harris-dawson

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass has reached an agreement with City Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson to find the money to reverse the cuts to police hiring made last month by the council.

On Friday, Bass signed the 2025-26 budget approved by the council, which reworked much of her plan for closing a $1-billion shortfall. Among the council’s changes to the mayor’s spending plan was a reduction in the number of police officers hired in the coming fiscal year, which would drop from 480 to 240.

The following day, as part of her signing announcement, the mayor highlighted the separate deal with Harris-Dawson to ensure that “council leadership will identify funds for an additional 240 recruits within 90 days.” The budget year begins July 1.

The money for the additional officers would be allocated within the 90-day deadline, said Bass spokesperson Zach Seidl.

“No one got everything they wanted,” Harris-Dawson said in a statement. “There is still more work ahead, especially our commitment to work with the Mayor to identify the funds for an additional 240 recruits within 90 days.”

Restoring the 240 police recruits would require the council to free up an additional $13.3 million for the coming year. In 2026-27, the cost of those officers — who would be working their first full year — would grow to about $60 million, according to a city estimate.

Bass proposed a budget in April that called for laying off about 1,600 civilian city workers, one-fourth of them at the LAPD. The council voted last month to reduce the layoff number to around 700, in part by scaling back the mayor’s hiring plans at the LAPD and the Los Angeles Fire Department.

During their deliberations, council members said a slowdown in the hiring of police officers would protect the jobs of other workers at the LAPD, including civilian specialists who handle DNA rape kits, fingerprint analysis and other investigative tasks.

Bass, in her statement, thanked the council for “coming together on this deal as we work together to make Los Angeles safer for all.” She said the budget invests in emergency response, homeless services, street repairs, parks, libraries and other programs.

“This budget has been delivered under extremely difficult conditions — uncertainty from Washington, the explosion of liability payments, unexpected rising costs and lower than expected revenues,” she said.

During the budget deliberations, Bass voiced dismay about slowing down recruitment at the LAPD. In recent days, she had weighed whether to veto all or a portion of the budget, which could have led to a messy showdown with the council.

The council voted 12 to 3 to approve the reworked budget proposal last month. Because only 10 votes are needed to override a veto, Bass would have had to secure at least three additional votes in support of her position on police hiring.

Whether Harris-Dawson has the support of his colleagues to find the money — and then spend it on police hiring — is unclear. Unless the city’s labor unions make financial concessions, the council would likely need to either tap the city’s reserve fund or pull money from other spending obligations, such as legal payouts or existing city programs.

The budget provides funding for six classes with up to 40 recruits each at the Police Academy over the coming fiscal year. Bass had originally sought double that number, providing the department with 480 recruits.

Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky, who chairs the council’s budget committee, said she shares the mayor’s goal of restoring LAPD recruit classes — and looks forward to “working with her to make it happen.”

“The question has always been how to do it in a way that is fiscally responsible and sustainable,” Yaroslavsky said.

To increase police hiring and eliminate the remaining 700 layoffs, the council will need to turn to the city’s labor unions for additional savings, Yaroslavsky said.

The council’s budget provided enough funding to ensure the LAPD has 8,399 officers by June 30, 2026, the end of the next fiscal year. The $13.3 million sought by Bass would bring the number of officers to more than 8,600.

The LAPD had 8,746 officers in mid-May, down from about 10,000 in 2020, according to department figures.

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass has come under heavy scrutiny for deleting the text messages she sent during the region’s disastrous January firestorms.

But she wasn’t the only elected official expunging her correspondence during those history-making days.

L.A. County Supervisor Kathryn Barger, who represents the area devastated by the Eaton fire, also routinely deletes her text messages, her spokesperson said.

“Supervisor Barger’s iPhone auto-delete setting is set to 30 days. She also manually deletes her texts sometimes,” Barger spokesperson Helen Chavez Garcia said last month.

The Times filed a public records request for Barger’s communications with Bass from Jan. 7 through late February. Barger’s office provided no written communications in response, despite Barger having publicly said that she was texting with Bass late into the night on Jan. 7, while Bass was in transit back to the city after a diplomatic trip to Ghana.

The other four supervisors — Lindsey Horvath, Hilda Solis, Holly Mitchell and Janice Hahn — do not use the auto-delete function on their phones, according to their spokespeople.

Chavez Garcia said in an email that there is “no pre-determined method that the Supervisor applies when selecting which messages to manually delete.”

Constance Farrell, a spokesperson for Horvath, said her understanding was that county officials were supposed to retain their text messages for two years to comply with the county’s record retention policy. Horvath’s office released some of her text messages in February after a Times public records request. The messages showed the supervisor sparring with Bass during the fires.

The county record retention guidelines make no mention of text messages but say that routine “administrative records” are supposed to be kept for two years.

The board’s executive office said the public record act applies to text messages, though some may be exempt from disclosure.

“Whether a supervisor’s text is a public record depends on whether it is a text regarding the conduct of the peoples’ business,” Steven Hernandez, the chief deputy for the executive office, said in a statement.

According to county policy, employees must sign an agreement every year acknowledging that all electronic communications, such as emails or instant messages, sent on county devices are the property of the county.

Bass previously kept her phone on a 30-day auto-delete setting, far shorter than the two-year retention period outlined in the city’s administrative code.

However, after being pressed by The Times, which had filed public records requests for the mayor’s correspondence during the Palisades fire, Bass’ office said it was able to recover the deleted messages using “specialized technology.”

(The Times sued the city in March over the mayor’s texts. Even though city officials ultimately provided some texts, The Times is contesting the city’s argument that releasing them was not required under state law.)

It also remains unclear whether Los Angeles City Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson, who was filling in as acting mayor in Bass’ stead when the fires broke out, deleted his text messages from that time period.

After The Times filed a public records request seeking correspondence that Harris-Dawson sent to Bass or received from her between Jan. 6 and Jan. 16, Harris-Dawson’s office said it had “no responsive records.”

Harris-Dawson’s office did not respond to repeated questions over the course of several months about why there was no correspondence and whether it had been deleted.

“It’s very disappointing to see that that practice has spilled over up the street [to the County]. I was hoping it was just L.A. City Hall shenanigans and the absurdities of our two big leaders,” said Unrig LA founder Rob Quan, referring to Bass and Harris-Dawson.

Quan, who leads a transparency-focused good-government advocacy group, said he believed proper recordkeeping from January was all the more important given the historic importance of the fires.