horvath

Good morning, and welcome to L.A. on the Record — our City Hall newsletter. It’s David Zahniser, giving you the latest on city and county government.

It wasn’t that long ago that the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority was the place to be — at least, if you were a local politician.

L.A. Mayor Karen Bass put herself on the agency’s 10-member board in 2023, saying direct oversight would help her confront the region’s homelessness crisis. L.A. County Supervisors Lindsey Horvath and Kathryn Barger joined that year as well.

Those who follow local politics — and the travails of the region’s beleaguered homeless agency — know what happened next.

Barger left the board, comprised of city and county representatives, after a single year. Horvath lasted two. Both spearheaded the effort to shift more than $300 million out of LAHSA and into a new county homelessness department, saying they had lost confidence in the agency.

On Wednesday, Bass finally stepped down too, offering the latest and perhaps most crucial sign that LAHSA’s days could be numbered.

Bass, now in a tough reelection fight, portrayed her resignation partly as a scheduling issue, saying she recently became chair of the board that oversees the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

But Bass also said she has concluded that the city needs direct control over homeless services, replacing the joint city-county governance structure that has existed for three decades.

“To me, it is not functional at this point,” the mayor told reporters on Wednesday.

Bass was in fact Metro’s board chair when she joined LAHSA three years ago, juggling the two roles. But things are different now. LAHSA, long a subject of criticism, is under attack from all sides.

The Trump administration has spent months trying to strip LAHSA of its federal funding. Federal court battles have highlighted weak oversight at the agency. L.A. City Council members have voiced renewed frustration with LAHSA’s handling of the yearly homeless count. All of this follows years of critical news coverage and unflattering audits.

Paul Rubenstein, a LAHSA spokesperson, said the agency remains focused on its work — moving unhoused Angelenos indoors, managing public funds and “ensuring transparency and accountability across our rehousing system.”

Bass and her opponent in the mayor’s race, City Councilmember Nithya Raman, tried without success last year to dissuade county officials from pulling their funding out of LAHSA. At the time, they sent a letter telling the supervisors they were “going backwards into a silo.”

Now, LAHSA’s core responsibilities are up for grabs. County officials plan to compete for those duties, including management of the homeless count.

Bass and Raman want the city to compete as well. Asked this week if that process spells the end of the homeless agency, Raman hedged a bit.

“I don’t know what moment will be the death knell of LAHSA,” Raman said. “What I am saying right now is that the city … should be able to take greater control over the dollars that we are investing.”

Bass said Friday that she can envision a scenario where LAHSA continues to exist but is much, much smaller.

“Our $300 million would stay within the city,” she said.

Traci Park unloads on Raman

Raman has been taking her campaign to Pacific Palisades, talking to residents about her recovery plan for the community, which was devastated by the January 2025 wildfire. During one recent appearance, she told an audience that the city has let them down.

“I don’t want to let you down. I feel an urgency to show up,” she said.

That appearance — and Raman’s social media posts on the issue — drew a testy response last week from Councilmember Traci Park, who represents the Palisades. Appearing on KFI’s The John Kobylt Show, Park said Raman never spoke with her one on one about the disaster or what her constituents needed in the aftermath.

Park said she had council members tour the burn area with her early on, to help them understand what would be required during the recovery. Although most of her colleagues took her up on that offer, Raman did not, Park said.

“The Palisades have been through enough,” Park said. “They don’t need politicians discovering their suffering, and the challenges they’re dealing with, only when it becomes politically useful.”

Raman, through a campaign spokesperson, said she did tour the Palisades both before and after launching her mayoral bid — and signed on to multiple council motions dealing with wildfire prevention and disaster recovery.

In a statement, Raman also offered praise for Park, saying she has “worked tirelessly to support the rebuilding of the Palisades.”

“As mayor, I’ll be the strongest partner to her and Palisades residents to help them rebuild and return home as quickly as possible,” Raman said.

Park remains the only council member who has not endorsed in the mayor’s race. Thirteen others are backing Bass.

