The Brief

Electric bikes and scooters can be spotted in most major cities in the United States, zooming past their non-motorized counterparts and pedestrians. Despite the devices’ rising popularity, colleges across California can’t come to a consensus on just what to do about them.

Some campuses allow students to ride both e-bikes and e-scooters, while others only allow one or restrict them to certain zones. Several ban them completely.

For college students, these modes of transportation mean shorter commute times compared to walking. They’re far cheaper to rent or buy than vehicles, and easier to park, too. Since they run on electric-powered batteries, the devices are also more sustainable than gas-powered cars and produce fewer harmful emissions.

Riding an e-scooter allows Kristine Bhan, a fourth-year Cal State Long Beach student majoring in studio art, to haul heavy art supplies up the campus’ many hills.

“I hang my art supplies in a folder and the folder has a little hook, so I could hook it onto my scooter and I just ride it to upper campus,” said Bhan, who also prefers her e-scooter over her car during peak traffic.

E-bikes and e-scooters aren’t just booming on and near college campuses: Motorized micro-mobility is gaining traction across the country.

Shared e-bike trips, which are bikes that can be borrowed or rented from automated stations, or docking stations, rose from 9.5 million in 2018 to 17 million in 2021, according to a report from the National Association of City Transportation Officials.

While the devices are attractive in their speed and convenience, they also pose safety risks. They can travel more than 30 mph, meaning accidents can be severe if the rider isn’t wearing protective gear. Pedestrians are also at risk of being struck.

At UC Davis, nearly a quarter of students (22%) who rode an e-bike had an on-campus fall that resulted in an emergency room or hospital visit, according to a campus-wide travel survey conducted in 2022. Among students who rode a regular bicycle, that number was just 7.5%. Nearly 90% of e-scooter riders who fell or crashed reported an injury that didn’t need medical attention.

The devices pose another safety concern: Their lithium-ion batteries have caught fire in some cases.

Weighing the devices’ benefits and drawbacks, California’s public universities are split on whether e-bikes and e-scooters should roam campus. All 10 UCs allow e-bikes while only five UCs allow e-scooters. In the 23-campus CSU system, 10 campuses allow both e-bikes and e-scooters, while of the 116 community colleges in the state, at least 40 allow both devices. Some of those campuses restrict them to certain routes or zones.

Regulating motorized micro-mobility

Micro-mobility refers to all transportation devices smaller than a car — including bikes, scooters, skateboards, unicycles and tricycles. E-bikes and e-scooters are electric-powered with motors of up to 750 watts. The devices typically cost between $150 and $3,000.

The vehicle code allows state colleges and universities to regulate the use of bicycles, e-bikes, skateboards, electric skateboards, roller skates and “electrically motorized boards,” but does not specifically include all scooters and e-scooters. For this reason, some campuses, such as Sacramento State, allow e-scooters because campus officials don’t believe the state gives them the power to deny their use on campus.

“We actually don’t have authority, as the state of California, to tell an electric scooter operator where they can and cannot go,” said Sacramento State Director of Transportation and Parking Services Jeff Dierking.

A student rides their scooter past a dismount sign as they enter the zone where she can be on the scooter rather than walking alongside it at Cal State Long Beach on Oct. 4, 2023.

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Lauren Justice

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CalMatters

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Senate Bill 295, introduced in February by state Sen. Bill Dodd, a Napa Democrat, would add e-scooters to the vehicle code. The UC Office of the President approached Dodd after several student accidents led the UC to review the code.

“College campuses have long been home to multimodal transportation, and they should pursue safety through effective education, engineering and enforcement,” Dodd said in a statement to CalMatters. “I’m standing by to help to the extent any clarification in law or other support is needed.”

The bill is pending further evaluation by the Assembly Transportation Committee.

Convenience vs. safety

It’s not hard to see why e-bikes and e-scooters are trending among students: they’re fast, fairly light and can be parked at bike racks.

After trying out her friend’s e-scooter, Anjali Patel, a senior majoring in journalism at USC, bought one of her own last year. USC allows e-bikes and e-scooters on most of its campus but prohibits the parking of rented scooters, which would cause congestion, said USC Department of Public Safety Assistant Chief David Carlisle.

Riding an e-scooter shortens Patel’s commute from her off-campus apartment from a 15-minute walk to less than 10 minutes, which means a lot, she said, when she’s running late for class or during a Southern California heat wave.

“It’s the fastest option. It’s not the most unsafe option,” Patel said. “For me, it’s the best.”

Since some motorized micro-mobility devices can reach speeds of up to 30 or even 40 miles an hour, and users often ride unprotected without helmets and other safeguards, rider safety is a concern. An October 2022 report from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission found that micro-mobility injuries rose 127% from 2017 to 2021, with e-scooter trips resulting in the most rider deaths. Last year, the California Statewide Integrated Traffic Records System recorded 225 crashes involving an e-bike, up from 80 crashes in 2021.

A student rides his scooter among walkers at Cal State Long Beach on Oct. 4, 2023.

