LA Squawk Box for Thursday, September 24, 2026

LA city and county are in a divorce over homelessness, but what does it all mean? Firefighters work to cool lithium batteries, after MWD solar farm fire. Metro ridership keeps climbing. And more.

What’s happening today?

Tuesday’s lithium battery explosion at a Metropolitan Water District plant still has parts of La Verne under an evac order; Robot dogs used to get air samples

“News you can trust, because I live here.” That’s the tagline of Staci Baird, who publishes La Verne Daily News, and who has been doing around-the-clock reporting on a lithium battery fire that broke out on Tuesday at a solar farm at the Metropolitan Water District’s F.E. Weymouth Water Treatment Plant. The initial battery fire was put out, but a second battery has been overheating, which means mandatory evacuations have continued for the last three days. Baird offered a live-stream of a 4 p.m. news conference conducted by LA Verne officials earlier today. The LA Reporter was pitching in today with some reporting on the incident, and was told by a Battalion Chief (who retired in 2019 from LA County Fire) doing PIO duty for La Verne Fire, that each of the two battery units in question is similar in size to that of a Winnebago RV.

During that news conference, a La Verne official mentioned that the Metropolitan Water District has been using robot dogs, by getting them to walk up to the batteries to take air samples. The smoke that comes from the lithium batteries is toxic, fire officials say, which is why even though they haven’t detected the smoke leaving MWD’s property, they have issued orders for residents to leave, and for businesses to close, in the event that the situation does go “broken arrow.” MWD also had to fly in some experts from out of town to help firefighters deal with the incident. They could not attend the news conference to field questions this afternoon because they were needed at the plant.

For those who mainly follow my LA city coverage and other communities around or near that area, and may not know exactly where the city of La Verne is, it is near San Dimas, home of the Raging Waters water park, and the cities of Claremont and Pomona, which is where you have the Fairplex that hosts the LA County Fair. You can get to that area, thereabouts, by taking the Pomona-bound A Line from Union Station.

A couple more things…

Speaking of the A Line, Metro sent around a press release today about its latest ridership numbers from August, and that particular line’s ridership is up 14.3% to 2,106,929 boardings. The overall ridership on Metro’s trains and buses in August was 26,565,486, which is 5% more than last August, according to the report Metro officials sent to reporters. They also play up the fact that the numbers indicate more people are riding Metro for leisure than they used to, ascertained by looking at the increased ridership on the weekends. You can also see their ridership data here.

And for those tracking the LA city elections, a new raft of campaign fundraising data is being posted to the LA City Ethics Commission website by today’s midnight deadline for campaigns, when they’re required to report both spending and fundraising from a recent 80 day span from July 1 until September 19. A strategist for Mayor Karen Bass’s campaign for re-election told POLITICO to watch for a haul of around $2 million to be posted today. Half of that is public matching funds dollars. Meanwhile, the campaign for Bass’ challenger, Nithya Raman, maxed out on the amount of matching funds a few days ago, and they now have $1.5 million already posted from matching funds alone. It now remains to be seen where the two line up in terms of bigger pocketed donors.

What just happened?

LA county and city officials are now vying to lead homeless services delivery, and tomorrow is the deadline for the two government entities to send in their applications. Governance expert Raphe Sonenshein, who has been a longtime observer of LA city and county politics, shared some thoughts on this with The LA Reporter (that’s me), and described the city and county as having an “uncomfortable relationship” since the 1990s, on the topic of homelessness. The two have even sued each other a few times over the years, he said.

The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, which is a joint powers authority between the city and county, had been the glue holding the two sides together for the last three decades. And according to Sonenshein, that agency has often been “scapegoated by both sides.” But now that this joint powers agency has opted to give up its lead role in the matter, what does it all mean and where do things go from here?

He says that no matter what happens, the two parties actually really need each other, in order to succeed at tackling homelessness. “Homelessness has two parts, one of which falls largely within the city’s role, which is providing housing,” Sonenshein says. He notes that the city has “great sway on land-use,” while also providing “basic services to the city as a whole, including police, fire, housing, and street maintenance.”

The county meanwhile focuses on social services, which is just as important when tackling homelessness, Sonenshein said. [He also says the county provides services in the form of “law enforcement through the sheriff for unincorporated territory and cities that contract with the county.”]

“The problem is that the city is unlikely to become a social service provider and the county will not be happy constructing neighborhood support for, or overcoming opposition, to building more housing,” he said. “So they kind of need each other.”

Keeping that relationship going was something that Mayor Karen Bass emphasized as soon as she assumed office in 2022. Sonenshein said that her emphasis on this relationship was a good thing.

“For the first two years of the Bass mayoralty a state of good feelings helped make progress,” he said, also explaining that “when the city and county are aligned, homelessness governance makes good things possible.”

Sonenshein also shed some light on the cultural differences between the two governmental bodies that can sometimes be the source of the unease between the two sides

“The city and county governments sometimes look at each other skeptically,” he said. “Some county people consider their government to be better managed and less ‘noisy’ than the city government. Some city people say the county does not get held directly accountable by the people for failures the way that city officials visibly do.”

A bonus point that Sonenshein made was that even as LAHSA may be fading into the sunset, there are other agencies that could serve as a shared table.

“One new place for common work is the Los Angeles County Affordable Housing Solutions agency (LACAHSA) which has governing representation from both county and city,” he said. “I remain, as ever, hopeful.”