What Happened
The day's first grouped roll call recorded 15 ayes, with attendance dropping to 13 and 14 for stretches of the afternoon. Council Member Curren Price Jr. left the floor for one item, which passed with 12. This was the first full meeting of the reconstituted Council: Adrin Nazarian and Ysabel Jurado had replaced Paul Krekorian and Kevin de León, and both took part in the votes below.
Most of the calendar moved in groups without dissent. The substantive business was two pieces of the city's Housing Element implementation — the Citywide Housing Incentive Program and the citywide Adaptive Reuse Ordinance — both of which drew long public comment and a string of floor amendments.
Item 35 — Citywide Housing Incentive Program (CF 21-1230-S5). The Planning and Land Use Management Committee report proposes the CHIP Ordinance amending Chapters 1 and 1A of the Los Angeles Municipal Code, the city's main vehicle for meeting the housing production targets in its state-mandated Housing Element. Three amendments were taken in sequence before the item itself passed as amended, without dissent.
The consequential vote was the first. Amending Motion 35C, introduced by Council Member Nithya Raman, would have added single-family parcels to the rezoning through Options 2 and 6 as prepared by City Planning, rather than confining the program to multifamily and commercial land. It failed 5-10, with Bob Blumenfield, Heather Hutt, John Lee, Tim McOsker, Nazarian, Imelda Padilla, Traci Park, Monica Rodriguez, Hugo Soto-Martinez and Katy Yaroslavsky opposed. Amending Motion 35B from Soto-Martinez passed unanimously, and Amending Motion 35A from Lee — which its author described as "just removing redundant language that is already present in Option Number 3," a technical cleanup — passed 14-1 over Padilla. Lee used his time to thank Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson for the two years of work behind the plan.
Item 38 — Adaptive Reuse Ordinance (CF 21-1230-S9). The report updates the Adaptive Reuse Ordinance to apply citywide, further incentivizing conversion of existing buildings to housing, streamlining Planning approval and superseding the Adaptive Reuse Incentive Areas Specific Plan. Four amendments were on the floor. Soto-Martinez explained his two: "In recent years there's been a growing trend of hotels being converted into housing. Although I think that could be a great idea in many cases, right now through the adaptive reuse regulation, there are not robust conversations that need to be had with the workers that will be affected." Amending Motion 38C would require conversions to account for affected hotel workers, and 38B was technical, clarifying that the responsible-hotel ordinance applies to all new hotels in Los Angeles. Mid-debate Soto-Martinez moved to change his own threshold from 60 rooms to 300; the clerk split that off as Amending Motion 38E, seconded by Price, and it passed 14-0. Amending Motion 38C, as amended by 38E, then passed 13-1, with Eunisses Hernandez the only vote against. Raman's 38D also passed 14-0.
Item 41 (CF 22-1545) reaffirms that the local emergency on housing and homelessness the Mayor declared on July 7, 2023 continues to exist under Los Angeles Administrative Code Section 8.33 and renews the declaration for another 90 days. Rodriguez asked colleagues to vote it down, tying the renewal to what she described as the Council's responsibility "for our fiscal oversight and greater transparency around expenditures associated with homelessness," and said she would again be casting a no. It passed 13-1, with Rodriguez the lone opponent.
Item 64 (CF 24-1524) transfers and appropriates $114,000 from the Century City Neighborhood Traffic Protection Trust Fund to the LAPD to buy and install automated license plate readers in the Cheviot Hills neighborhood of Council District 5. Yaroslavsky called it special for an amendment and Hernandez called it special for a separate vote. No member asked to speak, and the initial tabulation was 12-2. As the Council moved on to Item 65, Jurado interrupted to say she wanted to reconsider Item 64 because she had forgotten to vote; the clerk entered it as a technical change and restated the result as 11-3, with Hernandez, Jurado and Soto-Martinez opposed.
Public comment ran long and was concentrated almost entirely on the CHIP ordinance, with the two sides making opposite asks of the same vote. Homeowner and neighborhood groups, including a representative of Greater Toluca Lake, asked the Council to keep R-1 single-family homes excluded from multifamily development and objected to the rezoning "options" framing. Pro-housing speakers pushed the other way, several explicitly backing Raman's amendment to add single-family parcels through Options 2 and 6, and framing it as a matter of desegregation — one speaker said the city needed "to expand single-family zones to desegregate the city," another that "if we rule off every single-family home, we cannot solve the crisis." One commenter pointed out that fewer than 5 percent of single-family blocks would be affected, describing their own block as "houses on one side and small apartments on the other." The Council rejected the amendment they were asking for.