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Lauren Justice

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CalMatters

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“[E-scooters] are very vulnerable to irregularities in the roadway and can toss a rider off easily if they’re going too fast,” USC’s Carlisle said.

Though Patel admits to going a little faster than she should on her e-scooter — 18 mph at most — she said she’s attentive. When others aren’t, safety becomes an issue.

“People are like, ‘Scooters and bikers are so rude and so unsafe, and they’re going so fast,’” Patel said. “I can’t use my phone while I’m scootering — my eyes are up. If anything, it’s the people walking that are not looking.”

Although she considers herself a safe driver, Patel was injured while riding her e-scooter in December. As she crossed a small intersection near her off-campus house, an idling car began moving — to Patel’s surprise — and hit her.

Luckily, the fall wasn’t too bad and, amid finals week, Patel nursed a scraped chin. The accident hasn’t led her to change the way she rides. She’s always been careful on roads and when riding around pedestrians, Patel said, though she doesn’t wear a helmet.

But some schools have seen serious student injuries — and even fatalities — from motorized micro-mobility accidents.

After a freshman died from falling off his e-skateboard near campus in 2020, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo officials cracked down on most micro-mobility devices on campus, where e-scooters, scooters and skateboards have been prohibited for over a decade. E-bikes and bicycles, however, are allowed.

UC Irvine bans e-scooters from the campus’ inner core, which consists primarily of pedestrian walkways. Bikes, e-bikes and non-motorized scooters, however, are allowed on a road that circles the school’s central park.

Erika Rule, UC Irvine’s sustainable programs manager, said excluding e-scooters, which are commonly ridden on sidewalks, is a matter of “protecting pedestrian safety.”

The motorized devices come with another safety concern: the chance of starting a fire. Improperly charging e-bikes and e-scooters and using damaged chargers can overload electrical circuits, according to the National Fire Protection Association.

In March and April, Berkeley’s fire department responded to six fires related to mobility devices, including one inside a UC Berkeley dormitory. A charging e-skateboard plugged into a power strip caused an accidental fire in March at Ida Sproul Hall, resulting in damage to the room. The school’s principal mobility planner, David Sorrell, said that despite a campus-wide rule against doing so, students often ride inside buildings and charge their devices indoors.

UC Berkeley currently prohibits rented e-scooters from entering campus, but personal devices are allowed in campus bike lanes.

Disseminating information about safe riding practices has been difficult, Sorrell said, given UC Berkeley’s large student and employee populations. That’s why some at the university are eyeing a ban on micro-mobility in their areas of campus. But Sorrell has pushed back.

“The scooters are a necessity. E-bikes are a necessity,” Sorrell said, adding that high-grade hills on campus make motorized devices the easiest way to get around. “Why would we discriminate against those vehicles?”

Some campuses have struck a balance

Managing congestion, traffic flow, parking availability and student safety is a tall task for colleges deciding on micro-mobility policies.

Laney College in Oakland allows e-scooters on campus, while e-bikes have to be dropped off in designated zones on campus, Public Information Officer Mark Johnson wrote in an email to CalMatters.

Sacramento State redesigned its policy on e-bikes and e-scooters in 2019 and allows personal devices on campus with designated pedestrian-only zones, where campus police watch for violators and ask them to dismount their devices. Storage locations — bike racks and a bike compound — border the zones. A geofence around the campus perimeter deactivates all rented e-scooters and e-bikes.

“Those are high-traffic areas, and those are intended so that we can have a safe environment on campus to facilitate all equitable modes of transportation,” said Dierking of Sac State.

Electric scooters are locked at a bike rack on campus at the UC Davis on Oct. 3, 2023.

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Miguel Gutierrez Jr.

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CalMatters

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Safety concerns arise, Dierking said, when pedestrian-only zones converge with areas allowing wheeled devices. At the start of each school term, the university deploys workers wearing yellow vests to chat about safety with students on mobility devices. It also puts up signage telling road users to slow down at these intersections.

At UC Davis, a fatal student accident involving a non-electric bicycle in May 2022 led university officials to evaluate all micro-mobility policies and safeguards. The university formed working groups and conducted a campus-wide survey about safety and theft.

The working groups heard that motorized micro-mobility devices go too fast and that bikes are often stolen, said Active Modality Manager Jeff Bruchez, who heads the school’s bicycle program. According to the same study, 12% of UC Davis students who rode a bike to school in 2021-22 reported having their bike stolen.

To limit speed and theft, UC Davis introduced a shared e-bike and e-scooter program. UC Davis and the City of Davis launched a partnership with Spin on Sept. 8, making 400 e-bikes and 200 e-scooters available to students while eliminating personal liability for theft and allowing the university to regulate the devices’ maximum speeds, Bruchez said.

“By bringing a shared system onto campus, we can ensure that everyone can operate a device that fits within the ecosystem that we have, specifically that 15-miles-an-hour speed limit,” he said.

