LA Squawk Box for Tuesday, July 7, 2026
Lineage execs non-committal despite community's post-fire demands, judge pauses Trump Admin's suspension of housing funding, LAPD's conflict of interest list goes to LA City Council, and more.
What’s happening today?
A heat wave is starting today.
The Board of Supervisors is meeting and taking up a motion meant to fix the mixup with Measure G that repealed Measure J, an earlier ballot measure that sets aside funding in the LA county budget to spend on programs that repair the damage that mass incarceration has had in the community. It just so happens, Measure G has its own language cleanup to do in order to set up a truly independent Ethics Commission, and Supervisors could potentially use this opportunity to rectify the Measure J repeal, which Measure G’s champions insisted was unintentional in response to concerns that there was disgruntlement among public officials about reducing the flexibility over how a portion of the county’s budget could be used.
At the Board of Fire Commissioners’ meeting, there are a few items about drones, including this presentation entitled LAFD UAS Program: Modernizing Emergency Response.
What just happened?
A federal judge has ordered a pause on the Trump Administration’s suspension of funding to LA’s homeless services agency, the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority. LAHSA officials said that suspending those dollars could put 11,000 people back onto the street.
Judge David O. Carter’s order last Thursday is a stop gap to allow for the issue to be argued in court prior to anything definitive happening to the funds. It gives the city the ability to “argue for a definitive ruling” at a court hearing set for Aug. 6, according to a statement from Gita O’Neill, the interim CEO of LAHSA.
O’Neill also said Carter’s order “lowers the anxieties of thousands of families, veterans, and seniors in the LA region who rely on federal funding for rental assistance.”
At last week’s Housing and Homelessness Committee meeting of the Los Angeles City Council, LAHSA officials told ouncil members — including Nithya Raman who had asked about the effect of HUD suspending funds woud have on LA residents — that the Trump Administration’s plan would affect 8,000 households living in permanent supportive housing, with about 60% of them estimated to be in the city of Los Angeles. [FYI, the LAHSA officials used the word “households,” each of which could contain more than one person.]
HUD’s announcement that they are suspending federal funding comes out of a political fight framed around allocating resources between permanent housing and temporary shelter. The Trump Administration does not support the use of federal funding for housing that’s permanent, and had alreay attempted to reduce that funding last November. This latest round is a second attempt at changing HUD funding guidelines.
“Both sets of funding guidelines reflect the Trump administration’s dislike of Housing First programs, long considered a bipartisan, mainstream response to homelessness,” according to Street Sense Media, which referenced the “housing first” terminology that’s used to describe housing such as permanent supportive housing, which come with support services.
LA leaders demand housing, remediation after cold-storage fire, but Lineage execs noncommittal
Los Angeles City Council member Ysabel Jurado expressed disappointment that Lineage executives made no commitments to Boyle Heights community leaders, after a meeting between those parties on Monday. The company operates the cold storage warehouse that was on fire for a week in late June, and is now undergoing a cleanup of the debris and the rotting food that remain at the site.
Over the weekend, Jurado was part of a joint letter from LA city and county leaders sent to Lineage’s president and CEO Greg Lehmkuhl, demanding that the company provide short-term lodging accommodations for the residents in Boyle Heights and East Los Angeles affected by the effects of the fire, as well as assistance with finding longer term housing. It also contained demands for smoke and toxins remediation programs, funding for mobile health clinics, and community meetings.
It was perhaps the first time such demands — many of which had already been voiced by people in the community while the fire was happening — were being made, at least publicly, by LA leaders to the company’s executives. They demanded the company fund the mobile health clinics, as well as create a “no-cost smoke and toxins remediation” program so that people could get the damage from the smoke and other pollutants the fire fixed or removed from their homes and other areas.
The meeting was coordinated by Jurado and included community leaders representing residents, small businesses, environmental justice groups, street vendors and others. Her office shared a list of some of the groups that were at the meeting. They were Proyecto Pastoral, Weingart East LA YMCA, East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice, InnerCity Struggle, Boyle Heights Chamber of Commerce, Inclusive Action for the City, Community Power Collective, Union de Vecinos, Centro CSO, ACCE, and Resurrection Church
Jurado’s press release stated that “despite the urgency of the community’s concerns, the company did not provide concrete public commitments, funding amounts, or implementation timelines for the relief and recovery measures requested, including relocation assistance, no-cost remediation, health support, small business relief, and a dedicated claims process.”
A Jurado aide later also pointed to community members coming away from the meeting saying they felt disrespected by the Lineage executives’s lack of commitments, even though similar demands were already in the July 4 letter from two days prior.
Meanwhile, Lineage issued a statement that appears to hint that they were going to make some announcements about “next steps in the coming days.” The statement also stressed the importance they were placing on the community’s needs, and they said they were “pleased to meet with city officials and community leaders.”
