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Who Will Replace Garcetti Until the Next Election?
That ideal leader would be less concerned with currying favor and image-burnishing than an elected official whose success depends on public support.
Mayor of Los Angeles Eric Garcetti (Photo by Joe Scarnici/Getty Images for Bloomberg Philanthropies)
As Eric Garcetti prepares to head off to India as the U.S. Ambassador to that country, Los Angeles is still almost a year and a half away from its next scheduled election. While several potential candidates are lining up for that race, the city’s economic, housing, public safety and transportation crises are not going to fix themselves over the next eighteen months. The temptation among many local political leaders will be to defer significant action on these policy fronts and simply maintain the status quo until LA voters select our next chief executive, but this path of least political resistance ignores the urgency that these challenges require.
On April 1, officials from the Los Angeles County Metro Transportation Authority (L.A. Metro) presented to the public controversial plans for a new Bus Rapid Transit line in Northeast L.A. connecting the San Fernando Valley to Pasadena. Then, for the next four hours, they fielded around 50 questions from more than 200 attendees, many of whom were irate at plans to convert car lanes to bus-only lanes on Colorado Boulevard in Eagle Rock, a hip suburb in the middle of the intended route.
The dispute is another example of the gridlock behind the gridlock all across Los Angeles. When city officials try to convert auto transit to greener, faster and more equitable mass transit, they face organized, hostile opposition. Meanwhile, even ambitious vehicle electrification goals adding 70 million electric cars by 2030 and banning gas vehicle sales by 2035 are not enough to meet 1.5 degree Celsius warming targets, according to the Rocky Mountain Institute, a nonprofit studying climate change