Dueling controllers unite for Raman

Raman has picked up endorsements from something of a political odd couple: two city controllers who have not always had kind things to say about each other.

City Controller Kenneth Mejia, who recently won reelection, stood with Raman in Chinatown on Wednesday as she called for L.A.’s nonprofit homeless providers to be paid based on their success rates.

A day later, Raman appeared in the San Fernando Valley with former City Controller Laura Chick as the two spoke out against the city’s $2.6-billion upgrade of the Convention Center.

The back-to-back appearances brought back memories. Chick had tough words for Mejia back in 2022, calling him “unfit for public office.” She pointed to his tweets calling then-President Joe Biden a rapist and a racist, and his decision to pose for a photo with a poster of Hillary Clinton photoshopped to look like she was behind bars in an orange prison jumpsuit.

Mejia responded by blasting Chick, a former City Council member, as a career politician who recycled lies and “exaggerated attacks.”

Chick, who served as controller from 2001 to 2009, went after Mejia again this year, endorsing his opponent, real estate executive Zach Sokoloff, in the run-up to the June 2 primary. This time, she said Mejia was not producing enough reports to fulfill his office’s watchdog role.

In many ways, Chick was the Mejia of her day, railing against the status quo and turning a spotlight on the city’s shortcomings, drawing the ire of other elected officials.

So could the Raman campaign bring about a detente between the two?

Chick, in an interview, said she hasn’t spoken with Mejia but would gladly take his call. She said she wishes him well now that he has another four years in office.

“I think she’s trying to get us together,” Chick said, referring to Raman.

Chick said she’s hoping that Raman, as mayor, will receive “lots of vigorous audits” from the controller and then implement the findings.

“I yearned for a mayor, as city controller, that I could turn to and say, ‘Here. Here are the findings of my audit. Please do something about it.’ She’ll have that with Mejia,” Chick said.

We should point out that Bass has picked up support from at least two former city controllers: Rick Tuttle, who served from 1985 to 2001, and Wendy Greuel, a former city councilmember who succeeded Chick in 2009.

State of play

— STICKER SHOCK: A long-promised makeover of the Veteran Administration’s historic Building 13 in West L.A. will create 24 units of housing for homeless veterans, at an estimated cost of $1.25 million per apartment. “It must be one of the most unaffordable projects ever undertaken,” said Bobby Shriver, the former Santa Monica mayor.

— LINEAGE LAWSUIT: Lineage, whose cold storage warehouse recently burned down in Boyle Heights, leaving behind the stench of rotting meat, said in a new lawsuit that a company that operated a solar array on the building’s roof is to blame for the fire. Altus Power, the solar company, said it would fight the allegations in court.

— BOTHERED BY BUSES: Business owners in Eagle Rock are worried about a dedicated bus lane coming to Colorado Boulevard — and the potential impact on customer visits.

— SETTING A SCHEDULE: The City Council voted this week to draft legal language that would require fast-food restaurants to give employees notice of their work schedules at least two weeks in advance. The move would build on an existing city ordinance that currently applies to retail employees at large companies.

— BACKING A BILL: Hollywood film and TV post production workers stood with Bass and Assemblymember Nick Schultz (D-Burbank) on Thursday, urging Gov. Gavin Newsom to sign a bill that would create the state’s first standalone post-production tax incentive.

— LIFE AFTER PRATT: Bass or Raman for mayor? In Spencer Pratt’s Pacific Palisades, some say that’s no choice at all.

QUICK HITS

• Where is Inside Safe? The mayor’s signature program to address homelessness went to Skid Row, an area represented by Councilmember Ysabel Jurado.
• On the docket next week: A House subcommittee holds a hearing Tuesday to discuss waste and fraud in L.A. County’s homelessness response system — one that won’t be attended by Bass.

Stay in touch

That’s it for this week! Send your questions, comments and gossip to LAontheRecord@latimes.com. Did a friend forward you this email? Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Saturday morning.

