Randall Winston has declared victory in his campaign for Seat 6 on the Los Angeles Community College District Board of Trustees, in what was the closest of three races in last week’s election for the seven-member board.
Second-place finisher Gabriel Buelna has conceded.
According to the count released Monday, Winston had 38.7% of the vote and Buelna had 31.7%, followed by community college professor Roberto David LaCarra in third place and realtor Tonia Arey in fourth.
To win a seat on the seven-member board, candidates need only a plurality of votes, not a majority.
Winston declared victory in an email to supporters over the weekend.
“You voted and told your friends and family why this race mattered,” Winston told supporters on Saturday. “Because of you, the Los Angeles Community College District will have a trustee who believes our colleges are where this city builds opportunity.”
In a brief interview Monday, Buelna said he called Winston to concede and wished him the best in his new role.
Seat 6 turned out to be the most contentious of the races for the Board of Trustees, which oversees the largest community college district in the country with some 200,000 students, most of whom are low-income.
During the campaign, Buelna and Arey accused Winston of misleading the public by describing himself as an architect and an educator, when his full-time job is deputy mayor of infrastructure and climate resilience under Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass.
Winston responded by saying his first professional degree is in architecture, he is licensed in the field and he will be teaching a leadership class at West L.A. College this fall.
Helping boost him to victory was a key endorsement from the community college district’s faculty union, which put significant financial resources behind his candidacy.
Between Sept. 20 and Oct. 17, the union contributed $800,000 to a committee supporting Winston and the two other winning candidates, helping produce slate mailers that hit the doors of voters, according to campaign filings.
James McKeever, president of the faculty union, AFT Local 1521, declined to discuss many details of the union’s decision, but told The Times that the executive board wanted to go “in a different direction” and saw Winston as the best candidate.
In the race for Seat 2, incumbent Steve Veres held a 40.91% to 33.48% lead over educator Adriana Cabrera, who was in second.
Cabrera did not return emails seeking comment, and Veres said she had not called to concede. As of Monday afternoon, Veres had nearly 97,000 more votes than Cabrera with an estimated 44,000 more ballots to be counted county-wide, according to the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk.
In Seat 4, Darryn Harris, a government and community affairs officer for St. John’s Community Health, has the biggest lead of all.
According to the latest numbers, Harris had 57.3% of the vote in a seven-person race. Healthcare workforce specialist Elaine Alaniz was in second place with 14.4%.
Despite a nationwide blue wave in the midterm election, California’s much-debated billionaire tax didn’t get the support many expected in one of the country’s most liberal states.
Since the Golden State’s powerful healthcare union proposed the new tax, supporters of Proposition 40 have faced a fierce, expensive battle against the world’s richest people.
In what has been described as a David-versus-Goliath fight, the underdog appears to have lost. The proposition, which would have imposed a one-time 5% tax on the assets of California billionaires to mostly fund healthcare, seemed headed toward defeat as votes were tallied Wednesday.
“In a deep blue state like California, most voters are going to support additional funding for healthcare, especially to replace Trump funding cuts. But in retrospect, the sponsors may wish they’ve been a little bit less ambitious,” said Dan Schnur, a politics and communications professor at USC, UC Berkeley and Pepperdine.
Nearly 56% of California voters rejected the proposal while 44% voted for Proposition 40. However, with roughly 6 million votes still needed to be counted, the results are still too close to call.
The battle over the billionaire tax has been one of the most expensive ballot-measure fights in California’s history, sparking a debate over wealth inequality and taxing the ultrawealthy. It also highlighted how billionaires have wielded more influence in politics.
Well-known politicians such as U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the California Democratic Party, healthcare workers and Hollywood celebrities including actor Mark Ruffalo, backed the wealth tax. But the idea drew opposition from California Gov. Gavin Newsom, the teachers union, Planned Parenthood, business groups and others who expressed fears that billionaires could flee the state.
The state’s next governor, Xavier Becerra, who just won, also opposed the tax.
Opponents of the wealth tax heavily outspent Proposition 40 supporters, flooding televisions, radio, social media and smartphones with ads. Their message: the wealth tax is a reckless experiment and a tax on everyone, not just billionaires.
UC Berkeley law professor Brian Galle, who helped write the wealth tax proposal, said it’s tough to “fix a broken system” and get the facts to people when they were up against the ultrawealthy. Billionaires also own media outlets and social media companies, megaphones that help spread political messaging.
“When billionaires have half a dozen different strategies for buying this election, it shows that they already have too much money and pay too little back,” he said.
Support for the billionaire-bashing proposition had already begun to wane in recent months.
A poll by UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies, co-sponsored by the Los Angeles Times and released last week, showed that voter support for Proposition 40 had fallen to 42% of voters surveyed last month from 48% in August.
The measure also may have lost fans because taxing assets rather than income can be a complicated and confusing process and sparks concerns among even non-billionaires on whether they want to allow the state to start demanding a slice of the value of the things that they own.
No matter the result, Proposition 40 also fueled a conversation about taxing billionaires that will continue, Galle said.
As of Wednesday afternoon, roughly $489 million has been raised to support and oppose Proposition 40 along with two ballot measures — Propositions 41 and 42 — that could block the wealth tax, data from the California secretary of state show.
The vast majority of that funding, more than $380 million, went toward killing the billionaire tax. Supporters of the wealth tax, including the Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West, trailed far behind, contributing roughly $100 million, according to filings with the California secretary of state.
Billionaires such as Google co-founder Sergey Brin contributed millions to a group called Building a Better California that funded ads against the wealth tax and propositions that could block it.
Money doesn’t always win an election, but a big funding imbalance is tough to overcome, Schnur said.
“As important as the money was to beat Prop. 40, the coalition against it may have been just as important. You didn’t see Sergey. You didn’t see tech billionaires in the ads. You saw teachers and nurses and firefighters,” he said.
