Mayor

Labor Day is behind us, election day is less than two months away, and the question before Los Angeles voters is this:

Can anyone run this city?

Two fires at abandoned properties, one in Studio City and the other on the eastern edge of Larchmont, offer windows into City Hall dysfunction as Mayor Karen Bass defends her job against a challenge by City Councilmember Nithya Raman.

Let’s start on Babcock Avenue, just south of Moorpark Street, where, for roughly five years, neighbors of a vacant house begged City Hall for attention to what had been a dumping ground, a fire hazard and a homeless hangout.

To no avail.

When they received any response at all, they got the runaround.

Resident Jon Manzanares told me he has supported Bass and Raman in the past. But in a spring 2025 email to City Hall, he said both “should be ashamed and resign in disgrace.”

Well, they didn’t. And following an Aug. 26 fire at the Babcock property, which damaged the rear of an adjacent home, Bass and Raman went after each other for not having addressed all those pleas for help.

“Nithya Raman wants to lead the whole city,” said a Bass campaign social media post, but after six years in office “she can’t even get a single lot cleaned up in her own district.”

Raman shot back, saying she had alerted the mayor’s office about the nuisance property 10 months earlier.

“I cannot call her about the 200-plus issues that we’re dealing with that are at this level of risk,” Raman snapped.

The finger-pointing doesn’t inspire confidence, does it?

At least, said Manzanares, a retired lawyer, L.A. found out what it takes to get a response from the two mayoral candidates.

“The news crews showed up” to cover the fire, Manzanares told me, “and it finally got some attention because of the election.”

But festering eyesores are everywhere, as Bass herself indicated when she called in to KTLA-TV.

Fire damage is seen at an abandoned Studio City property following a overnight blaze on Aug. 26.

(KTLA-TV)

“You know,” she said, “this is a situation that unfortunately exists all over the city.”

A for honesty. F for failing to clean up all those messes, regardless of whether the problem is departmental failure or communications breakdowns with council members.

The fire in Studio City spread to a neighboring property and damaged a structure that Kayt Miranda uses for storage and as a home office. I spoke to Miranda on the front porch of her home, and she said she had filed multiple complaints about the nuisance property over a five-year period.

Five years.

“And we never heard back,” Miranda said, telling me she had seen people set up camp at the property, bringing in mattresses, book shelves and clothing racks. “Then we went to Raman’s office … They would send responses, but … we never saw any action.”

Manzanares showed me an email from a Raman staffer last month that said, “unfortunately, there is not a clear and expeditious path forward on this case.”

Why not? Was it going to take another five years?

Miranda said exasperated neighbors had banded together to put up more lighting and cameras to protect their properties, “but it really did feel like this is forever, because nothing was going to happen.”

When I was done in Studio City, I drove across town to meet with construction worker and pastor Juan Galicia, whose house was torched in March when fire jumped from an adjacent abandoned property.

I had first heard about Galicia in April, when I toured a nearby Hollywood neighborhood for a column about a homeowner who had hired her housekeeper to report illegal dumping, help bag up the daily mess and try to reduce the fire risk around encampments. The city wasn’t doing its job, Stefanie Keenan had told me, so she was spending her own money to protect herself and neighbors. And she still is.

Galicia didn’t get the protection he needed, despite multiple contacts with police and city offices — by him, relatives and neighbors —regarding the empty dwelling next door to his on North St. Andrews Place. Galicia said squatters were in and out of the house, with periodic fighting and drug use. Police would come, he said, but when they left, the trouble would return.

Galicia was preaching at his church in South L.A. when flames engulfed his home, where he lived with an extended family of 10.

“Eighteen years,” he said of his time in the house. “And in 10 minutes, you have nothing.”

I followed him into the house, with its charred walls, ceiling and flooring. Galicia wore a somber expression, as if still suffering from the shock, and he saw new evidence of trespassers, along with some fresh graffiti.

Galicia told me, as he told The Times’ Seamus Bozeman in July, that he intends to rebuild. But his insurance settlement won’t cover the cost of rebuilding, and he’s still paying $2,000 a month on the mortgage, plus $6,200 for temporary lodging in a rented house.

Meanwhile, as he struggles with a crushing financial problem he did not create, he’s aware that millions are being spent on homelessness without significant progress.

Aerial view of Larchmont home belonging to Pastor Juan Galicia that was destroyed by a fire that began at a vacant property next door.

(Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)

“I don’t understand,” Galicia said.

A spokesperson for City Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martínez told me his office became aware of Galicia’s issue in January, but because of paperwork and the complexity of legal records, could not track down the owner of the adjacent property before the fire.

In L.A., people trip and fall in droves and successfully sue the city for millions. I wondered if Galicia might have a liability case against the city, but two attorneys told me going after the next-door property owner could be more fruitful.

In a Sept. 5 press release, Bass said she was directing city crews to clean and secure nuisance properties citywide. OK, fine, but what took her so long?

Bass also said she had earlier signed legislation initiated by Councilmember Monica Rodriguez to speed the process of cracking down on negligent property owners and to hit them with stiffer penalties.

Those fines ought to go into a fund to assist Juan Galicia and others like him.

Between 2018 and 2024, according to the L.A. Fire Department, homelessness was a factor in about one-third of all fires in the city.

“I feel for these people, I really do. I’m not unsympathetic,” Jon Manzanares told me in Studio City. “But by the same token, we need to do something constructive and not have these encampments that start fires.”

With less than two months to go before the election, it’s on Bass and Raman to convince voters they can make a difference.

The finger-pointing is useless.

steve.lopez@latimes.com

On the night of the June primary, standing before cheering supporters at a downtown brewery, Nithya Raman was in a familiar position:

Outspent by rivals. Mocked by online haters. Her political career left for dead.

In early returns for Los Angeles mayor, Raman was in third place behind incumbent Karen Bass and reality TV villain Spencer Pratt. The City Council member thanked everyone for helping her “little campaign” but seemed resigned to defeat.

“We may not get an answer we like,” Raman said. “But regardless of what happens next, nobody — nobody — can take away what all of us have built together.”

She ended her short speech by going on the dance floor to greet well-wishers and boogie for a bit. The move came off to me as someone losing herself in happiness so she didn’t have to think about the sad reality.

But when I think about that moment now, it seems clear that she was embracing another familiar position:

Confident in what was ahead. Content with being underestimated. Ready to upend City Hall yet again.

As more votes were counted, Raman overtook Pratt to face Bass in the November runoff. Raman’s last-minute decision to enter the race had shocked L.A.’s political class and drawn accusations of betrayal for challenging Bass, a longtime ally whom she had endorsed. Yet Raman managed to pull off a hard-fought campaign, with Pratt as an unexpectedly strong insurgent from the right — a winning streak that continued this week when she scored two key endorsements.

The L.A. chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America and Unite Here Local 11, the powerful hospitality workers union, will now bring their renowned get-out-the-vote operations to L.A. doorsteps, street corners and smartphone screens on Raman’s behalf. Unite Here gives Raman’s campaign a working class cred it has sorely lacked. The DSA will unleash the democratic socialist trade winds that have swept across elections nationwide and helped five of its six endorsed candidates in L.A. County either win outright in the June primary or move on to the general election.

Neither endorsement was guaranteed. Even though Raman is a member and the L.A. chapter had endorsed her two City Council campaigns, the group didn’t officially support her in the mayoral primary. Some members openly questioned whether having a democratic socialist run a city seemingly destined for the dumpster was the best look for their movement. Raman’s positions on police funding, the mansion tax and the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks also ran counter to the party orthodoxy.

Unite Here had regularly endorsed Bass throughout her 22-year political career and seemed likely to join the dozens of other unions backing the mayor.

But with the one-two punch, Raman has shown yet again that she’s the comeback kid of L.A. politics. Every time critics throw her a curveball, she smacks it to the opposite field and gets on base, ready to grind her way to a win.

People line up to attend a Democratic Socialists of America fundraiser May 17 in Los Angeles.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

In 2020, the city’s establishment initially dismissed Raman, then a political novice, as a wokosa fluke, until she beat David Ryu, who became the first L.A. council incumbent to lose in 17 years.

A year later, Raman was seen as such a threat that the powers that be sought to torpedo her for good. In the infamous City Hall leaked audio, then-Councilmember Kevin de León suggested to then-Councilmember Gil Cedillo, then-council President Nury Martinez and labor leader Ron Herrera that Raman’s district could be “put in the blender and [chopped] up, left and right” during redistricting to dampen her reelection chances.

On the recording, Martinez enthusiastically endorsed the plan, telling the other three that Raman had complained about her redrawn district.

