Squawk Box: Tuesday, May 5, 2026

Charter reform is back on the agenda today. A motion calling for a study of the cost of breaking up the City Attorney’s Office into two offices, one that serves as an elected prosecutor, and the other as an appointed legal counsel, is scheduled, along with other proposals, for the City Council’s Rules, Elections and Intergovernmental Relations Committee meeting this afternoon, at 1 p.m.

The Police Commission is taking up two police shooting cases from last May and June at its 9:30 meeting, which you can tune into here. The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors is also meeting at 9:30 a.m. and will be getting an update on how they’re supporting the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority workers, who were issued layoff notices last month, afer the county pulled its funding from the agency in order to form their own Department of Homeless Services and Housing. Supervisor Lindsey Horvath’s motion to improve safety at Whiteman Airport after an airplane crashed in a commercial area in Pacoima on April 20, will also be up.  FYI, the Los Angeles City Council’s will be taking a motion on the same incident, at the Energy and Environment Committee meeting at 3:30. The Los Angeles City Council is scheduled to take up the LA Alliance case in closed session at their meeting on Tuesday.

The Sherman Oaks Homeowners’ association’s debate between City Council member Nithya Raman and Mayor Karen Bass will SOHA debate is tonight, at 7 p.m. Organizers are advising arriving early. RSVP by emailing your full name and number of attendees to [email protected]. The debate will be live-streamed Zoom livestream. 

Everyone says the city is broken and needs to be fixed, but for a long time, even just getting a list of what public infrastructure projects ought to be repaired, maintained or built has been a seemingly impossible task. On Monday, though, the city may have finally started to take its capital infrastructure planning seriously.

Mayor Karen Bass released a capital infrastructure program that “includes 73 reports on assets maintained by city departments, which represents the first time in 30 years the city has provided a detailed citywide report on the state of repair of its infrastructure.” Such a roadmap and investment plan is routine in other cities, and Los Angeles has long been notorious for not having one.

What was released on Monday is only a first step and for now, it lays out a path for getting a plan into place. Also, the projects that are listed focus on getting the city into shape ahead of the Olympics. You can read the report here.

A website parodying Spencer Pratt created by television writer Toby Morton offers a not very flattering portrait of the mayoral candidate, whose campaign recently got a shot in the arm after it was reported that Lakers part-owner Jeanie Buss had made a maximum donation of $1,800 to his already healthily funded campaign. The website springboards off of Pratt’s autobiography that the candidate released soon after launching his campaign. That biography was recently reviewed in CalMatters by Jim Newton, who wrote that the person depicted in Pratt’s autobiography “does not impress. The Pratt of these pages — in his own words — is selfish, undisciplined and unprincipled. He deflects blame, squanders fortunes and complains. A lot. It’s hard to imagine him holding any office, much less one of such consequence.” (@PresKrekorian, a parody account that revolves around former Council President Paul Krekorian, alerted The LA Reporter to the website)

Reporter Jon Regardie spots Lou Calanche becoming the second person in the 1st District City Council race to receive a check for matching funds, in the amount of $129,498. Incumbent Eunisses Hernandez was first, receiving a check of $182,048. 

The video recording of last Thursday’s 13th District debate hosted by neighborhood councils in that district is up. The debate featured incumbent Hugo Soto-Martinez and challengers Dylan Kendall, Rich Sarian and Colter Carlysle is now up. Regardie provides a TLDR of the debate.

The TransLatin@ Coalition just did a roundtable talk with mayoral candidate Rae Huang. You can view the video here. According to the group, they had invited five candidates to do this talk with them, and two of the candidates responded. An earlier debate organized by the TransLatin@ Coalition that was planned for April 25 had been cancelled, after candidates City Council member Nithya Raman and Mayor Karen Bass pulled out. An email sent by organizers to people who had RSVP’d for that debate said that journalist Alex Cohen and organizer Melina Abdullah had been confirmed as co-moderators.

Amid the ICE raids over the last year, merchants at El Pueblo de Los Angeles have seen less foot traffic, and partly as a result that, about a third of them have not been paying rent, Domenika Lynch, the general manager of the 22-acre historic public park in downtown Los Angeles, told the Budget and Finance Committee during budget hearings Monday.

The declining business to their stalls, as well as inconsistent upkeep and cleanliness of the park itself, has made it more difficult for the merchants to make rent, Lynch told the committee. She said that was why they’re seeking some tweaks to the mayor’s proposed budget so that their department could have more control over custodial services, and be able to add five more security guards to a team of 10.

Lynch said that the merchants who have not “been in the position” to pay rent have told them that it was due to “the site conditions, because of the lack of safety, because of the unhoused populations, and at times, feeling a bit of neglect that's affected the foot traffic.”

The funding requests are among several Lynch highlighted in an April 21 letter responding to the mayor’s budget. They include a request for $500,000 to increase the number of security guards from 10 to 15. They are also seeking just over $800,000 to use on an in-house custodial team, rather than outsourcing them from another agency, the General Services Department, with about $375,000 on contractual services.

Lynch said they could be more responsive and provide more regular service with an in-house team. Right now maintenance has been inconsistent, and that’s been a “tremendous problem” she said. “It's basically tied to one of the reasons why the merchants have not felt compelled to pay rent when they themselves have to clean up so much of the of the park.”

Lynch, who was newly appointed at general manager of El Pueblo last September, said there has been progress in recent months on increasing rent payments. Before, they were collecting $84,000, out of $185,000 of rent due. They saw their rent collection go up to $124,000 in March. 

Lynch said the statistics on the percentage of merchants who haven’t been paying rent is part of a report their department is releasing soon. She said the 14th council district had commissioned the report. Council member Ysabel Jurado, who represents that district, made a motion in March seeking a report on lease agreements at El Pueblo. Her motion pointed to a need to help the businesses there, many of which have been there for decades and are part of its history, to become more sustainable. 

The merchants had earlier already been hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Jurado’s motion, but that experience also “exposed structural vulnerabilities and underscored the need for sustained investment and flexible policies to ensure El Pueblo’s long-term economic and cultural resilience.”

Lynch said they’re working out arrangements for payment plans with the merchants, and while “it’s slow and it’s consistent,” they believe that once there is more foot traffic at El Pueblo, “we’re going to see people really meeting their obligations.”

Lynch also went into how they were trying to address the needs of people who were unhoused at the park, saying that just before going to council chambers Monday to make their presentation, “there was a gentleman, an unhoused gentleman, dropped off with his hospital gown and bandaged up.” Lynch said this was “really heartbreaking to see,” and she said that “we have to figure out how to do better.” 

She also said that they are experiencing “public safety challenges driven by the growing unhoused population” and that because El Pueblo is “across the street from Union Station and adjacent to the jails” the park is “a natural spot for people to come to take a minute and decide what their next step is.”

Lynch told the committee that they recently reached out to the homeless services provider The People Concern, which operates El Puente, a transitional housing site that has operated in one of El Pueblo’s parking lots since 2018. They are trying to put together a task force that includes The People Concern, LAHSA, the council office, and “faith-based partners” in order “to coordinate services to find beds, particularly for our elderly who are unhoused” and to help them to “really feel safe at our park.”

El Pueblo was only one of several departments that reported to the Budget and Finance Committee on Monday. Other departments that were on deck included the Disability, Library, City Clerk, Zoo, Tourism, Civil & Human Rights and Neighborhood Empowerment departments, and the pension boards for city employees, firefighters and police. The meeting video is here.