The four richest Californians — Brin, Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang; Google co-founder Larry Page and Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg — would owe 40% of the estimated taxes to be collected from the billionaire tax, according to an L.A. Times analysis.
Ahead of the election, billionaires made moves to prepare for the potential tax. Zuckerberg expressed concerns that if he had to sell his stock to pay the tax that could reduce his control over the company, but Meta’s board struck a deal to address that fear.
The billionaire tax proposal also faced other big hurdles. Proposition 42, which could have blocked the billionaire tax, was on track to pass. It would prohibit new taxes on “retirement holdings, individually-owned assets, and other forms of personal savings” and bar retroactive taxes.
“They didn’t just reject a single bad tax idea — millions of Californians backed the strongest protections available to protect their hard earned life savings from double taxation. They joined firefighters, law enforcement officers, building trades workers, seniors, veterans and small businesses in doing so,” said Nathan Click, a spokesman for Proposition 42.
On the other hand, Proposition 41 — a proposal that would have required audits for new state special taxes, and also could have blocked the billionaire tax — was headed for defeat.
Supporters of Proposition 40 tried to convince voters that taxing roughly 200 billionaires was the solution to raise $100 billion needed to offset federal healthcare cuts.
This week, the wealth tax’s supporters emphasized the high stakes. People won’t be able to afford healthcare coverage, children will die and hospitals will shutter, they said, if California lawmakers don’t find a way to get more funding.
“If Sacramento fails to protect patients and deliver a real solution that makes billionaires pay their fair share, healthcare workers will pursue every available avenue, up to and including returning to the ballot in 2028 with a billionaire tax,” said Suzanne Jimenez, chief of staff for the SEIU-UHW.
Just after 11 on election night, Nithya Raman took the stage in a plum-colored dress outshined only by her smile.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass had a narrow lead in early returns. But to Raman and her supporters who packed the plaza in front of the Greek Theatre, they had already won.
A blue deluge had swept across the U.S. to clear out the MAGA status quo that has gaslit Americans for too long. The clueless Republican ruling class’ only defense was that the liberal alternative was worse than the crap President Trump fed Americans while calling it apple pie.
Los Angeles is as blue as the Pacific, yet the same anti-establishment wave, fueled by voters frustrated with the high cost of living and a mayor who face-planted during crisis after crisis, had crashed hard here. Raman, a City Council member, was standing on its crest.
A campaign that started on the last possible day, dismissed by rivals as amateurish and given little chance to succeed against an incumbent with decades of experience and the support of nearly the entire L.A. Democratic establishment, was poised to win. Raman, 45, was expected to pull ahead as more ballots from younger, left-leaning Angelenos were counted.
Standing before Raman was the coalition that made her unlikely rise happen — one that, despite the obvious differences between L.A. and heartland politics, paralleled the one that made the Democratic Party’s takeover of the House and Senate possible.
There were the democratic socialists, who embarrassed mainline Democrats in L.A. once again with a blockbuster night for candidates endorsed by the local Democratic Socialists of America chapter. In addition to Raman’s strong initial showing, Marissa Roy was ahead in the city attorney’s race, and Angela Gonzales-Torres had a substantial lead in her Eastside congressional matchup against incumbent Jimmy Gomez, a scion of the fabled Eastside Latino machine.
There were young people like Arthur Johnson, a 23-year-old Cal State Northridge student who waited in a long line on campus earlier that day to vote in person, “because I wanted that old-school feeling.” Johnson told me that many of his friends were voting for the first time “because they hate Trump, they hate Karen, and they wanted change, however it came.”
There were Latinos like Eloisa Galindo, 45, of East Los Angeles, who showed me a cellphone video of her hanging a handmade pro-Raman manta — a bedsheet sign — on a freeway bridge over the weekend. In Texas and California, Latino voters turned out in huge numbers, helping to make history in each state by electing one of their own as governor for the first time. Galindo and her fellow members of Eastside Padres Contra la Privatización, a group created to help residents affected by the Lineage warehouse fire, felt that Raman represented a new, better way.
“She paid attention to us, and the mayor didn’t,” Galindo said in Spanish. “We felt discriminated against, we felt forgotten — but Nithya did none of that.”
Galindo and her crew were far in the back but cheered so loud that it practically echoed across Griffith Park. The Four Tops’ ”Reach Out (I’ll Be There)” faded out, and Raman beamed.
L.A. mayoral candidate Nithya Raman dances with her campaign chair, Kathleen Murray, at her election night party on the patio in front of the Greek Theater.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
“Do you love Los Angeles?” she exclaimed. “Are you ready for an L.A. that loves you back? Look at the space around you. Look at what we built together.”
Her rousing speech surveyed the course of L.A. history, from its striving immigrants to Cecil B. DeMille to LGBTQ+ history to the creation of San Pedro’s harbor. She tied her campaign to an election year in which voters across America “demanded change” because they were “angry about a broken status quo, and the politicians who failed them over and over again.”
Angelenos, she said, have become convinced “that this is the best that we can do. Our City Hall became a place where we became so used to saying, ‘No,’ we forgot how to say ‘Yes.’”
She decried the “cynicism that started to take over this city, that started to make us believe that L.A.’s problems weren’t just bad, but they were permanent. That L.A.’s best days were behind us.”
Raman praised her supporters for believing in “hope” — for a better city, a better future, but also hope that even the most entrenched longtimer could be brought down by people who were just tired of being told their concerns didn’t matter.
She spoke for about half an hour and apologized for going on so long in the chilly weather — but no forgiveness was needed on a night like this. Supporters cried tears of joy and hugged one another, sharing political news of the city and also the country, as the energy in the crowd further amped up seemingly every half-hour. James Talarico won in Texas! Dr. Abdul El-Sayed took it in Michigan? Mississippi was in play?!
