How Mayor-elect Raman will remake L.A. City Hall
-
Click here to listen to this article - Share via
See more from the L.A. Times in Google Search. Set us as preferred
Bike lanes. Housing vouchers. A new police chief and many more new apartments, even in single-family neighborhoods.
And above all, data to find out if City Hall programs are working.
Mayor-elect Nithya Raman won’t represent a radical ideological break from her opponent, one-term incumbent Mayor Karen Bass. Like Bass, she’s a Democrat who believes in ending homelessness, keeping the city safe and delivering basic services.
But Raman is expected to push the city to the left on public safety, while also advancing urbanist policies that favor public transit, greater housing production and the redesign of city streets to improve safety and support alternatives to driving.
Rick Cole, a former deputy Los Angeles mayor who advised Raman throughout the campaign, said she’s dead serious about her campaign slogan “a city that works” — taking steps to ensure that streets, sidewalks and other parts of the city infrastructure are repaired, while also providing prompt responses to 911 calls.
Raman intends to be a hands-on manager, he said, improving coordination between city departments and analyzing ways to make them more effective.
“L.A. has been flying blind when it comes to measuring the impacts of the dollars spent,” said Cole, a Pasadena City Council member. “That is going to change.”
As mayor, Raman will have the power to hire and fire the managers of dozens of city agencies and appoint or remove hundreds of citizen commissioners — most of them volunteers — who will serve as an extension of her administration.
Cole is widely expected to supervise Raman’s transition team, sharing those duties with Andrea Conant, chief of staff for Raman’s council office. The mayor-elect will also have a close ally in City Controller Kenneth Mejia, the only elected official at City Hall to endorse her.
On the campaign trail, Raman has promised to let Mejia audit every dollar of city spending on homelessness, setting the stage for a potential overhaul of L.A.’s approach to the crisis. She said she would let his teams of investigators monitor encampment cleanups and operations aimed at moving homeless people indoors, something Bass resisted.
Raman has described the city’s use of hotel and motel rooms for temporary housing as expensive and ineffective, saying short-term rental vouchers are a better alternative. She has vowed to cut homelessness in half by the 2028 Olympic Games and entirely by the end of her four-year term.
Where Raman will land on public safety is murkier. She promised to replace Police Chief Jim McDonnell, saying he has lost the trust of Angelenos, while offering diverging answers on when that would happen. She told one news outlet she would keep him until 2030 and another she would start the replacement process on Day One.
When she began her mayoral campaign in February, Raman said the Los Angeles Police Department — which then had 8,700 officers — should not get any smaller. The LAPD has lost 200 since then. Raman has offered few strategies for rebuilding the force.
“I don’t think it should be shrinking indefinitely,” she said in August.
Raman, as part of her agenda for her first 100 days, said she will seek an audit of the Police Department’s efforts to follow L.A.’s sanctuary city law, which requires that city agencies treat information that can be used to trace a person’s citizenship or immigration status as confidential.
Once she takes office, Raman will be thrust almost immediately into salary negotiations with the Los Angeles Police Protective League, which waged an expensive campaign to defeat her. She opposed the union’s last contract, saying the package of raises and retention bonuses “bankrupted the city” and forced cuts to many taxpayer services.
Even though she is backed by the Democratic Socialists of America, the leftist organization that has supported her since 2020, Raman probably will govern in some ways as a fiscal hawk, said political science professor Fernando Guerra, who heads the Center for the Study of Los Angeles.
Raman opposed the $2.6-billion upgrade of the Los Angeles Convention Center, even as labor leaders and business groups said it would create jobs and help revive a struggling downtown, saying it would eventually add more than $100 million per year in costs to the city budget.
“When she voted against the raises for the police, she didn’t use arguments about defunding the police. She used a fiscal argument,” Guerra said. “When she was against the Convention Center, she didn’t say that it wouldn’t help the community. She used the fiscal argument [against it]. She understands numbers and their consequences.”
Raman was embraced by members of the YIMBY movement, which has been looking to ramp up housing production as a way of lowering rents. She promised to create a 60-day “shot clock” for the approval of new apartment projects that comply with city zoning laws.
She criticized Bass for opposing Senate Bill 79, the law that allows the construction of six- to nine-story apartments near rail stations and other transit stops. She vowed to bring “gentle density” — duplexes, triplexes and fourplexes — to single-family neighborhoods that are near public transit hubs.
“These are the kinds of homes that built L.A. and the kind of homes that many Angelenos want to live in,” said Scott Epstein, policy and research director at the nonprofit Abundant Housing LA, which endorsed Raman.
Epstein said his group appreciates some of the steps taken by Bass to speed up housing production. However, he sees “a lot more energy with Nithya,” he said.
Noah Suarez-Sikes, a member of DSA-LA’s steering committee, said his group expects Raman to follow through on her promise to create an Office of Tenant Protections to enforce the city’s laws protecting renters from harassment.
“They very rarely get used, but there’s many instances where tenants are being harassed by corporate landlords,” he said.
Raman is also expected to champion policies sought by the region’s transportation advocates. As a candidate, she criticized Bass for blocking a plan to install new bicycle lanes through Griffith Park, saying the improvements were urgently needed to reduce traffic deaths.
Hedge fund manager Aaron Sosnick, a bike lane advocate with homes in multiple cities, donated a combined $8 million to outside campaigns that promoted Raman and attacked Bass’ record. Some of those campaign ads were produced by the advocacy group Streets for All, best known for its success in 2024 in passing Measure HLA, which requires the expansion of bus lanes, bike lanes and other street improvements during major road repairs.
Michael Schneider, who heads that group, said he believes Raman will consolidate some of the city departments that are responsible for street maintenance, to make them more effective. He said it’s also likely she will pursue a ballot measure in 2028 — possibly a bond or tax hike — to raise money for sidewalk repairs, curb replacements, wheelchair ramps and other improvements.
Schneider predicted that Raman also will go much further than former Mayor Eric Garcetti, another transit enthusiast, on such issues as bike lanes, making tough decisions “even though it’s hard.”
“It doesn’t mean she’s going to railroad everything,” he said. “But I think she has much more of a political spine than Garcetti did when it comes to street safety, pushing projects through that may ruffle some feathers but are worth it for the safety benefits.”
Cole, the former deputy mayor, said Raman plans to place more emphasis on the commission system, which assigns citizen volunteers selected by the mayor to provide oversight of a number of city agencies, including the LAPD, the Department of Transportation and three proprietary agencies — the Department of Water and Power, the Port of Los Angeles and Los Angeles World Airports.
Raman will also join the 13-member Metropolitan Transportation Authority, where she will have the power to pick three of her colleagues. How she will interact with those other Metro board members — and the region’s other elected officials — is yet to be seen.
Times staff writer Noah Goldberg contributed to this report.
More From the Los Angeles Times
Podcasts
William Mulholland was the water boss who made L.A. possible. His reputation gave him unchecked authority as a dam builder. In 1928, that led to one of America’s deadliest disasters--and the question of whether it was a crime.
It started as a ploy to scare Texas out of redrawing its congressional map and ended with California voters approving a new map of their own, one that could hat could help alter the balance of power in Washington.
On this week’s episode of Boiling Point, Miranda Green speaks with Los Angeles Times climate reporter Hayley Smith about how AI bots are meddling in California’s clean energy policymaking.
