city council

The next Los Angeles City Councilmember to represent the West San Fernando Valley will either be a former small business owner backed by the Police Protective League or a career public-sector staffer who has racked up a long list of endorsements from unions and Democratic lawmakers.

Tim Gaspar, 44, founded an eponymous insurance agency in the Valley, which he sold in 2021and is now campaigning full time to win the Third District council seat, according to campaign spokesperson Haley Townes. He was the top vote-getter in the June 2 primary, garnering 46.1% of the vote.

Barri Worth Girvan, 43, was a close second with 42.5% of the vote. She is the director of community affairs for Los Angeles County Supervisor Lindsay Horvath and previously held staff positions with former L.A. mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and former Democratic state senator Bob Hertzberg.

The winner of the Nov. 3 runoff will replace termed-out council member Bob Blumenfield, who recently endorsed Gaspar, as did Christopher Celona, the third-place finisher in the primary.

“We feel like those are the endorsements that resonate with voters here,” Gaspar told a group of voters at a recent campaign event.

L.A. City Council Candidate Tim Gaspar speaks with Dr. Lawrence Kaplan during a Kids on the Spectrum Bowling League event at Lucky Strike Bowling Alley this month.

(Arwen Clemans/Los Angeles Times)

In an interview, Gaspar said the City Council could benefit from his business experience to counter members whose backgrounds are mostly in public policy or community organizing.

“They’re missing the business perspective,” he said. “Sometimes you need to do things that might be unpopular if it’s going to be something that benefits the greater good. A healthy economy is the tide that raises all ships.”

L.A. City Council Barri Worth Girvan chats wth LAPD Capt. Rudy Lopez while greeting voters during a recent neighborhood National Night Out event in Canoga Park’s Lanark Park.

(Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times)

Worth Girvan, by contrast, says her years of experience in the public sector will ensure that she can best navigate City Hall to advocate for the district’s interests.

“Delivering core city services is my bread and butter,” she said in an interview. “If your trash isn’t picked up, if your trees aren’t trimmed, if your street lights aren’t working, if you pick up the phone to call 911 and nobody responds, then not only is your neighborhood not safe, but your city is not working for you.”

Gaspar has a huge lead in fund-raising, reporting more than $180,000 in donations to his runoff campaign through June 30, compared with about $31,000 for Worth Girvan.

In addition, companies and special interests including Airbnb, Uber, the California Apartment Association, the L.A. Police Protective League and IBEW Local 18 spent $1.39 million through independent expenditure committees in the primary race.

Airbnb spokeswoman Nicolette Velasquez said the candidates it backs, including Gaspar, are in favor of expanding short-term rental policies to allow homeowners to supplement their income by renting out their homes. Hotel companies and the unions representing hotel workers oppose such expanding the short-term rental market out of existing housing stock.

Worth Girvan asserts that her second-place finish in June was effectively “a virtual tie” given all the money companies and others spent to back Gaspar.

“We were massively outspent with that kind of money, but the voters clearly spoke, and we’re expecting an even broader electorate in the general,” she said.

Tim Gaspar outside the Lucky Strike Bowling Alley.

(Arwen Clemans/Los Angeles Times)

Gaspar’s contributors in the runoff include billionaire developer Rick Caruso and the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce.

Worth Girvan has picked up donations from state Assemblyman Mark Gonzalez (D-Boyle Heights), former Democratic state Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon and former Los Angeles City Council member David Ryu, according to her filing.

She also touts endorsements from a long list of Democratic lawmakers, including state Sen. Ben Allen (D-Santa Monica) and Rep. Luz Rivas (D-North Hollywood)., and has strong backing from labor including the local chapters of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and the Service Employees International Union and the including the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor.

“Barri was a clear choice for us,” said Devin Osiri, Chief of Staff at the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor. “Our unions have actually worked with her at all three levels of government. Her reputation, her professional resume from the Valley and her personal story are just more reflective of the LA Federation of Labor.”

The two candidates differ on housing policy.

