L.A

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

Los Angeles voters have finally gotten some closure on the outstanding contests in the June 2 primary election, with City Councilmember Nithya Raman qualifying for the runoff against Mayor Karen Bass, and Measure ER, the countywide sales tax hike, prevailing after a week of ballot counting.

With nearly all the votes counted, Angelenos are now getting a more granular understanding of the strongholds built up by each of the top three mayoral candidates.

Districts that went big for Bass, Raman and Pratt

Early on in the vote-counting process, it looked like Raman might not win her Hollywood Hills-based district, which stretches from Silver Lake to Reseda. In the end, she pulled out a first-place finish, securing nearly 34% of the vote compared to Bass’ 31%, according to Paul Mitchell, vice president of the voter data firm Political Data Inc, who aggregated county precinct data into council districts. Spencer Pratt, the former reality TV personality, trailed at 27%.

Still, Raman’s strongest support came from three districts on the eastern end of the city.

Mitchell’s analysis showed Raman with 45% of the vote in Council District 13, which includes all or parts of Echo Park, Hollywood and Atwater Village. She got nearly 40% in Council District 1, which takes in parts of Highland Park, Mt. Washington and Angeleno Heights. And she scored nearly 38% of the vote in Council District 14, which includes downtown, Boyle Heights and El Sereno.

Those districts are represented by Hugo Soto–Martínez, Eunisses Hernandez and Ysabel Jurado, respectively — all members of Democratic Socialists of America, who all endorsed Bass instead of Raman, a DSA member herself. Raman placed first in all three.

Bass found her greatest strength in the three districts that cover South L.A., coming in first in all three. Her best performance was in District 8, represented by Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson, where she led with nearly 62% of the vote.

The mayor received 45% of the vote in Council District 10, which stretches from Koreatown to the Crenshaw Corridor, and 42% in Council District 9, which stretches from the southern edge of downtown south to 95th Street.

Pratt performed the strongest in the west San Fernando Valley. He was the top vote-getter in District 12, which is represented by Councilmember John Lee and includes Chatsworth, Granada Hills and Porter Ranch. In that district, he received 39% of the vote, Mitchell’s assessment showed.

Pratt got nearly 37% of the vote in District 3, which is represented by Councilmember Bob Blumenfield and includes Woodland Hills, Warner Center and Canoga Park.

Pratt also led the pack in the 5th District, which takes up much of the Westside and is represented by Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky. He had 30.7% of the vote, compared to Raman’s 30.6%, according to Mitchell’s analysis.

Nithya Raman attacks the L.A. ‘political machine’

It was one of tougher attacks of the mayoral primary: Raman accused Bass of engaging in “pay to play” — making decisions that benefited certain interest groups, who then spent big on her reeelection.

At her first post-election press conference Wednesday, Raman revisited that line of attack, criticizing Bass over her push to upgrade the city’s Convention Center. That $2.6 billion project was approved in the middle of the city’s financial crisis, when the council was contemplating major job cuts, Raman said.

“Downtown business groups then spent over a million dollars supporting her in her reelection. Meanwhile, the city went back to voters asking them to pay more to fix their streetlights. That is the political machine at work,” she said.

Pay to play was a potent issue in the 2005 election, when Mayor James Hahn was defeated by Councilmember Antonio Villaraigosa. At the time, federal agencies had opened corruption investigations into decisions at the city’s harbor and airports, as well as the Department of Water and Power. That year, the phrase “pay to play” was synonymous with criminal wrongdoing.

In a video acknowledging his primary defeat, Pratt said he got into the mayor’s race to “expose this corrupt machine.”

Raman stopped short of such a framing.

“It’s not corruption,” Raman told reporters at Vista Hermosa Park. “But it is evidence that the system, and how it works, particularly the influence of money in politics, has led to some very broken priorities here in the city.”

Last year, policy analysts warned the Convention Center project would be a financial drag from the moment it opens, consuming more than $100 million per year throughout the 2030s. Business groups and labor organizations pushed back, saying the project would help revitalize downtown while creating much needed construction jobs.

The Central City Assn., a downtown-based business group that supported the Convention Center upgrade, spent about $1.6 million on efforts to reelect Bass.

“Nithya Raman doesn’t think we need more jobs or visitors to our hotels and restaurants that produce the tax revenues downtown generates for the entire city, so it’s hard to support her,” said Central City Assn. President and Chief Executive Officer Nella McOsker in a statement.

Bass spokesperson Alex Stack also pushed back on Raman’s criticism, saying the mayor has been with “every group and industry to deliver results for Angelenos.”

“Nithya Raman can’t get anything done and then attacks the same groups she sought to endorse her campaign,” he said.

Pratt trailed Trump among L.A. voters

As a mayoral candidate, Pratt was dogged by questions about whether he was MAGA — shorthand for the movement that first powered President Trump into office in 2016. The Republican had received fulsome praise from Trump-aligned figures, including podcast host Joe Rogan and Greg Gutfield of Fox News.

Pratt downplayed his GOP ties. Still, there’s one area where he definitely had some similarity with Trump: His performance with L.A. voters.

Trump and Pratt both picked up roughly one out of every four votes in L.A. during their respective campaigns.

Pratt, former star of MTV’s “The Hills,” had 25.5% of the vote in L.A., according to results posted Friday. In November 2024, Trump did a little better, receiving 26.5%, county election results show.

Trump had 369,319 votes in L.A. two years ago, compared to 976,781 for then-Vice President Kamala Harris. By Friday, Pratt had 217,638 votes, compared to 247,242 for Raman and 292,115 for Bass.

It might not be fair to compare Pratt and Trump, given that there were key differences between the elections. Pratt was competing in a primary campaign, while Trump was in a general election. The candidate pool was different as well.

Trump was running in a six-way contest where Harris was his main rival. Pratt, on the other hand, was in a race featuring 13 other candidates.

Although two-thirds of those candidates were complete unknowns, four of Pratt’s rivals ran serious campaigns, amassing endorsements and spending significant amounts of money.

State of play

— TRUMP VS. LAHSA: The Trump Administration moved Thursday to block the embattled Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority from receiving federal funds, saying the agency was badly managed and engaged in fraud. Elected officials across the city denounced the move, while nonprofit groups also voiced alarm. “This is intended to create chaos,” said Jerry Jones, the head of the Greater LA Coalition on Homelessness, which represents groups that serve the region’s unhoused.

— PAYOUT PROBE: Dist. Atty. Nathan Hochman said Wednesday that he believes four out of every five claims in the largest sex abuse settlement in U.S. history — one that resulted in a $4 billion payout by Los Angeles County— may be fake. Hochman has asked a judge to pause the sex abuse payments while he continues his criminal investigation into the plaintiffs, lawyers and therapists involved in filing the claims.

— GET READY TO RUMBLE: The showdown between Bass and Raman is going to get ugly, political experts said this week, in part because they agree on a number of big-picture political issues. Both will need to court at least some of the disaffected voters who picked Pratt in the primary.

— A SCATHING SENDOFF: As we mentioned higher up, Pratt released a video Friday that was both an acknowledgment of his primary election defeat and a vitriolic screed against Bass and Raman, his former rivals. Pratt called them “morons,” “commie animals” and “corrupt communists,” and made clear he intends to ramp up his attacks in the coming months. “I don’t have campaign laws hamstringing me now. It’s war,” he said.

— WOOING LATINOS: Bass carried far more Latino-majority neighborhoods than her rivals in last week’s primary, a Times analysis found. She carried 35 Latino-majority neighborhoods, including Boyle Heights, Pacoima and Historic South-Central. That was a 46% increase from 2022, when she won 24 Latino-majority neighborhoods in her primary against Rick Caruso and Kevin de León, the analysis found.

— EKING OUT A WIN: The countywide sales tax hike known as Measure ER prevailed this week, with late-arriving ballots pushing the number of ‘yes’ votes just above 50%. “It’s a lifesaver to carry us through the storm we’re all in,” said County Supervisor Holly Mitchell, who led the push among her colleagues to get the measure on the ballot.

— AN EXPENSIVE FEE-FA: Bass was set to attend the U.S. opening game of the World Cup Friday at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood after being invited by FIFA, her office said. Still, Bass wasn’t exempt from the high ticket prices she criticized earlier this year. She paid $2,735 out of pocket for her ticket, a spokesperson said. On a related note, the mayor announced more than 100 “Kick it in the Park” events where Angelenos can watch World Cup games for free.

— MORE OF THE SAME: In a break with recent history, every council member who ran for reelection this year won their race. “People see what we’re doing, and they want us to keep fighting for them,” said Councilmember Tim McOsker, who won nearly three out of every four votes in his San Pedro-to-Watts district.

QUICK HITS

• Where is Inside Safe? The mayor’s signature program to address homelessness went to the area around 54th Street and Western Avenue, in the South L.A. district represented by Harris-Dawson.
• On the docket next week: The City Council meets Wednesday to take up a sprawling package of charter reform proposals, including a move to ranked-choice voting and a larger number of council members. Will the council send those ideas to voters or punt them for another two years? Stay tuned!

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.

First Assistant U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli — President Trump’s loyalist federal prosecutor in Los Angeles — has not been shy in recent days about his intention to ferret out voter fraud in California’s primary election and criminally charge those responsible.

He has announced that his office “has multiple election fraud investigations underway” in coordination with the FBI, urged Californians on social media to submit evidence of “potential election fraud” directly to his office, and said flatly he “will be charging some people” with election fraud — just as soon as California certifies its vote count and his office “can prove some of the allegations.”

Essayli’s public callouts and promises are highly unusual and in direct conflict with Justice Department guidance on ballot fraud investigations at the federal level, which states federal prosecutors should not publicly pursue such claims amid of vote counting.

The Justice Manual — which regulates the actions of federal prosecutors nationwide — says the department “should not engage in overt criminal investigative measures in matters involving alleged ballot fraud until the election in question has been concluded, its results certified, and all recounts and election contests concluded,” in part because doing so “runs the risk of chilling legitimate voting and campaign activities and of interjecting the investigation itself into ongoing campaigns and the adjudication of any ensuing election contest.”

Ciaran McEvoy, a spokesman for Essayli’s office, said neither Essayli nor the office had any comment.

Essayli has repeatedly acknowledged in other interviews that he has no evidence of widespread fraud that could sway the results of races, and he even shot down one prominent online conspiracy that falsely alleged Democratic cheating in the Los Angeles mayoral race.

But he has also pointed to more isolated instances of fraud as potentially indicative of bigger problems. He added that there’s no proof such rampant fraud isn’t occurring, partly because of resistance from California to a federal audit of its voter rolls.

Essayli’s remarks are part of a much wider battle to frame fraud in California as pivotal or not, in which Republicans cite individual instances of alleged fraud as evidence of some grand scheme by Democrats to steal the election from them, and Democrats — along with many elections experts — say there is no evidence that isolated crimes reflect fraud on a scale large enough to impact election outcomes.

His remarks have added fuel to baseless claims from Trump and other influential conservative voices that California’s elections have been poorly compromised by coordinated Democratic “cheating.” They have made Essayli one of the most prominent Trump administration figures in the nationwide debate around election integrity — which election experts expect to intensify ahead of November’s midterms.

A public campaign

Essayli has made his case in recent days on various alternative and right-wing news programs and podcasts, arguing that California’s slow process for counting votes had undermined public trust and needs to be audited.

On One America News Network, Essayli said his office has been “sounding the alarm on California’s election system” because it’s ripe for fraud.

“We believe that it has major vulnerabilities. We believe California does not have sufficient safeguards to make sure only eligible U.S. citizens are voting in elections in California, and that is why we’ve been demanding an audit of the California voter rolls,” he said.

On NewsNation with Chris Cuomo, Essayli said he doesn’t “care what the outcome of the election is,” but wants voters “to have confidence in the systems, and that the laws are being followed.”

“I guarantee you, when we do bring cases, we will have plenty of evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt, in a court of law — that is how we work,” he said.

On the podcast of conservative commentator Glenn Beck, Essayli said he was “prohibited from discussing ongoing investigations,” but that “election fraud is not a theory” but “a real thing” — noting his office recently secured a guilty plea from a woman who paid homeless people to register to vote.

He said California is “a fraudster’s paradise,” accused the state Legislature of “going out of their way to make it as easy as possible for people to commit fraud,” and repeated oft-cited complaints about California’s voter ID policies being lax, its universal mail ballot policies sending ballots to the wrong places, its ballot collection policies allowing “harvesting” and its voter rolls being “dirty,” or filled with ineligible voters.

Essayli said all of that makes his job “incredibly difficult,” because “California has removed the paper trail, they’ve removed the chain of custody, they’ve removed any meaningful way for us to basically have a forensic audit of where a ballot came from,” but that he will nonetheless be bringing election fraud charges in the next “one to two months.”

State and local elections officials in California have defended the state’s policies as facilitating voting by as many eligible voters as possible, which they say is more important than a quick count. They’ve said there are robust procedures in place to ensure ballots are cast fairly and counted accurately, and to identify any problems and audit the results.

Elections experts say instances of fraud do exist, both in California and everywhere else in the country, but that robust efforts in past years to investigate and identify widespread fraud that could sway an election — including by Trump and his lawyers but also outside organizations — have always failed.

Essayli’s efforts have drawn sharp criticism from elections experts, leading Democrats and former prosecutors in the office.

Justin Levitt, a Loyola Law School professor who studies elections and was a senior policy adviser on democracy and voting rights in the Biden White House, said what Essayli is doing — throwing out unspecified claims of fraud amid an ongoing election and before he has built a case — is “absolutely nuts” and “not a thing that real prosecutors do.”

Before the current administration, the “mantra” of federal prosecutors, he said, was that “you only hold a press conference about a not-yet-concluded investigation when the public is already aware of a large crime,” such as a mass shooting. “Absent that, you wait for the facts to come in, and you see whether there has been a legal violation, and then and only then do you issue a press release — usually hand in hand with an indictment or a conviction.”

In an election, Levitt said the standard is even higher, and “the ethos of a federal prosecutor should be to never become the story, and to never make the prosecutorial job itself an impact in the election you are investigating.”

In an MS NOW interview, Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), a former federal prosecutor in the L.A. office, blasted Essayli as wildly searching for fraud to please Trump — despite it and other efforts to please Trump, including on immigration, causing an exodus of experienced career prosecutors from the office.

Schiff said Essayli was “basically making a plea to the public: ‘Please send me evidence. I’m asserting there’s fraud. We don’t have evidence of it, but please send me something. I need to make the boss happy.’”

Another former prosecutor in the office, who requested anonymity to avoid retaliation, said Essayli is pursuing alleged election fraud cases as hard as he is only because “Trump told him to,” and he’s “constantly auditioning for a bigger D.C. job in case he gets kicked out of his current one.”

Essayli is not the U.S. attorney for Los Angeles — only the “first assistant” — because he has been unable to win confirmation from the U.S. Senate and has only remained in charge through a legal loophole.

Investigations in the works

It’s unclear what specific issues or incidents Essayli’s office is investigating.

Essayli has said his investigations so far lean toward individuals rather than networks, and he told the California Post that he would be investigating a report that thousands of people were registered to vote at homeless shelters with far fewer beds.

His office also looked into false claims that an election night ballot update in Los Angeles County include no votes for Spencer Pratt, the Republican candidate. He said his office “reviewed official county records” and determined the claim was false.

“My office will continue monitoring the election counting process and will follow the evidence wherever it leads,” he said.

