LA Squawk Box for Tuesday, May 12, 2026

Mayoral candidates Miller and Huang blocked from debate opportunities, contentious 1,589 residential unit mixed-use in Skid Row up in LA city planning committee, and vacation rentals also taken up.

What’s happening today? The LA Sanctuary Coalition will be presenting to the LA Board of Police Commissioners, a month after their presentation had been pulled without explanation (agenda). A project in Skid Row, near Little Tokyo, to turn a site with a cold storage facility into a mixed-use property with 1,589 residential units will be taken up in the LA City Council’s Planning and Land Use Committee, where the issue of vacation rentals will also be taken up (agenda). And the Board of Supervisors will take up, as part of their usually extensive agenda, a motion aimed at at protecting immigrants at medical facilities amid President Donald Trump’s ICE and federal immigration enforcement campaigns (meeting stream).

What just happened?

Los Angeles voters — who recently polled at 40% undecided on the mayor’s race — were set to hear from mayoral candidates this Wednesday during a televised debate on Fox 11. But that candidate forum was canceled on Monday, after City Council member Nithya Raman, withdrew, following on the heels of Mayor Karen Bass canceling her appearance at the last minute just a day before.

That left two candidates in the debate — Rae Huang and Adam Miller. And so, the Pat Brown Institute, the League of Women Voters of Greater Los Angeles, and Fox 11 who were hosting the debate decided to cancel the whole thing. A news release from the organizers of the debate stated: “With only two candidates remaining, the event partners have agreed not to proceed.”

Bass canceled in order to go to Sacramento to talk to lawmakers about the Olympics, and to advocate for homelessness, housing and wildfire recovery funding. And Raman pulled out because she had originally signed up to be in the debate with the expectations that she could debate Bass, according to a news release from organizers. The Wednesday debate had been set to follow two previous debates, neither of which included Huang or Miller. Raman debated Bass at the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Association forum last Tuesday. The next day, Raman, Bass and Spencer Pratt took part in a televised NBC4 debate.

Miller, who just earned the LA Daily News’s endorsement, weighed in Monday about the debate getting canceled. “If you can’t be bothered to show up for a debate, why should voters think you’ll ever show up for them as Mayor?” Miller said in a statement posted to social media. “I’ll debate anyone, anytime, anywhere. Voters deserve to hear the truth, and I’m the only candidate with the expertise, leadership, and results they can trust.”

Emel Shaikh, a spokesperson for Rae Huang’s campaign, said in a statement that Bass and Raman backing out of two recent debates (including one that was being organized by the TransLatin@ Coalition, but was subsequently canceled, in a similar way to Wednesday’s Fox 11 debate) was a “trend that demonstrates their inability to show up for the public unless it’s politically advantageous to them.”

“These establishment politicians continue to gatekeepe power in their small circle, denying the public the opportunity to hear from candidates critical of their poor leadership and new ideas that call for real systemic change for the working class.”

Raman held a news conference on Monday to discuss her opposition to Bass’s plan to increase vacation rental units in Los Angeles, which was scheduled to be taken up the next day, on Tuesday. She took some other questions including one from The LA Reporter about the debate, asking whether she foresaw herself debating the other candidates.

“I look forward to another opportunity to debate the leading candidates in this race and other candidates as well,” Raman said. “And hope that we have that opportunity coming forward.”

After Bass backed out, Wednesday’s debate was set to have the same lineup as the Streets for All debate held back on March 23. It was a streamed debate, and can be viewed here. That one was primarily focused on housing and transportation, given the organizers’ advocacy focus, but it provided a broad range of views on major issues that local candidates have a direct role in which they can play, such as Measure ULA, a property transfer tax that is being heavily debated.

Meanwhile, the TransLatin@ Coalition’s canceled debate did yield two separate roundtable discussions with Huang and Raman (the group said they reached out to five candidates to do the talks, but only two responded). Alex Cohen, a Spectrum News host and anchor, and Thandiwe Abdullah, with the People’s Budget LA, conducted the talks. Huang’s discussion with the group can be viewed here. And Raman’s discussion is available here.

Climate event: Sammy Roth of Climate-Colored Goggles reports that Marta Segura, the city’s chief heat officer was recently let go by Mayor Karen Bass (Roth also just released an exclusive look at mayoral candidate Nithya Raman’s climate policies).

While some might wonder why a city needs a “chief heat officer,” Roth writes that “climate tends to get lost when it’s not your main job. Hence the Climate Emergency Mobilization Office, which is charged by City Council with coordinating between agencies and marshaling resources in advance of heat waves, with a special eye toward protecting the most vulnerable. That includes the elderly, folks who can’t afford air conditioning and homeless individuals.”

And rising temperatures related to the climate crisis is a growing concern among health professionals. During a recent, unusual heat wave in March, I wrote in The LA Reporter about findings from a survey that UCLA and USC researchers did among unhoused people as part of a longitudinal study, that cited numerous health dangers of extreme heat exposure and the lack of public infrastructure and resources available. LA County has already released a heat action plan, and the city is supposed to be putting one out too at some point. Roth provided an update in his dispatch on LA city’s heat officer, Segura, getting fired saying that the mayor’s office subsequently provided him a statement (after initially not responding) saying they were getting ready to appoint a replacement who would shepherd the mayor’s climate action plan, and that work includes a heat action plan.

Big money lifts all spending: So when candidates take part in the matching funds program, it limits how much they can be spend in those races. After all, the focus of such a program is to both even out the playing field in elections, and to make it so that the size of candidates’ campaign war chests isn’t the main star of the show. But the fact is, money can be unavoidable, and when there are other ways large amounts of money can be spent in a race — for example by an independent expenditure committee — those participating in a matching funds program aren’t expected to continue operating at a disadvantage.

Well, that scenario just happened in the mayor and city attorney’s races in Los Angeles City. Due to higher amounts of spending by independent committees — separate from candidate campaigns — the matching fund limits were just lifted so that everyone has the ability to keep up.

In the mayor’s race, the spending ceiling was lifted after Streets for All Los Angeles spent to support mayoral candidate Nithya Raman, and that spending was preceded by spending opposing and supporting candidates Mayor Karen Bass and Spencer Pratt, who is better known as the star of reality show “The Hills” but also describes himself as a “community advocate” on the ballot. In the City Attorney’s race, independent spending supporting Marissa Roy, and opposing Hydee Feldstein Soto triggered the lifting of the ceiling. The LA City Ethics Commission has more details on the thresholds, rules and reasoning around all this here.