Barri Worth Girvan meets voters at the National Night Out event in Canoga Park’s Lanark Park.

(Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times)

Worth Girvan said she supports more housing development, particularly near transit lines, saying the West Valley “needs to do our part” to scale up construction and bring housing prices down.

Gaspar said District 3 is already doing its part to bring in new housing development in areas like Warner Center, and remains skeptical of increasing density in single-family home neighborhoods.

He opposes rent control and some of the city’s current tenant protections, and said at the campaign event that he has a “zero tolerance policy” for homeless encampments.

Both candidates say public safety is their top priority, and they support expanding the Los Angeles Police Department.

Benjamin Bycel, a civil rights attorney, law school dean and university president who took on the task of cleaning up Los Angeles politics as the city’s first ethics officer, died Aug. 2 in Santa Barbara. He was 84.

His son, Josh Bycel, said the death was due to complications from Parkinson’s disease.

Born in Brooklyn in 1942, Bycel moved to Huntington Park when he was 5. The son of a boxing manager and a teacher, he spent much of his childhood accompanying his father to downtown boxing gyms and the Olympic Auditorium. After graduating from Huntington Park High School, he earned a master’s in history from San José State University.

Bycel served with the Peace Corps in Uganda, taught at Manual Arts High School in L.A. and reported for the Associated Press in New York. As a law student at UC Davis, he was a press aide for San Francisco Mayor George Moscone’s campaign for governor of California.

After earning his law degree, Bycel worked as an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union in Sacramento. As a civil rights lawyer in Santa Barbara, he successfully argued a landmark California Supreme Court case, which upheld the right of adults unrelated by blood, marriage or adoption to live together as a family. In 1986, Bycel took on the role of dean for the Santa Barbara and Ventura Colleges of Law, helping steer the ship after the former dean was accused of misappropriating funds.

Five years later, he took on his most high-profile role as founding director of the Los Angeles Ethics Commission.

The Times called it “a Herculean task.” The commission was created in 1990 after a wave of political corruption scandals engulfed Mayor Tom Bradley’s administration. When the City Council initially declined to pass tough anti-corruption laws, voters overwhelmingly passed Proposition H to create an independent watchdog tasked with enforcing a tough new set of regulations governing city officials’ conduct.

“The idea of getting paid to reform the system and make it better is a thrill,” Bycel told The Times when he was selected. He vowed not to “conduct any witch hunts.”

There was controversy from the get-go. In the commission’s first year, The Times reported, investigators raided the offices of City Attorney James K. Hahn after getting a tip that city workers were engaged in political activities. When the district attorney later dropped the investigation, citing lack of evidence, Hahn publicly condemned Bycel.

Zev Yaroslavsky, a former L.A. politician who served then as a City Council member representing district 5, said the new ethics role represented a “dramatic, profound cultural change in municipal government.” Bycel, he said, rose to the occasion.

“Institutionally, he was a new power, a new person with influence over the vitals of elected officialdom, and I thought he did an excellent job,” Yaroslavsky said, noting that Bycel did not go in with guns blazing. “He was very judicious and even-handed and he gave the new institutional credibility out of the starting gate.”

Still, some complained Bycel was a publicity hound, and he made powerful enemies. In 1995, Bycel told The Times that he feared for his job: Mayor Richard Riordan’s new appointee as the ethics commission president, UCLA law lecturer Raquelle de la Rocha, he said, had told him that she had decided he should be fired. De la Rocha denied his claim, but said that she had called a closed personnel hearing on Bycel’s status.

A few weeks later, the commission fired Bycel, taking a vote in closed session. They refused to say why.

“Though outspoken and at times overly aggressive, Bycel has made an important contribution to political reform here in Los Angeles,” The Times said in an editorial. “Under his tenure, the commission staff has worked rigorously to enforce the toughest local ethics laws in the nation, including a gift ban and restrictions on lobbyists.”

Josh Bycel said his father reveled in the challenge of cleaning up L.A. politics and was frustrated by his abrupt ouster.

