The Los Angeles Mayor’s race between Mayor Karen Bass and her opponent LA City Council Member Nithya Raman is heating up, as the mayor asserted Raman was lazy, and no one can work with her.
“She has no support from the council members because nobody can work with her. That is a problem,” Bass said on Wednesday. “People don’t want to be on her committee. As a matter of fact, your committee met today. You called the meeting today. It was your last meeting, and you didn’t even show up.”
Bass continued, “You weren’t there. So what I learned from council members and I think there’s one [in] our audience now, people can’t work with you. You can’t manage your committee, but yet you want to manage the city.”
“You have a lot of aspirations in what you say you are going to do, but you have been in City Hall twice as long as I have, and I’m not sure what their accomplishments are,” the mayor added, writing on social media that Raman has “missed several thousand votes.
Bass also bragged of her own accomplishments, stating, “I did the first tax credit when I was Speaker of the House. You were nowhere.”
Raman responded to the criticisms, stating that her regular absences were due to her appointments to “external boards.”
“(Bass) knows, as well as I do, that I have had regular absences because I’ve been appointed to external boards that lead me to miss regular council meetings because these bodies that I’ve been appointed to by the previous mayor, by this mayor, sometimes conflict with our council days,” Raman said, slamming Bass for refusing audits on her homelessness initiative, Inside Safe.
Once allies, Bass and Raman spent much of the evening arguing over the power of a mayor, contrasted with the power of a councilmember. Bass argued that homelessness declined in Raman’s district because of the mayor’s Inside Safe initiative.
“Right now at City Hall, no one is in charge. Mayor Bass only looks at Inside Safe. That’s the only program her office manages. We are investing hundreds of millions of dollars in 8,000 beds not being managed. You deserve accountability,” Raman said.
Notably, Bass has blamed President Donald Trump for the rise in homelessness numbers, accusing the Trump administration of driving up the cost of “gas, groceries and rent, pushing more families to the edge, and slashed critical safety net funding.”
Raman also addressed the claims of a lack of endorsements from city council members, noting she jumped in the race at the last minute.
“Many of them had endorsed this mayor beforehand, including me. I had also endorsed this mayor before I ran. When you’re a council member, you have to work with the sitting mayor in order to get what you need for your constituents,” she added.