Good morning, and welcome to L.A. on the Record — our City Hall newsletter. It’s David Zahniser, with an assist from Sandra McDonald and Noah Goldberg, giving you the latest on city and county government.

Los Angeles City Councilmember Nithya Raman is waiting to hear whether she has secured a prize coveted by many of the city’s left-of-center candidates: an endorsement from the Democratic Socialists of America.

Earlier this year, the DSA’s Los Angeles chapter took up the idea for the June 2 primary, only to decide against it. They made that decision after hours of debate, all under the watchful eyes of local reporters. The group later recommended Raman in its June 2 voter guide, but that didn’t give her access to the DSA’s vaunted get-out-the-vote apparatus, which goes only to endorsed candidates.

This time around, endorsement discussions for the Nov. 3 runoff were held behind closed doors, followed by an online vote now under way. But the debate has been playing out publicly on a somewhat obscure platform: Geese magazine, which bills itself as “a daily review of American Communism.”

Contributors to that online publication — which declares on its website “We answer to no one” — have been going back and forth for weeks over whether the DSA should endorse Raman, a DSA member herself, in her campaign to unseat Mayor Karen Bass.

Things got rolling on Aug. 11, when Geese posted a 4,400-word essay supporting a DSA endorsement of Raman, arguing that such a move could “open the floodgates for socialism in Los Angeles.”

The four writers, DSA-LA members themselves, conceded that Raman is “no Zohran” — a reference to New York City’s charismatic DSA mayor, Zohran Mamdami. They acknowledged that she’s had a sometimes turbulent relationship with the group, which endorsed her council campaigns in 2020 and 2024 but also censured her at one point, in part because she accepted an endorsement from a pro-Israel group.

Still, the essayists praised her work on homelessness and tenant protections. And they commended her for seeking greater cooperation with the organization in recent months, hiring DSA-LA members to lead her campaign.

“What this signals is that with a DSA-LA endorsement, we may anticipate more constructive collaboration with the Nithya campaign going forward,” the group wrote.

Not so fast, argued another group of Geese contributors. On Monday, those five writers — also DSA-LA members — panned the idea of an endorsement, saying Raman hasn’t earned it.

These writers assailed Raman for voting to confirm former Sheriff Jim McDonnell as Los Angeles police chief and for seeking a rewrite of Measure ULA, the so-called mansion tax, which she views as an impediment to housing production. The authors also portrayed her as woefully out of touch with the DSA on Israel’s war in Gaza.

“If we endorse Raman, a candidate who lacks the inspirational leadership and collaborative political relationship that forms the foundation of a strong DSA endorsement, we risk spending the next four years managing the consequences; explaining, defending, and organizing around the shortcomings of a mayor who was never meaningfully accountable to our democratic socialist movement in the first place,” the group wrote.

Two days later, third Geese essay showed up, arguing that Raman is “the nerd that can dig our city out of this crisis.” That piece sought to rebut some of the criticism contained in the previous essay, while conceding that Raman can be “overly fixated on details, slightly thin-skinned, obtuse, and argumentative.”

“But let’s not forget that Nithya also has a long list of positive attributes as well: she is an exceptional administrator — reducing homelessness in her district by 49% through careful service provision,” the group wrote, anointing her as “Our Pothole Populist.”

A fourth piece, also pro-Raman, posted Friday. Meanwhile, Bass has not emerged unscathed during the back-and-forth.

Geese’s contributors criticized Bass for refusing to let City Controller Kenneth Mejia audit her Inside Safe homelessness program, saying she showed a “disregard for democratic processes.” They assailed her over her handling of the Palisades fire, the Lineage fire, police spending and other issues.

The pro-Raman rebuttal piece had some of the harshest language, accusing Bass, who made many trips to Cuba earlier in her life, of being “puppeted by business interests, landlords, the more reactionary segment of labor, and a smattering of liberal NGOs.”

Bass has not sought the DSA’s backing, either in the primary or the runoff. But she does have endorsements from the council’s other three DSA members.

Raman needs to win 60% of the vote to secure the endorsement. More than 6,000 chapter members have received emails with online ballots.

