LA Squawk Box for Monday, June 29, 2026

A fight erupts over eviction defense contracts, ideas proposed for who makes big decisions on LA County's public transit, and Lineage fire community resources centers are open 10am to 5pm this week.

What’s happening today?

Who gets to make the big decisions on LA County’s public transit? A proposal that would make it optional for the Mayor of Los Angeles and the LA County Supervisors to sit on the Metro board is being taken up this morning by an ad hoc committee that was put together to study possible ways to change the board, which oversees public transit countywide. The proposed changes that are being taken up by the Ad Hoc Board Composition Committee are laid out in this report, and it was prompted by the voter approved Measure G that expanded the Board of Supervisors from five members to nine. One thing that’s been talked about, but that wasn’t included in the proposals, is expanding the Metro board. The proposal also doesn’t include a dedicated seat for an elected County CEO position that was newly created under Measure G. Each of the board’s members currently also has a seat on the Metro Board, as does the LA city mayor. Streets for All, a transportation advocacy group, put out a call for action about the changes, and described the proposed changes now before the committee as the “least ambitious possible.” Here are Streets for All’s recommendations.

What just happened?

‘Is this play about us?’: A fight over eviction defense services contracts erupts as LA leaders vote on releasing funds

What might have been a routine vote on releasing payment for eviction defense services erupted at Friday’s Los Angeles City Council meeting into the latest episode of what one council member described as a “passion play” around contracts with legal aid and tenant advocate organizations.

Three of the LA City Council’s more conservative members took to the mic on Friday to denounce an amendment aimed at paying lawyers and groups that are helping tenants fight evictions and that are providing educational and outreach services to tenants. They mainly hammered away at a lack of detail about how the funds given to those groups have been spent, saying the city hadn’t gotten the needed reports on them.

One of those council members, John Lee, asked Housing Department Assistant General Manager Ana Ortega if services being delivered under the contracts would “stand up to a federal audit.”

Ortega responded that she thought so, adding that “it is a misunderstanding to say that we do not have reports or monitoring or required documentation for all of the services” being provided. “We have stacks” of that type of information, Ortega said.

The amending motion called for paying Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, Liberty Hill Foundation, SAJE and Southern California Housing Rights Center for services provided under the city’s ULA Homelessness Prevention Program. The amount of the payment overall was $14.76 million, and they go toward eviction defense work, education and tenant outreach, outreach on the city’s Tenant Anti-Harassment Ordinance (TAHO), and other emergency assistance.

Lee also asked Ortega why she thinks the City Attorney has not agreed with the housing department “that [the groups] have provided the information?”

Ortega responded that she does not think the attorney’s office has “the depth of experience with monitoring this type of contract.” The housing department recently provided a report that includes aggregated information about how the contracts performed. Meanwhile, in a June 15, 2026 report, City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto detailed some reasons for why she is refusing to sign the contracts, including pointing to redactions to the raw data sent by Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles as an obstacle.

“LAFLA has refused to honor the city’s request for names, addresses and court case numbers to be provided under the new contract, supposedly because that information is ‘confidential’ and LAFLA is concerned about production of individual information under the California Public Records Act,” the report said. That report also said the City Attorney’s Office offered a proposal for LAFLA to provide some partial information, but LAFLA has not accepted that proposal.

Some of the council members also asked whether the reporting on the funding meets federal requirements, echoing another of the concerns Feldstein Soto raised in her report. Ortega said that the current funding source aren’t federal dollars and do not have the same requirements. Some of earlier dollars provided did need to comply with federal requirements, Ortega also said, but she noted that the later and current requirements hadn’t existed back then, and so the city wouldn’t be able to demand that the organizations retroactively provide additional information. Ortega said the new contracts being executed strengthen the reporting requirements in terms of getting more information on the varying attorney rates for individual cases.

Ortega also said that the payments being taken up on Friday were owed for work that the firms had already delivered in April, May, and June, as allowed for under the prior contract that expired at the end of March. The expired contract allows for work to be paid for when a contract’s term lapses and the vendor is being called on to continue the work.

During the discussions, Council member Tim McOsker — who noted that there was a “passion play, that is an important play,” taking place around this seemingly routine item to authorize payment — pointed to the “precise” item they were voting on as something he needed some more clarity on from the City Attorney’s Office, which is led by an elected official, but it appeared there wasn’t one available to do so.

McOsker’s questions on the details of what was being voted on was initally answered only by proverbial cricket chirps, as far as City Attorney’s staff was concerned, although Ortega at times attempted to fill in the silence.

Amid the absence of advice from the City Attorney’s Office, McOsker remarked that he believed the meeting ought be broadcast across City Hall via a communication device called a squawk box, which means a City Attorney staffer ought to have heard his unanswered queries.

“I know squawk boxes are on, and I know there are hundreds of lawyers out there,” McOsker said. “Somebody must have heard we have these questions.”

Jonathan Groat, a deputy city attorney who staffs council meetings, spoke up this point, saying that he was “actively trying to see that somebody is available, but we didn’t know that somebody was going to be needed until we started this conversation.” He added that “we’re doing our best, Mr. McOsker.”

The vote comes as some tenants and their eviction defense attorneys have been coming to City Council to raise concerns about the funding. Eviction Defense Network representatives have said that not executing the contracts and providing the funding could lead to attorneys getting laid off. Tenants fighting evictions, with some saying they were also dealing with disabilities and major health issues, have also spoken at public comment in recent meetings about the need for the city to sign the contracts that the council had approved.

