🐦 The LA Reporter, Issue 18: It’s the LA City Council’s problem now

The Charter Reform Commission that’s been meeting for the past nine months is near term … and expected to be pushing out some thorny proposals to the City Council very soon. Today’s meeting will likely be the last time for this citizen panel to hash out the last batch of charter revision language before hitting upon their April 2 deadline.

The proposals include changes to give the City Council and other elected leaders a bit more power to hold the LAPD accountable, and another that would expand the mayor’s power, including allowing the mayor to participate in council meetings by introducing motions and take part in confidential, closed session conversations on legal matters.

But one of the thorniest of all the proposals they’re taking up is one that would break up the City Attorney’s Office into two offices. One office would remain elected and would prosecute criminal cases (for violations of city law, along with those that are misdemeanors under state law), and another would be appointed, with the attorney giving legal advice to elected officials in a style that is more familiar in smaller cities all over Los Angeles County. 

But City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto has been dead set against any proposal that makes her office appointed. On numerous occasions she has spoken out against the idea, and she just filed another lengthy letter opposing it. Many others are uncomfortable with the idea, too, because it makes the role into one in which the allegiance of the attorney is to the elected official or officials who appointed them, and not directly to voters.

Yet some have pointed to a ugly side to the status quo. The stalled Venice Dell affordable housing project is one case that has been pointed to. Affordable housing projects themselves tend to be highly politicized, especially when they are built in neighborhoods, often affluent, that balk at projects aimed at housing people who don’t earn a high wage or who are unhoused.

The Venice Dell project was approved by the City Council in 2022, but it has faced one obstacle after another, including from the City Attorney’s Office. After Feldstein Soto was elected, that office instructed staff at city departments to halt work on processing the project, after community groups filed lawsuits against it. The City Attorney’s Office has also come out against the project in a letter to the Coastal Commission, which is one of the bodies where the Venice Dell project needed approval.

The role that the City Attorney’s Office has taken, at least under the current attorney, Feldstein Soto, on this project has been a chief example used for why part of that office’s duties need to be “depoliticized,” or at least taken out of a context in which widely differing political points of view could easily clash. Some argue the legal advice that city elected officials, as well as city departments, receive from a city attorney should align with the intent of those proposing legislative language or authorizing the contracts that get negotiated.

Things have been so thorny around this issue of a “politicized” City Attorney’s office, that even the legal language needed to draft the charter language to bifurcate that office has gotten a bit political. The Charter Reform Commission has been reluctant to let the City Attorney’s Office write that language, and had sought to hire their own attorney. That request was denied by the City Attorney’s Office. Then they made that request to the City Council — this proposal has not moved. Further, the City Attorney, Feldstein Soto, offered up her own recommended “outside” firms to work with the commission. The City Council also has not taken action on that, even shelving one of them. Now time has run out, and the commission’s director, Justin Ramirez, was left to write a note to commissioners saying that unfortunately, the charter reform language for the City Attorney proposal won’t get the benefit of a lawyer’s look-through.

Ramirez wrote that “these reforms are our best draft at creating an elected City Prosecutor and an appointed City Attorney. I have discussed with staff of various City Council offices that if the Council does decide to move forward with this proposal, the Council can then utilize outside counsel to review and edit the final draft if they choose. This seems to be an acceptable approach from those I’ve spoken with so far.”

In other words, the matter of the City Attorney’s Office will now have to be the City Council’s political problem.

Meanwhile, the work of the Charter Reform Commission and the City Council have already started to overlap. During a committee meeting this week, City Council member Katy Yaroslavsky and others received a report from the City Administrative Officer on the proposal to change the charter so that budget planning will go to a two-year cycle, rather than an annual one. A lengthy policy discussion ensued, and at the end of it, Yaroslavsky motioned to make a change to part of the proposal. Meanwhile that same proposal is going to be voted on tonight by the Charter Reform Commission, at the same time Yaroslavsky’s amendment was submitted.

