What’s happening today?
Nithya Raman secures the support of LA County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, who had considered ousting Mayor Karen Bass
Los Angeles City Council member Nithya Raman rolled out an endorsement this morning from Los Angeles County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, for her bid to mayor, just as the city and county are in the middle of fighting each other for control of powerful homeless services roles.
That testy relationship between the city and county was likely on the mind of Raman when she noted at a news conference at Grand Park (an LA County park) across from LA City Hall, that she counts Horvath as a friend, even as they disagree on some things. And on homelessness, they may not be in agreement, at least for now.
Horvath, who had previously flirted with running for the role of LA city mayor herself, is the architect of a new county homeless services department that has played a part in dismantling a 30-year-old partnership with the city of LA under the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, a joint powers authority. That agency has increasingly come under fire for how it has handled its contracts and other affairs, and it’s now expected to shut its operations in a year. This revamping of homeless services, with the power shifting toward the county, has caused LA city leaders to worry about their own control over the situation, and Raman is among those who voiced frustrations.
During the Q&A with reporters, Raman referenced the at-odds relationship between the city and county, which is reflected especially in LA city now exploring legal options to try to force negotiations to wrest for itself some powerful roles. She said that’s an “outcome of the discussion so far that comes from a lack of partnership between the city and county to actually flesh out the details that matter.”
“One of the issues that matters so much for the issue of homelessness is trust,” Raman said. “Trust from the voters to our homeless services, trust from our voters to the city and our county’s response. But also trust between the city and the county. To build that trust requires engagement, requires work, requires hashing out the details. I’m willing to do that work. So is Lindsey Horvath. And I’m delighted to do that work for the betterment of the system going forward.”
Horvath, for her part, said there’s been a “change of pace” lately in which the city and county have been having conversations. She said that those talks will allow them to “figure out what partnership can look like, what the city needs, what the county needs, and how we can work together to make sure we’re solving this crisis for the entire region.”
Earlier this year, Horvath put weeks of speculation to rest when she announced she was sticking with running for another term in her county role, and that occurred when Horvath learned Raman was set to run for the role. Horvath’s role on homelessness, and her district’s overlap with the city with the Pacific Palisades, where the 2025 wildfires, has tested the city and county’s relationship, at least when it comes to her and the current LA city mayor, Karen Bass. Horvath, a former West Hollywood mayor and council member, and Bass had a falling out that bubbled to the surface amid the January 2025 wildfires in which the city and county needed to coordinate on the Pacific Palisades fire. And Horvath and Bass openly split over homelessness, with each engaging in sharply worded exchanges on social media, as Horvath sought to set up the LA county department.
However, homelessness is a topic that has long strained the relationship between LA county and city, beyond the current administrations of elected officials. Bass’s relationship has been more peaceful with other members, and she is endorsed by the four other members of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors.
LA county watchdog panel was set to discuss a need for independent legal counsel on subpoenas of Sheriff’s Department ‘use of force’ records
The Los Angeles County Sheriff Civilian Oversight Commission is meeting at 9 a.m., and they’re expected to take up a long-running dispute between this watchdog panel and the Sheriff’s Department over getting unredacted records about a trio of investigations into “use of force” by deputies, including one that resulted in a death.
Voters approved Measure R in 2020 to give the oversight panel subpoena power, but the use of this authority has hit some roadblocks, including with the sheriff’s deputy union arguing the subpoenas affect their members’ work and require “meet and confer” consultation with their labor union. In a recent ruling in litigation over this issue, a judge wrote that resolving this disagreement over whether to consult the sheriff’s deputy union on the subpoenas needs to be taken up later.
In the meantime, the commission faces another roadblock in which LA County’s in-house legal team, which is called County Counsel, is simultaneously the entity pushing back against the panel’s subpoena efforts even as they are supposed to represent the panel to enforce subpoenas. This kind of conflict means the Sheriff Civilian Oversight Commission could benefit from independent counsel, but according to the ruling, the court can’t order county officials to appoint outside counsel for the watchdog panel. County Counsel could choose to make this happen, though, and if they don’t do it, then the Board of Supervisors, the state legislature or the state bar could also ensure the oversight panel got outside counsel.
