The Brief

Most Los Angeles County departments would be required to reduce spending by 3% under an austere budget proposal unveiled Monday by the chief executive officer.

The $47.9 billion budget plan for the fiscal year that starts July 1 reflects “extraordinary budget pressures” facing the county, according to a statement from the CEO’s office. Under the plan, the cuts total $88.9 million and include more than $50 million in savings from cutting supplies, delaying equipment purchases and reducing the scope of some programs.

The proposal does not include any layoffs but calls for the elimination of 310 vacant positions.

“This is a different budget. It’s reflective of us being in tough times,” Supervisor Janice Hahn said in an interview.

Some county departments will be exempt from the 3% cuts, county authorities said. They are: the Sheriff's Department, Public Works, Regional Planning and Mental Health. The Correctional Health Services Department, which provides healthcare in the jails, is also exempt.

Various unions and community organizations attended the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors meeting Tuesday.

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Samanta Helou Hernandez

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Budget challenges

The proposed budget comes in response to mounting financial pressures — including from the recent $4 billion tentative settlement of thousands of childhood sexual assault claims against the county by people who were abused inside Probation Department-run juvenile halls and other county-run facilities over decades.

If approved by the Board of Supervisors, it would be the largest sex abuse settlement in U.S. history.

L.A. County is expected to pay hundreds of millions of dollars a year until 2030 to cover the settlement, then millions more each year until 2050-51. The Board of Supervisors is also expected to issue a bond and dip into its $1 billion rainy day fund to pay for the settlement.

In addition, the county is facing the potential loss of hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding under the Trump administration.

Federal assistance makes up 13% of the county’s budget, and billions more flow into departments indirectly through the provision of health, mental health and substance abuse services to Medicaid beneficiaries and other programs, CEO Fesia Davenport said.

She noted the federal government already has notified the county Department of Public Health that more than $45 million in previously awarded COVD-19 grants intended to last through July of 2026 were being rescinded. The cuts are being challenged in court.

The January wildfires also are expected to cost the county at least $2 billion, mostly from cleanup and lost property tax revenues.

“We do expect FEMA reimbursement for some of the county’s losses. But those reimbursements can take years. So we will be on the hook to cover those expenses ourselves in the meantime,” Davenport said Tuesday.

She said a day earlier in a briefing to reporters that property tax revenues already were falling. Property sales tax revenue is forecast to drop to 233.9 million in 2025-26, from $450 million in 2022-23, because of a 41% decline in home sales in L.A. County since 2021.

“We are in uncharted territory with these simultaneous pressures on our budget,” Davenport said.

Firefighters and lifeguards rally outside of the Board of Supervisors meeting.

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Measure A funding

Despite the constraints, the budget is committed to sustaining the county’s essential safety net responsibilities, officials said.

The budget reflects the passage of Measure A — the voter-approved half-cent sales tax that replaced Measure H — which has already started to bring “an enhanced stream of funding” into the entire L.A. region to address homelessness, the CEO said in a news release.

The nearly $1.1 billion in projected Measure A revenues in this budget will be shared by the county's partners. It is expected to be distributed as follows:

• $382.8 million will go to the Los Angeles County Affordable Housing Solutions Agency.
• $32.1 million will go to the Los Angeles County Development Authority.
• $96.3 million will go to local cities through the Local Solutions Fund. 
• And more than $500 million will go to the county’s own comprehensive homelessness services.

The budget also calls for spending $287.7 million for Care First and Community Investment, reflecting the board’s commitment to set aside 10% of locally generated unrestricted revenues annually to support social programs designed to keep at-risk people from going to jail.

The total Care First funding available for investment in communities and alternatives to incarceration is $571.6 million, including one-time unspent funds from previous years, according to the county.

Members of California Native Vote Project outside the supervisors meeting.

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In addition, the budget calls for adding six psychiatric mobile response teams to the 72 already in place. The teams provide non-law-enforcement-based mobile crisis response for people experiencing psychiatric emergencies.

“We’re still taking care of the safety net obligations that a county has,” Hahn said. “We’re still in good shape.”

Pressed about what services would be cut as a result of the 3% reduction in spending, the supervisor said she is confident departments would “get creative.”

“I think they’re going to do everything they can to not curtail services ... maybe they’ll just postpone certain things or defer certain things,” she said.

The proposed budget includes nearly $12 million to ramp up Measure G — the voter approved measure to expand the Board of Supervisors from five to nine members, create a countywide elected mayor position, and create a county Ethics Commission.