Monday is the last day to vote.

Tracking Traci Park

City Councilmember Traci Park represents a Westside district that runs along the coast. But that didn’t stop her from heading to Sherman Oaks for the raucous Aug. 19 mayoral debate.

Her appearance in the audience immediately sparked questions. Was she trying to make a decision on whether to weigh in on the mayor’s race?

After all, Park is the only council member who has not publicly picked a horse. Thirteen of the council’s 15 members have come out for Bass. (Raman also endorsed Bass at one point, but then jumped into the race at the last minute.)

Park has made clear she is no political ally of Raman, diverging on such issues as the city’s anti-encampment law. Still, an endorsement of Bass could pose risks.

Park represents the Pacific Palisades, where residents have sharply criticized Bass over her handling of the Palisades fire, which destroyed thousands of homes and left 12 people dead.

On Friday, Park declined to say whether she plans to endorse, saying she simply wanted to “hear what both candidates have to say.”

“It was a mayoral debate. I’m a City Council member, taxpayer, and resident,” she said in a statement. “The progress we’ve made on the Westside is at stake.”

Back to school for Mazariegos

It’s supposed to be a little like traffic school — but instead of learning to drive more safely, you learn to run a by-the-book political campaign.

Community organizer Estuardo Mazariegos, who is running to replace City Councilmember Curren Price in a South Los Angeles district, is now enrolled. He agreed to take a seven module, roughly three-hour class on the state’s campaign finance laws to resolve a complaint filed with the Fair Political Practices Commission, said Jesse Alson-Milkman, a strategist for the campaign.

That complaint accused Mazariegos of failing to pay for community space during at least six “postcarding party” events held by his council campaign at Mercado La Paloma. The complaint was filed by Josh Rothstein, a member of the Mid City West Neighborhood Council, who says he submitted the paperwork in his own capacity.

Mazariegos is on leave as co-director of the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, which hosts its corporate office at Mercado La Paloma. That facility charges for certain types of meeting space, yet Mazariegos’ spending report initially showed no payments or in-kind donations for such costs, Rothstein said.

Alson-Milkman said five of the postcarding events were held at the market’s public dining area, so no payment or in-kind donation was needed.

The campaign did have a sixth event where it rented a room for two and a half hours, Alson-Milkman said. But the invoice for $137.50 was lost, he said, delaying payment for months.

The FPPC concluded the violation can be remedied without an enforcement action or financial penalty by having Mazariegos take a Political Reform Education Program, or PREP class, Alson-Milkman said.

The class was created by the FPPC to help candidates who commit minor violations to avoid getting “a mark on their record” — or a financial penalty.

State of play

— CRUNCHING THE NUMBERS: We’ve told you in recent weeks about issues surrounding the Homeless Count: the failure to count a 600-bed homeless shelter in 2024 and 2025, which may have skewed this year’s numbers, and the wildly diverging numbers in Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson’s South L.A. district. On Wednesday, the council instructed the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority to report back on some of the discrepancies.

— VENDORS VEXED: Bass has ordered the LAPD to stop issuing criminal citations to street vendors and remove any that were erroneously issued. The mayor’s office took that step after learning that citations were being incorrectly handed to vendors in MacArthur Park, a situation reported by LA Public Press. The street vending issue has been a flashpoint in the mayor’s race in recent weeks.

— UNDER THE MICROSCOPE: With the mayor’s race heating up, Raman’s record on homelessness has come under fresh scrutiny, particularly her time overseeing the council’s housing and homelessness committee. Raman has touted her work in identifying less expensive strategies for tackling the crisis. Critics say her tenure as chair hasn’t adequately met the moment.

— AUDITING THE GAMES: Mejia, the city controller, called on LA28, the committee organizing the 2028 Summer Olympic Games, to turn over reports on its finances. Mejia said the private committee has fully complied with only two out of nine requirements of its contract with the city. The controller issued his statement on the same day that several lawmakers called on Trump to provide much-needed transportation funding for the event.

