By Earl Ofari Hutchinson
Contributing Columnist
There are 40 candidates seeking job of Los Angeles mayor. It is one of the most coveted and at the same time perennially under fire mayor jobs in the country.
The betting odds are that with the hyper overcrowded field of wanna be mayors, Mayor Karen Bass will be the overwhelming odds on favorite to grab a second term. It’s a good bet.
The three most dangerous and potentially bankable Bass opponents won’t run. Former Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent Austin Beutner dropped out after his 23-year-old daughter died. Billionaire and politically well-connected Rick Caruso did not drop in. L.A. County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, after much speculation about a run, also declined to challenge Bass.
The other mayoral candidates are an eclectic collection of varied activists, business persons, realtors, and even a reality TV guy. With one possible exception, none has even a remote chance of upending Bass. The one exception is City Councilwoman Nithya Raman.
She wears the Democratic Socialist label and holds a light end power base as a member of the City Council. She has some name recognition, will get support from the growing movement of politically charged Democratic socialists and left activists, and will run a grassroots type of campaign focusing on rent stabilization, housing affordability and other poverty related issues.
That won’t be nearly enough to topple Bass. And it certainly won’t address the range of key issues that have stirred much discontent in the city.
Homelessness, public safety, fiscal waste and mismanagement, and a bloated non-sustainable budget, are chronic problems that continue to pile up.
The crucial issue, as always, will be which candidate can actually deliver on the deluge of promises that they will make to solve the city’s mountainous problems. Let’s walk through the checklist.
Homelessness will again be the runaway number one crisis issue. The city has spent tens of millions of dollars, tossed up a few encampments and makeshift housing here and there, and repeatedly demanded taxpayers cough up millions on the pledge that their dollars will be used to end homelessness. Yet, many of L.A. streets, parks, freeway sides and underpasses, still look Dystopian.
The prime answer is massive expansion of affordable housing followed by an equally massive investment in drug and alcohol counseling, job finding and placement, skills training and retraining, child care, nutrition, and the ongoing monitoring of service programs to make a lasting dent in the problem.
This is a long, hard, uphill process. There are no quick fixes. The occupant of the mayor’s office at City Hall must understand that.
The homeless crisis does not exist in a vacuum. It has a nefarious twin that is virtually unchecked. High rents make housing and apartment affordability in L.A. a bad joke and swells the homeless numbers.
The mayoral winner must craft and push the City Council to enact a solid land-use plan to rein in upscale development. That means taking checkbook politics out of the development process while ensuring the building and subsidizing more affordable housing.
Next is getting a handle on L.A.’s rampant sprawl that has turned freeways and streets into stalled parking lots for hours on end. The answer is the continued expansion of light transit, busways, traffic signal coordination and synchronization, traffic flow monitors at major thoroughfares and carpooling incentives.
Then there are the always thorny issue of misconduct and the even more grave problem of the overuse of deadly force in highly dubious circumstances by the Los Angeles Police Department. It is perennially the issue that mayors walk a tightrope on.
The trick is how to balance the ongoing fight for police reform, continue to prod the department brass and the police commission to maintain vigilance on the issue, while also dealing with citizens’ fear of gang and criminal violence. The operative words on this remain firm direction, oversight and rigorous discipline.
The mayoral winner must understand that there are legions of voters who are fed up with the malaise of government and the self-serving that has often enveloped the mayor’s office. The taint of corruption, cronyism, manipulation, scheming and secrecy has been an ugly trademark of the City Council. That must end. And the mayoral winner must not trust the City Council to reform itself.
That means clamping down on special interest deal-making in and outside City Hall, trimming a bloated city bureaucracy and sneaky tax increases that smack of old-fashioned political pork barreling.
Bass has a small Achilles Heel in the continuing finger pointing at her for allegedly bungling and then covering up the handling of the wildfires that devastated the Palisades area in January 2025. She almost certainly will continue to be called on the carpet for that.
However, on the big ticket, bread and butter issues, her administration has been steady and consistent in acknowledging and trying to get the best handle possible on them. That requires political smarts, connections, ability and expertise to grapple effectively with L.A.’s colossal woes. Bass has shown she has them. The others haven’t.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His latest book is “White-Supremacist-In-Chief.” He hosts the weekly news and issues commentary radio show “The Hutchinson Report” Wednesdays at 6 p.m. at ktymgospel.net and Facebook Livestreamed at facebook.com/earl.o.hutchinson.