“Go f— do the work,” Martinez said she told Raman, “and see if you can” win again.

Raman did win, scoring an outright victory in the 2024 primary (Martinez, of course, resigned in disgrace). A censure from DSA-LA because Raman accepted the endorsement of a pro-Israel group proved no more debilitating than a stray eyelash.

In this year’s mayoral primary, Raman raised less money than Bass and Pratt and flopped during their one debate against each other. Her fellow democratic socialist council members — Eunisses Hernandez, Ysabel Jurado and Hugo Soto-Martínez — all endorsed the mayor.

None of it mattered. Raman is now easily scoring off of Bass mishaps, like the mayor’s response to the Lineage warehouse fire and her random broadside against street vendors during a debate in Sherman Oaks last month. The Dodgers should sit Raman in their dugout come playoff time, because her knack for rallying from behind is almost preternatural.

The road to victory remains hard, of course. Bass has never lost an election and won’t easily fold, even as her first term has careened from one crisis to another. Raman’s fiercest critics on the council — Marqueece Harris-Dawson, Traci Park and Monica Rodriguez — lord over South L.A., the Westside and the eastern San Fernando Valley, respectively, regions where Raman needs strong showings. The DSA endorsement will make it easier for critics to paint Raman as left of Lenin, even though her record is more pragmatist than pinko puppet.

She’s even drawing the ire of Pratt, who spent most of his campaign deriding the mayor as “basura” — trash — but is now blasting Raman, while the 26% of Angelenos who voted for him and are a key swing constituency are waiting to see who, if anyone, he’ll favor.

Raman anticipated all of this when she jumped into the race, she told supporters on primary night.

“These powerful interests spent millions of dollars against this little campaign, spent millions trying to preserve this city’s broken and unjust status quo,” she said. “And we said no.”

But the words I recall the most from that party at Boomtown Brewery came from Raman’s father, Venkit. After joking that his daughter didn’t go into a profession that most Indian immigrant parents wish for their children, he explained that her full name — Nithya Varsha — means “forever monsoon” in Sanskrit.

“If you think about it more, that’s exactly what she is,” Venkit said to cheers. “A constant, unstoppable force that brings life to the land.”

Let’s see how far the Raman storm goes.

Conservative MP Sir James Cleverly has said he is resigning from the shadow cabinet to run for London mayor.

“I am putting myself forward to be the Conservative candidate for mayor of London, because our capital needs more than an administrator,” he wrote in the Times.

Sir James said he has told Tory leader Kemi Badenoch he is stepping down as shadow housing secretary, saying: “I must be free to speak about every aspect of London’s future and concentrate fully on winning this race.”

The capital is not set to vote on a new mayor until May 2028. Labour incumbent Sir Sadiq Khan is yet to confirm whether he will seek an unprecedented fourth term.

The Conservatives are yet to pick their candidate for the London mayoral race.

A source close to Badenoch said Cleverly “is a formidable politician and will out-campaign Khan”.

Sir James, who was foreign secretary under former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, wrote that he intended to make London a city to be proud of again.

“We must rebuild its reputation and make it, once again, the best place in the world to live, work, invest and build a business,” he added.

A senior Conservative politician, Sir James has held a number of ministerial positions under three prime ministers – including roles as home secretary and education secretary.

The army reservist represented the Tories on the London Assembly before his election as MP for Braintree in 2015.

After rising through the backbenches, he unsuccessfully ran for Conservative party leader in 2024, losing out to Badenoch.

Reacting to Sir James’s announcement, a source said Badenoch “really didn’t want James to leave shadow cabinet”, but believed “he will be a big asset in London”.

Current London Mayor Sir Sadiq began his first term in 2016. Cleverly wrote that the capital has been “let down by Labour”.

He accused Prime Minister Andy Burnham of treating London as a “cash cow: somewhere to tax, regulate, raid and blame”.

Sir James said: “Londoners need homes they can afford to buy or rent. Entrepreneurs need to be able to start and grow businesses without being strangled by cost and regulation.”

The last time Londoners voted for their mayor in May 2024, Sir Sadiq beat Conservative rival Susan Hall by more than 275,000 votes – representing a swing of 3.2% to Labour.

The mayor won nine of the 14 constituencies including two gains from the Tories, and gained 43.8% of the vote share.

Reform UK revealed its candidate for the May 2028 election in January when it announced Westminster City councillor Laila Cunningham would be running.

