The Brief

Update, Friday: LA City Council approves $1 million in new spending for LAPD

L.A. Mayor Karen Bass has asked the City Council to increase the Los Angeles Police Department’s budget by $4.4 million to hire 410 more officers before July.

In a letter to council members yesterday, Bass wrote that the city needs to have enough officers to keep Angelenos safe in coming years, including during major events like the 2026 FIFA World Cup and the 2028 Olympic Games.

LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell made a similar argument at a Budget and Finance Commission meeting Tuesday, where he said that despite the city’s budget problems, he worries about whether L.A. will be prepared for the Olympics in 2028 under currently approved staffing.

Several City Council members have already been pushing back against the proposal, arguing that the budget for those positions was negotiated and signed by Bass in June.

“The council and the mayor signed a budget that included 240 new hires,” Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky said at the Budget and Finance Commission meeting on Tuesday. “The department chose to hire that full 240 in the first six months of this year.”

“Our job is to keep the city safe. We also have a responsibility to keep it solvent,” Yaroslavsky told LAist in an emailed statement. “I want to grow the police department, but I have yet to see a proposal that identifies an ongoing funding source to pay for more officers.”

LAPD Officers line up in preparation to form a skirmish line in front of protesters near the federal detention facility in downtown L.A. on June 7, 2025.

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LAPD hiring goals twice as high as current budget

Mayor Bass initially proposed a budget back in April recommending funding to support 480 new LAPD officers.

The final budget was a compromise reached by the City Council that approved hiring 240 new recruits in the midst of a budget crisis and attempts to reduce layoffs across the city. According to a press release on June 7, the day after she signed the final budget, Bass announced a plan to find additional funding within 90 days to bring the total LAPD hires to 480.

The funding never materialized and no additional positions have yet been approved.

LAPD has already hit its hiring cap of 240 new officers, according to a letter from the city personnel department.

The city’s most recent financial status report filed on Dec. 5 by City Administrative Officer Matt Szabo says if LAPD continues hiring at its current pace, the department would add 410 new sworn officers and exceed the plan previously budgeted.

The report shows that costs of the additional 410 officers would be expected to exceed $4.4 million through June, then about $23.7 million in the next fiscal year.

Chief McDonnell spoke to council members at the Budget and Finance Committee about the pace of hiring, and said that the department did what it was “told to do.”

“Our understanding was . . . that we would be able to hire an additional 240 if we hired 240 in the first six months,” McDonnell said, “we did that.”

The department cannot continue hiring without the additional positions requested by Bass.

Show me the money

At Tuesday’s Budget and Finance meeting, Councilmember Tim McOsker asked Szabo whether any funds had ever been identified to fill those positions.

“There has not been a formal report issued to this body identifying funds for additional hiring above what is in the budget,” Szabo replied.

“Is there any proposal — any sort of competent, grown up, adult proposal — for how we pay for this?” McOsker, who also chairs the Personnel and Hiring Committee, asked in a follow up question to Szabo.

“Not that I'm aware of,” Szabo replied. He said his office would be happy to identify reductions to fund additional hiring, but had not been instructed to do so.

That means the proposed hires would need to come from the city’s reserve funds, which Szabo’s office cautioned against.

“The impact of this overspending in 2025-26 and 2026-27 cannot be overlooked,” his office’s financial status report states, “as it represents a departure from the approved plan with likely repercussions to the City’s Reserve Fund.”

The reserve fund currently sits at 5.06 percent of the total general fund budget, according to the report, but overspending — primarily driven by LAPD and liability payments — could bring the reserve fund below emergency levels of 5 percent.

“We should never, as a practice, assume the use of the reserve fund for hiring police officers,” Szabo told the Budget and Finance Committee. “The reserve fund is there for unexpected circumstances.”

In an emailed statement provided to LAist, McOsker said he agrees with the mayor that public safety is the highest priority.

“I agreed with the Mayor six months ago when she originally proposed this saying she would work with Council Leadership to find the money to fund more officers.” McOsker said, “But six months later, this remains a proposal with no funding identification.”

Bass told Larry Mantle on AirTalk that the city is looking at “every account possible” to find money for more officers, and that not approving more hiring will also have a financial cost.

“ Either we hire new officers or we continue to spend millions and millions of dollars in overtime,” she said.

