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Alissa, Mike, and guest co-host Matthew Reagan of The LA Local dive into accountability, litigation, and federal assistance in Boyle Heights after the Lineage fire. LAHSA as we know it is over. And on the same day as a safe streets rally, five Angelenos are killed when a driver crashes an SUV into a Metro bus, then a news helicopter covering the crash also crashes. Only in LA?

LA Podcast is only possible thanks to our paid subscribers. Our goal is 100 new subscribers by Election Day to cover our show’s costs so we can keep producing weekly episodes. Sign up today at thinkforward.la

We celebrate local independent news outlets! The LA Local is training citizens to attend public meetings and report back to their journalists and the community at large. And the Boyle Heights Beat has led the charge in Lineage fire reporting. So important and needed

LA City Council voted to block any Lineage rebuilding efforts until LAFD has completed its investigation (though Lineage CEO Greg Lehmkuhl says they aren’t sure they’ll rebuild anyway)

Lineage has sued their solar power provider, blaming them for the fire

A Garden Grove neighborhood was preemptively evacuated over a chemical leak last year, fearing their own Lineage story, which posed the question: why weren’t Boyle Heights residents evacuated? 

Boyle Heights residents were frustrated by Mayor Karen Bass’s virtual attendance (or no attendance at all) at meetings

Federal disaster loans are available to affected businesses (but, meeting this administration’s politics, only if you are a citizen or green-card holder) 

The Lineage fire’s sweet smelly legacy is emanating from Simi Valley landfills and as you can imagine, no one is thrilled about it 

After LAist reported on Mayor Karen Bass skipping more than half of LAHSA’s meetings, she officially stepped down from the board

LAHSA is also stepping down from LAHSA, forfeiting the federal roles it has been performing for years like the annual homelessness count

LAHSA had already been on thin ice fighting a lawsuit from the Trump administration this summer 

City, county, and private agencies are placing bids to take over LAHSA’s work

Congress summoned Mayor Bass to a hearing in DC about LA’s homelessness spending but she declined, calling it “politically motivated.” Committee Republicans vow to “use every tool” to make her testify

Earlier this summer, the Department of Housing and Urban Development issued a $4.4 billion Notice of Funding Opportunity — a NOFO, if you will — directing aid money away from a “housing first” approach

The feds were in LA that week anyway, arresting two people for misusing millions of taxpayer dollars. You know that situation where you’re supposed to provide housing but you accidentally buy a nightclub and go to Tahiti? Haven’t we all been there?

As usual, this begs the question: but what will this look like during the Olympics?

Continuing our city and society’s addictions to cars and the crime news cycle, after an impaired driver crashed her SUV into a Metro bus, the news helicopter covering the situation also crashed

In a rare move, the driver was arrested and charged with second-degree murder

The New York Times analyzed the dangers of flying news helicopters in big cities like Los Angeles

Poignantly and ironically, there was a rally to declare a state of emergency over our dangerous streets the morning before the crashes

(Advocates cited facts like the city had to return $100 million of state grants for street safety projects and removed 5 miles of bike lanes despite the fact traffic fatalities are up 8% from last year)

Plans to slow cars on Forest Lawn Drive had been in the works for years. However, California lawmakers swooped in at the last minute 

** Since recording the podcast, Governor Gavin Newsom signed SB 194 into law, stopping traffic safety improvements on Forest Lawn Drive

Forest Lawn and Mount Sinai cemeteries spent $500,000 to lobby against these plans, wanting to generate future customers

Streetsblog LA’s Joe Linton has explained why the city is only doing “large asphalt repairs” to avoid having to upgrade street safety

Postively: it will eventually feel safer to walk on Spring and Alameda streets in Chinatown. And speed cameras! Many speed cameras! And speed governors, someday, maybe!

Thank you to Charlotte Landes for producing this episode and to our production assistant Bianca Cockrell

The reporting and analysis you hear in the show is put together by our rotating cast of producers and co-hosts every week. All opinions expressed on the show are solely those of co-hosts and may not represent the views of LA Forward

Alissa Walker writes the newsletter Torched, tracking LA’s megaevent progress. Find her at @awalkerinla on Instagram and @awalkerinla.bsky.social on Bluesky

Mike Bonin is the Executive Director of the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at CalState LA, and can be found at @mikebonin on Instagram and @mikebonin.bsky.social on Bluesky

Matthew Reagan is the assignment editor of LA Documenters, a program that trains and pays LA residents to put public meetings on the record. Documenter notes are published online and inform the community journalism produced by The LA Local

Mike, Memo, and guest co-host Faizah Malik look back on the 25th anniversary of 9/11 and its legacies, including the Department of Homeland Security, which recently decided they will not (yet) revoke Temporary Protected Status for Salvadorans. Then: childcare in Los Angeles is becoming more difficult and more expensive to find— but maybe a billionaire tax could help?

LA Podcast is only possible thanks to our paid subscribers. Our goal is 100 new subscribers by Election Day to cover the show’s costs so we can keep producing weekly episodes. Sign up today at thinkforward.la

Last week marked the 25th anniversary of 9/11 and Alex Padilla’s remarks about the tragedy as acting mayor of Los Angeles

Julia Wick profiled the moment in a piece for L.A. Material

This week also granted some relief to thousands of Salvadorans after a month of threats that their TPS (Temporary Protected Status) would be taken away

Memo and L.A. Taco reporter Izzy Ramirez chronicled this saga (and other ICE malfeasance)

Journalist Cerise Castle goes deep on LAPD’s relationship with ICE with Dominique DiPrima of KBLA

CHIRLA, CARCEN-LA, and other advocates gathered to demand protections for TPS holders and their families 

In other worrying news for families, UCLA is closing their childcare facilities

Similarly, the city of Los Angeles used COVID funds to build a network of city preschools — but now say they don’t have enough funding to run them

(How expensive is childcare in this town anyway?)

As the mayoral race draws nearer, make sure to educate yourself on your preferred candidate’s stance on street vending

LAist’s Gab Chabrán reports on the basics of legal street vending practices

The L.A. Times editorial board breaks its publishing drought, writing an opinion for the first time in a year and a half to oppose Prop 40, the proposed billionaire tax

Surely this isn’t because L.A. Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong is a billionaire? That would be too obvious?

Some guides and controversy to help you form your own opinion on whether or not Mark Zuckerberg should have to give the state $11 billion in a one-time tax

Check out LA Forward’s teach-in about the most dangerous measures on the ballot this Tuesday on zoom

Some of the best editorial writing in LA is still coming from former LAT editorial board member, Robert Greene, who now writes at regular newsletter at Los Angeles Rules

Thanks to Charlotte Landes for producing and Bianca Cockrell for production assistance

The reporting and analysis you hear in the show is put together by our rotating cast of producers and co-hosts every week. All opinions expressed on the show are solely those of co-hosts and may not represent the views of LA Forward

Mike Bonin is the Executive Director of the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at CalState LA, and can be found at @mikebonin on Instagram and @mikebonin.bsky.social on Bluesky

Memo Torres is an award-winning journalist with L.A. Taco, where he covers ICE and immigration raids as host of the Daily Memo. He’s on Instagram at @el_tragon_de_los_angeles

Faizah Malik is a housing and civil right attorney, who ran as a progressive for LA City Council in District 11. She can be found at @faizahforla on Instagram

Scott, Alissa, and Sophie attempt to understand the Lucas Museum’s decade-long arrival in Expo Park and what “narrative art” actually means. Does this mean the La La Land optimism of 2016 LA is back? MacArthur Park hosts a picnic — and potentially a new fence? And more major endorsements in the mayoral race.

LA Podcast is only possible thanks to our paid subscribers. Our goal is 300 new subscribers by election day (November 3rd!) to cover our show’s costs so we can keep producing weekly episodes. Sign up today at thinkforward.la

Haven’t you ever wanted to picnic with your district attorney? Your dreams could have come true this weekend

(Despite his throwing of the gauntlet, DA Nathan Hochman had enjoyed himself at a World Cup event in MacArthur Park earlier this summer)

Picnics might become harder in a fenced MacArthur Park, but it is unclear when or if that is actually happening

The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art will officially open on September 22 and everyone has thoughts about it (you might like to revisit Christopher Knight’s 2017 remarks where he describes this project as the “Treacle Museum — a sentimental vanity gallery pumped up on soppy emotional steroids”)

What is “narrative art” anyway? George Lucas explains. Kinda? Is it just horny statues?

It’s the 10th anniversary of La La Land’s premiere and Eric Garcetti is with us in spirit 

UNITE HERE Local 11 and DSA-LA both endorsed Nithya Raman for mayor (positioning Airbnb as a top issue in the race)

Meanwhile, Mayor Karen Bass shared videos about encampments near schools and “No-Show Nithya” (while, it must be said, missing a third of LAHSA meetings and two thirds of Metro votes)

“I’ll take Raman’s “wonderful ideas and plans” — Bass’ words, not mine! — over the mayor’s record. For climate voters, this is an easy choice.” Sometime LA Podcast host Sammy Roth also endorses Raman

And a happy Labor Day to all — City Council aides have unionized with EAA!

Thanks to Sophie Bridges for producing and Bianca Cockrell for production assistance

The reporting and analysis you hear in the show is put together by our rotating cast of producers and co-hosts every week. All opinions expressed on the show are solely those of co-hosts and may not represent the views of LA Forward

Scott Frazier is an original co-host of LA Podcast

Alissa Walker writes the newsletter Torched, tracking LA’s megaevent progress. Find her at @awalkerinla on Instagram and @awalkerinla.bsky.social on Bluesky

Sophie Bridges is a writer and audio producer whose work has appeared on This American Life, Radiolab, and Reveal. She’s a proud graduate of LAUSD and the Writers Guild of America

Alissa, Mike, and Olga discover that extreme humidity pairs nicely with our already-crumbling infrastructure. Luckily, social media is the key to fixing potholes! Controller Kenneth Mejia tries to demystify LA28’s finances. And will DSA-LA make an LA mayoral endorsement — and does it matter?

Southern California is used to being the best at many things, but unfortunately this week we took the prize for highest humidity in the country

Did you want to run your air conditioning in this extreme heat? Sorry! Power’s out

In cooler news: an LAUSD school in Westlake more than quadrupled their green space on campus, creating a shady oasis for their students, and there are plans for more district campuses to do the same

Streetsblog LA’s Joe Anthony and Joe Linton covered advocates commemorating 10 years of LA’s landmark sidewalk  settlement and why it hasn’t succeeded

LA is (still) a film town, so maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that you have to make a viral video to get any infrastructure fixed 

Alissa’s pothole campaign was successful! But others have not been as lucky

Are you tired of potholes in your neighborhood? Join LA Forward Monday night as we discuss what a Capital Infrastructure Program (CIP) could and should include to fix our streets

As 2028 draws closer, City Controller Kenneth Mejia is requesting their financial documents so taxpayers aren’t left paying for the Olympics and our city instead has money for projects like fixing sidewalks

Representative Laura Friedman (CA-30) held a panel to advocate for Metro funding with other less knowledgeable elected officials because the federal government has yet to pledge money for Olympics transportation (But hey, it’s one Olympics. What could it cost, $10?)

Whatever happened to those $28 Olympics tickets anyway?

City Council President Marquee Harris-Dawson introduced a motion to guarantee local businesses be included in Olympic contracts and therefore revenue

Geese magazine has the arguments for why DSA should or should not endorse “pothole populist” Nithya Raman for mayor. Voting ends Tuesday

Mayor Karen Bass walked back her remarks about street vendors made during the SOHA debate while Raman updated her street vendor platform

Los Angeles Public Press reported on LAPD using infamous ordinance 41.18 to warn, cite, and displace vendors in MacArthur Park for at least the past year

Support LA Podcast by becoming a paid subscriber at thinkforward.la

Thank you to Charlotte Landes for producing this episode and to our production assistant Bianca Cockrell

The reporting and analysis you hear in the show is put together by our rotating cast of producers and co-hosts every week. All opinions expressed on the show are solely those of co-hosts and may not represent the views of LA Forward

Alissa Walker writes the newsletter Torched, tracking LA’s megaevent progress. Find her at @awalkerinla on Instagram and @awalkerinla.bsky.social on Bluesky

Mike Bonin is the Executive Director of the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at CalState LA, and can be found at @mikebonin on Instagram and @mikebonin.bsky.social on Bluesky

Olga Lexell is a TV writer and local political organizer

Mike, Godfrey, and Olga dissect the heated mayoral debate at the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Association. Will LA see a Paramount Skydance Warner Brothers lot? Uber and Lyft drivers won the right to organize, making labor history. Then: you can file to run for LA County CEO starting next month, but what does this job actually entail?

Mayor Karen Bass and Councilmember Nithya Raman debated in an auditorium in Sherman Oaks last Wednesday night

L.A. Material’s Julia Wick dared to bravely ask and answer the question: but why do the mayoral candidates of our nation’s second-largest city trade jabs behind a duct-taped banner in the Valley?

(Not everyone was able to see that beautiful banner though: SOHA’s Zoom account maxed out on capacity)

The LA Times, L.A. Taco, and LAist analyze the debate (and Bass’s anti-street vendor comments)

A poll showing Bass trouncing Raman by double digits was actually fake. Oops!

Raman plans to hire Fight Agency for some television ads: their other clients include Mayor Zohran Mamdani and former Senate candidate Graham Platner (who withdrew after being accused of sexual assault)

Bass is calling for “all parties to come to the table” to settle the anti-trust lawsuit blocking a proposed Paramount Skydance and Warner Brothers merger, though a LA County Board of Supervisors report says it would cost thousands of jobs and about $2.78 billion in lost economic value

Raman stands by her opposition to the merger and support for the lawsuit

The WGA is not pleased with Bass’s approach nor the proposed merger — but DGA and IATSE just want a decision, one way or another, to prevent members from losing wages

Paramount and the State of California are scheduled to meet today to discuss a path forward

In other union news, Uber and Lyft drivers have won union recognition in the state of California thanks to the passing of AB 1340 and lots of organizing

(Gig drivers are still classified as independent contractors, but can now bargain for protections)

The filing window for LA County CEO opens next month. But what will the County CEO do, exactly? Is this election governed by campaign finance rules? What’s the structure of its future office? These questions and more are… still being decided

Whatever its scope, this change may be most helpful for unincorporated communities, who without local governments, rely on the Board of Supervisors for municipal services

The Governance Reform Task Force will review a final draft of these recommendations at its August 28 meeting: you can give public comment and lobby for your priorities

Support LA Podcast by becoming a paid subscriber at thinkforward.la

Thank you to Charlotte Landes for producing this episode and to our production assistant Bianca Cockrell

The reporting and analysis you hear in the show is put together by our rotating cast of producers and co-hosts every week. All opinions expressed on the show are solely those of co-hosts and may not represent the views of LA Forward

Mike Bonin is the executive director of the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at CalState LA, and can be found at Substack, or @mikebonin on IG, and @mikebonin.bsky.social on Bluesky

Godfrey Plata is the deputy director of LA Forward and is @godfreyplata on Instagram

Olga Lexell is a TV writer and local political organizer

Alissa, Godfrey, and Loraine go deep on LAUSD’s many changes and challenges as this new school year begins. LA’s City Council is set to make big shifts on how to address homelessness, but the hardest part might be getting everyone to agree. And what will actually get Angelenos out of their cars?

Andres Chait has been officially appointed LAUSD superintendent and has some plans to address the slew of issues ahead

Declining enrollment is creating a big financial challenge for LAUSD. One new income supplement: using vacant classrooms as childcare centers

If the budget deficit isn’t resolved, the county will step in

Some good student transportation news: speed cameras are being installed around schools

More students are taking the bus to school, which is helpful amid continuing ICE raids

Newly approved screen time reforms are in place, eliminating digital devices for first graders and younger, setting age-specific time limits on older students, blocking YouTube access, and more

Unfortunately, Boyle Heights kids have more grounds than most to say going back to school stinks — the odor of rotting food is not going away anytime soon

(Relatedly, Lineage will fail to meet Mayor Karen Bass’s 45-day clean up deadline, so she is directing city lawyers to pursue civil litigation — but Lineage claims the city has the deadline date wrong)

LAUSD says schools near the Lineage fire are safe from contaminants, though two tested positive for above-average levels of lead

Councilmember Nithya Raman has been removed as chair of the Homelessness and Housing committee, which was then split into two separate committees

Raman and Bass will surely discuss housing among other issues during their debate hosted by the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Association on Wednesday evening 

Many councilmembers made rather, er, harsh comments about this, which happened to coincide with news of Bass and Councilmember Imelda Padilla’s tiny home village opening

Speaking of scathing remarks, Judge David Carter didn’t mince words as he blocked Trump’s attempt to take over LAHSA, criticizing both HUD and LAHSA

Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martinez introduced an interestingly timed motion to get rid of all of the 41.18 zones in his district

Turns out an accounting glitch skewed numbers from this year’s homelessness count, inflating the rise in the unhoused population by almost 1.5% 

Newsom announces a new EV tax credit for first-time buyers but what about that e-bike credit?

Metro is piloting a program that will pay you not to drive for 5 weeks and DOT is piloting mobility wallets to reimburse all types of modes in low-income communities

More on homelessness and visits from the Trump administration on the new L.A. World podcast, a project of L.A. Material, hosted by Hayes Davenport, Antonia Cereijido, and Julia Turner

Support LA Podcast by becoming a paid subscriber at thinkforward.la

Thank you to Sophie Bridges for producing this episode and to our production assistant Bianca Cockrell

The reporting and analysis you hear in the show is put together by our rotating cast of producers and co-hosts every week. All opinions expressed on the show are solely those of co-hosts and may not represent the views of LA Forward

Alissa Walker writes the newsletter Torched, tracking LA’s megaevent progress. Find her at @awalkerinla on Instagram and @awalkerinla.bsky.social on Bluesky

Loraine Lundquist is chair of LA Forward’s board, an astrophysicist, and a sustainability policy expert who earned 49.4% of the vote as a candidate for LA City Council

Godfrey Plata is the deputy director of LA Forward and is @godfreyplata on Instagram

Alissa, Mike, and Marco say a requiem for the Graffiti Towers. Nithya Raman receives endorsements from some big players, including Kenneth Mejia’s corgis. In the wake of the Lineage environmental disaster, which still reeks, LA’s City Council votes for more environmental disasters. And who will be LA County’s first elected CEO?

The Graffiti Towers have been sold and cleaning efforts have begun

Aren’t the Graffiti Towers the Watts Towers of their generation? (Both are being refurbished for the 2028 Olympics)

Keep Honking! I’m admiring the Oceanwide Plaza Graffiti Towers! See them up close with Alissa and the Rent Brigade on a tour next week

Nearby, a new park under the Sixth Street Bridge, also resplendent with graffiti, continues gentrification conversations

LA Material’s Degen Pener reports on families of coyotes living in residential towers in West Hollywood

The Western States Carpenters union endorsed Nithya Raman, reversing their 2022 support for Bass

Raman was also recently endorsed by Kenneth Mejia, who is encouraging the public to add a Nithya sticker to their yard signs

City Council will vote on splitting Housing and Homelessness and Health into two separate committees this week

The Lineage fire still smells and it’s still bad news so Karen Bass wrote an open letter to the Lineage shareholders and supports an order of abatement from AQMD

Councilmember Ysabel Jurado introduced a seven-motion package for Boyle Heights fire recovery. Hilda Solis is in charge of small business recovery

The EPA has asked Lineage for documents to assess Clean Air Act compliance: aka, was there an ammonia leak? Lineage warehouses have had 63 fires over the last ten years, by the way

Hungry for more environmental disasters, Council approved a retrofitting of the Scattergood gas plant

Eric Garcetti has a new job and it is (or isn’t) what you’d expect

Garcetti recently declined Julia Wick’s request for comment as she explored who might throw their hat in the ring for the powerful LA County CEO election in 2028 for LA Material. Mike profiled Long Beach mayor Rex Richardson, another rumored candidate, on What’s Next, LA?, look for it in the upcoming weeks

Support LA Podcast by becoming a paid subscriber at thinkforward.la

This week’s episode was produced by Sophie Bridges

Thanks to our digital producer Bianca Cockrell

The reporting and analysis you hear in the show is put together by our rotating cast of producers and co-hosts every week. All opinions expressed on the show are solely those of co-hosts and may not represent the views of LA Forward.

