The LA Reporter, Issue 4: How to beat the mass extinction blues

Blink and you’ll miss it. Erroll Southers, a controversial re-appointment to the LAPD Commission, was confirmed by the LA City Council on Friday, but it was initially difficult for many to tell it had even happened.

That’s because it all went down in an unusual way. Mayor Karen Bass’s re-appointment of Southers, a USC security official, to the Board of Police Commissioners, was signed off on by the LA City Council failing to do anything to act on the confirmation. And there was no announcement to the public that by not voting on the issue by Friday’s deadline, Southers would be automatically confirmed.

Southers’ re-appointment comes nearly a year and a half after calls were made for him to be removed from the police commission, where he served as president. As a top security official at USC, he faced criticism from groups like Black Lives Matter LA and the university’s professors over the deployment of LAPD officers in riot gear and campus police to dismantle encampments set up by students at the campus to protest the genocide in Gaza. Southers was also under fire for being involved in a decision to cancel the graduation speech at USC of a pro-Palestinian valedictorian, Asna Tabassum.

Most such appointments are rubber-stamped with a unanimous vote, and the confirmations tend to be celebrated in a public way. But when Councilmember John Lee, who chairs the Public Safety Committee, requested that the confirmation vote be delayed to the next week, there was no verbal announcement or explanation that it was the last day to act, and that by not taking up Southers’ appointment by that day, he would be automatically confirmed. The agenda did include a written warning about this, and the deadline for acting is written in red in the City Council file for Southers’ appointment.

It was unclear which of the council members knew what had really happened, but when The LA Reporter asked what Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez thought of Southers’ confirmation, as she was getting into an elevator, she said, “you’ll have to find out when it comes up.”

And when The LA Reporter tried to explain that this was the last day to act, Hernandez said, “I don’t know if that’s accurate.” She said she would check in with her staff and get back to The LA Reporter.

Meanwhile, Josue Marcus, a spokesperson for the City Clerk’s Office, confirmed what one observer — Rob Quan, of Unrig LA, who raised the alarm about the under-the-radar appointment on social media — had already said happened.

In an email response to The LA Reporter, Marcus wrote:

Councilmember John Lee requested to continue Item 11 to Friday, October 3, 2025. The Item was continued to October 3rd without objection by the Council, past the Time Limit/Last Day for Council Action of September 26, 2025. The reappointment of Dr. Erroll Southers is deemed approved pursuant to Charter Section 502(a) as the Council did not disapprove the appointment within 45 days after its submission to the Council.

Hamid Khan, an organizer with Stop LAPD Spying who has spoken out against Southers’ appointment, characterized what the LA City Council did Friday as “completely, absolutely washing their hands of representing the people of Los Angeles and what people have been demanding. This is an issue of transparency; this is an issue of deliberation. People have been speaking out.”

There had been 10 council members – out of 15 total members – present at the meeting. Eight votes were needed to approve the confirmation, which meant that if some members had wanted to deny the confirmation, they would have needed to challenge the continuation, and if successful in doing that, they would have had to get together three or more people to successfully vote against Southers’ appointment.

Several Council members The LA Reporter approached and reached out to declined to discuss on what happened. Councilmember Ysabel Jurado’s spokesperson said their office “won't be providing comment for this story.” The LA Reporter also reached out to John Lee’s office to ask why he asked that the vote be delayed, but had not responded by press time.

City Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martinez had queried Southers extensively in a Sept. 3 Public Safety Committee meeting over the same concerns raised by activists. In that earlier committee meeting, Soto-Martinez had voted against Southers’ appointment, saying that “because there is a lot of information I need to suss through, I’m registering a no vote today.” Three weeks later, Soto-Martinez voted along with Lee’s request to punt the issue to another day, which then led to the automatic appointment of Southers.

The LA County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday, Sept. 30, will take up at its meeting a revised budget plan drafted after county departments were asked to cut away another 5.5% from their budgets, on top of the 3% they had been asked to cut back in the spending plan adopted in June for this fiscal year that began July 1.  The meeting can be viewed here.

The effects of the adjusted budget would vary by department, but among them are dozens of cuts to positions in the Public Defender’s Office, many of them attorney positions, as well as to the Alternate Public Defenders’ Office. Another prominent area of cuts would be to the County’s parks, according to this letter County CEO Fesia Davenport submitted to the board.

LA Public Defender Ricardo Garcia confirmed to The LA Reporter this week that his office faces “72 deletions, which includes 57 curtailed positions — 52 of which are attorney positions.” Those 57 curtailed positions are “permanent county positions that impact our ability to serve the people of Los Angeles,” Garcia said.

Garcia further explains that the remaining cuts to positions include to those that support post-conviction work that were “tied to state grant funding that has since expired.”

Garcia pointed to the fact that public defenders are required under the U.S. Constitution’s Sixth Amendment and said these cuts would “threaten public safety, and its impact will ripple throughout the courts, jails, and our communities.”

Garcia said their office plans to “zealously advocate for sustainable funding and resources.”

In 2023, RAND put out the National Public Defense Workload Study, which looked into what workload would be manageable for public defenders. That study was aimed at giving government agencies and others some guidance on how much work to assign to public defenders. 

When the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California used that guide to work out what LA public defenders had on their plate, they found that the Los Angeles public defenders’ workload was 4,160 hours or more, which is more than twice the number of available work hours in a year (not including vacation or sick time). They said that even though the RAND study recommends public defenders handle 59 low-level felony cases at a time, many defenders in Los Angeles handle twice that many cases.