Also on the civilian oversight commission’s agenda is a recent Rosas Settlement report in which the court’s panel on pages 24-26, disagreed with the Sheriff’s department on two in-custody deaths as being the result of “reasonable” use of force. Rather, the report says, “video evidence shows the force used was preventable and that the force used did not comply with the Agreement.”
You can watch the Sheriff’s Civilian Oversight Commission’s meeting here.
Also happening in the county today… The Board of Supervisors was meetingat 9:30 a.m. (supplemental agenda), and they’re getting a report on the state of Black Los Angeles. They’re also getting the Governance Reform Task Force’s recommendations on the elected county executive and the 120-hour agenda posting requirement – both of which were approved by voters under Measure G. There are also items related to a permanent supportive housing building in East LA, less restrictive juvenile justice programs, a memorandum of understanding with the Puente Hills Habitat Preservation Authority that manages 23 miles of trails in the Puente Hills area, a proposal to hire a chaplain who will work on creating programs that support “specialized populations, such as the re-entry population and individuals experiencing homelessness,” and a proposed policy on consulting local tribes.
LA city leaders to get the latest on the spendy LA Convention Center project, set to take up the Axon automated license plate camera agreement; LA city police commissioners getting hate crime stats, LAPD mental health unit presentation
The Los Angeles City Council was meeting at 10 a.m., and they were set to take up a motion to revive an earthquake retrofitting program in order to get an update, motions related to streamlining the city’s process for dealing with “nuisance” buildings, a motion related to e-bicycles on bike paths at parks including speed limits, and a couple of items on closing up parks after hours.
The City Council’s Budget and Finance Committee is meeting at 2 p.m., and they’re set to take up litigation by someone who alleges they were hit in the head with a 40 mm round fired by an LAPD officer during an ICE protest, a report on purchasing LAPD vehicles for the upcoming Olympics, and an update on the Los Angeles Convention Center project.
The City Council’s Public Safety Committee is meeting at 2:15 p.m. and they’re taking up a three-month pilot with Axon to try out automated license plate cameras on light posts.
Los Angeles city’s Board of Police Commissioners, which oversees the Los Angeles Police Department, was meeting at 9:30 a.m. and set to take up a report on body worn cameras, a presentation from the LAPD mental health unit, and hate crime statistics.
What just happened?
Light rail construction finally gets going on Van Nuys Boulevard in the East San Fernando Valley
Metro did a groundbreaking event on Monday to mark the start of construction for a new 6.7 mile light rail line along Van Nuys Boulevard, a north-south route that will eventually take people between Van Nuys Civic Center and San Fernando Road in Pacoima and near Arleta. It was held at the Van Nuys Civic Center.
This route will eventually have 11 stations, and according to this fact sheet, it’s anticipated to be completed by 2032. Although according to this article by Steve Scauzillo of the LA Daily News, they may have moved that anticipated completion date to 2031. Mayor Karen Bass and Supervisor Lindsey Horvath joined a gaggle of other officials to mark this milestone. Colleen Shalby of the LA Times writes that she did not get a response from officials as to why the project was delayed from its earlier anticipated start date of 2021 and is now $4 billion rather than $1.3 billion.
One of the key connections to this line will be off of the Van Nuys Civic Center stop along the G Line bus rapid transit route, which in turn is connected to the B Line subway route (formerly known as the Red Line) that then takes people out to the rest of the Metro rail system. The last time there was a light rail in the San Fernando Valley was in 1952, when the Red Car shut down, Scauzillo of the LA Daily News writes. This all comes after Skanska USA was awarded a $2.43 billion contract in August. There are actually plans to keep building beyond San Fernando Road in Pacoima, up into the city of San Fernando, which would add a couple more stops and miles to the line and get people connected to the Metrolink station in Sylmar.