Alissa Walker writes the newsletter Torched, tracking LA’s megaevent progress. Find her at @awalkerinla on Instagram and @awalkerinla.bsky.social on Bluesky.

Mike Bonin is the executive director of the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at Cal State LA, and can be found at @mikebonin on Instagram and @mikebonin.bsky.social on Bluesky

Marco Santana brings over a decade of leadership to the LA homelessness services sector and is a former candidate and active leader within local Democratic party politics. He’s at @Marco4LA on Instagram

Scott, Mike, and Olga convene a transportation sickos roundtable to discuss Metro’s State of the Agency, how the system fared during the World Cup, and big changes to the board’s structure. Will the LAX people mover ever open — and will anyone actually call it SkyLink? Then: Karen Bass’s sudden pivot on the Lineage disaster in a mayorship that has been defined by disasters.

Watch Metro’s State of the Agency featuring Metro’s magnetic CEO Stephanie Wiggins

Metro ridership numbers in June increased by over two million year over year during the World Cup

Alissa was on Spectrum talking about how well it all went and wrote more about the lessons learned on Torched

More than 560,000 fans attended the eight matches altogether, according to the Los Angeles World Cup 2026 Host Committee. There were approximately 212,000 boardings to and from SoFi. This means about 1 in 5 fans going to the matches took Metro’s shuttle service

Los Angeles Times: “The World Cup was an L.A. public transit success. The Olympics will be a much bigger test”

Bass, now in her second go as Metro board chair, suddenly started caring about transit, and is promising fare-free transit that advocates have been demanding for years

As advocates — including a direct plea from CicLAvia — begged Metro to find $1 million for open streets events while pouring over $100 million into freeway expansions

Metro’s board is changing — and is about to undergo more significant changes. Two small city reps are no longer elected councilmembers, so they’re out: Whittier’s Fernando Dutra who lost his council race and Glendale’s Ara Najarian who didn’t run again. Long Beach mayor Rex Richardson is replacing Dutra, but the obscure L.A. County City Selection Committee rejected Santa Clarita councilmember Jason Gibbs

Due to Measure G, which expands the LA County Board of Supervisors to nine members, Metro’s board composition has to change. The board approved a motion — a combination of a staff recommendation, and motions from Bass, Janice Hahn, and Lindsey Horvath — that will recommend including two rider representatives. There are still a few final wrinkles to iron out, but soon these proposals will proceed as Metro’s recommendations to the state legislature, which may have its own ideas about changes to Metro governance

The LAX people mover contractor has now sued the city, raising even more concern over when/if the three-years-late, $1 billion over budget, 2.25-mile connection from the airport to the LAX Metro station will actually open

Nick Andert has the only video about the people mover you need

After L.A. Material’s Julia Wick broke the news that Lineage Logistics had filed for permits to rebuild their burned and putrid cold storage warehouse, Bass quickly announced that she would stop Lineage from rebuilding, issuing an emergency executive order to deny the permits, weeks after saying that she didn’t know if she could do that

LAist has a great explainer on what Bass and the city could actually do

Meanwhile Lineage is getting hit by fines from both AQMD and the LA County Public Health Department for odors, vermin, flies, and more

“Bass’ summer has been beset by a string of negative news. Staff members on both her campaign and administration teams have left. She was away from the city — just as she was at the start of the devastating 2025 firestorms — when a blaze ignited at the Lineage cold-storage food warehouse in Boyle Heights, inundating the heavily Latino surrounding neighborhoods with noxious fumes,” writes Noah Goldberg at the LA Times

Support LA Podcast by becoming a paid subscriber at thinkforward.la

This week’s episode was produced by Kristen Torres

The reporting and analysis you hear in the show is put together by our rotating cast of producers and co-hosts every week. All opinions expressed on the show are solely those of co-hosts and may not represent the views of LA Forward

Scott Frazier is an original co-host of LA Podcast

Mike Bonin is the executive director of the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at CalState LA, and can be found at Substack, or @mikebonin on IG, and @mikebonin.bsky.social on Bluesky

Olga Lexell is a TV writer and local political organizer

Mike, Godfrey, and guest co-host Carla Hall discuss the Sunset Boulevard sinkhole in West Hollywood. Then, the results of the 2026 homeless count are in. And Mayor Karen Bass’s informal advisor steps back.

On July 16th, an LADWP pipe burst on the corner of Sunset and Holloway in West Hollywood. It was about 110 years old, and created a giant sinkhole in the middle of the night 

This pipe was on track to be refurbished in 2031- about 30%,of the city's pipes are over 80 years old

LADWP experiences a leak rate that is 36% below the national average

More small leaks on Sunset

For the LA Times, Hannah Fry reports that “there are about 547 miles of trunk line underground across the city. In 2019, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power said roughly 29% of the city’s pipes were over 80 years old, approaching their typical lifespan of 100 years.”

The LA Times has a map of locations where water main leaks have happened since 2010

West Hollywood mayor John Heilman was there, and so was Mayor Karen Bass

Councilmember and mayoral candidate Nithya Raman was on the scene with Councilmember Chelsea Byers

Officials said anyone with property or vehicle damage can file a claim through LADWP at ladwp.com/claims

After two years of modest but promising decreases in homelessness, numbers are up in both the city of LA and the larger overall county of LA, LAHSA officially announces

The overall homeless population in the city is up 3.5%, and the unsheltered population, which Mayor Bass focuses on through Inside Safe, is up 7.9% 

State funding for homelessness, which had been very healthy and robust, got cut in 2025 - a lot of that money was going to limited rental subsidies, which were hugely successful. This past year, there were 5,000 fewer people that the county was not able to put into housing because they didn't have enough subsidies

The Los Angeles County Affordable Housing Solutions Agency, shorthanded as LACAHSA, is investing over $228 million this fiscal year to help communities build and preserve affordable homes and to help prevent homelessness

Funding for support services and homelessness prevention is currently funded by Measure A dollars, and for LA city specific residents, some of this funding comes from Measure ULA

Mayor Bass is running for reelection against Council Member Raman - the numbers in Council District 4 are very different from the citywide numbers. The unsheltered population citywide was up 7.8%, and in Council District 4 it's down 49%

Yusef Robb, a close but informal advisor to the mayor, took on crisis comms work for Lineage after the warehouse fire in Boyle Heights through a group called M Strategic Communications - whose clients also include both Airbnb and the California Community Foundation 

Mayor Bass publicly promoted Airbnb's housing assistance after the fire, and asked Lineage to contribute a significant amount of money to the California Community Foundation. Robb’s work for Mayor Bass was unpaid

For L.A. Material, Julia Wick reports that Robb stepped back from working with the mayor, saying “I'm not going to let unnecessary distractions get in the way of the important things that need to be done, so I'm not extending my volunteer advisory work for the Mayor,” via text message

Robb remained in three WhatsApp groups used by the mayor’s comms team for at least a week after stepping back

Support LA Podcast by becoming a paid subscriber at thinkforward.la

This week’s episode was produced by Charlotte Landes

Our digital producer is Victoria Alejandro

The reporting and analysis you hear in the show is put together by our rotating cast of producers and co-hosts every week. All opinions expressed on the show are solely those of co-hosts and may not represent the views of LA Forward

Mike Bonin is the executive director of the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at CalState LA, and can be found at Substack, or @mikebonin on IG, and @mikebonin.bsky.social on Bluesky

Godfrey Plata is the deputy director of LA Forward and is @godfreyplata on Instagram

Carla Hall is a former editorial writer for the Los Angeles Times, where she covered and wrote extensively about homelessness

Alissa, Oscar, and guest co-host Rudy Espinoza discuss accelerating immigration enforcement activity in LA as ICE murders three people in one week nationwide. Then, how an unbearable stench, rats, flies, and extreme heat are impacting the Lineage fire aftermath. And as the 39-day tournament ends, reflections on what LA got wrong and right with the World Cup.

Three ICE murders in one week across the country: Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston, Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Maine, and an unidentified man in Miami. The Maine murder, where a man ran into traffic to escape ICE, is similar to the killing of Roberto Carlos Montoya in Monrovia last year

14 ICE detainees have died so far in 2026. In 2025, ICE reported that 33 detainees died

LA Taco reports that the San Fernando Valley has become a hotbed of ICE activity, with raids escalating. The DTLA ICE detainment facility is now being moved to Santa Ana, although perhaps temporarily

As reported by LAist’s Libby Rainey, advocates are receiving upticks in calls for help with ICE raids. Attorney Sarah Houston, who oversees calls, says: "I'm so happy that ICE hasn't ruined the World Cup by doing these mass raids, but they are still doing them piecemeal and one by one...In the background, the administration is still there, and these things are still happening. They're just not happening at SoFi Stadium."

ICE patrols shifted to fan zones and the areas surrounding SoFi Stadium

Jets used to deport ICE detainees were also used to transport World Cup teams

Sweeping changes are coming to the ICE detention center in Adelanto due to a federal ruling demanding the humane treatment of prisoners

ICE promised to halt vehicle stops and increase the use of body cameras. Hmmm, where have we heard that before?

CHIRLA, pro-immigrant leaders, and clergy members held a press conference to honor the people killed by ICE, and organize a day of action on July 25

85 million pounds of rotting food from the Lineage fire is now causing an overpowering smell that’s traveling far outside the neighborhood, contains odor-related toxins, and is creating a fly infestation. Extreme heat is also becoming an issue. AQMD has issued an odor violation for the smell from the Lineage fire, but residents continue to demand that the warehouse is shut down

Businesses in the area are empty and some haven’t gotten air purifiers 

Ruben Vives reports for the LA Times that Manuel Orozco, owner of Jim’s Burgers, and his workers wore face masks inside the mostly empty diner. Not far from the Lineage warehouse, Orozco said “No one is coming and it’s because of the smoke…It’s been a difficult time.”

For L.A. Material, Julia Wick tried to find out where the waste is going

LA Mayor Karen Bass had a quick response to the sinkhole and water main break in WeHo

Alissa wrote about how FIFA fan zones are privatizing public spaces. In Venice, the fan zone didn’t include a promised free component. Vendors were also kicked off the Venice boardwalk

Metro ridership numbers in June increased by two million year over year during the World Cup

Alissa will be speaking about what LA has learned from the World Cup at LA Forward's next meeting on July 21 from 7 to 8 p.m. RSVP for the Zoom

Support LA Podcast by becoming a paid subscriber at thinkforward.la

This week’s episode was produced by Sophie Bridges

Our digital producer is Victoria Alejandro

The reporting and analysis you hear in the show is put together by our rotating cast of producers and co-hosts every week. All opinions expressed on the show are solely those of co-hosts and may not represent the views of LA Forward

Alissa Walker writes the newsletter Torched, tracking LA’s megaevent progress. Find her at @awalkerinla on Instagram and @awalkerinla.bsky.social on Bluesky

Oscar Zarate is director of external affairs at Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA). He is @straight_outta_papeles on Instagram

Rudy Espinosa is executive director of Inclusive Action for the City, a nonprofit, Community Development Financial Institution based in Los Angeles. Follow him at @rudyespi

Alissa, Mike, and guest co-host Adam Conover take a look at the ongoing repercussions from the Lineage Logistics fire, an explosive town hall in Boyle Heights, and how the thawing cold storage warehouse has snowballed into a political nightmare. Then, what’s changed in Karen Bass’s mayoral campaign. And some bad (and also some good?) LAPD updates. 

At a town hall in Boyle Heights for the community impacted by the Lineage fire, Mayor Karen Bass and other officials were booed by the crowd. Watch the entire thing here

Both Bass and Lineage official Jeff Rivera issued multiple apologies, including admitting major communication issues around air quality

Meanwhile, ER visits spiked during the fire, and Boyle Heights residents were exposed to air pollution that was worse than the Eaton Fire

The Boyle Heights disaster once again raises jurisdictional issues about how residents of the adjacent unincorporated areas of LA County access services

Bass recommended Airbnb to displaced residents looking for temporary housing, despite the ongoing lawsuits against Airbnb from the city of LA for price gouging after the 2025 fires. Plus Airbnb is heavily funding her campaign

As reported by Julia Wick at L.A. Material Bass’ unpaid advisor Yusef Robb is also helping with crisis communications for Lineage, although he later said he would no longer advise Bass

Boyle Heights residents staged a protest along with LAUSD board member Rocio Rivas to demand the removal of Lineage from the neighborhood

Bass’ campaign is shifting leadership: Doug Herman is out and Julie Chavez Rodriguez, who worked on both Joe Biden’s and Kamala Harris’s 2024 campaigns, is in 

The LAPD officer who shot and killed a dog named Jameson during the Knicks victory last month will not be publicly named despite the fact that body cam footage and transcripts have been released, and the dog’s owner Marie Marseille has filed a lawsuit against the city

LAPD has agreed to end their deal with Flock surveillance cameras

Journalist Sean Beckner-Carmitchel has the LAPD-Flock MOU

Become a paid subscriber to thinkforward.la

This week’s episode was produced by Sophie Bridges

Our digital producer is Victoria Alejandro

The reporting and analysis you hear in the show is put together by our rotating cast of producers and co-hosts every week. All opinions expressed on the show are solely those of co-hosts and may not represent the views of LA Forward

Alissa Walker writes the newsletter Torched, tracking LA’s megaevent progress. Find her at @awalkerinla on Instagram and @awalkerinla.bsky.social on Bluesky

Mike Bonin is the executive director of the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at CalState LA, and can be found at Substack, or @mikebonin on IG, and @mikebonin.bsky.social on Bluesky

Adam Conover is a comedian, writer, and podcaster who hosts the weekly series Factually and created the television programs Adam Ruins Everything and The G Word with Adam Conover

Alissa, Godfrey, and Kate examine why the Palisades arson case ended in a mistrial, and how the feds biffed the prosecution. What you won’t see on the November ballot after LA City Council charter reforms go down in flames. Then, LA finally has a city service agreement with LA28, but human rights advocates are sounding alarms. 

A mistrial has been declared against Jonathan Rinderknecht, the man accused of arson in the 2025 Palisades Fire after a deadlocked jury 

Juror #4 on the case spoke publicly about deliberations, and the potential confusion surrounding convictions for a holdover fire 

The jury voted 10-2 in favor of acquitting Rinderknecht, and some Palisades residents would rather the effort of a retrial go into the effort of rebuilding. Longtime resident and journalist Lisa Sweetingham says, “They really don’t have the evidence to bring it home” 

Unlike the Palisades fire, the Eaton fire in Altadena has confirmed evidence that a century-old idle transmission line that Southern California Edison failed to remove was the cause of the blaze. Affected residents have to do the calculus between a compensation fund and a lawsuit, though rebuilds from both fires have a long journey ahead 

Fireworks are still banned in the city of Los Angeles

South LA families remain displaced by the LAPD’s 2021 botched fireworks detonation 

Seven workers were killed in  Northern California last year due to an explosion at a ranch storing huge amounts of fireworks owned by the aptly named company Devastating Pyrotechnics

LA Material’s Jessica Garrison reports on the massive black-market fireworks operation in Los Angeles, and how the illegal explosives are entering the city

We talked about charter reform a few weeks ago, but there’s an update: the ballot proposals for noncitizen voting and LAPD measures have been pulled  

Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez suggests in a comment that punting the LAPD measure may have been intended to support Mayor Bass’ reelection. And Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martinez says that protecting the status quo means the “city will remain broken  

A charter allocation for parks did make it through and will be on the ballot in November: Listen to Councilmembers Bob Blumenfield and Monica Rodriguez discuss the allocation here

Is LA’s mayor actually weak? Kate thinks the charter amendment process shows that might not be true! Read Robert Greene’s piece on power in LA for LA Reported

LA28 presented its human rights plan and answered questions about a city service agreement at the city’s  ad hoc Olympic and Paralympic committee meeting this week

Libby Rainey’s reporting for LAist notes how this city service agreement is nine months overdue and it has not yet been determined where the federal funds will go (or if LA will even get them) 

Read Alissa’s thread on Bluesky from the meeting

Councilmember Soto-Martinez grilled LA28 CEO Raymond Hoover over ICE enforcement; listen here And what do security perimeters mean for densely populated  areas and recently added venues like Griffith Park?

Support LA Podcast by becoming a paid subscriber at thinkforward.la

Thanks to Sophie Bridges for producing

The reporting and analysis you hear in the show is put together by our rotating cast of producers and co-hosts every week. All opinions expressed on the show are solely those of co-hosts and may not represent the views of LA Forward

Alissa Walker writes the newsletter Torched, tracking LA’s megaevent progress. Find her at @awalkerinla on Instagram and @awalkerinla.bsky.social on Bluesky

Godfrey Plata is the deputy director of LA Forward and is @godfreyplata on Instagram

Kate Cagle is an anchor at Spectrum News and the host of the LA Times Studios podcast “Rebuilding Los Angeles.” Find her at @katecagle at Instagram

Alissa, Godfrey, and Loraine examine the public health impacts of the Lineage warehouse fire that burned in Boyle Heights for a week. LA’s council votes to end oil extraction (for the second time). LAUSD superintendent Alberto Carvalho resigns amid a federal investigation into an AI chatbot deal as the board dramatically reduces screen time for students. And yet another ULA backroom deal turns into a win for Howard Jarvis.

After one week of burning in Boyle Heights and decimating air quality throughout the region, the Lineage Logistics warehouse fire was finally out

But the impact to the neighborhood won’t be known for some time, reports Capital and Main: “Short-term consequences for those nearest to the warehouse could be asthma and even heart attacks, but other effects will take time to surface. Much of it has to do with what’s in the smoke, which is hard to trace retroactively.”

The smoke has dissipated but the neighborhood faces new challenges: “‘Like a dead body’: after warehouse fire, LA residents say air thick with smell of rotting food”

LA Podcast founder Hayes Davenport reports for L.A. Material on a similar fire from the same company that burned for 63 days in Washington

Karen Bass’s response has been heavily criticized. She was out of town (again), didn’t hold a press conference until Friday, and didn’t declare an emergency response until Saturday. Then she said the air was “not dangerous” and “There is not anything you need to do to protect yourself. You do not even need to wear a mask” but later walked back those comments

Boyle Heights residents are reporting dizziness, eye irritation, headaches, nausea, and chest pain, the Boyle Heights Beat reports. “Smoke has seeped into their homes. It’s all over their clothes and couches. Air purifiers are in high demand. Meanwhile, a particle pollution advisory continues to be extended day after day.”

