LA Squawk Box for Monday, May 11, 2026
Police commissioners take up federal immigration enforcement on Tuesday, Mayor Bass drops the ball with Wednesday's Fox 11 televised mayoral debate, and a "big money" round-up for LA city's elections.
What’s happening this week?
Immigrant rights advocates to finally present to the Police Commission: The LA Sanctuary Coalition is scheduled to present on Tuesday to the Los Angeles Police Commission. The police oversight panel is also set to hear presentations by LAPD staff on any interactions police officials might have had with federal immigration enforcement officials. Last month, a presentation by the LA Sanctuary Coalition was abruptly pulled from the Los Angeles Board of Police Commissioner’s agenda. The groups have been calling for the LAPD to more heavily restrict officers’ involvement in ICE activity, including when responding to 911 calls from federal immigration officials. Coalition members show up in large numbers last month to demand an answer for why their presentation got pulled.
At that earlier meeting on April 7, several members of that coalition cited LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell’s history of being a prominent opponent of “sanctuary” legislation at the state level while he was LA County Sheriff. But McDonnell might not be in attendance on Tuesday. He happens to be scheduled to be out of town during the entirety of this week. He is set to attend National Police Week, based on this request for travel authority that was heard at the earlier, April 7 police commission meeting.
Contentious 1,600 unit residential project in Skid Row, near Little Tokyo, up in PLUM on Tuesday: A major development project proposing nearly 1,600 residential units in downtown Los Angeles, in the Skid Row and on the edge of Little Tokyo, is up for a vote on Tuesday, in the Los Angeles City Council’s Planning and Land Use Committee. The project, at Fourth and Central, is planned for a 7-acre site that now includes a cold storage facility. It is being appealed, and the project is opposed by community groups including the Little Tokyo Community Council and Nikkei Progressives. The Arts District Little Tokyo Neighborhood Council, meanwhile, has submitted a community impact statement, that supports the project moving forward.
Proposal to expand the vacation rental ordinance also up in PLUM on Tuesday: At the same Planning and Land Use Committee meeting, a proposal to loosen up LA’s short-term rental regulations is being taken up. The council file on the issue includes an April 2 report that includes a proposal for a temporary program to raise the cap on vacation rentals allowed in Los Angeles.
Board of Supervisors to take up issue of federal immigration officials at LA hospitals: The Board of Supervisors will be taking up a motion by board chair, Hilda Solis that bills itself as an effort to protect immigrants at medical facilities amid President Donald Trump’s ICE and federal immigration enforcement campaigns.
Mayor Karen Bass drops the ball on Wednesday debate, to travel to Sacramento instead: There will be another televised mayoral debate this week, this time on Fox 11, organized by the Pat Brown Institute and the League of Women Voters of Greater Los Angeles, on Wednesday, but it won’t include Mayor Karen Bass. She who was originally scheduled to be part of it, but withdrew at the last minute. Her spokesperson told the LA Times she’ll be in Sacramento instead. This decision didn’t go over well with the debate organizers, who issued a letter calling her withdrawal from the debate “disappointing.” They included a copy of the signed candidate response form in which Bass confirmed she would take part in the debate on May 13.
Mike Bonin, executive director of the Pat Brown Institute, offered some behind the scenes context on the scheduling of the debate, telling the LA Times in a text, “To be very clear, the mayor CHOSE this date and the other candidates adjusted their schedules accordingly.”
Organizers of Wednesday’s debate wrote in their letter announcing Bass’s withdrawal that their groups have a “track record” of holding debates that are “fair, non-partisan, substantive and focused on issues that matter the most to voters.”
This debate is set to follow on the heels of last week’s NBC4 forum in which candidates were instructed to give brief answers to a battery of questions on substantive topics. Some — including LA Times columnist Steve Lopez — panned that format as a disservice to voters.
City Attorney candidate forum on Wednesday, but there is a fee at the door: There will be a town hall on Wednesday for the City Attorney’s race organized by the Women Lawyers Association of Los Angeles and the Los Angeles County Bar Association. The event is $10 for members of the WLALA, and $25 for non-members.