— NO IFS, AND OR PHENIBUTS: The City Council instructed the city attorney to regulate phenibut, a drug that’s available at gas stations and being abused as a nervous system depressant. The regulations would include warning labels, a prohibition on sales to people under 21 and a ban on sales near schools and daycare centers.

— WHISTLE BLOWER SPEAKS: The police officer who recorded his colleagues making racist remarks told The Times that the LAPD “ruined my life.” Council members had been planning to formally condemn Dist. Atty. Nathan Hochman over his filing of 16 felony counts against Officer Daniel Flores. But they shelved that plan on Tuesday after those charges were reduced to misdemeanors.

— PROGRAMMING NOTE: Our newsletter will be going dark for the Labor Day holiday weekend. We’ll see you again on Sept. 12.

QUICK HITS

• Where is Inside Safe? The mayor’s signature homelessness program went to the Westside, focusing on an area around Venice Boulevard and Glendon Avenue, which is represented by Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky.
• On the docket next week: As we mentioned previously, the DSA will wrap up its endorsement vote in the mayor’s race.

Stay in touch

That’s it for this week! Send your questions, comments and gossip to LAontheRecord@latimes.com. Did a friend forward you this email? Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Saturday morning.

“Karen Bass decisively won the debate.”

She was “an assassin,” a “very skilled politician” who “made mincemeat of Nithya throughout the debate, both stylistically and substantively.”

If you think that assessment came from a Bass supporter, think again.

The words come from none other than Spencer Pratt, the erstwhile mayoral candidate, a Republican who routinely referred to Bass as Basura (that’s trash in Spanish) during the primary campaign.

There was no mention of Basura in Pratt’s Substack recap of Wednesday night’s debate before the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Assn. To be sure, his post was titled “Surviving the Dumb and Dumber Debate,” but even so Pratt praised the mayor’s performance against Councilmember Nithya Raman.

Not that he was thrilled by the prospect of four more years with Mayor Bass, however.

“A Karen Bass Mayorship is depressing,” he wrote. “A Nithya Raman Mayorship is terrifying.”

Pratt suggested Bass was borrowing from his own playbook, citing her comments saying street vendors shouldn’t be on the sidewalk outside restaurants and her call for the long-term involuntary hospitalization of people on the street who pose a threat to themselves. Bass herself said that backing involuntary hospitalization was a “controversial thing to say.”

Pratt didn’t respond to a text from The Times about whether he was considering endorsing the mayor in the runoff.

Bass is likely to welcome conservative voters during the Nov. 3 general election as she faces off with Raman, who is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.

And it’s not just Pratt who seems to be leaning toward Bass from the right.

Rick Caruso, who ran against Bass in 2022, referred to her as a “very good partner” when he recently celebrated the reopening of his Palisades Village shopping center. He didn’t respond to a request for comment.

In The Heights

Raman traveled to Boyle Heights Monday to join activists calling for Lineage to leave the neighborhood after the devastating fire at the company’s warehouse in June.

It wasn’t Raman’s first visit to Boyle Heights since the blaze, but it was her first public appearance and news conference.

“Lineage shouldn’t be permitted to open this warehouse again,” Raman said to cheers from the crowd.

Bass followed suit Thursday, after Lineage blew past its own self-imposed deadline for cleanup.

They “do not deserve to rebuild,” Bass said in a statement, while also calling on city lawyers to pursue litigation, a lien and other legal options for cost recovery against Lineage. Bass had already ordered the company’s building permits delayed at the end of July.

Raman was joined at the news conference by Eastside Padres Contra la Privatización and the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment — a group that has endorsed her — to call for the closure of the facility.

Raman also called for Lineage to pay for Boyle Heights residents’ healthcare, for environmental testing, cleaning and relocation assistance, lost wages and more.

“Families and taxpayers should not be left with the bill when a corporation runs up the tab,” she said.

Raman’s news conference appeared to draw the ire of at least one council colleague, Ysabel Jurado — who represents Boyle Heights.

