LA Reform Gets Real this Friday — traffic stops, school money, and who actually pays property tax in this city. This is LA Politics and Urbanism Daily — I'm Cassidy, Devin's here, and we've got a packed show: a City Council vote on police stops that already has an asterisk on it, a Measure ULA funding update, a lawsuit that could blow up LAUSD's budget, and a small-business tax win at the Assessor's office. A council vote that doesn't even change LAPD policy yet. Love that for us. Let's get into it. Here's AOL:
The Los Angeles City Council on Wednesday voted in favor of new restrictions on so-called "pretextual" traffic stops, signaling a growing impatience with the Police Commission's failure to rein in a controversial LAPD tactic that critics say enables racial discrimination.
City Council voted unanimously Wednesday to push the Police Commission toward restricting pretextual traffic stops — you know, pulling people over for a cracked taillight, a dangling air freshener, that kind of thing. Council wants LAPD to follow San Francisco's model. The Commission still hasn't moved. Unanimous. So not even close. And the Commission is still sitting on its hands. Padilla brought up her late father getting stopped for no reason, and the watchdog body still needs a permission slip to act? To be fair, the Council's vote is a directive, not a binding order — the Police Commission is independent. So this is pressure, not a policy change. Yet. Right, it's a very stern strongly-worded resolution. Meanwhile Black and brown Angelenos are still getting pulled over for a busted taillight while the Commission deliberates. The research on this is not ambiguous. United to House LA writes:
Drafted by homeless service providers, affordable housing nonprofits, labor unions, and renters’ rights groups, Measure ULA will create an unprecedented funding stream for affordable housing production and homelessness prevention in the City of Los Angeles. Over 200 organizations signed on in support of the movement, which earned nearly 58% of the vote in November of 2022.
Measure ULA — the mansion tax voters passed back in 2022 — now has permanent program guidelines on paper, drafted by the coalition that built the thing in the first place: housing nonprofits, labor, renters' rights groups, over 140 organizations. Two pillars: affordable housing production and homelessness prevention. That's the right frame. The question is whether the money actually moves, or gets strangled in City Hall process before it reaches a single unit. Fifty-eight percent of voters said yes in '22 — that's a real mandate. Keeping coalition-drafted guidelines in front of the bureaucracy is one way to hold the line on the original intent. Guidelines are only as good as enforcement. LA has a long habit of passing bold housing measures and then quietly letting implementation drift. I'll believe the transformation when I see permits pulled. This one's from Big Education Ape:
The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) is violating state law by refusing to use state education funds specifically targeted to help low-income students, English language learners and foster youth to increase or improve services for those students, according to a lawsuit filed on behalf of the Community Coalition of South Los Angeles and LAUSD parent Reyna Frias.
Public Advocates and the ACLU have filed suit against LAUSD in LA Superior Court, alleging the district is cooking its books to dodge two billion dollars in state funding that's legally required to go directly to low-income students, English learners, and foster youth. Two billion over a decade — diverted away from the kids the Local Control Funding Formula was literally designed to protect. And LAUSD's defense is apparently "creative accounting." This is the bureaucracy failing the most vulnerable students in the district while the administration keeps the lights on for everyone else. The Community Coalition of South LA is a co-plaintiff here, so this isn't just attorneys — it's South LA parents and organizers saying they've been watching this happen for years and finally have standing to sue. LCFF passed in 2013 because the old system was a shell game. If LAUSD has built a new shell game on top of it, that's not a paperwork problem — that's a political choice about whose kids matter. Here's 2 Urban Girls:
A recent internal study conducted by the Assessor’s Office found that it costs approximately $174 in staff time and administrative resources to process and assess a $5,000 business property account. By comparison, that assessment generates only about $50 in annual property tax revenue.
Hat tip to 2 Urban Girls for this one — the Board of Supervisors quietly approved a change that doubles the threshold for business personal property taxation, from five thousand dollars to ten thousand. And the Assessor's own numbers show the county was spending a hundred and seventy-four dollars in staff time to collect about fifty dollars in tax. That's not policy, that's a money pit. A taqueria shouldn't be filing paperwork on a used prep table and a chest freezer. This is exactly the kind of low-hanging bureaucratic dead weight that grinds small operators down — and it took years to fix a threshold that was set when fifty bucks meant something different. Better late than never, but let's not hand out medals. Got thoughts on today's stories, a tip we should follow, or a correction we need to make? Send us a note at ladailyfix at lantern podcasts dot com. We'd love to hear from you.
You'll find links to everything we covered today in the show notes, if you want to dig into the reporting or bookmark a story for later.
That's Los Angeles Politics and Urbanism Daily for this Friday, May 8th. Thanks for listening, and have a good weekend. This is a Lantern Podcast.