State lawmakers are requesting nearly $2 billion in funding to aid Los Angeles amid a projected budget deficit. This comes after a delegation of council members, led by Mayor Karen Bass, met with Gov. Gavin Newsom and other state leaders in Sacramento. The city’s budget woes have been partially driven by pricey legal settlements and emergency response costs related to January’s wildfires.
On this week’s “In Focus SoCal,” host Tanya McRae sits down with Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky, chair of the council’s budget committee. She is behind a motion to create a budget advisory group that will assess the city’s financial status and advise the committee on steps to secure long-term fiscal health.
“This wasn’t just a budget crisis that came on all of a sudden, right? This has been decades in the making where we make short-term decisions that don’t have long-term benefits for the city of Los Angeles,” Yaroslavksy said. “The way I think about it is that the city has been operating from a place of scarcity. Scarcity in resources, but also in our mindset and ability to see what opportunities are available that we just aren’t taking advantage of.”
Also on this week’s show, McRae visits the Food Insecurity Shared Hub, also called FISH, which is a space where a coalition of local organizations is collaborating to increase outreach efforts in the area to end food insecurity. The ongoing global trade war, with President Donald Trump’s latest tariffs, is expected to raise essentials like groceries for American families, disproportionately affecting low-income households.
Food that would have otherwise been thrown away by grocery stores or restaurants is rescued, repurposed and redistributed to organizations.
“Food is a conversation of love, and to me, it just doesn’t make sense that people in America are hungry,” said Hillary Cohen, CEO and co-founder of Every Day Action, which is one organization collaborating at FISH. “It has never made sense that a Costco can exist next to someone who’s starving.”
State Sen. Ben Allen also joins McRae on this week’s episode to discuss how he and some of his colleagues are working to modernize California’s film and television tax credit program to make it more competitive. The program currently covers up to 25% of qualified expenditures for movies and shows filmed in LA. It also provides benefits to productions happening in California outside of the LA region.
“We want to make sure that this is something that everybody in the state of California can benefit from,” Allen said. “And we’ve actually seen an uptick in the Bay Area and in the Central Valley and southern San Diego with other parts of the state as production crews have sought to take advantage of that additional benefit.”
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