A student carries his scooter down the sidewalk at Cal State Long Beach on Oct. 4, 2023.

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Lauren Justice

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CalMatters

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The university is hoping that revving up public education programs — including its “Helmet Hair Don’t Care” campaign that rewards students with free helmets after the completion of an eight-minute online safety course — will help reduce the number of severe collisions involving micro-mobility devices.

Across the UC system, another initiative is underway to incentivize e-bike use.

In December, an agreement UC reached with the United Auto Workers union, which represents postdoctoral workers and academic researchers, gives employees access to an e-bike discount program starting with the fall 2023 term.

The program has “made it possible” for UC San Diego sociology master’s student Beatrice Waterhouse to consider buying an e-bike. Climate demands were a key part of bargaining, she said, so the devices’ low environmental impact interested them.

“We care about the environment and we care about our universities being part of change, trying to fight for a more climate-just California and world,” Waterhouse said.

If Nithya Raman defeats incumbent Karen Bass on Nov. 3, she’ll become the third mayor of Los Angeles to oversee plans for the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games — and the first to have started out as an Olympics critic.

Raman told the Democratic Socialists of America’s L.A. chapter in 2020 that she opposed Los Angeles playing host to the world’s largest sporting event, skewering the city for making a “rushed” deal without public input.

Still, she’ll be stuck with the Games if she becomes mayor, and will also oversee the city in the period that follows, when L.A. will be left with any cost overruns if the private organizing committee LA28 runs out of money.

Depending on how she wields the role, Raman could shift the city’s approach to its host duties, ramping up pressure on LA28 to publicly disclose more about its finances and also changing the leadership on key bodies like the Board of Police Commissioners, Metro Board and even, potentially, the LA28 board of directors.

She’ll also have significant power to set the tone for the Games and the city's agenda leading up to them, observers told LAist.

“I think that she will end up being a booster of the Olympics because she has to be,” said Jim Newton, a veteran L.A. journalist and expert on California politics. “But what she does with that authority is what's up for grabs.”

Would Raman keep police chief through 2028?

The 2028 Games haven’t been a major talking point on the campaign trail, but Police Chief Jim McDonnell's fate has.

Bass nominated McDonnell to the post in 2024, and Raman voted to confirm him. But Raman said she’ll replace the chief if elected as mayor, criticizing LAPD’s response to federal immigration enforcement in Los Angeles. She has declined, however, to say if she’d do this ahead of 2028.

The mayor can’t directly fire the chief, but appoints the Board of Police Commissioners, which can. If Raman appointed a new chief ahead of the Games, the person would need council approval.

“The mayor appoints the Board of Police Commissioners, so they are unlikely to retain a chief that the mayor doesn't like,” said Raphael Sonenshein, an expert on the city charter and the executive director of the Haynes Foundation. He said it’s more typical for new mayors not to appoint a police chief to a second term than to remove them early. McDonnell’s five-year term is up at the end of 2029.

Moderator Conan Nolan pushed Raman to clarify if she’d remove the chief ahead of 2028 at the NBC4 and Telemundo 52 mayoral debate, citing the high-security status of the sprawling sporting event. Raman responded, saying it would depend on conversations with “other decision-making bodies.”

“I will work towards that with all of the responsibility and all of the care that this moment requires,” Raman said of removing McDonnell. “And I promise you Angelenos, I promise you, there is no decision that I will take as your mayor that will put you in danger.”

Bass pushed back, saying Raman didn’t have “any idea” what identifying a new police chief required.

“We are 640 days away from the largest sporting event to ever take place — a major national security event — and if you think that you’re going to find a police chief, you would send the department in disarray,” Bass said.

The U.S. Secret Service leads security for the Games but works closely with LAPD and other law enforcement agencies. In the spring, LAPD estimated its policing costs for the Games would exceed $730 million.

Other leadership roles could change

Raman could also shake up the L.A. Metro’s Board of Directors, which is overseeing Metro’s 28 by 28 initiative and steering the temporary bus system planned for the Olympics and Paralympics. Mayor Karen Bass currently chairs the Metro Board, and if Raman is elected, she would hold that position through June 2027, the end of the fiscal year.

She could replace any of the three mayoral appointees: Jacquelyn Dupont-Walker, president of the Ward Economic Development Corporation; and City Councilmembers Imelda Padilla and Katy Yaroslavsky

“I want to use those four seats to push Metro to invest in the biggest bang for the buck in terms of public transit investments,” Raman said at a mayoral forum in September, referencing her own spot on the board and her appointees'.

Alissa Walker, a mega-events expert who writes the popular newsletter Torched, told LAist that the mayor’s role on Metro is another way she can flex power ahead of the Games.

 “You could push forward an agenda,” Walker said, referring to former Mayor Eric Garcetti’s plan to accelerate transit infrastructure for the Games. “Let’s remember Garcetti's 28 by 28, that came from him being on the Metro Board. It wasn't something that he pushed through the city.”