The budget also allocates funding for the Governance Reform Task Force that will guide Measure G efforts.

Home-care workers protested proposed cuts at Tuesday's meeting.

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Samanta Helou Hernandez

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Maria Diaz, a home-care provider, attended the supervisors meeting with her union SEIU 2015.

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What’s next?

On Tuesday, the county Board of Supervisors heard public testimony from more than four dozen people, including members of the home-care workers union. They warned supervisors against balancing the budget on the backs of the county’s low-wage workers.

Criminal justice advocates urged the supervisors to shift money away from law enforcement and into more social programs.

Further public hearings on the budget will be scheduled for next month.

Dan Shimell, an attorney and a new face in local politics, is Santa Ana’s next mayor after a shocking win against incumbent Valerie Amezcua. His win has become one of the most surprising upsets in Orange County’s general election and marks a shift for a city that previously elected its first Latina mayor.

Amezcua congratulated Shimell on social media late Monday night after the last round of election results nearly doubled Shimell’s lead. As of Tuesday night, Shimell held a 5-point lead over Amezcua. Amezcua did not respond to LAist’s requests for comment.

“It has been the honor of my life to serve the people of Santa Ana,” Amezcua said in a post. “Together, we have accomplished great things. We invested in our neighborhoods, expanded opportunity for families, and strengthened the services that make Santa Ana home. Our work was never about one person. It was about all of us moving this community forward.”

Aside from Shimell, progressives Sandra de Anda and Isuri S. Ramos are also projected to win City Council seats, deepening the Santa Ana City Council’s progressive bench.

A flashpoint in Amezcua’s re-election campaign was during the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids that rattled much of Southern California, including Santa Ana, Orange County’s only sanctuary city. The raids sparked protests that drew a heavy law enforcement response from Santa Ana police, including rubber bullets and tear gas.

In Amezcua’s first public response, she accused protesters of inciting chaos and violence. She later walked back her comments in a city statement, saying most protesters were demonstrating peacefully and that she did not support the raids.

Shimell told LAist he thinks Santa Ana voters, especially young and first-time voters, went to the polls to vote for those who can't.

“Those who have been or might in the future be impacted by immigration policy and enforcement,” Shimell added. “Taking a bold stance on immigration and police accountability seemed to resonate with voters I spoke with, and stood in stark contrast to the [police]-backed candidates who remained largely silent on those issues.”

What does this say about Santa Ana politics? 

Orange County Supervisor Vicente Sarmiento served as mayor of the city from 2020 to 2022, and his current district includes Santa Ana. Sarmiento told LAist that the results were surprising but reflected the change voters want to see in their elected officials.

“I think the underlying message is that money and establishment conventional politics no longer is the formula to success in a campaign in the city,” Sarmiento said. “It's really the influence of people and voters over money. That's really the theme here.”

Santa Ana City Councilmember Thai Viet Phan told LAist that the race results were somewhat surprising — but spoke to a larger trend.

“[In] the election results throughout the country … you saw a very leftward shift, with not just candidates but also just how voters voted,” Phan said. “I think that was reflected here in Santa Ana on the council.”

Amezcua outspent Shimell — by a lot

Shimell raised about $28,500 in his campaign for mayor. Amezcua raised more than $75,000 and received more than $200,000 in outside support — more than half of that came from the Santa Ana Police Officers Association.

Mike Moodian, a public policy professor at Chapman University, told LAist that in many ways, the races capture the zeitgeist of Santa Ana.

“Here we saw that there was a police union-backed group, and there was a resistance to that,” Moodian said. “People might have seen the incumbent mayor as part of a police union-backed establishment."

He explained that voters may have looked at Shimell as a fresh face who can represent more people and that the city is experiencing a deeper progressive shift.

“I find the residents of Santa Ana tend to be much more involved and engaged in local politics than most other cities in Orange County. So you also have a well-informed, engaged citizenry that showed up, and the voices were heard in Santa Ana,” Moodian said.

Moodian said Amezcua may have lost support from some voters because they were unsatisfied with her response to immigration enforcement.

What’s next?

Ballots are still being counted. The OC Registrar of Voters posts updates every day, except Sundays, at 5 p.m. Election results will be certified by Dec. 3. You can find updates on key measures and other races here.

For seven years, Nazmul Chaudhry has been trying to get the city of Los Angeles to fix a broken sidewalk in front of his store.

Chaudhry owns Deshi Food, a restaurant and grocery store in Little Bangladesh. Before I could even begin our interview, he led me to the front of his store to show me the sidewalk that pedestrians sidestep and electric scooter riders slow down around.

