The Brief

Seventeen years ago, Californians bet on a grand vision of the future. They narrowly approved a $10 billion bond issue to build a high-speed rail line that would zip between San Francisco and Los Angeles in under three hours. This technological marvel would slash emissions, revitalize the state’s Central Valley, and, with some financial help from the feds and private sector, provide the fast, efficient, and convenient travel Asia and Europe have long enjoyed.

State officials promised to deliver this transit utopia by 2020. Instead, costs have more than doubled, little track has been laid, and service isn’t expected to begin before 2030 — and only between Bakersfield and Merced, two cities far from the line’s ultimate destinations.

It’s little wonder the project finds itself in a precarious financial position, fighting political headwinds, and deemed a boondoggle by everyone from federal Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy to Abundance authors Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson.

“In the time California has spent failing to complete its 500-mile high-speed rail system,” they wrote, “China has built more than 23,000 miles of high-speed rail.”

The reasons for this vary with who’s being asked, but people with expertise often cite three fundamental missteps: creating a new agency to lead the effort, failing to secure adequate funding from the start, and choosing a route through California’s agricultural heartland. The state’s strict environmental review process hasn’t helped, either.

Protestors voice their opposition to Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, who in February went to Union Station in L.A. to call California’s high-speed rail efforts a “boondoggle” and “failed experiment.”

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Allen J. Schaben

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Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

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Rail's challenges

Such struggles are not unique to the Golden State, where support for the project remains strong. Although the private sector venture Brightline has seen some success, publicly funded high-speed rail efforts in Texas, Ohio, Washington, D.C., and beyond have stalled. Regulatory complexity, a political environment that favors cars and highways, and constant funding challenges stymie America’s aspirations even as other countries have spent big on tens of thousands of miles of track. Gov. Gavin Newsom promises to see the nation’s most ambitious rail project through despite recently losing all federal support, but its troubled path underscores the systemic challenges of building big in America.

California has always been a car-crazy place, and by the early 1990s, transportation studies made clear that its highways would not keep pace with the growth to come.

Policymakers saw an answer in bullet trains.

The Legislature established the California High-Speed Rail Authority in 1996 and gave it the tough job of planning, designing, building, and running the system.

Some consider that a mistake because the agency lacked experience managing so big a project and navigating complex bureaucracy. Even some rail supporters concede it would have been better to let the authority provide oversight and leave the heavy lifting to the state Department of Transportation, or CalTrans.

“It’s building a lot of overpasses and right-of-way, which Caltrans does all the time,” said Ethan Elkind, director of the UC Berkeley climate program in its Center for Law, Energy and the Environment.

Without that experience, the authority’s 10 employees relied heavily on consultants like engineering firm WSP, running up expenses.

“We paid WSP and their predecessor more than $800 million in consulting fees,” said Lou Thompson. He chaired the High Speed Rail Peer Review Group, established in 2008 to provide project oversight, from 2012 until 2024. The authority has in recent years eased its reliance on consultants, who reportedly have gone from 70% of its workforce to 45% over the past seven years.

Funding and politics

Once the High-Speed Rail Authority set up shop, work proceeded in fits and starts. Even as it considered routes and started the myriad bureaucratic tasks the project required, political interest waxed and waned with the state’s fiscal health. Skeptics lamented the cost and questioned whether bullet trains would attract enough riders to be worthwhile. But rail advocates, environmentalists, unions, and others kept pushing forward and in 2008 convinced voters to approve Proposition 1A, securing $10 billion to finance construction.

It was never going to be enough — at the time, the cost was pegged at $45 billion, a figure that did not account for inflation — and funding has been a challenge from the start.

Still, the Obama administration saw an opportunity to show that the economy was bouncing back from the Great Recession. The federal American Reinvestment Recovery Act provided $3.5 billion to help get things started. The authority, which had already mapped a route through the Central Valley, soon began grading land, moving utilities, and taking other steps toward construction of the first leg, a 119-mile stretch from Bakersfield to Madera.

Things chugged along until 2013, when a state judge blocked the use of Prop 1A funds, ruling that some of the work did not meet the rules for bond expenditures.

With federal support contingent upon the state’s cash, the federal grants had to be renegotiated — before they expired in 2017.