Metro’s press release offers up a statistic that 19% of people who live around this line don’t own a car so depend solely on public transit. Also, construction work to move aside some water, communications and electrical lines actually began in 2024.
Nithya Raman offers a plan to get a better handle on LADWP rates
City Council member Nithya Raman, as part of her campaign for LA mayor, presented a plan on Monday for better monitoring LADWP rates, after ratepayers recently received bill amounts the size of a mortgage payment.
Raman says she wants to do an audit in partnership with Kenneth Mejia and the ratepayer advocate. She also notes that the LA City Council actually hadn’t updated the water and power rate schedule for a decade.
The increases that have now been causing sticker shock with ratepayers, Raman said at a news conference Monday, have been due to the wiggle room built into that rate schedule when it was adopted.
“These rates were designed for fluctuating costs, such as the cost of purchasing fuel for power plants or the cost of buying imported water from outside the city,” Raman said. “These adjustment factors were supposed to be a small portion of your bill, but under this mayor, these hidden charges now make up more than two-thirds of the full cost that ratepayers are paying. It did not used to be that way, so the mayor’s appointees at DWP are overseeing a process through which rates are being raised 40 percent through what feels like a loophole.”
Mejia, who has been fielding requests to investigate the bills, joined Raman at this event held outside an LADWP yard in North Hollywood, to discuss his plan to do an audit.
Mayor Karen Bass’s campaign initially responded to Raman’s plan with a link to an NBC Los Angeles story about the Los Angeles City Council adopting an increase in trash fees last year. Those fees are listed on the LADWP bill and are part of Angelenos’ overall utility costs, but those rates are set by the LA Sanitation Department, which is separate from the LADWP and the commission that Raman cited as overseeing water and power rates.
Bass’s campaign spokesperson Alex Stack told The LA Reporter that the current mayor has offered up financial assistance and other programs to address the affordability of LADWP bills. The LA Reporter asked about Raman’s contention that there is a loophole that is contributing to the spike in the water and power portion of the bill, but did not immediately receive a response to that. The LA Reporter also reached out to the mayor’s non-campaign staff for additional details, but did not get an immediate response until mid-day Tuesday when Bass released a statement saying that “Angelenos need swift relief, and I am taking concrete action to provide it.”
Bass’s statement said that LADWP customers will be able to “just pay what they can afford now. Second, I have asked the LADWP Board to pause shutoffs through the end of the year for customers facing higher bills after the record heat. No LADWP customer who is unable to pay their residential bill will have their electricity or water turned off for the remainder of this year. Third, beginning next month, LADWP will provide every residential customer with information about their electricity and water usage, to improve awareness of how they use utilities and how they can conserve. LADWP’s conservation programs can help permanently reduce usage and lower bills.” She also encourage people to take part in the “level pay” program that allows the bills to be averaged across 12 months.
Blanca Begert with The LA Times recently explored this LADWP bill spike, and in a couple of pertinent parts of the article, LADWP’s spokesperson Joe Ramallo told the paper that the utility bases its rate adjustments on costs before the billing, while the ratepayer advocate, Timothy O’Connor, noted that LADWP went above inflation this year. There was no mention though that the rate schedule adopted by the City Council a decade ago was for five years. This LA Daily News story by then-City Hall reporter, Dakota Smith, refers to the five-year span of the plan, as did my story and the LA Times’s story on the LADWP commission’s vote on it in January 2016.
LA city controller orders LA28 to cough up 2028 Olympics financial details owed to the city
Last Friday, Kenneth Mejia subpoenaed LA28, the private nonprofit that organizes the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles, to give up information about its finances that he said the group promised to give to the city under a 2021 contract. Mejia’s office says LA28 hasn’t been complying with that agreement and the “missing information includes comparisons of financial forecasts vs. actuals, bank statements, schedules and budgets for venues, the identity of contractors and the values and purpose of contracts.”