Listen to the interview

The Lynwood Library has reopened after its first major renovation in almost 50 years. New skylights brighten the space and there are dedicated areas for teens, kids, studying and community meetings.

“It does give you a feeling that our community matters,” said Danielle Trujillo, who grew up nearby and visited the library often. “That we deserve new books, that we deserve new furniture, that we deserve to be in a space that's welcoming, spacious, and inviting.”

The $8 million project began in 2024 and closed the library for about two years. The branch reopened Aug. 20 and celebrated with a ribbon-cutting Thursday.

“ I'm so happy to have this open, and a place for our community to gather, to connect,” said Lynwood Mayor Gabriela Camacho, who also brought her twins to the library.

Gabrielle Fata and her 3-year-old son Zennett can walk to the library from their home.

“ I just try to get him interested in loving books at a young age, so I just like him being around all the books and all the letters and everything,” Fata said.

Local leaders, including Lynwood Mayor Gabriela Camacho, Assemblymember José Luis Solache, Supervisor Janice Hahn and LA County Library Director Skye Patrick cut the ribbon to celebrate the completion of the Lynwood Library renovation.

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How the funding came together

Supervisor Janice Hahn said she advocated for part of L.A. County’s federal COVID-19 pandemic relief dollars to fund five library renovations in District 4, including the Lynwood Library. The southeast L.A. County city is home to about 64,000 people.

 “I still believe that libraries are a real treasure for communities and schools,” Hahn said. “I know a lot of young people get their information online and are on the internet, but I really believe libraries are still an important part of the fabric of a community.”

The 12,000-square-foot Lynwood Library renovation includes a new area for teens.

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The renovations were originally planned to be completed by November 2025. Hahn said she wasn’t sure what caused the delay.

“Wish it could've been open earlier, but [there] are always construction issues and problems that I think we face with almost everything we try to do in the county of Los Angeles,” Hahn said.

‘A library for the people’

LA County Library Director Skye Patrick said when the Lynwood Library was first built in 1977, the idea was to keep the space dark to preserve the books inside.

“The library is … no longer just about the books.  It's about the people.” Patrick said. “We want the space to be welcoming, we want it to be open, we want it to have a lot of airflow through it.”

 "I like how there's separate sections for different people to do things," said Jennifer Estrada, an eighth grader at a nearby middle school. "There's the study rooms, you could go with your friends or if you just wanna be alone."

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Jennifer Estrada is an eighth grader at Hosler Middle School, less than a mile away from the library, and has started visiting twice a week to study and hang out with friends since it reopened.

“ I feel like it's very open. You could be you in here,” Estrada said.

Trujillo, who is now the adult teen librarian here, said she’s excited to see the next generation embrace the library.

“ I try not to show it as much 'cause I don't wanna scare them away,” Trujillo said. “But I'm really excited that the teens are coming into the space and that they're happy with it.”

"Libraries have transformed from just checking out books," said librarian Danielle Trujillo. "People come in and they hang out with their friends, or they're studying for school."

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Trujillo said in addition to the teen space, the Spanish language and manga collections are also popular.

She said the library also welcomes feedback.

 “If anyone ever wants to come talk to us and share some ideas that they have for the library, we're completely open to that,” Trujillo said.

Fata said her son Zennett’s favorite books skew spooky, including Aaron Reynolds' “Creepy” series and Rhode Montijo’s Skeletown series.

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Visit the Lynwood Library

Address: 11320 Bullis Road, Lynwood
Hours:

• Tuesday- Wednesday: 12 p.m. - 8 p.m.
• Thursday- Saturday: 10 a.m. - 6 p.m.
• Sunday- Monday: Closed

Learn more: Website

Topline:

Key topics: The candidates each had about 45 minutes to individually answer questions from Erin Stone, an LAist senior reporter focused on climate and environment.

Here are some of the topics they covered:

• Extreme heat
• Emergency preparedness and recovery
• Protecting communities from pollution
• Water
• Public transit

About the organizers: The event is organized by a coalition of local environmental and environmental justice groups including: Los Angeles League of Conservation Voters, SCOPE-LA, Sierra Club, Clean and Healthy California, Neighborhood Council Sustainability Alliance and Communities for a Better Environment

LAist will have more coverage and analysis of the conversations Friday morning.