One person involved in investigating the latter case was Assistant U.S. Atty. Robert Renner, who joined the office in March after previously serving as deputy general counsel for the Center for Individual Rights, a nonprofit Washington, D.C., law firm where he worked on lawsuits focused on conservative free-speech issues, according to his LinkedIn page.

A worker carries ballots at the Los Angeles County Ballot Processing Center.

(Eric Thayer / Los Angeles Times)

Renner, who referred questions to the office spokesperson, visited an L.A. County ballot processing center as part of the investigation, where he questioned election officials about the ballot update, according to a law enforcement source with knowledge of the situation who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.

Election officials have said their numbers were always correct and that the discrepancy was based on a one-minute lag in vote updates for Pratt by The Associated Press, which also confirmed the lag.

Renner also grilled election officials about whether or not post office officials had backdated postmarks on mail ballots sent after election day so they could still be counted, the source said.

Essayli’s elevation to the top prosecutor position in L.A. was part of a broader push by the Trump administration to fill key Justice Department roles with people loyal to the president and open to his election skepticism. Earlier this year, a Times investigation detailed how disgraced ex-L.A. County prosecutor Eric Neff was named “acting chief” of the Justice Department’s voting section.

Neff led a bungled election integrity case at the L.A. County district attorney’s office that was thrown out after an internal review revealed it hinged on the word of “Stop The Steal” activists who had pushed Trump’s discredited theory that the 2020 presidential election was “rigged.”

It was one of two election integrity cases Neff tried in his entire career before being elevated to the voting chief post by Asst. Atty. Gen. Harmeet Dhillon, another proud Trump loyalist from California.

Michael Sanchez, a spokesperson for Dean Logan, head of the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk, said the office has not received any formal document requests or investigation notices from Essayli’s office, only “routine questions about operations.”

What will come of Essayli’s investigations is also unclear. He will have to prove whatever allegations he makes in court — which he has repeatedly appeared to begrudge in recent interviews.

“Instead of putting the burden on the system to reassure the people [that] only legal citizens are voting, one person one vote is the law of the land, and the burden on the system to assure us that there’s integrity and we can believe in it,” he complained to Beck, “they’ve flipped it and now it’s on us to prove every allegation of fraud.”

More than any other artist in the 20th century, David Hockney defined Los Angeles in the public imagination. When he first arrived in January 1964, age 26, his mental image of the city had been forged not by art but by Hollywood movies, which he had watched as a young boy in Yorkshire, England. In later life, he often recollected the sharp-edged shadows cast by the Californian sunlight in movies such as Laurel and Hardy’s “Big Business.

Before he ever went to L.A., Hockney — who died Thursday at 88 — knew that he would love it. Writing about his first descent into the city, he recalled how “as I flew over San Bernardino and looked down — and saw the swimming pools and the houses and everything and the sun, I was more thrilled than I’ve ever been arriving at any other city, including New York.” By this time, the glamour of Hollywood had been compounded by other influences, including the homoerotic magazines that an American friend had given him at the Royal College of Art in London. Titles such as Physique Pictorial, published in L.A. by the pioneering “beefcake” photographer Bob Mizer, held out a promise of California as a paradise of rippling men and permanent sunshine. A darker, no less thrilling image of the city had arisen from Hockney’s reading of “City of Night,” the 1963 novel by John Rechy that tells the story of a hustler in the gay underworld of downtown L.A.

Los Angeles itself felt young to Hockney. He loved the light, the architecture, the sense of space and the sense of possibility — not least the possibility of greater sexual freedom. West Hollywood boasted a large gay bar, the Red Raven on Melrose Avenue, that was unlike anything he had found in London or New York. There was also the lure of the beach, with its pageant of sculpted physiques. Venice Beach struck him as a more body-beautiful version of London’s Portobello Road.

Before long, his work shifted from generic fantasies of the city (a young man showering in Beverly Hills, for instance) to vivid portrayals of its real-life pools, palm trees, architecture and people. American artists such as Edward Ruscha and Edward Kienholz were producing their own canonical images of L.A. in these years, but for Hockney, there were no artistic precedents — “no ghosts,” as he later put it — to live up to. “People then didn’t even know what it looked like,” he once said. “And when I was there, they were still finishing up some of the big freeways.… I suddenly thought: ‘My God, this place needs its Piranesi, Los Angeles could have a Piranesi, so here I am!’ ”

He was true to his word, even if his luminous, serene images of the city were a far cry from Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s feverish visions of Baroque Rome. “Beverly Hills Housewife” (1966), a portrait of a pink-dressed collector in her modernist home, marked the onset of a realist style that would define Hockney’s work for the next decade. This era gave rise to paintings that became icons of their time and place. Among them were “A Bigger Splash” (1967), which was based on a magazine cover that he came across on a newsstand, and “Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy” (1968, sold last year at Christie’s New York for $44.3 million). Inspired by Hans Holbein, this portrait of the English novelist and his artist partner was one of the first celebratory portrayals of a gay couple. Hockney would later recount how Isherwood proclaimed: “Oh David, we’ve so much in common; we love California, we love American boys, and we’re both from the north of England.” Hockney’s beloved American boy at this time was Peter Schlesinger, a young artist he had met while teaching at UCLA in the summer 1966 — and a recurring presence in the early L.A. pictures.

According to Norman Rosenthal, who curated a major survey of Hockney’s art at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris last year: “It is astonishing that a boy from a poor family in Bradford became the person — partly because of his gayness, but also his talent — who defined what everybody now thinks of as California. L.A. had no real image in the world before then, unlike New York.”

Despite his enchantment with Los Angeles, Hockney didn’t settle there until 1978, after a decade of bouncing between America and Europe. In the summer of 1979 he moved into a house in the Hollywood Hills, and soon adorned its pool with swishing strokes of blue paint. In the early 1980s, he converted the paddle tennis court into a studio. The meandering routes and Mediterranean scenery of the Hills were a fresh source of amazement, giving rise to monumental depictions of Mulholland Drive and Nichols Canyon in a newly abstract style.

By this time, the city was deeply familiar — a second home — and he had a close circle of friends around him who included the patron Betty Freeman (subject of “Beverly Hills Housewife”), the designer Gregory Evans, the gallery owner Nicholas Wilder and the film producer Joe Simon. “L.A. had represented a whole new world for him,” says Simon, who remained in regular contact with the artist until his final days. “He just loved the light. He was like a kid in a candy store when he first came. But David was all about the work. Everything came back to that.”

In recent decades, Hockney’s name had become synonymous with the landscapes of his native Yorkshire, which he began painting prolifically in the early 2000s. But Los Angeles never lost its newness and promise. His house in the Hills remained a sanctuary until his final years, when he was too frail to travel. L.A. was where he had come of age, and it remained an indelible part of his life and psyche — not least in terms of its egalitarian spirit and its tendency toward the horizontal. “The great thing about Hockney was that he spoke to everybody,” says Rosenthal. “Few artists of his world and his generation could do that.”

James Cahill, a novelist and an art critic, is the author of, among other books, “David Hockney” and the forthcoming “The Beverly Hills Housewife: Hockney’s Californian Muse and the World Beyond the Pool.”

WASHINGTON — A year after the Trump administration kicked off its aggressive immigration enforcement tour with military-style raids across greater Los Angeles, federal officials have veered toward a less flashy but broader strategy: making immigrants’ lives harder so they will leave.

The changes range in scale and scope, from disqualifying immigrants from certain jobs to indefinitely pausing the processing of visa applications. They target those lawfully present as well as the undocumented.

Since President Trump’s second term began, the administration has used executive orders and federal regulations to chip away at services or benefits, such as work permits and small business loans, that immigrants could obtain in the past.

Now, immigrants are finding that freedoms — the ones that once made the U.S. a desirable place to start over — are disappearing. Many are retreating back into the shadows as they fear previously routine tasks, such as traveling across states, filing taxes and seeking medical care.

“The priority is to force people to leave the country or not come, regardless of legal status or really any other criteria,” said David Bier, immigration studies director at the Libertarian think tank the Cato Institute. “They’re taking a sledgehammer to the system.”

Trump won the White House in part on his promise to clamp down on illegal immigration, but recent polling shows support for his agenda has waned, especially after immigration agents shot and killed two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis.

In a statement, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said Trump’s highest priority has always been the deportation of immigrants with criminal records. The Department of Homeland Security said Trump also prioritizes immigration that strengthens the country financially, socially and culturally.

President Trump displays the signed “Secure America Act” during a ceremony in the Oval Office on Wednesday. The act provides $70 billion for immigration enforcement and border-security agencies.

(Aaron Schwartz / CNP, Bloomberg)

The number of arrests by ICE agents has declined. On average, ICE arrested about 1,000 immigrants per day in early March, down from a peak average of just under 1,400 in mid-January, agency data show. And there are fewer detained immigrants — facilities across the country held about 60,000 detainees in April, compared to more than 70,000 in late January.

The downturns prompted some Trump loyalists to say the administration is failing to fulfill his signature promise, which is an assertion the administration rejects.

“ICE is NOT slowing down,” said Homeland Security spokesperson Lauren Bis. “Since Day One, DHS law enforcement has been delivering on President Trump’s promise to the American people to arrest and deport criminal illegal aliens.”

At a border security conference last month, Tom Homan, who leads border policy for the White House, suggested immigration agents would return to more muscular enforcement tactics.

“You ain’t seen s— yet,” he told the audience.

But along with focusing on deportations, the administration is deploying other tactics to deter illegal — and legal —immigration.

ICE agents confront protesters on June 8 as they gather outside the federal immigration center at Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey, where ICE is housing detained immigrants.

(Spencer Platt / Getty Images)

Curtailing visas

Last month, the Department of Homeland Security announced that “except in extraordinary circumstances,” immigrants seeking lawful permanent residency must leave the U.S. to complete the process. After a backlash, the administration defended the policy, saying it won’t prevent anyone who qualifies for a green card from getting one.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency in charge of processing immigration benefits, has upped security screening since Trump took office. The agency says that’s to root out fraud, but critics say all it does is unnecessarily slow down a system that already vets applicants vigorously.

The administration indefinitely banned people from 75 countries from receiving immigrant visas, which allow people to move permanently to the U.S.

In a similar move, the government halted the processing of immigration applications for people from 39 countries and who are already in the U.S. On June 5, a federal judge struck down the policy in a scathing ruling that said the administration “justifies its actions with pretextual concerns of ‘national security’ that mask anti-immigrant sentiments.”

Children of Guatemalan origin, from left, Areimy, Mariela and Enrique, arrive at Miami International Airport on Dec. 4, 2025, as they prepare to leave the United States to reunite with their recently deported parents in Guatemala.

(Chandan Khanna / AFP via Getty Images)

The judge’s ruling may offer relief, but for many immigrants, the effects of the policy are devastating. Armin, a 42-year-old from Iran, said he has racked up more than $15,000 in debt since the pause took effect in December. Armin asked The Times not to fully identify for fear of jeopardizing his immigration case.

The nutritional scientist came to the U.S. in 2019 on a student visa and has a pending green card application under a provision that allows certain highly skilled immigrants to apply for permanent residency without needing an employer to sponsor them.

After receiving his PhD and completing a postdoctoral program, Armin was in between jobs when he received a research grant in November. But with the processing of his work authorization halted, the university that issued the grant said it couldn’t hire him as a research associate. In February, he was turned down for another job.

Armin said he is confused about why the administration won’t differentiate between legal immigrants and those who should be deported.

“I can’t believe it,” he said. “I’m doing research and my research has national interest benefits. You expect support from the government. Unfortunately they don’t differentiate. They don’t care about your resume.”

Bier said the visa policies affect half of all legal immigrants coming from abroad. He published a report in April about how Trump has cut legal immigration far more than illegal immigration, noting that the administration’s policies have led to big drops in visas for international students, high-skilled workers and refugees.

“The legal immigration system is being used as a means to carry out the mass deportation agenda,” he said.

Alessandro Negrete, who lived most of his life in the U.S. undocumented, crosses into Mexico after deciding to leave.

(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

Encouraging self-deportation

More than 90,000 immigrants have been granted voluntary departure since the start of the Trump administration, according to federal immigration court data through April that was analyzed by TRAC, a data research organization. Voluntary departure avoids official deportation and can leave open the possibility of an immigrant returning to the U.S. legally.

Homan, who declined to be interviewed for this story, has said self-deportations were part of the administration’s immigration plan all along.

“We knew if we surged unlimited ICE resources in the interior, and we do these operations, that that will force those that are here illegally to leave on their own,” he recently told the Washington Examiner.

Halting work permits

In the past, asylum seekers and others with deportation protections have had the ability to seek permits to work legally in the U.S. But work is now an administration target.

One proposed regulation would prevent asylum seekers from working legally in the U.S. Another proposal, published Friday, would further restrict access to work permits for other immigrants.

Under a rule that took effect last month, asylum seekers pay an annual $102 fee within 30 days of receiving a notice from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. If the deadline is missed, their applications will be rejected — with no opportunity to appeal — and they could be placed in deportation proceedings. Those who apply for asylum with the agency have entered the U.S. legally, such as on a visa, and are not undocumented.

Asylum seekers rest at a Tijuana migrant shelter a day after President Trump began his second term in the White House.

(Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)

Conchita Cruz, co-executive director of the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project, said many asylum applicants have not received notice that the fee is due.

Cruz said she believes the Trump administration is using these changes as an excuse to dismiss people’s asylum claims. While the president has the power to decide whether to offer or rescind humanitarian programs, such as Temporary Protected Status, the right to seek asylum is enshrined in law.

“We’re worried this is a pretext for people to fall out of the asylum system and fall out of the workforce,” she said.

The processing of work permits has already been slowed, leaving many immigrants who still qualify for employment authorization unable to work.

During a House Homeland Security Committee hearing last week, Rep. Lou Correa (D-Santa Ana) asked Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin to help him speed up the work permit renewals for two police officers who were recently fired by agencies in his district because their DACA status expired.

Mullin said he would help but that Congress ultimately must pass a permanent solution for DACA recipients.

“These are police officers on Main Street, sir,” Correa responded.

“Not all of them are,” Mullin said. “I’m not just going to wave a magic wand and fix them all.”

“You have that magic wand — that’s your job,” Correa said.

It wasn’t just Democrats complaining about slow processing. Rep. Gabe Evans (R-Colo.) similarly asked Mullin for help because many of his constituents — “farm workers, youth ministers, nurses, grocery store business managers” — who have lived and worked in the U.S. legally for decades are now having trouble renewing their visas.

Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin, left, and President Trump, center, walk to the motorcade after exiting Air Force One at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, on May 20.

(Kent Nishimura / AFP via Getty Images)

Calls for mass deportations

Mullin, who took the reins in March after Trump fired his predecessor, Kristi Noem, rolled back some of Noem’s policies, including telling agents to stop entering homes without judicial warrants and canceling some contracts she had initiated.

But the changes and the downturn in arrests have drawn criticism from some fervent Trump supporters.

“Trump’s legacy is tied up in this,” said Mike Howell, a former DHS attorney who founded a group called the Mass Deportation Coalition. “It’s going to be hard to tell a younger voter to get excited to show up when one of their top issues is mass deportation and, a year and a half in, it doesn’t appear it’s going full-steam ahead.”

Howell said enforcement at work sites is critical to scaling up arrests and deportations. That more such operations haven’t happened, he said, is a political decision to appease wealthy donors and special interest groups who don’t want to see their workers deported.

The architect of Trump’s immigration agenda is Stephen Miller, a top White House aid who has called for a “moratorium on immigration from third-world countries,” demanded 3,000 arrests per day and said that immigrants and their descendants “recreate the conditions, and the terrors, of their broken homelands.”