You can also catch Jurado’s spoken press conference remarks along the same vein, through the Boyle Heights Beat, which has been dedicating its reporting energies on this community for years now. Jurado’s office also has a video of the same moment, that’s more edited. You’ll hear in them Jurado saying that they’re going to keep pushing Lineage to make commitments, and that there are future opportunities soon to add pressure on the company.
Here’s a list of the specific demands made (the screenshot below contains more details on them): “Immediate and long-term support for impacted residents… Seed a neighborhood relief fund… Complete comprehensive environmental testing and cleanup… Create a no-cost smoke and toxin remediation program… Fund community health providers and community-based organizations delivering mobile medical clinics… advance notice of major cleanup activities, establishing a dedicated multilingual claims and case management center….”
Jurado represents the 14th City Council District that includes the warehouse and the Boyle Heights residents living near it. The demands presented at Monday’s meeting mostly mirror some of those in a joint letter that Jurado, LA Mayor Karen Bass, and LA County Supervisor Hilda Solis (who represents a district that includes unincorporated East Los Angeles residents living near the warehouse) sent to Lineage President and CEO Greg Lehmkuhl demanding that Lineage provide temporary lodging at hotels, or something similar, and help with long term housing, as well as provide a remediation program. They also specifically noted that the company had yet to provide real-time information about the cleanup. The full letter is here.
Tussling over demolition work as Lineage cleans up after Boyle Heights warehouse fire
Meanwhile, there was a little bit of a “finger-pointing” drama, happening over the holiday weekend, between the different parties involved at the warehouse site. Lineage is the tenant and operator of the warehouse, but the property is owned by another company. Meanwhile, the solar panel array on the roof that Lineage says may have started the fire is owned by yet another company, Altus. Altus representatives have said the cause of the fire has not been determined, and that the investigation is ongoing.
In the middle of this mosaic of involved parties, Lineage last Friday complained to the LA mayor, Karen Bass, and the chair of the County Board of Supervisors, Hilda Solis, that they were being told by Altus to halt demolition work.
The Lineage letter called this correspondence from Altus a “serious obstacle” in their efforts to remediate the charred warehouse. In response to that, Mayor Bass released a statement, which was referenced in reporting by City News Service and the LA Times.
That statement, in which Bass appeared to be addressing Lehmkuhl directly, said the city was not asking that Lineage “demolish any portion of the building that could be relevant to determining the source of the fire or other issues in any litigation among you and anyone else with interest in the building or in any lawsuit.” She also stated that there isn’t a court order that’s preventing the company from taking “all measures to eliminate any fire flare ups and remove the food waste as quickly as possible.”
Here’s the full statement from Mayor Bass:
“I’m in receipt of your letter raising concerns about third parties seeking to delay you from cleaning up the property. The city has not asked and is not asking you to demolish any portion of the building that could be relevant to determining the source of the fire or other issues in any litigation among you and anyone else with an interest in the building or in any lawsuit. The city is simply urging you to continue to take all measures to eliminate any fire flare ups and remove the food waste as quickly as possible. No court order is preventing you from doing this and it is critical that you stay laser focused on clearing out your warehouse of your stored food waste and debris since it is that food decomposition that is causing the greatest ongoing harm to our adjacent communities.”
In Lineage’s letter, which they posted up on their updates page on July 3, the company’s president and CEO, Greg Lehmkuhl, called on Bass and Solis to “hold Altus and any other party seeking to delay cleanup and fire prevention at the site to the same standard of accountability you have applied to Lineage. Direct them to stand down and allow remediation to proceed.”
Lehmkuhl writes that “demolition is required to address flare-ups and extinguish the fire once and for all.” The Lineage letter also says that their planned work “does not affect the suspected area of origin or materials potentially relevant to evidence preservation or further investigation.” Lehmkuhl describe Altus’s request for the company to to do demolition as a “serious obstacle” to their remediation work, pointing to that work being in response to the emergency declarations by the city and county.
Altus didn’t provide the correspondence they sent to Lineage that appears to have generated the drama, but they did share their full statement:
“Our first concern is for the residents of Boyle Heights, everyone affected by this fire, and for the firefighters working to contain it. The cause of the fire where our rooftop solar array is located at the Los Palos Street facility has yet to be determined. We are cooperating fully with the authorities as they investigate.
From the moment we were notified of this incident, we deployed resources into the community to provide whatever assistance we could, and we have reached out to local leaders to let them know we are here to help in any way that is useful.”
LA city employee, ex-Assembly aide, killed at a community block party
An LA city employee who was just recently responding to the Lineage warehouse fire, and recently led a youth soccer tournament during the World Cup, was killed during a community block party in Compton on July 4, according to the LA city housing authority and Mayor Karen Bass’s Office.