The Trump administration is taking steps to advance a mysterious and unprecedented project to compile state-by-state lists of people it has decided are eligible citizens over the age of 18 who can vote in the upcoming midterm election. But it will no longer meet its own deadline to publish that information on a portal on Friday, which is 60 days before Election Day.

Department of Justice attorneys told opposing counsel in two separate lawsuits that instead of meeting the Sept. 4 deadline, they would give 48-hours notice to plaintiffs' counsel before the state citizenship portal was launched, according to recent court filings.

The U.S. has never attempted to create a comprehensive list of American citizens before this administration. Maintaining voter lists is the responsibility of states, not the federal government, as the Constitution dictates that states control elections. But President Trump has repeatedly taken steps to try to exert executive control over elections.

The basis for the federal government creating state citizenship lists is an executive order Trump signed on March 31. A lower court had blocked implementation of key parts of that executive order in 23 states and Washington, D.C., but the Supreme Court stayed that injunction late last month, opening the door for the plan to be implemented after all.

The March 31 executive order directs U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and the Social Security Administration to create "State Citizenship Lists" of individuals the agencies believe are citizens in each state, and send those lists to state officials "no fewer than 60 days before each regularly scheduled Federal election."

The next section of the executive order says the U.S. attorney general will prioritize investigating and prosecuting state and local officials who issue federal ballots to anyone not eligible to vote.

"States here have a strong incentive to actually use these lists to try to avoid federal investigation," said Jules Torti, counsel at the nonprofit Protect Democracy, in an interview with NPR. "But we know that these lists are going to be based on really inaccurate data. So the risk of disenfranchisement here is really, really palpable."

The privacy group Electronic Privacy Information Center, along with individual voters, filed a motion Thursday asking a federal judge in Maryland to block the administration from creating the citizenship lists and publishing them on a portal. Specifically, they seek to block a June 8 implementation memo authored by USCIS director Joseph Edlow that outlines the plan.

The motion, which was brought by Protect Democracy, along with another nonprofit legal group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, argues the administration's plans to share Americans' personal data between agencies and then disseminate the data to states violates multiple federal laws, including the Privacy Act, the Social Security Act and the Administrative Procedures Act. Under the Privacy Act, federal agencies must give the public 30 days notice and the opportunity to comment before they collect and disseminate Americans' personal data for a new purpose.

The EPIC lawsuit also argues the government does not have access to accurate, up-to-date information on American citizens, especially those who move frequently, have changed their names, or are foreign-born. For example, Social Security's citizenship data often isn't updated when people naturalize, and the SAVE data system, operated by USCIS, frequently doesn't include records for people who became citizens as minors when their parents naturalized.

Torti said it is "deeply concerning" that the administration is still planning to go ahead with the creation of citizenship lists but is no longer going to meet the deadline, since that means the lists will be completed even closer to Election Day.

"It means additional chaos, additional confusion for the state election officials and just for voters," Torti said. "And I think that's the point. The point here is to create chaos in advance of the election."

Neither the Department of Justice, nor the Department of Homeland Security, which is tasked with compiling the citizenship lists, responded to NPR's request for comment.

The June 8 implementation memo stated that the portal for state election officials would be available around June 30 and a second portal where citizens could check their information would be available at a later date – but that deadline passed without further updates.

The federal government has secured a domain for the state citizenship lists portal. While the portal is not currently online, it was briefly live in recent days with a landing page that said "Coming Soon," according to court filings.

Lawyers representing Democratic party groups that had challenged the March 31 executive order in a separate lawsuit filed in April, accused the administration in a recent filing of failing to notify the court or the parties about its plans to move forward with the state citizenship portal. They asked the judge to require the federal government to give immediate updates about their plans to implement the executive order.

This latest legal battle over the administration's plans to compile state citizenship lists comes as the Department of Homeland Security is ramping up its efforts to analyze state voter rolls with the goal of identifying potential noncitizens who are registered to vote. Previous audits have found instances of noncitizens casting ballots to be incredibly rare. 

Additionally, last week, ICE published a request for information on a federal procurement site seeking vendors who can compile public voter rolls and voter history files from all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and U.S. territories, "to support Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) fraud detection and data segmentation activities."

NPR's Hansi Lo Wang contributed reporting to this story. 
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