Los Angeles’s first mayoral debate on Monday featured a succinct overview of the differences of opinion that surrounds the Measure ULA “mansion tax,” which taxes the sale or transfer of high-valued properties in Los Angeles, the proceeds of which then go toward building affordable housing, retaining attorneys for tenants so they have a fighting chance in eviction court, emergency rental assistance and other programs to keep people housed.

Since it was passed, city leaders have faced pressure from developers to get it repealed, saying it’s made it difficult for their projects to pencil out, to make financial sense. But there is an opposing view, from community groups, many of them advocating for tenants, that worked on getting the tax passed, that says those reactions from developers are a knee jerk reaction, and that the market will eventually adjust to the tax. And then there is a third, Goldilocks type of approach, to adjust the tax’s language to give carveouts to some developers as a way to soften the effect of the measure on developers. This “just right” approach also warns that the opponents of the measure — such as the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association — have organized behind a state ballot measure that could ultimately nullify it.

Meanwhile, some studies have argued that it was likely responsible for slowing down development, while other analysis argue that there are other possible reasons, such as shifting regulation that may have caused some developers to hold off on their projects until the new planning rules have been finalized. A new analysis of projects during the last 33 months that applied a "pro forma” approach to seeing if projects would have penciled out even without Measure ULA was also just released by the original authors of the tax measure, also arguing that other economic factors unrelated the Measure ULA prevented some projects from being built. These analysis will likely be the subject of a newly formed Measure ULA ad hoc committee at LA City Council, the first meeting of which is expected to be scheduled for this week. That ad hoc committee is chaired by Council member Ysabel Jurado, and has two other members, John Lee and Imelda Padilla.

At Monday’s debate, the three mayoral candidates on the stage were largely a reflection of the three major perspectives out there now. There was Rae Huang, a housing advocate whose stated raison d’etre for entering the race and wanting to oust the incumbent Karen Bass was the mayor’s failed attempt last fall to gut Measure ULA, and whose approach to housing is anti-speculative. There was Adam Miller, a tech entrepreneur with a “letting capitalism work” approach to the housing and homelessness issue. And there was the Goldilocks of the bunch, Nithya Raman, who had just before jumping into the race, made a failed attempt to present a compromise that would exempt properties during their first fifteen years of existence from having to pay the tax (this is aimed at incentivizing developers that build and then quickly sell to want to do those projects). Raman was a major supporter of Measure ULA, but she said she proposed the compromise because she was convinced by studies arguing it was affecting the market, and she also pointed to the threat of a state ballot measure that could kill the tax altogether if placed on the ballot and passed. She has described her own position as trying to protect the tax.

An added layer to the debate Monday is that one of the organizers, Housing Action Coalition, has been one of the advocates pushing for Raman’s compromise package. The question asked at the debate about Measure ULA was asked by one of the moderators, Jesse Zwick, the Southern California Director of Housing Action Coalition. The debated was co-hosted with transportation advocacy group Streets for All, and its CEO, Michael Schneider, was also moderating.

Here’s a transcript of that portion of the debate, which can also be viewed here:

Jesse Zwick: Measure ULA, sold to the voters as a mansion tax, is a tax on all high-value real estate transactions that passed as a citizens initiative in 2022. It has raised significant revenue for affordable housing and tenant assistance, but numerous studies from UCLA, Rand and USC all indicate that it has devastated new multifamily housing production in the city, reducing permitting by roughly 50% compared to neighboring jurisdictions around the county, and has even prevented the construction of more deed-restricted affordable housing than it has been able to fund. Would you keep it, repeal it or reform it, and if reform, what should that look like? Starting with Nithya, then Rae and Adam.

