task

Political polls are like weather forecasts. They’re worth passing consideration, maybe, but you’d have to be a fool to bet your house on their accuracy.

And yet there’s something that rings true about the recent poll suggesting that L.A. Mayor Karen Bass is in deep trouble among likely voters as she tries to hold on to a job that Councilmember Nithya Raman is trying to snatch away from her.

Here are the numbers, as compiled by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies and co-sponsored by The Times:

Raman: 39%.

Bass: 28%.

Undecided: 33%.

Bass has naturally tried to debunk the poll. What else could she do, when her supporters are outnumbered by people who can’t make up their minds? Bass would need to dominate the undecided vote to have a chance, but given her high unfavorability rating, that’ll be hard to do.

On the other hand, Raman certainly hasn’t put things out of reach, despite the fact that Bass carries the baggage of the Palisades fire and has made only minimal progress on her signature issue — homelessness. Election day is less than two months away, and Raman has failed to convince anywhere near a majority that she’s the answer.

So what do Raman and Bass need to do between now and Nov. 3?

Some speculate that Bass may need to step up the negative attacks.

I beg to differ.

We need both candidates to be bolder, more creative, more convincing, and to tell us things we haven’t heard before.

All the recent L.A. mayors I’ve known had their faults and failures, whether the task was filling potholes, building out transit or addressing the high cost of housing. But among their best qualities, Dick Riordan was arrogantly confident, Jim Hahn had a steady hand on the tiller, Antonio Villaraigosa was tireless and passionate, Eric Garcetti was a long-range thinker on earthquakes, water and energy.

L.A. needs a mayor with all of those qualities. A cheerleader. A task master. A ball buster.

Running the second-largest city in the country is no easy task, because many of the problems at street level begin well beyond local control, related in part to an economy that leaves too many people behind.

But if you want to lead a world-class city, you need to have world-class answers on the big stuff like housing and homelessness and on the basics, too, like fractured sidewalks and neglected parks. Most voters don’t give a hoot about which candidate is more of a socialist or a moderate. City Hall is broken, and they want to know who can fix it.

On Wednesday, I checked the same sadly neglected area around City Hall that I wrote about in April and found only minimal improvements. Graffiti has been washed from the Frank Putnam Flint fountain, but it remains a broken-down monument to neglect, as it has for most of the past 60 years. And all around it, most of the little placards identifying native plants are broken or missing.

People rest on the Frank Putnam Flint fountain outside City Hall, a sadly neglected area.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

The L.A. Mall is still a largely abandoned wreck, with broken planter boxes and weeds at street level. A woman with two shopping carts told me she’s been homeless for 5½ years. The restaurant next to the nearby police department is shuttered; the restaurant across the street from it is long dead, and the once-vibrant downtown — which generated revenue that benefited every neighborhood of the city — is gasping.

I drove down Hope Street, south of 12th Street, because a reader who lives in that area and has told me about repeated fires at abandoned properties. A tractor was clearing debris from a recent blaze.

I drove west on Olympic toward Alvarado, an area I visit regularly to see a friend. Streets are strewn with trash. They’re always strewn with trash. At Olympic and South Lake, where encampments line the street and a fire once spread into a church parking lot, destroying vehicles, there’s a concrete triangle that was heaped with trash. It’s always heaped with trash, like a municipal dump on a busy thoroughfare.

Next I headed west on Wilshire to the RFK Memorial I wrote about 10 months ago, near the site of the 1968 Bobby Kennedy assassination. It remainsfenced-off, with trash and graffitiand with overgrown vines covering tributes to Kennedy. The city was going to help the school district clean things up. Then the school district took on the task.

It’s still a mess. Actually, it’s more than that. It’s an indictment. And so is the fact that in Studio City, where frustrated neighbors complained for five years that an abandoned property had been taken over by squatters, it took a recent fire to get City Hall’s attention.

The property, since cleared, is in Raman’s district, and she and Bass traded accusations about who had dropped the ball.

“As far as homelessness goes, I don’t see either candidate really showing a clear vision to solve this,” said Kayt Miranda, whose home was damaged by the fire at the abandoned property. “I mean, it’s a tall order, and I wouldn’t want to be in charge of that. But I’m not hearing anything from either of them that sounds like it will work or hasn’t been tried already.”

To be fair, Bass and Raman have each had lots of success on homelessness, with thousands of people being brought indoors. That job is not easy, especially given the number of people with mental illness and addiction issues. I know this from personal experience, having spent a year trying to steer a friend in from homelessness.

But the pace is too slow and the cost too high. As my colleague David Zahniser reported earlier this year, $300 million had been spent on the mayor’s Inside Safe program since December 2022, and as of last December, 40% of the 5,800 people who had been housed were back on the street.