Watch the AQI change throughout the region as winds shift 

Calls for accountability came from City Controller Kenneth Mejia and candidate for city attorney Marissa Roy

Meanwhile the East LA oil spill last month a few miles away was actually 25,000 not 2,400 gallons? What?!?

What better time to end oil extraction in LA City? The Stand LA coalition celebrates the first step towards victory after a similar 2022 ordinance was challenged by oil companies. 

Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky made a great video showing how pervasive oil drilling still is in LA

LAUSD superintendent Alberto Carvalho resigned after being put on paid leave during a federal investigation related to the company AllHere, which made an AI chatbot product LAUSD used. Further reporting by the LA Times revealed potential ethics violations related to gifts and trips paid for by AllHere that Carvalho failed to disclose on his Form 700 

LA Podcast listeners remember a previous Form 700 discussion due to a Vegas trip attended by Councilmember John “City Staffer B” Lee who failed to disclose gifts and was fined by the ethics commission — and is now suing the city and taxpayers are paying for it!

Meanwhile sweeping screen time reforms are passed by the LAUSD board which would dramatically limit how much younger students in particular spend on computers, prioritizing teacher-led instruction, and blocking some platforms like YouTube

This is a huge victory for the Schools Beyond Screens advocates, who also advocated for the dismissal of Carvalho

Longtime administrator Andres Chait is now LAUSD superintendent and promises to bring stability to the district

Bass commented to Conan Nolan that a deal was being made in Sacramento that would stop a threatened attack on all transfer taxes if legislative reforms were made to cap them. As it turns, the anti-transfer tax measure coalition collapsed due to the intransigence of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association

The final deal made by the legislature removes the anti-transfer tax measure from the ballot, so ULA won’t be affected. The entire process ended up reaffirming Prop 13 and became a huge win for Jarvis

There are going to be so many state ballot measures and the ULA measure on the city ballot is still to come

And due to Prop 218, also passed by the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, LA property owners need to vote to raise their streetlight assessments that hadn’t been raised since 1996 — and 80% of the weighted vote said no way, creating yet another huge infrastructural crisis for the city

Support LA Podcast by becoming a paid subscriber at thinkforward.la

This week’s episode was produced by Sophie Bridges

The reporting and analysis you hear in the show is put together by our rotating cast of producers and co-hosts every week. All opinions expressed on the show are solely those of co-hosts and may not represent the views of LA Forward

Alissa Walker writes the newsletter Torched, tracking LA’s megaevent progress. Find her at @awalkerinla on Instagram and @awalkerinla.bsky.social on Bluesky

Godfrey Plata is the deputy director of LA Forward and is @godfreyplata on Instagram

Loraine Lundquist is chair of LA Forward’s board, an astrophysicist, and a sustainability policy expert who earned 49.4% of the vote as a candidate for LA City Council

Scott, Alissa, and Mike look back at the first week of the World Cup as LA hosts its first of many major events. SoFi’s stadium workers won an unprecedented labor contract and a huge fire in Boyle Heights continues to burn. Then: what charter reforms are going to the ballot, and what decisions — like council expansion — are being punted back for more “study.”

Alissa wrote about the opening weekend of the World Cup and how the city is doing one week later. She also has a daily guide to activities happening around LA

So far the World Cup seems to be going pretty well in LA

One watch party at Seoul International Park in Koreatown with a huge turnout became very overcrowded and families had to leave because it felt unsafe

Metro shuttles to the games — only $1.75! — are seeing surging ridership, with CEO Stephanie Wiggins writing regular updates

Unite Here’s SoFi workers voted to authorize a strike a week before the first game, then negotiated for an unprecedented contract — allowing them to strike whenever they feel they are threatened by ICE. As Mike notes, this strategy of using deadline leverage instead of normal bargaining paid off and this now becomes the template for negotiating with LA28

By the way, many local labor contracts are set to expire May 1, 2028

There hasn’t been any ICE spotted around the stadium but ICE raids regionally have not stopped

We also don’t know how much this is costing us. The deal LA made with FIFA has not been made public — here’s an explanation for why — but other host city contracts don’t look great

Meanwhile DEA agents are conducting sweeps in MacArthur Park, which is also hosting watch parties, and Karen Bass says she’s directing LAPD to support them

LA District Attorney Nathan Hochman made a video saying MacArthur Park would be ready for picnics by Labor Day while Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez made her own video saying don’t wait until Labor Day

A huge Boyle Heights cold storage warehouse fire forced local residents to shelter in place and is making air quality terrible as it continues to flare up. Since we recorded, Bass finally held a press conference and declared an emergency. Boyle Heights Beat has the best updates

Listen to Mike summarize the conclusion of the charter reform process on KCRW’s Press Play

LAist’s Frank Stolze explains what’s going to the ballot in November, including noncitizen voting and police reform

Big changes to the way LA builds things are coming with a Capital Infrastructure Program and ability to budget 5 years in advance, which would prevent us from having to give back money to Caltrans because we can’t build bike lanes

A huge win for parks, which will double their charter allocation to 0.06%. Alissa wrote about why that’s good but still nearly not enough money for what our parks actually need

And altering a tiny clause, 104(g), would change how LA does public-private partnerships, which could help save LA’s beleaguered zoo

Council has instructed the City Attorney to draft a ballot measure to amend ULA, most notably an exemption from the transfer tax for multifamily buildings sold within 10 years of construction. The Yaroslavsky/McOsker proposal is more narrowly tailored than what CM Raman pitched in January but broader than the legislative tweaks pushed by CM Jurado’s ad hoc committee. Council will make a final decision on whether to put it on the ballot in the coming weeks.

Mayoral candidate Nithya Raman says we’re not getting more reform because Bass slow-walked the process — and she’s not wrong!  

Veteran journalist Robert Greene offers an incredibly thoughtful explanation of why LA doesn’t have a weak mayor system but doesn’t really have a strong mayor system either  

Support LA Podcast by becoming a paid subscriber at thinkforward.la

This week’s episode was produced by Sophie Bridges

The reporting and analysis you hear in the show is put together by our rotating cast of producers and co-hosts every week. All opinions expressed on the show are solely those of co-hosts and may not represent the views of LA Forward

Scott Frazier is an original co-host of LA Podcast

Alissa Walker writes the newsletter Torched, tracking LA’s megaevent progress. Find her at @awalkerinla on Instagram and @awalkerinla.bsky.social on Bluesky

Mike Bonin is the executive director of the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at Cal State LA, and can be found at @mikebonin on Instagram and @mikebonin.bsky.social on Bluesky

Mike, Godfrey, and guest co-host Jasmyne Cannick discuss the promise and perils of the LA mayoral runoff between Karen Bass and Nithya Raman. Plus, the fake controversy over California’s ballot counting process, and LA’s City Council is poised to ditch years of effort to reform the city’s charter.

How bad will the mayoral runoff be? The LA Times reports on a likely “knife fight” between now and November 3. Jasmyne writes that the “Democratic group chat is about to get messy”

Bass kicked off her general election campaign with a broadside at Raman, indicating she intends to hit Raman on police hiring and homeless encampments.

Raman, meanwhile, held a press conference, outlining her vision and appealing to the frustrations of supporters of Spencer Pratt

Pratt, who promised to leave LA if he lost the mayor’s race, has apparently changed his mind. Friday afternoon he dropped a 3-minute video attacking Bass and Raman in his typical over-the-top fashion, and claiming he has a private recording of one of them making remarks that will force them to resign in disgrace

Mike, on his most recent episode of What’s Next, Los Angeles, talked about the way the candidates are framing the race, and what that could mean for their governing coalitions and their agenda in office 

The data analysts have been crunching numbers and creating all sorts of reports on how subsections of the electorate broke in the June primary. Raman carried renters, according to Paul Mitchell of Political Data Inc. Bass dominated in Latino neighborhoods, according to the Los Angeles Times. The New York Times published an updated map of the city, showing which candidates prevailed in which neighborhoods

If you want to go deep on the data, Mitchell has launched a fascinating experimental website that combines LA County 2026 primary election results with voter-file data to provide detailed analysis of nearly every race, including precinct maps, demographic correlations, ecological inference modeling, and candidate-to-candidate voting pattern comparisons. Mitchell also offers a quick look at which mayoral and gubernatorial candidates came in first and second in each LA City Council district

Nationally, the pace of the vote count in California has spawned a bevy of conspiracies, voiced by Donald Trump and other administration figures — although disputed by GOP gubernatorial finalist Steve Hilton. The Atlantic has a good deep dive on the substance of the issue

The conservative attacks have spawned sadly predictable hand-wringing in places like the New York Times editorial board. Yousef Baig, the CalMatters opinion editor, responded to the editorial on Bluesky: “Red states are aggressively disenfranchising Black and brown voters for the third consecutive century, but sure let’s call for federal reforms because California is too slow”

This is the week the LA City Council must decide which charter reform proposals to put before the voters in November. At the moment, the body seems poised to defer most items, saying recommendations from the Charter Reform Commission need more study. Liz Chou in her daily Squawk Box newsletter, gets into it here and here

Happy LGBTQ+ Pride! The two documentaries Mike mentions in this week’s show are The Life & Times of Harvey Milk (1984) and Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin (2003)

LA Forward is hosting an election debrief on Zoom 7 p.m. Tuesday, with special guests Marissa Roy and Estuardo Mazariegos. RSVP here

If you plan on watching or celebrating the World Cup events in Los Angeles, the best resource available is Alissa’s guide to the World Cup, who also wrote about how this is LA’s chance to live out in public

This week’s episode was produced by Sophie Bridges

The reporting and analysis you hear in the show is put together by our rotating cast of producers and co-hosts every week. All opinions expressed on the show are solely those of co-hosts and may not represent the views of LA Forward

Mike Bonin is the executive director of the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at CalState LA, and can be found at Substack, or @mikebonin on IG, and @mikebonin.bsky.social on Bluesky

Godfrey Plata is the deputy director of LA Forward and is @godfreyplata on Instagram

Jasmyne Cannick is a political consultant and journalist.  You can find her on  on Substack at or Instagram at @hellojasmyne

Alissa, Mike, and guest co-host Marco Santana recap the election results from a wild primary season. Who are the winners and losers? How did progressive incumbents and challengers fare? And the mayoral race numbers seem to show that Angelenos will never have to think about Spencer Pratt again.

After we recorded, Nithya Raman surged ahead of Spencer Pratt and appears set to hold her #2 spot to make the runoff with LA Mayor Karen Bass. Decision Desk has already called the race

Mike rejects the framing that mainstream Democrats “survived” the election

When MAGA loses they say everyone else is “cheating,” but that’s not the case. California makes it very easy to vote and counts every ballot — and that takes time

You can view LA County’s election results, new ballot drops are added every day from 4 to 5 p.m., but the absolute best way to track what’s happening in the mayoral race is to use Scott’s spreadsheet

The biggest winner of this election cycle was Kenneth Mejia, dancing on election night “feeling like 10 million bucks,” a reference to his opponent’s mom spending $10 million — 10! MILLION! — dollars in a failed attempt to defeat him

Hydee Feldstein Soto is also out, the first incumbent LA city attorney to lose in 100 years. Marissa Roy and John McKinney will advance

The New York Times election tracker is the best place to track state elections with more coverage at CalMatters

In the governor race, Xavier Becerra moved to first and will advance to the runoff. Tom Steyer has a very small and dwindling chance of bumping Republican Steve Hilton out of the second spot For insurance commissioner, progressive Jane Kim has a decisive lead over Ben Allen who is still wrestling for a runoff spot with Republican Stacy Korsgaden

U.S. Rep. Jimmy Gomez’s re-election campaign received an election day bombshell as the House ethics committee opened an investigation into sexual misconduct allegations. He’s headed to the runoff with Justice Democrat Angela Gonzales-Torres

Pratt told CNN’s Elex Michaelson he would win outright with 50 percent (HAHAHA)

And MS Now’s Jacob Soboroff offered a very clear-eyed assessment of Pratt’s poisonous populism and connection to Trump

Alissa is honestly very mad that Pratt was boosted so much by elected officials who took him and his conspiracies so seriously

Bass gave a triumphant speech on election night where she rallied supporters

Raman was moved to tears when talking about building a city for her kids (which right-wingers claimed was a teary concession speech)

Monica Rodriguez gave an absolutely brutal interview where she called Raman’s run “disgusting” (remember we told you Rodriguez was toying with a mayoral run)

Monterey Park voted overwhelmingly to ban data centers, the first U.S. city to pass an outright ban

Last month, Rachel came in second in the D Line Dash, the subway/car/bike race from Beverly Hills to Pershing Square. Here’s Rachel’s journey as the driver. The transit rider came in first, of course, and the cyclist came in a very close third

Support LA Podcast by becoming a paid subscriber at thinkforward.la

This week’s episode was produced by Charlotte Landes

The reporting and analysis you hear in the show is put together by our rotating cast of producers and co-hosts every week. All opinions expressed on the show are solely those of co-hosts and may not represent the views of LA Forward

Alissa Walker writes the newsletter Torched, tracking LA’s megaevent progress. Find her at @awalkerinla on Instagram and @awalkerinla.bsky.social on Bluesky

Mike Bonin is the executive director of the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at CalState LA, and can be found at @mikebonin on Instagram and @mikebonin.bsky.social on Bluesky

Marco Santana brings over a decade of leadership to the LA homelessness services sector and is a former candidate and active leader within local Democratic party politics. He’s at @Marco4LA on Instagram

Mike, David, and Liz weigh the progressive divide in the last days of the mayor’s race, the latest polls which show a Karen Bass-Nithya Raman-Spencer Pratt dead heat, and the AI-assisted rise of Pratt. Plus, some reforms are on the way for Measure ULA and voters are being asked to tax themselves with Measure ER to stop catastrophic cuts to the County's healthcare system.

In the final days of the mayoral primary, a new LA Times poll shows a tight three-way race between Mayor Karen Bass, Councilmember Nithya Raman, and Spencer Pratt. Meanwhile, the CA Post poll shows Pratt in the lead

Many lefty voters are wrestling up to the last minute with a decision over voting for Raman or Haung. Huang has been sharply critical of Raman and publicly rebuffed overtures from the Raman camp

Meanwhile, Liz’s reporting shows that Huang’s claims to have qualified for public matching funds were not accurate, leading some voters to feel they were misled about her viability

Just days ago, Knock LA revised its lefty voter guide, going from a Huang-only rec to a dual rec for Raman and Huang

Mike wrote about how Pratt’s mastery of public storytelling is resonating beyond Republicans.

Pratt’s candidacy has also drawn sharp commentary from Jimmy Kimmel, and has some wondering if TMZ is now becoming a force in political journalism

The weekend featured a bevy of stories analyzing the race. The LA Times looks at the fraying of the establishment Democratic coalition Tom Bradley forged. The Guardian meanwhile, framed the state’s races as the “most turbulent election in years”

CalMatters reports that big money is pouring into the governor’s race. One of the biggest issues recently has been Chevron’s spending on behalf of frontrunner Xavier Becerra

After months of Democrats worrying they might get shut out of the gubernatorial runoff, there is a slim chance it could be a Democrat vs Democrat race after all

On Friday, an ad hoc council committee chaired by CM Jurado recommended that the City directly enact legislative reforms to Measure ULA and refrain from placing a major overhaul on the November ballot. The rec drew cheers from ULA supporters and jeers from groups who want sweeping changes to ULA

This comes as California voters will be asked this fall to repeal ULA entirely, as part of a Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association prop that would sharply curtail the ability of cities to raise revenue and roll back local taxes across the state. 

Voters will also have a chance to thwart the Jarvis measure thanks to ACA 13, which would require any ballot measure that raises the voter threshold to also meet that threshold itself. So the Jarvis measure would need to garner two-thirds of the vote statewide in order to impose a new two-thirds vote requirement for local tax increases

For months, the ULA debate has been shaped by the April 2025 Ward-Phillips report, “Taxing Tomorrow,” which warned that ULA was suppressing production of multifamily housing. ULA supporters say that report has been debunked by a re-analysis of the exact data underlying the April 2025 report, demonstrating that Ward’s quantitative analysis merely showed a decrease in the average size of LA City multifamily housing projects, not a decrease in total units. RAND’s Jason Ward hit back with a new study last week

A really important issue on the ballot for LA County voters is whether to temporarily increase the sales tax to raise money for healthcare programs, backfilling federal cuts. LAist has the most thorough explainer, covering how the measure is structured, the political dynamics, and what the revenue would fund

Are you doing some last-minute cramming to decide how to vote? LA Forward has got you covered. At 6 p.m. Monday, June 1, Election Eve, there’s an cram session on zoom. (BYOB: bring your own ballot.) And of course you can check out the LA Forward’s Voter Guide, which covers nearly everything on the ballot

This week’s episode was produced by Kristen Torres

The reporting and analysis you hear in the show is put together by our rotating cast of producers and co-hosts every week. All opinions expressed on the show are solely those of co-hosts and may not represent the views of LA Forward

Mike Bonin is the executive director of the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at CalState LA, and can be found at @mikebonin on IG and @mikebonin.bsky.social on Bluesky

David Levitus is the founder and executive director of LA Forward. He’s doing his best to stay off social media

Liz Chou reports, writes and edits The LA Reporter, which now has a weekday email newsletter called the Squawk Box. You can follow her on  X, Bluesky, or IG

Alissa, Godfrey, and guest co-host Loraine Lundquist track local wildfires, an oil spill, and a leaking tank of methyl methacrylate in Garden Grove. LA Mayor Karen Bass fires her heat officer and other climate champions flee the administration. Then: LA’s Capital Infrastructure Program has finally been launched! How it would transform the city budget process, which just concluded.

LA Podcast is seeking a part-time Digital Producer! Work with our small but mighty team on show notes, social media, and other digital assets for our weekly local news roundup. Go here for the full description and interest form

Several fires continue to burn in Southern California, wreaking havoc on air quality

The Sandy Fire may have been caused by a tractor doing brush clearance; the Santa Rosa Island Fire was started when a shipwrecked sailor set off an emergency flare

Although the Sandy Fire is close to the Santa Susana Nation Laboratory, the site does not pose a threat. In fact, the Woolsey Fire, which literally started on the campus, burned about 80 percent of the site already, and out of 360 samples taken three weeks after the fire, only 3% showed high activities of radioactive isotopes

Meanwhile, about 40,000 people were evacuated in Garden Grove due to a leak in a 7,000-gallon tank of methyl methacrylate, the chemical used to make plexiglass, that could potentially explode at the GKN Aerospace facility. The evacuation zone is so large because they don’t know which way the wind will blow the gas

And a crude oil pipeline was severed in East LA by utility crews, spewing 2,500 gallons of oil into the LA River

Sammy Roth broke the news that LA Mayor Karen Bass fired her heat officer, Marta Segura. This — and the departure of other environmental leaders — is calling this administration’s climate commitment into question, as the mayor releases an unambitious climate plan

LA’s rankings in the Trust for Public Land’s annual ParkScore report has dropped to 93 out of 100, much to Alissa’s dismay

Different ballots are also due June 2 — for property owners to raise the streetlight assessments that haven’t been increased since the 1990s

Both these problems would be addressed if LA had a Capital Infrastructure Program (CIP) allowing the city to budget for improvements, service, and maintenance five years at a time, instead of just one — and the CIP was finally released!

