L A mayor s race heats up, with a focus on the city s ills latimes.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from latimes.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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.
With Garcetti poised to exit, L A has to pick a new mayor latimes.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from latimes.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
At Los Angeles City Hall, everything is suddenly up in the air.
With Mayor Eric Garcetti again in the running for a post in the Biden administration this time as U.S. ambassador to India politicians, bureaucrats, activists and others are trying to figure out what a mayoral departure would mean for the city and its most pressing issues.
An early exit could reshuffle the race to replace Garcetti in next year’s election. And it would likely trigger another, behind-the-scenes competition for the post of interim mayor a choice that would be up to the City Council.
“It’s going to have a ripple effect,” said Loyola Law School professor Jessica Levinson, “not just in terms of who Garcetti’s successor would be but how that would affect the race for mayor, who on Garcetti’s staff stays and goes and, perhaps most importantly, what happens to the mayor’s initiatives and goals.”