Was the blue wave real? Could it hold against an angry, vengeful Trump? On this night, at least, it would.
“We have shown Los Angeles” that it’s “a city that is worth fighting for every single day of our lives,” Raman said.
She ended her speech by inviting her Indian American family to the stage — parents, brother, husband and twin 10-year-old children. Faces of a new, more progressive America, now likely the First Family of L.A. They descended the stairs together, and then a crush of Raman supporters stopped her for photos and congratulations.
Another Motown classic — “Dancing in the Streets” — blared, a song of freedom and boogie and promise from a previous generation.
Early in Raman’s speech, she asked the crowd for a favor: “Will you all get on the dance floor with me?” Many obliged, joining their leader to shimmy to Selena and other SoCal favorites.
Tomorrow would come the hard part: What to do next. But on this night, Raman and blue America would dance.
A few hours later, with more votes counted, she was ahead of Bass.
A jubilant Nithya Raman stood before cheering supporters at her election night party Tuesday, giving a speech that fell just shy of declaring victory, but one that urged the crowd at the Greek Theatre plaza to hold off on the celebrations for now.
“I’m hopeful. I’m very hopeful,” Raman told a raucous crowd fueled by tequila and chicken tenders. “I’m also really superstitious. So we’re all just going to be cool, okay? Very cool.”
The initial vote tally Tuesday had Raman slightly behind incumbent Karen Bass in the race for Los Angeles mayor, but analysts were quick to point out that this was actually a strong indication that Raman would win. Polls have consistently shown Raman is heavily favored by younger voters, who tend to vote later than older people and whose late-arriving ballots are considered likely to turn the tide in her favor.
“The expectation is that once Nithya Raman starts gaining votes she will continue to gain votes. There is not going to be a seesaw. It is likely going to be pretty unidirectional,” said Paul Mitchell, who heads the polling data firm PDI. “I don’t call races. But if that expectation holds true then there is no reason to expect that Raman is going to do anything but gain votes from here.”
Votes were still being counted the day after the election, but by early Wednesday morning, Raman had taken a slight lead over Bass.
“Nithya Raman is going to win. She’s going to be our next mayor,” said a gleeful L.A. County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, who has clashed with Bass and endorsed Raman a few weeks before the election.
“It’s over,” declared Estevan Montemayor, who ran an independent expenditure group supporting Raman.
Across town at the Loews Hollywood Hotel, Bass projected confidence on Tuesday night that she would triumph in her reelection bid.
“Let me just say it takes a while to count the vote in our city, but pretty soon we shall know and I am confident with all the work that is done here that we will achieve victory,” the mayor said at the L.A. County Democratic Party’s election night watch party.
The pattern of Raman gaining votes would follow what occurred in the June 2 primary, when former reality TV star Spencer Pratt was leading Raman for second place on election night, only for Raman to claw her way back day after day, until she finally overtook him five days after the election.
Raman and Bass were locked in a tight race up until election day, with final polling in the race showing the second-term council member and the incumbent mayor each with support from 40% of Angelenos while 19% of the electorate was still undecided.
But a blue wave across the country that toppled Republicans in the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives also appeared to be buoying Raman’s campaign against Bass from the left.
Raman ran with the backing of the Democratic Socialists of America, the leftist organization that endorsed Mayor Zohran Mamdani in New York, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D-NY) in Congress, among others.
Bass, meanwhile, ran on a public safety message that was meant to convince moderates and more conservative voters that she was a better alternative to Raman.
Raman also cast herself during the race as a hopeful technocrat who wanted to deliver “A City that Works,” her campaign slogan, promising to make L.A. a city that fixes broken sidewalks and potholes and repairs darkened streetlights in a more timely manner.
“This city’s government has made solving problems look impossible for so long that I heard form people across this city who started to believe it was impossible,” Raman said during her more than 20-minute-long election night speech that verged on a victory speech. “Hopelessness can be fatal for a city, but this campaign refused to accept that.”
She then pitched a more hopeful Los Angeles.
“In just one century, Los Angeles built itself into a global metropolis. The gateway to the Pacific. A center of ingenuity and invention. The cultural capital of the entire planet,” she said. “That ambitious Los Angeles, that joyful Los Angeles, that creative Los Angeles, that entrepreneurial Los Angeles, that inclusive Los Angeles, is the Los Angeles that this campaign was born to fight for.”
Raman’s position on the precipice of ascending to the mayoralty would have seemed nearly unthinkable at the start of the year, when Bass’ challengers included Pratt, former LAUSD Schools Superintendent Austin Beutner, leftist Rev. Rae Huang and entrepreneur Adam Miller — with Horvath and billionaire developer Rick Caruso also considering bids.
Beutner suspended his bid following the death of his daughter and it seemed Bass, despite low approval ratings, might glide to a second term without a serious challenger in the race.
“Who remembers in February when it was the end of the candidate filing and no one was, like, running for mayor?” asked City Controller Kenneth Mejia at Raman’s election night party. “I was like, ‘Oh my God,, I’m going to be here again for another four years stuck like this.”
“And then out of nowhere — out of nowhere — Nithya Raman came out of nowhere with the three pointer and she came out of nowhere and was like, ‘I’m running for mayor!’” Mejia yelled during a rollicking speech, as he mimed himself shooting a basketball.
After her speech, Raman asked that her supporters join her on the dance floor, where she shimmied to “Remember the Time” by Michael Jackson, pausing every few moments hug her backers and pose for selfies with them.
Joeseph Fuchs, a representative for the Western States Regional Council of Carpenters, was watching the returns closely as they first came in.
“That’s just the beginning,” he said. “Get ready.”
