🐦 The LA Reporter, Issue 14: Didn't they already approve an Olympic Wage?

There are now at least 10 ballot initiatives efforts in the city of Los Angeles, including one that would raise the minimum wage to $30 an hour. There are also a couple of tax measures, one to fund the fire department and the other to pay for recreation and parks related expenses. Proponents of yet another possible ballot measure want to expand LA city’s encampment ban. Five of the efforts recently got cleared to begin gathering signatures.

The most recently filed proposal, submitted via a letter dated Dec. 23, 2025, is what proponents dubbed the “Olympic Wage Initiative.” It calls for raising the minimum wage to $30 an hour by 2030, and it also sets a schedule for that wage to be reached two years earlier for airport and hotel workers, by 2028.

If this sounds familiar, that’s because the Los Angeles City Council recently already adopted an Olympic Wage ordinance, which also is known as the “tourism wage,” to increase airport and hotel worker wages to $30 an hour, by 2028, which is also when LA is set to host the Olympics. The ordinance went into effect in September, with a lot of fanfare. It was considered a big victory after a tough battle. Business groups had tried but failed to put a referendum on the ballot to defeat the wage ordinance. But since the ordinance went into effect, there’s been a bit of a hitch.

Earlier in December, LA City Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson introduced a motion calling for delaying the schedule tourism wage increase by two years, to 2030. That’s prompted some outrage from those who supported it, including the president of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor president Yvonne Wheeler, who called this letter turn in events “shameful.”

Meanwhile, folks who were in the trenches fighting against the earlier referendum effort by business groups may have had an inkling that their fight wouldn’t be over quite yet. An LAX cashier and Unite Here 11 union member had told The LA Reporter last September, shortly after the business groups’ referendum effort failed, that he was already worried about continued pushback from business groups aimed at defeating the tourism wage.

The initiative effort dubbed the Olympic Wage Initiative is still early in the process. A similar proposal to raise the wage for all workers had been floated last summer, amid the contentious battle between labor and business groups over the tourism wage ordinance, but then ultimately withdrawn.

The City Clerk provides regular updates of the status of initiative efforts here, but there is not much detail, readily available to the public, on what exactly is being proposed. The LA Reporter requested some of the paperwork for those efforts, which the City Clerk provided. Here is a rundown of some of the initiatives, with links to some of the associated paperwork:

Olympic Wage Initiative, and other wage initiatives: The latest wage initiative to come in was submitted in late December, and it’s called the Olympic Wage Initiative. The proposed language, which hasn’t been approved for circulation, along with the names of the proponents can be viewed here. This was filed even as another wage initiative, to increase the minimum wage to $25, was cleared on Dec. 10, 2025. The language of that can be found here. There was also another measure submitted last summer, that called for raising the minimum wage for workers citywide in Los Angeles to $30 an hour, but it was subsequently withdrawn by proponents. All three of these minimum wage measures share at least one of the same proponents, and it’s the same firm, Olson Remcho, filing those proposals on the proponents’ behalf.

A pair of sales tax measures: One proposed measure calls for an added 0.5% sales tax to pay for city recreation and parks projects. The submitted proposal can be read here, and a summary of that proposal can be read here. This measure hasn’t been cleared for gathering signatures. Meanwhile, proponents for another tax measure has gotten clearance to collect signatures — for a measure to impose an added 0.5% sales tax to pay for the salaries and expenses of the Los Angeles Fire Department. You can read the language of the measure here.

Encampment prohibition: A proposed measure, to create a ban on encampments and change an existing anti-camping law in Los Angeles known as LAMC 41.18, isn’t cleared for signature gathering, but a summary of the measure has been prepared that lays out a few things the initiative proponents say they would like it to do. One of their goals is to prohibit people from camping on public property such as streets and sidewalks during the day, when they refuse shelter. It also calls for removing requirements to notify people when clearing encampments, including no longer requiring signage to be put up. It would also call for requiring the city to clear encampments within a specific time frame, and give people the ability to sue the city “to compel city enforcement.” Read the submitted proposal here, and the summary here.

The Nation magazine’s January 2026 issue features a special package on Los Angeles, which appears to be what the magazine’s publisher and its executive director describes as the first stop in an “expanded focus by The Nation on Donald Trump’s assault on the blue zones of a nation he is bent on tearing apart.”

The package includes a Q&A with L.A. Mayor Karen Bass, who tells journalist Gail Reed that “if you look at the cities in the president’s crosshairs, they are overwhelmingly governed by African American mayors. In my opinion, it was an attempt to drive a wedge between African Americans and Latinos, even though there are plenty of Black immigrants. In fact, the raids in Miami primarily targeted Haitians. We have a lot of Black immigrants here from Central America, South America, the Caribbean, and African countries.”

She also tells Reed that “Trump is dosing the American public. In LA, we got a dose on immigration. Will Angelenos tolerate it? We did not – Angelenos stood strong. Our city was more united than I have ever seen it. We stood strong, we stood together, we were morally outraged as a city.”

Bass was also asked about progressive platforms, to which she responded by sketching out her “practical” approach to “ideology.” She mentions that when she ran for office, she had ambitions of making city buses and trains free to ride, “but then I faced the reality that it’s not affordable post-Covid. I could stay stuck in my ideology, or I could make as much of the [transit] system as free as possible. Right now,  that means young people and students. And that was doable.” 

Bass’s re-election bid is being challenged by numerous candidates including Rae Huang, a progressive characterized as being further left than Bass. Huang’s platform includes making buses “fast and free.” (Candidates officially file with the City Clerk to run in February, but in order to raise and spend money on their campaigns, they must file earlier with the City Ethics Commission in order to meet requirements to disclose campaign finance activity. And according to the Ethics Commission site, Bass is potentially being challenged by 18 people at the moment, who may or may not end up filing with the clerk in a month.)

