An Economy for the People

The City of Los Angeles runs its budget on a broken process. Each year, the Mayor's office, the CAO, and City departments spend months drafting a budget in relative isolation. By the time the public gets to weigh in, the document is essentially finished. Equally troubling, this annual cycle consumes so much time and energy that there is almost none left to actually think about how the money is being spent. The result is a budget that reflects institutional inertia more than the needs of Angelenos.

Rae will fix that from the top. As mayor, she will move Los Angeles to a two-year budget cycle, freeing up time and resources for genuine planning, and requiring that meaningful public engagement happen before the Mayor's proposal is drafted, not after. Angelenos will have a real opportunity to shape priorities rather than react to decisions already made.

We will also make the budget legible. Today, even a close reader of the City's budget book cannot easily determine how much a department spends, on what programs, or with how many staff. Rae will require that every budget include plain-language summaries of changes in funding, staffing, and programs compared to the prior cycle. And we will provide robust, independent funding to the City Controller's office so that taxpayers can actually verify where their money is going.

The goal is a budget that reflects what Angelenos need, even when that means challenging the funding patterns that have persisted for decades.

The 2028 Olympics are coming to Los Angeles whether we asked for them or not. To be clear, we didn't: the bid was made without a public vote, without meaningful community input, and without a plan to protect the Angelenos most at risk from what follows. Critics have documented how mega-events consistently accelerate displacement, gentrification, surveillance, and the criminalization of informal economies in every city that hosts them. 

The games are two years away. The question before us now is not whether to host them, but how to ensure that Angelenos — not the International Olympic Committee, not real estate speculators, not surveillance contractors — are protected during the games and the ones that benefit.

Rae will align with the Fair Games Coalition's demand for a New Deal for Angelenos. The games must generate lasting benefits for the communities that make them possible. That includes defending the Olympic wage floor, keeping ICE out of venues and away from workers, and demanding that LA28 govern independently of federal political influence. It entails backing the Overpaid CEO Tax initiative, which would generate over half a billion dollars annually to fund housing, sidewalk repairs, after-school programs, and grocery access in the neighborhoods most in need ahead of 2028. 

To prevent displacement, Rae will work with City Council to ensure that the Olympics do not become an opportunity to push out low-income residents in favor of short-term rentals. She will pursue an eviction moratorium in Olympic zones, due to the strong economic incentives that landlords will have to replace rent-controlled apartments and other housing with tourist and athletic infrastructure. Short-term festivities cannot be treated as more important than our families’ housing stability. 

Rae will also fight to make the Olympic moment a genuine revitalization of LA's live entertainment and hospitality industries, prioritizing local vendors, neighborhood-based businesses, and union employers over corporate chains. Infrastructure investments tied to the games should serve Angelenos for decades, not sit empty after the closing ceremony. And we will refuse to let the games become a pretext for expanded surveillance or the criminalization of our most vulnerable neighbors. A fair Olympics requires a fair City. We will fight for both.

LA drives a quarter of California's economy, yet too many Angelenos are being left behind. High road businesses know that when everyone plays by the same rules, employers invest in their workforce to compete on quality and innovation, not a race to the bottom on wages. We reject the false choice between supporting workers and supporting small businesses. Responsible employers also want to see wage thieves prosecuted and union-busters stopped because they undercut fair competition.

As Mayor, Rae will level the playing field. She'll strengthen workers' ability to improve their working conditions and crack down on wage theft that gives bad actors unfair advantages. She will expand union jobs in City contracts, and partner with labor and city agencies to ensure safe and healthy workplaces. Rae will keep Los Angeles a strong union town.

$30/hour Minimum Wage for Large Businesses

Rae will work with City Council to increase the minimum wage to $30/hr by 2028 for businesses over 50 employees. Los Angeles has already passed a $30/hour minimum wage for hospitality workers. This would bring additional workers of larger businesses in line with them.

Increased PTO

LA workers need not only a living wage, but enough paid time off to proactively care for themselves and their family and friends. That is why we’re proposing every worker in Los Angeles gets at least 12 days of paid time off every year. This policy is inline with what the city of West Hollywood already provides. 