Another point of data for Raman: “Kalshi says it’s a 95% win” for Raman, he said, referring to the prediction market site.
Bass had a warm reception at her election night party, with supporters chanting “four more years!”
Despite high energy at the party — in part due to the Democrats’ victories in Congress — some supporters understood the lead was far from safe.
“I’m disappointed that people don’t recognize all of the great things she’s done,” said Alton Reed, when asked how he felt about the extremely tight initial results.
Reed, who works for the Communications Workers of America 9003, said he had put in more than 100 hours knocking on doors urging voters to support Bass. He said the positive response he received in the field had made him feel that the incumbent mayor had a strong chance.
Reed said he was not giving up hope that Bass would prevail.
“I’ve been through many close races,” he said. “So we will see what happens.”
City Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martínez said he was “feeling good” about the election results shortly after the initial round of ballots were released Tuesday evening.
Soto-Martínez was one of several elected city leaders who gathered alongside labor union representatives and nonprofit leaders to support Bass at the watch party.
“I’ve been part of many elections and I think when you have a bigger coalition and more people behind you that is going to show in the results,” he said. “That’s why I remain hopeful.”
Marissa Roy is on track to become Los Angeles’ next city attorney after jumping out to a significant lead over L.A. County prosecutor John McKinney based on early returns.
Roy, 34, a deputy state attorney general, campaigned on a promise to convert the city attorney’s office into a massive “public interest law firm,” vowing to champion renters and defend Angelenos from an increasingly hostile White House.
Roy, a coalition-builder, had long been the favorite in the race, leading McKinney by double digits in polls leading up to Tuesday. She won the June primary with more than 40% of the vote.
Roy and McKinney’s head-to-head race came after voters and powerful city unions turned on the incumbent, Hydee Feldstein Soto, whose June primary defeat marked the first time a sitting L.A. elected official failed to advance to a general election in nearly a century.
Supporters at Roy’s watch party at the downtown Audio Graph brewery erupted in cheers when the first batch of results dropped, showing Roy doubling up McKinney’s early vote total. The mood was ebullient as the first batch of returns trickled in, buoyed by dramatic wins for Democrats across the country and a better than expected early lead for their candidate.
Roy arrived around 9 p.m. in a plum-colored dress, her arms stacked with bangles that rang as she embraced supporters and took the stage.
“I was planning on hedging and saying, ‘It looks like we’re winning,’ but I think we won!” Roy told the crowd to whoops and cheers.
Roy ran to the left of her opponent and tried to paint him as the preferred choice of Republicans in L.A. County. McKinney is a lifelong Democrat and has been critical of President Trump.
At Hill Street bar, close to the downtown criminal courthouse where McKinney has built his career, supporters swayed to smooth jazz and Top 40 radio hits, nursing cocktails and betraying no reaction to the dismal early returns.
In a brief interview outside the bar, McKinney remained positive and said he always knew he faced an uphill battle. He announced his candidacy long after Roy and Feldstein Soto began their campaigns, yet still surged to a surprise second-place finish in June. He said he was proud he was able to inject discussion of public safety issues and real strategies for solving homelessness into the race.
“I got into this race nine months ago because the people of Los Angeles deserve better,” he said.
Although he said he had “no bitterness” toward Roy and wished her the best of luck, he did express disappointment at the efforts her campaign and some of her supporters took to incorrectly paint him as a conservative.
“I just felt that it was very misleading … it’s not a political position. It’s not a partisan position,” he said.
The candidates were a study in contrasts: Roy is a stylish progressive with savvy social media campaign videos, while McKinney is a stoic law-and-order-type. They also offered voters starkly different plans for leading the city attorney’s office.
A core part of the California Department of Justice legal team that won a historic $17-billion settlement from Meta this summer, Roy ran as a champion of the average Angeleno, promising to hold corporations and landlords accountable for misconduct. A Yale-educated lawyer, she positioned herself as the only candidate who would stand up to Trump administration policies that have harmed Los Angeles.
McKinney, who often noted he has been a lawyer nearly as long as Roy has been alive, leaned on his nearly unblemished record prosecuting some of the region’s most notorious and violent crimes and his compelling personal history. Orphaned at 5, he was raised by an older sister in a household where money was extremely tight and found himself painting houses just to afford college classes. In a 28-year career as an L.A. County prosecutor, McKinney won convictions in a number of high-profile cases, including the murder of rapper Nipsey Hussle.
The veteran prosecutor promised to focus his energy on reducing homelessness and improving public safety through misdemeanors he believed the prior administration under-enforced, including street racing and animal abuse on Skid Row. He also vowed to conduct more aggressive reviews of the way nonprofits that do business with the city spend funds meant to aid unhoused citizens.
Although they aligned in few places, both Roy and McKinney said they would work to bring down the city’s out-of-control legal costs. That figure exploded to nearly $300 million in city payouts last year.
Roy was supported by the L.A. County Democratic Party, the local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta and U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). McKinney was backed by a coalition of law enforcement unions, four former city attorneys and L.A. County Dist. Atty. Nathan Hochman.
Los Angeles voters will head to the polls Tuesday to vote on a slew of ballot measures, including a half-cent sales tax that would beef up the city’s Fire Department — but which also would cost Angelenos more to fill up their gas tanks, buy clothes and dine out.
Another measure would allow the City Council to meet just once a week, instead of three times as required by the City Charter.
In all, there are eight ballot measures before L.A. voters that could have a significant impact on how the city government functions, and which take just a simple majority to pass.
Here’s a roundup:
Measure FD: Sales tax hike for the Fire Department
Voters will consider a half-cent increase to the city’s retail sales tax, bumping it from 10.25 cents per dollar spent to 10.75 cents per dollar spent. The tax hike is expected to raise an estimated $345 million annually and would be funneled into a separate fund specifically for the Fire Department.