Royce Bernstein Murray, a former Homeland Security official who worked on immigration policy under the Biden administration, said the winding down of flashy enforcement surges has given the administration more time to “focus on tearing down the legal immigration system.”

“This is Stephen Miller’s sweet spot,” she said. “He was never in enforcement — he’s a policy guy. This is really an opportunity for him to make good on all he has planned for years.”

While ICE has, in recent months, returned to its more conventional targeted enforcement tactics, Homan has sought to make clear that mass deportations are still a goal.

“For the people out there saying ‘President Trump’s getting weak on mass deportation,’ you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” Homan said at the border expo.

On Monday, Homan told Fox News that he had just reviewed plans for an ICE operation that would surge agents to New York City.

Fred Armisen loves living in Los Angeles.

“It’s my favorite city in the world,” says the comedian, musician and actor best known for the beloved sketch comedy series “Portlandia” and for “Saturday Night Live.” “It has a really strong sense of community for such a giant city,” he adds, noting the recent celebration surrounding the new Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Metro’s D Line extension.

In Sunday Funday, L.A. people give us a play-by-play of their ideal Sunday around town. Find ideas and inspiration on where to go, what to eat and how to enjoy life on the weekends.

Armisen enjoys being behind the wheel, which is how he first noticed Hulu’s “Deli Boys,” where he plays casino boss Max Sugar in the show’s second season.

“Strangely, I was a fan before I was a fan of the show,” he says. “I was a fan of the billboards. I saw ads for it, and I was immediately curious. Like, ‘What is that? Why is it called ‘Deli Boys’? Who are these people?’ There was something about the three leads, a sort of chemistry or charisma, that I wanted to be a part of.”

For him, the perfect Sunday involves traversing the city, checking out record stores and visiting museums like the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City. “I fell in love with it as its own art piece,” he says. He also enjoys going to live shows, sometimes performing and spending time at home with his family. For him, the ideal day in L.A. “is a mix of all of those things.”

The one place you won’t find the sun-averse actor is the beach. “Los Angeles is a great place for people who hate the sun,” he says. “There’s a goth quality to it. So many of the best punk bands came out of Los Angeles.” He appreciates that you can avoid the sun by staying in your car. “It feels like I get to confront my hatred for the sun without being in it,” he says.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for length and clarity.

5 a.m.: Early rising

I love Los Angeles so much that sometimes, when I wake up, it’s still dark outside. So it’ll be, like, 5 or 6 o’clock in the morning, and it’s dark, but the palm trees are silhouetted in the sky. Right away, I’ll have granola or Grape Nuts with almond milk and blueberries. And then I just like to sit in silence while it’s still dark out, while sipping two mugs of coffee. If I do go out, the Village Bakery and Cafe on Los Feliz Boulevard is really nice for breakfast or if you have to meet someone. There is a scramble there that I really like. But lately, I’ve also been getting granola with yogurt.

8 a.m.: Make it a work day in Elysian Valley, a.k.a. Frogtown

I like to make every day a work day. So even if I have a day off, I still try to do one work-related task. I have a music-and-writing space in Frogtown where I’ve had an office for a while. I had one there when we wrote “Portlandia.” I’ve got my drums set up, and I usually like to get things ready for touring. I have all these flight cases and drums there and I get all my equipment together. I’ll just clean them up a little bit. Sometimes I practice — not practicing to get my rudiments up for drumming — but just because I enjoy drumming so much. 


11 a.m:. Lunch in Frogtown

There are a few places in Frogtown where I like to have lunch. There’s a vegan cafe near me called Just What I Kneaded, which is great, or the Spoke Bicycle Cafe, which is a little down the river. I like the chickpea farro bowl with Brussels sprouts and tempeh. Sometimes I’ll go to Wax Paper and order the Kai Ryssdal sandwich. Their sandwiches are really good and are named for National Public Radio hosts. We have to embrace being pretentious. I think in these cafes, we should talk about the Velvet Underground. It’s almost like cosplaying. Like, let’s really be Silver Lake. Well, you know, with bicycles.

1 p.m.: Run errands at the Americana at Brand

I can’t just stay in Frogtown, so
I’d next go to the Americana at Brand outdoor mall because sometimes, when a place is devoid of all those pretensions, it’s actually very relaxing. You can walk around and get a lot of errands done. I love the sushi place the Bar — Hand Rolls by Seabutter.

2 p.m.: Take a drive through Griffith Park

I love driving. That’s one thing that I love about Los Angeles. Everywhere I go, I get to be in my car. 
I like listening to the radio. It’s just a peaceful place to be. There’s something special about it, especially as day turns into dusk. I like going down Sunset Boulevard or Beverly Boulevard. I also love driving Crystal Springs Drive through Griffith Park. It is the prettiest drive. The speed limit is nice and slow. In the summer, there’s a free Shakespeare festival in that same park. I haven’t made it yet because I’m usually traveling, but I’ve always wanted to go.

3 p.m.: Hit the record stores

I know it’s a cliché for me to say I go to record stores, but I do. I like going to Amoeba Music in Hollywood. I’ll get any reissue, like a new box set. And there’s always something that’s just come out. Sometimes I’ll go to a musical instrument store called Caveman Vintage Music in Lincoln Heights just to pick up a few things that I’ll need, you know, drumsticks or whatever. Or sometimes I’ll get a weird little amp or keyboard.

6 p.m.: Sushi dinner in Glendale

If I go out to dinner, I like going to Sasabune in Glendale. It’s on the third floor of a building near the Americana. In my opinion, Los Angeles has the best sushi in the world. Ventura Boulevard in the Valley is amazing, but this place is my favorite restaurant in the world. Wow. I love it.

8 p.m.: See live music

Once a month, although not usually on Sundays, I play covers at a bar and record store called Permanent Records Roadhouse in Cypress Park. Sometimes I do stand-up at Largo at the Coronet. But I love to see live bands. The Bellwether and the Teragram Ballroom are great venues to see bands. Those two, I’d say, are my two favorites to go to because I like a little bit of space, because I can’t be up at the front. You know, I’m so famous that bands stop playing [laughs] when they see me. No, I’m just a patron. I’m a fan. The Greek Theatre is a fantastic place to see live music. And the Ford amphitheater! The last time I went, I thought,
‘Why don’t I come to every show here?‘ because it’s the perfect size. It’s outdoors. It’s not gigantic. Every seat is good. It’s really, really great. I saw Neil Young there. I saw Paul McCartney at the Fonda Theatre in March, and he was unbelievable. I love that he played there. I like the Hollywood Bowl, obviously, but everybody knows that.

When Republican Spencer Pratt burst into Los Angeles politics, venting a torrent of online fury against Mayor Karen Bass’ handling of the Palisades fire, he pitched his mayoral campaign as a full-bore challenge to L.A.’s political status quo.

The former reality TV star, who lost his home in the blaze, started as a long shot but emerged as a national story, with the ability to harvest social media attention, rally a base and dominate the news cycle.

But in a city overwhelmingly Democratic, where Republicans make up just 15% of registered voters, even some of his supporters wondered how far he could rise. In the end, voters selected Bass, a Democratic centrist, and democratic socialist City Councilmember Nithya Raman, who ran to Bass’ left, to face off in the runoff.

Still, for many of the 200,000 Angelenos who voted for Pratt, his brash, social media-fueled campaign was not just a long exercise in trolling. Pratt gave voice to their discontent with the system of one-party rule and said things they too often felt uncomfortable saying.

And now, they face a difficult choice of who to support in November.

“I know a lot of people who are disappointed,” said Meghan Daum, an L.A. writer and podcaster and former Los Angeles Times columnist who endorsed Pratt. “They are saying, ‘OK, now what? What can we do?”’

While Pratt did not make the runoff, political experts said his candidacy tapped into Angelenos’ dissatisfaction with the Democratic establishment and resonated with a sizable number of Angelenos who are rarely represented in L.A. politics.

“He identified a previously invisible level of anger and frustration,” said Dan Schnur, a longtime politics professor at USC, UC Berkeley and Pepperdine University, of Pratt. “The question going forward is whether he, or someone else, can shape that raw emotion into a movement.”

Pratt has yet to put out a statement conceding the race or contesting the results. As a stream of Republicans, including President Trump, made unfounded allegations of election fraud in California, the campaign’s most online candidate was conspicuously absent on X and Instagram.

Some Democrats in L.A. urged Pratt to make good on his promise to leave the city if Bass or Raman were elected. Late night TV host Jimmy Kimmel, a prominent Democrat, told Pratt he had rented him a U-Haul.

Despite the snark from Democrats, political observers say Pratt changed the terms of L.A.’s mayoral debate.

“He forced the more conventional candidates to talk about the issues in a way that would not have been the case if he weren’t in the race,” Schnur said.

“For the first time in years, there is a critical mass of citizens who are done pretending that what they see before their eyes isn’t really there,” Daum wrote on her Substack. “The people in charge will have to answer to those citizens.”

In the final weeks of the campaign, Pratt became ubiquitous in the national media. There were profiles in high-end publications, podcast interviews and regular reports from Fox News. But the results show he fell short of persuading enough Angelenos to make the runoff.

“It doesn’t appear that he’s impacted the political underpinnings of a deep blue city like Los Angeles,” Schnur said. “His impact was less ideological than attitudinal. He wasn’t convincing the voters to become more conservative, he was convincing them that it was OK for them to vent their anger in an unconventional way.”

Dissatisfaction is building in L.A. as the city’s cost of living mounts and a new generation of young Angelenos are unable to buy homes. Many are concerned about the lack of visible progress on street homelessness. Some are angry at what they see as city leaders’ poor preparation and response to the Palisades fire.

Ultimately, the momentum for change in Los Angeles was divided. As Pratt challenged Bass from the right, Raman tacked to the left of Bass on homelessness and policing and made affordability a key plank of her campaign.

Whatever their concerns about the status quo in L.A., many Angelenos were unwilling to vote for a Republican.

During the course of the campaign, Daum said she had numerous conversations with Angelenos who said: “I can’t associate with anybody who voted for Trump. I can’t have them in my house. I can’t have a conversation with them. I want nothing to do with them.”

A 42-year-old millennial who became famous on “The Hills” and owns a business selling “healing” crystals, Pratt had no political experience when he entered the mayoral race. He didn’t even appear to have a campaign manager.

“The system in Los Angeles isn’t struggling, it’s fundamentally broken,” Pratt said as he launched his campaign on Jan. 7, the anniversary of the fire. “It is a machine designed to protect the people at the top and the friends they exchange favors with while the rest of us drown in toxic smoke and ash.”

Bombastic and full of braggadocio, Pratt critiqued what he saw as Bass’ failure to prepare for and respond to the wildfires. He berated city leaders for not doing enough to get unhoused people off the streets. He railed against the city’s challenges with public safety, potholes, and the abuse of dogs on Skid Row. He even seized on a comment Bass made on the campaign trail about using taxpayer money to fund dental care for meth users.

As Pratt talked about homelessness, his message resonated with Marissa Comstock, 36, a stay-at-home mom and former software engineer in Eagle Rock.

“It’s totally obvious to me,” she said. “We need to get these people off the street.”

Last year, Comstock said she and her husband had a negative encounter at Griffith Park as they pushed their daughters around in strollers. Just a few minutes into their hike, she said, they were accosted by an unhoused person who screamed at them and threatened to cut off their daughters’ legs.

Since that incident, Comstock said, she takes her daughters only to places like the Huntington or Descanso Gardens that require membership to be admitted.

“I don’t feel comfortable even being on regular streets,” she said. “If there’s some crazy homeless person, what am I supposed to do?”

Pratt did extraordinarily well in capturing attention and developing a message, said Paul Mitchell, vice president of the Sacramento-based bipartisan firm Political Data Inc. Many Angelenos, he noted, had a better sense of Pratt’s viewpoint than they did of much more deeply funded California gubernatorial candidates, like Matt Mahan or Xavier Becerra.

During his campaign, Pratt did not express support for Trump or the Make America Great Again movement. He insisted he was a nonpartisan candidate running on local issues.

“I’m going to show everybody that I’m their mayor,” Pratt said on election night.

But even if Pratt was not explicitly MAGA, his reality TV theatrics mixed with antiestablishment populism were so MAGA-coded that he struggled to persuade disaffected liberal Angelenos. He referred to the homeless as “fentanyl zombies.” He railed against California’s “socialism.” He called Bass “Basura,” Spanish for trash.

When Trump spoke of Pratt, telling reporters “I heard he’s a big MAGA person,” Raman was quick to share Trump’s remarks on social media, warning Angelenos that Pratt was wildly out of step with their views.

While Pratt impressed some political observers with his performance in a May 6 televised debate with Bass and Raman, others said he alienated a significant portion of Angelenos with some of his social media antics.

“He could have talked about the drug use and the risks and the filth and the fire risks and all that,” said Rob Stutzman, a GOP political strategist, of Pratt’s zombie rhetoric, “but then paired that with, ‘My God, these liberals are leaving these people out here to die,’ and expressed some humanity towards the population that’s on the streets.”

Ultimately, Daum said Pratt was a “terrible candidate.”

“He did a million things wrong,” she said. “The whole time, I was yelling on Twitter about how he’s got to stop it: the AI videos are gonna hurt him, the Basura stuff, the zombie stuff. Like, stop it! Stop it!”

As Pratt’s campaign came to an end, Stutzman said, it is not clear that he represents any kind of lasting political movement.

“The question remains: Did he create a political movement or did he exploit the opportunity to run for mayor to restoke his diminishing fame?” Stutzman said. “He’s in the mold of a Kardashian: He’s just found ways to be famous without ever really doing anything important. I suspect that this was more about him acting out as to what he is as a reality celebrity versus becoming a leader of a political movement in L.A. We’ll see.”

When Angelenos go to the polls in November, there are several paths for Pratt voters.

Some, Mitchell said, will probably sit the election out entirely.

“You’ll get some Republicans who vote for Raman because they’re like, ‘Well, she’s a socialist and I can’t stand her, but I’m just voting no on Bass.’ And then you’ll have a lot of Republicans who are like, ‘OK, Raman’s a socialist.’”

After Raman made it to the runoff, Bass’ campaign slammed the city council member for voting against hiring more police and blocking efforts to keep homeless encampments away from schools. Meanwhile, Raman positioned herself as the anti-status quo candidate.

In a statement celebrating her advance to the general election, Raman did not mention Pratt or his supporters, but railed against “powerful interests” in City Hall.

“Working people pay the price in higher rents, depleted services, and a city that has stopped working for them,” she said. “If you’re as frustrated by the broken status quo as I am, I hope you’ll join our movement to build a city that works for everyone.”

Even as Daum felt depressed that Pratt’s campaign was not continuing, she said she felt more engaged in L.A. politics than she had ever been. She planned to vote in November and would be watching both Bass and Raman to see how they responded to Angelenos’ concerns about street homelessness.

“If Karen Bass said, ‘OK, I get it, “housing first” is not the panacea that I’ve been thinking it is. Seriously, I’m gonna put together a task force of people who are going to actually think this through.’ … I would be following that. I would be very curious,” Daum said. “Same if Nithya said that, too. I’m open to either of them, I guess.”

Comstock said she would probably vote for Bass in the runoff.

“Nithya Raman is just way too far on the socialist scale for me and will likely do more damage, rather than Karen Bass’ ineffectualness,” she said. “I don’t want to go any farther left.”

