Make California Post a Preferred Source The votes are counted, and Nithya Raman is officially our mayor-elect. Campaign promises run into reality.
One thing is clear: LA cannot afford another administration that manages dysfunction instead of fixing it.
Raman’s new mandate is not “socialism,” but rebuilding City Hall around competence, responsibility and accountability.
Raman campaigned as “an agent of change,” and change is what the times demand.
Under outgoing Mayor Karen Bass, the city tried extracting more money out of residents through higher service fees rather than restructuring departments to cut costs.
It is significant that Raman is not just a politician, but a trained urban planner, with a master’s degree in the field from MIT. Now she has an extraordinary opportunity to apply that training to how the city is governed.
Merging the Bureau of Street Services with the LA Department of Transportation would be a major step toward efficient operations and savings.
In the current setup, for example, sidewalks and crosswalks are excluded from transportation and mobility planning. That means one agency tries to widen streets to outdated standards, while the other seeks grant funds to narrow them back for safety and livability.
I am certain the mayor-elect understands quite well that LA’s cumbersome government has made confusion systemic. Authority overlaps, responsibility is unclear, and accountability is lost.
Without clear ownership, problems persist, costs rise, and government fails to deliver. It is this confusion of responsibility that must be eliminated.
The Department of Public Works also needs to be restructured. It is a wasteful anachronism outmoded by time.
The department was initially a reasonable concept, housing all city physical infrastructure projects with multiple obligations. But with age and time, it became a colossal body that oversees tasks ranging from bridge construction to the building of wastewater treatment plants; from graffiti removal to trash collection and street light maintenance.
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The federal government and state governments long ago realized the need to split these functions into different departments.
I have been pressing the city to make a similar change for over two years, and I am pleased that Angelenos voted to amend the city charter and restructure DPW.
The third piece of the puzzle is transferring the Bureau of Street Lighting to the LA Department of Water and Power (LADWP), which makes sense on many fronts.
Street lighting is a prime sore point with residents, who blame darkness for making neighborhoods feel eerie, and for spreading crime. More than 30,000 street lights are dark on a typical night. This figure likely understates the true extent of the problem, as unreported outages may leave even more areas of the city without adequate lighting.
Widespread outages increase the risks of traffic collisions, pedestrian and bicycling accidents, crime, and attacks on vulnerable residents. Currently, the Bureau of Street Lighting and LADWP perform complementary and overlapping street-lighting functions under separate organizations.
LADWP already possesses the engineering expertise, skilled field crews, equipment, dispatch systems, and procurement capabilities to take over the entire job.
In 1998, Mayor Richard Riordan recommended that LADWP should take over street lighting work. However, the bureau, with its lobbying and backdoor political maneuvering, kept things as they were.
It is my hope that the new mayor will move swiftly, as expected, to make the city efficient and to end the squandering of tax dollars.
Has the change we urgently need finally arrived? Can the new mayor make LA government efficient by simplifying City Hall, streamlining outdated departments, eliminating overlapping duties, clarifying authority, demanding measurable results, and holding department leaders accountable?
As an agent of change, she must. The goals are clear: fewer bureaucratic layers, clearer authority, faster decisions, and creating a government citizens can understand and trust.
New policies mean little if an outdated system cannot implement them. Mayor-elect Raman must undertake the Herculean task of restructuring City Hall itself. Confusion must yield to clarity, fragmentation to responsibility, and bureaucracy to institutions equipped to act.
Transforming the city begins with making its government governable.
Nick Patsaouras is an engineer, civic leader, and the author of the book “The Making of Modern Los Angeles.”