The sales tax increase was spearheaded by the union representing rank-and-file firefighters, who have long complained the department is underfunded.
The city still would be required to fund the department at the same average percentage out of the general fund, ensuring extra revenue generated by the tax would add to its regular budget.
Opponents say this would be the third sales tax hike since 2024, costing an average of $86 per person and $345 for a family of four in additional sales taxes each year.
The firefighters union said the tax fund is essential to increase the number of firefighters and lower response times across the city.
Charter Amendment EE: Fewer City Council meetings
Amendment EE would allow the Council to meet once a week instead of three times, as required under the City Charter.
The Council voted 12-0 to put the measure on the ballot, with three council members absent. Council members in support of the measure said the three meetings are costly and ineffective, and noted their time is better spent working in their district.
Councilmember Monica Rodriguez opposed the measure, saying it would reduce the time available for L.A. residents to engage with their representatives in a public forum and could lead to council members rushing through deliberations on important matters.
The amendment also would approve changes to how the city governs. If passed, independent inspectors for the L.A. Police and Fire Departments would have more power to conduct audits, and it would increase the penalties for campaign finance violations. The changes also include raising the number of signatures needed for a ballot referendum and would bar ethics commissioners from running for City Council or the Los Angeles Board of Education for five years after they leave office.
Proposition TE: An exception to the ‘mansion tax’
Proposition TE would grant a one-time exemption to Palisades fire victims from paying the so-called “mansion tax” if they sell their home within five years of the disaster.
The “mansion tax,” or Measure ULA, took effect in 2023 and imposed an additional 4% transfer tax on all L.A. property sales above $5.4 million and a 5.5% tax on sales above $10.9 million. Despite its nickname, the tax also falls on more modest multifamily residences like apartment buildings that exceed the sales price benchmarks.
The proposition would exempt Pacific Palisades homeowners from paying the tax, regardless of whether they lived at the property or not. It also would refund any resident who already sold their property and paid the tax.
The proposition was spearheaded by Councilmember Traci Park, who represents the region. Supporters say fire victims have been through enough and should have more flexibility as they navigate expensive rebuilding costs.
Opponents argue the proposition is too broad and should have included only victims whose primary residence was destroyed.
Charter Amendment LA: Restructuring how the city administers public works
Amendment LA is intended to more efficiently deliver basic city services for infrastructure in need of repair, including streets in need of repaving, dangerous sidewalks and broken streetlights. It also would leverage existing resources to open up sources of revenue.
The measure would reduce the sway of the Board of Public Works or pave the way to eliminate it, while also increasing the power of the director of public works. Critics oppose the elimination of the board, saying it would weaken accountability and increase public scrutiny.
Charter Amendment PL: Streamlining the Planning Department
L.A. residents have for years complained that navigating the Planning Department to build or open businesses is complicated and confusing.
Amendment PL includes five proposals that would increase efficiency and streamline certain parts of the Planning Department, which controls land use and approves construction and renovation projects.
The changes would consolidate seven Area Planning Commissions into one, partly to lower costs and ensure that all appeals and applications are governed by the same logic. It also would give the City Council more flexibility in approving taller buildings and set deadlines to speed up rulings from the City Planning Commission.
Charter Amendment PRK: Doubling the money for recreation and parks
Amendment PRK would double the minimum amount of money set aside for the Department of Recreation and Parks by reworking the parameters of the city budget.
The department is in charge of maintaining green spaces, playing fields and senior centers in the city. The City Charter mandates the department receive .0325% of the total assessed value of taxable properties, which is about $303 million for the park system this year and would be around $493 million in 10 years.
If the measure passes, that would double, meaning the park system would get a minimum of $986 million by 2036.
Supporters say the existing city allocation isn’t enough and has led to deteriorating recreation centers, swimming pools and restrooms. Critics warn it would force city officials to cut other services to make room for this additional funding.
Charter Amendment PRT: Changes to airports, harbor and water and power departments
Charter Amendment PRT is part of a package of proposed changes to the City Charter to increase transparency, build public trust and streamline operations. It would change how airports, harbors and the Department of Water and Power are managed.
The amendment would require that two of the seven members of the Los Angeles World Airport’s board of commissioners, who oversee Van Nuys and Los Angeles International airports, live in Van Nuys and three live around LAX.
It also would require the L.A. Board of Harbor Commissioners allocate a portion of its operating income from the Port of Los Angeles to investments in waterfront public access projects. The harbor is one of the busiest in the country and generates revenue from the operators at its terminals. PRT also would broaden public insight into how lease agreements with the port affect the local workforce.
Supporters say people overseeing Van Nuys and LAX should have a firsthand understanding of living near the airports.
No ballot argument against PRT was submitted, although the L.A. Area Chamber of Commerce said it opposes the measure, citing concern over the additional requirements it would impose on businesses and the potential impact on port operations.
Charter Amendment SC: Altering LAUSD’s campaign finance rules
Amendment SC wouldn’t make major changes, but would clarify rules on campaign finance for candidates running for a seat on the Board of Education, which oversees LAUSD.
Language would be simplified to clarify that the same rules apply for mayoral candidates and Board of Education candidates, except in certain instances. Some of those rules include governing campaign contribution limits, filing deadlines, public disclosures and fundraising windows.
Supporters say it won’t make any substantive changes, but instead make the rules easier to understand by deleting duplicated language. No argument was provided against the amendment.
WASHINGTON — President Trump offered $1 million Monday to anyone who reports voter fraud that leads to an arrest and conviction, escalating his efforts to cast doubt on the midterms as Republicans risk losing control of Congress.
“Anybody reporting Voter Fraud in the past Elections, or the upcoming 2026 Midterm Election, will be paid $1,000,000 upon the arrest and conviction of those that created the Fraud!” Trump posted on Truth Social.