Cleverly’s announcement follows speculation in recent weeks that he would step down and launch a bid to become London’s next mayor.

During his time at the London Assembly, Cleverly chaired the London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority, and also worked for Boris Johnson while he was mayor of London.

Aug. 24 (UPI) — A group of grocers filed two lawsuits Monday over New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s plan to open five city-run grocery stores, saying it would harm neighborhood supermarkets.

The Multicultural Business Coalition, an organization that says it represents owners of smaller stores, said in the filings that the city would violate business owners’ civil rights if the new stores open and that officials did not study how the planned stores would affect existing businesses.

Kenneth Roldan, the president of the coalition, said the plan would have a “devastating” effect on small grocery stores. He called it “a direct assault on minority business,” The New York Times reported.

The plan for city-owned grocery stores, which would sell some items at a 30% discount, was part of Mamdani’s platform as he ran for mayor. It calls for five stores, one in each borough of New York City, to open by 2029.

Mamdani said at a news conference Monday that the new stores are needed to address the high cost of groceries and that they would not offer significant competition in the city.

“I’m confident both in the legality of this, that it will stand up in court, and the importance of delivering it,” Mamdani said.

The new stores would reevaluate prices once a month and set the cost for food items at 30% below retailers, The Hill reported. The city would own the land and cover the rent and construction costs. A private operator, selected through a request for proposals, would manage daily operations.

“We are talking about a reflection of a cost-of-living crisis that has seen grocery prices increase by about 30 percent over the last few years, and we’re also talking about delivering five city-run grocery stores in a city of 8.5 million people that has more than 1,000 grocery stores,” Mamdani said.

The first store is expected to open in 2027 in the Hunts Point neighborhood in the Bronx. An East Harlem store is expected to open by 2029. The city has not yet selected sites in Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island.

Nithya Raman has made Los Angeles’ struggle to combat homelessness a key plank in her mayoral campaign, yet her own record on the matter has itself become an issue with her ouster as head of the City Council committee seeking solutions to the crisis.

Mayor Karen Bass is at the helm of the city’s battle against homelessness, but since 2023 Raman has been the second-most powerful official as chair of the City Council’s Housing and Homelessness Committee. That changed this month, when council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson, a key Bass ally, split the committee in two and removed Raman as its chair, effective Sept. 1.

Raman claims that politics were at play, casting her removal as a hit job for her decision to challenge Bass. Harris-Dawson disputes that, saying Raman failed to lead the committee with the urgency needed to combat L.A.’s enduring homelessness crisis.

“The committee is behind in excess of more than 100 issues,” said Harris-Dawson in an interview. “There are very serious decisions to make over what happens with homelessness. We needed someone who could focus on that and get it done and get it done quickly and show ability to build consensus.”

Beyond the dispute over Raman’s leadership of the committee, there are clear policy disagreements between the mayor and the council member over the best way to combat the crisis.

A Metro bus passes by a man sleeping on the sidewalk on North Spring Street in downtown Friday.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

Raman contends that Bass’ signature program Inside Safe, which dismantles encampments and moves people living there into motels, hotels and interim housing, is overly expensive and unsustainable. On average, the cost of housing these individuals runs about $82,000 a year, according to city reports.

Raman has repeatedly signed off on funding for the program, but has become more critical of it in the last year.

Despite the city’s efforts, L.A.’s unsheltered homeless population — those living outdoors or in their vehicles — went up by 7.9% after two consecutive years of decreases, the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority reported last month.

“The approach to homelessness that Mayor Bass has led and defended has brought us here,” Raman said after LAHSA’s report was released.

Raman has called for the use of time-limited subsidies, or rental vouchers, to house homeless Angelenos in private residences — at a city-estimated cost of $30,000, less than half the price of an average Inside Safe bed. Raman says she would “significantly expand” the city’s investment in the vouchers if she became mayor.

“For the same amount of money, we could rent three apartments using a short-term rental voucher and provide intensive services — housing more people in a program that has delivered much better outcomes,” Raman says in her mayoral policy platform on homelessness.

Even so, the more than $60-million voucher program Raman has already pushed through her committee has so far struggled to get off the ground under a tight timeline, and Raman’s critics have seized on the delay as evidence of the council member’s ineffectiveness.

