The Thorn West is a state and local news roundup compiled by members of DSA-LA. Our goal is to provide a weekly update on the latest developments in state and local politics, and to track the issues that are most important to our membership.

Issue No. 140 - January 13, 2023

State Politics

• Representative Katie Porter, the Orange County congresswoman known for her thoroughness at congressional hearings, was the first candidate to announce for the 2024 California Senate race. Diane Feinstein is the incumbent in that seat.

City Politics

• The first full week for the incoming Los Angeles City Council also saw the first time that Kevin de León attended a full council meeting since October. Incoming councilmembers Eunisses Hernandez and Hugo Soto-Martinez addressed him personally, renewing calls for his resignation. Hernandez also announced that she would support De Leon’s recall. Anyone interested in helping DSA-LA build a coalition to run a recall campaign in CD14 can sign up here to learn how!

Housing Rights

• The city’s COVID declaration of emergency, which is currently preventing evictions from resuming in Los Angeles, is still scheduled to end January 31, after another motion to extend failed by one vote in city council.

• A coalition of tenant activists and councilmembers have been pushing for a package of tenant protections to mitigate the potential return of evictions. On the table are expanding just-cause eviction protections to all Los Angeles tenants, mandatory relocation fees for tenants who are priced out of their homes by sudden rent increases, and an increased threshold for the amount of missed rent that can trigger an eviction. “These are not radical, radical changes to our system right now,” said Councilmember Nithya Raman, who has spearheaded this effort in council, at a tenants rights rally at City Hall. Nevertheless, these protections are viciously opposed by landlords. Keep LA Housed is organizing people to email the councilmembers currently on the fence and urge them to support this step in tenant protections. Quick and easy toolkit here. Phone numbers of swing councilmembers here.

Police Violence and Community Resistance

• [Content warning: police killing] LAPD officers killed three people in the first week of 2023. Keenan Anderson, a school teacher who was in a car accident in Venice, was tasered by police and died of cardiac arrest. Bodycam footage of all three killings was released this week. Each victim was experiencing mental health needs, a fact which has renewed calls to divert emergency calls away from armed police and toward trained mental health professionals. On Tuesday Councilmember Hernandez spoke the names of the three victims — Mr. Anderson, Takar Smith, and Oscar Leon Sanchez — into the record at Tuesday’s council meeting, and today introduced a motion calling for spokespeople from Denver’s successful care-fist program STAR to present to council. 

• Earlier in the week, Councilmember Hernandez introduced a motion calling for the LAPD officers stationed at council meetings to be disarmed.

• In the Los Angeles Sentinel, BLM-LA co-founder Melina Abdullah called on Mayor Karen Bass to replace Police Commissioner Michel Moore with someone else when his current term expires: “He has established a record of mismanagement, deceit, corruption and brutality. While these harms have impacted the entire City, they have had a particularly brutal effect on Black and poor communities.”

Gentrification

• Councilmember Soto-Martinez spoke with Capital & Main about ending the Hollywood Walk of Fame “no-vending” zone. A state law legalized street vending statewide in 2018, but business groups were able to lobby the city to set-up exclusionary zones in certain areas.

Environmental Justice

• Weeks of heavy rain mitigated drought conditions across the state, but last year’s storms were followed by incredibly dry months. This dynamic has renewed public interest in capturing storm runoff. With 80% of storm runoff lost into the Pacific Ocean, the LA Times covered the infrastructure necessary for the city to do better next time. The Conversation tackled the issue of retaining more storm water at the state level.

• Facing a budget shortfall, Governor Newsom has proposed cutting $6 billion out of climate initiatives.