Meeting Summary
What Happened
This was the council's first regular meeting following the January 7, 2025 windstorm and wildfire disaster. Item 22 was continued one week to January 21. The council adopted Item 56, a resolution ratifying Mayor Bass's January 7, 2025 Declaration of Local Emergency for the windstorm and extreme fire weather event, unanimously 15-0, and sent it forward "forthwith."
The council then adopted a large slate of Rule 23 emergency special motions responding to the fires, all passing unanimously 15-0, primarily authored by Council Member Park (whose district includes Pacific Palisades) with co-authors including Lee, Rodriguez, Nazarian, Hutt, Padilla, McOsker, Price, Hernandez, and Soto-Martinez. Council Member Park clarified that while her district was most severely impacted, several of the motions' emergency response sites were not limited to CD11. One motion (Special 11, Hernandez-Soto-Martinez) was amended, at Council Member Raman's request, to exempt Hillside High Fire Severity Zone areas from certain traffic-management restrictions, preserving the council's ability to maintain time-specific parking rules that keep evacuation routes and emergency-vehicle ingress/egress clear during high-fire-risk periods; the amendment was accepted as friendly.
Contested Votes
Item 39 (continued Housing and Homelessness Committee report on the Homelessness Emergency Declaration 2024-25 Second Quarterly Report) passed 14-1, with Council Member Rodriguez casting the lone no vote. No floor debate accompanied the vote.
Public Comment
Public comment on the Rule 23 emergency motions included sharp criticism of the LAFD's budget and staffing history, with one speaker citing that 12 council members had previously voted to cut LAFD funding and arguing the fire chief position should be made elected rather than mayoral-appointed; the speaker also raised the department's prior terminations of firefighters over a COVID-19 vaccine mandate as a contributing factor to recruitment shortfalls. A staff attorney with the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, who practices eviction defense, testified that the city saw 5,500 eviction filings from October through December 2024 and that the Housing Department had received over 2,700 eviction notices per week in January, warning — citing post-fire rent increases of up to 44% in Maui and lingering elevated rents five years after Hurricane Katrina — that the city should expect a surge in evictions and rent increases following the January wildfires without swift protective action.
Contested Votes
Tallies and member votes are the official record (LA City Clerk CVVS). Descriptions are drawn from the meeting transcript.
Item 39 — CF 23-0652-S6 (Adopted): S6 CONTINUED CONSIDERATION OF HOUSING AND HOMELESSNESS COMMITTEE REPORT relative to the Homelessness Emergency Declaration 2024-25 Second Quarterly Report.
| Vote | Members |
|---|---|
| Yes (14) | Adrin Nazarian, Bob Blumenfield, Curren D. Price, Eunisses Hernandez, Heather Hutt, Hugo Soto-Martinez, Imelda Padilla, John Lee, Katy Yaroslavsky, Marqueece Harris-Dawson, Nithya Raman, Tim Mcosker, Traci Park, Ysabel Jurado |
| No (1) | Monica Rodriguez |