Pedestrians pass by a homeless encampment along the 101 northbound offramp, at right, near City Hall Friday.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

A city consultant on the program set a goal of having 600 households moved into leases by July 1 of this year, and 2,000 households moved in by next April. But as of that July 1 date, only three households had moved into homes via the vouchers, housing officials said in a report.

By Aug. 13, however, the number had jumped to 54 households, “with new move ins happening nearly every day,” the housing department said in a report.

Bass’ campaign spokesperson, Alex Stack, cited the sluggish start to the program and said subsidies are only a small part of the fight against homelessness.

“It’s not the silver bullet Raman’s selling,” Stack said.

In an interview, Raman said that the contracting process slowed the start of the program, but that time-limited subsidies are a great way to free up space in city shelters by moving those people into private housing.

“This is a cost-effective program that has very good outcomes in the past in terms of percentage of people moving on to permanent housing,” she said.

Nithya Rama listens to a question at the mayoral debate hosted by the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Assn.

(David Butow / For The Times)

Raman added that the council will continue to monitor data from the program and make fixes as needed if it doesn’t move fast enough.

Homeless services providers working with the city on the program said part of the challenge has been getting a completely new program off the ground.

“It’s definitely been slower than I think most people anticipated,” said Sasha Morozov, the regional director of supportive services for PATH, a nonprofit contracting with the city for the program.

But Morozov said the program is speeding up now and she believed the 2,000 slots will be filled on time.

A key plank in Raman’s platform

Raman said she ran for council largely to take on the homelessness crisis in Los Angeles. She says she is running for mayor for the same reason.

She’s cited a 49% drop in street homelessness in her district over the past year as a clear sign that she is equipped to bring down homelessness citywide. Bass counters it was her efforts through Inside Safe that brought homelessness down in Raman’s district.

People living on the street in downtown L.A. gather cardboard for shelter during a heat wave last month.

(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

While chair of the Housing and Homelessness Committee, Raman established monitoring of all the city’s spending on homelessness and tracking of 35 key performance metrics to see how effective the city’s investments are. She also stewarded the creation of a Bureau of Homelessness Oversight within the city’s Housing Department that is responsible for coordinating and overseeing the city’s homelessness system.

Her critics say that Raman’s tenure atop the committee hasn’t adequately met the moment facing the city of Los Angeles — with the Trump administration and county both moving to cut funding from LAHSA, the joint city-county authority responsible for homeless services. Meanwhile, the city is still managing a landmark federal lawsuit settlement, which requires it to invest in thousands of new shelter beds in its response to homelessness.

“She’s been in this building … longer than Karen Bass,” said Councilmember Monica Rodriguez, who served on the committee under Raman. “It’s convenient now for her to saddle all blame on the mayor when she rubber-stamped Inside Safe and stood in lockstep with the mayor.”

Mayor Karen Bass, left, and City Council member Monica Rodriguez at City Hall.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

Rodriguez has specifically accused Raman — as chair of the committee — of slow-walking Rodriguez’s proposal from 2024 for the city to study a plan to separate itself from LAHSA and form its own department that would directly contract with homeless services providers.

Rodriguez said it took Raman months to schedule her motion in committee and that, while it was pending, the county removed most of its funding from LAHSA.

“The city has been left flatfooted because she wouldn’t lead our conversation. She wouldn’t schedule our items. She set us up for failure,” Rodriguez said.

Raman tried until the last minute to get the county to remain in LAHSA.

While Rodriguez’s motion was waiting on a report, Raman made her own proposal to create a Bureau of Homelessness Oversight within the Los Angeles Housing Department to keep track of the city’s more than $1-billion annual investment in homelessness response.

The council moved that bureau forward last year, and a spokesperson for the Housing Department said that seven positions have been hired within the bureau handling contracts and data oversight.

Harris-Dawson said a seven-person bureau isn’t adequate.

Raman said the bureau was a starting point that could one day lead to a department, which she said would be expensive and take a long time to stand up.

“This was not precluding [the creation of a department],” Raman told The Times. “This was trying to speed up that staffing faster than the departmental process normally takes in this city.”

Raman said she talked to Bass about creating a department for homelessness in late 2023 or early 2024, but the mayor told her to move ahead with the bureau instead. Bass representatives didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Paige Sterling, a spokesperson for the mayor, said that Bass and Raman discussed the bureau in 2025, during the budget process. The mayor opposed a standalone department at the time because it “would add to the bureaucracy,” and the bureau was a compromise, Sterling said.

