FORMER L.A. MAYOR ERIC GARCETTI had the easy air of someone who no longer has to answer for potholes or power outages when he stopped by our studio, matcha in hand, to be interviewed for this week’s episode of our podcast, L.A. World.
Garcetti presided over the city from 2013 until 2022. It was a period in which Los Angeles at first surged with optimism, funding a massive expansion of the transit system and raising the minimum wage, and then slumped under the weight of the homelessness crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic.
Garcetti handed the keys to the mayor’s office to Karen Bass in December of 2022 and headed off to India, where he served as U.S. Ambassador while Joe Biden was president. Now back in Los Angeles as mayor-elect Nithya Raman prepares to take the reins from Bass, Garcetti joined us to unpack the mayoral transition and what lies ahead. The role of mayor, he said, is “storyteller in chief” and also “essentially” that of “a mother or a father for the city.”
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