Alissa writes about the CIP, why it’s just focused on Olympics related projects for now, and how these basic changes could help restore infrastructural trust in the city

There are ten proposed recommendations for the CIP, many of which would need to be made through charter reform. The CIP would also help resolve a lot of the issues with LA’s budget, which was just approved this week

One of those reforms is naming a public works director, Investing in Place’s Jessica Meaney tells Steve Lopez at the Los Angeles Times:  “If the city gets this right, she said, implementation of the infrastructure plan “could finally show Angelenos the true scale of deferred maintenance, make trade-offs visible, and create a road map for better sidewalks, streets, parks, and accessibility’”

The ballot measure to repeal the business tax was also abandoned after the council approved a shameful deal to delay the Olympic wage for up to 18 months, which Bass said at a Politico event Wednesday she personally stepped in to help negotiate

If you’re listening to this Monday, join LA Forward Institute in Grand Park from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. for food, music, and cheering on the Amazing Vote Center Race. Tuesday there’s a ballot party in Highland Park and Thursday there’s a ballot party in the West Valley (hosted by Loraine!). And here’s LA Forward’s voter guide

Subscribe to Mike’s podcast What’s Next, Los Angeles to hear interviews with candidates all over LA County

Support LA Podcast by becoming a paid subscriber at thinkforward.la

This week’s episode was produced by Sophie Bridges

The reporting and analysis you hear in the show is put together by our rotating cast of producers and co-hosts every week. All opinions expressed on the show are solely those of co-hosts and may not represent the views of LA Forward

Alissa Walker writes the newsletter Torched, tracking LA’s megaevent progress. Find her at @awalkerinla on Instagram and @awalkerinla.bsky.social on Bluesky

Godfrey Plata is the deputy director of LA Forward and is @godfreyplata on Instagram

Loraine Lundquist is chair of LA Forward’s board, an astrophysicist, and a sustainability policy expert who earned 49.4% of the vote as a candidate for LA City Council

Scott, Alissa, and Mike recount yet another attempt by LA’s City Council to undermine the Olympic Wage and why a corresponding ballot measure to repeal the city’s business tax is like playing Russian Roulette. Then, new LA mayoral race polls show Nithya Raman and Spencer Pratt in a tight race for second place, and what Mike would have asked in the final, now-cancelled debate. And: was the former mayor of Arcadia a spy for the People’s Republic of China?

LA Podcast is seeking a part-time Digital Producer to work with our small but mighty team on show notes, social media, and other digital assets for our weekly local news roundup podcast.  We’re looking for someone with about 5 hours a week to spare, and we estimate that most of the work will fall on Fridays, but some weekend availability is key. Go here for the full description and interest form

Los Angeles Times: “In a 9-6 vote, the council gave initial approval of an ordinance to postpone implementation of the $30 hourly minimum until 2030, instead of 2028. But L.A. City Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson, who introduced the motion, called it “a placeholder” that allows negotiations among city officials, hotel and airport businesses and labor unions to continue in the coming days. Another vote would be needed to formally delay implementation”

LAist: " I would expect my councilmember to stand up for working Angelenos, not help giant companies take money out of our pockets," said Jordan Long, a bartender at LAX who said he lives in Harris-Dawson's district. " Do not be fooled by corporate threats against the city budget”

The proposal was paired on the agenda with a ballot measure to repeal the city’s Business Gross Receipts Tax, which workers are calling a “shakedown” from the hotel and airline industry — as of now, this would go to the November ballot

The city would see a “sudden, permanent loss of $860 million on average in annual revenue starting in 2027-28 would coincide exactly with the final, most intensive preparation phase for the 2028 Games,” according to this fiscal report from the City Administrative Officer Matt Szabo

What Mike would have asked in the mayoral debate that was canceled after Bass and Raman backed out

New Emerson College polling in the mayoral race: “30% support incumbent Mayor Karen Bass, 22% support television personality Spencer Pratt, 19% support City Councilmember Nithya Raman, 7% support tech entrepreneur Adam Miller, and 4% support Rae Huang”

LA Forward’s mayoral entry for its voter guide was revised after the newest polls to recommend Raman

Candidates are paying influencers to post content for them, including gubernatorial candidate Tom Steyer

Pratt has reportedly inked a reality show if he wins. Are we already living in a reality show?

Arcadia residents wonder if former mayor Elieen Wang was a foreign agent for the People’s Republic of China

LA Times: “The scandal had mostly quieted — until Monday, on the eve of President Trump’s planned trip to Beijing, when a plea deal was unsealed revealing Wang’s own murky role as an agent for China”

Here’s the unsealed plea deal from the U.S. Attorney’s Office

The situation was pretty clear back in December 2024 when Mike Sun, her former fiance who seemed to be orchestrating this deal, was also indicted. He was sentenced in February

Have you ever wanted to compete in a big scavenger hunt, kind of like the Amazing Race, but with a get out the vote twist? Register by Wednesday, May 22 to enter a team of 3 to 5 people in LA Forward Institute’s Amazing Vote Center Race for a chance to win a $500 Hollywood Bowl package.

This week’s episode was produced by Charlotte Landis

The reporting and analysis you hear in the show is put together by our rotating cast of producers and co-hosts every week. All opinions expressed on the show are solely those of co-hosts and may not represent the views of LA Forward

Scott Frazier is an original co-host of LA Podcast

Alissa Walker writes the newsletter Torched, tracking LA’s megaevent progress. Find her at @awalkerinla on Instagram and @awalkerinla.bsky.social on Bluesky

Mike Bonin is the executive director of the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at CalState LA, and can be found at @mikebonin on Instagram and @mikebonin.bsky.social on Bluesky

Metro’s D line extension is finally open! Alissa, Mike, Godfrey, and David discuss the many ways a longer Wilshire subway can be a game-changer for LA. Then: more dark and dirty money is flooding into local races as ballots hit mailboxes. Plus, a recap of recent mayoral debates — and why you won’t see Mayor Karen Bass on the debate stage anymore.

“Why it took 65 years for LA to build its most important rail line”

The Guardian: “Riding the D in Los Angeles: city famous for traffic hopes new subway stations will be a ‘game changer’”

Even the New Yorker wrote a story about LA’s new subway

Read Alissa’s story about the opening of the D line extension and also read her story about the release of LA’s Capital Infrastructure Program, another highlight from the week (more on that soon)

Unrig LA highlights a new dark money network named American Middle Ground that’s sending out mailers in CD 1 and CD 11

LA Times: “Neighbors First has sent mail pieces boosting more moderate City Council candidates and criticizing those backed by the Democratic Socialists of America, which pursues leftist policies. Because it is a 501(c)(4) charitable organization, Neighbors First doesn’t have to say who paid for those messages”

Listen to our previous episode where we discussed dark money and read Mike’s piece that lays out the strategies from these groups

Incumbent City Attorney Hydee Feldstein-Soto is quickly losing support

Airbnb just gave $1.5 million to an IE backing John McKinney for LA City Attorney and the Los Angeles Police Protective League gave $20,000 to the same IE a couple days ago, sponsored by Central City Association

Controller candidate Zach Sokoloff’s mother, who we talked about previously, has now put $4 million in an IE to defeat his opponent Kenneth Mejia

Watch the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Association debate, which was really just Bass and Raman talking policy

The vibes were very different at the NBC LA debate featuring Bass, Raman, and Spencer Pratt

“In fairness to Raman, the moderators’ uneven application of the rules gave the impression everyone was against her,” writes Orange County Register reporter Rafael Perez in his analysis “moderators flail as Pratt bullies and Bass deflects”

The LA Times’ Gustavo Arellano said both Pratt and Bass won the debate

After signing an agreement with the Pat Brown Institute, Bass is pulling out of this week’s debate organized by the Pat Brown Institute, the League of Women Voters, and Fox 11, claiming she has to go to Sacramento

Did the California Post write the best story about Bass refusing further debates?

Voter guides discussed included Thrive (don’t use this one), DSA LA, Knock LA, and of course, the one just out from LA Forward

Subscribe to Mike’s podcast What’s Next, Los Angeles to hear even more interviews with candidates all over LA County

This week’s episode was produced by Sophie Bridges

The reporting and analysis you hear in the show is put together by our rotating cast of producers and co-hosts every week. All opinions expressed on the show are solely those of co-hosts and may not represent the views of LA Forward

Alissa Walker writes the newsletter Torched, tracking LA’s megaevent progress. Find her at @awalkerinla on Instagram and @awalkerinla.bsky.social on Bluesky

Mike Bonin is the Executive Director of the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at CalState LA, and can be found at @mikebonin on Instagram and @mikebonin.bsky.social on Bluesky

Godfrey Plata is the Deputy Director of LA Forward and is @godfreyplata on Instagram

David Levitus is the Executive Director of LA Forward and is trying hard to stay off social media

Alissa, Rachel, and Sophie talk about yet another new ICE detention center that’s opened in a former private prison in the Central Valley. How a new citywide adaptive reuse ordinance could convert vacant buildings into housing. Then, UCLA’s Los Angeles County Quality of Life Index dips to an all-time low. How bad are the vibes?

CalMatters: “ICE quietly opens another detention center in a former California prison”

The opening is part of a larger push by the regime and ICE to acquire more than 20 warehouses to be converted to concentration camps, according to a new ACLU report, which also notes that at least 17 people have died in ICE custody this year

In March, Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez honored Alberto Gutierrez Reyes, “a Westlake resident, husband, and father,” who died in ICE custody after being denied medical care at a facility in Adelanto

Rachel would like to remind everyone that California’s new concentration camp is about a three-hour, 200-mile drive from Manzanar, one of ten camps that were used to incarcerate our Japanese-American neighbors not even 100 years ago

LA Times: “Thousands of apartments set to take over empty office buildings with new L.A. ordinance”

“Changes to the original 1999 ordinance — which was created to incentivize the conversion of underutilized buildings into multifamily housing — include a substantial expansion of eligibility both in a building’s age and location as well as the removal of minimum unit size requirements for these projects,” reports the Los Angeles Business Journal

Mayor Karen Bass visited downtown’s World Trade Center building, which is set to be converted into 500 housing units

Bass also instituted Executive Directive 19 which streamlines some development

On AirTalk this week, Bass told Larry Mantle: “If you want me to describe the culture of the city, I would describe it as 'slow' and 'no'"

“Misery and malaise cloud LA Why it feels so hopeless this time,” is the title of Shelby Grad’s piece at the LA Times

The vibes were also noted in a recent LA Material newsletter quoting No Bad Days responding to Blackbird Spyplane

The Los Angeles County Quality of Life Index is measured every year by the UCLA Luskin School of Public Policy, and this year, the index was the lowest ever measured

Subscribe to Mike’s podcast What’s Next, Los Angeles to hear interviews with candidates all over LA County

Support LA Podcast by becoming a paid subscriber at thinkforward.la

This week’s episode was produced by Sophie Bridges

The reporting and analysis you hear in the show is put together by our rotating cast of producers and co-hosts every week. All opinions expressed on the show are solely those of co-hosts and may not represent the views of LA Forward

Alissa Walker writes the newsletter Torched, tracking LA’s megaevent progress. Find her at @awalkerinla on Instagram and @awalkerinla.bsky.social on Bluesky

Rachel Reyes is an LA native and community organizer. Follow her advocacy and antics at @rchrys on Instagram

Sophie Bridges is a writer and audio producer , who produces LA Podcast. Her work has appeared on This American Life, Radiolab, and Reveal

Alissa joins Mike and Godfrey to decipher LA’s new budget, Karen Bass’s second (or third?) State of the City, and which departments are getting more money this year. Then, how a plan to help Airbnb snuck into the budget, and fundraising updates for candidates as ballots for the June 2 election arrive later this week.

Here are all LA’s budget documents and the press conference where Mayor Karen Bass presented her budget to the people, not to be confused with her 7-minute State of the City shared only on video

We highly recommend using Controller Kenneth Mejia’s awesome budget app to understand it all. And he also has a new campaign billboard highlighting the city’s problem with liabilities (guess which department’s mistakes are costing you the most!)

A new climate budget was included, as part of the mayor’s new climate action plan, released earlier this month 

“A Passage Buried in L.A.’s Budget Hints at an Unusual Airbnb Gambit,” writes LA Material’s Julia Wick

And Aaron Schrank also reports at LAist: “Airbnb claims proposal included in mayor’s budget will bring tax revenue to LA ahead of Olympics”

Remember the “Save Our Services” campaign that Airbnb was trying to roll out last year? Yep, now it’s basically part of the mayor’s budget recommendations

“Los Angeles doesn’t need new loopholes for the STR industry. It needs enforcement of the laws already on the books,” says Better Neighbors LA, which estimates that enforcing just 5% of illegal short-term rentals would add add $42 million to this year’s budget

Featured in the LA Times On The Record newsletter, City Attorney’s Hydee Feldstein-Soto’s presence at the anti-LGBT “HopeFest” festival was originally reported by LA Ten Four and Left Coast Right Watch. Feldstein-Soto has yet to denounce the event

LAist: “$19M and counting in LA races. Campaigns for LA mayor and city attorney lead the fundraising”

Here’s the dashboard for all the campaign finance information for LA City candidates

If you’re listening on Monday, LA Forward’s Charter Reform Advocacy Launch is happening Monday night, 4/27, at 7 p.m. on Zoom

Subscribe to Mike’s podcast What’s Next, Los Angeles to hear interviews with candidates all over LA County

Support LA Podcast by becoming a paid subscriber at thinkforward.la.

This week’s episode was produced by Sophie Bridges

The reporting and analysis you hear in the show is put together by our rotating cast of producers and co-hosts every week. All opinions expressed on the show are solely those of co-hosts and may not represent the views of LA Forward

Alissa Walker writes the newsletter Torched, tracking LA’s megaevent progress. Find her at @awalkerinla on Instagram and @awalkerinla.bsky.social on Bluesky

Mike Bonin is the executive director of the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at CalState LA, and can be found at @mikebonin on Instagram and @mikebonin.bsky.social on Bluesky

Godfrey Plata is the deputy director of LA Forward and is @godfreyplata on Instagram

Alissa, Mike, and Rachel on the 2 a.m. union deal that prevented an LAUSD strike. A major hack of sensitive LAPD information causes City Attorney Hydee Feldstein-Soto to lose her police endorsement. Mad about pricey LA28 tickets? So are LA’s councilmembers. Then: how a whisper network of accusers ousted Eric Swalwell from the governor’s race — and Congress.

LAist: “A late-night labor deal averts LAUSD strike and keeps schools open. Here are the details”

“The mayor’s role was a mixture of shuttle diplomacy, jumping from room to room, and convening senior leaders together into the wee hours”: LA Material reports on how Mayor Karen Bass helped close the deal during negotiations

Some LAUSD board members apologized to parents for waiting so long to share information about the school day

How will the district pay for it? Especially with declining enrollment? LAUSD doesn’t actually know

A trove of “337,000 files, including some of the LAPD’s most closely guarded records” were leaked in a major data hack of a third-party file system used to store documents regarding LAPD litigation

Reporter Liz Chou was the first to get a statement about the hack from the city attorney’s office, which initially tried to downplay the magnitude

The Los Angeles Police Protective League then rescinded its endorsement of City Attorney Hydee Feldstein-Soto 

Councilmember Ysabel Jurado introduced a motion to get more answers about the hack and what city systems were affected

Alissa covered a similar Metro hack and how it impacted riders last month

Ten photos of City Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson listening to the City Clerk read a list of lawsuit settlement payouts into the record for council approval, totaling $5,735,650.72

LA28 has an estimated $4 billion in contracts that it’s trying to award to local businesses. But what “local” means is riling up councilmembers, who want the definition to include more city of LA businesses

Are expensive LA28 tickets the only way the city can break even? Good analysis from California state budget advisor Jason Sisney

LA28’s human rights strategy is finally public but anti-trafficking advocates say it just pays “lip service” to prevention

Alissa has more details about all the recent LA28 encounters with city officials in her Torched news roundup

San Francisco Chronicle: “Ex-staffer says Eric Swalwell, candidate for California governor, sexually assaulted her

Politico: “The whisper network that caught up to Eric Swalwell”

Mike’s interviews at What’s Next, Los Angeles include gubernatorial candidate Tom Steyer, Raymond Meza, chair of the LA City Charter Reform Commission, and LA mayoral candidates Nithya Raman, Rae Huang, and Adam Miller

Alissa and Rachel will be appearing at Torched LA Live at frank.radio on Thursday night — all details here, plus a week’s worth of events celebrating Torched’s 2nd birthday, including a screening of the documentary Changing Lanes on April 20 in Santa Monica Mayor Caroline Torosis

LA Forward’s Spring Into Action fundraiser is April 25, honoring Dr. Loraine Lundquist, EAA Union, and Cofax

This week’s episode was produced by Sophie Bridges

The reporting and analysis you hear in the show is put together by our rotating cast of producers and co-hosts every week. All opinions expressed on the show are solely those of co-hosts and may not represent the views of LA Forward

Alissa Walker writes the newsletter Torched, tracking LA’s megaevent progress. Find her at @awalkerinla on Instagram and @awalkerinla.bsky.social on Bluesky

Mike Bonin is the executive director of the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at CalState LA, and can be found at @mikebonin on Instagram and @mikebonin.bsky.social on Bluesky

Rachel Reyes is an LA native and community organizer. Follow her advocacy and antics at @rchrys on Instagram

Mike, Rachel, and Laura reveal the troubling story of the Neighbors First dark money network that’s mucking up LA City Council elections, including previously unreported details. Then: the latest in the ongoing Measure ULA saga, and a potential new progressive revenue stream for housing and basic services in the city of Long Beach

Details about the dark money network in Los Angeles were first shared by Rob Quan, including images of the mailers and billboards 

Mike followed up and dives much deeper for a piece in Think Forward

CalMatters wrote about the emergence of “Govern for California” as a political force back in 2022

Nielsen Werkasamer, the law firm at the hub of the dark money network, played a key role in ousting progressive officials in San Francisco like DA Chesa Boudin, and flipping control of SF City Hall

The law firm also played a key role in passage and defense of Proposition 22, the 2020 ballot measure that stripped workers rights for Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash drivers

The local arms of the dark money network are Vibrant LA and Neighbors First, which have websites that tell you zilch about who they are

In the 2024 Los Angeles elections, a local network called Thrive LA emerged to try to knock out progressive candidates. (They’re still around.) A piece in The Nation co-authored by Mike covered the story in depth

LA’s Housing Department is proposing an allocation of $360 million in Measure ULA money to fund 80 projects, construction of 1,528 new units and repairs to more than 2,500 affordable units

Anti-tax groups like the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association and the California Business Roundtable submitted 1.3 million signatures for ballot measure that would require two-thirds vote for local special taxes, cap transfer taxes at 0.11%, and repeal all the transfer taxes that exceed that cap

LA’s City Council formed a new Ad Hoc Committee to consider reforms to Measure ULA, and is studying potential impacts of changes. Critics of ULA say the potential changes do not go far enough

In Long Beach, a coalition of renter advocates and firefighters are pushing a proposal to tax wealthy homeowners to pay for road repairs, new housing, and new fire stations. Advocates call it the ‘fair share’ tax proposal

Listen to this week’s episodes of What’s Next, Los Angeles, featuring interviews with gubernatorial candidate Tom Steyer, and Raymond Meza, chair of the LA City Charter Reform Commission. And don’t miss recent interviews with LA mayoral candidates Nithya Raman, Rae Huang, and Adam Miller (Apple Podcasts, Spotify)

This week’s episode was produced by Sophie Bridges.