The mayor also has direct influence on the makeup of LA28’s board of directors, a body that has faced scrutiny for its Trump allies and its chairman, Casey Wasserman. The city has six members on the board who were appointed by the mayor without city council approval, the mayor’s office told LAist.

The board mainly operates behind the scenes, but the City Council can require the city’s board members to report back on the board’s progress and decisions that impact the city — a right the mayor could encourage the council to flex.

LA’s financial gamble

Then there’s the question of how Raman would navigate the city’s complex relationship with LA28, and unlimited financial risk as the backstop of the Games. The host deal was championed and brokered by then-Mayor Garcetti, but it’s the coming mayoral term that will oversee the actual event and its aftermath.

The Olympics committee is operating mainly on its own to deliver the Games with a $7.2 billion budget, but will use many city resources to pull them off, including police, traffic control, trash collection and more.

Raman was one of four council members to vote against the city’s agreement with LA28 on how it will be reimbursed for those services during the Games earlier this year, saying it left taxpayers too exposed to unexpected costs. The deal established that the city will seek reimbursement for the cost of policing venues from the federal government, which is overseeing Olympics security.

“Would you agree to cover someone else’s bills without knowing what you might have to pay — or even being allowed to see what they’re spending? Of course not!” Raman wrote on X.

If elected, Raman could throw her weight behind her ally, City Controller Kenneth Mejia, who subpoenaed LA28 this month for financial documents he said the organization owed the city.

“Right now you have a mayor, Karen Bass, who's really highlighted the Olympics as a signature moment for Los Angeles, and certainly as a signature moment for what she hopes will be her second term,” Newton, the L.A. journalist and historian, told LAist. “Raman, if she were elected, is not as invested in that and may see that she has some leverage over LA28.”

She has also said she would appoint “an experienced financial executive to oversee the City’s Olympic costs” in her first 100 days in office. LAist asked Raman’s campaign whether she would remove Paul Krekorian, who currently leads the city’s Office of Major Events, but did not receive a response.

Kavish Harjai contributed to this story.

Los Angeles Unified will hold another round of community meetings in November as it begins to consider school closures and mergers.

“We're gonna be embarking, I would say, on one of the most consequential initiatives that this district has completed and done over the last 30 years,” said Pedro Salcido, a deputy superintendent, at a similar community meeting in early October.

LAUSD officials’ decisions could reshape the experience of 374,000 students from transitional kindergarten through high school. The meetings, scheduled from Wednesday, Nov. 4, through Monday, Nov. 9, offer community members a chance to share their concerns and questions directly with district staff. Most are virtual, but there are two opportunities to attend in person.

Enrollment has fallen more than 40% in the last two decades, and the district has closed relatively few of its more than 1,000 schools. District officials say resources are often stretched thin at underenrolled schools. For example, small high schools may not be able to offer as many electives or advanced courses.

The district is also under increasing scrutiny by state and county officials because current projections show LAUSD will be unable to pay its bills by the end of the next school year. In response, the district is considering a series of budget cuts that could lead to the elimination of thousands of jobs.

When are the meetings?

After 170 years, one of the great mysteries of early Los Angeles history remains unsolved: Who initiated the freedom suit that emancipated Biddy Mason and 13 other Black women and children in an L.A. courtroom in January 1856?

The City Council’s recent move to rename Pershing Square for Mason has refocused public attention on her history. Yet we’re no closer to identifying the single figure behind her emancipation, a historic case that broke the back of slavery in Southern California.

I’ll confess, I’ve probably spent as much time as anyone trying to unravel that mystery. As a history professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, I spent a decade deep in research, resulting in the first scholarly biography of Biddy Mason, The Boundless Biddy Mason: An Odyssey from Slavery to Freedom Across the American West.

Yet it brought me no closer to the truth. My excuse: The 19th-century official court records were either destroyed or lost, while the accounts of Mason’s own descendants point toward different people, in different places.

Only recently did I realize that I’d been asking the wrong questions all along. No single figure was capable of overturning the institution of slavery in California, which had gone uncontested for years, despite the state’s constitutional ban on human bondage.

The only way to understand Mason’s emancipation was to begin, not with a person, but with a network: the hidden history of Southern California’s Underground Railroad.

Proslavery status quo

Southern California and the Underground Railroad are terms not often paired together. The Underground Railroad, after all, is almost exclusively associated with the history of abolitionism in the Northeast. According to common understanding, it was a network of Black and white allies, working in secret, to ferry enslaved people from the South to freedom in the North or Canada.

That’s all true, of course. But those same networks existed in the American West as well. They helped usher Black people from slavery in Texas to freedom in Mexico. And they challenged the entrenched power of slaveholders in Southern California.

Although California had outlawed slavery in its 1849 constitution, that didn’t stop white Southerners from hauling their human property into the state. Perhaps as many as 1,500 enslaved African Americans had been carried into California by the time Mason’s freedom suit came to trial. Black Californians could count on little support from the state’s courts. Nearly every case they tried went in favor of slaveholders.