Trump did not say how the tips should be submitted to the federal government or who would decide whether a claim qualifies for a reward. The White House declined to comment beyond Trump’s social media post.
Last week, the administration launched a separate program that is meant to pay people for providing information to the administration to combat fraud. When announcing it, Trump said he would personally decide who gets paid.
“I will be the arbitrator of all of these decisions,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “In other words, I’ll determine whether or not the person is deserving, and I’ll determine, and I will be very generous.”
It is unclear whether Trump, who has spread false claims about the nation’s voting systems and routinely questions the integrity of the elections, intends to play a similar role over the voter fraud tipping system.
In the lead up to the midterms, Trump has tried to assert more control over the elections, calling on Republicans to “nationalize” voting and pushing for restrictions on mail-in ballots. Trump has also cast doubt over the integrity of California’s primary election, claiming without evidence that Democrat cheated — an allegation that was investigated by the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles, which is run by a Trump loyalist.
Even as Trump says he wants “honesty in our elections,” the president told supporters at the Republican Party convention in Dallas in September to “cheat like hell, like they do.”
Trump’s efforts to cast doubt over voting come as polls show Republicans facing headwinds heading into the Nov. 3 election as Trump’s popularity sags amid voter concerns over the economy.
More than $351 million in political donations has been poured into a high-stakes contest about a proposed wealth tax on the November ballot, making it one of the most costly campaigns in California history.
About 90% of the money is being spent to defeat a statewide initiative to impose a new tax on the assets of billionaires, a multifaceted opposition effort bankrolled primarily by ultra-rich Californians being targeted by a measure that supporters call an economic reckoning.
The billionaire tax, Proposition 40, would levy a one-time, 5% tax on many assets of California billionaires who lived in the state as of Jan. 1.
Millions of dollars continue to flow into the campaigns of three intertwined ballot initiatives at the center of the debate: Proposition 40, and Propositions 41 and Proposition 42, which would neuter the Proposition 40 through strategic, esoteric tax law changes.
“The pro-40 campaign picked a fight and then came to that fight with a butter knife against a nuclear arsenal,” said GOP strategist Rob Stutzman, who is not involved in any of the wealth-tax-related ballot measures. “Because they’re so well funded, in today’s multifaceted media world, they are able to show up everywhere from network TV to inside video games. That is a very, very large advantage few campaigns ever get to have.”
But, Stutzman warned, money does not guarantee a win.
In the most expensive ballot measure fights in California history, $463 million was spent on two gambling proposals 2022. The initiatives pitted some of California’s most successful Native American tribes with gaming interests against gambling corporations, including online sports gaming companies DraftKings and FanDuel. Both side’s measure failed.
People attend a rally against Proposition 40 at the Iron Workers Apprenticeship Training Center on Oct. 5 in La Palma.
(Eric Thayer/Los Angeles Times)
The tax measure was crafted by Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West in response to federal healthcare funding cuts signed by President Trump last year that are expected to reduce California’s healthcare budget by $100 billion, burdening the state’s most vulnerable residents.
“Trump’s ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ slashes healthcare funding, with major coverage cuts scheduled to hit after the midterms,” said Suzanne Jimenez, the union’s chief of staff. “More than 3 million Californians could lose their health insurance. Hospitals and emergency rooms face closure. Patients will die unnecessarily when the care they need is no longer there. Proposition 40 is an emergency response to that looming disaster.”
The proposition’s supporters raised $34.3 million, nearly all of it from Jimenez’s union.
The two other measures, Propositions 41 and 42, would nullify the billionaire tax if either receives more votes.
Proposition 41 supporters say the measure aims to cut wasteful government spending by requiring audits for new state special taxes and would bar new state taxes that exempt their revenue from a state spending limit. Backers of Proposition 42 argue it would prohibit new taxes on retirement holdings, individually owned assets and other forms of personal savings.
Advocates for the billionaire tax say both are well-financed smokescreens to undercut Proposition 40.
Opposition campaigns to the wealth tax as well as the two countermeasures have received enormous donations from several of the state’s billionaires. But Building a Better California, the main funder of efforts to defeat the wealth tax, noted that its allies included Democratic and Republican politicians, prominent labor groups and business leaders.
“It’s rare for such a broad coalition to unite around any single cause in California, but it reflects the potentially devastating impact of this measure on healthcare, education, and our state’s economy,” the group said in a statement.
Among the largest donors opposing the wealth tax are billionaires Sergey Brin, a co-founder of Google who has donated more than $100 million to anti-wealth-tax efforts, and former Google leader Eric Schmidt and venture capitalist L. John Doerr, who each kicked in $40 million.
Brin, Schmidt and Doerr did not respond to requests for comment.
US tech entrepreneur Sergey Brin and Gerelyn Gilbert-Soto arrive for the 2026 Met Gala celebrating “Costume Art” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in May.
(ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images)
The spending disparity also reflects a divide among Democrats and their allies, many of whom support wealth taxes, but argue that the way Proposition 40 was written is disastrous to California’s volatile budget, which is dependent on the state’s wealthiest residents.
Jodi Hicks, chief executive and president of Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California, said that while her organization would support a nationwide or a California wealth tax, their primary concerns are about 40’s impacts on the state budget and healthcare in the state.
“We are opposed to this particular proposal because we think it does more harm than good,” she said, adding that after what her organization “faced last year having to scramble for dollars because of [federal funding cuts] we are committed to work with the stakeholders facing cuts and not harming the budget and finding revenue in a smart way.”
The cash imbalance between supporters and opponents of the billionaire tax is vast. Those opposed to the measure raised $316.7 million, while proponents raised nearly $34.3 million.
