LA Squawk Box for Wednesday, June 24, 2026

Ex-LA sanitation worker's lawsuit goes to LA Council, funds for neighborhood councils to distribute masks and air filters during Lineage fire, compromise floated on Measure ULA, and more.

What’s happening today?

The Los Angeles City Council was scheduled at its 10 a.m. meeting today to consider a request by the Ethics Commission’s executive director to retain an outside firm to represent the city ,as Los Angeles City Council member John Lee fights the Ethics Commission’s order that he pay the city $138,124 for ethics violations, which include accepting excessive gifts.

The City Attorney recently determined that outside legal counsel is needed to represent the city due to a conflict. The Ethics Commission is made up of five members appointed by different elected officials, including the City Attorney. Other commissioners are appointed by the Mayor, the Controller, the President of the Council and the President Pro Tempore.

The Ethics Commission’s director, David Tristan, recommended the firm, Hecker Fink LLP. He wrote that the firm has a “former Assistant United States Attorney for the Central District of California and has extensive experience in complex governmental ethics litigation.”

We are now on the 8th day of the Lineage cold storage warehouse fire in Boyle Heights: Fire officials were hoping the extinguish the fire by mid-week, and return the site to the operator, Lineage, by Friday. The fire department’s updates on this fire, and other fires, can be found here.

What just happened?

State lawmakers move to lower Measure ULA transfer tax, which funds eviction defense and affordable housing, to 1.5%

State lawmakers are entertaining a plan to scale down LA’s transfer tax, Measure ULA, from a 5.5% tax on high valued properties, to one that takes 1.5% during the sale of such properties. That proposal is being floated as a way to neuter a ballot initiative by the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association that threatens to repeal Measure ULA entirely. LA lawmakers and others say a compromise such as this is needed to avoid losing the transfer tax. LA city officials use proceeds of Measure ULA to fund affordable housing projects and tenant protection programs, including eviction defense. You can find the latest update to AB 736, where the compromise proposal appears, here at CalMatters’ Digital Democracy database.

But such a compromise is being opposed by the United to House LA Coalition, which wrote and championed the tax’s passage. The group issued a statement on Tuesday saying they oppose this proposal to lower the tax from 5.5% to 1.5%, as it would result in the city losing $300 million in revenue. The group says that Measure ULA has been working, and they have pushed back against accusations that it has been suppressing housing production, pointing to more recent numbers that show an uptick in development and tax revenue. Meanwhile, opponents of the transfer tax also don’t seem persuaded. Howard Jarvis’s president, Jon Coupal, told reporters they don’t plan on withdrawing their measure in response to this state legislative proposal.

When asked about Coupal’s stance, Mayor Karen Bass pointed to the state legislature having until Thursday before final decisions are made by the state legislature, and that while it’s not official or inked, “we actually reached resolution, and the Howard Jarvis measure will not be placed on the ballot. ULA will be placed on the ballot. It is a financial hit to the city of Los Angeles. But two choices — hit, or catastrophe… all of our labor partners are on board. I don’t think the community groups are necessarily on board. But that’s what we had to do, in order to essentially save the city.”

On the seventh day of the Lineage cold storage warehouse fire…

Council member Ysabel Jurado, whose district includes Boyle Heights where the warehouse and some of the surrounding residential neighborhoods are located, introduced some promised motions in response to the Lineage fire.

One motion calls for funds to pay for distributing more masks and air filters to go to neighborhood councils. The motion calls for putting $1,000 each into the accounts of six neighborhood councils. Those councils are Boyle Heights, Historic Highland Park, LA32, Elysian Valley, and Lincoln Heights. “Neighborhood Councils play an important role in responding to local emergencies and connecting residents with resources,” the motion reads. “Providing additional funding for protective equipment and air filtration resources will help support ongoing community-based response efforts and ensure that residents continue to have access to tools that can help reduce exposure to smoke and airborne contaminants during this emergency.”

