What’s happening today?
🕸️ Spooky election money reports drop today: Once the clock strikes midnight, Halloween and another filing deadline will have arrived for candidates in Los Angeles city elections. That’s the hour by which the mayor, city attorney and council district 3 and 9 race candidates will need to submit reports, detailing the money they raised and spent — as well as how much cash they still have on hand — as of two days ago, Oct. 28. You can check for the filings here if you so desire. There will still be 24-hour disclosures of donations $1,000 or more (just no spending info, and anything donated less than $1,000).
🗳️ Some quick voting links: There are 123 in-person vote centers now open across LA county. By Saturday, Oct. 31, there will be 646 vote centers open. Vote center hours are from 10 a.m. until 7 p.m. up until this Sunday, Nov. 2, but on election day, they will be open from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. You can locate a nearby vote centers here. Ballots can also be dropped off at 429 drop boxes around the county, and you can locate a nearby one here. You can track your ballot here.
🗞️ Read this: David Zahniser of the LA Times has been following the mayor’s race closely, and he has a piece today about concerns over Black representation at LA City Hall waning further, as Mayor Karen Bass faces a strong challenge to her re-election.
What’s squawking: 💨 🔥 🌳 Clearing brush around illegal pot farms: Agenda | 💵 A line-up of potential LA county corruption watchdogs: Agenda
A bit more on what’s on the Squawk Box:
💨 🔥 🌳 Los Angeles recently received a $6 million grant from the state corrections board to clear brush in areas of Angeles National Forest where illegal pot farms are “a persistent issue,” and the Los Angeles City Council is set to vote on accepting the grant at its 10 a.m. meeting. This vote is usually a formality.
The mayor’s office applied for the funds in order to remove vegetation that could quickly fuel for fires and replace them with “fire-resilient native plant communities,” according to the state’s list of grant summaries from June. Part of that work includes hiring 20 to 25 conservation workers for 12 months to clear brush, which they say would double as on-the-job training.
The grant is funded by state cannabis tax revenues, and was created through Proposition 64, a 2016 voter-approved measure that legalized cannabis use in California for people over 21. The grant is meant to address the effects of cannabis legalization. The brush-clearing grant is not the only one that was awarded to the city in the recent round. The Los Angeles Police Department also got a $6 million grant to enforce marijuana laws.
💵 Who will keep an eye out for corruption in LA County government? The three initial members of the newly formed seven-member LA County Ethics Commission will be selecting four people to fill the remaining seats. Last week they selected a not-so-short list of 16 candidates to interview during public meetings. Eight of them are lined up for interviews this afternoon, starting at 3 p.m.
Here’s a rundown of who they are (click their names if you want to view their applications):
They include a USC professor and Rolling Hills Estates mayor Frank Vram Zerunyan, who lists Board Supervisor Janice Hahn as a longtime friend and as a reference for the commission to contact.
Then there’s the executive director of the Asian Pacific Community Fund, Chun-Yen Chen, who volunteers as a “current affairs commentator” on KAZN AM1300, a Mandarin-language radio station. She lists the mayor of San Marino, where she also serves as a Recreation and Parks commissioner, as one of her references.
The former president of the Los Angeles City Ethics Commission and business attorney Jeffery Daar will also be interviewing. He lists as references Bob Stern, a governance and ethics expert who sits on LA city’s Ethics Commission, and the city ethics department’s executive director David Tristan.
Also interviewing is the president of the Gorman Group law firm, Gregory Gorman, who has served as strategic counsel for small cities on election-related issues, including around donations and outside interests.
Pomona College politics professor and former U.S. diplomat Mieczyslaw Pawel Boduszynski is also interviewing. He lists Sara Sadhwani, one of the Governance Reform Task Force members who is a colleague at Pomona College, as a reference.
The vice president of the Azusa Unified School District Board and chair of the Azusa Leaders for Learning Education Foundation, Yolanda Rodriguez-Peña, will be interviewing.
A retired Lutheran pastor and former La Habra City Council member and mayor, Dennis Michael Laherty, who served on the Great Lakes Naval Hospital medical ethics committee and helped develop La Habra’s first code of ethics guidelines, is also going before the panel to be interviewed.
And attorney Bert H. Deixler, who served as a counsel for the Cowan Commission (that developed LA city’s ethics code), and the county’s Citizens’ Commission on Jail Violence and the Sheriff’s Civilian Oversight Commission, will be interviewing. He’s known for successfully representing the plaintiff in a landmark U.S. Supreme Court case, Johnson v. California, in which forced racial segregation in state prisons was ruled unconstitutional.
The other eight candidates who are supposed to be interviewing a week later on Nov. 6 are Jennifer Farrell, Guy Primus, Barbara Ann Pollack, Georgianna Marie Streeter, James P. Shotwell, Eduardo Rodriguez, Dalia Evangelina Velasco, and Wendy Carrillo.
What just happened?