“We were literally sitting there saying, ‘Well, if we don’t start going, we could lose $700 [million] or $800 million of the federal money,” said Dan Richard, who was the High-Speed Rail Authority’s board chair from 2011 until 2019.

That prompted the agency to do something no one wanted to do: Move forward without having acquired all of the necessary land. So it did.

Then President Donald Trump took office. He seemed interested in what California was attempting to build, having lamented that China and Japan “have fast trains all over the place” while the U.S. relies upon “obsolete technology.” His opinion soured when Gavin Newsom became governor in 2019 and the two sparred over the president’s policies. Trump later canceled nearly $1 billion in federal funds for the rail project.

The Biden administration restored it and provided another $3.1 billion from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. The infusion was to help build a station in Fresno and acquire trains for testing. Even with the windfall, California remained at least $7 billion short of what it needed for the first short run through the Central Valley. The situation grew worse in July when Trump rescinded the entire amount after the Federal Railroad Administration said it saw no way of covering that shortfall and no path to completion by 2033.

Newsom said the move “reeks of politics," and the state is suing. But the impact goes beyond California by establishing a precedent to cancel projects at will.

“How do you go to your voters and say, ‘Put up the money. We expect 50% federal share,’ without knowing that the next administration could turn around and say, ‘I don’t like that project,’” Richard said.

The High-Speed Rail Authority initially planned to rely upon state, federal, and private sector funding in equal measure, but California has provided 75% of the $14.6 billion spent so far. The authority wrote in a letter to the Railroad Administration that Newsom’s plan to allocate $1 billion, pulled from the state’s cap-and-trade program, toward the project each year for 20 years will be enough to finish the Central Valley segment. The governor also recently signed a bill requiring the authority to update its estimate on the funding gap for that leg of the journey.

With California seemingly on its own, Thompson said the project needs an income stream approaching $5 billion a year to build everything. That is one reason the authority in June asked the private sector and financial institutions to weigh in on the chance of public-private partnerships. Its chief executive, Ian Choudri, said private investors have shown “extreme interest.”

Thompson isn’t buying it.

“My opinion is that that is hot air,” he said. The way he sees it, no one’s going to invest until they can see that there is demand for the rail line.

Politics and permitting

One of the reasons Brightline is held up as an example of how to bring high-speed rail to the United States is its strategy includes building on public land. Part of its 235-mile line between Miami and Orlando stands on land owned by Florida East Coast Railway. The company’s planned run between Las Vegas and L.A. will largely follow Interstate 15.

California could have done the same and built along the 5 Freeway, which bisects the Central Valley, but chose to go through major population centers 20 to 50 miles to the east. That pivotal decision increased the project’s cost and complexity. Following the freeway would have been straighter and flatter, without the elevated track, tunnels, and other infrastructure needed to traverse cities. The route also turned a state effort into a regional development project beset by local politics.

The High-Speed Rail Authority had good intentions, however. It hopes that bringing rail to places like Merced and Bakersfield might entice Silicon Valley and Los Angeles firms to open offices in the Central Valley, which would be a 90-minute ride from their headquarters. It also would boost local economies left behind by the state’s boom — and it has, to some extent. The project has added 11,000 construction jobs to the region. But that exacted its own toll.

“Those economic benefits have been really substantial, so that sort of worked, but it came at potentially the cost of not being able to build the system at all, because by starting it in the Central Valley they’ve basically blown all the money there,” said Elkind of the UC Berkeley Climate Program.

Should the state once again ask voters for money, it would have had a stronger case if initial construction had occurred in major population centers, he said.

The route also created additional hurdles as the project navigated California’s environmental oversight rules. Going through several cities and all that farmland increased the number of stakeholders who had to be consulted, ballooning the environmental review process.

To be fair, the California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA, has long protected the state’s rich biodiversity. But some rail proponents argue it has been used to stymie progress. High-Speed Rail Authority data shows it has spent more than $765 million on environmental review. Lawsuits stemming from CEQA can be particularly expensive.

“If you have a $100 billion project, and let’s say that interest rates are 3% a year, every year’s delay costs you $3 billion,” Thompson said. “A $50,000 lawsuit can delay you for a year, and so there’s an enormous pressure on you to try to bargain your way out of these kinds of situations.”

California recently loosened CEQA requirements for the rail system’s maintenance facilities and stations, a move Newsom cheered.