The reporting and analysis you hear in the show is put together by our rotating cast of producers and co-hosts every week. All opinions expressed on the show are solely those of co-hosts and may not represent the views of LA Forward

Mike Bonin is the executive director of the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at CalState LA, and can be found at @mikebonin on Instagram and @mikebonin.bsky.social on Bluesky

Rachel Reyes is an LA native and community organizer. Follow her advocacy and antics at @rchrys on Instagram

Laura Raymond works on housing campaigns and strategic initiatives in Los Angeles at ljraymondstrategies.com

Scott, Mike, and Godfrey go long on Metro’s greenlighting of a major regional transit expansion – the northern extension of the K Line – and the politics that almost derailed the action. Plus, what recent polls say about LA Mayor Karen Bass’s reelection chances, and political attacks that backfired in the race for City Controller and Council District 9.

Metro’s approval of the K Line northern extension promises to fill a missing link in the region’s network, connecting Hollywood Bowl, West Hollywood, Cedars-Sinai, and the Grove, different rail lines, as well as major bus lines, by 2040

The project was approved after a dramatic week of negotiations, protests, and public advocacy, with transit advocates warning Bass was trying to delay or kill the project. Bass strongly objected to the characterization but her public statements only exacerbated the fears

Bass tried to calm the residents of Lafayette Square, a historically Black neighborhood worried about the impacts of tunneling, comparing the K Line to the history of nearby Sugar Hill, an affluent Black neighborhood that was devastated by the construction of the 10 Freeway

Although Bass and Supervisor Lindsey Horvath – one of the project’s biggest champions –  reached a kumbaya moment and jointly claimed credit for progress on the project, it felt like yet another chapter in an ongoing feud between the two public officials

LA Material: “Why is everyone so mad about Metro’s K Line extension vote?” 

New polls in the mayor’s race show Bass struggling in her bid to win a second term. A poll from LMU’s Center for the Study of Los Angeles put Nithya Raman in first place by nearly two-to-one, with the mayor only .4% ahead of community organizer Rae Huang. The poll’s methodology was controversial, and many decried it as an outlier

UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs released its own poll, showing Bass with 25%, ahead of Spencer Pratt with 11%, Raman with 9% and Huang and Adam Miller with 3% each. The Luskin poll showed 40% undecided

Jim Newton on the potential Bass-Pratt runoff at CalMatters: “Top-two race in Los Angeles makes strange political bedfellows”

When Controller Kenneth Mejia’s campaign qualified for and received public matching funds, challenger Zack Sokoloff said he was exploiting a loophole in the program’s rules and tried to block Mejia’s access to the funds. Liz Chou of LA Reporter talked to Zokoloff’s campaign consultant

The LA Times published a story about CD 9 candidate Esturado Mazariegos’s 2009 arrest on a gun charge – a story opponent Jose Ugarte had been hinting about on What’s Next, Los Angeles last fall – but Mazariegos shared an emotional story about how the arrest was a turning point in his life and prompted him to turn to activism and public service

As election season heats up, be sure to listen to subscribe to Mike’s podcast What’s Next, Los Angeles to hear interviews with candidates all over LA County

Support What’s Next, Los Angeles and LA Podcast by becoming a paid subscriber at thinkforward.la. We’re already planning our next paid subscribers-only event! 

This week’s episode was produced by Kristen Torres

The reporting and analysis you hear in the show is put together by our rotating cast of producers and co-hosts every week. All opinions expressed on the show are solely those of co-hosts and may not represent the views of LA Forward

Scott Frazier is an original co-host of LA Podcast 

Mike Bonin is the Executive Director of the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at CalState LA, and can be found at @mikebonin on Instagram or @mikebonin.bsky.social

Godfrey Plata is the Deputy Director of LA Forward and can be found at @godfreyplata on Instagram

Alissa, Mike, and Sammy discuss the resignation of Janisse Quiñones as head of LADWP and what this will mean for LA’s clean energy goals. Then, takeaways from the first LA mayoral debate and how climate is factoring into the governor’s race. And a new baseball season means more complaints about how the Dodgers can be doing more for the community.

LADWP CEO Janisse Quiñones stepped down earlier this month to return to Puerto Rico and work on modernizing the grid

Sammy’s excellent story about Quiñones leaving describes the role as “one of the most important roles in global climate policy” — and she helped push forward that vision

LA Mayor Karen Bass named David Hanson as interim director. He’s worked at DWP two decades, starting as an electrical mechanic

The LADWP board has almost completely turned over under Bass, and, in addition, four out of five of her Fire Commissioners have also stepped down

If you want to catch up on LA’s clean energy goals and all the various colors of hydrogen, listen to the last episode where Sammy joined us

The LA Local: “Bass orders 60,000 streetlights to get solar upgrade in 2-year plan”

Meanwhile, LA’s City Council advanced a plan to raise streetlight assessments, with ballots going out April 17

And Councilmembers Katy Yaroslavsky and Eunisses Hernandez announced their own “solar surge”

A general reminder to read India Mandelkern’s excellent book: Electric Moons: A Social History of Street Lighting in Los Angeles

Watch the first LA mayoral debate sponsored by Streets for All and Housing Action Coalition. It was unusually friendly turf for a candidate — one of the moderators used to work for Nithya and the other helped recruit Nithya to rum for mayor

So far, only Rae Huang has a climate platform

Nithya Raman is talking about parks as a neighborhood-cooling solution — and look at those Griffith Park bike lanes!

Raman was also removed from the AQMD board by Bass just before she declared for mayor, and just after this bizarre vote where an AI-powered campaign bot sent 20,000 emails and helped defeat a motion to phase out gas-powered appliances (Raman voted yes, but it failed)

Watch Sammy’s climate forum with governor candidates and read his take on the governor’s race

Politico: “Tom Steyer’s climate pivot signals new playbook for Dems”

LA Material: “Why USC Really Spiked the Gubernatorial Debate”

Alissa’s quoted in Bill Shaikin’s LA Times story on walking to Dodger Stadium

As election season heats up, be sure to listen to subscribe to Mike’s podcast What’s Next, Los Angeles to hear interviews with candidates all over LA County

And support What’s Next, Los Angeles and LA Podcast by becoming a paid subscriber at thinkforward.la. We’re already planning our next paid subscribers-only event 

This week’s episode was produced by Sophie Bridges

Alissa Walker writes the newsletter Torched

Mike Bonin is the executive director of the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at CalState LA

Sammy Roth writes the newsletter Climate-Colored Goggles

The reporting and analysis you hear in the show is put together by our rotating cast of producers and co-hosts every week. All opinions expressed on the show are solely those of co-hosts and may not represent the views of LA Forward

Alissa, Rachel, and Sophie discuss the bombshell sexual abuse accusations against the late labor leader Cesar Chavez, including by Chavez’s fellow labor leader Dolores Huerta and two women who were abused as children. A reckoning is underway to erase Chavez’s likeness from public space and rename the March 31 holiday honoring Chavez to Farmworkers Day. Then: LAUSD teachers and staff are set to strike April 14.

If you or someone you know is dealing with sexual abuse, please reach out to RAINN’s National Sexual Assault Hotline. Help is available 24/7 by texting HOPE to 64673

The New York Times: “Cesar Chavez, a Civil Rights Icon, Is Accused of Abusing Girls for Years”

“I am nearly 96 years old, and for the last 60 years have kept a secret because I believed that exposing the truth would hurt the farmworker movement I have spent my entire life fighting for,” Dolores Huerta wrote in her statement

Before the NY Times story dropped, United Farm Workers issued a statement Tuesday canceling all Cesar Chavez Day related activities: “Far more troubling are allegations involving abuse of young women or minors. Allegations that very young women or girls may have been victimized are crushing”

The Los Angeles Times, also published a story before the NY Times story: “’Profoundly shocking' allegations against Cesar Chavez spark soul-searching in movement

Change was swift: Supervisor Janice Hahn was the first to call for a renaming of the March 31 holiday celebrating Chavez’s birthday; California House Speaker Robert Rivas introduced the legislation to change the name to Farmworkers Day that day, and LA Mayor Karen Bass held press conference also calling for a change to Farm Workers Day

“As the UFW looks to move forward, with an understanding of Chavez’s conduct that contradicts his longtime use as a symbol, perhaps they can look to feminism for guidance. Feminists, after all, have learned how to commit to a principle even as one must discard a cult of personality,” Moira Donegan wrote for The Guardian

Meanwhile, UFW held a rally at a federal courthouse in Fresno to protest the Trump administration cutting farmworker pay

Many Boyle Heights residents didn’t want Brooklyn Avenue to be named for Chavez in the first place

Statues boxed, signs covered, murals defaced or repainted: the erasure of Chavez’s name and likeness from public space was just as swift

“Everything should be named for the martyrs of the Farm Workers Movement. Every street should be named after them,” Huerta told Latino USA

LAist: “LAUSD's teacher and staff unions will strike if no deal is reached by mid-April”

“One undisputed example of contracts that went awry is $6 million allotted to AllHere, a tech startup that was hired to design an all-purpose, artificial intelligence chatbot for L.A. Unified. The district spent about $3 million of that contract for a chatbot that was never fully deployed and quickly withdrawn from service when AllHere collapsed financially,” reports the LA Times 

The FBI hasn’t commented on why Superintendent Alberto Carvalho was detained and investigated — and handcuffed outside his home — but sources have said it’s because of the AllHere chatbot contract

One reason LAUSD’s budget is in trouble is due to payouts for sexual misconduct and abuse cases

This week’s episode was produced by Sophie Bridges

The reporting and analysis you hear in the show is put together by our rotating cast of producers and co-hosts every week. All opinions expressed on the show are solely those of co-hosts and may not represent the views of LA Forward

Alissa, Rachel, and Mike discuss LA city’s six-year journey to end the racist and ineffective practice of pretextual stops by police. For the first time in a decade, the number of homeless people who died in LA County went down, not up; from a high of seven deaths per day to six deaths per day. Then: the Noma pop-up in Silver Lake is protested after allegations of abuse by Danish chef René Redzepi resurface, fueling a reckoning over how restaurants treat workers.

Our LA Podcast party for paid Think Forward subscribers is coming up this Saturday, March 21! Subscribe today at ThinkForward.la to join us

Alissa, Rachel, and Mike discuss LA city’s six-year journey to end the racist and ineffective practice of pretextual stops by police. For the first time in a decade, the number of homeless people who died in LA County went down, not up; from a high of seven deaths per day to six deaths per day. Then: the Noma pop-up in Silver Lake is protested after allegations of abuse by Danish chef René Redzepi resurface, fueling a reckoning over how restaurants treat workers.

Our LA Podcast party for paid subscribers is coming up this Saturday, March 21! Subscribe now to join us. Here’s a personal plea from Alissa

LAist: “Black and Latino Angelenos are overrepresented in traffic stops used to investigate serious crimes”

The city’s Chief Legislative Analyst office report noted Black people made up one third of all pretextual stops, despite being only 8% of the city’s population. LAPD released its own report, and Catalyst California released a report showing the ineffectiveness of such stops

Meanwhile, traffic enforcement of actually dangerous driving has decreased since 2020

Listen to Mike’s interview with Chauncee Smith of Catalyst California and Leslie Cooper Johnson of the Community Coalition

NACTO’s 2020 statement: “The harassment and injustice that people of color, particularly Black people, experience at the hands of law enforcement on transit and in streets and public spaces is unacceptable and wrong”

During a joint hearing of the transportation and unarmed response committees, Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson testified that he had been stopped four times in a city vehicle, including the previous Wednesday

A new poll shows LA Mayor Karen Bass is polling very poorly for an incumbent, with just 20% support

Read the LA County Department of Public Health report: “Lives Lost : Mortality Trends and Prevention Opportunities For People Experiencing Homelessness in LA County, 2015-2024”

The Guardian: ​​”LA county reports first drop in deaths of unhoused people in a decade”

But as the LA Times reports, “health officials warn that steep cuts to federal and state homeless services threaten to reverse the progress achieved over the last two years”

LA City Council had to overrule City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto to fund $107 million in tenant aid after her office tried to end the Legal Aid Foundation contract

Watch Feldstein Soto’s very disingenuous campaign video claiming she supports renters

The famous Copenhagen restaurant Noma was just about to start an LA pop-up for $1500 a person when new allegations surfaced about chef René Redzepi

Former Noma employee Jason Ignacio White has been collecting allegations of abuse from workers on his Instagram

Protests at Noma LA have been organized with One Fair Wage, which has been fair wages for restaurant workers

Eater LA: “Noma LA Sponsors Exit Amid Abuse Allegations”

Redzepi stepped away from Noma — posting a statement and video — but the protests have continued

LA Times food critic Jenn Harris wrote that she would not review Noma LA. “Normally, an event of this scale would warrant coverage. Instead, I found myself making no plans to attend, and even rethinking how I approach my job”

As Meghan McCarron and Julia Moskin write at the New York Times, local chefs were promised spillover economic impact by Noma coming to town that never really happened. And some of them have joined the protests

This episode was produced by Sophie Bridges

The reporting and analysis you hear in the show is put together by our rotating cast of producers and co-hosts every week. All opinions expressed on the show are solely those of co-hosts and may not represent the views of LA Forward

Mike, Godfrey and Oscar dive into two big charter reform debates: oversight of the LAPD and the role of LA’s city controller, which current Controller Kenneth Mejia is turning into a public battle. The Trump administration is planning to evict thousands of immigrant families, but community groups are fighting back. Plus, the proposed “Billionaire’s Tax” that’s dividing California Democrats.

COME PARTY WITH US! Join all the LA Podcast co-hosts and producers on Saturday, March 21! This gathering is exclusively for paid subscribers so sign up today at thinkforward.la to get the invite

Godfrey is quoted in this LAist story by Frank Stoltze: “LA commission recommends expanding City Council power over LAPD”

Meanwhile, even some commissioners are expressing confusion about the significance of the recommendation

The commission originally punted on the issue entirely before facing pushback from the public, advocacy organizations, and Councilmembers Eunisses Hernandez and Hugo Soto-Martinez, who wrote letters proposing specific and significant reforms

The debate over whether the City Council can set policy for the LAPD gained new energy when Chief Jim McDonnell flatly stated he would not enforce a law against immigration agents wearing masks, and a later executive order from Mayor Karen Bass instructing LAPD to enforce the ban and train their body cameras on immigration operations. A recent Police Commission meeting revealed LAPD’s enforcement of the mayor’s orders has been minimal

The subject of police liability — and police immunity — is covered by UCLA’s Joanna Schwartz in her excellent book Shielded: How the Police Became Untouchable

The commission has also been looking at ways to rein in LAPD liability costs, which have resulted in massive taxpayer-funded settlements, as often highlighted by the City Controller

City Controller Kenneth Mejia has been marshaling public support on social media to fight back against efforts to limit his power, including the suggestion to add a CFO

Public comment was overwhelmed with over 1,000 pages of written comments supporting Mejia’s agenda after he issued pleas to back his recommendations

Mejia has also been pushing for expanded resources and greater oversight of other elected officials at the same time. Here's more on his vision — including a Capital Infrastructure Plan! — on Spectrum's "Inside the Issues," and his history of LA's budget priorities

You can watch the full March 7 charter commission meeting hearing here

A mixed-status family is a household with members holding different citizenship or immigration statuses, often consisting of U.S. citizen children living with undocumented parents or relatives. A new proposed regulation from the Trump administration to deny these households rent subsidies could have a devastating impact on families living in public housing or using federal housing vouchers. More than one-third of those families are in California

Capital & Main: “Community organizers in Los Angeles are rallying in opposition to a Trump administration rule that they say will displace and fracture immigrant families, increase homelessness and potentially throttle rent collections to the point that local housing authorities might be forced to shutter some of their stock”

LA officials are fighting the policy, warning it could force 1,700 local families into homelessness

Weigh in on the proposed policy by making a public comment or attending one of many virtual teach-ins organized by Keep Families Together, and you can also sign up for email updates

California voters may get a chance to impose a one-time 5% tax on the state’s estimated 200 billionaires in November. The proposal is dividing Democrats, and causing concern the uber rich may flee the state

LA Forward, CHIRLA and dozens of other groups are planning a mass mobilization, LA Strikes Back: A Call to Action, this Saturday, March 14 at 9 a.m. at LA Trade Tech College. Details and registration here

This episode was produced by Sophie Bridges

The reporting and analysis you hear in the show is put together by our rotating cast of producers and co-hosts every week. All opinions expressed on the show are solely those of co-hosts and may not represent the views of LA Forward

Alissa, Mike, and Godfrey report back from the California Democratic Party state convention where endorsement battles plague the governor’s race. Will Republicans end up nabbing the top two spots on the November ballot? LAUSD Superintendent Alberto Carvalho is placed on leave after an FBI raid of his home and office. And Metro wants you to ride the D — with crop tops to match — on May 8.

Join all the LA Podcast co-hosts and producers on Saturday, March 21! This gathering is exclusively for paid subscribers so sign up today at thinkforward.la.

Here are the full CADEM endorsement results

CalMatters: “CA Democrats can’t agree on endorsement for governor. Will Republicans benefit?”

Columnists like the Los Angeles Times’ George Skelton are arguing for some Democratic candidates to drop out

Watch Mike’s video which provides the critical analysis that the candidates being urged to drop out are almost all people of color

Meanwhile, the race for insurance commissioner is interesting, but who would want this job?

An early morning FBI raid of LAUSD Superintendent Alberto Carvalho’s home and office appears to be tied to an AI chatbot that Carvalho championed

The chatbot, named Ed, was made by the company AllHere which collapsed in 2024 when its CEO was indicted for defrauding investors. Carvalho said he’d set up a task force to investigate the company but never did

After meeting for a total of seven hours, the LAUSD school board placed Carvalho on paid leave and named Chief of School Operations Andres Chait as interim superintendent

SEIU Local 99, which represents educational workers, put out a statement calling for more accountability. SEIU Local 99 and UTLA had previously planned a rally on March 18 to draw attention to proposed layoffs

Harbor Peace Patrols first broke the news of Carvalho’s home being raided. The group which had formed to track immigration raids staging on Terminal Island recently celebrated a win when federal agents packed up their operations

The Graffiti Ghost Towers are being bought by developer Kali P. Chaudhuri — but he doesn’t want to save the graffiti

Artist Sayre Gomez built an astonishing sculpture of the towers

Unfortunately for Alissa’s 2025 predictions, but fortunately for everyone else, the D line extension is finally opening on May 8!

But the even bigger news was that Metro made ‘Ride the D’ shirts and the internet went wild

Alissa wrote about the astonishing demand for ‘Ride the D’ t-shirts

Some LA City charter reform recommendations are moving forward, including expanding the council to 25 members and ranked choice voting starting in 2032

Plus, LA City Council votes to make Unarmed Crisis Response a permanent city program. But $40 million a year is needed to make the program citywide

This episode was produced by Sophie Bridges

The reporting and analysis you hear in the show is put together by our rotating cast of producers and co-hosts every week. All opinions expressed on the show are solely those of co-hosts and may not represent the views of LA Forward

Scott, Alissa, and Rachel dry off after yet another flash flooding event and absorb a new report that says LA County could eliminate half of its pavement. Casey Wasserman is leaving his own company but will apparently stay on as LA28 chair (?!?) as more elected officials call for him to step down. And LA’s City Council searches for more ways to not build more housing near transit by delaying implementation of SB79 as many places as possible.

