Karen Bass touts shaking up 'the status quo' in LA

LOS ANGELES — Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass’ long resume in elected office and even-keeled demeanor doesn’t exactly scream “shake up the system.”

But the mayor leaned so hard into her message of upending how City Hall operates that her State of the City address sounded more like a Silicon Valley Ted Talk.

“The state of our city is stronger today because we have made change and disrupted the status quo,” Bass said at the outset of her speech on Monday evening — the first of eight times she uttered “status quo” in the roughly 35-minute speech in council chambers.

Bass portrayed nearly every major initiative and priority as a break from the old ways of doing business and promised “turning the page” on City Hall’s reputation for internal dysfunction and rocky relationships with the LA County Board of Supervisors.

She even framed her support for giving raises to police officers, an effort that is getting renewed grumbles from the left as the city’s budget picture darkens, as a necessary move to stanch the department’s retention troubles — “a status quo [that] simply cannot protect Angelenos.”

She described her signature program Inside Safe, which focused on moving people off of the streets into temporary housing such as motel rooms, as “a sea change” in how Los Angeles approaches homelessness.

The implicit subtext of all this rhetorical sweeping change was that disruption can be messy work. Bass has enjoyed high popularity ratings since being elected, but she is acutely aware that Angelenos’ patience can run thin, particularly on vexing challenges like solving the homelessness crisis.

Inside Safe, for example, would be moving from its initial “rescue phase” — which Bass acknowledged came with a precariously high price tag — to a “recovery phase” focused more on long-term planning.

Bass also appealed to the city’s wealthiest residents to help solve the homelessness crisis, announcing a new campaign dubbed LA4LA to tap into the largesse of the private sector.

She called it “an unprecedented partnership to confront this emergency, an example of disrupting the status quo to build a new system to save lives.”

The next test for Bass is whether she can bring a status-quo shakeup to the city’s fiscal planning. Bass is expected to release her new spending plan next week against a tough reality of a cash crunch at City Hall.

Bass has faced heat from the Los Angeles Times editorial board, among others, for backing expensive raises for police officers and other city employees.

She did not back down from her support for the pay hike, asserting that the city must “pay our workers fairly.”

But she did promise to disrupt, so to speak, the budget process by eliminating “ghost positions” — vacant city positions that had been carried over on the books year after year, while promising to “preserve core services.”

Now she’ll just have to sell that budgeting overhaul to the City Council — and Angelenos at large.

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