The incumbent faces a primary challenge from his upstairs neighbor, as well as two others, in District 13, which includes Echo Park, Atwater Village and much of Hollywood.
Robert Greene
is an independent journalist in Los Angeles. He is a 2026-27 John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation fellow.
Four candidates are trying to unseat the incumbent in L.A. City Council District 1, which includes the neighborhoods of Highland Park and Westlake, among others.
The oddly shaped Council District 13 includes much of Hollywood and almost two dozen officially recognized neighborhoods in the contiguous areas of East Hollywood, Silver Lake, Echo Park and Elysian Heights. It also reaches east of the Los Angeles River and alongside the Golden State Freeway to include the Northeast L.A. communities of Elysian Valley, Atwater Village and Glassell Park. It is the city’s smallest district by geographic area and its densest by population.
The district’s ethnic diversity is reflected in the names of some of the neighborhoods wholly or partially within the it, including Koreatown, Thai Town, Historic Filipinotown and Little Armenia.
What’s at stake in the City Council races
Voters will choose who will be their chief steward of city services in each of eight odd-numbered council districts (look up your district here) for the next four years and will determine the ideological makeup and effectiveness of the 15-member City Council.
Follow the vote after polls close
Insights straight from our newsroom. Our limited-run newsletter Make It Make Sense will unpack the ballot count and results, then check in regularly on the officials voted into office and measures passed by voters.
Challenges include federal immigration enforcement, homelessness, the city’s readiness for the 2027 Super Bowl and the 2028 Summer Olympics and continuing city budget shortfalls.
What does a City Council member do?
Council members have three distinct roles:
Each member curates their district by identifying local problems and opportunities and working with more than 40 city departments to steer needed services to residents and businesses. They may work to bring in non-city resources in the form of county, state, federal or philanthropic grants. They serve as intermediaries between their constituents and City Hall. Members play a vital role in shaping development in their districts.
As part of the full-time, 15-member council, they set citywide policy, adopt ordinances, commission studies and provide a counterweight and oversight to the mayor and city departments and bureaus. They adopt an annual city budget ($14 billion in 2025-26) based on a proposal provided by the mayor, divvying up money among the Los Angeles Police Department, homeless services, libraries, parks, sidewalk repair and tree-trimming, among other services. They approve or reject the mayor’s appointments to city commissions and to lead most city departments. They focus on areas such as policing and public safety by leading or serving as members of council committees.
Council members often work outside their formal roles through appointment to other governmental boards such as Metro and the Metropolitan Water District and by providing leadership in their communities through assisting charities, schools and civic institutions.
District 9 in South L.A. is one of the most competitive races for a City Council seat in the June 2 primary, partly because the incumbent is termed out.
Fast facts about the City Council:
Each City Council member represents about 260,000 Angelenos.
Annual salary is $244,727.
A term lasts four years. Members may serve a maximum of three terms.
City elections are non-partisan.
Voters may have a chance to enlarge the council from the current 15 members to 25 members under a charter reform proposal that supporters say will provide better representation. (As a point of comparison, several other major cities have far larger councils. New York has a 51-member City Council. Chicago has a 50-member council.) It’s up to the current council whether to put the question on the Nov. 3 ballot.
What it takes to win
Candidates who win more than 50% of the vote June 2 will be sworn into office in December. If no candidate wins more than 50%, a runoff between the top two vote-getters will be held Nov. 3.
Sponsored message
The candidates for City Council District 13
Hugo Soto-Martinez, incumbent
Hugo Soto-Martinez
(
Courtesy Hugo Soto-Martinez
)
Hugo Soto-Martinez defeated incumbent Mitch O’Farrell in 2022 and is now seeking a second term. A son of immigrants, Soto-Martinez went to work at a non-union hotel at age 16 and became involved in labor organizing, eventually working full time for Unite Here Local 11. He became the first union organizer elected to the City Council, capping the city’s remarkable evolution from its often virulently anti-union civic culture to its current labor-dominated politics, in which Unite Here plays a prominent role.
Soto-Martinez is part of the council contingent affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America, whose stances often — but not always — square with organized labor.
The early months of Soto-Martinez’s council tenure were dominated by a continuing controversy over Echo Park Lake that began in his predecessor’s term with attempts to remove homeless encampments and the installation of a chain-link fence. Soto-Martinez’s promise to remove the fence at times became equally contentious, with some in the neighborhood warning that homelessness and drug use would return and others complaining that the fence degraded the park and the neighborhood.
Sponsored message
“I spoke for hours with one neighbor who wanted to keep the fence,” Soto-Martinez said. “After it was gone and the problems didn’t come back, she agreed that it was the right thing to do.”