There’s nothing like taking a cool dip after a hot day, especially in L.A. summer weather. As peak swimming season kicks off, the Hansen Dam Aquatic Center pool in Lake View Terrace reopened Memorial Day on weekends after being closed for the season. It will be open daily for swim and play starting Saturday.

The popular San Fernando Valley aquatic center spans 40 acres that include a massive 1.5-acre pool lined with sand like a beach. There’s also a nine-acre lake used for fishing and nonmotorized boat activities.

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1. Jaylia Martinez, 5, left, is splashed with water by Elijah Santillana, 6. 2. The height chart for the water slide at the Hansen Dam Aquatic Center. 3. Visitors enjoy the pool at the Hansen Dam Aquatic Center. (Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)

“As one of the largest pools in the U.S., capacity [being] 3,500, we get so many people from all over the city, all over the county, people coming from out of state to this place,” Edwin Realegeno, aquatic facility manager of the center, said.

The Hansen Dam Aquatic Center pool was constructed in 1999 in a $15-million project to replace a previous pool in the area that was filled with silt.

Along the pool’s sandy shores, individuals can use the volleyball courts and teqball table. There are also different levels of shallow water for young swimmers and toddlers.

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Paty Santillana, a Van Nuys resident, has visited the Hansen Dam Aquatic Center for the last 15 years. “It’s perfect for little kids. I have a 5-year-old and also a 21-year-old, who we used to come here with,” Santillana said. She adds that her grandchildren are ecstatic every time she mentions a visit to the pool.

Idalia Fraga, a 12-year-old swimmer who has been to the pool twice since its reopening on Memorial Day weekend, said she enjoys the pool for its affordability.

“Prices are very cheap … it really helps those families who struggle,” Fraga said.

After some renovations to its large water slide that will be reopening Saturday, the pool is open to swimmers for an admission fee of $4 for adults and children 17 and under for $1. The center takes cash only.

The recreational lake is open year-round and is restocked with fish from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.

Christopher Lopez relaxes by regularly fishing at the Hansen Dam Recreation Lake on the weekends.

(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)

Along the lake, people enjoy walking the surrounding grassy pathway and fishing. Christopher Lopez, a Pacoima resident, who also goes by the nickname Squid, goes to the lake for the latter.

Lopez started fishing nearly two months ago with his longtime friend from elementary school. “[It’s about] getting out of the house and having something to do on the weekends and being able to enjoy the day,” he said. “Spending our time out here I think is just a great addition.”

For Lopez, catching bass or trout and enjoying the occasional breeze is a perfect day to absorb the beauty of nature.

Lifeguards Israel Orozco, left, and Ian Zabel, right, watch the pool as visitors cool off at the Hansen Dam Aquatic Center.

(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)

The recreational center is hosting fundraising 1K and 5K runs on Sunday followed by a party with free access to the pool. Realegeno said the fundraiser is to help fund public pool centers across L.A. County and to promote swimming safety lessons.

Visit the recreation center’s website or Instagram page for more information as well as updates on pool or slide closures. Hours vary.

Supporters of a new Los Angeles County half-cent sales tax rallied Wednesday to celebrate what they framed as a historic win for the region’s cash-strapped healthcare system.

After a rocky election night that showed the tax lagging, supporters claimed victory Tuesday after the latest vote tally pushed Measure ER further over the 50% margin needed to pass. The measure would impose a new half-cent sales tax countywide, with the proceeds going toward local hospitals and clinics hit by federal funding cuts.

Jim Mangia, the chief executive of St. John’s Community Health who helped craft the measure, summed up the campaign as “grueling and expensive.”

“We had to ask an already overtaxed community — in the midst of runaway inflation and [an] affordability crisis — to tax themselves yet again,” he told a crowd of supporters Wednesday.

L.A. County already has a sales tax of 9.75%, and some cities add their own on top. Measure ER passing would raise the countywide sales tax to 10.25%, with some individual cities having a sales tax of more than 11%, according to the California Department of Tax and Fee Administration.

Despite a recent winning streak for sales taxes in L.A. County, some political observers had forecast doom for the measure, which came at a time of skyrocketing gas prices and cost-weary voters.

The largely informal opposition had consisted mainly of local cities that warned another sales tax would disproportionately burden the poorest residents and force shoppers across the county border in hopes of finding lower costs. Some city leaders had also dinged the county for misusing homelessness money generated from a previous sales tax and argued this new pot of dollars would be handled no better.

But supporters were able to eke out a narrow victory, according to the latest election returns, by emphasizing looming hospital closures and the temporary nature of the tax, which is set to sunset in five years.

“It’s a lifesaver to carry us through the storm we’re all in,” said county Supervisor Holly Mitchell, who led the push within the Board of Supervisors to get the measure on the ballot.

County leaders in February voted 4-1 to put the tax on the ballot after federal legislation threatened to pull health insurance from the poorest residents, leaving the already cash-strapped county to foot the bill for their care. Officials say cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act are expected to slash more than $2 billion from the county’s budget for health services over the next three years.

“It’s disgusting what’s going to happen to our residents,” said Supervisor Hilda Solis, who championed the measure alongside Mitchell.

The tax, which begins Oct. 1, comes at a time of budget-tightening for the county amid rising labor costs and a $4-billion sex abuse settlement that is set to be paid out over the next five years.

Officials estimate the tax will bring in about $1 billion per year, which will go to clinics, hospitals and Planned Parenthood services that supporters say are at risk of closure without a new source of cash.

A similar proposed healthcare sales tax in Contra Costa County, meant to generate $150 million a year, was soundly rejected with about 57% of voters opposing the measure, according to votes tallied as of Wednesday.

Whether you’re looking for the best restaurants L.A. has to offer, a fun and affordable way to spend your day or a new adventure in one of our city’s iconic neighborhoods, the Los Angeles Times has you covered.

You can now make our guides your own by saving individual recommendations for later — mixing and matching from food to fun and everything in between — with the confidence that your choices are backed by L.A. Times experts.

Saving is simple. Visit any of our local guides, find something that interests you and look for the “Save” button. From there, you can choose a category in which to save your item, such as Food & Drink or Things to Do.

Not an L.A. Times subscriber? Don’t worry. You can register for a free account to get saving on many of our guides. Once you’ve saved a few items, check out your personalized save dashboard at latimes.com/saved/guides. You can also find it in the site account dropdown menu.

Call it a wish list, bucket list or checklist — the dashboard is all yours. Revisit your saves, remove ones you don’t want and even see your items on a personal map.

We hope this makes it easier to explore L.A. and beyond.

LA28 reserved the first Olympic tickets for locals. To kick off the second round of ticket sales, it’s a sponsorship connection that could help fans get to the front of the line.

Before the second Olympic ticket drop officially begins Aug. 10, LA28 announced Wednesday there will be a presale for Visa cardholders that will run from July 29-31.

Visa has sponsored the Olympics for 40 years and is the only credit card accepted for payment in Olympic zones. For a chance to be selected for the presale, fans need to first confirm their status as a Visa cardholder. Fans who have already registered can log into their existing LA28 ticket account, check the “Visa presale box” and save changes. New registrants must select the Visa cardholder option during the registration process. All ticket sales during the presale must be completed with a Visa credit card.

Fans can register for the second ticket drop at tickets.la28.org until July 22. Those who already registered for Drop 1 but weren’t selected or didn’t purchase their full 12-ticket allotment do not have to sign up again and are automatically entered into the lottery for Drop 2, which will run from Aug. 10-20.

Fans who are randomly selected for the Visa presale will be notified of their time slot on July 27. Those who aren’t selected for the presale remain eligible for a time slot in Drop 2. Email notifications for Drop 2 time slots will go out from Aug. 6-7.

The second ticket drop will offer tickets across all Olympic sports at a range of price points, LA28 said in a statement, subject to inventory availability. Prices start at $28 for individual tickets, but of the total 1 million $28 Olympic tickets, half were scooped up during the Drop 1 presale that was reserved for locals living near venue cities in Southern California and Oklahoma City.

April’s ticketing debut frustrated fans who were surprised by high prices, a 24% service fee on every ticket and limited inventory for key events. Still, LA28 sold 4 million tickets across 85 countries, a historic number that had International Olympic Committee officials giddy for the potential of the 2028 Games.

“What we thought we were going to sell, and what we thought we were going to get for people who registered for interest, we exceeded those by magnitudes,” LA28 Chief Executive Officer Reynold Hoover told The Times on June 4 after IOC members visited L.A. “We were able to set Olympic records in terms of sale, but I think the broader picture about all of that is people want to be a part of something really big and be part of something here in L.A., a part of history.”

LA28, the organizing committee behind L.A.’s first Olympics in 40 years, expects to generate $2.5 billion in ticketing and hospitality to support what has been advertised as a privately funded Games. The estimated $7.1-billion operations budget is also buoyed by $2.5 billion in expected sponsorship revenue. LA28 already has $2 billion in domestic partnership money.

Spencer Pratt had a few things going for him when he launched an insurgent campaign to become Los Angeles’ next mayor.

He had a heart-tugging origin story that saw him transform from a has-been television star into one of the thousands of residents who lost their home in last year’s Palisades fire. He faced an unpopular incumbent in Mayor Karen Bass. He was powered by a vigorous social media presence and an angry electorate thirsty for change.

He was able to capitalize on those conditions to outraise his main rivals, Bass and city council member Nithya Raman, and transform his candidacy from an afterthought into a national story. Running as a Republican in a super-blue city like L.A. put him at an automatic disadvantage — one that might have been extremely difficult to overcome in the end. But the Pratt posse started to feel like a bona fide movement the more it thundered on, the type of revolt against the old guard that in previous eras led to the passage of Proposition 13 and the recall of Gov. Gray Davis — the type of movements that forever alter California politics.

Pratt, however, faced an apparently insurmountable obstacle.

Pratt.

With almost all votes counted, he’s going to finish in third place with about 26% of the electorate — the same slice Donald Trump received in 2024 — while Bass and Raman proceed to face each other in November. Political strategists will teach his failed attempt to their clients as a cautionary tale of how a candidate blew every advantage they had when they couldn’t afford to lose one.

Pratt’s first mistake was thinking that Angelenos wanted a campaign of wanton rage. Yes, many residents are furious at the state of the city. Yes, they want change. Yes, the angry Angeleno archetype is a real phenomenon that flares up in local elections to smack back at the powers that be.

But L.A. is not MAGAlandia — running from the right on apocalyptic, whiny messaging will only get you the few Republicans that remain in the city and some disaffected liberals. Pratt didn’t run as a MAGA candidate, but it’s hard to say he didn’t run like one — even as he swore he was running for everyone.

He took every opportunity to ridicule progressives in a city where four democratic socialists sit on the city council, one of them — Raman — has a good chance of becoming the next mayor, and five of the six candidates endorsed by the local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America either won outright or are moving on to the general election.

Instead of making overtures to that side of the populist coin, Pratt recorded videos obsessing over Bass’ trip to communist Cuba in the 1970s, a well-known fact he treated as revelatory and which made Pratt sound like he was stuck in a John Birch Society meeting circa 1965. His dismissal of Raman as “stupid” and the mayor as “Basura” — trash — came off as facile juvenilia at a time when we already have the Big Juvenile Delinquent running things in the White House. Ridiculing homeless people as “zombies,” “vagrants” and “bums” only riled up the worst elements of the city and turned off anyone with a heart.

Keith Casey of Casey’s Family BBQ serves up food as L.A. mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt hosts a campaign “block party” event on 10th Avenue in Los Angeles on May 20.

(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

Pratt undoubtedly attracted votes from a good amount of non-MAGA people fed up with various problems afflicting L.A. But many of the supporters who brayed the loudest on his behalf were the same people already doing daily propaganda on social media for a failed, hate-filled president and his baleful cronies.

Pratt acted like he believed the AI-generated videos created by fans that cast him as a comic-book hero was real life instead of forgetting that he was a novice trying to take on two experienced politicians. While Bass and Raman trekked across the city during the primary, Pratt limited his public appearances mostly to the Westside and random encounters with supporters he posted on social media. The few times he appeared outside those safe spaces came off as safari expeditions in a mysterious city the 42-year-old lifelong Angeleno obviously didn’t know.

Take the South L.A. block party he hosted last month. Instead of having something thoughtful to say about the state of Black L.A. or how its political leaders continue to neglect the region, all Pratt seemed to take away from that afternoon was that it was in the territory of the Rollin’ 60s Neighborhood Crips, a detail he shared ad nauseum on social media and to the press — as if kicking it with gang members would fix L.A. or gain him any votes or grant some kind of street cred.

That self-centered cluelessness ended up torpedoing Pratt’s best campaign moment. In the one debate he participated in, Pratt put Bass on the defensive, turned Raman into a tongue-tied mess, kept his answers sharp and relatable, and even earned the praise of the moderators. He should’ve demanded more gatherings like that to flex his mastery of television cameras, make his case to as many Angelenos as possible and showcase the self-proclaimed Pratt Daddy as someone willing to take on hard questions anytime, anyplace, from anyone.

Instead, Pratt declined an invite to their only other scheduled debate and never bothered with the forums civic groups across the city held in order for their members to hear from candidates. Instead, Pratt flew out to New York the week before election day to appear on Fox News.

Sticking to largely sycophantic media who lobbed softball questions hardened his ceiling. Pratt needed to proselytize — not preach to the choir.

The thing is, Pratt made some strong points about the inefficiencies of L.A.’s political status quo and the outrage that is having tens of thousands of people live on our streets. And there’s something appealing about an outsider crashing City Hall, which is way too beholden to sclerotic lifers who can be as clueless about what the city needs as Pratt turned out to be.

Instead, he platformed people who saw L.A. as a hellhole — or “shithole,” as Trump likes to call certain places. It was hard to see what some of Pratt’s loudest and most strident supporters actually thought was worth preserving in the city — but not why they felt he was their man.

In the wake of his loss, Pratt sure hasn’t push back against unfounded claims by too many of his followers and Trump, Vice President JD Vance and House Speaker Mike Johnson that Democrats somehow rigged the election against him. Quite the contrary, Pratt has insinuated on social media that they’re onto something.

That last point reinforces the ultimate reason Pratt could never become L.A.’s next mayor: He really doesn’t believe in L.A.

Angelenos don’t mind haters — it’s the type of city that frustrates residents even on its best days. But one insult residents won’t brook is someone who doesn’t have confidence in better days ahead for the city no matter how dire things may be.

Angelenos can spot a phony from far away — and Spencer, you’re turning out to be phonier than the fake drama on any of the television shows you ever appeared in.

You vowed to leave L.A. if you didn’t win the race for mayor. Maybe you should stay and try to righteously pressure Bass and Raman to make much needed changes. If you do, urge your followers to do the same instead of them pouting and sitting out the mayor’s race.

But if you don’t, well, maybe you never really loved L.A. as much as the City of Angels, warts and all, deserves. And you kind of need to really love L.A. to really fix what ails it.

Step up, or step outta town.

There’s a sense of quiet mystery in tarot. That’s why during my reading last week, it was more peculiar than disruptive when a dancer hopped on a table to lay at a 90-degree angle and jet her feet in the air.

Despite said activity, the tone was contemplative, and moments later, as I was being asked to describe the colors and mood of a Ten of Swords card, I was tapped on the shoulder. After a gesture to follow, I was handed a lantern.

The way I swayed the light would now dictate the performer’s movements. We may not have been dancing, but it was close. Melancholic and intimate, the performer (Haylee Nichele) silently guided me to become comfortable in my discomfort, to sit with the evening’s themes of longing, loss, confusion and impending grief.