Other articles in The Nation’s special package include a piece by Bill Gallegos, former executive director of Communities for a Better Environment and member of The Nation’s editorial board, that gives an account of how L.A. resisted the immigration raids, from a big picture perspective that tells the tale from some of the city’s more established advocacy groups and political players. (Btw, there is also a good piece about LA’s efforts at resistance, that gives a close to the ground look of what that resistance by some newer groups looked like, published last fall in the publication Hammer and Hope.)

The special package on Los Angeles also features another piece, Breaking the LAPD’s Choke Hold, that is an adaptation of a new book published last October, by former chair of the ACLU Foundation of Southern California and music executive Danny Goldberg. The article draws comparisons between former, infamous LAPD chief Daryl Gates’ style and that of Trump’s. The book the piece is based on is an “insider” look at a pivotal 16 months between when four LAPD officers’ brutally beat Rodney King and the resignation of police chief Daryl Gates. During that period, what became known as the Warren Christopher Commission was convened by then-Mayor Tom Bradley (the city’s first Black mayor and among the country’s first, and a former LAPD officer) that then resulted in voters approving amendments to the LA city charter in 1992. The Los Angeles Public Library has a couple dozen copies of Goldberg’s book, Liberals With Attitude: The Rodney King Beating and the Fight for the Soul of Los Angeles.

Mayor Karen Bass is often described as a “progressive,” but some on the left in Los Angeles have pointed out inconsistencies in her actions, including some they consider to be outright betrayals of that progressive brand. They include Melina Abdullah, a longtime political ally of Bass’s and a leader of Black Lives Matter, Los Angeles, who writes in an “open letter” she penned to Bass and the “Black political class” that was published in the LA Progressive over the holiday break, that Bass is no longer the progressive politician she once looked up to.

In the letter, Abdullah pointed to how there had been signs over the years, but the “betrayals poured in fast and furious” when Bass ran for mayor in 2022. As she was running, Bass promised to increase funding for the Los Angeles Police Department, and then when elected, she proceeded to appoint police chief Jim McDonnell over the objections of many on the left (including many immigrant rights advocates). Bass also worked to secure raises for police officers, Abdullah wrote. And then, in one of the final nails in the coffin, Bass sought the endorsement of the police officers’ union for her latest campaign for mayor. In her prior campaign for mayor in 2022, the police officers’ union, the Los Angeles Police Protective League, had endorsed her opponent, Rick Caruso.

Abdullah closed the “open letter” by stating that she “is staunchly opposed to a Caruso or even a [Austin] Beutner mayoralty” and that she appreciates Bass’s “rhetorical support to those who are most targeted by ICE.” But Abdullah said she disagreed with Bass’s recent characterization of “young Black Angelenos” who were protesting her as a “threat.” Abdullah said that those Angelenos ought to be viewed as “courageous,” and so she issued “a call for Mayor Bass to match that courage and return to the progressive values that she once advanced.”

Abdullah’s open letter didn’t mention the latest kerfuffle. But it did come after it happene. Bass had riled some of the more moderate members of the LA City Council when she made a push just before the holiday break to get them to go against the approved budget for the LAPD so that there could be more funding to hire police officers.

Members of the council have generally come to agree that the LAPD’s sworn employees — the police officers — should share the burden in cutting costs, as the city faces a particularly dire budget crisis that is threatening city worker layoffs (and has prompted a cost-cutting exercise ahead of the next budget deliberations). Some are concerned that continuing to increase funding for police officers, without identifying new sources of income, will take away from the city’s ability to fund other needed services that also contribute to safety, including keeping up with infrastructure needs such as fixing street lights, and painting crosswalks, which some members of the public have resorted to doing through “guerrilla” operations, as Yaroslavsky pointed out during the last meeting before the holiday break.

That meeting was a contentious one. Bass had issued a letter, just before that meeting, to the City Council urging the body increase funding for police hiring. She pointed to upcoming major events as a reason, arguing that “we must have enough officers to effectively and sustainably keep Angelenos safe in the coming years, especially as we host major events like the 2026 FIFA World Cup and 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games welcoming millions of visitors to our neighborhoods.” When the City Council voted instead for a smaller increase than was being requested, Bass issued another statement expressing her disappointment, saying that the decision “risks taking us backward.”

The Los Angeles Charter Reform Commission might finally get its 13th member. The seat has sat vacant for months, leaving the panel one person shy of complete. Now, Councilman Bob Blumenfield has nominated Jason Levin, a former communications director for his office (from 2013 until 2016) who had gone on to work for the public relations firms Cerrell and Edelman.

Levin has a far lower profile than former City Councilman and LAPD officer Dennis Zine, the last person Blumenfield tried to nominate. But Zine’s nomination didn’t go too well, with some anti-immigrant commentary by Zine surfacing, as well as a clip of him making homophobic jokes. Zine eventually withdrew, writing in an opinion piece that he decided to do so after concluding that the City Council — which votes to confirm members of the commission and will ultimately take up the commission’s recommendations — was too anti-LAPD.

Levin’s nomination is being made pretty late in the process, since the commission is getting ready to wrap up deliberations so that it can prepare a set of recommendations by March, to submit to the City Council by April, at the latest.

Finally, next week, there’s a chance to catch a screening of Crushing Wheelchairs, a film by current and formerly unhoused residents that “invites audiences to experience the realities of poverty and homelessness directly from those who struggle against it everyday but who rarely (if ever) are the ones in front of or behind the camera.” The screening will be on Wednesday, Jan. 7, at 6:30, at 2220 Arts + Archives, 2220 Beverly Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 90057. Tickets can be purchased here.

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