Soto-Martinez has made progress in clearing encampments from much of Hollywood, although debate continues over whether the people who had been living on the street have remained in the housing they were moved to.
Projects in his first term included the remaking of traffic patterns and pedestrian safety in Hollywood by reconfiguring sections of street, reducing traffic lanes and adding bicycle lanes.
His goals for a second term focus on expanding the availability and affordability of housing in the district.
Colter Carlisle grew up in Illinois and Iowa, where he became active in politics, working on campaigns to get Democrats to the polls. He became disenchanted as the party “collapsed” in the rustbelt because, he says, it was not helping the working class. He moved to Los Angeles and worked in legal sales, matching attorneys and clients. He became vice president of the East Hollywood Neighborhood Council, where he brokered a compromise in a fight over a liquor license for a major restaurant. “Everyone was mad at me,” he said, but the experience pushed him further into local politics.
Sponsored message
Carlisle is Soto-Martinez’s upstairs neighbor in an East Hollywood apartment complex. He opposes Soto-Martinez’s tactics for increasing housing because, he argues, they would result in tenants losing their homes in rent-stabilized apartments that could be torn down to make way for higher-rise buildings with more units and higher rents.
He also sharply criticizes Soto-Martinez’s changes to traffic patterns on Hollywood Boulevard and elsewhere, which he said make the city more unlivable and undermine the economy.
“People don’t shop from the bus; they shop from cars,” he said, arguing that bus and bike lanes will lead fewer people to shop at small businesses lining major streets.
He cautioned that Los Angeles is likely to face economic uncertainty because of immigration raids.
“We have to stick the landing on the Olympics,” he said, by being ready with infrastructure that will support local business.
Dylan Kendall spent several years living on a tiny island off the coast of Kenya, then returned to Los Angeles, where she had previously lived in the 1980s and worked at Gaslight/Opium Den, a Hollywood bar. “If you had a drink in the ‘90s, I probably served it to you,” she said.
Then she turned her bedroom into a ceramics studio, with a kiln in her living room, and became a ceramicist. She later moved to Oakland, returned to Hollywood, enrolled at UCLA, built a school for homeless young adults, created the nonprofit Open Museum of Los Angeles and became interested in local politics when working on a project to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the 1992 riots. She became a Coro fellow and a foster mother. She became known for bowls with human-shaped feet but is now winding down the company that makes them.
“I’ve never seen this district struggle as it is now,” Kendall said. “It’s getting almost unlivable. There are homes burning down. Encampments running drugs. Our council member is focused more on ideological goals than practical goals.”
She said the city is “close to losing Echo Park Lake,” which she said was rapidly becoming like MacArthur Park. “No sane mother would bring their kids to a park in this district,” she said.
Kendall advocates for more aggressive removal and treatment for addicted and mentally ill people living on the street. She supports increasing LAPD officers to the 10,000 benchmark set by former Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.
Rich Sarian helps operate a business improvement district, in which businesses pay fees for services that traditionally have been provided by city governments. His current district is at the southern end of downtown Los Angeles, where he moved after leading clean-up and tree-planting projects in Hollywood. He was raised in the San Fernando Valley. After graduating from college he worked in government affairs with a family friend, became involved with community affairs in Hollywood, chaired the Hollywood Arts Council and worked on arts programming for public school students. He oversaw a makeover of Hollywood Boulevard’s Walk of Fame in 2020.
Sarian calls for free public transportation until age 18, universal childcare and community-run grocery hubs.
He criticizes current city leadership for permitting service cuts and infrastructure collapse without a sufficient plan to fix things. He wants to focus on economic development, which he said is needed to keep revenue flowing to pay for city services. “We do not have a council member who knows how to strategically spend money to transform the city,” he said.
He said he would be better able to make use of Los Angeles County resources because of relationships he has developed with Supervisor Lindsey Horvath’s team. He cited business improvement districts as a model for non-police intervention in nonviolent social problems, including homelessness and substance use.
He calls for more housing construction in Los Angeles and eliminating long backlogs for approvals by the Department of Water and Power and other government agencies, but not at the expense of tenants currently living in relatively low-rise rent-stabilized units. He noted that he is one such tenant.
You ask, and we'll answer: Whether it's about who's funding the campaigns or how to track your ballot, we're here to help you understand the 2026 election
The incumbent is running in the June primary for a second term representing District 15, which includes San Pedro, Wilmington and Watts.
Four candidates are trying to unseat the incumbent in L.A. City Council District 1, which includes the neighborhoods of Highland Park and Westlake, among others.
