral candidates, there was a stark difference between pastor and housing advocate Rae Huang, who listed 73 line items in her contributions, and community advocate and reality TV star Spencer Pratt, who raked in donations from more than 10,000 donors, in the span of the month. Even those who are considered part of the political establishment, such as Nithya Raman and Karen Bass, are reaching those types of numbers. Each got a few hundred donations in the past month. Many of the Pratt’s donations though appeared to from outside the city of Los Angeles.