Nithya Raman: So measure ULA is an incredible resource for the city, one that I campaigned for and led phone banks for, but I think it's one that we have to fight to keep by reforming it. It has, to me, led to a significant drop in multi-family construction, exactly the kind of housing that we need. And I think it will continue to do that. I also think that it endangers a lot of funding across the state. There are measures at the state level that are being put in place to actually eliminate all transfer taxes because of the damage that ULA is doing in Los Angeles. My reform, my reform is to keep the best of ULA, because I know what it's doing for LA, it's giving us eviction defense dollars. It's giving us money for affordable housing that we didn't have before. And my reform, which exempts the first 15 years of new multifamily construction would keep the majority of ULA dollars, while still ensuring that we are able to build much needed new housing and to stave off threats from Sacramento that threaten to eliminate ULA entirely.

Rae Huang: This is where Nithya and I disagree greatly. We should not be giving tax breaks to developers. We should be increasing the number of housing and making sure that all of our revenue is going to building housing. Funding housing doesn't matter if we don't actually build housing. Our current leadership, including Nithya and Karen Bass, has entertained revisions under legal and political pressure and supported motions to revisit or adjust implementation timelines, creating instability in both funding and project planning. They are dangling the idea that developers will get a tax break, and that's why they haven't been building. But we need to move forward. This plan, this measure, was decided and determined together with communities, and yet, Nithya and Karen Bass together decided that they would continue to move forward in changing revisions without the community input. This is not okay. I am not going to be that kind of Mayor. I will be working with communities to ensure when we need to make amendments and revisions, we do it collectively, especially to ensure that the people are the ones who are going to make the change.

Adam Miller: I didn't need to go to three years of law school at UCLA to know that ULA was a terribly drafted law. ULA had a completely detrimental impact on the point it was trying to make, which was to drive more affordable housing. In fact, most people don't know this. ULA actually even applies to affordable housing projects. So if you were to build a new affordable housing project, you get the ULA tax. And the reality is, ULA has lowered our housing supply, has made it worse to build housing in LA and is exactly the kind of law that we don't need. It needs to be greatly reformed. There is nothing wrong with how it was sold. A mansion tax that's going to give money to build more affordable housing, if that's what it did, that would be a fine law. What actually occurred was something that detracted from real estate investment in this city, which makes this, yet again, one of the worst places in America to build, and we need to.

Huang: Can I give a rebuttal, by the way?

Zwick: Hold on. Councilmember Raman was invoked in your answer, so she will get 30 seconds.

Raman: Oh … Sure, I forgot that we could rebut. I do want to say that for reforms to Measure ULA, my office and I worked very, very closely with both the proponents of ULA, with our labor partners and with the broader Los Angeles community, both affordable housing developers and market rate developers to come up with the proposals that would preserve the bulk of dollars, 90% of ULA dollars, while still allowing new housing when we're in a housing shortage to be built. We worked for months on this issue, and this is exactly the kind of community engagement that our office has always led on and will continue to do if I'm elected Mayor.

Zwick: Thank you.

Huang: Can I give a rebuttal?

Michael Schneider: We're going to move on.

Mayoral candidate Nithya Raman, city attorney candidate Marissa Roy and others get the seal of approval of group that wants more housing production: Abundant Housing LA, an organization that advocates for increasing housing production, has endorsed Nithya Raman in the mayor’s race, as well as Marissa Roy for City Attorney and Henry Mantel for the City Council seat on District 5 on the Westside. They also endorsed the incumbents in a few of the other races. Their endorsement page, with detailed descriptions of why they endorsed the candidate, can be found here.

Faizah Malik, candidate in CD11, says her supporters’ signs are getting stolen out right off their private property: Every election, some signs get stolen. It is no different in the race between Malik and incumbent Traci Park on the Westside. But it may have also become a fundraising opportunity for them, with the campaign posting about how a small donation of $25 would pay for seven replacement signs.

Kenneth Mejia held a town hall on Sunday, which helped him qualify for a matching funds boost: City Controller Kenneth Mejia just capped off a weekend campaigning for re-election with a town hall on Sunday, which will help him qualify for matching funds. Usually a candidate would need to be part of a debate with an opponent, but a town hall can substitute for that if “no opponent agrees to debate,” according to the rules. Zach Sokoloff, Mejia’s opponent, had declined to show up for another debate, according to Jane Nguyen of Mejia’s campaign.

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