Los Angeles mayoral election: Mayor Karen Bass, reality TV star Spencer Pratt, Councilmember Nithya Raman face off in fiery debate
LOS ANGELES (KABC) — A fiery debate was held on Wednesday between incumbent Karen Bass and two of her primary challengers in the race for Los Angeles mayor.
The candidates sparred over how to handle wildfires, homelessness and the dwindling Hollywood film industry. The debate comes with just one month until the mayoral primary election.
There is an unlikely alliance in an ugly race for L.A. mayor. Former reality star Spencer Pratt and current Mayor Bass were hardly in agreement on Wednesday night, but coordinated or not, the opponents led a two-on-one tag-team attack against progressive L.A. city councilmember Nithya Raman.
SEE ALSO: Who’s running for LA mayor? Here’s the full list of 14 candidates
Trying to rise again to reality fame out of the ashes of the Palisades Fire, Pratt has staked his candidacy as the anti-incumbent.
“Mayor Bass and I are definitely not working together. I blame this person for burning my house, and my parents’ house, and my town — all my neighbors down,” Pratt said. “As mayor, I will never drain the reservoirs that we need for wildfire protection.”
Still answering for her absence during the fires and cutting short funding for fire operations budgets, Bass shifted blame.
“The primary problem there was that the chief sent home 1,000 firefighters. We actually had fire trucks with not enough firefighters there,” Bass said. “So yes, there were fire trucks that were broken, but there were also firetrucks that were out of use because she had sent the firefighters home.”
Bass quickly looked to prove what she calls an improvement to one of the city’s most persistent problems — the unhoused population.
“Homelessness was going up year after year, and under my watch, it is the first time we’ve had a decrease in street homelessness,” Bass said. “While it went up in the country, 18%, it came down in Los Angeles, 17.5%. I have expedited the building of housing because our number one issue in this city is affordability.”
In a new plan proposed just this week, chair of the city council’s Housing and Homelessness Committee, Raman, is promising to clear half of the homeless encampments before the Olympics in 2028.
“Let’s actually build out a real system that can get as many people indoors as possible,” Raman said. “Let’s not put them into $100,000 a year motel rooms for a year or more per person. This system is not fiscally sustainable, and we must work to end this crisis with urgency and with accountability right now.”
“Councilman Raman’s plan for treatment first — I will go below the Harbor Freeway tomorrow with her, and we can find some of these people she’s going to offer treatment for. She’s going to get stabbed in the neck. These people do not want a bed. They want fentanyl or super meth,” Pratt said.
Unaffordable rent is crippling L.A. residents, and each candidate’s fix seemed indicative of their approach to governing.
“I expedited the building. 42,000 units are being fast-tracked for affordable housing. We have another 43,000 units at our potential with our adaptive reuse, which means you can change office buildings into housing,” Bass said.
READ MORE: Mayor Bass visits office space being converted to affordable housing, touts adaptive reuse ordinance
Mayor Karen Bass visited a downtown Los Angeles site that is being converted into a 512-unit affordable housing apartment complex as a result of a program making it easier to turn existing buildings into housing.
“As mayor, I will take my executive authority over the departments and ensure that they respond to new apartment applications within 60 days if they are zoning compliant, so that we can build exactly the kind of housing that will make this into a city of opportunity again,” Raman said.
“When I enforce the law and clear the streets of the drug addicts that have taken over 40 blocks of downtown L.A., abandoned buildings that have drug addicts just lighting them on fire every other day, I will have potentially 20,000 units available to build,” Pratt said.
“This is a MAGA Republican’s idea of what Los Angeles looks like,” Raman said. “This is really not the city that I love so much.”
If there was any issue of consensus — though veiled in attacks by a combative Pratt — it was a determination to lure production back home.
“We need post-production tax credits, and Councilman Ramen will tell you, ‘My husband’s a producer blah, blah, blah,'” Pratt said. “The reality is, she’s been in power for five years now… both of these people have been the reason why there’s no more Hollywood.”
“This issue is very personal to me. My husband has been a longtime writer in the industry, and we desperately need to keep Hollywood here,” Raman said. “I feel like the mayor’s role is really to be the loudest advocate for the best possible version of the policies that we need, including a tax credit that has no cap, that is guaranteed years into the future, so that production, so that studios, can actually invest here.”
It was an hour of personal attacks with obvious wide gaps in policy between the three leading candidates for mayor.
Amid a surge of home break-ins across the San Fernando Valley, all three candidates agreed public safety was the mayor’s number one job, but differed widely on how to fund and staff the understaffed Los Angeles Police Department.
SEE ALSO: Former Vice President Kamala Harris endorses LA Mayor Karen Bass for re-election
Former Vice President Kamala Harris has endorsed Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass in her bid for re-election.
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