Nithya Raman

It made me absolutely crazy.

And so finally, in the last couple of days, I seriously considered running.

And then on the very last day, threw my hat in the ring.

You know, I think a lot of it has to do with really poor fiscal management here at the city.

We are making decisions that undermine our capacity to be able to deliver basic essential services for our residents.

And I think that's a shame because it is, again, it's completely possible to do it.

We last year had a billion dollar budget deficit that definitely had some kind of impacts from the fires the year prior and from or a few months prior and from heightened liability claims that

are impacting a lot of municipalities across the country.

But the biggest issue was that we signed unsustainably large contracts, beginning with the police union, which is one of the biggest players in local politics.

We signed an enormous contract with them that everybody at City Hall knew would lead to hundreds of millions of dollars of shortfall.

And yet we signed it anyway because the mayor and many other city hall leaders, I voted against it, many other city hall leaders knew that the police union is the major player in local elections.

They're the biggest funders of independent expenditure committees of campaign funding here in L.A.

And so we signed that contract.

We knew that we would be hundreds of millions of dollars in the hole as a result.

And then exactly as everyone knew, we ended last year with a billion dollar budget deficit and 1,600 layoffs on the table.

And because that happened, we are now in a situation where we have 30,000 streetlights off across the city of Los Angeles and an average repair time of a year.

to fix a streetlight.

We haven't paved a single mile of street this entire fiscal year because we don't have the money.

We're filling fewer potholes because we have the trucks to fill potholes, but we can't pay for the drivers to fill potholes.

We are doing everything worse than we could, and now we're going back to residents and asking them to pay more in order to deliver these essential services.