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Mayor Garcetti: When It Comes To Flying, He's Just Like Us (...Sort Of)
By now, there's no Angeleno who books a flight through LAX and thinks they're in for a fun time. We all know about the bottleneck traffic, the hellacious lines and... well, the bottleneck traffic and the hellacious lines.
Anyway, it's a nightmare. So when an anonymous reader wrote in wondering if Mayor Eric Garcetti was aware of the situation, we got curious, too.
"Where does the mayor fly in and out of when he travels?" asked our reader. "I'm confident it's not LAX since no one could possibly go thru the traffic and not immediately declare a state of emergency."
We reached out to the Mayor's press secretary, Alex Comisar, for answers, and he told us that the Mayor does in fact fly in and out of LAX.
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"He buys a plane ticket, goes to the airport and gets on the plane," Comisar told LAist over the phone. "He's flying on commercial flights, just like everyone else."
Garcetti: He's just like us!
After a week of pressing Comisar for more detail, he conceded a few more (short) answers, and said via email that the Mayor and his staff are responsible for booking mayoral flights. Garcetti does not typically fly first class, Comisar added.
This isn't the first time that the Mayor's flying habits have been questioned. In 2018, the Los Angeles Times sued the city after their repeated refusal to provide the amount of taxpayer dollars spent on security when Garcetti traveled to other states, which he did frequently at the time.
Eventually, the Times received an answer: Garcetti's security expenses totalled $450,000 between 2015 and 2018.
Maybe he's not so much like us after all.
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