The Fair Games Coalition, made up of community leaders, labor organizations and advocates, announce the launch of the Overpaid CEO Tax Initiative in front of the Tesla Diner in West Hollywood in January.
(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)
The supporters of the wealth tax spent nearly all of their money gathering signatures to place the measure on the ballot. They had $1.6 million on hand as of Oct. 17.
Now, as voters cast ballots, their campaign appears reliant on public events and media coverage, such as of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) recent rally in support of Proposition 40 in downtown Los Angeles.
“What you are showing people from coast to coast and all over is that, yes, we can take on the greed of the oligarchs,” he said, calling it the most important ballot measure in the country. “Yes, we can create an economy and a government that works for all of us, not just the 1 percent.”
Facebook creator and Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg was among the California billionaires Sanders name-checked in his remarks. After Zuckerberg told company leaders that he planned to leave the state to avoid his control over the company substantially reduced by being forced to sell enough of his stock in the social media giant to pay the proposed levy, the company on Wednesday announced the creation of a new, non-voting type of stock that would allow Zuckerberg to sell enough shares to pay the proposed tax while retaining his voting power in exchange for him agreeing to remain in the state for eight years.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg listens as President Trump speaks to reporters at the White House on Sept. 29.
(Jacquelyn Martin / Ap Photo/jacquelyn Martin)
The pro-wealth-tax campaign is sending voters emails and texts and has an online presence.
“Remember: it’s not enough to vote YES on 40. You also need to vote NO on 41 + 42,” read an email sent to voters on Tuesday. “Don’t be fooled: Props 41 and 42 are billionaire-funded initiatives designed specifically to undermine Prop 40, the California Billionaire Tax.”
Meanwhile, the anti-40 and pro-42 campaigns are inundating voters on television, streaming services, in mailboxes, through online influencers and even in digital video games such as Sim City.
Jimenez said voters will see through the blizzard of campaign messaging.
“The billionaires think voters are stupid. They think they can bury the facts under millions of dollars in advertising and disguise Prop. 42 … as protection for ordinary taxpayers,” she said. “Their spending also makes our case for us. When billionaires can afford to spend millions a day protecting their fortunes, voters can see that billionaires have plenty of money to spare.”
Sheri Sadler, a veteran Democratic media buyer, questioned how much voters were hearing about the rationale for the proposed billionaire tax.
“The yes side is severely lacking in getting their message through while the no side is dipping into different kinds of pockets,” she said.
Jessica Levinson, an election law professor at Loyola Law School, said that beyond voter confusion about the competing ballot measures, it is certain to face legal challenges, notably about the retroactive nature of the tax, which would apply to any billionaire who lived in California as of Jan. 1. She described that as “the biggest legal pressure point.”
“It’s kind of a mess,” she said.
Times staff writer Gabrielle LaMarr LeMee contributed to this report.
It was less than a month before the Nov. 3 election when Los Angeles city attorney front-runner Marissa Roy realized she’d missed her lucky manicure.
A deputy attorney general in the California Department of Justice, she had scarcely slept since her team clinched its historic $17-billion settlement with Meta in August. She’d been canvassing hundreds of voters and sounding out scores of deputy city attorneys in her bid to transform the troubled office where she’d launched her career in 2017 into the “largest public interest law firm” in L.A.
Between filming TikTok spots and prepping for formal debates, Roy has been fine-tuning her plans to avenge exploited tenants and claw back stolen wages, tame runaway civil liability, protect victims of child abuse and domestic violence, and join other elected attorneys in lawsuits against the Trump administration.
Nails didn’t make the cut.
“There’s just been too much to do,” Roy said of the chrome gel ritual she inaugurated as a volunteer for Eunisses Hernandez in 2022.
Marissa Roy outside L.A. City Hall. “I wanted the slogan ‘let’s sue it’ — that was violently nixed,” she said of her campaign.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
Seen one way, Roy’s talismanic manicure is an object lesson for her fiercest critics: all flash and no substance, evidence the 34-year-old lacks the “gravitas” to be among the state’s most powerful elected lawyers.
But like the iridescentglitter in her campaign-matched chrome polish, the meaning shifts with the viewer’s perspective.
To supporters on the city’s restive left and the clique of California city attorneys eager to add Roy to their group chat, it’s a winking show of solidarity burnished through years of knocking on doors for fellow up-and-coming progressives. It was metallic blue for Hernandez, silver for Ysabel Jurado and ultraviolet for her own historic primary upset in June. Her backers see fierce loyalty reflected in the polish, a ritual she started while hunting salon wage thieves to sue.
“I wanted the slogan ‘let’s sue it’ — that was violently nixed,” Roy said of her campaign.
With her Democratic Socialists of America sass, bright amethyst blazers and Bollywood needle drops on Instagram, the lifelong Angeleno cuts a stark contrast to her rival, Deputy Dist. Atty. John McKinney, 58, who leapfrogged to a second-place finish in the primaries amid a stoic, law-and-order campaign that sometimes slipped into Spencer Pratt-style dystopian imagery.
McKinney’s boosters point to his extraordinary biography — from penniless orphan to director of special prosecutions in the country’s largest district attorney’s office — and celebrated courtroom prowess as evidence he is better suited to handle the 120,000 violations referred to the city attorney for potential charges every year.
“John has the experience, stature, reputation, and gravitas to do the job and will be both effective and respected,” said former Los Angeles City Atty. Burt Pines. “I do not have the same confidence in her.”
Campaign materials for the Los Angeles city attorney candidate at a canvassing event in Silverlake.
(Gary Coronado / For The Times)
Roy’s allies counter that prosecuting misdemeanors is only a third of the city attorney’s job — and typically the less complex part. Whereas McKinney has never worked a civil case, Roy has managed multicity litigation and shares the credit for legal victories no attorney could secure alone. In the Meta case, Roy and her team had argued that the social media giant had intentionally designed its products to hook young children and repeatedly misled the public about known risks.