Sam Alper’s Bill, foreground, and Haylee Nichele’s Constance in Koryn Wicks’ “You Must Be Here for the Reading,” an immersive tarot show.

(Daniel Kleen)

“You Must Be Here for the Reading,” running through June 20 at North Hollywood’s After Hours Theatre, is part theatrical and dance performance, part tarot reading and part cocktail hour. It’s also personal, led by two actors who encourage the attendees to open up, to complete poems and to generally tune into their vulnerability.

The 60-minute show, partly scripted and partly improvised, comes from the mind of Koryn Wicks. Trained in dance and choreography, Wicks’ day job is in themed entertainment while her personal projects explore the immersive space. They’re theatrical works that experiment with audience interaction. “You Must Be Here for the Reading” is no different.

The setup: Collectively, our group of eight has arrived at a tarot reading, only the famed reader we are there to work with, Constance, performed by Nichele on the night I saw, never arrives for her assigned role. We know her fate, but her partner, Sam Alper’s Bill, who nervously attempts to carry on with the performance in her absence, does not.

From there, “You Must be Here for the Reading” becomes a show heavy on audience participation. There are scripted, story-specific beats, but the cards pulled — and the tales they tell — is, of course, randomized.

Sam Alper as Bill, an unsuspecting tarot card reader in Koryn Wicks’ “You Must Be Here for the Reading.”

(Daniel Kleen)

“I knew that I wanted the audience to be the primary drivers of the tarot reading,” Wicks says. “I knew that I wanted the host to not be a tarot reader and there to be some sort of event that made it so the audience would have to take the reins and read the tarot.”

In turn, “You Must Be Here for the Reading” works for both those who are novices to the space as well as those who are more experienced. During the pre-show, guests can explore tarot books and uncover slips of paper hidden in them that prompt us to answer questions or complete poems — the latter will figure into the performance. A worksheet given to us asks us to interpret some core tenets, as well as to enter the reading with a question we would like to explore.

The show then focuses on how each attendee’s desires, concerns or lived experiences shape the perception of the reading.

“What’s drawn me to tarot is the way it’s built on symbolism and the way that symbolism is embedded in the collective unconscious,” Wicks says. “I think it’s really fascinating that we have this artifact that has this ability to give us insight into a lot of shared experiences. When I’ve read different books about tarot, or had my cards read by different people, there is an openness to interpenetration.

“The assignment I gave myself for this piece,” Wicks continues, “was to create an experience in which you had a group of people coming together and going through the process of defining the symbolism and meaning of the cards in real time.”

And yet the show also pulls from Wicks’ background in dance. While Constance never shows for the reading, her presence is still felt, often hovering or circling around the table with movements designed to interpret the tone of the reading. She’s a ghostly presence, the gracefulness heightening the somber emotions of the night. Though she and Bill never interact directly, much of the dance seeks to explore their unseen bond. At times, Constance may call on various audience members to act as a dance partner.

Koryn Wicks, creator of “You Must Be Here for the Reading,” an immersive tarot performance in which audiences are tasked with deciphering their own cards while a melancholic story unfolds around them.

(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)

“I really believe that one of the most beautiful things art does for us is remind us that we are not alone,” Wicks says.

Immersive art allows for a sense of participation, which Wicks hopes will increase one’s appreciation of dance.

“Dance is an embodied art form,” Wicks says. “There is science that shows that some of the enjoyment from watching dance comes from imagining yourself moving. In North America, a lot of people haven’t had an experience or education with dance, especially not concert dance. Then we ask them to sit in a dark auditorium in a small chair and not move to enjoy it. I found through my research, both practical and academic, there is something to inviting audiences to participate in dance that allows them to derive meaning from it.”

While there isn’t enough time in the show for everyone to have a one-on-one experience with the dancer, watching an audience and cast member attempt to get in sync with each other underlines the night’s themes of connecting. Ultimately, that’s the space where the show resides. “You Must Be Here for the Reading” uses tarot as a means to bring some structure to our often disconnected lives.

“It stands in contradiction to our current historical moment,” Wicks says of the show. “It’s very anti-AI. It’s asking people to sit with books and to find little seeds and not necessarily pursue solutions or puzzles. It’s asking us to connect, sometimes with strangers.”

I kept my question that I brought to the reading secret, but I found the show provided a hopeful answer. Not because the cards offered a solution. Instead, they provided a community.

Supporters of a half-cent sales tax proposed to help fund health services in Los Angeles County declared victory Tuesday after days of steadily gaining ground as more ballots were counted.

The latest results show the “yes” camp ahead by a slim margin, with just more than 50% of the vote. The measure needs a simple majority to win.

“Today, Angelenos sent a clear message: we take care of each other,” said Jim Mangia, chief executive of St. John’s Community Health and a spokesperson for the campaign, in a statement. “For months, we watched Washington make decisions that stripped healthcare away from hundreds of thousands of our neighbors — and today, Los Angeles County answered.”

The campaign said it would be organizing a news conference Wednesday to celebrate the “historic win.”

The proposal, on the ballot as Measure ER, had gained traction since election night, when results showed the tax had failed to gain a majority of support among early voters. Voters have not rejected a sales tax hike in L.A. County since 2012, when a transportation measure fell just short of a needed two-thirds majority with 66.1% support.

Approval of Measure ER would impose a new sales tax of half a penny of every dollar spent in the county, with the proceeds going to local hospitals and clinics that say they’re bleeding funding after federal cuts. Officials anticipate it will bring in $1 billion annually to patch the holes in the health services network.

The tax, which was championed by a coalition of healthcare advocates, takes effect Oct. 1 and will last for five years.

Ana Cruz was 13 when she arrived to the U.S. from Mexico with her family. But after 23 years of living in Los Angeles, raising two children and working as a community organizer, she has never been able to vote in any elections because of her status as a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipient, which doesn’t offer a pathway to citizenship.

She’s now among those backing a proposal from Los Angeles City Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martínez that would allow noncitizens to cast ballots in city and Los Angeles Unified School District elections.

“For me, it will be the first time I will have a chance to vote and help decide who represents me,” Cruz said during a press conference in support of the measure at City Hall Tuesday. “Without a doubt, this strengthens our democracy.”

Soto-Martínez is seeking council support to include the measure in a package of City Charter reforms that will go to voters for approval in the Nov. 3 general election. The council is scheduled to discuss this and other proposed charter changes Friday.

The expanded voting eligibility would only apply to Los Angeles city and Los Angeles Unified School District elections, and not county, state or federal contests.

Other cities and states, including Maryland, Vermont and San Francisco, have adopted similar measures.

“People have spent many years here, and in many cases, decades, contributing to the city of Los Angeles,” Soto-Martinez said. “This is about local representation and local democracy.”

The proposal has already faced push back.

Ira Mehlman, spokesperson for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, said Tuesday that noncitizens who pay taxes benefit from public services, and temporary status serves as a probationary period until people take an oath to become citizens.

“Citizenship does mean something, it means you are a fully participating member of society,” he said. “It doesn’t seem unreasonable to say you’ve got to do some time here and demonstrate that you’re somebody that we want as a citizen.”

If placed on the ballot and approved by voters, the City Council would then need to pass an ordinance creating a residential voting program and establishing eligibility requirements.

While those requirements have yet to be determined, advocates have discussed possible options might include extending voting to lawful permanent residents, or green card holders, DACA recipients and others who live, work and pay taxes Los Angeles, according to the council member’s office.

Soto-Martínez first pitched the idea in April, with the support of councilmember Ysabel Jurado, who also signed the motion.

Soto-Martínez represents District 13, which includes many immigrant and mixed-status communities living in Echo Park, Hollywood and Filipinotown. He said the Trump administration has terrorized communities by conducting mass immigration raids and breaking up families, and that his measure is aimed at underscoring the city’s values.

“We say L.A. is for everyone, and that means no exceptions,” he said.

Among those who could benefit are Grace McManus, a Filipina mother, caregiver and resident of L.A. for 24 years. With permanent resident status, she said she has no say in electing officials who shape her everyday life, despite contributing taxes and caring for the elderly.

“I am too familiar with the feeling of working and taking on low-wage work while feeling invisible because my voice is disregarded just because of our broken immigration system,” McManus said.

Public speakers at Tuesday’s City Council meeting also urged approval.

“Trump and MAGA want to limit voting. We need to fight to expand it, so all of our neighbors have the same rights as us,” said Julie Van Winkle, vice president of the United Teachers Los Angeles, during public comment.

Martha Arévalo, executive director of the Central American Resource Center, stood alongside Soto-Martínez as he rallied for support.

“We know that immigrant communities uphold the economy in this nation, and I think that people who contribute to their community, that call this home, should have a say in their local government,” Arévalo said.

Since its creation more than a century ago, the Los Angeles Bureau of Street Lighting has been in the lamppost business and little else.

But in recent months, the little-known city agency has found itself pulled into a fierce debate over L.A.’s relationship with Flock Safety, a surveillance technology company that has been criticized for supplying data used to enable the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.

In L.A., Flock operates dozens of automated license plate readers, which allow authorities to scan for vehicles that have been reported stolen or are registered to known fugitives, tracking their movements throughout the city.

The devices are often mounted on municipal light poles, which makes the Bureau of Street Lighting responsible for their installation.

Reports that Flock has shared license plate data with federal authorities, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, have prompted dozens of mostly smaller cities across the country to end their relationship with the company. But in L.A. it still has found willing customers, including the LAPD.

Hundreds of emails obtained by The Times through public records requests reveal how LAPD boosters, homeowner associations and elected officials have engaged in a months-long campaign to pressure the Bureau of Street Lighting to speed up installations of the plate readers.

Flock, headquartered in Atlanta, said that it contracts with roughly 5,000 U.S. law enforcement agencies nationwide, and that its technology complies with a California law that limits what information can be shared with federal authorities. A company spokesperson said that Flock’s technology is “built around transparency, accountability, and local control.”

“Our customers own and control their data, which is deleted after 30 days by default,” the spokesperson, MoMo Zhou, said in a statement to The Times. “Our platform includes safeguards like audit trails to help ensure accountability at every step. Every day, Flock supports communities across the country in addressing crime and locating missing people.”

The Bureau of Street Lighting, with 177 employees and a relatively modest budget of $49.4 million, would seem an unlikely player in the broader debate over police surveillance. It is primarily tasked with repairing and fortifying the city’s more than 210,000 streetlamps — a frequent target of copper wire thieves — and maintaining its network of electrical vehicle charging stations.

The push to put up more plate readers has come amid calls for greater transparency around the Los Angeles Police Department’s dealings with Flock. In March, the Police Commission asked the department to report back on what information the company’s scanners collect and share. In recent months, the commission declined to approve donations of Flock cameras.

Members of the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition held a news conference to express opposition to Flock Safety, a license plate reader, ahead of a Los Angeles Board of Police Commissioners meeting on March 3, 2026.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

The commission ordered its inspector general to conduct an audit of the LAPD’s use of license plate reader technology, with the findings expected to be released in the summer.

Recently, Councilmember Ysabel Jurado introduced a motion urging the commission to “refrain from entering into any new Memoranda of Understanding, Contracts, or other Agreements, or implement any pilot programs with Flock Safety or its affiliates.” LAPD officials said last month that the city attorney’s office has been working on drawing up a formal contract with Flock.

Behind the scenes, though, the pressure to work with Flock has been ratcheting up from other council offices and community groups.

When a representative from Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky’s office emailed the streetlighting bureau urging speed, she received a response that said the installation process shouldn’t be rushed because some city light poles can’t support the weight of a Flock reader, which is normally powered by a solar panel.

“The last thing we need is to have a pole fall onto someone or something if there are high winds,” the bureau’s Clinton Tsurui wrote in the June 4, 2025, email.

In another exchange, Tsurui expressed frustration with a colleague who had offered what he thought was an overly optimistic timetable for installing new plate readers.

He wrote: “smh, promising things we can’t do is going to catch up with us one day.”

The Los Angeles Police Foundation, a nonprofit group that has long bankrolled equipment for the LAPD and offered other support, has criticized delays in installing the Flock devices. Last year, the foundation facilitated the donation of dozens of Flock cameras, most of which ended up in affluent neighborhoods on the city’s Westside and in the San Fernando Valley.

Records show that in May 2025, Dana Katz, the foundation’s executive director, reached out to the mayor’s office with a request to waive permit and rental fees associated with installing the new readers. Katz wrote in an email that the extra expense of around $2,000 per device were “cost prohibitive and detrimental to public safety.”

Katz also pointed out that in some places, there are no city-owned poles on which to mount the devices — but offered a possible solution.

“Flock has its own pole that has been accepted by the County of Los Angeles for these situations, and we would like the City to accept the use of them, too,” she wrote to Robert Clark, the city’s then-deputy mayor of public safety.

A few of L.A.’s historic streetlights stand outside the Bureau of Street Lighting’s office near Virgil Avenue and Santa Monica Boulevard.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Katz wrote Clark again on Aug. 6 to ask why officials were estimating a six-to-12-month wait for approval of new Flock readers on public property in the neighborhoods of Cheviot Hills and Brentwood Park, where there were no existing city poles to mount them. She noted that the county’s engineering department had already approved the company’s poles, and asked Clark whether there was a way for the city to “piggyback on these other entities’ approvals in order to speed this up so that these neighborhoods don’t have to wait so long for help in preventing these home invasions?”

In the following weeks, Katz’s emails took on an increasingly urgent tone. In one of her last messages, email records show, she told an aide she expected more help than the mayor’s office was offering.

“With all due respect, the answers you have provided are completely generic and do not provide any guidance and direction as to how we can expedite this process,” she wrote.

She added: “I’ve said it before, and I will say it again — these delays are harmful to public safety.”

A spokesperson for the mayor’s office told The Times that ultimately neither Clark nor the aide intervened on the Los Angeles Police Foundation’s behalf.

Email records show Flock’s courtship of the bureau dates at least to spring 2024, when the company agreed to donate two of its plate readers to help combat copper thefts.

Tsurui emailed LAPD Capt. Celina Robles to say that the company’s executives had requested an in-person meeting with the bureau and the LAPD “to discuss the benefits of this product and how it can benefit the city moving forward.”

On June 24, 2024, a lobbyist from the D.C. firm Modern Fortis emailed Bureau of Street Lighting Executive Director Miguel Sangalang seeking to “explore a public-private partnership” between Flock and the city. Sangalang took another meeting to discuss Flock a few months later with former City Councilmember Joe Buscaino, who after leaving City Hall had gone to work for Ballard Partners, a powerful Florida-based lobbying firm.

In January 2025, after wildfires devastated Pacific Palisades, Altadena and other areas, Flock stepped in again. The company agreed to donate more than 50 plate readers, free of charge for six months, to the wealthy Palisades area, where residents and law enforcement officials were on high alert about potential theft.

A Flock Safety automated license plate reader in Costa Mesa.

(Courtesy of the city of Costa Mesa)

In the days and weeks that followed, city and police officials continued to pepper the bureau about speeding up the approval process.

On Jan. 21, 2025, records show, Cmdr. Randall “Randy” Goddard of the LAPD’s Information Technology Bureau wrote streetlighting officials to say that the Palisades community “could use a big favor from your department.”

LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell “fully supports this and has been working with the City Attorney’s office to finalize the terms,” Goddard wrote.

The second ballot we sent out for the L.A. Times Sports Report Hall of Fame was the NBA ballot, with 24 names appearing. People were able to vote for up to 10 candidates.

Reminder: Whoever is named on at least 75% of the ballots will be elected. The five people receiving the fewest votes will be dropped from future ballots for at least the next two years. A person must be retired to appear on the ballot.

