LA Squawk Box for Tuesday, July 28, 2026

Staying at the SaMoShel shelter in SaMo may become a thing of the past, the irrepressible urge to compare homeless count data by council district, Pasadena Jewish temple's mural defaced, and more.

What’s happening today?

Port officials for Long Beach and Los Angeles are sharing a progress update , at 10 a.m., on their “clean air action plan,” which is their roadmap to reducing emissions to zero, all the while being mindful of the jobs, at the ports. The update should include details on how the clean truck program, the clean marine fuels feasibility assessment and workforce assessment are doing.

The LA County Board of Supervisors will be deciding today on whether to ask voters in November about creating an independent seven-person Ethics Commission that has the power to enforce ethics and campaign finance laws. The measure would also aim to fix a screw-up that repealed an earlier, voter-approved measure, Measure J, which sets aside LA county money for community-based services as alternatives to jailing people. You can read more about how the commission would be appointed, what powers it has, and other details in the resolution to place the issue on the ballot here.

Last week, LA city’s police commission meeting got cancelled after the board’s executive director said they couldn’t get their mics working. Today, they’re meeting again, starting at 9:30 a.m., with an agenda that includes reports from LAPD officials, along with the independent watchdog of the department, on incidents involving federal immigration officials. The topic of federal immigration enforcement, which the board asked for regular updates on, had originally been scheduled for last week’s meeting. There’s also an item to clarify that officers need to have their body cameras on when around federal immigration officials. Another postponed item that is crammed into this agenda is a big report sharing survey results from sworn women officers, who are not always the best treated people on the LAPD workforce.

The Santa Monica City Council tonight is taking up a big change to how they shelter and house people, which includes replacing an existing shelter, known as SaMoShel, with what they’re calling a “continuum” that involves an “interim” motel shelter at Palm Motel to be operated by People Concern. That plan also includes putting out a request for information to find “non-congregate housing options” in and around Santa Monica that would then replace SaMoShel. The council’s report says one of their key goals is to “preserve” an existing program at the Palm Motel: “LA County is planning to defund the program currently operating at the site, and rather than lose that resource, staff proposes bringing the facility under city control.” They say the motel would serve participants of the city’s program, “with the city (and not LA County) determining placements, services, security, and good neighbor policies.” There’s also an effort to preserve SaMoShel, too, and they are seeking help getting letters to the council by noon today. The Santa Monica City Council’s meeting starts at 5:30 p.m.

What just happened?

A tale of two governance reform efforts in LA county and city

Veteran political journalist Robert Greene has a CalMatters opinion piece comparing the messier but more sweeping LA County governance reform effort underway, and the overly careful one that just sputtered in the city of Los Angeles despite getting more press coverage. Greene would know about the press coverage because he’s basically the only reporter, and sometimes the only audience member, at county governance reform task force meetings.

And Greene echos one thing that some have been saying about LA city’s reforms having a role in the November elections. Even though there were no major reforms that came out of LA city’s charter reform efforts, the “relative puniness” of the reforms that will go before voters “may in fact exacerbate anger at City Hall’s perceived resistance to change and play a role in the run-off campaigns of Bass and challenger Nithya Raman.”

A few weeks ago, Council member Eunisses Hernandez had hinted at how her colleagues’ decision not to move forward on some major charter reform would backfire. Even though Raman is on the City Council, her entrance into the race earlier this year has been framed by some as a betrayal of her political loyalties to the mayor. Meanwhile, the president of the City Council is a close ally of Mayor Karen Bass, who meanwhile has not been a fan of the city’s charter reform process.

See how various communities stacked up in the latest homeless count, but take it with a grain of salt (i.e. don’t get politically bamboozled)

The results of the homeless count conducted back in January were released last Friday, and LAHSA officials are blaming the increase in homelessness to a pause on placements into a short-term housing program that uses so-called “time-limited” vouchers that last for one or two years. This program has faced some challenges because some people housed using these vouchers who aren’t able to afford rent after they run out, end up needing to figure out where to go after the year or two ends. There have also recently been some efforts to improve the outcomes of this program.