“These are very targeted exemptions that will help cut red tape and deliver on California’s vision of high-speed rail without compromising environmental protections,” gubernatorial spokesperson Daniel Villaseñor wrote in an email.

Whether that reform has an impact remains to be seen, because most of the environmental review is already completed.

And regulation was never the project’s biggest problem.

“It just seems like the easy, obvious answer,” said Hana Creger, associate director of climate equity at the Greenlining Institute. “But I think these things are a lot more complex.”

Progress on high-speed rail

Given all of this, it can be easy to lose sight of what progress has been made. The authority is quick to note that 463 miles of the 494-mile system has cleared the environmental review process and is “construction ready.” It also boasts of having laid 70 miles of guideway — meaning track, elevated structures, or other riding surface — and erected 57 structures. All told, the project has created more than 15,500 jobs since its inception.

Despite the challenges, Newsom remains steadfast in his determination to see Californians one day riding the trains they were promised so many years ago. “I want to get it done,” he said in May. “That’s our commitment.”

That will surely resonate with his constituents; recent polling shows 62% of voters believe the state should continue financing the project, though opinions split sharply along partisan lines. Still, experts caution that support isn’t enough. Tangible progress and credible funding streams are essential to maintain momentum.

The High-Speed Rail Authority seems to understand this and is pressing ahead to connect Bakersfield to either Merced or Gilroy.

There’s a lot to do before crews start laying track, but the goal is to finish that run by 2032 and the authority recently opened the bidding process to begin installing track next year.

Looking further ahead, its latest plan, released late last month, calls for extending the line south to Palmdale by 2038, putting it within 80 miles of San Francisco and 40 miles of L.A. at a cost of $87 billion.

“While challenges remain, so too does the potential to deliver a modern transportation system worthy of the state’s ambitions — one that reflects the scale, complexity and promise of California itself,” Choudri wrote in the plan. “Let’s go build it.”

Assuming the project retains its $4 billion federal grants, the project has $29 billion available, with an additional $15 billion from Newsom’s proposal, according to the CHSRA. Thompson said the governor’s proposal, which would set aside $1 billion every year for the project, should keep it alive for the next four years.

Beyond that, it will need an infusion of cash, likely from voters but possibly from a future presidential administration.

“I think the path forward is that they could show some first segment success and then go back to the voters,” Elkind said. “You just got to get through this first era here, and get something built that they can show to the voters.”

Ultimately, California’s high-speed rail is more than a train line; it is a test of the nation’s ability to deliver transformative infrastructure. Its path forward remains uncertain, but every mile of track laid could lead to a turning point — not just for the state, but for the broader goal of building the kind of transportation network other countries take for granted.

The U.S. Justice Department has issued subpoenas to California officials in an escalation of its scrutiny of local election administration.

The Associated Press obtained copies of three subpoenas sent Oct. 21 to employees of the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder, ordering them to appear in court on Nov. 4, the day after the election. The documents request any records, documents and communications related to letters sent in July and October by federal officials to state election officials outlining allegations of noncitizens on the state’s voter rolls. The subpoenas also seek information relating to the office’s “methods for screening for unlawful voting by aliens” and anything about efforts to prevent noncitizen votes from being counted.

The subpoenas were being issued by all four U.S. attorneys in California, according to a person familiar with the matter who insisted on anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation.

Dean Logan, the Los Angeles County registrar, said, “threats and intimidated have no place in elections.”

Subpoenas come amid ongoing court battle

The Trump administration has sued to force California to set aside up to 20,000 ballots it suspects went to noncitizens and not count them until citizenship can be verified. A district court judge on Tuesday rejected that request, then on Thursday appointed a special master to evaluate the administration’s claims.

U.S. District Judge David O. Carter did not specify the exact scope of special master Daniel B. Garrie’s responsibilities, but said he would be tasked with “developing the factual record” for the court.

In a Tuesday court hearing, Carter said he wanted to vet the federal government’s list of over 20,000 alleged noncitizen voters since there has been extensive debate over its reliability and both sides have agreed that it includes an unspecified number of citizens.

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Carter also said at the hearing that a special master could investigate California’s claims that it cannot logistically separate the ballots in time for the county election certification deadline on Dec. 3. The federal government has contested that assertion.

