By Elizabeth Chou/Los Angeles Public Press
This article was first published by the nonprofit newsroom LA Public Press on Oct. 25, and is republished here with permission.
A pair of Los Angeles City Council races in this November’s election could shift the city’s politics in a more progressive direction, and boost a minority voting bloc that has pushed for tenant protections, and the diversion of funding from police to other programs to promote public safety.
This comes as some polling in the election has indicated voters may actually be headed in a more conservative direction – particularly around public safety in the local District Attorney’s race and the “tough on crime” Prop. 36 that would stiffen penalties for minor drug and theft crimes.
If progressive City Council candidates win, they would bolster an existing three-person progressive wing that includes Eunisses Hernandez, Nithya Raman and Hugo Soto-Martinez.
“We’re on the cusp of making big moves in public safety, big moves on the budget and big moves around tenant protections,” Hernandez, told LA Public Press during the June 15 launch of tenant attorney Ysabel Jurado’s general election campaign to unseat incumbent Kevin De León.
Soto-Martinez joined Hernandez at the kick-off for Jurado, who is running on a progressive platform to represent Los Angeles’ 14th City Council District. The district includes Boyle Heights, Northeast LA, and parts of downtown Los Angeles. She is in a runoff against De León, after she came in first in the March primary.
Jillian Burgos, an optician and renter, is the other progressive running for a City Council seat. She’s vying to represent the city’s 2nd City Council District, in the southeast San Fernando Valley, which stretches from North Hollywood up to Sun Valley. She and former State Assemblymember Adrin Nazarian are in a runoff.
The name of the game is eight votes
Even if Burgos and Jurado both get elected, the progressive wing would still be in the minority. They would need to convince a few more council members to support their issues because it takes a majority of the 15-member council to pass most legislation or policies.
“The name of the game is to get to eight,” said Meghan Choi, field consultant for Jurado. That would mean swaying a few extra members to their side, an easier task when there is already a solid group of progressive members, she said.
Choi is also executive director of Ground Game LA, a progressive group that grew out of an earlier, unsuccessful City Council campaign inspired by Bernie Sanders’ call for people to get involved in local politics. The organization endorsed Burgos and Jurado.
Hernandez said that there are times members of the council may feel uncomfortable voting according to their own values. But adding like-minded people to the council can help with that, she said.
“It gives people more flexibility to vote truly how they feel, and [with what they] are aligned with, because sometimes people feel they have to vote in ways their communities constituents and special interest groups want,” Hernandez said.
Hernandez added that sometimes council members fear the potential repercussions of voting a particular way. She said that when she voted against the city’s budget last year to protest the $3.2 billion that was allocated to the Los Angeles Police Department, she had to “rework” relationships with her colleagues and was surprised she did not get stripped of any committee appointments.
She said she would want more colleagues on her side, beyond Raman and Soto-Martinez, who joined her this year to vote against the now $3.3 billion LAPD budget, which she said is an astoundingly large sum for how much Angelenos may be getting out of it.
“At no other moment in history have we given more money to the LAPD than we do today,” she said “And you’re saying we don’t feel safe? Maybe there are things we need to work on.”
More debate, votes that align with council members’ values
Up until recently, Choi said the LA City Council was known to vote mostly in unison, and there was very little debate on “incredibly important” issues. But that changed, she said, when progressives were elected.
“Having a progressive bloc in there enabled an actual discussion to happen, which is what people deserve,” Choi said. “They deserve a real debate about these policies and programs, and expenditures that can change people’s lives.”
In May, the City Council picked Councilmember Marqueece Harris-Dawson as its new leader. Some feel Harris-Dawson, who has typically cast moderate votes, could be convinced to support more progressive policies, given his background as a community organizer.
Since he was seated as council president in late September, the council has backed stronger laws to protect tenants from landlord harassment. The law is colloquially called TAHO 2.0, which is short for the Tenant Anti-Harassment Ordinance 2.0.
Organizing work by tenants is seeing some results. City Councilmember Bob Blumenfield, who is typically not as friendly on tenant issues, put forth a motion to expedite a pause on landlords using renovation work as a reason to evict people. That motion was prompted by the Los Angeles Tenants Union, which has been organizing a group of tenants on Echo Park’s Mohawk Street facing eviction because the property owner says they are planning a remodel.
Meanwhile, Harris-Dawson has been criticized for the appointments he has made to City Council committees.
Since taking the leadership position, he’s appointed one of the council’s more conservative members, John Lee – who is accused by the city’s Ethics Commission of improperly receiving gifts from a real estate developer – as the chair of the influential Planning and Land Use Committee. His appointment of Jurado’s opponent, De León, to that same committee also drew criticism.
Harris-Dawson and others had previously called on De León to resign after a secret recording was released of De León and other council members making racist and homophobic comments while discussing how they could rig the redistricting process to benefit their own political careers.
Some progressives had hoped that Harris-Dawson would be swayed to use his powers as council president in a way that benefits their aims. For now, even those powers can be limited by the make-up of the City Council.
“It would be great if Marqueece could rely more fully on the votes of the progressive members of the council to govern, to stay in office, and not have to worry about the more conservative members of council,” said David Levitus, executive director of the progressive group LA Forward.