“The mayor signed a budget with funding and positions for the bureau, which begins to give the city the capacity it needs to start overseeing homelessness as we evaluate what the future governance of this issue looks like,” Sterling said.

Raman has touted the bureau as a success that provides clear oversight of how the city spends its money, but has also claimed that the mayor’s office has moved too slowly to staff the bureau. The Housing Department still hasn’t hired an assistant general manager to oversee it.

The rotunda at L.A. City Hall.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

Canceled meetings and frustrated colleagues

Raman hasn’t been endorsed for mayor by any of her colleagues on the council, and some of those who served on her homelessness and housing panel say she did a shoddy job as its chair. They complain that she frequently canceled meetings and allowed hundreds of motions to pile up without getting moved through council.

“It had started to feel less like a policymaking body and more like a scholastic seminar — a lot of philosophizing, a lot of talk about feelings, but not enough substantive questions or direction on policy to present to staff,” Councilmember Imelda Padilla said in a statement to The Times.

In response, Raman said her committee focused on data to make sure the city’s investment in fighting homelessness is paying off.

“That doesn’t feel scholarly to me, that feels like oversight and accountability — exactly what the public is asking for for one of our largest investments as a city,” she said.

The full council, meanwhile, has agreed to review its relationship with LAHSA and the county, and to study creating a new department to centralize homelessness oversight.

“This conversation that we’re having about this … is long overdue,” said Councilmember John Lee.

Raman will have a seat on the new homelessness committee, but it will be chaired by Councilmember Ysabel Jurado. Padilla was named chair of the new Housing Committee.

Raman’s final meeting as committee chair was supposed to be Wednesday.

She didn’t show up.

New York City, United States – Mayor Zohran Mamdani is challenging a new law that would give New York City’s teaching aides a one-time $10,000 bonus, arguing it goes against the city’s collective bargaining laws.

On Wednesday, the bill, which was passed by New York City’s City Council, automatically became law because the mayor had opted not to veto it. Instead, Mamdani filed a lawsuit to block it because the City Council had enough votes to override his veto.

The bill, called the Respect Check Act, was backed by the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), a labour union representing teachers across New York City’s public school system and was championed by City Council Speaker Julie Menin, who has often clashed with the mayor.

Teaching assistants are among the lowest-paid workers in the city’s school system, according to a statement released by Menin’s office on Wednesday. Their pay is as low as $32,000. According to MIT’s living wage calculator, the living wage in New York City is $79,469 for Manhattan, $67,558 for Brooklyn, $73,258 for Queens, $67,974 in Staten Island, and $60,341 for the Bronx.

When the bill passed in July, Mamdani argued that the law directly violated a state law called the Taylor Law, a nearly 60-year-old law that gives public sector workers the right to organise. The UFT, which endorsed Mamdani in July 2025 ahead of the city’s election, pushed back on the mayor’s claims. The group argued the City Council did not undermine collective bargaining.

“The City Council would not have introduced – let alone passed – this bill if it were illegal, and we would not have supported a bill that threatened our collective bargaining rights,” Michael Mulgrew, president of the UFT, said in a statement provided to Al Jazeera.

“This moment is an opportunity for Mayor Mamdani to create a new, fairer system and build the kind of city he said he wanted to lead. This administration must keep its promises, and we won’t stop until it does.”

The City Council crafted the law to avoid violating New York’s Taylor Law, a UFT representative told Al Jazeera.

Under a 2023 state appeals court ruling, additional payments to public employees are mandated to be independent of a worker’s regular salary and cannot be tied to collective bargaining, they argue.

“The Court of Appeals has found that the Taylor Law does not prevent a municipality from unilaterally providing an economic benefit,” Beth Norton, general counsel for the UFT, said in testimony in front of the City Council in 2025, provided to Al Jazeera.

Pushing back

New York City Hall sees it differently.

“Council labels these ‘stabilisation’ payments; they effectively function as stipends or salary bonuses and, regardless of terminology, are an additional form of compensation and, as such, a mandatory subject of bargaining,” the 18-page filing obtained by Al Jazeera said.

“I think the mayor is right that this sets a bad precedent,” Adin Lenchner, founder of the New York-based political consultancy Carroll Street Campaigns, told Al Jazeera.

