LA FAILS — Karen Bass's Record as Mayor

Does Karen Bass have a grudge against Los Angeles?

Seems like it. Everything else on this page is dead serious — sourced, cited, and about real people's lives, not punchlines. This one section is the exception: where we stop gritting our teeth long enough to joke about the cartoon-supervillain theory instead.

The crisis got worse, not better

The 2026 Homeless Count showed homelessness rising again inside city limits — even as Bass's signature program, Inside Safe, has spent hundreds of millions of dollars.

• Advocates call it a policy failure. Housing Is a Human Right's Susie Shannon said the 2026 count "has shown, once again, that the City's policies on homelessness are a complete failure," arguing that moving people from encampments into temporary shelter or bridge housing still leaves them homeless. [LA Blade]
• No durable exit strategy. Even a service provider partnering with the city, The People Concern, acknowledged: "we still struggle with the exit strategy" for people brought inside under Inside Safe. [LA Blade]
• Accountability gaps. Inside Safe has faced a 2024 fraud investigation tied to meal-provision contracts and a 2025 audit that could not fully verify how funds were spent. [LA Blade]

Streets, sidewalks, and streetlights falling apart

City crews have touted pothole-filling surges, but LA's underlying street and lighting maintenance has fallen behind need — and the city has quietly scaled back full repaving to dodge state-mandated bike/bus/pedestrian upgrades.

• Repaving is being skipped, not fixed. Reporting found LA's Bureau of Street Services is "no longer fully repaving streets to avoid installing the bus, bike, and pedestrian improvements required by the voter-passed Measure HLA" — leaving potholes and cracked pavement in place. [LA Public Press]
• Basic services lagging. Opponents have specifically criticized Bass's administration for "falling behind on basic city services," citing street maintenance and infrastructure conditions. [LA Public Press]
• Reactive, not proactive. City Hall's pothole response has largely come in storm-driven "surges" after rain events, rather than a sustained maintenance program. [ABC7]

Piling up faster than the city can clean it

Illegal dumping complaints spiked to their highest level in years in early 2025, and the city's own auditors have flagged how thin enforcement is relative to the scale of the problem.

• Some neighborhoods hit far harder. Council District 8 in South LA saw dumping complaints more than double, from 2,118 to 3,329 reports. [Yahoo/Crosstown LA]
• City auditors flagged thin enforcement. The City Controller's audit found no comprehensive interdepartmental enforcement strategy and minimal public-awareness efforts to deter dumping. [LA City Controller]
• Council leadership admits it's a crisis. Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson called the situation "unacceptable." [Yahoo/Crosstown LA]

Out of the country as the Palisades burned

Bass was in Ghana on a State Department trip when the Palisades Fire ignited on January 7, 2025. Text messages later released show her being briefed by staff in real time from overseas while the fire exploded in size — and the city's own water system buckled at the worst possible moment.

• Hydrants ran dry as homes burned. Fire crews in the Palisades reported hydrants losing pressure and running dry during the height of the fire, while the Santa Ynez Reservoir — a nearby DWP reservoir — sat offline and empty for repairs. [CBS LA]
• The after-action report was reportedly softened. The LA Times found the LAFD's own after-action report had been edited to downplay leadership failures and response mistakes. [LAist]
• Rebuilding has been slow. A year on, the Palisades Recovery Coalition's founder said "we think she's lost that sense of urgency"; a proposed waiver of rebuilding permit fees stalled at the City Council over cost concerns. [LAist]

LAPD staffing at a 30-year low

Bass touts falling homicide numbers, but the department enforcing that safety has shrunk to levels not seen in a generation, and it keeps missing its own hiring targets.

• A department shrinking despite promises to grow it. Bass's own recruitment goals reportedly "shifted from expanding the department to stopping it from shrinking." [Police1]
• Hiring targets keep getting missed. The department has targeted 45 new hires a month and "hasn't reached that goal in years," even as hundreds of officers sit on injury or sick leave. [Police1]
• Emergency budget requests mid-year. Bass has had to go back to the City Council asking for millions more just to keep LAPD hiring on track. [ABC7]

Billion-dollar deficits and a pay cut headline

LA has lurched from a nearly $1 billion shortfall to a narrower — but still real — budget gap, with over a thousand layoffs proposed along the way before union concessions clawed most of them back.

• Layoffs threatened, then averted through concessions. Bass proposed over 1,600 layoffs; more than 1,000 positions were later restored after unions agreed to unpaid holidays and deferred overtime pay. [The Center Square]
• Bass took a symbolic pay cut following the shortfall — a gesture critics say does little to address a nine-figure structural gap. [NBC LA]
• Liability payouts remain enormous. The city's FY26 budget sets aside $210.3M just for liability claims — money that isn't going to services or repairs. [LA Public Press]

Voters are souring on her — and now she's in a runoff

It's now a two-person race: Bass against Councilmember Nithya Raman in the November runoff, with a majority of voters viewing Bass unfavorably. Raman is campaigning directly on the failures documented on this page.

• Source: UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies / LA Times poll, March 9–15, 2026, 840 likely LA voters. [Westside Current] · [The Hill]

The alternative: Bass vs. Raman

Nithya Raman — the progressive LA City Councilmember who beat Spencer Pratt for second place — advanced to face Bass in the runoff. Here's how her proposals stack up against Bass's record, point for point.

How this page is built

Every figure above is drawn from named local and national news outlets, official City of Los Angeles publications, a City Controller audit, and public polling — each linked at point of use. This is an independent opinion and accountability project, not a news organization — the calls to action are our opinion, and the Opinion Desk section is clearly-labeled satire, not a factual claim about Mayor Bass's employment. Have a correction or a source we should add? Facts get fixed; opinions don't need to.