LA Squawk Box for Thursday, June 11, 2026

Police reform and council expansion might not make it to the Nov. ballot, Raman did win her own district in LA mayor's race, quarterly lobbying report includes spending in LA city races, and more.

What’s happening today?

Want to know what fun thing your big city library is planning, how the city is handling discrimination complaints, or what’s happening at your local swim center? On the docket today are LA city commission meetings for the LA public library’s board, the board overseeing the Civil and Human Rights and Equity Department (they handle complaints of discrimination and decide on enforcement, which recently has actually led to fines for such companies like Smart & Final, Ross and a motel), and a committee overseeing the Balboa Aquatics Center, which includes a presentation on a design for the center. You can check out the full schedule of such commission meetings here.

And with LA County setting up its own homeless services department, this might be a time to get to know some of the nitty gritty of how the county is allocating time, money and energy into this issue. Up this afternoon is the county’s “homelessness & housing” cluster meeting during which they’ll be discussing contracts and budget recommendations for the upcoming fiscal year. So even though there is usually just one big long meeting of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors each week, there are actually even more tests of stamina scattered through out the week in several such “cluster” meetings, with policies and decisions being discussed by different groupings of county departments (such groupings, for example, include public safety or health services). The schedule for those cluster meetings can be found here.

And some notes about these more obscure meetings: There are several such commission meetings happening at any given moment throughout the week. These panels are made up of appointees, and sometimes other representatives sent by elected offices, who gather and dive into the muscle and guts of policies and decision-making in LA city and county government. The meetings are a slog, and usually not exciting. People on committees and commission tend to talk in more detail about the important issues, but it’s usually not dressed up in big sweeping language. Yet they’re stuff that tends to get glossed over by the more big ticket decision-making bodies, and you may learn more about how things really work (or don’t work) at these meetings than at the usual ones people do pay attention to. And you can sometimes get ahead of things before they reach the point where it’s too late, and key votes are already being made.

What just happened?

Policing reform, council expansion and other big ticket and hot 🥵 charter reform proposals could get voted off the island? 🏝️ 🚨

Spencer Pratt won’t be on the November ballot. But neither will police reform and other very hot charter reform issues like council expansion and ranked choice voting?

That’s what it’s looking like going into tomorrow’s Rules committee meeting. This will be a key meeting in which the City Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson will be leading a small committee that includes four other council colleagues to help shape the fate of what proposed changes to the city charter — it’s similar to the constitution for the city — will be taken up in this November’s election.

A city report that landed with a big thud on Wednesday punted on some key charter reform proposals, including council expansion. That was one of the bigger issues that motivated the latest reform process, and city staffers are recommending that city leaders skip this November’s ballot and instead place council expansion on the 2028 ballot. Right now the proposal is to expand the council to 25 members, increasing the current 15 members by 10 people. The council’s ad hoc committee on governance reform about two years ago said nearly the same thing — that more study was needed on this issue — so they created a charter reform commission to do that.

The report also leaves up in the air whether police reform should go onto November’s ballot. Meanwhile, policing reform, a topic that many hadn’t anticipated would even be taken up, turned out to be one of the more popular charter reform topics that ended up getting regular Angelenos to tune into this relatively obscure process. That’s also potentially getting dropped from consideration for this November’s ballot.

The issue of reforming the LAPD has easily been the most talked about subject in the LA city’s charter reform process, with numerous regular Angelenos who would not have normally paid attention to a seemingly insider-y process such as charter reform going to commission meetings to make public comment both in-person and through written comment. It was also something that the charter reform commission’s staff pushed back against even including on their agendas — and it wasn’t until heavy pushback from members of the public that it got included.

The LA Reporter got an early inkling of regular Angelenos’ interest in police reform when she interviewed people at an El Sereno doughnut shop last fall, as part of a piece kicking off the charter reform process. Manuel Berru, an El Sereno resident, told The LA Reporter it would “be a blessing” if the charter reform commission were actually able to push through changes that bring accountability to the LAPD. It was the one topic that she asked people at the doughnut shop about that didn’t cause their eyes to glaze over.

The possibility that these big topics won’t go to voters in November has raised the hackles of some of the advocates who pushed the hardest for urgency on these issues. In a post festooned with a siren emoji, LA Forward’s deputy directory Godfrey Plata urged people to write to the five City Council members who sit on the Rules committee to urge them to get the police accountability and council expansion items onto the ballot.

“We don’t need to study whether police should be following the First Amendment,” Plata says in the video. “We don’t need to study that the chief of police ought to be able to let go officers with histories of harm. And then there’s this: we all know that our districts here in LA are too large. They got 270,000 residents each, as 15 council members, but here they are saying that further study is required to determine whether or not we should expand. Of course, we should expand the number of districts we have. We’ve been talking about this for years.”