And that was with an estimated annual cost per person of $82,000. Raman, who had supported the program, became a critic of it and touted a less expensive strategy that itself has been criticized for its slow pace, as Times City Hall reporter Noah Goldberg wrote in August.

Not long ago, a homelessness policy expert suggested to me that if we could figure out a way to double the nearly $1,000 Social Security Disability subsidy many homeless people get, it would open some doors in a housing market they’re now priced out of. Too expensive? It’s cheaper than what we’re doing.

I’d like to hear the candidates rethink the playbook like that, double down on what works and drop what doesn’t.

I’d like to hear from a candidate with a realistic plan to get L.A. out of the cellar in park rankings nationally, to break up the 10-year logjam for a sidewalk repair and the two-year wait to fix a street light.

All those undecided voters know exactly what they want.

A mayor who says fix the busted fountain by the end of the week, or else.

They want someone to win their vote.

steve.lopez@latimes.com

Haitian foreign minister says renewal is necessary to ensure safety ahead of elections scheduled in December.

Haiti’s Foreign Ministry has called on the United Nations Security Council to renew the mandate of an internationally backed security force meant to tamp down the powerful armed groups controlling parts of the country.

On Thursday, Foreign Minister Raina Forbin reiterated her view that the Gang Suppression Force (GSF) needed to be fully deployed to her country, with support from the international community.

Its mandate, however, is slated to expire on September 30, unless the UNSC acts to extend its mission.

“We need technical, financial, logistical and safety support that is up to the challenge,” said Forbin. “We must now move from solidarity to action.”

Her remarks came at a meeting of the Organisation of American States (OAS), focused on the continued gang violence in Haiti.

Forbin gestured to a pressing need in her country. This year alone, in the three months from April to June, an estimated 1,408 people were killed in Haiti, with 656 injured. Much of that violence was attributed to gangs.

Haiti is also pushing ahead with long-postponed general elections. Critics, however, fear that the violence could disrupt the elections and weaken public confidence in the outcome.

Political instability in Haiti has been heightened since the assassination of former President Jovenel Moise in 2021. Armed groups have flourished in the vacuum, assuming control over large swaths of the capital of Port-au-Prince and displacing more than one million people.

Authorities have struggled to address either the out-of-control violence or the deeper causes of instability in the country, including poverty and government corruption.

The upcoming elections, the first in a decade, are currently scheduled to take place on December 13. But officials have questioned whether they will take place, given conditions on the ground.

OAS Secretary-General Albert Ramdin said that the regional body would deploy an Electoral Observation Mission to help support a credible vote, urging greater assistance for Haiti’s provisional electoral council.

He added that about one million identity cards must also be produced and distributed before voting can take place.

“Haiti is at a critical juncture,” Ramdin said in a statement on Thursday. “Our responsibility is clear: to strengthen security efforts, advance electoral preparations, fulfill existing commitments and ensure that international cooperation translates into tangible improvements in the daily lives of the Haitian people.”

But international assistance efforts have also drawn criticism, with many Haitians sceptical of outside interference in their country.

Officials within such international forces have also bemoaned a lack of steady support. Before the GSF, Kenya had led a Multinational Security Support (MSS) to support Haitian police, only to withdraw in April, after failing to meet its funding and deployment goals.

The UN Security Council voted to create the GSF task force in October 2025 as a replacement for the MSS. The mission was given a 12-month mandate.

The GSF is authorised to pursue “counter-gang operations to neutralize, isolate, and deter gangs”, either independently or in cooperation with Haitian police and its military.

Human rights advocates, however, note that such international support has been lacking for Haitians fleeing the violence.

Many Haitians have been forcibly returned to the country after fleeing for safety. A UN official informed an emergency meeting of the UNSC last week that nearly 200,000 people have been sent back to Haiti during the first eight months of this year.

That amounts to a 20,000 increase over the same period last year.

ATLANTA — Lefty Tarik Skubal hasn’t had time to fully reflect on his time in Detroit. When he learned at the beginning of the month that he was being traded to the Dodgers, he had one night of emotional goodbyes, before shifting his focus the next morning to preparing to face the Cubs in a few days.

Friday won’t be the right time either. He’s scheduled to take the mound against the Tigers, the only organization he’d played for up until three and a half weeks ago, in the series opener.

“I play baseball, and I don’t really want to let any noise or anything outside change or take away from my ability to go play baseball and put our team in a position to win,” he said in a recent conversation with The Times. “So that’s where my focus is always at. It doesn’t matter if it’s opening day of the season, it doesn’t matter if it’s spring training, it doesn’t matter if it’s the dog days of July, it doesn’t matter if it’s the postseason. For me, the game is always the same game, and that’s something that I take a ton of pride in.”