🍻 LA’s lackluster nightlife a hot topic amid mayor’s race
Mayor Karen Bass signed an executive directive on Wednesday to streamline permitting for restaurants. It included some items aimed at making it easier for restaurants to offer al fresco dining, including by setting up a self-certification process, and giving restaurants more flexibility in paying their sewer fees. But slipped in at the end was an instruction to city staffers to explore a citywide “entertainment zone” that would “promote economic development through our small businesses, cultural vibrancy, nightlife and creative communities.” The directive references state Sen. Scott Wiener’s SB 969, which allows for zones where alcohol can be served outdoors.
Meanwhile, the LA City Council also hopped onto the “entertainment zone” bandwagon, advancing a motion on Wednesday authored by Council member Ysabel Jurado to create entertainment zones within her 14th Council District, which includes downtown LA, that would be consistent with the state’s entertainment zone law, SB 969.
As these issues were being taken up by Bass and others at City Hall, the vibrancy of LA’s nightlife also happened to be a topic taken up by the mayoral campaign of Council member Nithya Raman, who attended and gave remarks at a gathering this week to support Ye Rustic Inn, a Los Feliz dive bar that has an al fresco patio that faces potential closure. Earlier this week, Raman had unveiled a “nightlife” platform hat calls for creating entertainment zones, and she also spoke about an idea (borrowed from what Daniel Lurie did in San Francisco) to allow restaurants to self-certify to do sidewalk dining.
The subject of creating a vibrant nightlife in Los Angeles had actually been brought up pretty early on, in the mayor’s race by Rae Huang’s campaign during the primary. Huang, who didn’t make it into the runoff, proposed in March to create a office that would help manage and cultivate our nightlife.
🏘️ Mayor Karen Bass rolls out two more affordable housing directives
Mayor Karen Bass actually released three executive directives this week. In addition to the one aimed at restaurants and small businesses, mentioned above, she rolled out a couple more related to affordable housing, which you can find here and here, and were signed Thursday during a news conference at the site of the Alveare affordable housing project in South Park. Notably, Bass actually tackled affordable housing as her “first order of business” in her very first executive directive.
In one of the directives, ED 25, Bass gives instructions to numerous city departments to improve their coordination with affordable housing developers. For example, she tells the Department of Water and Power to appoint a liaison that will work to “expedite water and power services” for affordable housing projects. She also called on the LADWP to come up with utility services cost-saving and cost-sharing strategies and to streamline water and power hookups for ADU projects. In another example, she calls on the transportation department to identify any source of delays in its traffic control review process and to make recommendations to address them.
In the second directive on affordable housing, ED 26, Bass turns her focus to the people trying to find affordable housing to live in. One key thing she calls for is to centralize both the listings of affordable housing, and form tenants to fill out when they apply for affordable housing.
A few more things…
For most of the mayor’s race, Mayor Karen Bass’s campaign website did not include details of what she planned to do in her second term. Now, in the final week of the election, Bass appears to have debuted a menu of policy platforms on a range of topics, which you can read here.
Chinatown tenants who are facing unaffordable rents and organizing with Chinatown Community for Equitable Development say they have secured a meeting with their Los Angeles City Council representative Eunisses Hernandez’s office in November. Tenants from six buildings went to her office on Wednesday and shared testimony with staffers. You can view the archive of the live video from that visit here.
A petition to recall Los Angeles City Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson just got approved for circulation, the City Clerk Office announced on Thursday. The petitioners would need to gather at least 21,569 valid signatures from qualified registered voters in order for it to be presented to the City Council.
Loma White, who retired from Ninth District City Council member Curren Price’s office last year after serving as his senior field deputy, is canvassing for Estuardo Mazariegos, who is running to replace Price. Interestingly, Mazariegos is running against White’s former coworker, Jose Ugarte, who was Price’s deputy chief of staff.
City Controller Kenneth Mejia says he just dropped off his ballot, which includes a vote for Nithya Raman for mayor.
And speaking of turning in ballots, Miles Morton of Basin.la reports that early ballots as of Tuesday show that a couple west San Fernando Valley districts where Spencer Pratt got the most votes have turned in the most ballots.
And someone just published a 400-plus page biography of Biddy Mason, who’s name has been proposed to replace that of John J. Pershing at the park named after him, as well as the Metro train station. David Allen of Southern California News Group talks to Kevin Waite, the historian who wrote the biography titled “The Boundless Biddy Mason.”
Caroline Petrow-Cohen at the LA Times reports that the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles are mulling a program to help truck drivers who have switched from diesel to electric vehicles who have found it tougher than expected to get by. Port officials are looking at subsidizing drivers $60 for each one-way trip, capping the subsidies at $36,000 per truck. This plan comes after the Harbor Trucking Assn. went to the ports seeking help for EV truck drivers. Among the challenges EV drivers face is they have to charge up more often than if they were driving diesel trucks, and the upfront cost is as much as $700,000 when diesel trucks can be purchased for $70,000. The ports are still seeking feedback from stakeholders and haven’t presented the plan to the Harbor Commission yet.
Doug Smith of the LA Times has a rundown of where things now stand in terms of the fight over who controls the delivery of homeless services in Los Angeles. And Colleen Shalby at the LA Times reports that the LAX People Mover, already delayed, got its opening pushed yet again to February.