Coming up on Saturday, March 21 –a fun gathering exclusively for paid subscribers with LA Podcast co-hosts and producers! Become a paid subscriber at thinkforward.la to join us and to keep this podcast coming out every week

Melrose stores flooded again and business owners are blaming the city’s lack of response. Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky is calling for an investigation: "The response was delayed, inadequate, and local businesses were left dealing with flooding and damage”

Elsewhere: food delivery bots can’t swim, Santa Monica channel in Rustic Canyon lost all its concrete, Trader Joe’s parking lot floods store in Silver Lake

Alissa would like to remind everyone we would have had stormwater gardens to stop the flooding on Melrose if former councilmember Paul Koretz hadn’t killed the Uplift Melrose project

The new DepaveLA study from Accelerate Resilience LA shows that LA County contains 488 square miles of pavement — that’s about the size of the city of LA — and nearly half of it may be unnecessary

Accelerate Resilience LA’s Devon Provo writes about LA County’s sustainability plan, which calls for “the first explicit depaving target from a major U.S. public agency, signaling an emerging shift in how policymakers are rethinking infrastructure” — but it’s only 1,600 acres by 2045

There are incentives for property owners to reduce impermeable surfaces through Measure W, also known as the Safe Clean Water Program

Flooding happens pretty much exactly where we paved over old creeks, which are easy to see thanks to maps from UC Irvine’s Flood Lab that show flood risk. Unsurprisingly, LA’s Black communities would be hit the hardest in a major flood

Last Friday, after dozens of the artists he represents fled his agency due to his ties with sex traffickers Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, Casey Wasserman announced he was selling his entire company and issued a heartfelt apology to his employees

Yet he will stay on as LA28 chair, because the board voted to keep him. Here’s a really good Guardian story that sums it all up, with some very angry quotes from Councilmember Monica Rodriguez

Alissa wrote about “LA28's big gamble” over at Torched

LA Mayor Karen Bass finally said she thought Wasserman should step down

CNN: LA mayor calls for head of 2028 Olympics to step down over Epstein ties 

West Hollywood had a rally with survivors and Councilmember John Erickson said he was introducing a resolution to call for Wasserman’s resignation

More state representatives have called on Wasserman to resign, including a statement from the LA County delegation (although some said they didn’t know they were signed on)

Sports Illustrated’s Michael Rosenberg puts the emails in context and argues why Wasserman is a liability

NOlympics LA: LA28 Chair Casey Wasserman: A Lifelong Pattern of Abuse 

LAist: “How much housing is LA actually building?”

LA’s planning department has delivered a plan to delay SB79 effectuation (also in StoryMap form), the new state law requiring cities to build more (as in taller and denser) housing around high-quality transit stops

Come learn about SB79 implementation on Thursday evening and why LA Forward, Abundant Housing LA, and others are supporting Option C in the planning department's proposal

Meanwhile, Beverly Hills has a thoughtful plan to reluctantly implement SB79 (which the city only has to do for a ¼-mile area around at the three new D line stations) 

Although Beverly Hills is also forced to approve multiple “builders remedy” projects because the city didn’t build enough housing

This episode was produced by Sophie Bridges (allegedly)

The reporting and analysis you hear in the show is put together by our rotating cast of producers and co-hosts every week. All opinions expressed on the show are solely those of co-hosts and may not represent the views of LA Forward

Alissa, Mike, Rachel, and Olga unpack Nithya Raman’s surprise mayoral run. How the LA city councilmember’s last-minute decision to challenge incumbent Karen Bass has rattled establishment Democrats and angered activists on the left — and why comparisons to progressive officials in other cities don’t really hold up. Then: Trump’s attorney general Pam Bondi is suddenly worried about crime in Culver City.

Become a paid subscriber at thinkforward.la to keep this podcast weekly. A fun gathering exclusively for paid subscribers with LA Pod co-hosts and producers is coming up Saturday, March 21!

New York Times: “Rising Progressive Star Shakes Up Race for Los Angeles Mayor”

Here’s Raman’s campaign video and her first TV interview with NBC LA’s Conan Nolan

LA Daily News: “Nithya Raman’s entry tests Karen Bass from the left in Los Angeles mayoral race”

More reaction stories from the Los Angeles Times and Politico

“Now is not the time for distractions from a political opportunist — especially one who backed the Mayor’s re-election campaign just weeks ago,” said Yvonne Wheeler, president of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO told the LA Times

“As Raman scrambles to build a campaign apparatus before the June election, Bass’ supporters have rallied around the embattled incumbent with fresh energy and barely-veiled fury,” writes Melanie Mason at Politico (includes a quote from Mike!)

LA Times: “The record of Nithya Raman, L.A. mayoral candidate, may surprise you”

Meanwhile, mayoral candidate Rev. Rae Huang got her mic cut at a charter reform meeting about LAPD reform

One of Raman’s key platform planks is addressing the city’s streetlight outages. While some councilmembers might prefer dark skies, the truth is that the city needs to raise the streetlight district assessments not increased the 1990s — and Raman has already been messaging this reality to her constituents

Read Alissa’s story at Torched about the new SAJE report looking at the financial risks of hosting the Olympic and Paralympic Games and how the city could turn a bad deal into a less-bad one

And if you need a refresher about who, exactly, is running for mayor, check out Mike’s video about the five front-runners

In response to questioning about the Epstein files from Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove, Attorney General Pam Bondi went off on a bizarre tangent: “Her district includes Culver City, and she’s not talking about any crime in her districts”

“Kamlager-Dove shrugged off Bondi’s comment, saying Culver City was known for “breakfast burritos — not crime,” reports the LA Times

“The first thing I thought was, ‘What is she talking about?’ said Bryan Fish, the vice mayor of Culver City, whom everyone calls Bubba but doesn’t look like someone whom everyone calls Bubba. ‘The only crime here,’ he added, ‘is like the $18 strawberry at Erewhon,” reports the New York Times

Yes, Culver City actually bought a gun store and they’re turning it into 67 units of affordable housing with a preference for teachers

This episode was produced by Sophie Bridges

The reporting and analysis you hear in the show is put together by our rotating cast of producers and co-hosts every week. All opinions expressed on the show are solely those of co-hosts and may not represent the views of LA Forward

Alissa, Mike, and Memo discuss the “No Secret Police Act,” which requires ICE agents to remove face coverings — and why LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell’s refusal to enforce it is such a red flag. Don Lemon’s federal detention highlights the double standards for LA journalists who are arrested during protests. LA Mayor Karen Bass delivers her (first) state of the city. Plus: why elected officials are calling for LA28 chair Casey Wasserman to step down.

At a press conference, LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell “described two state laws that were passed by the state legislature in response to the ICE raids — one banning face coverings, the other requiring law enforcement officers to identify themselves — as ‘not a good public policy decision,’” LA Taco reports

Mike writes about how McDonnell is setting the city back: “In his 15 months as chief, McDonnell has consistently shown contempt for civilian authority, tolerance for police violence, hostility toward the press, and a drive to militarize LAPD under the guise of mega-event security. He is rebuilding the old LAPD that had only recently been partially dismantled.”

After deadly shootings, ICE says it will start using body cameras for transparency (where have we heard that before?). Read Copaganda’s Alex Karakatsanis on why body cameras are bad, actually

Attorneys for Keith Porter, Jr.’s family are calling for an investigation of his murder at the hands of an off-duty ICE agent

Don Lemon and Georgia Fort were two of four Black journalists detained after covering a protest in St. Paul. Lemon talked more about his arrest on his YouTube channel. ”We’re having a constitutional crisis,” Fort said on Democracy Now!

LA Mayor Karen Bass was publicly defending Lemon but hasn’t defended journalists arrested by LAPD at protests, including LA Taco reporter Lexis-Olivier Ray who was detained by LAPD at a protest in downtown the same weekend

Adam Rose, deputy director of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, was out sounding the alarm about these arrests and had some very harsh words for Bass

Bass delivered her first of two State of the City addresses: here’s the address as delivered and here’s Alissa’s thread from the event

LA28 chair Casey Wasserman is facing calls to resign due to associations with Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell revealed in the latest Department of Justice release

Bass declined to call for Wasserman’s resignation, saying instead: “Ultimately, any decision on the LA28 leadership must be made by the LA28 Board. As you know, they are a separate and independent nonprofit organization."

Alissa’s tracking which elected officials, organizations, and clients are calling for Wasserman to step down

Lindsey Horvath and Monica Rodriguez both went on TV calling for Wasserman to step down

And yes, after we recorded, Horvath opted not to run for LA mayor, but, in a huge surprise, Councilmember Nithya Raman did. We’ll talk about that more next week

This episode was produced by Kristen Torres

The reporting and analysis you hear in the show is put together by our rotating cast of producers and co-hosts every week. All opinions expressed on the show are solely those of co-hosts and may not represent the views of LA Forward

Become a paid subscriber at thinkforward.la  to keep this podcast weekly! A fun gathering exclusively for paid subscribers is coming up Saturday, March 21!

Alissa, Godfrey, and Sophie recount another week of accelerating immigration raids and how Angelenos are organizing against them. Why the “national shutdown” isn’t a general strike (yet). If ICE is going to the Winter Olympics, what does that mean for LA in 2028? And what about the World Cup this summer? And RIP to Shirley Raines who brought dignity, agency, and eyelash extensions to Skid Row residents.

LA Taco’s Daily Memo for Wednesday, January 28: “There was a time when 25-40 was the total number of incidents I’d report for a whole week; they just did that in one day”

“What we’re seeing now are large numbers of officers to grab anywhere from one to five people, not necessarily questioning them, and then moving out as quickly as possible,” Juan Pablo Orjuela-Parra, an organizer with the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, told the Los Angeles Times

TPM: ICE not only looks and acts like a paramilitary — it is one

Gavin, wyd? “California has cooperated with more ICE transfers probably than any other state in the country,” California’s governor told Ben Shapiro

Meanwhile progressive district attorneys — meaning: not LA’s DA — are banding together to prosecute federal agents: “The group launched Wednesday and calls itself Fight Against Federal Overreach, or FAFO”

Highland Park is testing out air raid sirens for ICE raids

There’s another community defense training Saturday, February 7 at 11 a.m.; here’s how to sign up

Kim Kelly on the difference between a general strike and a national shutdown

Yes, ICE is going to the Winter Olympics. Yes, it’s also kind of horribly normal for U.S. law enforcement to be involved in the Olympics — does everyone remember when the LAPD got special permission to carry guns in Paris during the 2024 Summer Olympics? 

“ICE, NO GRAZIE!”

LAist’s Libby Rainey reported on potential plans to clear unhoused people from around sports venues ahead of megaevents

Will LA see a boycott in 2028? Will LA see a boycott this summer?

Alissa’s Torched piece focused on “hospitality houses” in what feels like the least hospitable possible environment — and she also reported on the World Cup fan zones announcement

Speaking of cognitive dissonance, how about that Home Depot World Cup sponsorship deal?

LA Mayor Karen Bass is giving two State of the City addresses; one is Monday, February 2, watch it here

Finally, remembering the Skid Row outreach legend Shirley Raines who died at 58

Tune in Tuesday, February 3 at 7 p.m. for a Measure G teach-in to learn the latest news about LA County’s charter reform initiative

This episode was produced by Sophie Bridges

The reporting and analysis you hear in the show is put together by our rotating cast of producers and co-hosts every week. All opinions expressed on the show are solely those of co-hosts and may not represent the views of LA Forward

Become a paid subscriber at thinkforward.la to keep this podcast weekly! Subscribers-only event is coming soon!

Mike, David, and Carla do a deep-dive on state and local efforts to build and fund — and also stop and kill — housing, while changes are proposed to LA city’s ULA transfer tax, also known as the “mansion tax.” More charter reform proposals advance. Are 23 councilmembers enough? Should 16-year-olds get the right to vote in local elections? Then: California’s mountain lions might finally get endangered species protection.

2025 was a pivotal year for housing legislation in California and Los Angeles, with a slew of new laws and rules taking effect this year to spur housing construction — and the coming year might see even more, as KQED reports

Politico’s Liam Dillon reports on LA’s latest strategy to stop/subvert SB 79, the new state law allowing more density in transit-rich areas. Metro also weighed in against SB 79, expressing concern that transit-oriented housing creates opposition to new transit. Reminder to Metro board members that building housing near transit increases transit ridership, which you think would be their goal? 

Metro also voted on this as they approved the Sepulveda subway and potentially stall the C line extension to Torrance. Time to dissolve (or seriously reform) the Metro board?

Liam also reports on the high-stakes staredown between the state and the city trying to kill affordable housing in Venice

Meanwhile, YIMBY Law has filed a lawsuit to overturn Gavin Newsom’s executive order blocking SB 9, which would allow new duplexes, in Pacific Palisades

The fight over Measure ULA has been brewing for months. Affordable housing advocates proclaim success with more than $1 billion raised. Opponents of the measure contend it’s killing development of multifamily housing in Los Angeles.  Conflicting reports — even in the same publication — argue new apartment construction is down and that multifamily investment is on the rebound

Councilmember Nithya Raman, a longtime supporter of Measure ULA, is proposing a ballot measure to exempt multifamily and commercial housing from the transfer tax for 15 years after construction. Raman’s proposal is getting a lot of attention. The council has until February 11 to put something on the June ballot

State lawmakers are mulling a proposal to put a $10 billion affordable housing bond before voters in November

LA’s Charter Reform Commission is weeding through various proposals. If you can’t find anything to binge on Netflix, watch the full 6 hour, 22 minute meeting — the commission is likely to recommend expanding the size of the City Council from 15 to 23 

The commission also seems poised to recommend lowering the voting age for Los Angeles city and LAUSD elections to 16.  There is a national movement to lower the voting age and extend the franchise to 1-6 and 17-year-olds. Liz Chou recently looked at the issue in her LA Reporter newsletter. A ballot measure to lower the threshold to 16 in Culver City failed narrowly last year, getting 49.5% of the vote

Here’s the Charter Reform Commission website. Stay involved with LA Forward’s governance reform and CIP working groups. Topics coming up: police reform; the removal/replacement of elected officials for misconduct; establishment of a 2-year budget cycle, ethics, and neighborhood councils

California wildlife officials are considering listing mountain lions as threatened. Advocates of the protected status point to the hazards encountered by LA’s beloved Hollywood Hills mountain lion, P-22

In 2022, the wealthy Northern California town of Woodside declared its entire jurisdiction a mountain lion habitat to pause all new housing projects under SB 9 — yep, the same duplex bill that’s being exempted in Palisades — but the decision was later reversed

This week’s episode was produced by Sophie Bridges

The reporting and analysis you hear in the show is put together by our rotating cast of producers and co-hosts every week. All opinions expressed on the show are solely those of co-hosts and may not represent the views of LA Forward

Become a paid subscriber at thinkforward.la to keep LA Pod going. Subscribers-only event coming soon! 

Alissa, Rachel, and Godfrey remember Keith Porter Jr., who was killed by an off-duty ICE agent on New Year’s Eve in Northridge. A new UCLA report shows how Metro’s unarmed ambassadors are helping Metro’s riders. A subway concept advances for the Sepulveda Corridor and Fred Rosen’s monorail might finally be dead. And LA City’s charter reform commission has begun the purge.

“Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” by Martin Luther King, Jr.

On New Year’s Eve, Keith Porter Jr. was killed by off-duty ICE agent Brian Palacios in Northridge, and vigils were held across the city this past week

There’s just so much to protest! An anti-ICE protester was blinded by a DHS agent in Santa Ana

Meanwhile a new LA City Council motion that advanced would require LAPD to adopt tactics like a “graded response” model

ICE raids seem to be intensifying: 10 people were taken across 8 Echo Park locations in 3 hours. Read Blood in the Machine and 404 Media on how tech companies like Palantir are finding neighborhoods to raid

Sign up for the Community Self Defense Coalition patrols training and share the information on Instagram

Read the Metro ambassador report from UCLA’s Institute of Transportation Studies

Streetsblog LA: “UCLA Study Finds Metro Transit Ambassador Program Is Benefitting Metro Riders”

And the monorail option for the Sepulveda Pass project MIGHT ACTUALLY BE DEAD but keep your calls coming — Modified Alternative 5 is up for a full Metro board vote this week

Nick Andert’s video shows how they picked a hybrid option that’s pretty cool actually

LA’s city charter reform process held “the purge” last weekend, where certain reforms are starting to be taken off the table. Here’s the Charter Reform Commission website and a way to join the conversation at Rethink LA

Here’s a great policy document with proposed reforms for LA’s Capital Infrastructure Program — a 5 year outlook and 2 year budget, to start!

Stay involved with LA Forward’s governance reform and CIP working groups

Finally: we’re out of drought after 25 years! Check our progress with Cal Matters’ 2026 California Water Tracker 

This week’s episode was produced by Kristen Torres

The reporting and analysis you hear in the show is put together by our rotating cast of producers and co-hosts every week. All opinions expressed on the show are solely those of co-hosts and may not represent the views of LA Forward

Our first subscriber-only event will be held in 2026! Become a paid subscriber at thinkforward.la and you’ll be the first to know the details

Alissa, Mike, and guest co-host Golden State’s Mariel Garza talk about how local officials commemorated (or didn’t commemorate) the one-year anniversary of the fires, including a shocking statement from Councilmember Traci Park. Reality TV star Spencer Pratt is running for LA mayor. Gavin Newsom delivers his final State of the State address. And right-wing tabloid journalism is coming to the West Coast with the launch of the California Post.

“It wasn’t an act of nature. It wasn’t some ‘storm of the century.’ And it wasn’t climate change, and don’t let anybody try to tell you otherwise.” Yep, that’s Councilmember Traci Park at the "They Let Us Burn" rally on the anniversary of the fires. Recent LA Podcast guest co-host Sammy Roth wrote a whole story about Park’s climate denial

At the same rally, reality TV star Spencer Pratt announced he was running for LA mayor at what ended up being a very MAGA Palisades rally (but Pratt can’t give interviews until February?)

Mike talked to the Los Angeles Times about Pratt: “If you look at the model of who he is as a candidate, it’s similar to Trump: the reality television background; his most visible communication presence is on Twitter, just as Trump’s was. And he’s sort of developing a candidacy around frustration and blowing the system up, just like Trump did.” Mike also said Pratt’s entry into the race could be “perilous” for Bass.

LA Mayor Karen Bass did not go out in public the entire day on January 7

Read Mariel’s piece: “14 ways fire victims were failed by government at all levels”

LAFD Chief Jaime Moore accepted responsibility for the watered-down after-action report but then news broke that Bass’s office might have been trying to make changes? Sorry, refinements

LA Times: “Anger overflows in west Altadena: Where is the accountability for 19 deaths, epic losses?”

Supervisor Lindsey Horvath made it sound even more like she’s running for mayor in an interview with CNN’s Elex Michaelson (here’s the transcript)

Watch Gavin Newsom’s final State of the State address, with coverage from Politico and commentary by CalMatters’ Dan Walters

Why Mariel is excited about a wide-open governor’s race

The New York Post officially announced the California Post is launching at the end of the month

But lots of other new local publications are launching, like Golden State, the LA Local, and LA Reported 

This week’s episode was produced by Kristen Torres

The reporting and analysis you hear in the show is put together by our rotating cast of producers and co-hosts every week. All opinions expressed on the show are solely those of co-hosts and may not represent the views of LA Forward

Our first subscriber-only event will be held in 2026! Become a paid subscriber at thinkforward.la and you’ll be the first to know the details

One year ago this week Los Angeles was forever changed by the most destructive natural disaster in the county’s history. Alissa, Mike, and Kate survey the impact of the firestorms, and discuss what year two of recovery looks like for the thousands of Angelenos who are still displaced. Plus LAFD’s after-action report is deemed a “cover up,” and the real story behind the collapse of the state’s insurance system.

