L.A. on the Record: An October surprise

Good morning, and welcome to L.A. on the Record — our local elections newsletter. It’s Julia Wick, writing with Ben Oreskes as we guzzle coffee in the City Hall press suite.

After years of indictments and slow-burning scandals, Los Angeles City Hall is now at the blistering center of an international media maelstrom. The racist leaked audio recording that upended L.A. politics came to wide attention less than a week ago, and the council is still very much in chaos.

Meanwhile, following former City Council President Nury Martinez’s resignation, Councilmembers Gil Cedillo and Kevin de León remain in office.

And with everyone from President Biden to AOC calling for them to step down, the legislative body finds itself somewhat paralyzed. Friday’s council meeting was canceled, and it remains unclear whether Tuesday’s meeting will actually proceed.

As Raphe Sonenshein — who quite literally wrote the book on L.A. city government — told me earlier this week, in the understatement of the year, “City charters don’t really address this kind of standoff.“

No, they do not.

(Though for the record, the most applicable sections would probably be 207 and 242. The latter dictates that council “shall hold regular meetings at least three days each week.” And the former stipulates that if someone doesn’t show up “for more than 60 consecutive days” without their absence being excused by the council, their office is deemed vacant. Needless to say, we’re a very long way from anyone approaching the 60-day mark.)

Acting council President Mitch O’Farrell has said he intends to hold Tuesday’s meeting. There’s also a vote on a new council president scheduled for Tuesday, where tensions will surely run high.

There has been fervent politicking at City Hall in recent days around the next council president — a role that O’Farrell, as president pro tempore, stepped into this week on an acting basis. Councilmembers Curren Price and Paul Krekorian have both expressed interest in becoming president.

But the better question is whether anyone can count to eight — the number of votes needed to secure the presidency with a majority on the council.

And speaking of voting ... the local elections we’ve all spent the last year following will be held in just over three weeks. Talk about an October surprise.

But as far as October surprises go, the leaked audio recording is a rather bizarre one. It’s irrefutable that the leak has upended city politics, but this isn’t a news bomb that clearly benefits any one candidate. The blast radius is wide — and my phone is ringing off the hook with wildly conflicting theories about how, exactly, the news will cut in various races.

The thing to remember is that we’re still in the middle of this. The frenetic pace of the crisis may be calming slightly, but the clay is far from dry.

So don’t trust anyone who tells you they know exactly how all of this is going to play.

State of play

— THIRD TIME’S THE CHARM: There’s no doubt that the leak revelations have shaken up the mayor’s race. Nowhere was that more evident than on Wednesday when KNBC and Telemundo hosted the third and final head-to-head mayoral debate.

It was a lovefest between Rep. Karen Bass and Rick Caruso, who each made a point of complimenting the other and talking about this as a time for unity. Caruso did say that this episode showed how City Hall was broken, but he could’ve gone much harder and leaned into this point.

For Bass, it allowed her to talk about how she’d been working on improving relations between the Black and Latino community for decades. The upshot, though, was that this debate was almost sedate compared to past bouts, with little to no mention of abortion or USC and kind words from each candidate about the other. It might say something about where the final weeks of the campaign are headed.

Also be sure to check out takeaways from the debate from Los Angeles Magazine’s Jon Regardie.

— BASS BOMBSHELL: For weeks, Rep. Karen Bass has faced intensifying questions over her free USC master’s degree in social work while in Congress. She asserted that she formally applied to the program at last week’s debate and promised to release her application. The Bass campaign made good on that promise this week, but the documents released by the campaign are not actually an application for admission to USC’s social work master’s program, my colleague Matt Hamilton reported. The form is an application to attend classes on “limited status.”

As Matt reports, USC’s “limited status” program by definition allows people to take courses without having been admitted to a degree program, and they are barred from receiving financial aid.

The Bass application — which is undated and unsigned — specifically says she had not applied to the master’s in social work program but planned to at a later date, indicating that when she began her coursework in 2012, she lacked formal admission.

The document shows that when Bass was offered a full scholarship in 2011 by USC’s social work dean, it was before she had been accepted into the social work master’s program, an unusual sequence of events that raises questions about preferential treatment for an elected official.

— DEFINE LATIN: Caruso has been taking heat online for a moment during this week’s debate when he said he wasn’t white but Italian and then said, “That’s Latin, thank you.”

In her second L.A. politics reference of the week, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted “4 days. There were just 4 days left in Hispanic Heritage Month” with a face-melting emoji in response to the clip. (Hispanic Heritage Month runs from Sept. 15 to Oct. 15.)

— A FEW MORE CARUSO CLIPS: Caruso this week joined Variety’s Cynthia Littleton on the publication’s podcast. The Associated Press’ Michael Blood has a nice dive into how Caruso’s campaign is spending its money — and how a chunk of the candidate’s millions is being spent on canvassing and voter outreach.

— AD TRACKING: The Bass campaign has gone on TV and is scheduled to spend just under $3 million through election day on broadcast and cable advertising, according to data from media tracking firm AdImpact. Meanwhile, Caruso is slated to have spent more than $22 million on TV advertising through Nov. 8. (Both figures are just for the general election; Caruso’s total TV bill when you add in the primary exceeds $44 million.)

And in nonmayoral news ...

— NEWSOM WEIGHS IN ON SUPES RACE: Gov. Gavin Newsom has jumped into a heated L.A. County supervisor race, throwing his support behind state Sen. Bob Hertzberg in a new ad. Hertzberg is facing off against West Hollywood City Council member Lindsey Horvath to replace Sheila Kuehl.

Newsom previously said he’d “tried to stay out of these Dem-on-Dem races as a rule” while talking about the L.A. mayor’s race, as Politico’s Jeremy B. White reported back in August.

— WESTSIDE BATTLE: Our Jim Rainey reports on the increasingly vitriolic battle to represent the Westside on the Los Angeles City Council. The race roared to new levels of intensity last week, as attorney Erin Darling charged that his opponent, lawyer Traci Park, had moved to “defend racism” in a case where she represented the city of Anaheim against a city employee who accused a supervisor of using the “n-word.”

Darling this week pointed to Park’s substantial fundraising advantage and said it showed that she would be beholden to well-heeled business interests. For example, real estate corporation Douglas Emmett Inc., a publicly traded company worth about $3 billion, has given a total of $400,000 to the independent campaign to elect Park, while the company’s employees have given $9,700 directly to the Park campaign, records show.

QUICK HITS

• Who’s running the city? Still Eric Garcetti. His confirmation as ambassador to India awaits a Senate vote.

• The latest in mayoral endorsements: La Opinión and the Los Angeles Times editorial board endorsed Bass.
  

• And other city endorsements: Emily’s List endorsed Traci Park in the CD 11 race, while Rep. Maxine Waters and Councilmembers Nithya Raman and Marqueece Harris-Dawson backed Park’s opponent, Erin Darling. The L.A. Times editorial board rescinded its endorsement of Danielle Sandoval in favor of opponent Tim McOsker.

(If you have an endorsement you’d like to flag for next week, please send it to us.)

• On the docket for next week: Who could possibly know...