The Alternate Public Defenders' Office also faces cuts to positions that support the defense of adults and juveniles. Charts showing revised budgets for that office, as well as for the Sheriff and the District Attorney departments, can be found in this report for a recent public safety “cluster meeting.”

This latest round of cuts is part of an annual process in which county officials take another look at their finances partway through the fiscal year to see if they need to make adjustments to their spending plan. The proposed cuts in this revision would amount to $162.4 million and lead to 930 budgeted positions being cut, according to the County CEO’s letter.

Los Angeles residents are being invited in October to join an effort to document nature as a way to contribute to biodiversity research. To get things started, the city is hosting a kick-off at Griffith Park on Oct. 4 for the LA Nature Quest, which used to be called the LA Bio Blitz, something that has now been held for the past four years. 

This annual, month-long, family-friendly event is a concerted effort to recruit citizen scientists to go out into their neighborhoods to take photos of animals, wild plants, insects, and fungi. Identifying species where they live or frequent can help scientists trying to protect biodiversity, city officials say.

Why is biodiversity important, you might ask? One of the public agencies helping to organize the event, LA Sanitation & Environment, explains it in an ominous, but potentially motivating, way by stating that “we are currently on the cusp of a mass extinction, with over one million species at future risk.”

“Without action, we could soon see biodiversity collapse, and we cannot survive without biodiversity,” LA Sanitation’s website reads. “Reversing biodiversity loss is crucial for food security, climate stability, and public health.”

Now for the less ominous part. LA City Recreation and Parks’ urban ecologist, Courtney McCammon, told The LA Reporter that citizen scientists joining the Griffith Park event can expect to spot:

Sign-up information for the Griffith Park kick-off can be found here. It will be from 9 a.m. to noon, at the Griffith Park Visitor Center Hall, at 4730 Crystal Springs Dr., Los Angeles, CA 90027. Their phone number is (213) 228-7360.

The Library also offers some material to set citizen scientists up for exploring and documenting the natural environment in their own neighborhoods. Also , take a peek at the iNaturalist page set up especially for this Los Angeles “bio blitz.”

The LA Nature Quest “bio blitz” is put on by LA Sanitation’s Biodiversity Program, the Los Angeles Public Library’s Neighborhood Science Initiative, the Los Angeles Recreation and Parks, Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County are also part of the effort.

The LA City Council’s Housing and Homelessness Committee this week met to discuss the cost of shelters that were set up to meet the requirements settlement in the LA Alliance lawsuit against the city. Those costs are laid out in this Sept. 24 report by the City Administrative Officer, including for the Mayfair Hotel in downtown LA and many others around the city. Those costs hover around $80,000 annually for leasing and services for each “bed,” with some at around $30,000 and others as high as $100,000.

The Los Angeles Charter Reform Commission will be hosting a virtual town hall on Monday, Sept. 29 at 5 p.m. during which the panel wants to hear from the public on such topics as elections and voting process, police discipline, and ethics oversight to prevent corruption. One way to guide what you might want to give input on is by looking at the topics that are assigned to different committees the commission has set up. The link to join the Zoom meeting can be found here.

On a related note, the City Ethics Commission is putting together a set of recommendations to the Los Angeles Charter Reform Commission and is seeking feedback at a Wed., Oct. 1 Zoom meeting at 6 p.m. The commission is looking into changes to sections 470, 471, 609(e), 700-712, and 803 of the Charter, which have to do with contribution limits, campaign finance regulations for city and LAUSD candidates, the city's public matching funds program, and the Ethics Commission’s structure and authority. Use this Zoom meeting link for the Oct 1 meeting. The meeting ID is 161 841 8084 and the password is 829594. Written comments can be submitted at [email protected].

Los Angeles City Controller Kenneth Mejia has thrown his support behind City Attorney candidate Marissa Roy, who is looking to unseat the incumbent, Hydee Feldstein Soto. He joins two other sitting elected officials — City Council members Eunisses Hernandez and Ysabel Jurado — in supporting Roy over the incumbent.

A recall effort against LA City Councilmember Imelda Padilla is back on, after it was off last week. The City Clerk had announced the prior week that the earlier recall effort had failed when to meet a publishing requirement. But this week, new recall paperwork was submitted.

Councilman Bob Blumenfield on Friday introduced a motion calling for a probe into what happened when a pair of elephants, named Billy and Tina, were quietly whisked from the LA Zoo to the Tulsa Zoo, amid litigation against the Zoo that the elephants were living in substandard conditions. Blumenfield said the “lack of communication was alarming” and that he and staff only learned of the transfer when advocates spotted moving trucks at the elephant’s enclosure. “Generations of advocates and leaders deserve to know what happened,” his motion said.

LA Mayor Karen Bass said this week that the more than 1,600 layoffs that had loomed in this year’s budget are no longer happening, after striking deals with city employee unions. Those agreements include one in which civilian employees represented by the LA City Coalition of Unions and the Engineers and Architects Association agree to take five unpaid holidays. The Los Angeles Police Protective League, meanwhile, has agreed to voluntarily take paid time off in place of working overtime.

Thank you for reading. If you have any tips, corrections, suggestions or musings for The LA Reporter, please send them to [email protected].