Raman Won on Potholes. Make Her Govern on Them.

The LAPD chief and a new police contract will crowd her first year, but her street promises should set the scorecard.

Near the end of the only televised debate of the L.A. mayor's race, Karen Bass went after the people backing her challenger. "There's very influential people who are supporting your campaign who are very, very much advocates for bike lanes," Bass said in the Oct. 13 debate, LAist reported. Nithya Raman, barely audible, said: "Um, yes."

That quiet yes won. Raman's the mayor-elect and Bass has conceded. Here's my position: the city should grade her on the sidewalks, streetlights, potholes and trains she ran on, starting the day she's sworn in. It shouldn't let the fight over the LAPD become her whole first year.

Look at what she actually promised. Her platform, LAist reported, treated broken sidewalks, dark streetlights and torn-up roads as emergencies that better government can fix, not as permanent conditions of life in L.A. For her first 100 days, she's pledged to start on urgent road repairs and potholes and to tell the public when broken streetlights will be fixed. That's a checklist. I like a checklist. You can hold one up at a council meeting.

The voters who gave her that checklist weren't only her old base. An LAist analysis of 793,692 precinct-level votes counted as of Nov. 9 found Raman took big parts of the city that had backed Bass in 2022. Even in South L.A., where most voters still went for Bass, she shed a lot of the support she'd had four years earlier. Those neighborhoods switched for something, and they're owed it.

Now look at what's headed for her calendar. The Los Angeles Times laid out the LAPD decisions waiting for her. One is whether to replace Chief Jim McDonnell, which she said again and again she'd do. The other is the next police contract, with talks expected to ramp up in January. In a text to the Times, Melina Abdullah, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter-Los Angeles, said she wants the new mayor to make good on her "commitment to remove Chief McDonnell."

I'm not telling her to drop it. I'm telling her it's a slow fight she can't win alone. The mayor can't fire the chief, the Times noted. Only the Police Commission, whose five members she picks and the council has to confirm, and the City Council itself, by a two-thirds vote, have that power. Not one council member endorsed her. A pothole crew, meanwhile, works for a department she'll run.

The best objection is one Raman made herself. At her first news conference as mayor-elect, she called public safety the city's "most important service," the Times reported. Fine. Then count the deaths on the street. In recent years traffic violence has killed more Angelenos than homicides have, LAist reported, while the Times describes crime as near record lows. The safety service this city has failed at worst is the crosswalk.

And the police contract doesn't pull her away from the potholes. It's where the pothole money gets decided. Raman has said the officer raises Bass negotiated in 2023 made the city's money problems worse. She's also said she doesn't want a smaller force, with sworn ranks at 8,504, the lowest since October 1995. Whatever she gives up at that bargaining table comes out of the street outside your house.

The street agenda has tests she can be graded on fast. On Forest Lawn Drive near Griffith Park, she pushed a long-studied lane reduction. Weeks out from construction, Bass killed it, and her substitute design makes the lanes wider. Measure HLA, passed by two-thirds of voters in 2024 to require bike, pedestrian and transit upgrades, has moved slowly and is tangled in legal fights. When she takes the mayor's seat on Metro's 13-member board in December, she can replace Bass' three appointees.

Both sides spent money telling voters what this election was about. The Times reported that the Los Angeles Police Protective League, the union for rank-and-file officers, spent millions of dollars on ads attacking Raman. On the other side, campaign finance filings cited by LAist put the anti-Bass ad bill from the Streets for All political action committee at nearly $1.7 million. Voters heard both pitches and picked hers. If she drifts, the people who lose are the riders, the pedestrians and the neighborhoods that switched.

On election eve, riding the Metro B Line with supporters, Raman said a fast, safe, connected transit system is "totally achievable, if you have the will. I have the will." She said it on a train. Make her prove it on the street.

Source: LAist, retrieved November 11, 2026. Other sources: LAist (2), yahoo.com.

From the Handbook: Pothole Damage Claim in Los Angeles: How to File