It is not clear what would happen if a special master did find a substantial number of noncitizen voters on the federal government’s list or whether it would affect the certification of California’s election results. The 20,000 people on the DOJ’s list constitute only a small fraction of California’s 23 million voters.

Trump administration appeals to higher court

Meanwhile, the Trump administration asked a federal appeals court to quickly weigh in.

The Justice Department said in a late Wednesday filing that it’s essential the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals issue a ruling as soon as possible due to “irreversible ballot processing occurring on an ongoing basis.”

Carter’s decision was the latest legal setback for President Donald Trump in his efforts to expand federal control over state-run elections in the midterms that will decide control of Congress for the rest of his term. The Justice Department has made similar demands in other states, including Washington. Noncitizen voting has been a central focus of Trump’s political messaging for years, although available data indicates it is exceedingly rare.

Trump blasted Carter’s ruling against the federal government on Thursday morning before heading to a campaign rally in South Carolina.

“California is very corrupt. The elections are extremely corrupt. The judge should not have done that but we’ll appeal that, of course,” he told reporters. Trump added without evidence that there are “hundreds of thousands” and then amended it to “millions, in my opinion” of “bad ballots” in California.

Carter, an appointee of Democratic President Bill Clinton, argued that the Justice Department’s demands were a clear violation of the National Voter Registration Act, which prohibits changes to voter rolls or election procedure within 90 days of an election.

A number of US citizens were included in the Justice Department’s list of names

Both sides agree that an unspecified number of citizens were inadvertently included. Carter argued that separating the ballots at this point would risk disenfranchising citizens and “wreak havoc” on the election certification process.

Over 500,000 votes have already been processed in Los Angeles County alone, according to court filings. The system also protects voter privacy: Once a vote is processed, it cannot be traced back to the person who cast it.

Carter is to rule on the government’s renewed request for a preliminary injunction, which would bar the state from counting the ballots until the litigation is resolved. He said he will do so after a Nov. 13 evidentiary hearing with input from the special master.

He said that if the federal government suspected noncitizens were voting, it could continue to prosecute those cases criminally. Federal authorities have charged over two dozen foreign nationals in California as part of a statewide sweep targeting people officials allege have illegally registered or voted in U.S. elections.

Appeals panel judges have said they wouldn’t support setting aside ballots this close to midterms

The appeal will be the second time that the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals will consider the case.

The first time was just last week when the Justice Department argued before an appeals court panel that a fast ruling on its request was needed to stop any counting of the ballots.

Although the panel ruled it was premature for an appeals court to get involved before a lower-court ruling, two of the three judges wrote separate concurrences making it clear they wouldn’t support setting aside ballots at this late date. They questioned the accuracy of the federal government’s list of alleged noncitizen voters and argued that to set aside votes risks disenfranchising citizens.

One judge dissented, arguing that federal law bars noncitizens from voting and requires California to vet the potentially illegal ballots before counting them. The failure to do so, he wrote, would cause irreparable harm to the election.

A group representing garment workers in Los Angeles is asking Olympic organizing committee LA28 to invest in the local garment industry, as it prepares to spend on contracts for apparel and linens for the 2028 Games.

The Garment Worker Center launched its “Wear LA” campaign Thursday at its office, which sits south of the Fashion District, where thousands of workers labor daily in the city’s garment factories, and east of the Coliseum, one of the main sites for Olympic and Paralympic competition.

“In the past, contracts have gone almost exclusively to giant multinational brands,” said Marissa Nuncio, executive director of the workers center, referencing past mega-events in Los Angeles. “It's overdue to start sharing these contracts with the businesses that make up the fabric of L.A.”

LA28 already has a raft of high-profile corporate deals, including with Skims, Ralph Lauren and Nike to produce Olympics apparel, but it is planning to purchase sheets, sports uniforms and towels starting next year, according to its procurement plans. LAist reached out to LA28 for comment, but did not hear back ahead of publication.

Olympics organizers will spend billions on goods and services during the Games, and have set a target of 75% local procurement, defining local as anywhere within Los Angeles, Orange, Ventura, Riverside and San Bernardino counties.

The Garment Worker Center is the latest group to ask LA28 to tighten that definition by restricting apparel manufacturing to the city of Los Angeles. L.A. City Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson is pushing a motion at City Hall asking Olympics organizers to commit to giving some contracts to businesses in the city specifically.