Whereas most slaveholders made their way to the gold diggings around Sacramento, a sizable colony of Southern transplants settled in San Bernardino, about 60 miles east of Los Angeles. There, they held more than two dozen Black people, including Biddy Mason and her three daughters, in bondage.

Robert Mays Smith, pictured here in old age in Texas, traversed the continent in search of fortune, built on the backs of enslaved people.

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Courtesy Kevin Waite

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By the mid-1850s, San Bernardino was the most prosperous slaveholding settlement anywhere in the American West. And Mason’s owner, Robert Smith, was the single largest slaveholder among them, with 14 people under his control.

California abolitionists challenged the proslavery status quo at their own peril. “The name of ‘black Republicans’ stunk in their nostrils worse than that of a horse-thief,” wrote one Californian of his violently anti-abolitionist neighbors. As the future U.S. Sen. John Conness recalled: “If any man could be found who had temerity enough to believe it [slavery] was a bad system, and his opinions became known, he was proscribed, clubbed, or shot, according to the pleasure of the ruffians who dominated public opinion” in California.

The politics of slavery became a matter of life and death in Los Angeles. In 1851, L.A.’s marshal discovered that a local slaveholder had been whipping a Black man in the courtyard of his adobe home. When the marshal attempted to intervene, he was confronted by a group of vigilantes. “They told me that I was required to leave the city within the space of 24 hours, at my peril,” he later reported in court records, “which I distinctly understood to mean the peril of my life.” The marshal departed the next morning for San Francisco.

“Mob Law,” lamented the Los Angeles mayor, “is triumphant as respects the existence of negro slavery in this district.”

Refuge for Black freedom-seekers

That didn’t dissuade Robert and Winnie Owens, two of the earliest Black settlers in Los Angeles. They knew as well as anyone that freedom often came at great personal sacrifice. They had been enslaved in Texas but managed to purchase their freedom and make their way west with their children. In Los Angeles, they formed the early core of the region’s Underground Railroad.

The San Pedro Street home (right) of Robert and Winnie Owens, a key site on the Underground Railroad of Southern California.

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C.C. Pierce Collection of Photographs, the Huntington Library, San Marino, California

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They turned their adobe home on San Pedro Street into a refuge for Black freedom-seekers. “Many slave owners have claimed that their property was kept in hiding” at the Owens home, recalled a resident of early Los Angeles in the Los Angeles Herald. In one instance, Bob and Winnie harbored a fugitive woman from her owner, “a drunken brute” from Rancho Cucamonga.

The Owens family did not act alone, however. The enslaved themselves provided the engine for Southern California’s Underground Railroad. Although their actions were circumscribed and their movements policed, they found ways to resist within the bonds of slavery.

Biddy Mason had been chipping away at her owner’s authority for years. In 1849, a Black man named Rande successfully escaped from Robert Smith and made his way to freedom. Mason almost certainly colluded in his escape. Although she couldn’t flee herself as the mother of three young daughters, she could take a vicarious pleasure in depriving her enslaver of his only adult male worker.

Mason’s was a rebellion in slow motion, a campaign built over months and years. In San Bernardino, she began conspiring with other enslaved people. A woman named Elizabeth Flake played a key role in those efforts, according to a later interview with Mason’s eldest daughter. Flake and Mason had formed a friendship through their shared ordeals, including a harrowing overland journey and enslavement in San Bernardino.

Elizabeth Flake (later Rowan), seen here later in life, played an instrumental role in Mason's quest for freedom in 1855-1856.

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San Bernardino Historical and Pioneer Society

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It was probably Elizabeth Flake to whom Mason first turned when she discovered that her owner intended to transport her family to Texas in late 1855. Somehow, they got word to the Owens family and a small network of Black and white allies.

From there, those allies alerted local law enforcement, who then apprehended Robert Smith on the eve of his planned departure for Texas. The largest freedom suit in the history of the American West was underway.

A suit for freedom

Despite her success in bringing Smith to trial, the odds were not in Mason’s favor. The presiding judge was a former slaveholder himself who claimed to “appreciate the kindly attachment that grows up between master and slave.” Mason was prohibited by California law from testifying against her enslaver or any other white person. Meanwhile, Smith or one of his cronies threatened Mason’s lawyer, prompting him to abandon her case. A gang of local rowdies stood at the ready to help Smith reclaim his property “by force.”

As her case rapidly deteriorated, Mason turned once more to her allies. The Owens family harbored Mason and many of the enslaved petitioners, enduring more threats of violence from Smith’s thugs. A white ally, Dr. A.H. Cooper, narrowly escaped a belligerent former constable who threatened to “blow your brains out” for daring to side with the enslaved.

Benjamin Ignatius Hayes in 1849, several years before he would become district judge for Los Angeles, San Bernardino and San Diego Counties.

