Karen Bass Faces Last Minute Challenge from Former Supporter

The race for mayor of Los Angeles is on, with Mayor Karen Bass running for a second term in the midst of a PR crisis connected to the deadly fires that dominated the news a year ago. But just before the deadline for candidates closed, Bass got a new challenger. 

Nithya Raman, a progressive Los Angeles councilmember, announced her mayoral run on Saturday, three hours before the filing deadline for the June election and less than two weeks after endorsing Bass’ reelection.

The 44 year-old former urban planner, addressing reporters after officially filing to run, described a city that was “at a breaking point,” prompting her to break with Bass.

“I do think Angelenos have really given us a lot of faith, voted for more taxes to address important housing issues, address homelessness, to address some of our biggest crises,” she said. “And if we don’t show results to them, I think we will lose them.”

The city isn’t reaching any kind of new breaking point but Mayor Bass’s campaign may be. Last week the LA Times reported that Mayor Bass was personally responsible for watering down an after-action report on the Palisades fire.

One Bass confidant told one of the sources that “the mayor didn’t tell the truth when she said she had nothing to do with changing the report.” The source said the confidant advised Bass that altering the report “was a bad idea” because it would hurt her politically…

“All the changes [The Times] reported on were the ones Karen wanted,” the second source said, referring primarily to the newspaper’s determination that the report was altered to deflect attention from the LAFD’s failure to pre-deploy crews to the Palisades before the fire, which killed 12 people and destroyed more than 6,000 homes and other structures, amid forecasts of catastrophically high winds.

Bass has denied that report, attacking the LA Times over the story.

“This is muckraking journalism at its lowest form. It is dangerous and irresponsible for Los Angeles Times reporters to rely on third-hand unsourced information to make unsubstantiated character attacks to advance a narrative that is false,” the statement read.

The mayor’s office said Bass reviewed an early draft of the report and asked the LAFD to ensure issues such as weather conditions and budget information were accurate, but that she “made no changes to the draft.”

The problem for Bass is that the cat is largely already out of the bag. The current fire chief had admitted the report in question was watered down and there’s also no doubt that a copy of the report was sent to the mayor’s office before it was published with changes. It seems pretty obvious where the call for changes came from, though whether you could prove that in a courtroom is another issue.

In any case, Nithya Raman’s decision to jump into the race two weeks after endorsing Bass suggests she sees an opportunity that opened up thanks to this LA Times report. But Raman isn’t the only challenger.

As Saturday’s noon filing deadline approached, Ms. Bass’s most significant potential challengers appeared to be Spencer Pratt, a Republican millennial reality television villain who lost his home in the Palisades fire; Adam Miller, a tech executive and a founder of an affordable housing nonprofit; and Rae Huang, a community organizer and a progressive advocate for affordable housing.

I don’t know if Spencer Pratt has a real chance in this race but the idea that LA needs some accountability seems long overdue. Former Bass challenger Rick Caruso said recently that he was worried about electing someone with no experience running a city.

Billionaire developer Rick Caruso took a swipe at Spencer Pratt’s long-shot mayoral bid — while doubling down on his scathing criticism of Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass over her response to last year’s deadly wildfires.

Caruso believes the former reality TV star’s political ambitions may be “well-intended,” but warned that Los Angeles can’t afford another inexperienced leader running a city of nearly four million residents.

“I think he’s a very well-intended guy,” Caruso told The Hollywood Reporter of Pratt, a fierce critic of Bass who kicked off his mayoral campaign this week.

LA voters really ought to care about the wildfire cover-up the city has been engaged in for the past year, but counting on progressive voters to act rationally often turns out to be a fool’s errand.

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