The center also wants LA28 to commit to sourcing goods from manufacturers that pay $25 an hour and have no outstanding wage claims. Wage theft is rampant in the garment industry.

The new campaign also takes aim at the city of Los Angeles, asking city leaders to establish a position within the Community Investment Department focused on the garment industry and develop a “Made in LA” program to give city apparel contracts to local ethical manufacturers. L.A. County is currently working on developing a similar pilot program, and the Garment Worker Center is asking the city to follow suit.

As her reelection campaign was heating up, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass held a news conference last month at an apartment complex recently built above the Vermont/Santa Monica station on the Metro B Line.

Her message: During her first term in office, the city has tackled high rents by facilitating construction of more than 10,000 new income-restricted apartments.

“Today marks an important milestone in our work to make Los Angeles more affordable for the people who call this city home,” Bass said outside the colorful, six-story apartment building.

Affordability, she said, was the city’s “number one issue.”

L.A. voters who agree with that assessment will need to decide in Tuesday’s election whether Bass has done enough on housing affordability to merit a second term, or whether her challenger, City Councilmember Nithya Raman, would do a better job addressing the deep-rooted problem.

Bass vs. Raman

Raman has pitched herself as the Yes in My Backyard (YIMBY) alternative to L.A.’s status quo, bucking consensus opinion among elected leaders who have often been skeptical about the benefits of new housing construction. As a result, she has at times struggled to win majority support on the council for pro-development proposals.

Bass has made several policy changes aimed at boosting affordable housing production. But housing policy experts say the results have been mixed. One thing she didn’t mention in her announcement at the Metro stop housing project was that the building that served as a backdrop had been funded by Proposition HHH.

That $1.2 billion measure to build units for formerly unhoused tenants was supported by former Mayor Eric Garcetti and passed by voters a decade ago.

About half of the building’s 187 units are not available for most renters — they’re reserved for people exiting homelessness, in accordance with the goals of Prop. HHH. The other half is open only to tenants earning less than 50% of the area’s median income.

Jason Ward, an economist and director at Santa Monica-based policy research organization the RAND Housing Center, said permanent supportive housing units can help get chronically unhoused people off the streets, but they have “nothing to do with the housing affordability of an average low-income Angeleno household.”

An LAist analysis found that about 40% of the 10,000 affordable units built during Bass’ time in office were in projects funded by Prop. HHH. That measure passed in 2016, long before her inauguration in late 2022.

“Things that really allowed HHH to have a pretty big impact all preceded the mayor's term,” Ward said. “Any projects getting built in a current mayor's four-year term, you can just basically assume that [mayor] didn't have a lot to do with the conditions that enabled them to begin.”

LAist asked Bass’ campaign about her statements outside the apartment complex above the Metro station. A spokesperson sent LAist an email saying, “Los Angeles underbuilt housing for decades,” and “Mayor Bass changed that.”

“But the Mayor is not satisfied,” the spokesperson continued. “She's continuing to take action to finally address our city's housing crisis."

Housing accomplishments under Bass 

Some housing policy experts give Bass credit for taking some meaningful steps to speed up low-income housing creation, which they say is needed in a city where about 60% of renters spend more on housing than is considered affordable under federal government standards.

Bass signed off on what is, perhaps, her signature housing reform during her first week in office. Her Executive Directive One (ED 1) speeds up city permitting for projects where all units have rents capped at levels deemed affordable to low- and moderate-income tenants.

Developers responded to the program’s fast-tracking by submitting plans for more than 47,000 income-restricted apartments.

Shane Phillips, the housing initiative manager for the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies, openly supports Raman. But he said ED 1 has been a positive change for L.A.

“It's certainly not enough, but I think it was an effective policy,” Phillips said. “In some ways, the mayor's office, I think, was a little surprised by how effective it was.”

Most of those ED 1 units remain unbuilt. Again, completing new housing developments often takes longer than a single mayoral term.

Bass’ campaign told LAist that 7,728 units in ED 1 projects are currently under construction, and 418 units are now ready for occupancy.

Bass says the affordable units completed during her time in office represent a fourfold increase from levels under the Garcetti administration.

