LA Squawk Box for Wednesday, July 1, 2026
LA leaders get cold feet on LAPD accountability, Measure ULA decisions up in council, and a Little Tokyo group withdraws opposition to a big residential project after community benefits promised.
What’s happening today?
LA leaders expected to make big decisions on Measure ULA: The LA City Council is taking up several items today related to Measure ULA, a polarizing transfer tax that was approved by voters to fund affordable housing construction and programs to protect tenants. The measure created a tax on the transfer, including the sale, of high-valued properties. The proceeds have already funded programs aimed at helping tenants defend against evictions or give them tools to fight back against harassment from landlords, and funding was recently awarded to programs the create social housing.
A couple of the Measure ULA items would allow for reimbursing ULA funds to nonprofits that build affordable housing and plan to use the funds to further the goals of ULA. And there are a couple of measures that would require going to the ballot. One would be a one-time exemption of properties affected by the January 2025 wildfires. The other would exempt multi-family properties from the transfer tax.
LA City Council forced to allow remote comment again, thanks to new state law: Remote comment, something that came into vogue during the pandemic and had stuck around for a bit until the current City Council president did away with it, is back. During the pandemic for example, residents of the Echo Park Lake encampment were able to call in from a rally they were holding ahead of their encampment getting cleared by the city. Parts of SB 707, a state law passed last year, goes into effect starting today that requires that remote comment be available for meetings of an “eligible legislative body.”
Today’s LA City Council agenda includes instructions on how people can connect into the meeting remotely to make comment. Those instructions don’t appear on the agenda for the Housing and Homelessness Committee meeting this afternoon. Josue Marcus, with the City Clerk’s Office, confirmed that the remote comment is only for City Council meetings. “SB 707 only applies to Council meetings as the Council is the acting legislative body,” he said. Marcus also said that SB 707 has required since January that the City Council take comment on issues that were already taken up in the Budget and Finance Committee, the Public Safety Committee and the Rules committee. Typically once comment is taken at a committee meeting on an issue, the full council don’t take allow comment on that issue.
What just happened?
After police union threatens to sue, LA City Council gets cold feet on LAPD accountability
An LAPD accountability ballot measure was tossed to committee on Tuesday, joining a proposal to expand the City Council that’s in a heap of many other potential charter reform proposals that LA leaders punted on for the November ballot, in which critical election matchups are expected, including a faceoff between LA Mayor Karen Bass and City Council member Nithya Raman.
The tossed proposal called for giving the Los Angeles City Council more authority to set LAPD policy. Some council members have said not having clear authority on this has prevented the city from doing more to adequately address lawsuits accusing the LAPD of attacking protesters, and tied their hands on trying to ensure LAPD doesn’t coordinate with ICE and other federal immigration officials.
The vote was 8 to 6 to send the issue to a committee that is being set up to consider charter reform ballot measures for 2028. The council had originally voted to send the issue to the ballot, but they decided against it after going into closed session to discuss a threat of litigation from the Los Angeles Police Protective League, a powerful union that represents the city’s police officers.
The eight votes to send LAPD reform to committee include Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson. The others were from Council members Bob Blumenfield, Heather Hutt, John Lee, Tim McOsker, Adrian Nazarian, Traci Park and Monica Rodriguez. Rodriguez, Hutt and McOsker had previously voted in favor of putting the issue on the ballot, but appeared to have gotten cold feet.
Four of the six votes that stuck by the reform, by going against delaying the issue, came from the progressive bloc on the council that consists of Eunisses Hernandez, Ysabel Jurado, Nithya Raman and Hugo Soto-Martinez. The two others were from Imelda Padilla and Katy Yaroslavsky.
“The chokehold that [the Los Angeles Police Protective League, the police officers union] has on this body is wild to me,” Councilman Eunisses Hernandez said, just before the vote. “We literally started going broke because of the promised raises. There are so many things that we just continue to give and give and give.”
Other developments on charter reform ballot measures: Soto-Martinez also withdrew a measure that calls for allowing city leaders to decide if they want to have noncitizen voting in school and local city elections. Soto-Martinez explained he was doing so because he heard concerns from the Black community about the measure. And the LA City Council did end up signing off on a ballot measure to double the protected budget for Recreation and Parks, after parks advocates pushed to get more funding. City officials have pointed to their budget being cut down to the bone due to rising costs, even as LA parks have ranked poorly on a Trust for Public Land list, recently falling to 93rd among major cities. However, city officials have said they are concerned about being able to meet the funding requirement. The proposal would allow some time for them to do that, giving the officials 10 years to ramp up to being able to pay for that set aside.
A few more things…
The June 2 election results have been certified. You can find the official results here.
LA city leaders signed off on a big housing project near Little Tokyo in the Skid Row area, and it is expected to include more than 1,000 residential units. This came as the main opponent on the project, the Little Tokyo Community Council, withdrew their appeal. Kristin Fukushima, executive director of the group issued a statement (shared through a press release from 14th District City Council member Ysabel Jurdao) saying that their group was “proud of the Little Tokyo community, in partnership with members from the Skid Row community, and our work on the 4th & Central Cold Storage campaign over the last few years. After countless hours of work alongside community members and partners, we are proud to have secured meaningful benefits and mitigations that will help make this a better project. We are grateful to Councilmember Jurado and the CD14 team for their partnership in securing these community benefits, and to the Little Tokyo and Skid Row communities whose years of advocacy made this possible.”
City News Service reporter Jose Herrera has a piece on what might usually be considered a routine allocation of voter approved Measure B funding for trauma hospitals. But Herrera points to some concerns raised by MLK Community Hospital about the fairness of the process for allocating the funds. The hospital’s VP of governmental affairs, Atul Nakhasi, told Herrera that they’re “calling for a needs-based formula because we need the safety net. The system is facing grave danger… This community of South LA has been historically deprived of resources. We’ve been under-resources and we’ve been underestimated, and so we are asking for a fair share for South LA.” They pointed to pending federal funding cuts, due to the H.R.1 One Big Beautiful Bill, that could threaten funding even further for safety net systems.