He said he’s tried to get the attention of city officials, but nothing has been done.

The broken sidewalk in front of Nazmul Chaudhry's shop in Little Bangladesh.

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He’s hoping that will soon change. He said then-candidate Nithya Raman spent time in the historic enclave just north of Koreatown this fall, talking with community members about their problems. For the first time since he moved to the United States in 1989, Chaudhry is excited about a mayoral election.

“Everybody's happy because we've never seen anyone [come] like that directly to us,” Chaudhry said.

Mayor-elect Raman is of Indian descent and an immigrant. When she takes office, she will be the first South Asian mayor of Los Angeles. Chaudhry is proud of that distinction. But what means more to him is that Raman spent time walking the streets of Little Bangladesh, visiting businesses and speaking to community members about their concerns. Chaudhry said that, because of that, he asked all his customers and family members to vote for Raman. At dinner parties, Chaudhry said, Bengalis would share how they were excited to vote for Raman in this election.

Nazmul Chaudhry and one of his customers, Mohamed Hassen. They both voted for Nithya Raman for mayor.

In the Little Bangladesh area, vote returns to date show Raman with a 2-to-1 margin over Mayor Karen Bass.

 "Hopefully she's gonna take care of the city," Chaudhry said.

His business has been hit hard after federal immigration raids ramped up in Southern California. People are afraid to leave their homes for fear of being taken by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. And for those who do come to his store, he said, they are met with increased prices because of tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump's administration on imported goods.

Nazmul Chaudry offers a lunch buffet at his restaurant but he has seen a drop in foot traffic after ICE raids ramped up.

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"Everybody's suffering actually these days," Chaudhry said. “If you see, Nov. 3 is a huge change because people [are] fed up."

Chaudhry also said city services don’t do a good job keeping the streets clean. So he takes it upon himself to pick up trash in front of his shop.

A few weeks before Election Day, Raman posted a social media video from Little Bangladesh addressing the trash along the street.

His relatives in New York told Chaudhry that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, also of Indian descent, has “changed the whole city.” He’s hoping for some of that change in Los Angeles when Raman takes office in December.

Shift away from identity politics

While Raman’s Indian background was a feature of her campaign, it was “not the central thesis,” said Sara Sadhwani,  an associate professor of politics at Pomona College and a senior researcher with AAPI Data.

In 2020, when Kamala Harris, also of Indian descent, was running for vice president, Sadhwani said, she conducted research on Indian Americans who wanted to see more representation in politics. In 2024, some of them turned away from Harris.

“When the economy is bad, identity slips away as the top issue on someone's mind,” she said.

Identity politics, Sadhwani said, was important in 2008 when the nation elected the first Black president, Barack Obama.

Los Angeles mayor-elect Nithya Raman poses for a photograph with family members after casting her vote on Election Day during the midterm elections at the Silverlake Community Church.

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“ We're ushering in a new political generation of millennials and Gen Z; diversity is just expected at this point amongst a vast majority of Americans,” she said, highlighting how at the last census more people identified as multiracial.

Nationally too, Sadhwani said, thec ountry is seeing a shift. South Asians have gone from “model minority” to “governing minority.”

”The old script was that for Indian Americans, for South Asians, that being that quiet professional is what success meant,” she said. “When we look at Raman and also Mamdani, they're fighting for executive power in very visible, very messy city politics, and they won not by following the rules, but they won by challenging the status quo.”

South Asians as a political force

That idea resonates with Faizah Malik, managing attorney for housing justice at Public Counsel and a former L.A. City Council candidate.

“When we were growing up, our parents said, ‘Just keep your head down, go to school, get educated, make a nice life for your family, and that's it,’” she said. “Politics was not really part of the conversation, but I think what we're seeing is that we can run for office, we can win by being our full selves.”

This is an exciting time, she said, for “South Asian political empowerment,” with Raman set to join Mamdani in leading the country’s two largest cities.

Malik said that, as a housing advocate, she cares about Raman’s fight “to build more housing around the city that people can afford, her fight to keep renters in their homes, to prevent homelessness, her fight to try and really solve our homelessness crisis but also be efficient with our public dollars.”

Nikita Chaudhry, an actor and political organizer, wants to see Raman revitalize L.A.’s film industry, “to call the city the home of Hollywood again.”

“Having that kind of representation and knowing that it exists is really exciting because I think and hope it will activate South Asian Americans of all ages to get more involved in their communities,” Chaudhry said.