“Even though he felt he made great progress and they were doing good things, I think he felt that the job was not done … There were forces that did not want him to do the job.”

In 1997, Bycel was appointed president of the University of West Los Angeles, and in 2001 he moved to Washington to serve as the vice president of Common Cause, the national advocacy group. Later, he served as the executive director of the Connecticut Office of State Ethics before moving back to Santa Barbara to practice law.

Bycel died at a memory center in Santa Barbara he had moved into just a few weeks earlier, Josh Bycel said. He was surrounded by his beloved longtime partner, children, grandchildren and dog, he said, in a room filled with photos and quotes of his longtime hero, boxing champion, Muhammad Ali.

“For good or for bad, my dad was a fighter and someone who would speak his mind,” Josh Bycel said, noting that was probably what got him in trouble at the ethics commission. “He always believed that you had to fight the righteous fight.”

Los Angeles mayoral candidate Nithya Raman is expected to lose her leadership role on the L.A. City Council’s Housing and Homelessness Committee, which she has chaired since 2023, according to people familiar with the situation.

Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson is planning to announce this week that the committee will be split into a housing committee and a homelessness committee — neither of which will be led by Raman, the people said.

Harris-Dawson is a close ally of Mayor Karen Bass, whom Raman is challenging for re-election. He declined to comment.

“It’s hard to imagine that it’s not related to politics. The timing of it would be too much of a coincidence,” said Zev Yaroslavsky, a former Los Angeles City Councilmember and Los Angeles County supervisor who now serves as chair of the Los Angeles Initiative at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs.

Raman’s campaign didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the impending shakeup, which was reported earlier by the California Post.

The move comes at a pivotal moment in the mayor’s race on homelessness.

The city’s unsheltered homeless population increased this year after two straight years of decreases, the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority reported last month.

While the citywide number has increased, the number of homeless people living on the street in Raman’s district decreased by 49%, a fact she has touted as she challenges Bass.

Raman and Bass have presented starkly different takes regarding the situation citywide and in Raman’s district.

The mayor has posited that her signature program, Inside Safe, which addresses homeless encampments by moving homeless individuals into temporary housing, was largely responsible for the drop in Raman’s district and that federal and state budget cuts partially led to the increase citywide.

She also attacked Raman’s performance as the chair of the Housing and Homelessness Committee.

“While Raman takes credit for the City’s work in her district, ignoring the fact that she’s the Chair of the Homelessness & Housing Committee for ALL of Los Angeles, Mayor Bass is working to move our city forward and address years of neglect,” said Bass’ campaign spokesperson Alex Stack in a statement last month about the homeless numbers.

Raman claimed that there have only been three Inside Safe operations in her district and that her committee has been stifled by inaction from the mayor.

“Council can pass legislation… move motions forward, but it is the mayor that has charge of the implementation and outcomes, she said at a press conference last month.

An effort to exempt new apartment buildings in Los Angeles from the so-called mansion tax moved forward Wednesday, amid concerns that the tax is suppressing housing construction and making the affordability crisis worse.

In a 9 to 5 vote, the City Council directed the City Attorney to draft a ballot measure that would ask voters to change Measure ULA, which funds subsidized housing construction and homeless prevention efforts by taxing nearly all property sales over $5.3 million.

Once the proposal is drafted, it must come back to council for a final approval to make it onto the November ballot.

Wednesday was the deadline for the council to take the vote and stay on track to make the ballot this fall, said Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky, who introduced the proposal along with Councilmember Tim McOsker.

“We should protect what is working and fix what’s not,” Yaroslavsky told colleagues before the vote. “If we fail to act today, that door closes.”

The ULA tax, approved by voters in 2022, is known as the mansion tax but applies a 4% tax to nearly all properties — whether they are mansions or not — if they sell for more than $5.3 million, increasing to 5.5% for sales at or above $10.6 million.

Under the proposed ballot measure, the ULA tax wouldn’t apply to multifamily buildings sold within 10 years of construction. There would also be some more technical changes put before voters, including to allow ULA money to be spent on temporary housing for homeless people.