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The Bancroft Library Portrait Collection

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It may have been one of Mason’s allies who convinced Judge Benjamin Hayes to interview her privately in his chambers (thereby skirting the ban on Black testimony). That interview finally swung the case in her favor. Mason’s “glorious instinct of freedom,” Hayes wrote, had lifted a “bright torch” to expose the subterfuge of her enslaver and convinced Hayes that justice lay on the side of the enslaved. On January 19, 1856, he declared Mason and 13 others “free forever.”

Mason’s courtroom victory emboldened other Black Californians to seek freedom for themselves. A wave of self-emancipations in San Bernardino followed. By 1857, the institution of Black chattel slavery in Southern California had ceased to exist.

California wasn’t born free through its putatively antislavery constitution. It only became free after the coordinated efforts of a courageous network of abolitionist allies — the westernmost spur of the Underground Railroad.

So, we may never know who, specifically, initiated the freedom suit that led to Mason’s emancipation. But I’d argue we shouldn’t lament our ignorance; we should celebrate it. Mason and her allies so carefully covered their tracks that neither the judge, nor their enslaver, nor anyone else in Southern California uncovered the full extent of their abolitionist network. They confound us still.

The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority is losing control of responsibilities tied to about $239 million in federal taxpayer funds as the Trump administration continues a push to strip power from the joint city-county agency. Now, Los Angeles and L.A. County are competing for control of some of those federal roles.

A key vote scheduled for Monday could help chart the future of the region’s response to its homelessness crisis.

And it’s happening in a unique format. Anyone, including you, can join and likely cast a vote.

Here’s what to know about what’s happening and how to get involved.

How we got here 

A regional planning group called the L.A. Continuum of Care voted earlier this month to designate L.A. County to take over at least two federal roles currently managed by the L.A. Homeless Services Authority, known as LAHSA — running the homeless count and managing the region’s federal funding application.

The city and county have been competing for two other federal responsibilities currently held by LAHSA — managing a database that tracks unhoused people receiving public services and administering a system used to match people who need help with housing and shelter.

The local process to select LAHSA’s replacements began after the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development suspended the embattled agency from these federal roles in June, citing financial mismanagement.

Independent reviewers scored the county’s applications higher than the city’s. On Oct. 6, the L.A. Continuum of Care’s 21-member board voted to recommend L.A. County for all four roles.

The following week, the L.A. City Council instructed its attorneys to explore potential legal challenges to the L.A. Continuum of Care’s selection process while negotiating with L.A. County for shared control of these responsibilities.

This week, city officials said those negotiations paid off. On Friday, the City Council voted 10-0 to support a tentative agreement with the county on the two remaining federal roles.

How to participate

The L.A. Continuum of Care’s general membership meeting is scheduled Monday at 3 p.m. The group will vote on whether to approve designating L.A. County for the two federal roles still up for grabs: managing the unhoused database and the housing matching system.

You can attend in person or online via Zoom, and anyone who attends might be eligible to vote.

The L.A. Continuum of Care is a regional planning group required by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development that chooses which agencies handle the region’s federal homelessness responsibilities. It’s a nebulous body without a fixed roster. It technically includes all “persons and entities interested in collaborative, solution oriented planning to address homelessness in L.A. County (with the exception of Glendale, Long Beach, and Pasadena)," according to its charter. Anyone who fits that description is allowed to vote.

Because L.A. County is the only candidate under consideration in the vote, county officials encouraged county employees not to vote to avoid potential conflicts of interest, according to an email from the county’s homelessness department.

Attend in-person at 637 Wilshire Boulevard, 1st Floor Commission Room, Los Angeles, CA 90017

Register to attend online here.

Worth noting: These are yes-or-no votes. If L.A. County is not approved, no decisions will be made.

How might this change things?

Since 2020, the homeless population has increased by nearly 10% in both the city of L.A. and across L.A. County, according to the official homeless counts.

The region’s homelessness budgets swelled over that same period, with hundreds of millions more spent on shelter beds, housing and services for unhoused Angelenos. Much of that money was available because of local voters who in recent years approved several sales taxes and other measures to fund homeless services.

The decisions getting voted on by L.A. Continuum of Care determine who runs the systems that track and direct that money and who answers to the public when results fall short.

After Monday’s vote, the L.A. Continuum of Care’s selections will go to a federal judge for review on Tuesday. The court will then largely determine when and how the transition away from LAHSA happens in the coming months.

It’s unclear how the shift in control will impact homeless services on the ground. LAHSA leaders and employees have warned that transferring these responsibilities is complex and could take up to a year.

A bitter fight over the best path forward played out ahead of the vote.

L.A. city officials, including Mayor Karen Bass, said they want collaborative governance, and argued giving the county sole authority over federal responsibilities would hurt city residents.

“The City of Los Angeles provides the overwhelming majority of housing for the region,” Bass and several city council members said in a statement earlier this month. “The City must be able to help the people on our own streets by placing them into the housing that we build and fund in order to solve the homelessness crisis,” the statement continued.

This month, Bass and a group of L.A. City Council members sent a letter to the L.A. Continuum of Care, arguing that the city’s applications should have scored higher, and urging more support for the city’s bid.