Jurado didn’t mention Raman by name, but after winning council support for a motion Wednesday continuing the state of emergency in Boyle Heights, she thanked her colleagues who called and texted before they “did a press conference about the issue.”

Jurado spokesperson Mason Santa Maria declined to say whether the remark was directed at Raman. Raman spokesperson Liz Garcia said Raman was invited to the presser.

Jurado, who has endorsed Bass, did not attend.

No shows at H&H

Raman has been outspoken about her removal from the chairmanship of the council’s housing and homelessness committee, suggesting she is being punished by Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson for challenging Bass.

Harris-Dawson rejects that narrative, saying the committee needed a chair who can focus undivided attention on the crisis.

Raman doesn’t officially lose that post until the end of the month. So on Wednesday, she was still listed as chair of the committee’s 2 p.m. meeting. But she wasn’t there, and neither were two of her colleagues.

Councilmember Bob Blumenfield took the gavel instead, delaying the session until 3 p.m. in the hope that a third member would show up to join him and Councilmember Tim McOsker, giving the committee a quorum.

An hour later, Blumenfield came back.

“This meeting is going to have to be canceled for today,” he told the audience. “So I apologize for making you wait.”

Raman spokesperson Stella Stahl, in an email, said her boss already had other plans, with the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Assn. debate happening later that same day.

“At the time, Nithya was near Sherman Oaks and had pre-planned campaign activities in advance of the mayoral debate,” Stahl said.

Stahl said the committee had a “last-minute cancellation from a council member who was expected to attend,” but didn’t provide a name.

Jurado, who takes over as chair of the newly renamed homelessness and health committee next month, also wasn’t there. Her spokesperson said Raman’s team was told the previous week that Jurado had a personal matter and couldn’t attend.

Devyn Bakewell, a spokesperson for Councilmember Heather Hutt, said her boss let Raman know Wednesday morning that she would not make it to committee due to a family issue.

The committee won’t meet again until next month. Raman will remain on the panel.

State of play

— SHAM SURVEY: The Times broke the story of the faked poll in the Los Angeles mayor’s race that purported to show Bass leading Raman by around 12 percentage points. The poll was faked as a “social experiment,” according to Median Strategies Polling, the group behind the fake survey. The creator of the fake poll revealed himself to the Guardian on Thursday as 21-year-old Rahil Prakash.

— FLIP IT AND REVERSE IT: The Los Angeles City Council has rescinded camping bans on a dozen locations in Hollywood, Echo Park and Silver Lake at the urging of the area’s council member, Hugo Soto-Martínez, who called the bans ineffective in addressing homelessness.

— THE RUMBLE IN THE VALLEY: Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and City Councilmember Nithya Raman slammed each other Wednesday over their handling of homelessness, public safety and many other issues during the first face-to-face debate of the Nov. 3 election campaign.

— THE BEST LANE PLANS: A long-running dispute between cemeteries and bike-lane and safe streets advocates in the San Fernando Valley has escalated to become a campaign issue in the Los Angeles mayoral race.

— LIGHTS, CAMERA, INACTION: Despite improvements to the state’s tax incentive program, Los Angeles and California continue to struggle to keep movies, television series and even game shows from fleeing elsewhere. Production levels have failed to bounce back since the pandemic and the labor strikes by writers and actors, and they remain at historic lows.

— HEALTH WOES: Hundreds of Boyle Heights residents suffered health problems after a fire at a cold storage facility burned stubbornly for days, including respiratory infections, eye disorders and persistent cough, according to a new study.

QUICK HITS

• Where is Inside Safe? This week the mayor’s signature program was in Eunisses Hernandez’s district in Westlake, where it moved 37 people indoors from Ocean View Avenue and Lake Street.
• On the docket next week: After a Saturday meeting, the Democratic Socialists of America will vote next week on whether to endorse Raman for mayor.

Stay in touch

That’s it for this week! Send your questions, comments and gossip to LAontheRecord@latimes.com. Did a friend forward you this email? Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Saturday morning.