Proposal to take the Olympics out of the Olympic Wage up on Wednesday: A proposal by the City Council’s leadership to put off a wage increase to $30 for airport and hotel workers by the 2028 Olympics, is on the agenda for Wednesday. A motion by Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson and Council member John Lee to delay the increase to 2030, two years after the Olympics, is scheduled for the City Council meeting on that day.
Charter reform and the budget closing up the week: Watch for the City Council’s rules committee taking charter reform back up on Thursday, and the Budget and Finance committee returning on Friday to deliberate over the city’s fiscal year 2026-27 budget.
What just happened?
Two more ideas for November’s ballot, one to check the mayor’s power, the other to tax golf courses: LA City Council member Ysabel Jurado authored a motion last Friday, that would place a measure on the November ballot that calls for giving the City Council more power over a role that Los Angeles’s mayor now has more control over right now — which is to remove general managers.
Jurado’s motion, seconded by Bob Blumenfield, states that the city “has long operated under a governance structure that concentrates significant appointment and removal authority in the hands of the Mayor, while leaving the City Council with limited ability to act when a General Manager fails to effectively serve the public or uphold the responsibilities of their office.”
And Council members Adrin Nazarian, Marqueece Harris-Dawson and Eunisses Hernandez say they want to try to impose a $4 per square mile parcel tax on “non-profit private country/golf clubs (social clubs).” The council members envision the tax revenue would be used on public infrastructure, initiatives supporting the film and television industries, and programs for homeownership.
Both proposals calls for the proposals to be placed as measures on the November ballot.
Settlement in lawsuit challenging LAPD response to Garcetti protest: The City Council on Friday approved a $287,626.44 settlement in a Black Lives Matter Los Angeles case against the city related to the LAPD’s response the Garcetti protest, calling on President Biden not to appoint him ambassador to India.
What if you got to choose your opponent? The LA County Federation of Labor is spending money on a video that many are saying appears to do a good job of promoting mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt, even though the labor organization backs his opponent, Mayor Karen Bass. Observers are saying this is an attempt to line up an ideal opponent for Bass to face off and win against in the November runoff. This is because there is a high likelihood that instead of being able to win the seat outright in the June primary, Bass will be forced to face off with one other opponent in a runoff in November. Aside from Pratt, Bass faces a viable challenge from former ally and now opponent, City Council member Nithya Raman, and some are predicting she would be a more formidable opponent than Pratt in a county where Republican candidates don’t fare well. And pundits have weighed in on this from across the political spectrum. They include Hasan Piker on the (extreme?) left, and Susan Shelley, a conservative pundit and member of the Southern California News Group editorial board, who wrote on X.com on Sunday that this could be a risky gambit by Bass: “This labor-funded ad belongs to the genre of ‘elevate the candidate we can beat into the top two,” Shelley writes. “It’s obviously aimed at Republican voters in Los Angeles. Could backfire by helping Pratt’s fundraising across the city, county, state and country. Bass could be another Hillary [Clinton].”
The LA Daily News backs Adam Miller for mayor: Meanwhile mayoral candidate Adam Miller, who has been polling in the single digits, has been grinding away — and pouring in his own substantial fortunes — to increase his standing. Those efforts might be bearing some fruit. The Southern California News Group editorial board that does endorsements for the LA Daily News just came out with its endorsement in the mayor’s race, and they’re backing Miller. Their endorsement piece describes Miller as “running for the right reasons and with the right ideas to put LA back on course.”
Zev’s face startles at D Line opening: One big name attendee of the D Line opening ceremonies, Zev Yaroslavsky, drew some shock and ire from transit advocates, as well as other observers of transportation-related politics. That’s because the former longtime LA county supervisor (he also served a much shorter stint amid his 40 year political career on the LA City Council) is known for ruining or delaying the Purple Line extension that is now known as the D Line extension, and other subway projects in Los Angeles County. He sponsored a 1998 referendum that basically stopped local county sales taxes from being used subway projects, something he did in response to a methane explosion in the Fairfax area that destroyed a Ross Dress for Less, forcing transportation and other public officials to seek funding in other ways, and delaying planned projects for years. What was once known as the Purple Line (some at the opening wore purple) and now is known as the D Line, finally opened on Friday with stops along Wilshire Boulevard, at La Brea, Fairfax and La Cienega. But that’s not the only project affected by Zev’s back-in-the-day activism. When the Gold Line Eastside Extension opened in 2009, Supervisor Gloria Molina was still noticeably upset that they had to pivot from constructing it as a subway extension of the Red, now B Line, because of the referendum.
