L.A. on the Record: Bass’ star turn in school strike mediation

Good morning, and welcome to L.A. on the Record — our City Hall newsletter. It’s Julia Wick writing from the press suite at 200 N. Spring Street, with help from Dakota Smith.

It was quite a place for the mayor of Los Angeles to be.

Clad in a red suit, Mayor Karen Bass stood between SEIU Local 99 Executive Director Max Arias and Los Angeles Unified School District Supt. Alberto Carvalho on Friday afternoon as both men effusively praised her for leading them out of the stalemate wilderness and toward a transformative labor deal after a three-day school strike.

Carvalho described her as “a partner” who had been present “incessantly” to broker the agreement. And Arias credited the mayor with allowing the union “to find a pathway to communicate and finally reach an agreement.”

Bass spoke first at the news conference, announcing the tentative agreement and saying that her lack of formal control over the school system would “never stop me when it comes to fighting for our children and their families.”

One has to imagine that Bass — who has focused almost exclusively on homelessness since taking office — had been planning some very different imagery to delineate the 100th day of her administration this week.

Maybe cameras trailing her at an Inside Safe site, to mark the fact that as of Tuesday her program had gotten nearly 1,000 Angelenos into temporary housing. Or perhaps a news conference with some of her friends from Washington or Sacramento, locking arms as they announced further partnerships on homelessness.

Instead, as it often goes when you’re the mayor of the nation’s second-largest city, she got a crisis — a school strike that created disruption on par with a natural disaster, with meal distribution for students and parents scrambling for childcare.

Despite Antonio Villaraigosa‘s best efforts when he was in office, L.A. mayors do not actually have any authority over the school system.

But like other mayors dealing with potentially crippling labor disputes in the city, Bass publicly stepped in Wednesday to mediate between SEIU Local 99 and the Los Angeles Unified School District, bringing both sides to City Hall for talks. She had been privately involved in the days prior, her office has said.

“You are expected to try and settle things, especially a mayor who is kind of close to all the contending sides,” said Raphael Sonenshein, a local governance expert and executive director of the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at Cal State L.A.

Sonenshein described involvement in a school strike as one of the “informal expectations of mayoral leadership,” comparing Bass’ mediator role to the one then-Mayor Eric Garcetti took on during the 2019 teachers’ strike.

This week’s three-day strike ended Thursday as planned with the dispute unsettled, and talks continued into Friday as schools reopened.

Bass’ political brand is built on coalition-building and pragmatism, and those skills surely served her well during the days of discord.

In another hallmark of her style, she also remained largely quiet in public during the tense period of negotiations, saying Friday that “grandstanding and speaking publicly when things are being hashed out does not benefit anyone.”

“What was important was getting the work done and getting the job done,” Bass said.

Crossing the 100-day mark is an admittedly made-up milestone. But amid the long, slow slog of municipal politics, it’s also a good framing device for defining early progress — something concrete to grasp onto and easy to reference on the 11 o’clock news.

And all told, she could hardly have scripted a better moment than successfully steering the city through her first real test as mayor.

Which brings us to the real next question: Will Bass step in if Hollywood writers strike? (Unlikely, even in a so-called company town, given the history of prior WGA strikes. But you never know.)

State of play

WHITHER MRT? As of Friday morning, the fate of suspended Councilmember Mark Ridley-Thomas is now in a jury’s hands, following a dramatic trial that painted sharply conflicted portraits of a powerhouse L.A. politician. If Ridley-Thomas is acquitted, he will return to his position on the council.

Suspended Los Angeles City Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas, center, arrives at U.S. District Court in downtown L.A. with his team of attorneys earlier in the trial.

(Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)

— THE SITDOWN: Bass did a lengthy interview with the New Yorker in which, among other things, she discussed the city purchasing apartment buildings, motels and hotels as a possible next “iteration of public housing” with less stigma and smaller facilities dotted around the city.

— NAMING NAMES: In other 100-day news, Bass dumped a boatload of commission appointments late Tuesday. (Full list from the mayor’s office here.) Bass has been significantly slower than her predecessors to name commissioners.

— DANIELS UPDATE: After sweeping the Oscars with their film “Everything Everywhere All At Once,” directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert went on KCRW, where Scheinert praised his “favorite city councilwoman,” Eunisses Hernandez, and called for Councilmember Kevin de León to resign.

— MENDING WALL: Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martínez is preparing to take down the (in)famous fence around Echo Park Lake, just as the city reaches the second anniversary of the controversial encampment operation. But the neighborhood remains at least partly divided over the fence — and the future of the park.

— BIG OOPS: The Los Angeles Police Department accidentally released the names and photos of numerous undercover officers to a watchdog group that posted them on its website — a matter that is now being investigated by the Office of the Inspector General.

— METRO’S FINEST? Frustrated with local law enforcement agencies, Los Angeles County transit officials on Thursday rejected their proposals for a new contract to patrol buses and trains and signed off on a plan to explore creating their own police force. The rebuke of local law enforcement came as the board approved extending the current contract for another year.

— FLIER WOES: A campaign flier sent out by Marco Santana, a candidate in the April 4 special election to fill Nury Martinez‘s council seat, drew criticism from the chair of the Los Angeles County Democratic Party for saying Santana is “endorsed” by the Democratic Party.

Meanwhile, La Opinión is demanding a public retraction of a mailer supporting candidate Marisa Alcaraz paid for by Local 770 United Food and Commercial Workers PAC.

The mailer says Alcaraz is endorsed by the newspaper. “That endorsement is a false claim,” said Armando Varela, La Opinión’s executive editor. “We all need to bring integrity to City Hall and this is not the way to do it.” The newspaper also issued a blistering editorial on the mailer.

A representative for the union declined to comment.

— WHO’S A LOBBYIST? After much back and forth, the big revamp of the city’s municipal lobbying ordinance remains in committee for another go-round. All parties appear to agree on the broad strokes of the reform, which would change the definition of a lobbyist from a time-based threshold to one based on annual compensation. But such a move would considerably widen the net on who qualifies, and the Ad Hoc Committee on Governance Reform has yet to reach a consensus on how that should affect influence-seekers who don’t hold conventional lobbying roles.

Council President Paul Krekorian pushed a proposal to exempt 501(c)(3) nonprofits and unions from traditional filing requirements and instead create a new separate filing class for them with different requirements, which drew fresh controversy and was ultimately sent back to the drawing board. Of particular issue is whether the new rules will fairly distinguish between small nonprofits with fewer resources and larger ones that wield major influence, as well as whether unions should be lumped in with nonprofits at all.

Quick hits

• Almost to India: Standing with his parents, wife and daughter, a grinning Eric Garcetti was finally sworn in as the U.S. ambassador to India by Vice President Kamala Harris on Friday.
• On the docket for next week: Council will be in recess for the next two weeks.