What’s happening today?
Experts tell the LA Times big-spending campaign committees backing Karen Bass’s re-election ought to be investigated
A few of Karen Bass’s former aides (from her campaign and her mayoral office) head up committees that can spend unlimited amounts to GOTV for her – and experts, including a former director of enforcement at the City Ethics Commission, tell David Zahniser of the LA Times that they need to be investigated. [Updated to make ot clearer that those are former aides to Bass]
At stake is the fact that an independent expenditure committee can pour unlimited amounts of money into supporting a candidate, especially through putting out ads to convince voters to support Bass’s re-election. But if they are coordinating, then that capacity gets dramatically reduced, since those committees would then only be able to contribute no more than $1,800 to their cause. A lawyer for one of those committees tells Zahniser they’re in the clear, though, because he’s sure there wasn’t coordination.
A few more things…
Expect to see some stuff in the news cycle today about LA city crime statistics. Bass is sharing some stats at a news conference this morning. You can usually get the latest statistics at LAPD commission meetings, but this Tuesday’s meeting of that police department oversight panel was cancelled.
And Bass announced that she is calling for an “outside the city, independent audit” of LADWP rates. This comes a week after her challenger in the mayor’s race, Council member Nithya Raman, held a news conference outside an LADWP yard in the San Fernando Valley to call for an audit – which she would partner with the ratepayer advocate and City Controller Kenneth Mejia on. Bass’s statement notes that the ratepayer advocate would give input, but it does not mention whether the controller would be involved. The silence on that is understandable — as the situation is awkward. Mejia, who secured his re-election in the June primary after fending off a well-funded and Democratic Party backed challenger, has been very actively putting his political capital into campaigning for Raman to oust Bass. Still, the issue of auditing has long been a sore point with the controller. He has criticized Bass for paying a consultant for an independent audit the city’s homelessness program when she could have also looked to the city’s elected controller to do that at a lower cost.
There may be news today about Nithya Raman’s DSA-LA endorsement. The chair of the LA chapter, Leslie Chang, acknowledged to the Times that they had indeed left off a required question asking if Raman supports the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement, and Chang’s co-chair Sean Wakasa told members that this was an “oversight.” Based on a response Raman gave at a mayoral forum held by the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles, it was unclear if Raman was only supportive of the movement’s ability to protest, or if she was also supportive of the movement itself. DSA’s national political committee is expected to take up whether to suspend DSA-LA’s endorsement of Nithya Raman, or to ask her to clarify her position, according to the LA Times’s On the Record newsletter this Saturday.
And this morning, in the Board of Public Works 10 a.m. meeting, they’re taking up a few items related to managing the odors emanating from our sanitation system, unspecified “abatement” work being done at the Hollywood Sanitation Yard, a state-required air toxics pooled emissions study, and the city’s hydraulic conveyance system that moves water.
What just happened?
LA city leaders won’t sue for control of homeless services, after hammering out deal with LA County
After some saber rattling, the Los Angeles City Council has decided they’re okay with a tentative agreement with LA County over homeless services, and so they won’t have to sue. They decided this during a meeting on Friday, where CAO Matt Szabo presented terms hammered out through talks with LA County officials, including a key promise that LA city would get local preference on placing people within LA city into the city’s housing programs.
The other terms Szabo outlined include one that he said gives the city access to “all data” related to unhoused people within LA city, which includes city access to HMIS and other datasets, and that would continue existing access to the data. You can see the tentative terms here.
The fact that there isn’t similar levels of housing available in the 80-plus other smaller cities has been a sore spot for LA leaders in the past, and in the latest negotiations they have argued that LA city has built about 90% of the housing resources throughout the county. And those terms around LA city getting “local preference” on matching LA city people to the housing local city representatives feel they have risked their political necks to build may be an attempt to address that. Szabo explained that under the terms, the city would have the ability to manage the matching of people to city resources, “in recognition of the city’s significant investments” both politically, and in creating that housing.
Some city leaders have lamented in the past that similar agreements have not made it easier for the city to feel like they have a sense of control, or enough data, to ensure they would be able to match constituents to services, shelter and housing. Council member Katy Yaroslavsky got in a question Friday about whether these terms havev any teeth. “What happens if they don’t comply?” Yaroslavsky asked.
Szabo responded that the data agreement portion of the terms would be a binding contract, while other policies would be part of a “memorandum of understanding.”
While some council members, like Council member Tim McOsker, expressed doubts that this new agreement would be any different, Council member Ysabel Jurado, who chairs the council’s homelessness committee, said she believes this will be “night and day,” as it gives the city control over things the city had not had before, including being able to manage the homeless services delivery system in “real time.”
The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors should also be taking up this tentative agreement at their weekly Tuesday meeting, tomorrow.
A few more things…
LA Material’s Antonia Cereijido reports anonymous sources alleging that Memo Torres had a fling with a state lawmaker, and that it might have contributed to Torres getting fired. LA Taco, which had previously put out a more circumspect statement about Torres’s departure, went into more specifics in a second statement released after that article published, addressing backlash from those who came to the defense of Torres and his work covering the ICE raids, including by canceling their subscriptions to the outlet. They addressed readers’ concerns about LA Taco’s continued commitment to covering the federal government’s immigration raids – which were compounded by the fact that another reporter Izzy Ramirez, who covered the raiders had also left the outlet– by saying that “LA Taco will never stop covering ICE, immigration and the attacks on our communities.”
Mayor Karen Bass just signed a new executive director that aims to send more 911 calls to unarmed crisis response teams. The language of the directive is in their press release, but should eventually go up on their Executive Directive page.
And on Sunday, Nithya Raman released a new policy platform on how she would support Black Angelenos that she called her Black Agenda. Raman paired the release with the unveiling of her endorsement by the Black Los Angeles Young Democrats, which recently put out a statement saying that they had made attempts to engage with Bass’s campaign get her positions on police accountability but got no response, while Raman had “articulated positions on police accountability and other issues affecting Black Los Angeles that aligned with BLAYD’s advocacy.” They wrote that BLAYD has since 2020 “maintained a policy against endorsing candidates who heavily align themselves with the current policing and carceral system.” This endorsement was considered a major switch up for BLAYD, which has had a close relationship to Bass and was founded in 2012 in the living room of then-Assemblymember Bass, according to this post on BLAYD’s Facebook page.