LA Squawk Box for Tuesday, May 19, 2026

LA leaders to take up proposal to delay $30 tourism wage past the 2028 Olympics, Nithya Raman unlocks $1.25M in matching funds, 41.18 zones in northeast Valley up for a vote, and more.

What’s happening today?

The Board of Supervisors is discussing how the new Ethics Commission at the county will be staffed up, and that has implications for how independent the body will be… The City Council last week started discussing a proposal that backpedals on a $30 minimum wage for airport and hotel workers that had been slated to go into effect by the 2028 elections. Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson promised to convene again on that issue today, with a more fleshed out proposal… And buried in the same council meeting is Council member Imelda Padilla’s big beautiful motion to designate LAMC 41.18 anti-camping zones at 26 locations where she wants homeless encampments to be banned.

What just happened?

LA City Council member Nithya Raman, who entered the mayor’s race at the last minute in February, had little time to lose. Since then she has been able to catch up to other candidates quickly through a program that allows her campaign to raise money from LA residents giving no more than $257, and then get those donations matched six times with public dollars.

And Raman’s campaign just marked a milestone of unlocking $1.25 million in matching funds for her campaign, the maximum amount. The campaign characterized the result of what was a three-month sprint as “historic,” a description that Rob Quan, who advocated for and helped to write the current version of the city’s current matching funds program, agrees with. He said he has not seen any other candidate hit the maximum this quickly.

Quan said the goal of the city’s matching funds is to give people who aren’t part of the “normal establishment” a chance at running viable campaign.

When Raman unlocked a significant amount of matching funds back in April, she explained some of her motivations for why it was important for her to pursue the funds, telling The LA Reporter that she had “stepped into this race because I wanted to have a real conversation about what direction we were moving in as a city, one that I felt like it was essential for us to have.”

Quan also explained that the matching funds program helps shift candidates’ focus toward voters, so even when candidates like Mayor Karen Bass — who are squarely in the establishment — also qualify for matching funds, it still benefits the public.

“I would rather Karen Bass be focusing on her job and talking to voters instead of raising money from lobbyists,” Quan said.

The process of qualifying for such funds can be tough, because donor information needs to be submitted properly, and there are inevitably donations that are rejected and have to be fixed by the campaigns. The donations also need to come from LA residents, so those donating from a different city could throw things off for campaigns. Some campaigns in the mayor’s race are indeed struggling to meet requirements to release the matching funds. While Rae Huang announced about two months ago that she had met the minimum threshold of small donations to qualify for the funds, that was just the start of the process. Those funds remain locked away as of earlier this week, as they work to meet reporting requirements. Spencer Pratt, who is also raising small donations to get the matching funds, also has not yet received a check.

Also on Monday, mayoral candidate Rae Huang announced an endorsement from Black Lives Matter’s Melina Abdullah. They met because of the People’s Budget LA, which is a survey that asks people where they want the city to prioritize public funds. Huang took part in a presentation to the City Council in 2020 that shared the results of the People’s Budget LA for that year.

Meanwhile, endorsements by Raman’s fellow progressives on the City Council — Eunisses Hernandez, Hugo Soto-Martinez and Ysabel Jurado — are going to Mayor Karen Bass, according to a story out today by The LA Times.