But L.A. remains far short of meeting the housing production targets laid out in a state-required planning process. To reach those goals, the city would need to build about 23,000 units of affordable housing every year.

“We don't have a lot to be super proud of,” Phillips said. “We've kind of had this trade-off where, yes, we've been building more low-income affordable housing than in past years. But that's been offset by a reduction in housing production overall. And it's housing production overall that actually affects prices and rents for the city as a whole.”

L.A. is not alone in failing to keep up with its state housing production targets. Most cities are far behind. But Bass’ opponent argues the city could be doing much more to reach those goals.

Where has Raman disagreed with Bass?

Raman’s positions on some major housing policies offer a stark contrast with Bass.

Before it was signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom last year, Bass opposed SB 79, a recent state law that overrides local zoning restrictions to allow more housing density near major public transit lines. She said the law could “disproportionately impact low-resource neighborhoods.”

A majority of the City Council joined Bass in opposing SB 79. But Raman, who until recently chaired the City Council’s Housing and Homelessness Committee, voted against the council’s opposition, saying state lawmakers were right to push reluctant city officials toward permitting more homes.

After ED 1 applications began flooding in, angering some homeowners near proposed projects, Bass rolled back the program. She canceled ED 1 near single-family zones and in historic districts. Nearly three-quarters of L.A.’s residential land remains reserved for single-family homes, and this zoning has been protected by Bass and other elected leaders.

Raman was the lone council member to favor allowing some controversial ED 1 projects to move forward. Her position earned strong disapproval from some homeowners in her district.

Court rulings later found that the city illegally blocked the projects.

“Working Angelenos are leaving the city every single day because they can’t afford to pay the rent,” Raman said in a recent forum. “We can change the policies in the city that have made Los Angeles one of the slowest, most unpredictable, most expensive places to build.”

Bass’ case against Raman

Bass has said that taking a more permissive approach to market-rate housing development could harm existing tenants. She has said she believes new market-rate apartments can end up gentrifying neighborhoods.

“We need housing, but we cannot displace Black and Brown people,” Bass said at another recent forum. “If you have housing that is just built anywhere and everywhere, they're coming for us.”

Bass has also said Raman’s talk on housing hasn’t produced enough results for her district, which stretches from Encino east through the Hollywood Hills and into Los Feliz. Bass’ administration says Raman’s district has seen 130 affordable units completed in the last four years, the second-lowest of any council district.

The Raman campaign has said her district was redrawn in 2022 to exclude many of the neighborhoods where affordable apartments could be built. The single-family zones that dominate her district now restrict low-income units more than in other districts, they’ve said.

“Comparing raw unit totals across districts with very different zoning doesn’t show which offices are actually doing the work to get housing built,” a campaign spokesperson said in an email.

In L.A.’s political system, mayors need to work closely with the City Council on major legislative reforms. But during Raman’s time in City Hall, she has not been able to convince a majority of her colleagues to explore making certain single-family zones more dense, to exempt new apartments from the city’s “mansion tax” or to join her in other housing-related reforms.

“There's a lot of unwillingness to do things dramatically different than the status quo, at least on average, in the City Council,” Ward said. “I think that's going to continue to be a challenge.”

A Raman campaign spokesperson told LAist in an email that some of her reforms, such as speeding up utility hookups for new buildings, could be enacted without council approval.

“Much of her platform is focused on cutting red tape and implementing bureaucratic reforms that fall squarely under the powers of the mayor,” they said.

Where the candidates are aligned 

Both Bass and Raman have been eager to take credit for lowering the city’s rent control caps, which apply to annual rent increases for most of the city’s apartment dwellers.

As chair of the Housing and Homelessness Committee, Raman oversaw legislative debate on the new policy, which lowered the city’s maximum allowable rent increase from 10% to 4%.

Bass signed that reform into law last year.

Both have also supported efforts to rein in Measure ULA, the city’s so-called “mansion tax.” Many economists blame the tax, which applies to all kinds of real estate selling for more than $5.4 million, for dragging down the development of new apartment buildings.

Bass said her support for “mansion tax” reforms at the state level fell apart as Sacramento lawmakers hit a legislative deadline last year.

Raman’s proposal to ask voters to cancel the tax on new apartment buildings never made it to a vote in the City Council.

For more on Los Angeles-area races in the upcoming election, go to LAist's Voter Game Plan.