Since ULA passed, apartment construction in Los Angeles has plummeted. Some studies have found that the additional tax on property sales has played a big role in the drop-off by adding extra costs for developers.

That’s led to fears that the tax, in some ways, is making the affordability crisis worse by suppressing new supply.

A coalition of business groups and pro-development activists have been pushing the council to amend ULA, in part hoping that the effort will blunt another possible measure on November’s ballot that would cancel ULA and other similar taxes altogether.

ULA supporters, however, have fought the exemption for new construction and say that other factors — like high interest rates — are the reasons for the multi-year construction drop-off. They also point to a surge in new building during the first three months of this year to argue that it’s too early to know ULA’s long-term impact.

Also on Wednesday, the council, in a unanimous vote, directed the City Attorney to draft a separate ballot measure that would exempt homeowners impacted by the Palisades fire from paying the ULA tax for five years, retroactive to Jan. 7, 2025.

“ULA has been an impediment to the Palisades recovery, leaving properties sitting empty and people mired in tax and regulatory hell,” City Councilmember Traci Park, who represents Pacific Palisades, told colleagues before the vote. “We need to move forward with this exemption.”

Similar to the broader ULA changes, the Palisades changes must receive a second council approval to make the ballot.

More than a day after polls closed, voters still hadn’t learned which two candidates would run off in the November general election for dozens of races.

Many significant races are still too close to call. In the race for governor, Republican Steve Hilton and Democrat Xavier Becerra held leads, with Democrat Tom Steyer and Republican Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco trailing. Former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, San José Mayor Matt Mahan and former Rep. Katie Porter conceded the race Tuesday night.

The Associated Press surveys the numbers posted by local election officials and projects the winner using vote returns and other data. Races can be called within minutes of polls closing on election night. However, if a race has tight margins or an high expected volume of mail-in ballots, it can take longer to call.

In some cases, such as for L.A. mayor and state treasurer, the tight race is between second and third place.

In California’s primary, the top two vote-getters move on to the general election regardless of candidate pool size, party preference, or whether one candidate receives a majority of votes. Locally and in nonpartisan races, however, a candidate can avoid the November election if they win with a majority.

Statewide

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State Assembly

Congress

Almost half of California’s 52 U.S. House of Representatives seats had known finalists on election night. But in tight races such as the Republican vs. Republican competition in the 40th District and the Democrats’ challenging of Republican Rep. David Valadao in a redrawn 22nd District, the top two vote-getters weren’t yet known.

Local

In Los Angeles County, there were still 27 races with uncertain results. The Times considers uncertain races those where no candidate has a majority or where the vote share for the top two is between 55% and 40%. The Associated Press does not call winners for most local races, such as city councils, city officers and ballot measures. If no candidate wins with a majority, the top two will face off in November. That could be the case for the sheriff and L.A. City Council’s 3rd District.

The L.A. County registrar will continue to count and confirm mailed-in, provisional and conditional ballots until June 26. Updates to the results charts below are expected approximately once a day in the early evening.

Close city races

Voters can track their own cast ballot here.

The secretary of state will certify results in early July.

Elections in the city of Los Angeles include mayor, City Council, three ballot measures and Los Angeles Unified School District board seats and, if you live in the city, you’ve maybe seen an ad about them.

The high-profile competition between incumbent Mayor Karen Bass, City Councilmember Nithya Raman and conservative reality star Spencer Pratt has been tumultuous. And that is to say nothing of Rae Huang, Adam Miller and the nine others contenders.

With leaked files, millions in campaign fundraising donated by a candidate’s mother, and a multi-campaign effort by L.A.’s chapter of Democratic Socialists of America, the race for mayor isn’t the only one making headlines this primary.

A candidate can win by getting a majority of the vote. If no one receives 50% + 1 vote, the top two advance to the November election.

Mayor

The Associated Press, which surveys the numbers posted by local election officials and projects the winner using vote returns and other data, will call a winner (or a runoff) for L.A. mayor.

City Council

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