Raman's and Mamdani’s victories were years in the making, Chaudhry said: from organizing in their communities to holding other elected positions to engaging voters who are otherwise ignored by elected officials. And she hopes that it will inspire other South Asians to become more involved in their communities.

“If you're feeling activated, if you're feeling excited, that's great," she said. "Take that energy and the time and the skills and the specificity of what fires you up towards your local organization, towards your neighborhood, towards your community.”

As the race to represent L.A.’s Council District 9 remains too close to call, candidate Estuardo Mazariegos’ campaign has accused the campaign of Jose Ugarte, the front-runner, of potential ballot tampering.

The Mazariegos campaign made the accusations Monday, saying it had filed a complaint with the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk. In a press release, the campaign alleged that representatives for the Ugarte campaign had collected voters’ ballots to drop off without signing the appropriate line identifying the individual who returned the ballot.

In one case, Mazariegos’ team accused Ugarte campaigners of filling out a ballot on a voter’s behalf without her knowledge of who she was voting for.

“Taking people’s ballots, filling them out, and not following legal voter assistance guidelines in a district that has faced so much disenfranchisement is disgusting,” Mazariegos said in a statement.

Mike Sanchez, a spokesperson for the L.A. County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk, said his office had forwarded the news release to the district attorney for review. He also pointed to the California Elections Code, which says that a “ballot shall not be disqualified solely because the person authorized to return it did not provide on the identification envelope their name or signature.”

Under California law, a voter can authorize another person to return their mail-in ballot — an approach also called ballot harvesting.

Justin Levitt, a  professor of constitutional law at Loyola Marymount University, told AirTalk Tuesday that there is no legal limit on the number of ballots an individual can turn in on others’ behalf, so long as they aren’t being compensated per ballot returned.

“Even if there were some sort of administrative wrongdoing, as long as there's no indication of fraud with the ballot itself, those ballots will all be counted,” he said.

Levitt said, however, that signing a ballot and then handing it to someone else to fill out would be illegal.

“ To the extent that there are allegations now that the DA may investigate, I suspect that's what they'll be focusing on,” Levitt continued.

The Mazariegos campaign also sent a collection of photos to the press, including one of a campaigner, USC student Amir King, returning a stack of ballots at a ballot drop box.

The Mazariegos campaign alleged that representatives for the Ugarte campaign had collected voters’ ballots to drop off without signing the appropriate line identifying the individual who returned the ballot.

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Courtesy of Estuardo Mazariegos' Campaign

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Ugarte’s campaign responded to the accusations by pointing to a post by King on Instagram in which he accused the Mazariegos campaign of bullying him and making false claims about him.

“Why is he attacking me? For participating in our democracy, as is my right under California state law and for helping others participate in democracy, as is their right under California state law,” King said in the post.

As of Tuesday morning, just under 300 ballots separate Ugarte and Mazariegos, with 44,000 ballots left to count in L.A. County. It’s not clear how many ballots in Council District 9 are left to count.

This story first appeared on Long Beach Post.

An off-duty Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputy died in a motorcycle crash near Marina Pacifica on Friday.

The crash happened at about 11 p.m. at the intersection of Pacific Coast Highway and Second Street, according to Long Beach police.

Martin Maciel, 40, was heading south on PCH when he collided with a vehicle traveling east on Second Street, throwing the rider from the motorcycle, police said. He was pronounced dead at the scene, according to the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner’s Office.

The other vehicle’s driver remained at the scene and cooperated with investigators, who believe speed was a contributing factor in the crash. Police did not specify which driver they suspect was speeding.

The Sheriff’s Department said Maciel was a 10-year veteran of the force and an Army Reservist. He worked at the Norwalk Station as a motorcycle deputy after starting his career at the Twin Towers Correctional Facility and working patrol at the Transit Services Bureau.

“Throughout his years of service, Deputy Maciel was a valued member of the department, and his dedication will be remembered by those who had the privilege of serving alongside him,” the Sheriff’s Department said in a statement. “Our thoughts and prayers are with his family, friends, and all who knew him.”

In recent years, Long Beach has been fighting a stubborn rise in traffic deaths. Last year, the city recorded 53 fatal crashes, its highest total in more than a decade.

Friday’s crash marked the city’s 41st fatal traffic collision this year. At this time last year, Long Beach had recorded 43 fatal crashes.

To fight speeding in particular, Long Beach recently installed automated speed cameras that are scheduled to start issuing tickets in December.