Eric Washington, who was a community engagement manager at the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles, also previously worked for Assemblyman Mike Gipson, who shared his memories about Washington, saying that Washington was intervening in a conflict when he was killed. Washington was also a staffer in former City Council member Joe Buscaino’s office. And he was part of the Watts Rising Initiative at HACLA.
HACLA released some details about Washington, saying he started as an intern at HACLA in 2019, and then came back to the department in 2022 to serve as a community relations specialist. He then got promoted to community engagement manager.
Some called the punting on LAPD accountability a “political” move
In Monday’s “playbook” from Politico, they write about the Karen Bass vs. Nithya Raman mayoral runoff, pointing to their exclusive on more additions to Bass’s team. And they also noted the significance of recent LA City Council decisions on charter reform ballot measures in November, although they were not specific about where that chatter was coming from, even though some public officials have been fairly upfront about what they thought.
After a proposal to place an LAPD accountability measure onto the ballot was killed off last week, LA City Controller Kenneth Mejia called it a victim of “political calculations” related to November’s elections.Mejia’s comments came after some rather dramatic remarks delivered by Cit Council member Eunisses Hernandez following the vote: “I think you all think that you all made the decision that is gonna impact things in a positive way in November, and I think you’re absolutely wrong. I think you’ve just lost it.”
Because Hernandez’s remarks were part of the meeting’s adjourning remarks, she ended up walking off the floor right after, leaving Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson to look around the room and ask, “Any other announcements, members?” There were no other announcements, and Hernandez ended up having the last word that day.
The accountability measure was taken off the table after the police union threatened litigation. But after coming out of closed session to discuss this potential legal matter, there appeared to be some disagreement among the City Council members about whether there was a need to go through the labor process before placing the measure on the ballot. Meanwhile, the police union plays an influential role in elections and has backed candidates in at least a couple of the major races in November, including the runoff in the mayor’s race between Mayor Karen Bass and Council member Nithya Raman, as well as in the City Attorney’s race, which is going to be a runoff between progressive Marissa Roy, and John McKinney, a moderate.
A few more things…
People are running to be member representatives on the California Working Families Party’s board right now.
The LAPD’s conflict of interest code is going to the Los Angeles City Council for a sign-off vote. This is a list of top LAPD officials who will need to report their financial interests to the Ethics Commission. Keeping an eye on something like this can be especially relevant, or at least interesting, given that LAPD contracts on such things as body cameras, tasers, robot dogs, and surveillance equipment are regularly getting handled by top department officials.
Billy G. Mills, who along with Tom Bradley, was elected to the City Council 1963, as one of the first Black members of the LA City Council, has died. Bass released a statement highlighting his role leading Los Angeles “through the aftermath of the 1965 Watts Uprising.” He also served as a judge with the LA Superior Court. Here is the LA Times’s story, and the LAist’s story.
The LA Times’s latest LA on the Record newsletter about the goings on at LA City focuses on one major item that did get sent to voters, which is the meeting frequency charter reform measure. They also point out that the LA office of the law firm Hecker Fink — which is the “outside counsel” the LA City Council just approved to defend against John Lee’s appeal of his Ethics Commission fine in an excessive gifts case — is headed by Mack Jenkins, a former federal prosecutor who worked on some extremely high-profile public corruption cases involving LA City Council members, including the case involving Lee’s former boss, Council member Mitchell Englander. Ethics Commission staff told the Times that Jenkins is expected to be walled off from handling John Lee’s appeal of the $138,000 fine that the commission ordered him to pay.
LA On The Record also remind their readers of a back story on LA City Council’s efforts to reduce meeting frequency, in which Katy Yaroslavsky had already attempted to put such a measure on the ballot in 2024. This time around was the charm. Voters will be deciding to replace the requirement that the City Council meet at least three times per week, to a requirement to meet once a week. Originally, the language sent back to the City Council would have did away completely with any requirement for how frequent the council should meet, but the City Council cleaned up the language a bit so that the council should at least be required to have one per week.
LA Times’s story about noncitizen voting gaining steam before being scuttled highlighted Council member Hugo Soto-Martinez and CHIRLA’s Angelica Salas meeting regularly last summer, as LA responded to the ICE raids, as the origin of this proposal, which appeared relatively at the last minute of the charter reform process. The story dove into Black community leaders reaching out with concerns that the proposal could weaken Black political representation in Los Angeles, as well kick up a divide between Black and brown communities.
Rev. K.W. Tulloss, western regional director of Mobilizing Preachers and Communities, told the Times, “At the end of the day, we don’t want any type of deal that will be divisive in the community.”
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