Even in his short time with the Dodgers, Skubal has thrown himself into the task at hand, from the way he’s pitched, to his commitment to connecting with his new teammates, to how he’s handled questions about his impending free agency.

Oddly enough, after the World Series favorites traded for the best pitcher available, they lost the next six games as part of a seven-game losing streak.

“Everyone around here was like, ‘Hey, we win games here,’” Skubal said. “And I go, ‘I don’t know, maybe it’s me.’”

Eventually, the Dodgers did win a game with Skubal on the roster. They even swept two series straight — before running into the Braves this week. And as Skubal has settled in, he’s enjoyed the sheer abundance of baseball conversations going on around him all the time, whether it be a pitcher chatting with the pitching coaches about sequencing, or hitters breaking down how an opposing pitcher attacked him.

“No one’s ego is too big to ask a question and try to learn from anybody,” Skubal said. “So I think that’s what makes this team so good. I think that’s why they tick, and I think that’s why they’re so good, especially in September, is they’re just not afraid to fail. They’re going to try and learn as much from each other as possible. I just love being a part of that.”

Likewise, his new teammates have loved him embracing them right away.

“You can’t tell whether he’s pitching or not because his personality never changes,” Kiké Hernández said. “And I appreciate how talkative he is, like even during his starts, like in the middle of the game, which is kind of refreshing.”

Already, Skubal’s joining in on pregame handshake lines and slapping the dugout railing in time to Roki Sasaki’s warm-up music. After Miguel Rojas nicknamed him “Scooby Doo Pa Pa,” Skubal used the song that inspired the name on an Instagram post.

“At the end of my career, if the one thing [all my ex-teammates] say about me is, ‘Yeah, he was talented on the field, but he was an even better teammate,’ that’s what I want to be remembered as,” Skubal said.

Skubal is only under club control for the rest of the season, but he’s consistently said he doesn’t want to address free agency.

“I really am probably not going to get to that until this season’s done,” he said. “Until, hopefully, I’m holding up a trophy and I’m celebrating with these guys for two weeks, and I’m going to [have a headache] for a month after.”

A video clip from Skubal’s appearance on the podcast “Pardon My Take” caused a stir on social media, when he said, “I would love to play my whole career in Detroit” and expresses hope that the Tigers are involved in negotiations in November. But Skubal points out the missing context in that clip.

His response was to a question that described the Tigers trading him as an “unfortunate part of where baseball is.” He understood the premise as, smaller markets can’t retain their stars.

Pitcher Tarik Skubal (29) hugs Jack Flaherty in the dugout after getting pulled from his last start with the Tigers on July 29.

(Paul Sancya / Associated Press)

“Which I don’t agree with,” said Skubal, who has thought a lot about the larger picture as a member of the MLB Players Assn. Executive Subcommittee. “You can retain whoever. Now, the longer you wait, the harder it is to get guys to give away the years to hit free agency. I think that’s just the business of baseball, and that’s not any different than any other sport.”

He backed his point with counterexamples on each side: the Royals signing homegrown star Bobby Witt Jr. to an 11-year extension worth $288.8 million guaranteed, and the Yankees’ Aaron Judge still hitting free agency in 2022 (before ultimately re-signing).

“There’s narratives around the sport that I don’t agree with, and that’s one of them,” Skubal said.

Though Skubal excels at focusing on the present, he also seems to sense how much weight his words carry. Wanting to avoid out-of-context reading between the lines as he praised the Dodgers, Skubal made sure to note that he wasn’t comparing his new situation with his old one.

He’s made clear over and over how special his time in Detroit was to him.

Skubal’s resolve hasn’t been tested in exactly the way it will be on Friday. But he’s performed on that same mound under unique circumstances.

When Skubal took the mound in his last start for the Tigers on July 29, he knew it could be a turning point for him and the club. The Tigers lost in extra innings, but he made a quality start and recorded his 1,000th career strikeout before leaving the game to a standing ovation at Comerica Park.

“You really appreciate that stuff,” Skubal said. “And I went down the tunnel and had some conversations with coaches that were pretty emotional too.

“You appreciate everything because without fans, this game is nothing. If no one showed up, we wouldn’t be able to play baseball for a living.”

He’s sure to have quite the reception on Friday, too. And even though Skubal excels at compartmentalizing, Dodgers manager Dave Roberts had one request for the Tigers.

“I hope they do the festivities the night after we win on Friday,” Roberts said, “so the emotion doesn’t get to him and he can just kind of enjoy the welcome back.”

The Dodgers have struggled at times since the All-Star break, but Will Smith’s return from injury and Shohei Ohtani’s return to pitching should help.