What’s happening today?
LA city leaders told not to waste the public’s time on charter reform, in latest ‘charter review’ endeavor
LA city leaders were back at it with yet another attempt at revamping the city charter, but they encountered wary members of the public on Wednesday who said they did not want their time wasted again.
At the first meeting of the Ad Hoc Committee on Charter Review, Jason Enright, an organizer with LA Forward, told the panel’s members — who are City Council members — that volunteers took many hours out of their lives to attend and speak at earlier meetings of their predecessors on Charter Reform Commission and subsequent meetings on the matter. Many of them pushed for things like police accountability and expanding the City Council to make the panel more responsive to people. There is some mistrust that this panel had been truly set up to accomplish anything real, he told them.
“We just really want to make sure that you are going to take this all seriously,” Enright said. “There’s a perception among the public that there were a lot of items that were sort of kicked down the road to be killed… and it seems like for political reasons, this committee was created as an effort to kill those reforms [such as police accountability and council expansion]. We’re looking at all of you to prove that public perception wrong.”
The Ad Hoc Comittee on Charter Review, which is tasked with reviewing proposals to place on the November 2028 ballot, had planned to take up a number of topics at its 8:30 a.m. meeting today, but they were allotted only an hour and a half to meet before they needed to clear out for the City Council meeting at 10 a.m. The first hour or so was devoted to hearing public comment, many similar to that of Enright’s, in which people urged the panel to take up specific issues – such as lowering the voting age, police accountability, and implementing ranked choice voting – but also urged the panel to do serious work on those proposals this time around.
Kat Hartman, who had chaired a committee of neighborhood council members that read the 52,000 page charter word-for-word and red-lined changes to it before presenting their proposal to the prior charter reform panel, the Charter Reform Commission, noted in her comment that city leaders only ended up making one small change to capitalize the words Neighborhood Council in the charter, while promising to make other changes in the ordinance, which doesn’t require going to voters to make happen.
“Council member [Nithya] Raman said we should keep track of the items that could be handled by ordinances,” Hartman said. “Did you?”
The committee also heard some opening remarks from each council member, before then hearing a presentation from governance expert and scholar Raphe Sonenshein on the last round of major charter reform changes made in the late 1990s. Sonenshein was executive director of one of two commissions set up in the late 1990s that developed the current language of the charter that voters approved. After that, the ad hoc committee ran out of time and had to turn the room over to the full 15-member City Council to meet. You can catch the full ad hoc committee meeting here.
What just happened?
LA County budget adjusted up to $54.2 billion — that’s bigger than the budget of many states, and LA city too
The LA County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday adopted changes that adjusted this year’s budget to $54.2 billion, which is more than three times the size of the $14.85 billion budget that LA city adopted earlier this year. But some people still think LA city is a much bigger deal, according to LA County Supervisor Hilda Solis, who chairs a five-member elected body that leads the county government.
“Our budget is phenomenal and people quite honestly don’t understand,” Solis said at Tuesday’s board meeting. “ They think the city [of Los Angeles] is larger than we are. They still do. They think that. But our budget is $54 billion.”
The under-estimation of LA County’s size didn’t stop there. “People say, ‘Well, aren’t you just a commissioner?’” Solis continued. “I go, ‘Depends on who you’re talking to, because our budget is bigger than so many states – 42. And I like to brag and say that my colleagues – all women by the way, that blows them away, still blows them away – we represent, each, 2 million people. And I laugh because many U.S. senators have less than 670,000 people in their jurisdiction.”
Solis said all this just before she and her colleagues adopted a series of changes to the budget they had already approved in June for this fiscal year, from July 1 until next June 30. This budget has been hampered not only by an avalanche of sexual assault related lawsuits that were filed under AB 218 (a bill that lengthened the statute of limitations to allowed people to file assault claims later than usual), and the Trump Administration’s ongoing cutbacks and restrictions on health and social safety net services. But some also noted that the budget had grown quite a bit while they were themselves serving on the board, with some such as Supervisor Janice Hahn noting that the budget was around $30 billion when she first started serving in her seat in 2017.