The Council ultimately voted 10 to 3 to authorize the payments. Lee, along with Council members Traci Park and Monica Rodriguez voted against it. Council member Current Price had recused himself, and Council member Nithya Raman was also absent. There was an additional amendment to request that the contracts come back for council review. Typically the contracts don’t need to come back to the City Council. Ortega noted that two of the contracts had actually already received signatures and they were expecting signatures for the others.

Council member Ysabel Jurado, who authored the amendment to release the funds, said that in the aftermath of the Lineage fire, the eviction defense services are all the more needed. The people affected by this drama over the funding “are monolingual, they have [air] filters that are black, doors that have been kicked open that have holes,” said Jurado, whose background is as a tenant attorney. “They haven’t been able to leave, and property managers are not fixing it. This is what this fund is for.” Jurado added that she shares her colleagues’ frustrations over reporting requirements for contractors, but added that they should not “pick and choose the battles in which we’re trying to enforce good governance,” but rather work as a governing body to set up a more uniform system for contracts.

Council member Hugo Soto-Martinez dismissed the efforts to block the funding as “shenanigans” and a form of “fear-mongering.”

“Let’s make it clear,” Soto-Martinez said. “A lot of folks just don’t like [Measure] ULA.” ULA is the the voter approved ballot measure that has been in the midst of some heavy debate after developers and others said it was suppressing housing production, an accusation that others have also said cannot be solely blamed on the transfer tax.

Council member Eunisses Hernandez, who also supported authorizing the funding, questioned the arguments against it being based on a matter of demanding more fiduciary responsibility. “We need to stop playing games,” she said.

“I hope we bring the same energy when we’re talking about buying an 18th and 19th helicopter for LAPD, based off a report from 1971,” Hernandez said. “Some of our districts see over 100 eviction filings per week. And then we’ve got to deal with that on the other side when people fall into homelessness? Let’s be straight up. We have the data.”

Hernandez later also asked Groat, the deputy city attorney, why there weren’t city attorneys making themselves available any time this subject comes up. “It always gets dicey,” Hernandez said. Groat responded that if members want to share any amendments, ahead of time, then he and others would have a chance to arrange for city attorneys to be there.

Hernandez later added that she hopes this kind of “scrutiny” is also there when entering contracts with outside counsel, “so that we don’t get screwed like with Gibson Dunn,” citing the contract that the City Attorney’s Office entered into with the big shot law firm, Gibson Dunn, to defend the city in a case related to the city’s response to homelessness. The contract with Gibson Dunn was increased to $7.5 million in January. And last November, a judge demanded that LA city officials produce records on those contracts.

“I just can’t believe this is how much we’re putting in scrutiny for money that’s going to help people,” Hernandez said. “I think it’s a disservice.”

The Los Angeles City Council agendas for Tuesday and Wednesday of this week dropped last Friday, and there are more than 200 items across the two meetings. This might be because the City Council’s summer recess begins next week, starting July 7 and lasting through July 31. There are also some big decisions to make, including on ballot measure language for November.

Several proposed charter reform ballot measures’ draft language is going to the City Council on Tuesday, according to the agenda. Unrig LA has a helpful guide (plus talking points on issues they advocate on) available here. And among the more than 120 items on Wednesday’s agenda is the recommended $506,757 salary for Joone Kim-Lopez, who was appointed by Mayor Karen Bass to be the new director of the Bureau of Sanitation. Kim-Lopez’s disclosure of her economic interests, which appointees are required to file before the council votes to confirm them, can be found here.

County officials have set up a community resilience center at the East Los Angeles Library for people affected by the Boyle Heights Lineage fire. They have masks and air purifiers available and a mobile health clinic will be there. The agencies taking part in this are the county’s departments on Aging and Disability, Animal Care and Control,Consumer and Business Affairs, Economic Opportunity, Health Services, Mental Health, Public Health, Public Social Services, and Homeless Services & Housing, as well as the Salvation Army, Neighborhood Legal Services of Los Angeles, United American Indian Involvement and California Community Foundation. The address is 4837 E 3rd St., Los Angeles. Their hours are from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. And Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass says the city has set up a resource center for people affected by the Lineage fire at the Lou Costello Jr. Recreation Center, on 3141 E Olympic Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90023. Their hours are also from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

According to a report last week by UCLA’s Latino Policy & Politics Institute, there are 31,700 residents who are employed living in the smoke advisory area if the recently Lineage fire, and 81% of them identify as Hispanic or Latino. Nearly half of workers earn below the “very low-income” threshold of $4,046 a month (this is for a single-person household), while 12% earn $1,250 or less per month, which is below the “extremely low-income” threshold of $2,429 for a single person. They also pull out a finding about workers residing in the zone who are 30 years or older that says that roughly 14,000 workers have a high school diploma or less, which they say may imply that they lack health insurance and remote work options, paid leave, and that they have lower earnings and less job flexibility. “Workers may be less able to avoid smoke exposure because they cannot work remotely, seek timely medical care because they lack health insurance, or recover from lost wages resulting from the fire and its aftermath,” UCLA’s briefing said. As for the jobs that are within the smoke advisory zone, there are 13,000 of them and the majority, 66%, are held by Hispanic or Latino individuals. Many of the jobs can’t be done remotely, and require people to be on-site. “Online reports and anecdotal stories suggest that many employment sites, particularly small businesses in retail, accommodation, and food service, have closed or experienced a steep decline in clients who do not want to be exposed to smoke. Many of these small business owners are Latino,” the briefing said. And finally, 9 out of 10 people working in that zone, live outside the area surrounding that fire, which implies that the fire affects many more people beyond the surrounding residents.