Roundup of BIG MONEY in LA city’s elections: John McKinney in the City Attorney’s race, is set to get a boost from a $1.5 million contribution from an Airbnb-funded committee to a Central City Association committee supporting his campaign.
His opponent, deputy attorney general Marissa Roy, said in a statement that this type of money comes into the race as she poses “a credible threat to all companies in Los Angeles seeking to take advantage of working people.”
“These corporations know I have the track record to hold them accountable — and are willing to place a $1.5 million dollar bet on a late-entry candidate to stop our momentum,” Roy said in a statement.
Human rights attorney Aida Ashouri responded saying that the short-term rental company Airbnb had previously donated money to support the current city attorney, Hydee Feldstein Soto, “but has recently shifted its support to John McKinney, another conservative opponent. Their donations show these candidates’ support for big tech will result in no accountability as these corporations continue to take our housing units for their corporate profits!”
In the City Controller’s race, Zach Sokoloff’s mother antes up with $1.5 million to bring her support for her son’s run for office to $4 million. And that support is funding three videos attacking incumbent Kenneth Mejia that cites an April 2023 LA Times story in which volunteers for his campaign described him as a “toxic” boss in social media posts and interviews. Mejia released a response describing the attack videos as “deceptive” and saying that those putting it out dug up an “old story” that “wasn’t true back then and was publicly addressed as well.” One of the people who spoke to the Times back in 2023 about their experience said that she did not want “cancel” Mejia, and that she wanted him to “do a better job as a boss.” At the time, Mejia responded three months later with an interview with Spectrum News’s Kate Cagle, telling her that the allegations were “simply untrue,” adding that he though “these allegations that they’re making are so absurd or not true that it’s coming from a place of hurt, and we understand that. Especially if we had that relationship, of being close.”
And in the mayor race, Nithya Raman receives another check for matching funds that puts her above $1 million. While it’s big money, those are public funds that candidates can unlock by seeking small-dollar donations of no more than $257 each. The program is aimed at diverting candidates’ loyalties away from wealthy donors and to focus more of their attention to the issues affecting a wider set of constituents.
And while there isn’t much information out there about Neighbors First, a “dark money” group that’s been funding mailers in several LA city races, including council races in the Eastside’s 1st district, and the westside’s 11th district, the spending should be big. And there is some information trickling out. On Saturday, the LA Times had a story on Neighbors First that finds a connection to a former aide for Gil Cedillo, the councilman that 1st District incumbent Eunisses Hernandez ousted in 2022. The group also has since filed some spending with the Ethics Commission, posting $366,158.72 in a “major filer” disclosure that was spent on lobbying on the city’s anti-camping law, Los Angeles Municipal Code 41.18, affording housing, police funding and emergency response, and the fire in the Pacific Palisades.
Measure ULA’s authors present to City Council ad hoc committee, amid Howard Jarvis threat: An ad hoc committee that is exploring the Measure ULA property transfer tax that is helping to fund the city’s tenant protection programs and affordable housing construction heard a presentation on Fiday from panel representing the United to House LA, the group that authored and pushed for the tax’s passage in 2022.
The panel told the Ad Hoc Committee on Measure ULA that revenues from the tax have been on an upward trend, recovering from initial delays that were largely unrelated to the transfer tax itself, but rather to bureaucracy and wider economic forces. The funds, they said, have since been important in preventing people from becoming homeless and for making it possible to fund affordable housing projects, including alternative forms housing such as community land trusts, which are part of the category of housing called “social housing” that doesn’t treat housing as a real estate investment.
Joe Donlin, the director of the coalition, told the committee that they continue “to welcome a thoughtful, data-driven policy evaluation process.”
“Our position continues to be — not that ULA is infallible — but that it is too early to do the level of analysis in a meaningful way that should be required before overturning the articulated will of nearly 60% of the voters of Los Angeles,” Donlin said. “This measure is owed the time and the substance of the analysis, in an environment of certainty, in an environment where its opponents aren’t frequently given a microphone. It’s impossible to look at any data, including our own, and feel like it’s not been compromised.”
The full meeting of that ad hoc committee meeting can be heard here.
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