LA Squawk Box for Wednesday, August 12, 2026

Olympics agreement up in council today, Raman officially gets booted from homelessness and housing chair seat, LA council member takes step toward removing 41.18 signs, and more.

What’s happening today?

An agreement that lays out how much money taxpayers will be putting into hosting the 2028 Olympics – in terms of city services – is getting taken up by the City Council today. That agreement is called the Enhanced City Resources Master Agreement. And there are several dozen items on the agenda related to lawsuit settlements, including one by someone who worked with an LA city unit that conducts CARE+ sweeps. A panel of top LA leaders were also holding a special “executive” meeting this morning to discuss labor negotiations with LADWP workers, airport police and park rangers.

What just happened?

Political or not, Raman loses leadership roles on two of her favorite policy areas: Council member Nithya Raman officially lost her seat as chair of a committee that steers homelessness policy, and she was not assigned at all to the housing committee. Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson released his new committee assignments, which the City Clerk has posted here. Raman has accused the council president of political motivations for booting her out of the chair seat. Harris-Dawson insisted in an interview with KNX that this was not so. Raman now chairs a mish-mosh committee that encompasses civil rights, immigration and neighborhood councils. Also, the new committee assignments don’t go into effect until Aug. 31.

Raman had chaired a committee that combined both housing and homelessness. Now those topics are split into two committees. The three-person housing committee will be chaired by Imelda Padilla, and also will include Traci Park and Ysabel Jurado. The new five-member homelessness committee, which will also take on health-related topics, will be chaired by Jurado, and vice chaired by Tim McOsker. The three other members of this committee will be Raman, Bob Blumenfield and Padilla.

The Los Angeles City Council first set up a dedicated committee to discuss and set policy on the homelessness crisis in 2015 — the first in recent memory at least. An ad hoc committee on homelessness was created in June 2015, followed by a permanent committee co-chaired by Jose Huizar and Marqueece Harris-Dawson that started meeting a couple months later. You can actually listen to the co-chairs’ bright-eyed and bushy-tailed opening remarks at the inaugural Aug. 16, 2015 meeting of the Homelessness and Poverty Committee in this recording posted by the City Clerk here. Some trivia: Back in 2015, the homeless count led to an estimate that the number of people who were experiencing homelessness was 25,686 on a given night. Now that figure is around 45,000, give or take.

Anti-encampment zones on their way out? Hugo Soto-Martinez just introduced motions to rescind several of the 41.18 zones set up in his district by his predecessor, Mitch O’Farrell, that make it illegal to set up encampments. For the past year or so, dozens of mutual aid groups and advocates had been reminding Soto-Martinez that he’d promised to do away with those 41.18 zones when he ran for office. When Soto-Martinez didn’t respond, they called on comedians to pull out of a comedy fundraiser for him. Several comedians and a band that was going to play at that fundraiser told The LA Reporter that they were indeed joining the boycott of Soto-Martinez’s fundraiser. You can read Soto-Martinez’s motions to rescind many of the zones. The original motions by O’Farrell from 2021 identified a threat to public health and safety as the reason for setting up the zones. Zones set up for that reason technically expire in a year, although that detail may not be widely known. Soto-Martinez’s motion to “rescind” those zones does call for looking at how signage posted up about the prohibitions could be removed. You can find Soto-Martinez’s motions, both with seconds from Council President Harris-Dawson, here and here.

LA City Council tries out a new (for them) tech upgrade called a Google Drive folder: And for those who give public comment at City Council meetings, you can now finally see a digital copy of amendments of motions and resolutions on the agenda. The direct link to the folder for those motions is here, and you can find it by going to the meeting calendar page and clicking on the yellow button at the bottom of the page. This doesn’t include the motions that get taken up at a future meeting. You can subscribe to those motions here.