A second motion calls for the fire department to “report on the cause of the fire at the cold storage facility located at 1400 S. Los Palos Street in Boyle Heights, the status of ongoing investigations, and with information on the facility’s compliance history related to hazardous materials storage, refrigeration systems and fire and life safety requirements.” The motion also calls on the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety and the fire department to “report on current oversight and inspection protocols for large cold storage facilities utilizing ammonia refrigeration systems, and prepare recommendations for strengthening protocols.”

And a third motion calls for the city’s DASH Boyle Heights/East LA bus to run more frequently, at intervals of every 10 to 12 minutes, to reduce the amount of time residents have to wait outside. “Transit-dependent residents, including seniors, students, workers, people with disabilities, and families without access to a vehicle, may be required to spend extended periods of time waiting outdoors for bus service” the motion reads. “During an active smoke emergency, longer wait times can result in additional exposure to unhealthy air conditions.”

A note on navigating these motions: Jurado’s motion are all part of the same council file series with the numbering system that starts with 26-0906. That is actually the file for Mayor Karen Bass’s declaration of emergency for the Lineage fire. The first two numbers in a council usually refers to the year the motion was introduced. Each of Jurado’s motions above are followed by an “S” and a number, such as S1, S2, and S3. If you sign up to receive email updates on the original motion, you can opt to receive any updates on “supplemental” motions introduced under this 26-0906 series.

The Board of Supervisors also ratified a proclamation of emergency that the body’s chair, Hilda Solis, had issued on Saturday. This was the motion submitted by Solis and Supervisor Janice Hahn addressing the fire and the proclamation that there is a local emergency.

And the fire department’s update on the fire can be found here.

Altus, owner of the solar arrays atop the Lineage cold storage warehouse, says the fire’s cause hasn’t been determined yet: Altus Power, the company that owns the solar arrays on the roof of the Lineage cold storage warehouse, issued a statement on Tuesday saying the cause of the fire hasn’t been determined yet and that they are cooperating wiht authorities who are investigating the fire. Lineage has said they believe the fire at the warehouse “started on the roof when the owner of the solar array, Altus Power, was doing tests. The solar array does not power the building directly but provides power into the city power grid. As we step up for the community, we are also urging Altus to join us getting the Boyle Heights community the support they desperately need.”

And the LA Times’ Alex Wigglesworth also has a story that looks into Lineage’s safety record.

A few more things…

Ex-LA Sanitation worker’s lawsuit settlement goes to City Council: A potential settlement in a case by a former Los Angeles Bureau of Sanitation worker just landed at the Los Angeles City Council, and has been referred to the Budget and Finance Committee. The lawsuit was filed by Michael Bates, who worked in the Livability Services Division that is most known for carrying out CARE+ and CARE operations, which are targeted at homeless encampments. In a 2023 complaint, Bates accused city officials of retaliation on a number of occasions, including after he reported fraudulent timecards, as well as after he found that the city was “violating legal obligations with respect to spot cleaning on Skid Row, which Plaintiff’s team, along with Environmental Compliance Investigators (“ECI”) and Solid Waste Management, were assigned to conduct.” Bates’s complaint said that “in the summer of 2020, Plaintiff discovered that the ECI team was not bagging and tagging personal property at the site as required by this protocol but was instead directing the Solid Waste crew to throw away anything they found. These violations were leading to altercations between the clean-up crews and unhoused people who discovered that their possessions had been improperly thrown away.”

Ex-LAFD chief Crowley sues Mayor Bass for defamation: Former LA fire department chief Kristin Crowley filed another lawsuit on Tuesday against Mayor Karen Bass, this time against Bass personally and accusing her of defamation. California Post reported on the story first, and the LA Times also has a story on this.

LA City Council advances LAFD sales tax and oil drilling ban: The City Council on Tuesday signed off on placing a measure on the the November ballot to raise the sales tax by a half-cent to pay for fire department needs. They also moved forward on another attempt to ban oil drilling in Los Angeles, after the city was forced to repeal an earlier ban.