What’s happening today?
LA city’s Board of Police Commissioners is taking up a three-month, no-cost pilot contract with Axon to do license plate surveillance cameras on lightpoles, similar to that of Flock. That contract was previously put on last week’s agenda, but was then rescheduled to today’s meeting. It’s now paired with renewals of LAPD’s other agreements with Axon related to body-worn cameras, police car dash-cams and tasers are also getting taken up. Police commissioners last week discussed ALPR (automated license plate reader) cameras as part of a “comprehensive” presentation on police technology.
The Los Angeles City Council is meeting today, and their agenda includes a few items related to how homeless services are delivered in Los Angeles. The question of who heads up homeless services in LA is now up in the air, after the three-decade old joint powers authority, the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, opted to step down from those lead roles last week. Those roles include managing a database – called HMIS – that holds each unhoused person’s paperwork and a case worker notes related to housing applications and services (although an important thing to note about this responsibility is that unhoused people themselves have experienced delays in viewing their own case files within this system, something that would be considered unacceptable if those delays happened with an individual’s medical files, for example). The three other lead roles include managing the criteria for how people are matched to housing and services (called the Coordinated Entry System), conducting a homeless count that’s used to apply for funding, and finally, taking on the role of actually applying for the federal dollars from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development that has long funded a good portion of homeless services. Los Angeles County’s new Department of Homeless Services and Housing is planning to apply to take on those leadership roles, as is the city of Los Angeles.
The City Council is also expected to take up an item that tees off the application process for $460 million in funding for affordable housing, both new construction and preserving existing housing. A portion of the funds come from Measure A, a sales tax that funds affordable housing (and homeless services), but the lions share – $324 million of it – comes from Measure ULA, the tax that’s applied to the sale or transfer of high value property. This is the second year that this funding program, known as Homes for LA (or H4LA, for short) is being offered. The funding round is expected to conclude next April with the awarding of the grants to projects. Last year’s $360 million in funding went to projects that aimed to build approximately 1,500 new units and preserve another around 3,700 existing affordable housing units.
Also of note is that the City Council is voting on four of Mayor Karen Bass’s appointments to the city’s Climate Emergency Mobilization Commission today. The commission hasn’t had a meeting since 2024, just a few months before Bass proposed in 2025 to cut the Climate Emergency Mobilization Department, which this commission oversees. Ultimately the department was saved, but Bass then quietly fired the original department head and then appointed her replacement, but very quietly. When asked about that at a recent mayoral forum, Bass said that her goal all along was to revamp the climate emergency department so it could be more effective. One of the groups that hosted the environmental forum, the League of Conservation Voters, ultimately went with endorsing Bass’s opponent in the mayor’s race, Nithya Raman, this weekend, although other groups such as the Sierra Club have yet to announce endorsements.
What just happened?
Raman’s League of Conservation Voters’s support dates back to her first run for City Council
Nithya Raman, while at Lewis MacAdams Riverfront Park in Frogtown on Saturday, unveiled the League of Conservation Voters’s endorsement. Raman, who had little institutional support when she ran for City Council in 2020 – when she ultimately denied then-City Council member David Ryu a second term – spoke a bit off the cuff, after the presser portion mostly concluded, about what it meant to have gotten that environmental organization’s support back then. Those remarks were mostly addressed to members of that group, which she said “was one of the few organizations that endorsed someone who was running against an incumbent here in the city of Los Angeles in 2020. It was one of my proudest endorsements that I received at that time, and to receive it again in this mayoral race is really – it makes me very emotional today.”