There were 12,725 ballots cast in the NBA voting, and six candidates received at least 75% of the vote, and a worthy six they are.

Inductees

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, appeared on 99.3% of ballots

Magic Johnson, 96.2%

Jerry West, 94.7%

Kobe Bryant, 90.1%

Elgin Baylor, 76.2%

Chick Hearn, 75.8%

Didn’t make it, but will remain on ballot

Shaquille O’Neal, 72.8%
Wilt Chamberlain, 59.9%
Pat Riley, 58.4%
Jerry Buss, 53.3%
James Worthy, 49.5%
Phil Jackson, 41.6%
Gail Goodrich, 24.4%
Jamaal Wilkes, 12%
Michael Cooper, 10%
Pau Gasol, 8.1%
Jack Kent Cooke, 7%
Blake Griffin, 5.2%
Ralph Lawler, 4.4%

Bottom five, dropped from ballot for two years

Chris Paul, 4.1%
Derek Fisher, 3.8%
Byron Scott, 3%
Elton Brand, 2.5%
Stu Lantz, 1.9%

Thanks to everyone who voted! There is still time to vote in our other active categories. The next ballot will be released Thursday morning.

To vote in the Rams/Chargers/Raiders ballot, click here.

To vote in the UCLA ballot, click here.

To vote in the USC ballot, click here.

Until next time…

That concludes today’s newsletter. If you have any feedback, ideas for improvement or things you’d like to see, email me at houston.mitchell@latimes.com. To get this newsletter in your inbox, click here.

You can’t own the beach in California. Our shoreline is public — thanks to the Coastal Act and the Coastal Commission — even when everything around it gets expensive and complicated. You can live next to it, monetize it and build a personality around proximity to it, but the wet sand itself belongs to everyone.

Jackie Snow takes a selfie by the new public stairs at Escondido Beach, also known as Hidden Beach.

(Jackie Snow)

In 2024, my colleague Jaclyn Cosgrove walked 27.4 miles of Washington Boulevard in a single day, from Whittier to the ocean. I read it in awe of the shape of it. One street. One day. A city revealed in a straight line.

And then a thought occurred to me, I could do something like that. What if I walked the entire L.A. shoreline? What would happen if I went to the beach and just kept walking along the crest of its waves? Except the shore does not reward this approach. It closes. It opens. Erosion pushes you onto the road and lets you back when it feels like it.

I set out to walk the 75 miles along the Los Angeles coastline anyway. I started at the mouth of the San Gabriel River and worked north toward the Ventura County line, taking 10 trips from the end of November to the second week of January, mostly waiting on tides and weather to cooperate.

Being a surfer helped. I already knew that wet sand means public access in California, that satellite view tells you things the default map doesn’t, and that tides can make or break an outing. For someone wanting to do a similar journey, the California Coastal Trail website is a valuable resource. You can walk long stretches and return back, but I went point to point, which means figuring out how to get back to your car. I usually Ubered, although public transit exists on some stretches. The slickest option is going with a friend who has a car: leave their car at the end, drive yours to the start, and walk. Their car is waiting at the finish to bring you both back to yours. Beyond that, bring more water than you think you need to especially as most stretches have no fountains, no services and no shade. Pack snacks that will sustain you throughout the journey, wear a hat and put on sunscreen, then reapply it. Even on gray, marine-layer days, you’re exposed for hours with nothing overhead.

If you’re inspired by this mega-trek but want to instead do a micro version, I suggest the 5.7 miles from Malibu Pier to Escondido Beach. You can park at one end and take a picturesque bus back where a tasty lunch at the pier’s Malibu Farm awaits at the finish. One last tip I picked up: be nice. People sometimes will give you water, or offer help, wanting to see you get to your destination too.

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1. A red-tailed hawk perched on a coastal access sign along the boardwalk in Long Beach. 2. A bench off the Long Beach boardwalk, near the start of the 75-mile walk. 3. Birdhouses located near the Long Beach boardwalk. (Jackie Snow)

Alamitos Beach to Port of Long Beach: 4.9 miles

I start at the mouth of the San Gabriel River at Alamitos Park at about 10 a.m. on a busy Sunday at the end of November, walking with a friend. The first stretch is a flat, easy boardwalk. We stop at the Long Beach Museum of Art, which sits on the bluffs overlooking the water, and grab lunch at Claire’s, the museum’s outdoor cafe. From there, we walk toward the mouth of the Los Angeles River, passing through the marina, where boats sit quietly and a pirate ship is inexplicably for sale. We don’t make it up the man-made pier to the Queen Mary. Instead, we turn around just short of it, one river book-ending the other.

Looking back toward the marina near the mouth of the Los Angeles River, one river bookending the other.

(Jackie Snow)

Cabrillo Beach to Portuguese Bend Beach Club: 8.7 miles

I park at Cabrillo Beach, along the Port of Los Angeles, around 6:30 a.m. People are already playing ping-pong. Someone is dancing alone on the sand.

I start along the Cabrillo Beach Walking Path, which you enter at the south end of the beach where the sand ends and the bluffs start. In what feels like two seconds, I’m up on the cliffs, which quits partway and dumps me onto the residential streets of Coastal San Pedro, a neighborhood that looks quintessentially California. The houses are probably a few million dollars each, but they’re tidy bungalows, not the kind of aggressive beachfront wealth that makes you feel like you’ve wandered somewhere you’re not supposed to be.

I pass through Point Fermin Park, home to a lighthouse perched above the water. Down below, the beaches are rocky and loud. The waves are being sucked forcefully back out between the rocks, a sound that feels more industrial than oceanic. There’s more neighborhood walking on West Paseo Del Mar, interrupted by a Little Free Library stop where I add a few books to my bag. I hit the San Pedro hike trails, and the coastline turns dramatic, and suddenly I can’t step two feet off the path without risking a fall, but it’s breathtaking in its beauty.

Cabrillo Beach at the Port of Los Angeles, where the second walk began.

(Jackie Snow)

I hit another closed section, this one bordering Trump National Golf Club in Rancho Palos Verdes. Not wanting to end up on a Secret Service list that bars me from flying, I find another way around, on a surprising trail that curves between holes that’s part of the Ocean Trails Reserve. I climb down to the beach and start picking my way along the rocks toward the Portuguese Bend Beach Club, moving slowly and trying not to break my neck. You can definitely skip this part.

A security guard named Gilbert Blair waves me over and explains to me what I already know: I’m allowed to walk on the wet sand, but everything else is private. When I tell him what I’m doing, he starts offering advice, pointing out places on my Google map he thinks are closed because of last year’s heavy rains. This area is some of the shiftiest parts of all of California, with landslides going back all through the geographical record. In 2024, areas were moving 9 to 12 inches a week, although it has slowed down to 1 to 2 inches a week. He tells me the unstable land actually created a new beach, which the coast almost never does. People came from all over to see it, he says, gesturing toward a new form of sand that locals have called “unreal.”

Blair is nice, but not nice enough to wave me off the wet sand and through Portuguese Bend’s private roads so I can call an Uber. I have to backtrack, spending more time than I’d like carefully navigating the rocks. I briefly consider stopping at the nearby Trump National Golf Club to eat and use the bathroom, but I’m hot, sweaty and not in the mood to test my welcome.

The trail descending toward the rocky beaches below Point Fermin, where waves get sucked back out between the rocks with a sound more industrial than oceanic.

(Jackie Snow)

Terranea Beach to Palos Verdes Estates Shoreline Preserve: 5.4 miles

Based on Blair’s advice, I skip a section that isn’t open to the public and probably not safe. I drive Palos Verdes Drive South, a rutted, uneven road that skirts the area and feels vaguely off-roading. I park at Terranea Resort, which charges a fee, but there is also nearby free public parking. I pick the walk back up at the charming tucked-away Terranea Beach. As I head north, the trail climbs. I can see stretches of shoreline closed off, tantalizingly visible with no way to reach them.

I stop at the Point Vicente Interpretive Center, a modest but free museum perched above the water. Several people are gathered outside with binoculars, scanning the horizon. They tell me humpbacks were spotted farther out earlier, feeding. It’s easier to see them on the far side of Catalina, they explain, but they still watch from here, every day, sunrise to sunset, December through May. This is the Gray Whale Census and Behavior Project, run by the American Cetacean Society. Volunteers have been coming here for 43 years, counting whales as they migrate past the point.

The Point Vicente lighthouse, perched above the water where Gray Whale Census volunteers keep watch.

(Jackie Snow)

Volunteers with the Gray Whale Census and Behavior Project scanning the horizon. They’ve been counting whales here for 43 years.

(Jackie Snow)

After I peel myself away from looking for whales, the tides won’t allow me to climb down to Honeymoon Cove. I stay on the cliffs and admire the impressive houses around me. I continue until I round the Palos Verdes Estates cliffs, on Paseo del Mar, and see the long, flat stretch of built-up beaches unfurling ahead, South Bay-style, Malibu faint in the distance.

I’ve only done about 15 miles of my walk and suddenly I see how much more there is to go. I’m hot. I’m tired. I packed bad snacks. The sheer expanse of it, frankly, stresses me out. I had planned to make it to Rat Beach in Palos Verdes Estates, but I call it early.

The small coves that punctuate the Palos Verdes coastline, visible from the cliffs above.

(Jackie Snow)

Palos Verdes Estates Shoreline Preserve to El Porto Beach: 7.9 miles

I start back at Palos Verdes Estates cliffs. A couple of turns in, I come across my first real surf spot of the walk. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a surf break from this high up. The waves look less like waves and more like pulses of energy moving under the skin of the ocean.

When I finally hit Rat Beach and see how flat the coastline stretches ahead, I feel like dropping to my knees and kissing the ground. After days of cliffs and detours, the openness feels generous.

Hermosa Beach is busy with volleyball nets in use at a level that suggests Olympic aspirations. Forty minutes later, I stop at Ercole’s in Manhattan Beach two blocks off the boardwalk and demolish one of its famed burgers. Instead of stopping where I planned, I keep going and end at my familiar surf spot El Porto.

Surfers walking out to the break at El Porto.

(Jackie Snow)

El Porto Beach to Ballona Creek Jetty: 4.8 miles

I’m back at El Porto Beach, this time walking a paved boardwalk through a thick, foggy marine layer with my husband and a friend who’s in town visiting.

Suddenly, my friend realizes he’s dropped his wallet somewhere north of El Segundo. Cue a round of retraced steps and mild panic. An angel named Dr. Gaz finds it, looks up my friend, and bikes it over so we don’t have to retrace any further. The wallet is returned. Our trio survives. We keep walking, stopping at Ballona Creek Jetty.

A dog and his man relaxing on the beach in Marina Del Rey.

(Jackie Snow)

Marina Del Rey to Will Rogers Beach: 7.4 miles

In this classic boardwalk stretch, we eye the muscle men of Muscle Beach, pause for a quiet break at Small World Books in Venice and walk next to skateboarders (including one dressed as a Santa) in Santa Monica, before ending at Will Rogers State Beach.

The rocks and tide pools just past Malibu Lagoon, where the king tide pulled the water back farther than usual.

(Jackie Snow)

Will Rogers Beach to Malibu Pier: 7.7 miles

I do this stretch with my husband on New Year’s Day, parking at Will Rogers Beach Lot Three and timing it to a king tide. The highs are higher, but the lows are lower too, which is the part we’re interested in.

Even with the king tide low, the beach opens up and pinches closed without warning, and we move between wet sand, rocks we feel like traversing, and the shoulder of the Pacific Coast Highway when we don’t.

Soon enough, we hit the section of burned-out houses that still haunt the beach nearly a year later. I think I can still smell the smoke. It’s the quietest stretch of the whole walk, and the only place the emptiness feels like loss instead of calm.

The Malibu coastline near Escondido Beach.

(Jackie Snow)

When we finally reach the Malibu Pier, it feels like stepping back into civilization. People are on the beach. Nobu is packed. We eat at Malibu Farm and sit indoors, grateful for chairs, shade and food that isn’t trail mix.

Afterward, we take the bus back to the car from a stop near the Pier on the PCH, which turns out to be one of the most beautiful bus rides in existence, with the coastline framed perfectly by wide windows.

Malibu Pier to Escondido Beach: 5.7 miles

We come back the next day for another king tide, despite rain in the forecast. I start on the other side of Malibu Lagoon State Beach, which looks like nothing else on this walk. It’s swampy and green and quietly buzzing, reminding me of Florida, my home turf. Birders are out, rain jackets zipped, binoculars already up.

There are still rocks and little rivers to navigate, but the tide is so low it’s exposing tide pools I didn’t know existed up here. The sand is packed and forgiving, and we cover distance quickly until the rain really starts coming down.

We exit using the new stairs at Escondido Beach, also known as Hidden Beach, which were installed in 2023 after a multidecade battle over access. I take them slowly as I celebrate a mostly triumphant walk.

The Malibu coastline just south of Point Dume.

(Jackie Snow)

Escondido Beach to Zuma Beach: 6.7 miles

I head back to Escondido Beach, a few days later at low tide, though the tide is already coming in. That turns out to be a mistake. My second mistake is coming alone. As I scramble over rocks helpfully labeled with a sign warning not to climb on them, it’s dangerous, I notice my phone has no service. I decide the safest option is to soak my hiking boots instead along the incoming tide.

With my shoes sloshing and Google Maps satellite view looking deeply uncommitted to the stretch just south of Point Dume, I try to exit. Nope. Gated community. Not ready to give up, I keep going.

The surfer south of Point Dume whose companions offered to unlock the gate.

(Jackie Snow)

I spot a woman surfing and stop to take a photo. Her non-surfing companions start chatting with me. When they hear what I’m doing and where I’m trying to go, they offer to unlock the gate. It’s a genuinely kind gesture. But since I’m doing this for you, reader, I ask if there’s an exit farther along. They say there are stairs up ahead, probably reachable. I tell them, in the nicest way possible, that I hope I don’t see them again, and keep going.

My shoes are now collecting water on every step, the bottoms of my pants are wet, and everything underfoot is baseball-sized rocks, which I think is the worst possible rock size for walking. I round the curve. I spot the stairs.

If I had turned off satellite view, the stairs would have been obvious. So much for trying to read the coastline.

I climb out and walk to the tip of Point Dume and look south. I can see the South Bay, where I called it early weeks ago, hot and tired and hating my snacks. I’m still hot. I’m still tired. My snacks are still crummy. But standing here, salty and damp, I realize I don’t want this to walk to end.

The view from the cliffs near Point Dume.

(Jackie Snow)

Zuma Beach to county line: 5.3 miles

Today I timed the hike with a tide going out and my husband joins me so I don’t have a repeat from last time. We park along the PCH at Zuma. The first stretch we go by “Hannah Montana’s View,” a very persistent Google map label. It’s calm until a curve, where a gaggle of adolescent boys, shirtless and shoeless, are trying but failing to climb over the mussel-covered rocks ahead of us. For the second time on this walk, I have to turn around and back-track to the last exit, maybe a quarter mile back.

Luckily, the sighting of a Little Free Library makes the detour feel less like a failure and more like a reward. We cut through a small gated community that turns out to have a door for exactly this purpose, a quiet acknowledgment that people do, in fact, want to walk through here. There is so much rock walking. So much. Eventually we reach Leo Carrillo State Beach, where Los Angeles actually ends and Ventura County begins. Despite the name, County Line Beach is another mile or so away.

Gated Lechuza Point neighborhood has a beach access road that lets walkers get to the shore.

