2023: A Year of Change and Progress

This has been a busy year for the City Council. Among the Council's achievements of the last year.

Public Safety

• A budget that prioritizes safety by giving our Police and Fire Academies the resources to continuously train full classes of recruits
• Creation of an Unarmed Response capability so mental health crisis incidents don’t turn into violent confrontations with police.
• Adding speed humps to streets by every public school in the city. 

Laws to Support the hardest working people in this City…

• Enacting a Fair Work Week ordinance so people can plan time with their families
• Tenant protections to prevent arbitrary evictions and keep our people housed 
• Ending our COVID era restrictions on business and achieving a compromise on rent increases as our economy fully recovers from the dislocations of recent years.
• On the last day of Council, we adopted a permanent Al Fresco dining program in the City to continue the revitalization of our restaurant and hospitality industry.

Protecting our Environment and Confronting Climate Change

• Ending the Age of Oil in Los Angeles by prohibiting all new oil and gas drilling in the city and initiating the process of shutting down the last remaining oil and gas wells.
• Committing record amounts to building electrification to reduce one of the largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions
• Enacting comprehensive plastic waste legislation to put an end to the flood of single-use plastics clogging our waterways and contaminating our food supply.

Building Affordable Housing

• We’ve locked arms with a new Mayor to drastically cut the timeline for building affordable housing.  
• Affordable housing projects that might have taken one or two years to receive the city’s approval can now be reviewed and given the go-ahead in as little as six weeks.  
• The Council has approved construction of District NoHo: 1,500 new units of housing right on top of the North Hollywood Metro station., with a quarter set aside for limited income tenants.

Reforming City Government

• Thanks to all of you who demanded change and participated in our public meeting process, Council has placed a measure on the ballot to create an Independent Redistricting Commission and take the process of drawing City Council district lines out of the Council's hands.  
• We’re giving the people a chance to vote for an independent process so we never see a repeat of the backroom scheming that turned this Chamber upside down a year ago.

Council President Krekorian continues to chair the Ad Hoc Committee on Governance Reform, and plans to put more reforms on the Council's agenda in the year ahead:

• Strengthening the Ethics Commission
• Updating our Municipal Lobbying Ordinance
• Reforming our Planning and Land Use process
• Expanding the Council to reduce the size of Council districts and give every neighborhood and every voter a bigger voice in this body.