Mayor Bass’s political allies rally around her after a tough week
And later that same, nice day, at another park nearby, Mayor Karen Bass’s allies – many who have worked with her for years – gathered around her at the end of a tough campaign week, during which an article had come out in a major media outlet pointing to flagging energy around her re-election bid, and her challenger releasing favorable internal polling even as her own campaign declined to do so (a possible indication that the latest results might not have been favorable). Dignitaries of labor, immigrant rights activism, and two LA City Council members not only stumped for Bass at the “Latinos con Bass” carne asada volunteer appreciation event held at Ernest E. Debs Park in Montecito Heights, but also took pains to remind whoever was listening of what Bass has done for the community over the years, and why they were now at her side. One of the more powerful among the group (aside from Maria Elena Durazo who is mentor to a few others there) was the chair of the Los Angeles County Democratic Party, Mark Ramos, who described Bass as the party’s “endorsed candidate… no challenges, no qualms, no question.” As with the rally the weekend prior, at the headquarters of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor (another powerful ally to have at election time), Ramos and others took exception to Council member Nithya Raman’s decision to challenge Bass, framing Raman’s entry into the race as opportunism. “Donald Trump has made it hard to be the mayor of Los Angeles,” Ramos said. “So instead of standing in solidarity and making sure Los Angeles is fighting for every single damn penny it deserves, somebody sees an opening and runs through that door and says, ‘I want to be mayor.’ That’s not how this works… What we do is we stand together in solidarity against tyrants like Donald Trump. We don’t look for opportunities.” [Corrected the park’s name to Ernest E. Debs. Eugene is obviously a much different, much more socialist, political figure, compared to Ernest, who was a council member and LA County supervisor]
A few more things…
Attorney generals and Paramount have settled a lawsuit that was blocking a merger with Warner Bros. Discovery. Also, the Writers Guild of America, says they have settled too, and that one of the agreements they secured was that no writers will be laid off for five years, according to a statement shared by Daniel Miller of POLITICO.
Gov. Gavin Newsom has declared a state of emergency around the El Niño weather pattern, which raises temperatures around the Pacific Ocean and may lead to more and stronger storms. The declaration focuses state resources into responding to the weather events, and loosens some competitive bidding requirements in order to speed up getting to work when needed.
A financial health check for the LA city election campaigns is coming soon. Saturday night was the fundraising deadline for an 80-day period from July 1 until Sept. 19. Now campaigns have until Thursday midnight to get their disclosures of the money they raised and spent. The numbers are posted here on the City Ethics Commission’s election totals page. As we get closer to the Nov. 3 election day, we’ll get more frequent disclosures, with the next one coming in just under a month, and the one after that in 10 days. Any donations above $1,000 are already supposed to be disclosed by campaigns within 24 hours though.
And with Nithya Raman’s campaign, watch for many of the under-$1,000 donations to be reported for around the time of a Sept. 19 fundraiser done in the Dungeons and Dragons style. Raman’s campaign strategist referenced a big haul that night, declaring it the “largest grassroots fundraiser” of the general election (for that campaign).
An independent expenditure committee that’s mostly funded by the LA city police officers’ union, the Los Angeles Police Protective League, rolled out a series of ads opposing Raman’s campaign, including a 30-second television spot on Friday that takes aim at Raman’s positions around encampments. Opposing law enforcement approaches to encampments has been a standard position taken by progressives, and continues to be, but it’s also meant to act as a kind of poison or weapon used against progressive candidates. Raman, to her credit, sounded unfazed by the television ad, telling reporters at a presser on Friday that in her district she gets people indoors “for good, not just moving people down the block,” likely referencing the fact that the default law-enforcement approaches to encampments that’s deployed in much of the city just shifts people around. Anyway, after that, the police officers union later threw in a couple hundred thousand more, and on Sunday, rolled out a website, DSAVoterInfo.com, that targets Raman’s Democratic Socialists of America support.
LA County Young Democrats put out a statement on Friday saying they are suspending their endorsement of Jimmy Gomez for Congressional District 34, in response to allegations of sexual misconduct (which Gomez has denied). Gomez is running for re-election, and faces a challenge from Angela Gonzales Torres.
Last Friday’s LA City Council motions include one by Katy Yaroslavsky that calls for ways to encourage developers to build more condos rather than rental properties, and a motion by Tim McOsker in which he wants to know what’s going on with delays with a port worker training center project. And you can catch up on the Ad Hoc Committee for Boyle Heights Fire Recovery’s discussion, here, on Council member Ysabel Jurado’s motion calling for suspending CARE+ encampment sweeps during environmental emergencies, such as the Lineage warehouse fire.
Jim Newton’s piece in LA Material Monday goes into this idea — that’s been popularized lately, and that has been rather pivotal in the fight between Nithya Raman and Karen Bass — that the mayor of Los Angeles is more powerful than City Council members, even though that’s not really the case.