As Solis reflected on the size of the county’s budget Tuesday, she is also in the midst of running to fill a Congressional seat this November representing the 38th District that was redrawn along with others in California, under Proposition 50, which aims to give Democrats a leg up in Congress. Solis had the opportunity to run for another term on the Board of Supervisors, but opted against it in order to take on representing the redrawn Congressional seat. (Maria Elena Durazo, a state Senator who has also been a prominent labor leader, won the election in June to replace Solis.) Supporters of the Proposition 50 district redrawing plan have described it as an “opportunity to fight back against the Republican cuts to healthcare, the rising cost of living under tariffs, and the cruel abductions and forced removals of immigrants.”
According to County CEO Joe Nicchitta, LA County’s supplemental budget changes that went before the board on Tuesday are part of the “final” phase of the county’s annual budget routine, and it comes “after we have closed the books on our last fiscal year.” This is an opportunity to budget in any additional dollars that went unspent the prior year or to allocate any new funds from federal state and other sources, he said. This is a chance to “make new investments and approve department requests that were deferred in earlier budget phases,” he said. Some major funding adjustments recommended, and adopted, on Tuesday, included money for public defenders, the closure of men’s central jail, rent relief programs and homeless services
The budget that the board adopted increases what they had planned in June to spend, by $3.9 billion, to the now $54.2 billion. Nicchitta said that increase includes $2 billion in one-time funds that were unspent in the previous year. There are also several hundred million more dollars from state, federal and other sources, as well as from belt-tightening measures they have been doing over the last year. He noted though that this is not a “typical year,” largely referencing the strains from the AB 218 sexual assault legal claims and the Trump Administration’s policies that directly affect LA County services. Even with the additional funds, Nicchitta and others noted that there are still many unmet needs in the county’s departments, which he says have been are under “intense” financial restraints.
The supervisors on Tuesday approved the recommended adjustments as Nicchitta and other departments presented them without making any major amendments. Anyone interested in reviewing what they were presented with and then adopted, can read this report from the CEO’s Office, and get an “at-a-glance” overview of the supplemental budget adjustments here. The slides Nicchitta used on Tuesday are here.
A few other things…
LA mayoral candidates Nithya Raman and Karen Bass’s responses on the topic of the Gaza genocide and the BDS movement at the 2026 Jewish Los Angeles Mayoral Forum set LA politics watchers abuzz Tuesday night. It was the most prominent discussion of the topic in the LA mayor’s race, which is for a seat that isn’t normally associated with policy that affects Israel and Palestine. But the issue is still personally important to many community members who vote in local elections. Raman reiterated her acknowledgment of Israel’s actions in Gaza as a genocide, something she originally stated on a live stream with Hasan Piker. Bass meanwhile, said she does not view what’s been happening in Gaza as a genocide, while noting that she grew up in the Jewish community and saying she went to “Jewish schools.” Her friends, she says, have parents and grandparents who are Holocaust survivors. And Raman responded to a question about the BDS movement, which calls for boycotting and disinvesting in interests in Israel, by saying she supports it as a form of protest. Louis Keene, a correspondent with The Forward, shared some of the key responses, with video showing how the audience responded, throughout the night. You can view the entirety of the mayoral forum here.
The Board of Supervisors on Tuesday voted to confirm the Governance Reform Task Force’s appointment of Michael Woo to be among the three initial members of what will eventually be the county’s new 7-person Ethics Commission. Woo is a former LA City Council member who happened to have been part of the effort to place a ballot measure that created LA city’s Ethics Commission in 1990.
City Attorney candidate Marissa Roy, known for running trivia game nights, rolled that talent into raising money for her campaign during a trivia night at Lawless Brewery in North Hollywood on Tuesday night.