“She was one of the original four team members in California that stayed up until 2 a.m. filing the [Meta] complaint,” said California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta. “She helped develop our legal strategy, particularly our deception theory, which was our core theory of legal liability for the case.”
Similarly, while McKinney’s camp paints a lawman of singular personal ability, Roy supporters describe her as brilliant, driven, and eager to lift the best and brightest around her.
“She is tenacious and works around the clock,” said San Francisco City Atty. David Chiu.
She’s also infamously bubbly: When a canvasser door-knocked 9th Circuit Judge Richard Paez, for whom Roy had clerked, he reportedly asked the volunteer to give her a hug.
“She has a natural enthusiasm about her that is infectious,” said Mark Ramos, chair of Los Angeles County Democratic Party. “She’s [always] shown up, and showing up matters.”
Which matters more — individual virtue or collaborative ingenuity — now in effect divides the race for the most abstruse job in local politics: Four of L.A’s former city attorneys have endorsed McKinney, while California’s current top elected lawyers have largely lined up behind Roy.
A head-to-head match with McKinney was not what Roy envisioned last year when she launched her campaign to unseat the incumbent city attorney, Hydee Feldstein Soto. After charming L.A.’s major power brokers, she had hoped to win the primary outright and avoid a runoff so she could focus exclusively on the Meta trial in August.
“I had been planning for things to end in June,” she said.
Feldstein Soto was bogged down by scandal and soaring civil liability costs for the city. She also faced criticism for ducking challenges to President Trump’s policies, including the deployment of military troops to Los Angeles last year, a fight the city joined but did not lead.
By early spring, Roy had racked up endorsements from the state’s legal elites and leftist kingmaker Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). She earned the imprimatur of the city’s powerful Democratic clubs and its influential labor unions, while enjoying widespread support from a democratic socialist base.
Marissa Roy, left, candidate for Los Angeles city attorney, and Alyssa Acevedo, with Service Employees International Union canvass in Silverlake.
(Gary Coronado / For The Times)
L.A. voters want “the transformational leadership that they’re seeing in [New York Mayor Zohran] Mamdani, and also in Mayor [Daniel] Lurie in San Francisco,” said L.A. County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, a longtime friend of Roy’s and among her earliest endorsers. “Angelenos are increasingly impatient in wanting to see that change come to their city, too.”
Then, in April, Feldstein Soto slipped from unpopular to politically radioactive after hackers stole thousands of LAPD files from her office. That inspired a late-breaking police union endorsement and a surge of corporate cash for McKinney, boosting him to a second-place finish and knocking out Feldstein Soto in a historic rout.
McKinney touts the city attorney’s prosecutor role as a means to stem quality-of-life crimes and curb homelessness. Roy has promised to keep more Angelenos housed and protect their livelihoods through “affirmative litigation” — suits brought against slumlords and exploitative corporations under the state’s Unfair Competition Law.
“When you file these suits, you have complete discretion,” said Pines, the former city attorney who successfully lobbied the state to extend Los Angeles that power in 1977 and watched in dismay as Feldstein Soto left it to whither.
In recent years, affirmative litigation has become an essential tool for defending against punitive federal policy and recovering public funds, Pines and others said.
Seeing the San Francisco city attorney’s office sue to overturn California’s ban on gay marriage — a law that would have stymied her gay younger brother — inspired Roy to give up her elementary school dream of decoding ancient texts to pursue the law.
“Childhood Marissa spent recesses in the library buried in books about ancient Egypt,” Roy said. “It was San Francisco suing — that was when I began to become aware of the power of lawyers.”
Unlike her opponent, Roy grew up comfortably in Monrovia, largely shielded from the sacrifices her family made to afford her an elite education. The daughter of an Indian immigrant mother and a white American father, she graduated from Flintridge Prep and attended University of Southern California on scholarship.
While studying law at Yale, she interned in the affirmative litigation department in the San Francisco city attorney’s office — a program Chiu lauded as “an essential training ground for the next generation of government lawyers” in a recent law review article.
Roy and her supporters say those early experiences cemented her commitment to teamwork, which is central to the less glamorous, more costly side of the city attorney’s job: serving as general counsel for myriad city agencies and legal advisor to City Hall.
“There’s absolutely more collaboration and it’s more significant given the things we’re up against,” said San Diego City Atty. Heather Ferbert, a close ally of Roy’s.
John McKinney, a Los Angeles County prosecutor running against Marissa Roy to become L.A. city attorney, speaks during a news conference on May 5, 2026.
(Kayla Bartkowski/Los Angeles Times)
Ferbert and others pointed to a surge in lawsuits against municipalities over everything from sidewalk trip-and-falls to police misconduct — cases that can lead to seven- or eight-figure payouts.
“If it’s not extremely unusual, it doesn’t make it to the city attorney’s desk,” said Oakland City Atty. Ryan Richardson, who endorsed Roy.
As a deputy city attorney, Roy spearheaded a trio of major wage-theft suits just a month after she was admitted to the bar. Independent expenditure groups supporting McKinney spent more than $350,000 trying to strip her of that title because she was paid by a nonprofit — an common arrangement employed by government law offices across the U.S. — while the city attorney’s office itself gave her permission to use it, and lists her as such in its court filings.
McKinney has since sought to paint Roy as the second coming of George Gascón, the polarizing district attorney who was drubbed in 2024 — a move that assumes most voters are still thinking about Gascón, or are likely to see the graying “godfather of progressive prosecutors” in a raven-haired deputy attorney general.
“The only way you disprove that is by putting your head down and doing the work 10 times harder,” Roy said. “Voters are smarter than that. People in the coalition see these tactics and are tired of them too.”