LA city leaders have become ever more frustrated by the amount of financial and contracting information LA28 has been willing to share with the city, and in early September, LA City Council members who are part of an ad hoc panel on Olympics planning raised concerns, including Katy Yaroslavsky, who serves as the council’s budget chair, wondering aloud if the LA 28 not producing more data might constitute a breach of contract. You can listen to Yaroslavsky ask about this during a meeting on Sept. 29. Sharon Tso, the chief legislative analyst. “It’s inadequate what’s been provided. It’s unacceptable.” Libby Rainey of LAist has stories on Mejia’s subpoena and that earlier meeting in which Yaroslavsky says LA28 might be in breach of contract.
And a few more things…
The New Yorker put out a story this weekend about how the DSA-LA’s endorsement of Nithya Raman came together. It looks at DSA’s trajectory on the west coast in the context of Nithya Raman’s campaign and it largely portrays it as a political home for people who would otherwise have “spent their lives as Democratic operatives or activists. But they had come to see the Democratic Party as careerist, cautious, and ideologically compromised, and what they were mostly trying to do was fashion a new political party within the Democrats—one that’s more self-directed and idealistic.”
The story happens to coincide with DSA’s national political committee taking up a petition to examine whether the Los Angeles chapter’s endorsement of Nithya Raman was properly done. At issue is whether DSA-LA violated rules by not asking Raman about her position on the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement (Raman has stated in other forums that the war in Gaza is a genocide and that she does not oppose the BDS movement — which isn’t necessarily support of the BDS movement, which is what DSA rules would have called for members to do in order to be endorsed). There’s some proposals that aim to expel Raman from DSA, but additional decisions that were set to be made on Monday, were postponed to next week (which is very close to the Nov. 3 election date), according to Peter Sterne of City and State NY, which happens to also have the rare DSA for Dummies guide.
Nithya Raman on Sunday did a cleanup on Avalon Boulevard in South LA with Juan Naula, who has built a large following on social media via his Clean LA With Me account by going out every day to do his part in picking up and throwing away trash on streets that the city has failed to address. Naula, who has invited candidates to join him for cleanups, says this was not meant as an endorsement in the mayoral race, and his call has also gone out to Raman’s opponent, Mayor Karen Bass. Naula told The LA Reporter he had something in the works with Bass on Monday, but Bass’s campaign did not immediately respond to confirm. The piling up of trash on city streets has been a problem for decades, going back at least to when LA Times investigative reporter Robert J. Lopez wrote about it in 2008. Naula gave The LA Reporter a simple formula for LA leaders to finally succeed at resolving this problem: “Do your job. Every day,” he said. He also said that there should be something done to discourage businesses from illegally dumping their trash because they want to avoid paying for fees at dumping sites — perhaps those fees could be reduced, he said. Meanwhile, Raman followed up her cleanup with Naula with this policy platform revolving around using data to target trash pick-up, setting up more conveniently located bulky item pickup sites and freeing up funding so they can “work across” departments.
Metro released their September ridership numbers showing that ridership was up 3.9% from the same month last year, with 27.281 million boardings. You can also find their ridership data here. The release also summarized some public safety data, including stat showing a 4,200% increase in citations “primarily for no proof of fare” from July 27 until Aug. 31, compared to the same period the prior year.
On Friday, Mayor Karen Bass joined immigrant rights advocates for a news conference about the recent ICE surge.
DTLA RA held a mayoral forum last Thursday, and you can catch up on their conversations with Mayor Karen Bass and City Council member Nithya Raman here.
The Los Angeles Housing Department’s general manager, Tiena Johnson Hall, recently said they hired on Christina Miller, Garcetti’s former homelessness deputy.
Alene Tchekmedyian of the LA Times reports that former firefighter union president Freddy Escobar was in an altercation with Jason Powell, a treasurer with the union, United Firefighters of Los Angeles City. Top LAFD union official accuses former president of battery.
And the question of whether Nithya Raman has friends at City Hall seems to be preoccupying a lot of our political reporters of late. They include David Zahniser and Noah Goldberg who point to Mejia as a rare ally for Raman. Both LA Material and Politico have offerings that look at the lack of endorsements from other City Council members.
Love the hed!