(Jackie Snow)

I watch people walk across the county border without noticing it at all, no fanfare, no announcement, no sense that anything has changed. They keep going. I stop. They are not done walking, but I am.

I haven’t seen every inch of the Los Angeles County coastline. I double-checked my walking distance and I’m still not at 75 miles, more like 65. The number I found online is probably not entirely accurate (the coastline is constantly changing). Maybe it’s closer to 70. But I have seen whale-watch perches, burned-out Malibu lots, crowded boardwalks and magnificent waves. The coastline is both fragile and welcoming — and walkable — if you’re willing to chase the tides.

TIJUANA — Iran’s soccer team arrived in Mexico on Sunday morning for training ahead of the World Cup, before its first two group matches at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood later this month.

Ehsan Hajsafi was the first player to exit the plane with markings for German charter airline USC, which arrived at about 5:05 a.m. He led the team, dressed in blue blazers over white T-shirts, through a brief security check with Mexican officials and dogs before boarding a bus.

The bus stopped briefly at the entrance to the Tijuana airport, where around 20 or so Iran fans waved flags.

The team’s participation in the World Cup, jointly hosted by the United States, Mexico and Canada, has been complicated by the Iran war. Problems with processing visas earlier led Iran to move its training base from Tucson to Tijuana.

The team has been training in the Turkish city of Antalya. It flew directly to Mexico on a private jet from the Mediterranean city’s airport.

Some members of their entourage were reportedly still without U.S. visas, according to Iranian state television Saturday. Those include the Iranian Football Federation’s secretary-general, Hedayat Mombeini, and its vice president, Mehdi Mohammad Nabi.

Iran plays its first two games at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood against New Zealand on June 15 and Belgium on June 21, then heads to Seattle to face Egypt on June 26. Iran and the U.S. could meet in the Round of 32 on July 3 in Arlington, Texas, if both teams finish second in their groups.

In March, President Trump discouraged Iran from participating in the tournament, saying he didn’t think it was “appropriate” and raising concerns over players’ “life and safety.” A day later, Iran’s national team countered, saying “no one can exclude” it from playing.

Iran finalized its team on Monday, including 17 home-based players whose clubs haven’t played since February because of the war. Star forward Sardar Azmoun was dropped in March, reportedly because of a social media post that angered Iranian authorities during the war.

Iran’s sports minister said in March that it would “not be possible” for the team to participate in the World Cup, but the Islamic Republic’s soccer federation said in May that it was moving ahead with a team. The federation had insisted that all players and staff be granted visas, including those who had military service in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

A site of big changes, the Music Center has become farewell central. Alongside the Gustavo Dudamel hullabaloo at Walt Disney Concert Hall, James Conlon has begun his final appearances in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion as music director for two decades of Los Angeles Opera, with his own signature form of enchantment in Mozart’s “Magic Flute.”

The silent-movie panache of Barrie Kosky’s production, which opened Saturday night at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and runs through June 21, is on its way to becoming a perennial. This is the third revival since L.A. Opera first staged it in 2013 — all four times with Conlon in the pit. The production operates like an operatic graphic novel and live animated film charmingly all in one. The scene is a giant movie screen broken up in sections and upon which is projected witty, fantastical background animation, while the characters are the live singers, dressed as though silent film stars.

The orchestra plays Mozart’s score as though it were, as orchestras did in the old days, accompanying a silent movie but to radically different effect. Fulgurous cinematic spectacle may immerse your attention, but the opera’s essence is transferred from the stage to the pit. The singers, meanwhile, function to an unusual degree as choreographed characters in a cartoon, leaving little opportunity for body language, allowing, instead, individual expression almost exclusively to their voices.

In Mozart’s opera, Tamino, a prince in a fairyland of mystic temples and mystifying gods, relies on his supernatural flute that turn sorrow into joy to get him out of jams. The genius of Kosky’s singularly musical production is that it magically makes the orchestra itself a compendious magic flute. It more than ever becomes an agent of delight.

That is where Conlon comes in. He has, while leading L.A. Opera for 20 seasons (half the company’s existence), served as an advocate for the core operatic repertory — notably Mozart, Verdi and Wagner — much of it little heard in our late-blooming former operatic desert. He has also been an international champion of his “recovered voices” project, salvaging the neglected operas of composers in the first half of the 20th century who were silenced by Nazi Germany.

“The Magic Flute,” one of the world’s two or three most popular operas, needs no such patronage. Written at the end of Mozart’s life as a popular entertainment, its a singspiel, or sung play. As a proto-Broadway musical operatic genre of spoken word and musical numbers, it appeals on all levels. The fairy-tale libretto is child-friendly. Mozart’s score is tune heaven.

The troublesome Queen of the Night dazzles with high notes that shoot out like daggers. The main lovers, Tamino and Pamina, are lyrical wonders. The comical bird-catcher, Papageno, is everyone’s darling. The domineering Sarastro, an all-powerful priest, bellows spiritual profundities. But if you start digging under the surface, deeper than the symbolic Freemasonry and all, you may never find bottom.

The opera begins with three ceremonial chords in the orchestra that signal a brief, sober introduction quickly undercut by an exhilarating fast-forwarding overture. Those three chords can be made to mean many things. Often, they come across as commands by an orchestra to sit up straight and pay attention. They may be dignified or downright quirky and playfully no big deal, just a here-we-go.

Conlon handles them as a sweet, perfectly tuned, almost amorous invitation to pleasure, implying this will be a genial, gracious, laid-back “Flute.” Among his accomplishments in L.A. has been to make the opera’s orchestra capable of producing just such velvety, flowing Mozart, as well as terse, tight theater.

Here, Conlon offers a lesson in the kind of leadership generally lacking in modern society, by simultaneously staying out of the way yet being at the essential center of things. Depth here is not announced, but the care of phrasing implies that there is more to everything Mozart is saying than first meets the ear, that, under it all, the “Magic Flute” is not fantasy but a spiritual lesson in morality.

Many in the cast, this revival, are young singers, not yet well known and new to the company. Sydney Mancasola and Miles Mykkanen, as Pamina and Tamino, are likable, lyric lovers. Kyle Miller catches Papageno’s vulnerable charm. Aigul Khismatullina, Queen of the Night, impresses with the silvery pricks of her high notes, while Kwangchul Youn’s Sarastro, unsteady in middle register, takes on weight at the bottom of his bass. Zhengyi Bai’s lustful Monostatos, disguised in the production as a hammy vampire, almost steals the show a time or two. The Three Ladies and Three Spirits provide vocal allure.

One of the evening’s most theatrical moments, though, came after the music stopped when what sounded like a gun interrupted curtain calls. But as if rescued by a magic flute, an instant of fear turned to joy, glittery gold graffiti filling the Chandler and celebrating Conlon.

The World Cup arrives in L.A. on Thursday. This marks the first time the festivities have taken place in the Southland since 1994, when Pasadena’s Rose Bowl hosted the final between Brazil and Italy, which famously ended in a scoreless tie and was decided by a penalty shootout that led to Brazil winning its fourth World Cup title. (The U.S. hosted the Women’s World Cup in 1999 and 2003, with the finals at the Rose Bowl and Home Depot Center [now known as Dignity Health Sports Park], respectively.)

Soccer is art and art is soccer and soccer is life — and also one of the most beloved sports on the planet — and thankfully for you, dear arts lover, you can mix your passion for art and fútbol by heading to a free public viewing party at a number of local museums and cultural institutions.

This year sees Spain and France as favorites, with England, Brazil, Portugal and defending champions Argentina all in the running. No matter who your team is, there is a museum watch party for you. Here are your top choices, in no particular order:

The Getty Center: A variety of watch parties will take place on newly installed big screens at the museum’s Trellis Bar & Lounge and Garden Terrace Cafe, which will also feature themed menu items and drinks. The Getty will stay open until 9 p.m. on June 12, 19, 26 and July 3 to accommodate evening games. Normal Friday hours will resume July 10. Admission is free, but a reservation is required. Parking is free after 5 p.m.

Los Angeles County Museum of Art: The museum is hosting two free outdoor watch parties on large screens located on its Smidt Welcome Plaza on Wilshire Boulevard. Mexico vs. Korea can be seen from 6 to 8 p.m. on June 18; and Uruguay vs. Cape Verde will take place at 3p.m. on June 21.

LACMA is also hosting a few soccer-themed events, including “Andell Family Sundays: ‘Fútbol Is Life’,” set to take place on June 7, 14 and 28 from 12:30 to 3:30 pm. The event features art-making workshops inspired by the museum’s ‘Fútbol Is Life’ exhibit featuring soccer miniatures by Lyndon J. Barrois Sr., and led by artists Karl Petion and Patricia Yossen. There is also an event called “Let’s Play: Soccer Juggling,” from noon to 3 p.m. on June 21. This is also tied to the exhibit and offers lessons in soccer basics through a drop-in juggling and accuracy workshop led by representatives from American Youth Soccer Organization. All ages and experience levels are welcome. RSVP required.

The Autry Museum of the American West: The Autry’s free Griffith Park watch party will take place at 4 p.m. June 12 when Paraguay takes on USA. The event will feature food trucks, themed cocktails, soccer-inspired games and activities, and local vendors selling specialty wares. Free, but an RSVP is required.

The Music Center: It’s not a museum, but it’s one of the city’s most beloved cultural centers. It’s also hosting a free public screening of Spain vs. Uruguay from 5 to 7 p.m. on June 26 on its lovely Jerry Moss Plaza, including family-friendly activities and themed refreshments. Bring a picnic or pick your dinner from an on-site restaurant. Stick around after the game for a free global dance party celebrating the start of the 22nd season of the Music Center’s Dance DTLA.

I’m Arts editor Jessica Gelt putting my game face on. This is your arts and culture news for the week.

The week ahead: A curated calendar

FRIDAY

Gustavo Dudamel: Celebrating 17 Years
In his final concert as L.A. Phil music director at Disney Hall, the maestro joins his Venezuelan and American identities, conducting two poetry-inspired choral symphonic works. John Adams’ “Harmonium” borrows texts from Emily Dickinson and John Donne to explore time, harmony and rhythm. “Cantata Criolla” by composer Antonio Estévez follows a Venezuelan troubadour who squares off against the devil.
8 p.m. Friday and Saturday; 2 p.m. Sunday. Walt Disney Concert Hall, 111 S. Grand Ave., downtown L.A. laphil.com

Haunted
In this one-act dance opera, composer Paul Salerni unites poetry and music to share a tale of doomed love entwined with a ghost story with an unexpected conclusion. Based on a libretto by former California Poet Laureate Dana Gioia.
8 p.m. Friday and Saturday. Sierra Madre Playhouse, 87 W. Sierra Madre Blvd. sierramadreplayhouse.org

SATURDAY

Family Fest: Pride
A free, outdoor event celebrating love, identity and inclusivity, featuring Bob Baker Marionette Theater, Iwalani Music, Everybody Dance LA, Drag Story Time, Color Me Face Painting and more.
11 a.m.-2 p.m. The Wallis, 9390 N. Santa Monica Blvd., Beverly Hills. thewallis.org

“Catapult” by Alex Gardner, 2025. Acrylic on canvas.
48 1/16 x 96 1/16 inches.

(Wild Don Lewis Photography; courtesy of Alex Garden and Perrotin)

Alex Gardner, Gabriel Rico and Makiko Kudo
A trio of new exhibitions connected through the natural world and the creatures, great and small, who inhabit it: In “Animals,” painter Alex Gardner explores his experience of fatherhood; Gabriel Rico’s “Gabrielinos (I Am You And What I See Is Me),” the artist’s first solo show in Los Angeles, uses textile, assemblage and sculpture to encourage viewers to think about the world around them; the life and death of Japanese painter Makiko Kudo’s pet cat inspired “Reincarnation,” a series of oil paintings.
Opening reception, 6-8 p.m.; exhibitions run through July 11. Perrotin Los Angeles, 5036 W. Pico Blvd. perrotin.com

Magnificent Mozart & Mahler
Eckart Preu conducts the Long Beach Symphony in two classical masterpieces, “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik” and Mahler’s Fifth.
7:30 p.m. Long Beach Terrace Theater, 300 E. Ocean Blvd. longbeachsymphony.org

Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum
The summer repertory season launches with Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in the great outdoors of Topanga Canyon.
“Romeo and Juliet,” 7:30 p.m. Saturday-Sept. 26; “A Midsummer’s Night Dream,” Sunday-Oct. 10. Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum, 1419 Topanga Canyon Blvd., Topanga. theatricum.com

SUNDAY

Juneteenth Block Party
Debbie Allen Dance Academy (DADA) hosts its annual free community celebration featuring free dance master classes, live performances, carnival rides, games, food trucks, music and a marketplace for local and minority-owned businesses. Noon-7 p.m. Debbie Allen Dance Academy, 1850 S. Manhattan Place, L.A. debbieallendanceacademy.com

L’Chaim America!
The Braid theater company performs real stories of American Jewish life centered on gratitude and possibility.
2:30 p.m. Skirball Cultural Center, 2701 N. Sepulveda Blvd., L.A. skirball.org

MONDAY
National Museum of the Aftermath
The project, conceived and titled by Cauleen Smith and curated by Jon Rubin and Harrison Kinnane Smith, travels from city to city adopting a different name and form in each location. For two months, it will operate within Oxy Arts, challenging the status quo of history and speculating on the future.
11 a.m.-4 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday; through Aug. 8. Oxy Arts, 4757 York Blvd., L.A. oxyarts.oxy.edu

WEDNESDAY

Denise Burse, from left, Charlayne Woodard and Deborah Joy Winans in rehearsal for “Angry, Raucous, and Shamelessly Gorgeous” at Geffen Playhouse.

(Isaak Berliner.)

Angry, Raucous, and Shamelessly Gorgeous
An expat actor of a certain age returns to the U.S. primed for a comeback, only to face a new generation with very different ideas from her own. Written by Pearl Cleage and directed by LaTanya Richardson Jackson. Denise Burse, Olivia Washington, Deborah Joy Winans and Charlayne Woodard star.
Through July 12. Geffen Playhouse, 10886 Le Conte Ave., Westwood. geffenplayhouse.org

The Revolutionists
Playwright Lauren Gunderson turns France’s Reign of Terror on its ear in this raucous comedy about women fighting for égalité. Directed by Jamie Torcellini.
Previews, 7:30 p.m. Wednesday and Thursday; 7:30 p.m. Thursday-Saturdays and 2 p.m. Sundays, through June 28. International City Theatre, 330 E. Seaside Way, Long Beach. https://ictlongbeach.org/therevolutionists/

THURSDAY

Double Take: Photographs in Pairs
An intriguing exhibition matching photographs based on their formal qualities: the angle of a body, the geometry of a space, the relationship between figures and the interpretation of color. Photographers featured include Diane Arbus, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Lauren Greenfield, Mary Ellen Mark, Helmut Newton, Irving Penn, Herb Ritts, Sam Taylor-Johnson, Bruce Weber and Bastiaan Woudt.
Opening reception 7-9 p.m. Thursday; exhibition runs through July 18. Fahey/Klein Gallery, 148 N. La Brea Ave. faheykleingallery.com

Esa-Pekka Salonen conducts the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in 2025.

