The council seated two new infrastructure chiefs by unanimous vote — and nobody in this mayor's race has said what they'd actually ask those departments to build. If you're just joining us: City Hall's November ballot is packed — a fire-department sales tax, local-democracy proposals, and multiple fights over Measure ULA, the transfer tax that funds housing and homelessness work. The biggest anti-ULA threat got defused, even as the council approved its largest-ever ULA spending plan. So the tax stays right at the center of this mayor's race. This is LA Mayor 2026. Today: new names running Public Works, a $544 million question nobody wants to own, and a Supreme Court ruling that finally puts the fraud talk to bed. Let's start with the confirmations, because that's where the promises meet the machinery. November City Hall ballot measures isn't over. Follow us wherever you're listening, and the next chapter comes to you. This one's from La City News:
In unanimous votes Tuesday, the Los Angeles City Council confirmed Crystal Lee as city engineer and Joone Kim-Lopez as executive director of the Bureau of Sanitation, which operates as LA Sanitation & Environment, putting the pair in charge of departments that oversee major capital projects, sewer and stormwater systems, environmental programs and street-cleaning work.
Unanimous votes Tuesday: Crystal Lee as city engineer, Joone Kim-Lopez running LA Sanitation. And here's what I want people to sit with: these are the offices that decide whether housing actually gets built on time. Lee's the first woman to hold the city engineer job. She's seventeen years in, came up through the airport development group overseeing 300-plus people. Real operator. But nobody in the council chamber asked her what she'd demand on a housing production timeline. Right, and look at her resume — long-range capital, revenue projects, climate resilience at LAWA. That's someone who's read a bond covenant. Which is more than I can say for most people who'll be voting on her boss. The Convention Center expansion lands right in her lap on day one. That project tells you whether this city can actually move dirt, or whether we just do press releases about it. And that's the pivot, Adam. The Planning Commission upzoned three G Line stops last week, and implementation runs straight through Public Works. Lee's now the official with her name on that. So when I ask Bass or Raman to say the word zoning out loud, there's an actual desk it points to. Unanimous, though — that's the tell. When everybody on that council agrees on an infrastructure chief, it usually means nobody made her commit to anything hard first. Every candidate running for LA mayor seems to be promising big things on housing and homelessness. But how much of that is actually bankrolled by the mansion tax, and what happens to those promises if voters gut it? So, Measure ULA — formally the Homelessness and Housing Solutions Tax — passed in November 2022 and kicked in April 1, 2023. It taxes real estate sales above $5.3 million inside the city of Los Angeles, including apartment buildings and commercial properties, not just actual mansions. And per Hanson Bridgett's legal analysis, there's no expiration date right now; it was built as a permanent funding stream for affordable housing and homelessness programs. But now it's getting squeezed from two directions. Critics — including a UCLA urban planning professor cited in a recent Wall Street Journal piece — say the tax has had an unintended consequence: developers are walking away from multifamily projects because transfer costs are higher, and that's contributed to a decline in multifamily construction permits, per that reporting. On revenue, a study presented to a city ad hoc committee estimated that one set of proposed carveouts, introduced by Councilmember Nithya Raman, could cut ULA revenue by 35 percent, or about $177 million. The coalition that originally backed ULA is sounding the alarm. They say any ballot measure rewriting the tax could strip tens of millions a year from programs that keep people housed. So is the city actually heading toward a November ballot measure that rewrites the tax, or is this still just a council fight? It's very close to the ballot. As of July 1, the LA City Council was scheduled to vote on whether to put a ULA amendment before voters in November, per The Real Deal's reporting. That vote becomes an immediate litmus test for every mayoral candidate: do you back the amendment, oppose it, or push for the ad hoc committee's less sweeping fixes instead? Whoever wins in 2026 will either inherit a rewritten tax or defend the original, and either way, it shapes what funding is actually available the day they take office. John Cádiz Klemack, writing in NBC Los Angeles:
Los Angeles County and California state elections officials hailed a Supreme Court ruling Monday that they said validates the process of accepting mail-in ballots that arrive a certain number of days after Election Day. The 5-4 ruling on an issue that has been a persistent target of President Trump rejected an attack on laws in more than half the states that allow mail-in ballots that arrive Election Day and still be counted, as long as they're postmarked by Election Day.
So the mail-ballot fight is over: 5-4, Supreme Court leaves California's process untouched. State officials are calling it validation, and honestly, they're right. Postmarked by Election Day, arrives after, still counts. That's exactly the rule LA County ran our count under. County certification said it was clean, the tally came in fast — and now the federal courts say the process is fine too. And zoom out — more than half the states have this kind of rule heading into the midterms. So the whole 'late ballots equal fraud' frame just lost its last legal hook nationally, not just here. Right, so I'm closing that loop. No changes required, no relitigation coming. From here, campaigns need to focus on who the November electorate actually is — operationally, who's mailing ballots in and when. Which is where turnout mechanics start to matter more than any debate line. The voters using that grace window are exactly the ones campaigns forget to model. If you’re following the mayor’s race, you might also like Los Angeles Politics and Urbanism Daily — City Hall, housing abundance, homelessness response, Metro, public safety, and small-business permitting. Find it wherever you listen to podcasts.
We’ll be watching the City Council’s July 1 vote on whether to put a ULA amendment before voters in November.
As always, we’ve put links to every story we covered in the show notes, so if something caught your attention, you can dig in there. That’s LA Mayor 2026 for today. This is a Lantern Podcast.