The big issues facing L.A., county in ’24
Concerns including homelessness and criminal justice will be in the spotlight.
few days into the new year, it’s hard to know what unforeseen corruption scandals, staffing shakeups or political crises will rock local government in 2024.
But it’s clear that many of the problems that were top of mind for Angelenos in 2023 — homelessness, mental health, the quality of government services — are not going away this year.
And it’s not too hard to hazard a guess at the bigticket policy issues local politicians will be obsessing over.
Here are five big things Angelenos can expect city and county government to make a priority this year.
Balancing the budget
Mayor Karen Bass had a smooth ride last year when she unveiled her first city budget, easily winning approval from the City Council for a record $1.3 billion to address homelessness.
Things could get more complicated this year, as her team works to balance the budget while covering the cost of salary increases — not just for police officers but for thousands of civilian city workers: clerks, custodians, landscapers, mechanics and many others represented by the Coalition of L.A. City Unions.
Coalition contracts, which head to a vote in the coming weeks, will almost certainly create new financial pressures at City Hall. Bass also will have to decide whether to seek another quarter-billion dollars this year for Inside Safe, the initiative moving unhoused Angelenos indoors. At the same time, she will be looking for ways to reduce the cost of the hotels and motels that have been serving as interim housing under the Inside Safe program.
The criminal justice system
Over at the county’s Hall of Administration, the new year will bring renewed pressure on politicians to turn things around inside jails and juvenile halls.
Last year delivered a steady stream of grim headlines about those facilities. In the juvenile halls, one teen died of a drug overdose. The Times obtained video of another crying out for his mother as he was restrained by officers — an incident some experts characterized as child abuse. The conditions were so dire that a state oversight agency ordered most of the youths in the halls out.
The conditions facing adults were even worse. Jails remained dangerously overcrowded. Forty-five inmates died. Two supervisors wanted to declare those facilities a “humanitarian crisis.”
The still-fresh leaders of the two departments — Sheriff Robert Luna and Probation Chief Guillermo Viera Rosa — say they’re working on fixes. Luna told The Times last month he’s formulating a plan to create something akin to a “care campus” so he can finally close Men’s Central Jail, the aging facility that county supervisors first ordered shut down more than two years ago.
Viera Rosa, meanwhile, is racing to fix familiar problems — too few staff, too little programming — that have developed at the newest juvenile hall, in Downey. The department has until Wednesday to address issues outlined recently by state regulators or risk yet another state-ordered cloA sure down the road.
Convention conundrum
The City Council has spent years trying to figure out when and how to expand the Los Angeles Convention Center, as it attempts to stay competitive with counterparts in Anaheim, San Diego and elsewhere. Plans for the project were shelved in 2020 in the wake of COVID-19, which devastated the tourism industry and left the facility dormant for more than a year.
This year, the council will return to that question, deciding whether to move ahead — and if so, whether that massive upgrade should be completed in time for the 2028 Summer Olympic Games.
“This is a vote on the future of downtown,” said Doane Liu, executive director of the City Tourism Department. Two options on the table will be expensive, taking a serious bite out of the budget, according to a report issued last month. If the city carries out the expansion on its own, the project is expected to cost taxpayers $48 million per year over the next three decades, even after convention advertising and other revenue is factored in. If the city hires a private developer to build and operate the facility, the cost would increase, reaching $103 million a year over the next 30 years, the report says.
CARE Court convenes
All eyes will be on California’s most populous county as it rolls out CARE Court, the state-funded program designed to treat people struggling with serious mental illness.
Signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2022, the CARE Act requires every California county to open courts that coordinate voluntary treatment and services to people with psychotic disorders. The program was launched in L.A. County in late November, with officials hopeful it would reduce the region’s homeless population, which disproportionately experiences severe mental health disorders.
Advocates say the success of CARE Court will hinge on L.A., by far the largest county to take the initiative on, doing it right.
County officials say they’re off to a strong start, predicting that as many as 4,500 people could be enrolled during the program’s first year. That could mean fewer emergency visits, they said, and fewer mental health crises playing out on the street.
A year of election drama
And of course, 2024 will bring an election — one that could leave city and county government looking very different at the end of the year.
At City Hall, contests are underway for seven of the City Council’s 15 seats. All but one of those races features an incumbent seeking another term. Meanwhile, three of the five county supervisors — Janice Hahn, Kathryn Barger and Holly Mitchell — are defending their seats against challengers. Finally, there is the lone countywide race, with Dist. Atty. George Gascón seeking to fend off a small army of rivals and win a second term.
The primary, scheduled for March 5, is right around the corner. In contests where no candidate secures a majority of the vote, a runoff will be held Nov. 5 between the top two.