Listen to Kate’s Rebuilding LA podcast

Although the death toll for the firestorms is officially 31 — revised up in July when additional remains were found west of Lake Avenue in Altadena — a recent study estimated that up to 440 people died due to the dangers of wildfire smoke

One (1) house has been rebuilt in each burn area, although the completed Palisades home is actually a spec house that was built by a developer with demolition permits that had been approved on the morning of the fires. Additionally, an ADU was completed in November that received the first certificate of occupancy in Altadena

As of mid-December, permits have been issued for 16 percent of the homes destroyed in Altadena and 14 percent of the homes in Pacific Palisades. Even though permitting is starting to pick up survivors are facing challenges like city rebuilding fees 

LAist: “Investors are buying close to half the empty lots in LA burn zones, report says”

Listen to Kate’s conversation with Greenline’s Jasmin Shupper, who is trying to help Black homeowners and business owners hold onto their Altadena properties through land banking and other alternative financing models

Washington Post: “A year later, Altadena fire survivors confront hard choices about housing”

Meanwhile, the Palisades mobile home community is just now getting its debris cleared

The big after-action LAFD report that we talked about last time was described as “watered down,” “highly unprofessional,” and, finally, deemed a “cover up” by fire experts in a bombshell LA Times investigation. And LAFD is also impugned in new text messages that showed questions about the presence of native plants might have impeded the mop up of the Lachman Fire

Listen to Kate’s conversation with Councilmember Traci Park, who told Kate councilmembers are not briefed on deployment: “I certainly don't get a briefing anytime the fire department or LAPD are called into action”

There are allegations that FEMA has been clearing lots sloppily and dumping debris illegally, without enough soil testing. And an absolutely devastating report from the New York Times shows families going back into smoke-damaged homes insurance companies said were fine and finding lead levels 27 times the federal limit 

The LA Times also has an investigation into California Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara’s campaign finance and ethical violations and why the state’s insurance system failed so spectacularly

Kate also looked into where the FireAid concert money ended up

Alissa wrote about the failure to create a Resilient Rebuilding Authority for the Los Angeles Review of Architecture

Kate’s spoke with Cal Poly Pomona professor Nicole Lambrou about social infrastructure. Read Lambrou’s Zocalo piece: “How do you rebuild community after wildfire?”

The annual relighting of Altadena’s Christmas Tree Lane and how the majestic deodar cedars may have saved the houses below

This week’s episode was produced by Sophie Bridges

The reporting and analysis you hear in the show is put together by our rotating cast of producers and co-hosts every week. All opinions expressed on the show are solely those of co-hosts and may not represent the views of LA Forward

Our first subscriber-only event will be held in 2026! Become a paid subscriber at thinkforward.la and you’ll be the first to know the details

It’s the end-of-the-year episode! And what a horrible year it has been! Alissa, Rachel, and Mike recap the biggest stories, the stories that didn’t get nearly enough attention, and what to look forward to next year. (Yes, there are some things to look forward to!) Plus: predictions for 2026 and what will be a very big election year for LA.

Check out last year’s end-of-the-year show to see what we got right (and wrong)

LA Mayor Karen Bass started 2025 seemingly invincible and after missteps, reversals, and delays now seems politically vulnerable

Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky had an incredible year challenging the status quo of LA’s fiscal woes. Here’s her final speech of 2025, captured by Unrig LA: “Public safety is about more than police... it's about having enough money to paint our own damn crosswalks and not having rogue volunteers doing it for us”

Local journalism flourished in the face of adversity: LA Taco, The LA Local, Boyle Heights Beat, The LA Reporter, Mar Vista Voice, Golden State, Streetsblog LA, and Alissa’s mega-event newsletter Torched — with more new publications still to come

Six local publications banded together to cover ICE: LA Public Press, Caló News, Capital & Main, Capital B, LA Taco, and Q Voice

Revisiting Emily Baumgaertner Nunn’s New York Times investigationabout the Blade, the 50-block sex-trafficking corridor on LA’s Figueroa Street

City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto is facing a new alleged ethical breach after a declaration in CA superior court accuses her of contacting an expert witness in a case against the city and asking him for a campaign contribution. The lawsuit spurred a major LA Times investigation about reckless LAPD driving. The case was settled for $18 million, “thought to be the most city taxpayers have ever paid to resolve a police collision case”

Feldstein Soto also put another major campaign donor, Mark Adams, in charge of the Skid Row Housing Trust as it was dissolving, only to remove him later

Last year, a city attorney who works for Feldstein Soto filed a declaration saying she prosecuted people based on “personal relationships” or “perceived political gain”

After a judge concluded that Councilmember John Lee violated laws on receiving and reporting gifts, LA’s City Ethics Commission fined Lee a staggering $138,000

Re-live the 2020 Department of Justice filing after the surrender of Mitch Englander, Lee’s former boss, and read Scott’s 2021 assessment of Lee’s role: “A Co-Conspirator on City Council”

There has been at least one call for him to resign, by Assemblymember Pilar Schiavo who represents a big part of CD 12

Councilmember Curren Price pled not guilty to corruption charges filed by the LA District Attorney’s office. Prosecutors filed an amended complaint in September alleging two additional counts of conflict of interest relating to development and land use. Price was arraigned and the DA’s office rejected a motion to dismiss the public corruption charges

Scott called the local charges faced by Price “outlandish and flimsy" but Price was one of three sitting councilmembers being investigated by the FBI in the original search warrant that took down Englander and former councilmember Jose Huizar, along with other Garcetti administration officials including former deputy mayor Ray Chan, who was sentenced to jail last year 

Anyway, this all makes reforming the city’s land-use decisions even more important! You can join a public assembly or become an ambassador for Rewrite LA, the new effort to bring more Angelenos inside the charter reform process. Sign up for updates at rewritela.org/deliberate

Will Rick Caruso announce his (second) campaign for LA mayor on January 7, the anniversary of the fires? Will the announcement happen at his unscathed Palisades mall, which is supposed to reopen in 2026? He’s got a Christmas tree up and ready to go

Will LA County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath also run for LA mayor? After Bass published an op-ed in the LA Daily News touting her progress on homelessness, Horvath called her track record “indefensible,"  Bass dunk-tweeted Horvath, then Horvath posted a highlight reel of bad headlines. Councilmember Ysabel Jurado offered her own commentary: “I fear the girls are fighting”

Will Bass’s “working people not billionaire class” message actually resonate with voters — especially as she undermines this message by playing an “instrumental” role in delaying the Olympic wage?

Will any gubernatorial ad top Tom Steyer’s Love Actually parody?

Will the D line open on time? And will the LAX people mover *ever* open? Watch Nick Andert’s excellent end-of-the-year Metro recap

Speaking of end-of-the-year recaps, read LA Forward's annual impact report and call-to-action for the new year for all sorts of ways to get organized

This week's episode was produced by Sophie Bridges

The reporting and analysis you hear in the show is put together by our rotating cast of producers and co-hosts every week. All opinions expressed on the show are solely those of co-hosts and may not represent the views of LA Forward

Become a paid subscriber at thinkforward.la

Mike, David, and Godfrey go deep on one of the wildest LA City Council votes in recent memory as councilmembers quarrel over Karen Bass’s manufactured deadline to increase police hiring. LAPD reform finally makes it onto the charter commission radar, plus all the different ways that council expansion could happen (27 districts…. or 9 three-member districts?). Then: two important races for open seats in the California State Senate.

In its final session of the calendar year, LA’s City Council sharply rebuked Bass’s demand that they immediately authorize money to allow LAPD to hire 410 new officers 

While most councilmembers said they support hiring more police officers, they warned that the mayor was ignoring the fiscal crisis and the potential impact on other city services. Council approved an additional LAPD Academy class for January, and promised to revisit the issue in January

Opposition to Bass was led not by the council’s progressive bloc, but by many of its more mainstream liberal bloc, such as Katy Yaroslavsky and Bob Blumenfield. Yaroslavsky was a particularly sharp critic of Bass and Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson: watch her comments here

Bass’s approach was backed by an odd coalition of the council’s conservative members (Traci Park and John Lee), her closest personal allies (Harris-Dawson and Heather Hutt), and two moderates (Adrin Nazarian and Imelda Padilla)

The council vote was the culmination of months of tension over police hiring, stemming from the mayor’s budget proposal last spring that called for potentially laying off 1000 city workers to finance a big increase in LAPD hiring. The council balked at that, cutting the mayor’s LAPD hiring request in half, and sparing layoffs that would have led to cuts in other city services. Despite that council direction, however, LAPD had been hiring and spending more than the council had authorized

The timing of this debate — and the sudden deadline — had left a lot of people, including Alissa, wondering if this has something to do with the city’s stalled negotiations with LA28 over who will foot the bill for Olympic related security expenses. (Speaking of the Olympics, LA28 chair Casey Wasserman continues to cozy up to the Trump administration)

As Jim McDonnell prepares to celebrate the first anniversary of his appointment, Los Angeles Times reporter Libor Jany asks “Who’s running the LAPD? Chief’s style draws mixed reviews in first year”

LA’s Charter Reform Commission is rushing to meet a tight deadline to submit potential ballot proposals to the City Council. The body has launched an interesting experiment — engaging with citizen assemblies to get public input; find out more at Rewrite LA

The LA Reporter: “LAPD is finally getting taken up by the LA Charter Reform panel. What took so long?”

The commission will be discussing the size and composition of the City Council at its January 7 meeting. You can track what the commission is doing on its website (subscribe to the newsletter!), and join LA Forward’s Governance Reform working group. You can also watch some great LA Forward teach-ins on the issues, including police reform and council expansion

Two state senate races we’re closely following: SD26 and SD24

SD26 candidates discussed: Wendy Carrillo, Sara Hernandez, Sarah Rascón, Maebe Pudlo, Juan Camacho

Watch the Santa Monica Dem Club debate for SD24; Assemblymember Rick Zbur endorsed four (?) candidates

SD24 candidates discussed: Dr. Sion Roy, John Erickson, Mike Newhouse, Ellen Evans, Brian Goldsmith, Eric Alegria, Nico Ruderman, Republican candidate Kristina Irwin

Listen to our overview of city races from September

This week’s episode was produced by Kristen Torres

The reporting and analysis you hear in the show is put together by our rotating cast of producers and co-hosts every week. All opinions expressed on the show are solely those of co-hosts and may not represent the views of LA Forward

We’re moving our first subscriber-only event to 2026! Become a paid subscriber at thinkforward.la and you’ll be the first to know the details

Alissa, Rachel, and Sophie dig into an investigation that shows the City of Los Angeles stopped repaving its streets instead of implementing multimodal safety improvements. Remembering Robert Silverstein, the lawyer who tried to halt nearly every major Hollywood development. Plus: an appreciation of LA’s own hometown starchitect, the legendary Frank Gehry, who died at the age of 96.

The Future Is LA: “LA has stopped repaving our streets”

LA has 28 pothole trucks, currently only 12 run daily due to budget cuts

Here are all the HLA appeals and a follow up on “large asphalt repair” by Streetsblog’s Joe Linton

The City is also trying to be ADA compliant (but with this federal administration, who knows)

This was the year traffic fatalities were supposed to be reduced to zero — except people keep dying! For contrast: Vision Zero in London: “Across all 157 schemes on borough roads, there was a 34% decrease in fatal or serious casualties.” Even crosswalks advocates are getting arrested

What will make LA safer when cars kill more people than homicides? Alissa wrote about “Dying to host the Olympics” last year

Traffic fatalities are also a problem at the state level, and advocates recently held a vigil at at Caltrans HQ

LA Times: “Robert Silverstein, who fought City Hall over Hollywood development and won, dies at 57"

Stop the Gondola recently celebrated Silverstein for slowing Metro approvals 

Bernard Luggage was preserved — but is still empty! — and Silverstein also tried to stop a residential tower by preserving a Spaghetti Factory (which is also still empty)

The classic Curbed (RIP) piece about “greenmailing” from 2013 

LA Times: “Frank Gehry dead: Disney Hall architect transformed LA's landscape”

“To look only at the overwrought megaprojects, however, is to miss one of Gehry’s crucial achievements: his ability to turn an existing building, no matter how ordinary, into something humane and delightful,” writes Carolina Miranda in The Atlantic

The Guardian on the “Bilbao effect,” where the Guggenheim “transformed Bilbao’s wider civic fortunes, attracting 1.3 million visitors in its first year and… became shorthand for uplift through cultural tourism predicated on “iconic” architecture”

LA Times: “To a handful of condo owners whose units face the Disney Hall on Hope Street, the view of the Frank Gehry landmark is glorious -- until around noon on a sunny day. Then, the sun hits the stainless steel arches on the hall’s Founders Room and bright light is reflected into their condominiums” (2004)

This week’s episode was produced by Sophie Bridges

The reporting and analysis you hear in the show is put together by our rotating cast of producers and co-hosts every week. All opinions expressed on the show are solely those of co-hosts and may not represent the views of LA Forward

We’re moving our first subscriber-only event to 2026! Become a paid subscriber to LA Podcast at thinkforward.la and you’ll be the first to know the details

Mike, Rachel, and Oscar check in on six months of still-escalating ICE raids terrorizing Los Angeles County. House Dems held a special Congressional hearing to collect powerful testimony about the state-sponsored kidnappings — and immigration advocates, mutual aid groups, and neighbors continue to fight back. Plus, LA’s City Council gives LAPD permission to use tear gas on protesters and journalists. And welcome to the silly season of our local election cycle.

Angelenos spoke publicly about the trauma and due process violations of the immigration raids at a special hearing November 24 hearing in downtown Los Angeles convened by the Democrats on the House Oversight Committee. The event was requested by Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and led by Long Beach area Rep. Robert Garcia, who announced the creation of a new oversight dashboard documenting “verified incidents of possible misconduct and abuse” during federal immigration enforcement operations

Rep. Jasmine Crockett of Texas, who attended the hearing, referred to it as “living an American nightmare.” The most talked-about testimony of the hearing was that of Andrea Velez, a U.S. citizen who was detained on her way to work and held under harrowing conditions

Six LA newsrooms are collaborating to cover the ICE Raids: LA Public Press, Capital B, CALÓ News, L.A. TACO, Capital & Main, and Q Voice News.

L.A. TACO continues to provide standout coverage, documenting the raids on a daily basis. They recently catalogued every person kidnapped by ICE and Border Patrol in LA since August

Leaders of the local trans community helped lead the recent push to get the County of Los Angeles to declare a state of emergency over the immigration raids.

Residents in LA and Chicago are building multiracial solidarity against ICE. Bystanders are beginning to disrupt immigration raids with nothing more than a whistle or a honking car horn

Family members, immigration advocates, and members of Congress are all demanding answers to the question: Where is Vicente Aguilar? Aguilar was taken into custody October 7, suffered a medical emergency, and has not been heard from since

With immigration raids making some people afraid to leave their homes, LAUSD enrollment is dropping

The LA County Board of Supervisors is gearing up for a legal fight with the Trump administration, passing a law — which the feds have said they ignore — to ban face coverings for law enforcement

International Migrants Day is on Wednesday, December 18, and CHIRLA, DSA and other groups are organizing a big event in downtown Los Angeles

In an 8-4 vote, the Los Angeles City Council reauthorized LAPD’s authority to use tear gas and other military grade equipment on protesters. They did so at the vigorous insistence of LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell, who claimed that using tear gas on a crowd is a “de-escalation” tactic

Prior to June 8, the LAPD had not used tear gas in crowd-control settings in almost 50 years, an LAPD spokesperson told L.A. TACO

Los Angeles City Controller Kenneth Mejia is famous for his prominent use of his adorable corgis in communications. Former State Senator Isadore, who is challenging Mejia, is trying to use that as the basis of a laughable ethics complaint

Meanwhile, Raul Claros, a challenger to Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez, held a self-described “publicity stunt” claiming that he would move into MacArthur Park if elected

Silly season is underway in Santa Monica as well, where councilmembers Caroline Torosis and Jesse Zwick are being attacked for, well, having full-time jobs in public service and public policy. Torosis and Zwick are set to rotate into the posts of mayor and mayor pro tem this week

This week’s episode was produced by Kristen Torres

The reporting and analysis you hear in the show is put together by our rotating cast of producers and co-hosts every week. All opinions expressed on the show are solely those of co-hosts and may not represent the views of LA Forward

We’re moving our first subscriber-only event to 2026! Become a paid subscriber to LA Podcast at thinkforward.la  and you’ll be the first to know the details

As the LA Podcast team takes off for the Thanksgiving long weekend, we’re featuring Mike’s recent one-on-one interview with Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass. In a wide-ranging conversation, they discuss Bass’s leadership style — she says she prefers to govern from the center — and how it has been tested by wildfires, ICE raids, and the ongoing homelessness crisis.

The conversation, which took place on October 16, is part of a new series of fireside chats focused on public leadership hosted by the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs, which Mike runs as his day job

Bass faces reelection in just six months — the primary is June 2! The interview with Bass was recorded a few days before former LAUSD superintendent Austin Beutner officially announced his campaign to unseat her, and a few weeks before progressive organizer Rev. Rae Huang announced a challenge from the left

At CalMatters, Jim Newton of UCLA (and an esteemed former LA Times political reporter) writes that Bass is vulnerable, but still tough to beat

Mike asks about some of the mayor’s controversial moves to undercut the voter-approved Measure ULA. It is a stance that angered many progressives. In recent weeks, Bass has taken another swipe at the voter-approved measure

Bass’s second term could look dramatically different as the Los Angeles City Charter Commission discusses expanding the 15-member City Council. The panel is preparing to discuss three different models of council expansion, each with unique benefits and challenges for Angelenos. This Wednesday, December 3 at 7 p.m. join LA Forward Institute, AAPI Equity Alliance, and LA Voice to explore the three models and consider pros and cons of each model. Organizers will also share how community members can make sure that commissioners hear their voices! RSVP here

This episode was produced by Daniel Huecias and Olive Greenspan. The interview previously aired as part of Mike’s podcast, What’s Next, Los Angeles? (Subscribe today on Apple Podcasts)

We’re moving our first subscriber-only event to 2026! Become a paid subscriber to LA Podcast at thinkforward.la and you’ll be the first to know the details

Alissa and Mike are joined by journalist Sammy Roth to answer all your questions about LA’s climate and environment goals. Why are green bins clustered on every corner? How can we save even more water? When are we weaning ourselves off coal? And is California slowly losing its status as a global environmental leader? Plus: a new way to think about getting to Dodger Stadium.