And while the fate of these proposals is uncertain, what we do know is that November’s ballot will feature a big mayoral race showdown. This week, election results determined that Council member Nithya Raman has forced Mayor Karen Bass into a runoff. Incidentally, Bass was a big factor in why the charter reform commission was pressed for time when going through a whole slate of complicated issues including council expansion. Bass dragged her feet in submitting her commissioner appointments, which needed before that panel could even start their work. Those late appointments reduced the charter reform commission’s runway down from more than a year to just eight months. In a recent sit-down interview with POLITICO, Bass said that she was “not really happy with charter reform,” and thinks the process should have been different.

Meanwhile, Bass’s opponent Raman has been more engaged in the charter reform process and was instrumental in getting the charter reform process started. She recently submitted a response to the Fair Rep LA Coalition, which has been advocating for council expansion (they also did polling, which can be found here), in which she wrote that one of the issues she most strongly supports is council expansion.

Police accountability would be an interesting ingredient on November’s ballot, if only because Bass is endorsed by the powerful police officers union, the Los Angeles Police Protective League, and among the proposals getting the boot could be one that would allow the police chief to fire problem officers.

You can read the chief legislative analysts’ recommendations on charter reform proposals here. The agenda for tomorrow’s Rules committee meeting also just dropped. And check out the charter reform council file where you can read more on this issue, as well as submit comment.

LA mayoral candidate Raman did win her own council district, after all

It turns out Nithya Raman did win her own 4th City Council District, which spans from a few communities such as Reseda on the southern edge of the San Fernando Valley, through the Hollywood Hills and into parts of the Eastside.

Paul Mitchell, who runs Political Data (also known as PDI), which provides voter data to campaigns, released a breakdown of the top two vote-getters in the mayor’s race by in each of LA city’s 15 council districts. Mitchell had previously put out the breakdown using election results data from when polls closed on June 2, prior to hundreds of thousands of ballots even being counted. In that chart, Raman didn’t even break the top two in her own district — something that was widely noted by those who weren’t paying close attention. But in reality, once basically all of the ballots were counted (there are just a few thousand conditional and provisional ballots left, plus some vote-by-mail ballots that need to be “cured”), Raman rose to the top to win her own district.

While one would assume an incumbent ought to be winning their own district, there is something to be said for how hard-earned even that might be for Raman in particular. This primary mayoral election would be the second time she has proven she could win a district that had its boundary changed in the 2021 redistricting process. Raman’s district went from being more renter-heavy to including a more significant share of homeowner constituents. That came after her district had been targeted by some of her past colleagues to be placed into a “blender,” in a now infamous, secretly recorded conversation known as the LA Fed tapes that not only featured racist remarks, but conversations around schemes to set future elections to favor or hurt certain council members, through redistricting.

Raman’s 2024 re-election was considered a big test given that, with the make-up of her district having changed, she was partially running a new race for City Council in which she was trying to earn the votes of a different electorate — one that has more homeowners. The latest primary results appears to underscore the resilience of that earlier recent victory.

Meanwhile, the political and policy leanings of renters and homeowners can be starkly dissimilar on some of the most polarizing issues in the city right now. What is considered conventional political wisdom for a homeowner electorate diverges from that of a renter electorate. A USC LABarometer survey from 2024 found that renters tend to support affordable housing and public housing construction, more so than homeowners. Meanwhile, homeowners are more supportive of encampment sweeps than renters tend to be.

The idea that renters prefer Raman is kind of a big takeaway in a mayoral race context. Los Angeles is majority renters. And Raman was initially elected to council on the strength of a renter electorate. Los Angeles’ politics though, has long revolved around a political discourse aimed at a homeowner electorate.

Mitchell teased on Wednesday that he’s working on a tool that can break down the demographics voted, including ones that breaks out the renter demographic. For example, renters tended to prefer Nithya Raman in the LA mayor’s race, with 46% of that group voting for her, versus the 27% who went for Karen Bass. Mitchell says that this tool “will have the data on all the LA County races, and will build out to other counties as well. Will have maps of results, regression analysis and ecological inference to look at.”

A few more things for today… A half-cent sales tax measure to raise revenue for the Los Angeles Fire Department just qualified enough signatures to be placed on the ballot… the LA City Ethics Commission released its quarterly report on lobbying activity, which includes $16 million in lobbyist spending. The report also provides information on lobbyist spending in the recent LA city races, include contributions by lobbyists and groups they’re lobbying on behalf of, that were made to the election campaign of Mayor Karen Bass in the mayor’s race… Mariel Garza of Golden State chats with Republican strategist Mike Madrid about the recent accusations of election rigging in California and Los Angeles’s elections… Mike Bonin, executive director of the Pat Brown Institute and a former LA City Council member, has a new podcast episode of “What’s Next Los Angeles” in which he talks about the recent election results, with segments on Controller Kenneth Mejia’s “landslide re-election victory” and LA County Registrar-Recorder Dean Logan’s thoughts on ballot counting and election integrity… and Alissa Walker of Torched continues to deliver the news on the SoFi stadium workers’ labor deal, which has been ratified and includes a $40 per hour wage.