How you can help LAist watchdog your elected officials

This is an excerpt from our pop-up election newsletter Make It Make Sense.

Most of the November 2024 election is over, despite the agonizing wait for final results. But until then, we’ve got an eye on the next phase of the election: holding our elected officials accountable.

Accountability is already a big part of LAist’s journalism. We follow major initiatives, spotlight critical gaps in protecting communities or preventing disasters, and uncover corruption scandals. But we’re particularly interested in better understanding the everyday work our representatives are doing — or not doing. Even if your city council member never makes headlines for a controversy, they’re making critical decisions all the time over how much housing is in your neighborhood, where and how you travel through the city and how much funding goes to police or homelessness services. The same goes for your school board, your district attorney, and more.

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As LAist’s civics and democracy producer, my job is to make local government more accessible to Angelenos. This work starts with knowing what you, the voters, want to keep tabs on.

Fill out the quick survey at the bottom of this post to let us know what you’re most interested in tracking as this next term gets underway. You can also share this link with anyone else you know who might want to share their thoughts, too. Here are some of the questions you can weigh in on:

• What measures or officials from the 2024 ballot do you want LAist to track?
• Is there specific information you want us to look for? 
• What questions do you have about any of the measures we passed or officials we elected?

Additionally, one of our next projects will be developing a tracker for members of the L.A. City Council. It’s one of the most powerful local governments in the nation, with 15 members representing more than 4 million people. And yet when we talk to voters, most have no idea who their city representatives are, let alone how they’re shaping residents’ lives.

Here are some ideas for what we could include in an at-a-glance snapshot of a city council member’s time in office:

• How they voted on major legislation
• How much affordable housing they approved in their district
• Pedestrian fatalities over time in their district 
• How they’re spending discretionary funds

Have any more ideas to add? You can let us know in the survey below.