You can check out how different communities, cities, county supervisorial districts and LA council districts stacked up on this dashboard, although LAHSA officials warned that “the count is an estimate best interpreted as a snapshot of homelessness at the regional level. It is not as useful for measuring neighborhood-level homelessness.” The count results are primarily supposed to be used to determine how much homeless funding a geographic region gets. Yet there is an uncontainable urge for many to use it as a political yardstick, anyway, despite the relatively rudimentary level of data that’s gleaned from the volunteer count. Council member Nithya Raman, who chairs the council’s Housing and Homelessness Committee, was able to declare a steep drop in unsheltered homelessness in her own district, something that she can take along with her on the campaign trail as she challenges Mayor Karen Bass in the mayor’s race runoff in November.

Mural on the side of Pasadena temple defaced with swastikas

A mural put up in May on the side of a Jewish temple in Pasadena was recently defaced, with people discovering last Friday that someone had spray-painted swastikas and an anti-Zionist message, “Zionism is not welcome.” The incident drew condemnation from local elected officials, and it also got a reaction from the executive director of the LA chapter of CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Hussam Ayloush, who said that “blaming and harassing Jewish community members for the actions of the Israeli government is antisemitic, immoral, and ignorant.” The mural shows yellow poppy, butterfly and peacock painted in a stain-glass style, and it is dedicated to the community’s effort to rebuild in the wake of the Eaton Fire. The Pasadena Star News’s David Wilson and Anissa Rivera write that the artist has vowed to restore it. Julia Grinblat, a temple member, told the Star News that her 13-year-old daughter helped with painting the mural and she doesn’t know how to answer her daughter’s questions about “why these people hate us.”

Federal DOJ want to drop their case against union leader, a year after arresting him during the first day of protests against ICE raids in LA last summer

Federal prosecutors with the Department of Justice filed a motion on Monday, July 27, to dismiss their case against Service Employees International Union-United Service Workers West President David Huerta, ahead of a scheduled trial date next month in August. Huerta was arrested on June 6, last summer, during a protest following an ICE raid at Ambiance in downtown LA’s fashion district. That raid was the first day of the latest ramped-up campaign of federal immigration enforcement under Trump featuring aggressive masked agents driving around town in unmarked cars, grabbing people off of streets. Political leaders, activists, union members and others quickly rallied around Huerta, a well-respected union leader who led LA’s historic janitor strikes in the 1990s, demanding his release, with California senators Adam Schiff and Alex Padilla sending letters to DHS and DOJ demanding a review of the arrest. There have been numerous other arrests of protesters, and many of the cases have not stood up.

The initial felony count of conspiracy to impede an officer that federal prosecutors filed against Huerta was later lowered to a misdemeanor charge of obstruction, resistance or opposition of a federal officer. Laurie Levenson told Brittny Mejia of the LA Times, that it would have been difficult for prosecutors to convince a jury, due to the video footage that showed Huerta was “just protesting.”

The DOJ put out a statement saying that Huerta has “agreed to accept responsibility for his actions” and that he has been complying with his “pretrial release terms” and not engaging in the “same obstructive behavior” that their office had filed criminal charges on. Huerta’s attorneys meanwhile hit back saying that the case showed that federal prosecutors were willing to hold criminal charges over a labor leader and then walk away when the charge “couldn’t survive scrutiny.“

And a few more things…

LA on the Record, the LA Times local politics newsletter, has been tracking three different metrics to measure the effectiveness of LA City Council members, and shared their results in their Saturday newsletter. Those yardsticks were meeting, attendance, committee assignments, and number of legislation.

LA Material has a piece from Hayes Davenport on the notorious Ghost Town Security, a private security company that many on the westside use to keep unhoused people out of neighborhoods. According to a UCLA report on a survey of RV residents on the westside, “there are unofficial parking rules that vehicle residents abide by, such as staying off streets with single-family homes and away from businesses protected by security groups like Ghost Town Security that use illegal practices of intimidation. For example, one participant was harassed by a Ghost Town Security employee to move from in front of a business, despite being legally parked there.” Harassment from housed neighbors was the second most common answer to the westside-focused survey, just behind what RV residents cited as their top source of harassment — the police or sheriff.

And Suhauna Hussain of the LA Times has a piece on Culver City leaders pushing back against a proposed In-and-Out, mostly due to its car-based business model. Despite the iconic nature of drive-through restaurants in Southern California, there appears to be very little academic attention to them despite their obvious role in transportation policy. Hussain found a professor who studies transportation, who co-wrote a study of driver-throughs that’s now being peer-reviewed, and he says that they can take away from the important social aspects of dining in a restaurant. Another expert that studied COVID-19 drive-throughs, described the car queues as “pollution hot spots.”