How Karen Bass delivers millions to pet causes

Good morning, it’s Tuesday, Sept. 1, and you can expect a reprieve from the sweltering heat, with highs reaching 81 in Central L.A.

As the Lineage warehouse in Boyle Heights burned this summer, the company’s CEO came to Mayor Karen Bass with a question: How could they help? The result was a $2 million donation to the California Community Foundation, which was then used to assist people hurt by the fire. 

Since becoming mayor, Bass has reported soliciting more than $38 million in charitable donations from corporations, foundations, unions and other wealthy backers. These are known as “behested payments,” and critics deride them as a “shakedown” that allows those with deep pockets to curry favor with politicians. Defenders, however, say these payments allow elected officials to lend support to worthy causes. Bass’ opponent in the mayoral campaign, Councilmember Nithya Raman, has also behested a handful of donations to charity. 

We looked at the two candidates’ records on behested payments — and why the $2 million donation from Lineage sparked a complaint to the state’s Fair Political Practices Commission.

The short answer is no, there is essentially no conceivable chance that a hurricane makes landfall in Southern California this holiday weekend. 

The more complicated answer is this: A clump of clouds currently sitting just off the Baja coast will, per the National Weather Service, “likely” develop into a hurricane by late in the week. Where that potential hurricane goes over the weekend remains an open question. Some models have it heading toward Southern California by Labor Day, while others show it not getting anywhere near us.

That means, as climate scientist Daniel Swain put it during his virtual office hours yesterday, “it is increasingly plausible that a tropical system of some magnitude will have at least indirect effects in Southern California for several days later this week.” Swain said that there was a very unlikely chance of a “tropical storm strength tropical cyclone” making a close approach or even landfall somewhere between Santa Barbara and San Diego.

Swain put the odds of us seeing a major Southern California storm (read: heavy rain and winds, but no tropical cyclone for the history books) somewhere between 25% and 30%. Still, he put roughly equal odds on the possibility that the system’s trajectory goes “completely out to sea and does almost nothing in Southern California.” So to sum it up: We might have very heavy rain, or we might have no rain. But we also shouldn’t rule out the highly unlikely but not implausible possibility of a tropical cyclone. Which, to be clear, is still not a hurricane.

L.A. Material can exclusively report that West Hollywood’s Coyote Condo is no longer home to its most infamous residents, a pack of six canids (including three pups) who began living on the second floor of an abandoned construction project earlier this year and became media stars in late July.