LA Squawk Box for Tuesday, June 16, 2026

LAPD charter reform proposals go to City Council, LA leaders to take up study to reduce bus and light rail delays at red lights, homeless shelter lease agreements up in committee, and more.

What’s happening today?

The LA City Council’s Government Operations Committee is meeting at 8:30 a.m. and taking up lease agreements with homeless services providers — including Five Keys, Hope the Mission and John Wesley Center for Health — that operate shelters and tiny homes. There are also lease agreements for community gardens in North Hills and Mission Hills. You can catch the meeting here.

The Los Angeles City Council will meet at 10 a.m. and take a proposal to exempt residential properties affected by the 2025 wildfires from Measure ULA, a motion to look at ways to reduce the time buses and light rail have to wait at red lights, including cutting wait times 50% by January 2028, and a motion to restrict oversized vehicles on and around Graham Avenue, Monitor Avenue, Maie Avenue, and East 111th Street in the 15th City Council District.

The Los Angeles City Council’s Budget committee will meet at 2 p.m. and take up an item on a “city homelessness governance structure,” along with a motion to look at legal options for protecting the city’s around homeless services governance. The latter item is related to LA County withdrawing funding from Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority. Several city council members and Mayor Karen Bass released a letter in April to address how the city will react to such shifts in how homeless services are funded and governed. These items are being scheduled as the Trump administration pulling HUD funding from LAHSA. There is also a resolution being taken up in City Council today opposing HUD funding from being taken away from LAHSA. The comittee is also taking up a couple of progress reports on the $2.6 billion expansion of the Los Angeles Convention Center, which city officials cautioned could be financially risky for the city unless they kept to a strict timeline for the project.

What just happened?

Police accountability charter reforms move forward, to face debate in a bigger arena

The LA City Council is expected to debate police accountability reforms on Wednesday, after the Rules committee on Monday advanced proposals that include giving the council more authority to set LAPD policy and the police chief the ability to fire problem officers. While the proposals have generated much public interest for the relatively obscure, months-long charter reform process that’s happening at LA City Hall, it will definitely be an uphill battle for advocates and other members of the public to get such policing oversight issues onto the ballot, especially as city staffers had not recommended that police oversight and accountability reforms to be placed on November’s ballot, nor any future ballots. Advocates have sent out a call for action for people to reach out to council members urging them to vote in favor of placing the issues on the ballot this November. And the Rules committee, which includes some of the more powerful members of the City Council, was split on the proposal to increase their authority to set LAPD policy, voting 3 to 2 in favor of advancing the proposal to the full City Council.

Some issues that didn’t make it out of the Rules committee, but that did generate some attention throughout the process, include switching LA elections to ranked choice voting, lowering the voting age to 16 years old for local elections, and most notably, expanding the City Council to 25 members.

The issues that have the strongest likelihood to actually making it onto the ballot, at least based on the discussion on them up until now, including those that revolve around creating a capital infrastructure program that’s led by the Department of Public Works, which is a financial plan that governs how public infrastructure projects are funded and prioritized. Many cities, including the Long Beach, already have such plans for maintaining and building public facilities and amenities such as roads and briges. Another fairly noncontroversial proposal to switch LA city’s budgeting timeline from an annual one to a two-year cycle has also made it out of committee. And they moved forward a way to strengthen the powers of the Director of Public Works, which had been eliminated after that role began competing against the power of the Board of Public Works. There is also a proposal to increase the protected budget for Recreation and Parks that got moved forward.

And a few more things…

City Controller Kenneth Mejia recently put out a correction to HUD’s letter announcing funding being pulled from LAHSA saying that their office found that much of the funding from that agency had not been spent. Mejia said that his findings were that LA city, not LAHSA funding, were going unspent.

Faizah Malik, a tenants rights attorney who recently ran for City Council, reacted to a story in LAist about 250 “master-leased” apartment units that were meant to shelter unhoused people but have been sitting empty. Malik called on progressives to take a more proactive approach to transparency and accountability around homelessness and housing. Right now these stories fuel talking points for conservative politicians like Council member Traci Park and Spencer Pratt, who recently ran unsuccessfully for mayor. “Unlike them, we WANT government investments to work,” Malik wrote. “But when leaders make excuses, it lets the other side say the whole strategy is a failure when it’s not.”

City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto on Monday released a report detailing the “challenges” around negotiating contracts with groups providing tenant protection services. Meanwhile, one of those groups raised alarms about needing to layoff employees due to their contract with the city not being signed.

The latest episode of the LA Podcast is out, and their guest is Jasmyne Cannick, who joins regulars Mike Bonin and Godfrey Plata to discuss the LA mayoral race runoff between Mayor Karen Bass and Council member Nithya Raman.