“Him and his team are either posturing, negotiating, or using this as a moment to negotiate toward some other kind of deal. I think everyone would agree that, substantively and philosophically, this is aligned with the mayor’s public policy approach and his vision for the city,” Lenchner added.

“So, if I had to guess, this is, on the one hand, about not wanting to establish a bad precedent and, on the other hand, a step toward a longer-term negotiation.”

Citizens Budget Commission (CBC), a nonpartisan think tank, urged the mayor in July to veto the bill, arguing that City Council should not make this decision. It says the now-law would add $325m in city spending.

“The City should continue to determine employee compensation at the bargaining table, not the legislative chamber,” vice president for research at CBC, Ana Champeny, said in a press release in mid-July.

Mamdani echoed that sentiment when he was asked about the law earlier this month.

“Conversations around compensation are better left at the bargaining table,” Mamdani said in a news conference on August 6.

However, the mayor voiced support on the campaign trail for legislation that would provide support payments to these paraprofessionals. That legislation supported recurring payments, not a one-time payment.

“The version he supported last fall made the payment recurring; what passed last month only guarantees it for one year. That’s the line between then and now, so not much of a flip-flop,” Lenchner added.

“We will not allow the political process to replace the collective bargaining table. The City is filing a lawsuit to protect the right of every union to negotiate on behalf of its members, to fight for the workplace they deserve and ensure that workers – not politicians – determine their own futures,” Matt Rauschenbach, a spokesperson for the mayor, said in a statement provided to Al Jazeera.

“We will work towards a quick resolution that respects workers, protects the City’s finances, and ensures that the Council does not interfere with collective bargaining in the future.”

Rauschenbach declined to provide further comment.

The mayor of Como has banned riding bicycles in certain areas of the historic Italian city after he was hit by an electric one.

Alessandro Rapinese said the ban was necessary to improve public safety. It means from September, cyclists will have to dismount through an area of around 30 streets.

He told Italian news agency Ansa: “People act based on their own experiences and I know what it’s like to be hit by one of these beasts.”

Several other local authorities around Europe, including in the UK, have restricted where and how e-bikes and other single-person vehicles can be used.

The measure put forward by Rapinese is part of a package of new traffic regulations, establishing a Limited Traffic Zone (ZTL) to manage tourist growth, and which impose stricter rules on cars and vans in the city centre.

Many of the roads covered by the ban are the widest in the old town and are popular with delivery drivers.

The measure applies to both electric and push bikes, as the Italian highway code does not distinguish between models.

Rapinese explained his decision in a video as part of a series of online videos he produces himself, known as RapiNews24.

He recounted an incident in which he had been leaving city hall in July and collided with an e-bike shortly after his administration had discussed traffic restrictions in the city centre.

The cyclist involved in the collision has not been identified.

“In this case, I didn’t even end up in the hospital,” Rapinese said. “I was hit by a bike. I gathered information, and that’s where the measure came from.”

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass’ terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad reelection campaign just got worse after Wednesday night’s debate in Sherman Oaks.

Bass came in as the clear favorite after toying with City Councilmember Nithya Raman the two times they faced off on the debate stage during the primary, as easily as the Dodgers sweeping the Angels.

Her Honor just needed to do more of the same: hail her own accomplishments, deliver well-timed zingers and keep as cool as a cucumber while baiting Raman into self-immolation.

Bass did none of that, while Raman stepped up the way she needed to.

This time, the challenger offered concrete answers instead of word salads. She mostly stuck to the allotted time limits while Bass repeatedly whined that she wasn’t given enough time. Raman effortlessly turned the mayor’s rhetorical traps around like Bugs Bunny twisting Elmer Fudd’s rifle right in his face.

Take the moment when Bass pointed out that Raman had missed the second-most votes among councilmembers during her six years in office. Raman responded that she missed many meetings while representing the city on the South Coast Air Quality Management District and other governmental boards. Bass’ clap-back — that Raman’s colleagues also had other official responsibilities yet “they find their way to work” — drew “ooohs” from the audience at the debate, put on by the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Assn.

If this were still the primary, Raman would have flustered her way to a non-answer. This time, she calmly said that she must not be such a bad councilmember, since Bass had appointed her to those boards.

“Well, we really need to look at that,” Bass stammered before asking Raman if she was “getting ready to resign” from them.

“I’m sorry?” Raman asked off mic as Bass challenged her to step down from all her boards. “No,” Raman then said firmly before shrugging and letting the moderator move on to the next question.