Leaders of the L.A. County Department of Homeless Services and Housing said the county applied for all four functions because it’s best positioned to represent and collaborate with the region's 85 cities and hundreds of service providers.

Ben Kay, chair of the L.A. Continuum of Care board, wrote to the mayor, City Council and county supervisors on Oct. 14 that the dispute had shifted from “a united front against federal encroachment to splintered infighting.” Kay warned that it could squander the chance to keep local control of these systems and head off further federal involvement. He defended the scoring and selection, saying the board “stands firmly behind the integrity of that process.”

The L.A. City Council held a special meeting on Oct. 14 to discuss the city’s next steps. City Administrative Officer Matt Szabo laid out some options: negotiating with L.A. County for co-leadership of federal roles, separating from L.A. County and forming a city-only continuum of care or potentially filing a lawsuit challenging the whole court-ordered selection process.

After a closed-session discussion, City Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson announced the council was formally requesting that the L.A. City Attorney’s Office “develop options for litigation to protect the city and to protect our constituents, both housed and homeless.”

The council also asked the city administrative officer to keep negotiating with the county.

Those talks produced a tentative agreement, which the council voted to support on Friday.

It covers the two federal roles still up for a vote Monday. If the county is picked to run both, the agreement would give the city a bigger role in each.

For the database, city staff would keep their current access. The city would also get all data in the system on unhoused people within city limits, including those enrolled in county-funded programs, according to the agreement.

Councilmember Ysabel Jurado, who chairs the council’s homelessness and health committee, said the city would get the raw data behind the system so it can build its own reports and dashboards. “That’s something we’ve never had,” she said.

For the matching system, the city funds the vast majority of permanent supportive housing in the city, but it doesn’t currently manage matching for any of those units, Szabo said. LAHSA does. Under the agreement, the county would contract with the city to do that matching in buildings funded by the city or its housing authority.

“We’re going from nothing to something, and something substantial,” Jurado said.

The deal isn’t final. Its terms still have to be turned into binding agreements approved by both the City Council and the county Board of Supervisors, according to a report from Szabo’s office.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development told the court in an Oct. 20 filing that L.A. County’s homelessness department is an acceptable applicant and that it “prefers” the county over the city.

U.S. District Judge David O. Carter’s court order requires the L.A. Continuum of Care to make its selections by Tuesday. Then, these complex federal responsibilities, supported by scores of LAHSA staff, have to move away from LAHSA on a timeline that will be set by the federal court.

LAHSA workers represented by union SEIU Local 721 have urged both the city and county to protect their jobs during that transition. They argue competent and experienced employees shouldn’t be sidelined because of leadership’s failures.

“We have spent years building relationships, learning these systems, and helping people move from homelessness into housing,” said Heather Varden, a LAHSA employee who posted an open letter from the union. “That experience should not be thrown away because the name at the top of the contract changes.”

The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, or LAHSA, is losing its federal responsibilities.

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How to understand the context 

City and county officials created the L.A. Homeless Services Authority, or LAHSA, in 1993 as a joint powers authority between the two overlapping jurisdictions. Both the city and county appointed members to LAHSA’s governing commission and relied on the agency to manage public homelessness dollars for the region.

The federal roles were delegated to LAHSA by the L.A. Continuum of Care, an obscure but newly powerful planning group that HUD requires regions across the country to maintain if they want federal money.

Since late 2024, LAHSA has faced a string of critical audits and other scandals, putting its management of L.A.’s growing homelessness crisis under scrutiny.

L.A. County’s Board of Supervisors voted last year to divert more than $300 million in county homelessness funding from LAHSA and manage the funds itself. The county's new Department of Homeless Services and Housing took control of those funds in July.

On June 11, HUD suspended LAHSA from federal programs, citing alleged failures in financial management, internal controls, grant oversight and conflict-of-interest policies.

The move, according to the Trump administration, meant LAHSA wasn’t able to do the jobs the continuum of care had delegated to it, including applying for $239 million in federal funds on the region’s behalf.

The federal housing department said that with LAHSA suspended, it intended to have L.A. service providers apply directly to HUD for the funds — a move that would have ignored regional priorities.

LAHSA sued. In August, U.S. District Judge David O. Carter issued a preliminary injunction on LAHSA’s suspension through Oct. 27.

This allowed LAHSA to submit the region’s collaborative application for federal funds by an Oct. 14 deadline. (The agency has since provided notice that it has submitted the application on time.)

Carter also ordered the L.A. Continuum of Care to start taking applications to consider replacing LAHSA as soon as possible. The group hired consultants and ran an application process over about a month, beginning on Sept. 11. LAHSA leadership decided the agency would not compete in it.

L.A. County applied for all four federal roles and was the only applicant considered for two of them. The city applied for and competed against the county for the other two.

A panel of reviewers (whose identities were kept private) scored written applications and interview responses for each of the federal roles up for grabs. L.A. County’s pitch to operate a key database, known as HMIS, used to track service participants through the system earned a score of about 87 out of 100, compared to the city’s score of about 82. On Oct. 6, a committee focused on the database voted 8-0 in favor of the county’s application. Later that day, the board voted 10-4 to pick L.A. County for that role.