Unarmed crisis response teams
Progressives are also trying to expand a program to send social and health workers – instead of police officers – to de-escalate situations involving people experiencing a mental health crisis. That effort recently failed to get the funding, because it was short two votes, according to Levitus.
Burgos, the candidate in the San Fernando Valley race, said she helped with LA Forward’s campaign to try to convince the council to move forward on the program. She thinks many people, no matter their political leanings, could find common ground on issues around police funding and unarmed crisis response. “I’m not the enemy of the LAPD,” Burgos said.
“If we’re being matter of fact about it, [the LAPD are] unable to hire at full capacity,” she said. “We’ve given them three budget increases … this is the perfect opportunity to try something new. And it also helps them at the same time.”
Palms resident Kay Hartman, who serves on a committee that examines the city budget, has watched the council’s progressive wing try to chip away at the LAPD budget. She said she isn’t comfortable with calls to abolish the police department. But in other areas, she said the progressives do have some “valid points.”
“They’re calling attention to stuff, some of which is 100 percent correct,” Hartman said. “You can go back to what causes crime, and what causes crime is a lack of opportunity, a lack of hope, and the government can influence that.”
Hartman recently chaired the Budget Advocates, a volunteer advisory board that interviews city department heads and puts together a white paper each year on the budget.
Hartman has been critical of how the city failed to include pending labor negotiations when balancing its budget. They recently said city employee pay raises, chiefly those for LAPD officers, “tanked” the city budget. Now the city is close to draining its reserves, and may need until 2028 – when it’s set to host the Olympic Games – to dig out of the hole, city officials say.
The ‘anti-camping’ law
Both Jurado and Burgos say they want to repeal Ordinance 41.18, the city’s anti-camping law that has led to arrests and citations of unhoused people for sleeping, lying and sitting in public areas.
On the campaign trail, Burgos says that when she talks to people about the law, she tells them that sweeps that clear encampments where unhoused people live and that are backed by 41.18 are ineffective. “What happens two weeks later? They’re back,” she said. She says the law does not have provisions to house people.
Burgos’ opponent Adrin Nazarian says he supports 41.18. But he said he does not want the law to be only about pushing people who are unhoused from one location to another. “That’s not the goal. To me 41.18 is actually a way of eventually getting to a point where we’re pushing everyone into some form of shelter,” he said.
Choi, who has served as chief of staff in two progressive council offices, said the law can make the overall effort of helping the unhoused community more difficult. So even as certain council districts work to make resources available as fully as possible to the unhoused community, “policy-wise, it’s really about building the power that’s needed to repeal 41.18 – and transform the city’s approach to homelessness.”
A different political landscape
When Hernandez first ran for office, those in powerful circles seemed to be unfamiliar with her, based on the conversations in a now infamous October 2021 leaked tape recorded at the LA Labor Federation offices. Her outright win in the 2022 primary, where she unseated the incumbent, Gil Cedillo, was considered an upset because Cedillo was a political veteran.
This time around, a progressive candidate winning might be less of a surprise. As a progressive candidate Jurado won the backing of the LA County Democratic Party and the Labor Federation, two traditionally powerful groups that haven’t typically sided with progressives.
“In the primary we were the underdogs, and now we’re considered the frontrunners,” Jurado remarked at her launch event, describing it as, “kind of like this whiplash effect.”
“In the primary we were the underdogs, and now we’re considered the frontrunners.”
Ysabel jurado
This came about after Jurado earned more votes in the primary than her opponent, De León, once a political star who lead the State Senate. Now De León is fighting to get re-elected after he was caught on the same leaked audio as Cedillo making racist and homophobic comments.
In the second district race, Burgos’ opponent Nazarian is the one with Democratic party and labor backing, making the match-up’s forecast more uncertain. Nazarian is also a former state legislative and city council staffer to former LA City Council President Paul Krekorian.
But some progressives backing Jurado and Burgos say those types of big endorsements aren’t needed to win. Voters are starting to look beyond easy signposts for who to vote for, and are “a lot more involved and savvy, and (are) looking into candidates, rather than going, ‘I see that name in someone’s yard, my neighbor likes them, it’s fine’,” said Celine Viravong, who supports Burgos’ campaign through an opposition research committee for the Democratic Socialists of America of Los Angeles.
Matt Penfield, another DSA-LA researcher who is supporting Jurado’s campaign, said the kind of candidates the organization supports are those fighting for tenants, the unhoused and others who are marginalized, so “by its nature, you’re not going to have that base of support from wealthy donors.”
He and Viravong dug up campaign finance information that showed the progressive candidates’ opponents received funding from landlord groups and real estate interests. Those are the types of interests that the progressives say they would return funds from and that detract from working for people who are not considered a source of donations.
“I think it’s pretty unreasonable to say you need to take apartment association, landlord or police money at this juncture, because we’ve had three council members get in without any of that money,” Choi said. Returning those donations is “really easy – I’ve done it before. It’s a couple clicks,” she said.
What isn’t easy, Choi said, is knocking on doors and convincing everyday people to get engaged and learn more about the issues. But that process often gives the candidates and their campaign staff and volunteers a better sense of what Angelenos are going through.
“They are sincere conversations, and that to me is the actual polling,” Choi said.
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