The moment was par for the mayor’s night.

Again and again, Bass went after Raman in the pettiest, most personal ways. She kept mocking the MIT graduate as a clueless egghead with no idea what’s going on in the city, stating twice that Raman governed as if L.A. were “an academic institution” — a line that sounded like a MAGA talking point and that was originally trotted out by Councilmember Imelda Padilla.

Bass tried to paint Raman as a member of an ineffectual city establishment, not a newcomer, which fell flat, considering that Bass has held one elected office or another for 22 years while Raman has been in politics only since 2020.

Bass frequently resorted to her trademark nervous laughter and repeated obviously crafted lines with all the enthusiasm of someone gulping down cod oil. Her furrowed brow and exasperated looks, which she had effectively used in previous debates, made her come off as embittered, tired and unable to defend the indefensible mess that has been her first term.

At one point, the mayor even compared street taco vendors to homeless encampments, with both supposedly disrupting the fabric of a well-run city.

Somewhere, Jonathan Gold is shaking his head in disgust.

“You have lots of plans and lots of ideas but have done very little,” Bass told Raman at another point.

And what have you done, Mayor Bass?

L.A. Mayor Karen Bass speaks with a woman after the end of a mayoral debate against challenger Nithya Raman in Sherman Oaks.

(David Butow/For the Times)

I’ve really tried to like Bass. Her trajectory from South L.A. activist to nonprofit founder to Sacramento, Washington and City Hall is impressive and important. Yet when Angelenos needed her to rise and succeed as their city faced one crisis after another during these past four years, Bass stumbled and stumbled again. Her flop of a debate performance left her sounding like someone with no vision or kindness — career suicide for someone who has made her reputation on both traits.

At this point, the architects of Bass’ campaign need to burn sage to drive out bad spirits or just bow out altogether. Any time something could go wrong, it has.

Bass placed first in the primary with 34% of the vote — an abysmal number for a Democratic incumbent in a deep blue city. Her campaign’s cynical gambit to boost washed-up reality TV star Spencer Pratt into the general election, because he’d be an easier opponent than Raman, failed. The Lineage fire in Boyle Heights brought back memories of the deadly Palisades inferno, angering a voting bloc Bass desperately needs — Latinos.

Then came news this week that a poll the Bass campaign had promoted, claiming that she held a commanding lead over Raman, turned out to be fake. Bass came out looking like someone incapable of overseeing paint dry, let alone running America’s second-largest city.

And now, this debate.

The audience, which was heavily pro-Bass, eventually started applauding more and more of Raman’s responses. Bass, desperate to trip up her opponent, talked over her so much that the councilmember responded with the line of the night and possibly the race:

“You gotta let me answer, Mayor Bass. This is my time.”

Raman still faces an uphill battle. Nearly all of the city’s power structure — elected officials, labor unions, the Los Angeles Police Protective League, business owners and even the three other democratic socialist councilmembers — has endorsed Bass. The mayor has outpaced Raman in fundraising. Raman has to win over voters who supported Pratt’s conservative stances while not alienating her progressive base. She did herself no favors with the Democratic Socialist of America’s local chapter, which didn’t endorse her in the primary and will decide next week whether to endorse her in the general election, by stating that the city needs to maintain the current size of its police force.

But in Wednesday night’s debate, she offered voters a distinct choice between how she would run L.A. and how Bass has.

Councilmember Nithya Raman speaks with staff and supporters after a mayoral debate with incumbent Karen Bass in Sherman Oaks.

(David Butow/For the Times)

All the mayor could sputter in her closing remarks was that Raman “does not have the support of [any] of her colleagues” — yet another line she had repeated ad nauseum.

When it was her turn, Raman said she keeps hearing from residents “that this city feels rudderless.”

“I have news for you, Angelenos. You’re right,” she continued. “No one is in charge right now.”

Then, instead of launching another fusillade against Bass, Raman went for something few people associate with L.A. nowadays:

Hope.

“You have every right to expect more from your city,” Raman proclaimed, her voice strong and clear. She urged Angelenos to “raise our expectations” of what’s possible and strive for a city that’s “affordable, functional, safe, joyful, ambitious.”

A few months ago, that would have sounded like the delusional ramblings of someone with no chance at winning. After tonight’s debate, Raman seems like L.A.’s final, best chance.