(David Swanson/For The Times)

Ojai Music Festival
This year’s music director, Esa-Pekka Salonen, is in the spotlight as a composer with the U.S. premiere of his new work for violin and cello and the first complete performance of his “Six Preludes” for piano, and other works; Salonen also conducts the Friday, Saturday and Sunday evening concerts. In its 80th year, the festival pays tribute to its defining musical figures and welcomes L.A. Phil New Music Group, Colburn Orchestra, L.A. Dance Project and many other noteworthy artists.
Through June 14, 2026. Libbey Bowl, 210 S Signal St., Ojai. ojaifestival.org

Rheology
This experimental play by Pulitzer Prize finalist and Obie winner Shayok Misha Chowdhury is a collaboration with his mother, physicist Bulbul Chakraborty, filled with dramatic urgency.
8 p.m. Thursday, and June 12-13. REDCAT, 631 W. 2nd St., downtown L.A. redcat.org

Thursday Night Jazz
Weekly series featuring guest musicians backed by the Jack Lieberman Trio. Upcoming guests include the Tyler Hammond Jazz Experience (June 11); Ido Eylon and Willem Jochems (June 18); and Joey Du Bois with Kahlil Childs (June 25).
8 p.m. Thursdays. The Spotlight, 1601 N. Cahuenga Blvd., Hollywood. thespotlight.la

Arts anywhere

New and recent releases of arts-related media.

Ann Patchett and her novel “Whistler.”

(Los Angeles Times illustration; images from Emily Dorio, Harper)

Ann Patchett, ‘Whistler’
What does a literary novelist have to do with the performing and visual arts? In Patchett’s stories, the past is often inextricably entwined with the present and within those threaded timeframes lie traces of genetic code leading to the arts and art-adjacent worlds. In “Taft” (1994), the protagonist is a former jazz musician turned Memphis bar owner; “The Magician’s Assistant” (1997) finds the title character unraveling the illusions of her own life; “Bel Canto” (2021) features a famous American soprano at the center of a hostage crisis; and “Tom Lake” (2023) revolves around a Michigan woman’s long ago love affair with a soon to be famous actor during a summer stock production of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town.” Of the writer’s latest book, “Whistler,” Times contributor Leigh Haber wrote, “This exquisite writer has once again delivered an incandescent work of fiction — sweet, but never sentimental, infinitely wise and suffused with love. It’s also an ode to New York City itself.” And that ode notably begins with the protagonist and her husband at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A place that Haber notes, “one gets the sense, they know by heart.” This connection to art may prove to be tangential — I’ve only read a quarter of the book — but Patchett’s appreciation of these worlds is anything but.
Harper: 304 pages, $30

— Kevin Crust

Culture news and the SoCal scene

Jeff LeBeau, left, and Tim Cummings in the West Coast premiere of Samuel D. Hunter’s “Grangeville” at the Ruskin Group Theatre Arts Center, dairected by John Perrin Flynn.

(John Perrin Flynn)

Times theater critic Charles McNulty reviewed the West Coast premiere of playwright Samuel D. Hunter’s “Grangeville,” directed by John Perrin Flynn, at the Ruskin Group Theatre. The play, which explores the lives of two estranged half brothers from a small Idaho town, is “beautifully acted,” McNulty writes, adding, that Hunter, “the bard of Idaho,” is “one of the theater’s outstanding American realists.”

McNulty also loved the Alicia Keys jukebox musical, “Hell’s Kitchen,” which staged its L.A. debut last week at the Hollywood Pantages Theatre. The musical tells the story of Key’s upbringing in the Manhattan neighborhood of the show’s title, but the story isn’t where the show shines, writes McNulty, noting that the joy comes from the way Keys’ music is seamlessly integrated into the narrative.

Yo-Yo Ma plays the solo for the premiere of Angelica Negron’s “Mudillo” on Thursday, May 28, 2026.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

“Our streets are garlanded with ‘Gracias, Gustavo’ banners and billboards. The Walt Disney Concert Hall shop has become a Dudamel-torium, aisles bursting with Gustavo T-shirts, hoodies, tote bags, refrigerator magnets and this and that,” writes Times classical music critic Mark Swed in a review of Dudamel’s penultimate weekend at Walt Disney Concert Hall, including one featuring cellist Yo-Yo Ma.

Dancers from choreographer Benjamin Millepied’s L.A. Dance Project rehearse at LACMA’s David Geffen Galleries on Friday, May 22, 2026, in Los Angeles.

(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)

Benjamin Millepied’s L.A. Dance Project is staging a free, two-week-long series of public shows called “City of Dance” which take place at nine Southern California landmarks, including LACMA, Hollywood Forever Cemetery, Tongva Park and Stearns Wharf. Read all about how the project came to be, including its use of Philip Glass’ score from the critically acclaimed 1982 documentary film, “Koyaanisqatsi.”

Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts announced its 2026-27 season.

(Jason Kempin / Getty Images for Wallis Annenber)

Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts has unveiled its 2026-27 season, its first under the leadership of its new executive director and CEO, Jean Davidson. Highlights include music by Joshua Redman Quartet; Ronald K. Brown and his dance company Evidence, comedy and cabaret by performers including Sandra Bernhard and designer Isaac Mizrahi; recitals by L.A. Opera, concerts featuring Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and much more. “At the heart of this season is a belief in the power of live performance to connect people to ideas, to one another, and to the shared human experience. We are proud to support artists who spark curiosity, foster empathy, and invite dialogue, while continuing to strengthen The Wallis as a vibrant gathering place for all audiences,” said Davidson in a news release. See the full schedule here.

Pacific Jazz Orchestra also announced its 2026-27 season led by composer, arranger and conductor Chris Walden. The 40-piece string orchestra and big band hybrid is entering its fourth season with five programs dedicated to jazz, swing, soul R&B, Broadway and pop, staged in six venues across the region, including in Beverly Hills, Irvine, Northridge, Palm Desert, Santa Barbara and Ventura. Featured guest artists include Broadway star Sutton Foster, pianist David Benoit and vocalist Nayanna Holley. See the full schedule here.

UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance has announced “Far Away, Here,” a new multiyear international opera initiative that will launch in the 2026-27 season with the U.S. premiere of a new adaptation of “Kafka’s Letter to His Father, “ scheduled to run Nov. 12-14 at the UCLA Nimoy Theater. The initiative will continue to present U.S. premieres of under-the-radar operas by artists from around the world, and is curated and produced by tenor Timur Bekbosunov, in collaboration with CAP UCLA’s executive and artistic director, Edgar Miramontes.

— Jessica Gelt

And last but not least

I told you where to watch the World Cup at area museums, but here’s a list for folks who would like to watch the old-fashioned way, at restaurants and bars.

Los Angeles City Councilmember Nithya Raman cut deeper into the lead of reality television personality Spencer Pratt on Saturday, as his lead slimmed to just a single percentage point.

Pratt fell to just over 27% of the vote while Raman jumped up to slightly over 26%, according to the results from the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder. Pratt now leads Raman by just 7,494 votes.

“We’ve seen Nithya Raman catching up on every update and the last two in particular she’s accelerated,” said Paul Mitchell, vice president of the bipartisan voter data firm Political Data Inc. “She’s continued to gain at a rate that means she will eventually catch up unless Pratt starts getting some ballots coming in that are either geographically or demographically better for him.”

Democratic consultant Michael Trujillo, who doesn’t represent anyone in the mayoral race, said the results suggest Raman will surpass Pratt as more votes are counted.

“I think it’s over,” Trujillo said. “It appears Nithya will be in the runoff. Pratt doesn’t appear to be growing much more.”

The second-place finisher in the mayoral primary will face Mayor Karen Bass in a Nov. 3 runoff. On election night Tuesday, the Associated Press determined that Bass had secured enough votes to qualify for the runoff.

Pratt has been in second place since then, but Raman has gradually eroded his lead as mail-in ballots have been counted. The updated vote tally released Thursday showed Pratt with 29% of the vote and Raman with 23%.

With Friday’s update, Raman’s share had risen to 25% and Pratt’s shrank to 28%, for a 3 percentage point gap.

In the most recent batch of mail-in ballots counted, Raman received 23,514 votes, while Pratt gained 10,336.

Election analysts expected Raman to gain ground as the mail-in ballots were tallied, reasoning that many left-of-center voters — Raman’s base — held onto their mail-in ballots until the last minute as they waited to choose between Democratic gubernatorial candidates. They also say younger, more progressive voters tend to hold onto their ballots longer generally.

Although the mayor’s race is nonpartisan, Pratt is a Republican in a city that is overwhelmingly dominated by Democratic voters and elected officials.

A poll by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies, which was co-sponsored by The Times, had Pratt running in third place behind Bass and Raman.

The poll of 1,351 likely voters conducted May 19-24 had Bass with 26% support, Raman with 25% support and Pratt with 22% support, with a 3% margin of error.

Los Angeles voters have become accustomed to seeing election results change as late-arriving ballots are tabulated. In the 2022 mayoral primary, real estate developer Rick Caruso led the pack for about a week before Bass pulled ahead.

Pratt was favored in many of the same neighborhoods that voted for Caruso, according to a Times analysis of precinct-level returns provided by the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder on Wednesday, when an estimated 62% of the projected vote had been counted. Raman, by comparison, made inroads in progressive areas dominated by Bass four years ago.

Pratt, whose Pacific Palisades fire home burned in the January 2025 fire, was strong there and on the Westside, as well as in the San Fernando Valley communities of Encino, Woodland Hills, Chatsworth and Sunland-Tujunga.

Raman dominated precincts known for their progressive politics, particularly those with younger people in renter-heavy neighborhoods stretching from Hollywood to Highland Park, including her home base of Silver Lake.

Mail-in ballots with an election day postmark will continue to be accepted by county election officials through Tuesday.

Proud boy expelled from Pratt’s party

Spencer Pratt’s election night party at Don Antonio’s Mexican restaurant in West Los Angeles included a few uninvited guests, and it wasn’t just members of the news media.

As Pratt spoke to reporters relegated to the sidewalk, a Virginia man convicted of joining in the Jan. 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol hovered behind him, trying to horn his way into the candidate’s frame as Pratt spoke to the news cameras.

A member of Pratt’s security team grabbed the man, Jon Mellis, by the shoulders, dragged him past the TV cameras and pushed him down onto the pavement of Pico Boulevard as cars whizzed by.

Mellis — a member of the far-right Proud Boys who was pardoned by President Trump along with the other Jan. 6 rioters — wasn’t thrilled. He attempted to interrupt multiple news broadcasts to air his grievances.

“They can’t assault me like that,” Mellis said.

“They hate MAGA,” someone else in his group chimed in.

Earlier Tuesday evening, Mellis had happily mugged for one news camera after another, expressing his fealty for Pratt.

Mellis described himself as “ultra-MAGA” to The Times and, pre-shove, said he didn’t mind that Pratt was distancing himself from the MAGA movement as he campaigns for votes in the Democratic stronghold of Los Angeles.

Recent polling showed most Democrats were less likely to vote for Pratt when perceiving the candidate as tied to MAGA and Trump. Given that, it’s hardly surprising that Pratt’s security team gave Mellis and his friends the bum’s rush.

“Those guys are paid ops,” a member of Pratt’s campaign wrote on X. “They crash every single event.”

Airbnb’s election night sweep

It was a good election night for short-term rental giant Airbnb, which infused numerous city races with cash and didn’t take a single loss.

The company teamed up with the Central City Assn., a group representing downtown Los Angeles businesses, to fund ads in support of Karen Bass, city attorney candidate John McKinney and five City Council candidates.

The business group said its PAC, which received funding from Airbnb and the Los Angeles Police Protective League, spent nearly $5 million during the primary election cycle, up from $1 million during the 2024 primary and general elections.

“We have been intentional about supporting candidates and causes focused on building more housing; investing in public safety, transportation, and infrastructure; and supporting the diverse businesses that provide jobs and put paychecks in Angelenos’ pockets,” said Nella McOsker, president of the Central City Assn.

“The results speak for themselves,” said Justin Wesson, Airbnb senior manager of public policy in California. “Airbnb has arrived in L.A. politics — not as a guest, but as a permanent resident.”

In council, CCA and Airbnb supported Traci Park, who declared victory and had a big lead over her opponent; Jose Ugarte, who will probably advance to a November runoff; and Timothy Gaspar, who was leading in his primary as well, though votes are still being tallied and it wasn’t clear if he would make the majority threshold needed for an outright victory. CCA also supported Monica Rodriguez, who ran unopposed and Tim McOsker (Nella McOsker’s father), who coasted to a big lead in the primary.

Betting on whims and vibes

This is Los Angeles’ first mayoral election in the age of prediction markets, and two giants of the field, Kalshi and Polymarket, have been actively promoting betting on who will be the next mayor — and even sub-bets within the election, such as which candidate will come in second place in the primary or which two candidates will advance to the runoff.

On election night, as Spencer Pratt led Nithya Raman for second place by about 9 percentage points, both Kalshi and Polymarket had Pratt favored to move on to the runoff.

But overnight, the market shifted, with a Bass versus Raman runoff now considered more likely by bettors, probably due to a widely held belief that the remaining votes to be counted will lean more Democratic as the county tallies late-arriving vote-by-mail ballots.

Although Kalshi promotes its markets as the “odds” that a certain candidate will win, experts warn it merely represents the beliefs of bettors, who are not always the best-informed.

“This is people’s whims and vibes. You might have better luck in Vegas; at least when you bet in Vegas there’s math involved,” said Democratic consultant Mike Trujillo.

A spokesperson for Kalshi said “sharp traders on Kalshi are experts at pricing likelihoods in real time.”

Eric Zitzewitz, a professor of economics and expert on prediction markets at Dartmouth College, said that sites such as Kalshi and Polymarket are pretty accurate, and that smart money usually corrects the market.

“Historically that movement in Pratt’s price would reflect a movement in his odds,” Zitzewitz said.

As of Friday, Polymarket had a Bass-Raman runoff at 80%, and a Bass-Pratt runoff around 22%. Kalshi gave Bass and Raman a 78% chance of advancing and Bass and Pratt 22%.

Pratt currently leads Raman, but Los Angeles County is still tallying ballots and Raman has gained some ground following initial results Tuesday.

State of play

— BASS VERSUS?: Mayor Bass will advance to a runoff against either Pratt or Raman after a bruising primary campaign during which the incumbent was attacked from the left and the right.

— COALITION KAREN: A broad coalition of supporters assembled by the mayor helped her secure a spot in the Nov. 3 runoff. On her side was organized labor, including the powerful police officers’ union; business leaders, working closely with Airbnb; the Los Angeles County Democratic Party, including key elected officials; and immigrant rights groups that applauded Bass for her condemnation of federal ICE raids.

— COMEBACK COUNCILMEMBER?: Raman is still running behind Pratt, but experts say the remaining ballots to be counted should favor Democrats. “Don’t count [Councilmember] Nithya Raman out yet,” said Zev Yaroslavsky, director of the Los Angeles Initiative at UCLA Luskin.

— INCUMBENTS IN CONTROL: The mood was celebratory in Los Angeles City Council chambers Wednesday, as incumbents up for reelection held wide leads over their challengers as vote counting from Tuesday’s primary continued.

— FELDSTEIN SOTO OUT, MEJIA IN: Los Angeles City Atty. Hydee Feldstein Soto all but conceded that her reelection bid had failed Wednesday morning, as she lagged far behind her two well-funded challengers based on early returns. Her incumbent colleague, City Controller Kenneth Mejia, appeared to be faring better in his bid to stay in office, holding a double-digit lead over finance executive Zach Sokoloff.

QUICK HITS

• Where is Inside Safe? The mayor’s signature program moved 20 people inside from Skid Row in Council District 14.
• On the docket next week: Proposals from the Charter Reform Commission are still being reviewed by the Rules, Elections, and Intergovernmental Relations Committee, with the next meeting scheduled for June 12.

Stay in touch

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