Los Angeles Times: “Green bins clog L.A. curbs as city’s organic waste program goes into overdrive”

Thanks to The Los Feliz Neighborhood Council for the best video on the Great Green Bin Apocalypse of 2025

One LA resident estimates the botched bin rollout cost $4 million that Sanitation Department doesn’t have

What can you compost in your green bin? Here’s a good guide

Meanwhile, many LA residents are about to pay more for less trash pickup while Sanitation general manager Barbara Romero is departing at the end of the year. Some advocates, like Bruce Reznik of LA Waterkeeper are saying she was pushed out

LA’s stormwater capture for this water year (since October 1) is equivalent to 10 Rose Bowls

Now LADWP is going to double the amount of water it plans to recycle at the Tillman Water Reclamation Plant amidst state orders to take less water from Mono Lake

Over at the Metropolitan Water District (MWD), advocates argue another leader was forced out: Adel Hagekhalil, who the board voted to remove after “an investigation into claims of harassment and a toxic workplace"

Once again, LA Waterkeeper’s Bruce Reznik has strong feelings about who should lead MWD

Yes, LA and California are actually getting off coal: this month!

LADWP plans to also convert one natural gas plant to hydrogen — although those plans are a bit more controversial

Billionaire hedge-fund founder turned environmentalist Tom Steyer announces campaign for governor — what are his climate credentials? He doesn’t mention environmental issues in his launch video

New York Times: “California’s Environmental Past Confronts Economic Worries of the Present”

One way California is starting to backslide: Gavin Newsom seems to be giving up on his 2035 EV mandate

Sammy has been following the calls for the Dodgers to cut ties with fossil fuel companies

After LA’s City Council voted 12-1 to oppose Metro’s environmental review of the gondola, LA Mayor Karen Bass voted to approve the EIR in her Metro board role. She also had a chance to say something — anything! — about the project, and she didn’t

Subscribe to Sammy’s newsletter, Climate-Colored Goggles

This week’s episode was produced by Kristen Torres

The reporting and analysis you hear in the show is put together by our rotating cast of producers and co-hosts every week. All opinions expressed on the show are solely those of co-hosts and may not represent the views of LA Forward

We’re moving our first subscriber-only event to 2026! Become a paid subscriber to LA Podcast at thinkforward.la and you’ll be the first to know the details

Mike, Rachel, Godfrey, and Olga analyze the significance of last week’s vote by LA’s City Council to limit annual rent increases for 1.5 million tenants — and somehow explain it all using Dodgers metaphors. The LAPD and city attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto are bucking civilian oversight in a variety of shocking (or maybe not-so-shocking) ways. Then, how labor power is brewing at your local Starbucks.

LA’s City Council voted to limit rent increases in rent-controlled units to 1 to 4%, based on an annual formula published by the Los Angeles Housing Department — a big change from the current 3 to 10% cap. It is the first time since 1985 that the formula for rent increases has been changed

Some see the council vote through the lens of the Zohran Mamdani victory in the New York City mayoral election. That misses the five-year arc of progressive victories in LA, which we discussed on last week’s show. Those victories have focused heavily on tenant protections, including the pandemic-era eviction moratorium, the passage of a “just cause” eviction ordinance, and the funding of a right to counsel for tenants facing eviction

On the council floor, the legislation was pushed by the progressive renters bloc of Nithya Raman, Hugo Soto-Martínez, Eunisses Hernandez, and Ysabel Jurado. But it is the undeniable result of years of organizing and hard work from the housing justice activists, like the members of the Keep LA Housed coalition

Housing justice activists had pushed for a 0 to 3% formula, while the landlord lobby wanted the old rules to stay in place. In the end, tenants won a huge chunk of what they wanted, but the landlords still tried to claim a partial victory, saying they defeated a more extreme proposal

The council action was based in large part by a study conducted by the Economic Roundtable, an esteemed nonprofit public benefit research organization that has long been a source of analytical foundations for L.A.’s progressive policies. The organization, which issued the report last fall, shut its doors recently after a 34-year run

LAPD has been all over the headlines lately, for all the wrong reasons. The department is refusing to release crime data, warning it could lead to public panic and bad public policy. (Um, what about Citizen?) 

Experts in public records law scoff at the LAPD assertion that withholding data is in the public interest 

Meanwhile, LAPD spends millions of dollars annually shaping public narrative

LAPD and City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto are fighting to preserve the department’s right to use force on journalists at recent protests. They’ve been sharply rebuked by the courts and by a unanimous LA City Council. Despite the legal and political reprimand, LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell is still pushing back

LA Daily News: “Los Angeles city attorney to press: drop dead”

The LAPD is also pushing back on spending restrictions in this year’s budget, blowing way past the number of authorized hires and putting the city in further fiscal jeopardy

Mike considers the LAPD’s bucking of civilian oversight to be significant, harkening back to days when the LAPD ran roughshod over LA’s elected officials. If you can find it, Mike recommends Joe Domanick’s excellent 1994 book: “To Protect and To Serve: the LAPD’s Century of War in the City of Dreams”

Did you know current charter reform conversations do not include LAPD reform? Join an LA Forward teach-in on Policing and LA's City Charter on Thursday, November 20 from 6 to 7 p.m. to learn more. Details and RSVP here

The Guardian: ‘Red cup rebellion’: striking Starbucks baristas urge customers to stay away”

Here’s where Starbucks workers are striking around LA

Starbucks Workers United also filed a complaint with the IOC after Starbucks was named official coffee partner of the 2028 Olympics. As the LA Times reports, the complaint says “Starbucks’ treatment of U.S. workers looking to unionize and bargain a contract — as well as allegations of forced labor abroad — conflict with the Olympic Games’ code of ethics”

Catch upcoming interviews with Council District 9 candidates on Mike's show What's Next, Los Angeles?

This episode was produced by Kristen Torres

The reporting and analysis you hear in the show is put together by our rotating cast of producers and co-hosts every week. All opinions expressed on the show are solely those of co-hosts and may not represent the views of LA Forward

We’re moving our first subscriber-only event to 2026! Become a paid subscriber to LA Podcast at thinkforward.la and you’ll be the first to know the details

Alissa, Mike, and Rachel break down last week’s election results and some major progressive victories. Zohran Mamdani is the new democratic socialist mayor of New York City! Prop 50 passes, temporarily redrawing California’s districts! And a blue wave produces downballot wins nationwide! What does it all mean for LA politics as our 2026 election cycle kicks into gear? Plus, surveying the state’s gerontocracy as 85-year-old Nancy Pelosi announces her retirement.

Zohran Mamdani wins New York City’s mayoral election: watch his victory speech

New York City saw turnout that was the highest since the 1969 mayoral race. Over 1 million votes were cast for Mamdani, even with fewer eligible voters — the electorate has shrunk to 5.3 million from 5.6 million four years ago

Alissa thought this clip of Jamaal Bowman at Mamdani’s victory party was the exact right sentiment

Contrary to pundit belief, socialism has been a part of New York City’s political fabric over the years, but as Mamdani takes power, the stakes are high. Luckily he has an outstanding all-women transition team

Here in California, Prop 50 passed easily, temporarily redrawing the state’s Congressional districts. Here’s what happens next

Prop 50 turnout is 38.6 percent so far, matching the Gavin Newsom recall election from 2021(another odd-numbered year election)

Yes on Prop 50 leads by 28 points, 64 percent to 36 percent. Kamala Harris won the state in 2024 by only 20 points, writes the New York Times’ Nate Cohn in “Why Democrats Could Win the Redistricting War”

What about LA? Watch and share Mike’s video on our Zohran Mamdani moment

Mayoral candidate Austin Beutner is trying to hit Karen Bass on affordability but he isn’t presenting his own solutions for making the city more affordable. Meanwhile, as we discussed last week, housing justice leader Rae Huang is going to declare her candidacy soon. Still not sure about Rick Caruso, who is going to make a decision about mayor or governor in the next few weeks

85-year old Nancy Pelosi announced she will not seek re-election

“The challenge for Democrats is to wrest control from the gnarled grip of gerontocracy while containing the chaos that will naturally ensue from younger politicians who are mad as hell at their own party,” writes New York Magazine’s Rebecca Traister in “It’s My Party and I’ll Leave When I Want To“

Many young progressives who won aren’t being talked about as much this week, like Michelle Wu, who ran unopposed for her second term as mayor of Boston (maybe she should have been quoted as one of the mayors giving advice to Mamdani)

Progressive prosecutors still notched big wins coast-to-coast

Catch upcoming interviews with Council District 9 candidates on Mike's show What's Next, Los Angeles?

This episode was produced by Sophie Bridges

The reporting and analysis you hear in the show is put together by our rotating cast of producers and co-hosts every week. All opinions expressed on the show are solely those of co-hosts and may not represent the views of LA Forward

We’re moving our first subscriber-only event to 2026! Become a paid subscriber to LA Podcast at thinkforward.la and you’ll be the first to know the details

Alissa, Godfrey, and Mike review a new city controller assessment of LAPD’s “armed-first, police-first, patrol-first” response to mental health crisis calls. Plus, what in the world is going on at LAX? The people mover is delayed to June 2026 at least, while billions in public transit investments are about to be undermined by new elevated roadways that are certain to make airport traffic worse.

If you’re hearing this on Monday — get your ballot in today or Tuesday!

The LA City Controller’s office published a comprehensive assessment of LAPD’s Mental Evaluation Unit and Systemwide Mental Assessment Response Team (SMART) program

There’s some troubling data: “Only 6% of the incident report narratives describe an attempt to de-escalate by the responding officers and/or SMART; 61% include no description of an attempt to de-escalate, and 33% describe no need for de-escalation”

Interestingly, LAPD would not comment on the report to the Los Angeles Times

“When it comes to LAPD mental health crisis response, LAPD requires an armed-first, police-first, patrol-first response to mental health crisis incidents,” Dinah Manning, who also is the controller’s chief of strategic initiatives, told LAist

Efforts to remove LAPD from some types of traffic stops have also stalled, although there is a set of draft recommendations from 2023

Compare these efforts to the very successful outcomes of LA’s Unarmed Model of Crisis Response, which we discussed in September: “6,700 calls were diverted from 911 dispatch and fewer than 4.1% of calls required police backup”

Karen Bass appointed a new LAFD chief: 30-year department veteran Jaime Moore

LAFD Chief Moore has his first big challenge: reports that firefighters were ordered to leave the still-smoldering Lachman Fire a week before the Palisades Fire may have started in the same place

Unrig LA spotted a big update in the mayoral race: pastor and housing justice advocate Reverend Rae Chen Huang enters the race to Bass’s left

Alissa is losing her mind about spending $1.5 billion on new roadways into the LAX horseshoe

Nick Andert made a great video about why this is such a bad idea

Meanwhile, what is happening with the LAX people mover? It was supposed to open in 2023 and is still at 95% completion

LAWA CEO John Ackerman told the LA Times that the people mover will not be open until June 2026 and may not be open in time for the World Cup

This week’s show is produced by Olive Greenspan

The reporting and analysis you hear in the show is put together by our rotating cast of producers and co-hosts every week. All opinions expressed on the show are solely those of co-hosts and may not represent the views of LA Forward

We’re hosting a party for all paid subscribers soon! Become a paid subscriber today at thinkforward.la and you’ll get the invite. Your support is critical to enabling us to release new episodes every week. Thank you for bringing more independent voices to California media with your paid subscriptions

Alissa, Mike, and guest co-host Liz Chou discuss a secretive $2 million payout to LA County’s CEO, who claims she suffered “reputational harm” from Measure G. An LA City charter reform proposal would bring dramatic changes to the Board of Public Works. Yet another fire investigation, this time from Republican senators who are trying to blame the flames on DEI. And remembering river advocate Melanie Winter.

LA County CEO Fesia Davenport was “quietly paid a $2 million settlement,” as LAist reported first, “over claims she was harmed” by the passage of Measure G one year ago, the ballot measure that expanded the Board of Supervisors from five members to nine members, and changed her position from an appointed role to an elected role

As Julia Wick reported in her final story for the Los Angeles Times, many think that Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, who pushed for Measure G, would run for the County CEO role. “There are people who are never going to be convinced that I created this measure without seeing a seat for myself in it,” she says. “I’m not interested in convincing people of that. I’m interested in doing the work”

“With six months remaining before the commission’s recommendations are due, several commissioners, city officials and good government advocates told LAist they have concerns about transparency and independence,” LAist reports. “Some say they doubt the commission is in a position to accomplish a fraction of what it first set out to do”

More on LA City’s Charter Reform Commission, including upcoming meetings. Sign up for the charter reform newsletter

Read more proposals on planning and infrastructure charter reform platforms from Investing in Place and Streets for All, including dissolving the Board of Public Works. Here are some of the reforms being proposed by the commission, and a set of recommendations from Mayor Karen Bass

LA Forward has both Governance Reform and Capital Infrastructure Program working groups

Liz reports on Councilmember Monica Rodriguez’s appearance at last week’s charter reform meeting and why she accused the commission of having an “agenda”

Subscribe to Liz’s newsletter, The LA Reporter

U.S. Senate investigations subcommittee requested Palisades Fire records from LA Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson including "records referring or relating to the creation or oversight of diversity, equity, and inclusion ('DEI') hiring policies for the LAFD and the LADWP"

As the LA Times notes, the letter mentions the Eaton Fire but no similar request was sent to LA County representatives

LA County passes an emergency declaration against ICE

Remembering river advocate Melanie Winter, who died last week, through this beautiful obituary as well as a 2024 profile, both by Ian James at the LA Times

This week’s show is produced by Olive Greenspan

The reporting and analysis you hear in the show is put together by our rotating cast of producers and co-hosts every week. All opinions expressed on the show are solely those of co-hosts and may not represent the views of LA Forward

We’re hosting a party for all paid subscribers soon! Become a paid subscriber today at thinkforward.la and you’ll get the invite. Your support is critical to enabling us to release new episodes every week. Thank you for bringing more independent voices to California media with your paid subscriptions

Mike, Godfrey and Carla welcome former LAUSD superintendent Austin Beutner to the LA mayoral race as the first serious challenger to incumbent Karen Bass. The state’s housing department sends a blistering letter to the City of Los Angeles about its obstruction of affordable housing in Venice. Plus, Governor Gavin Newsom signs (and vetoes) major pieces of legislation, including the highly anticipated passage of transit-density bill SB 79.

Warning that Los Angeles is “adrift,” Austin Beutner throws his hat in the ring for mayor with a four-minute launch video and coverage from major media outlets like the New York Times and Politico

Beutner was superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District during a turbulent time. The historic six-day 2019 teachers strike happened on his watch, and he oversaw the district's pandemic shift to online learning and food-relief efforts that served over 100 million free meals

Beutner also served as publisher of the Los Angeles Times for a year, pushing the paper to do a series of editorials giving letter grades to elected officials

Mike talked about Beutner’s entry — and a lot more — with Bass during a fireside chat for the Pat Brown Institute. You can listen to the interview in its entirety on this week’s episode of What’s Next, Los Angeles

The state’s Department of Housing & Community Development sent a stern letter to city officials for road-blocking already-approved homeless and affordable housing on a public parking lot in Venice. The letter says LA is now in danger of losing its “pro-housing” designation

The letter came just days after the City Council voted to support a “mobility hub” study on the same parking lot put forth by Councilmember Traci Park, who is trying to kill the housing project

Governor Newsom issued a flurry of bill signings and veto statements last week, weighing in on the hundreds of bills sent to him by the legislature this session. To the delight of housing production advocates, Newsom signed SB 79, which will limit the ability of cities to say no to some additional housing in certain areas near transit hubs

Will SB 79 have any impact in your neighborhood? While people are still debating precisely where it will apply, LAist did its best to understand the impacts

Newsom also signed a bill to raise wages for prisoners who fight wildfires, and a bill making it easier for Uber and Lyft drivers to unionize.The governor vetoed a bill that would make it easier for transgender patients to get a long-term supply to hormone-therapy drugs.

CalMatters has extensive coverage of what Newsom signed and what he vetoed

LA Forward has a full schedule of Prop 50 events leading up to November 4

Next week, Hollywood FWD will host “ULA: 3 Years In” at the Barnsdall Gallery Theatre. The October 29 panel will feature: Joe Donlin from United to House LA; Greg Good formerly with the LA Housing Department; Nella McOsker with Central City Association of Los Angeles; Shane Phillips from UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies; and Zerita Jones with ULA Citizens Oversight Committee. Register here

This week’s show is produced by Olive Greenspan

The reporting and analysis you hear in the show is put together by our rotating cast of producers and co-hosts every week. All opinions expressed on the show are solely those of co-hosts and may not represent the views of LA Forward We’re hosting a party for all paid subscribers soon! Become a paid subscriber today at thinkforward.la and you’ll get the invite. Your support is critical to enabling us to release new episodes every week. Thank you for bringing more independent voices to California media with your paid subscriptions

Alissa, Mike, and Kate recount a dramatic week as an arson suspect is taken into custody for allegedly starting a fire which smoldered underground for a week, then rekindled in high winds to become the deadly Palisades Fire. Analysis of LAFD’s after-action report reveals more communications breakdowns. Plus, ballots for Prop 50 hit mailboxes.

Former Palisades resident Jonathan Rinderknecht, also known as Jon Rinder, was arrested on a federal criminal complaint for starting what federal prosecutors allege eventually became the Palisades Fire

Los Angeles Times: “Florida man ‘maliciously’ started Palisades fire, then tried to cover his tracks, authorities allege”

Here’s the video he watched in the days before the fire: “Un Zder, Un The" by French artist Josman

What’s a “holdover” fire? LAist’s Jacob Margolis has a great explainer on how a fire can rekindle a week later

When the fires started, LA was in the “bottom two percent of historical records” for soil moisture readings

LAFD did not use thermal imaging to confirm the fire was out and least one fire expert (anonymously) claimed that cleanup from the Lachman Fire was not done properly. This raises more questions about liability: “This affidavit puts the responsibility on the fire department. There needs to be a commission examining why this rekindled fire was allowed to reignite,” said Ed Nordskog, former leader of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department’s arson unit. “The arsonist set the first fire, but the fire department proactively has a duty to do certain things”

Here’s LAFD’s after-action report on the Palisades Fire and good analysis by LAist

Alissa is, once again, worried about who is supposed to give warnings in LA County

Meanwhile, Rinderknecht might face the death penalty, and Kate reported at Spectrum that he’ll be back in court later this week

Listen to Kate’s Rebuilding LA podcast

LA Times: “Who is spending money on Prop 50?”

CalMatters has a good look at how Prop 50’s mid-decade redistricting would change representation in other ways

You should probably not mail in your ballot on the last day due to new USPS rules, so be sure to take it to the special ballot boxes. There is also a small mistake on the guide

LA Forward has a full schedule of Prop 50 events leading up to November 4, including a ballot party on Sunday, October 19 at 2 p.m. at the Hermosillo in Highland Park

Check out Mike Bonin's interview with California Environmental Voters ED Mike Young on "What's Next, Los Angeles?" about the good, the bad, and the ugly of this year's environmental legislation in Sacramento (Apple Podcasts, Spotify)

On the next What’s Next, Los Angeles?, Mike will be talking to Loyola Marymount University faculty members whose union was abruptly not recognized by leaders at the school claiming there was a “religious exemption”

This week’s show is produced by Olive Greenspan

The reporting and analysis you hear in the show is put together by our rotating cast of producers and co-hosts every week. All opinions expressed on the show are solely those of co-hosts and may not represent the views of LA Forward

We’re hosting a party for all paid subscribers soon! Become a paid subscriber today at thinkforward.laand you’ll get the invite. Your support is critical to enabling us to release new episodes every week. Thank you for bringing more independent voices to California media with your paid subscriptions.