The county scored about 91 on its application to manage the system that matches unhoused people with available shelter and other resources — known as the Coordinated Entry System or CES — compared to the city’s score of about 73. The board voted 12-1 to select the county to run CES.

A 21-member board speaks for the L.A. Continuum of Care and guides decision-making. That board voted Oct. 6 to recommend L.A. County for all four federal roles currently held by LAHSA. Bass and several city council members had been urging people to attend the upcoming meeting and vote against the L.A. Continuum of Care board’s recommendations and in favor of the city.

Reba Stevens, a community advocate who serves on the 21-member L.A. Continuum of Care board, reviews materials in October 2026.

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How does the Continuum of Care operate?

Communities like L.A. must form and operate a “continuum of care” if they want federal homelessness money. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD, introduced the model in 1994 to promote communitywide collaboration toward ending homelessness. Congress wrote it into law in the 2009 HEARTH Act.

The L.A. Continuum of Care is the largest in the U.S. — covering all of L.A. County, except Long Beach, Pasadena and Glendale, which each run their own.

It isn't a government agency with its own staff. It’s a group of service providers, city and county agencies, housing authorities, advocates and people who have experienced homelessness. Known as the L.A. CoC, it operates under a governing charter.

Federal rules require the L.A. Continuum of Care to apply for HUD funding each year, decide which local projects receive it and oversee how the money is spent and how programs perform. The group must delegate who operates a shared database, runs a system for matching people to housing, applies for federal funding and counts the region’s homeless population.

Because it has no staff of its own, the Continuum of Care delegated those jobs to “lead agencies.” Until now, the group had chosen the city and county’s shared homelessness agency, LAHSA, to perform all four of those federal functions:

• Federal funding (Collaborative Applicant): submits the region’s annual funding application to HUD.
• Homeless Count (Point-in-Time count administrator): conducts the annual unhoused population census that shapes funding and policy.
• Homeless Database (HMIS Lead): runs the database where homeless service providers track who they serve and what housing and services those people receive. In Los Angeles, about 400 agencies feed into a system holding about 175,000 active participant profiles.
• Housing matching (CES Lead): manages the system that assesses people and matches them to shelter and housing. That system runs on the HMIS database. 

Sarah Mahin, director of the L.A. County Department of Homeless Services and Housing, made the county's case to the L.A. Continuum of Care board at meeting in October 2026.

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Canceled meeting stirs controversy

On Oct. 9, the Continuum of Care’s general membership held a meeting to formally designate the county to fill the administrative roles. Because that general membership is broad, the vote was likely to be decided based on turnout.

The day prior, the L.A. mayor’s office sent text messages to “thousands of community members,” according to that office, urging them to attend the meeting and vote against the Continuum of Care Board’s recommendations and in favor of the city.

County agencies also sent out notices about the vote, including a warning to county employees not to participate because of conflict-of-interest concerns.

More than 1,000 people attempted to attend the meeting online, exceeding the Zoom call’s capacity, according to organizers. The meeting was immediately adjourned by organizers, who told attendees they had to stop the meeting to avoid violating California’s open meeting law.

Katie Hill, CEO at Union Station Homeless Services in Pasadena, called the L.A. mayor's office’s efforts to stack the meeting with voters “outrageous” in an interview with LAist.

“There’s a process that everyone has agreed on that is fair and represents our collective best interests,” Hill told LAist. “We were supposed to ratify it in the same way that Congress ratifies electoral votes. And then all of the sudden they said they didn't like the outcome, and now they want people to not ratify it.”

Some city officials defended the mayor’s push to involve the public. Councilmember Tim McOsker said the board’s recommendations are “not a rubber stamp.”

“The [Continuum of Care] has a responsibility to scrutinize the recommendations, evaluate the scores, and exercise its own judgment rather than blindly accepting them,” McOsker said in a statement. “Public meetings should be attended by the public,” McOsker’s statement continued.

Hill’s organization has several contracts with L.A. County and just one with the city of L.A., she said. Hill previously served on LAHSA’s governing body as an L.A. County appointee.

While Hill thinks the county is better suited to run the system, some homeless services providers are staying neutral.

“We did not mobilize participants for Friday’s meeting,” Jerry Jones, executive director of the Greater L.A. Coalition on Homelessness, a network of more than 60 service providers, told LAist. “The best path forward is for both groups of elected officials to work together.”

“Regardless [of] who the [Continuum of Care] lead is, there are 20,000 people being served — we need to keep that funding,” Ivet Samvelyan, vice president of Hope The Mission, told LAist.

After the capacity issues, the Continuum of Care upgraded its Zoom account and now has capacity for 10,000 people for Monday’s meeting, according to a report the group submitted to the court on Oct. 13.

The group must make its final selections by Oct. 27, the same day the preliminary injunction is set to expire.