Improve Wage Theft Enforcement

A living wage means nothing when bad actor employers shirk paying it. As Mayor, Rae will work with City Council to implement the recommendations from Chief Legislative Analyst’s wage theft report to expand and improve the city’s capacity to enforce wage and hour laws. To achieve this, she will work to protect and increase funding and staffing at the Office of Wage Standards (OWS). And she will collaborate with City Council to deputize worker centers and unions to co-enforce wage laws with OWS and educate workers about their rights.

There are reports that between 2023 and 2024, 100,000 small businesses closed in the Los Angeles metro area. There are a number of reasons why small businesses are struggling, and the resources currently being provided are not being targeted to businesses most in need. There is a lack of communication from the City to these mom-and-pop operations, and billion dollar businesses are hiding behind shell companies and claiming to be “small businesses,” stealing resources from true community-serving stores and services.

As Mayor, Rae will increase communication to micro and small businesses so they can take advantage of relief opportunities and commercial tenant protections. Rae will also work to connect micro and small businesses with non-profit community development financial institutions to ensure they can find stability and expansion capital. And her plan to facilitate mixed-use housing conversions in commercial zones will expand opportunities for small businesses to participate in thriving neighborhood economies. 

To ensure that support for small businesses are actually getting to the intended recipients, instead of high-revenue firms hiding behind layers of LLCs, Rae will require disclosure of the beneficial owner on the business license applications. She will work with City Council and relevant City departments to create data-tracking and enforcement mechanisms to ensure this information is compiled in an effective way, and that larger corporations are not evading the disclosure requirements. 

On the other side of the spectrum, Rae will work with community organizations and City and County officials to continue building protective policies for Los Angeles’ street vendors, who face high risks of immigration violence and harassment. Vendors are important members of our communities, whose presence keeps our streets safer and our neighborhoods more vibrant. It needs to be easier for vendors to obtain regulation-compliant carts, and we must ensure that Los Angeles is following the new state SB 635, which restricts sharing vendor information with the federal government.

Los Angeles is losing its small businesses at a faster rate than anywhere else in the country. Between 2023 and 2024, an estimated 100,000 small businesses closed in the LA metro area, amounting to a 5.56% closure rate. Behind each closure is a story. Extreme rent increases, compounded by the pandemic and the economic damage of federal immigration raids, are pushing out the businesses that define our neighborhoods.

The City's hands are largely tied. Since 1987, the Costa-Keene-Seymour Commercial Property Investment Act has banned local governments from enacting commercial rent stabilization ordinances, and blocked cities from requiring even mediation or arbitration when small business tenants face predatory landlords. A 2024 attempt to extend basic protections to commercial tenants (SB 1103) was gutted in committee before it could pass, stripped of its most meaningful provisions.

Small businesses are community infrastructure. Research consistently shows that local businesses return more than three times as much money per dollar of sales back into the local economy compared to chain competitors. When we protect small businesses, we protect our neighbors' livelihoods and the character of our neighborhoods.

Rae will sponsor state legislation to repeal or reform the Costa-Keene-Seymour Act and restore Los Angeles's ability to protect small businesses from displacement including commercial rent stabilization, just cause eviction protections, and relocation assistance for tenants forced out by rent spikes. We will fight for this at the state level until our City has the tools it needs.

Thousands of Los Angeles households struggle with utility affordability, often delaying or skipping payments to cover essentials like rent, food, or medical care. This difficult decision puts already vulnerable Angelenos at risk of shutoffs and housing instability. Many defer or skip utility bills as a survival strategy, not a choice. The current system places the responsibility of asking for assistance on the people in crisis. 

Early Intervention Program

As Mayor, Rae will require LADWP to use existing utility payment data to proactively identify customers showing early signs of affordability stress and initiate outreach before crisis occurs. This would include connecting these customers directly to customer assistance programs and trusted community-based organizations that provide wraparound support. This shifts responsibility from vulnerable residents to the City, intervenes early before consecutive months of personal debt occur, helps reduce the number of accounts in arrears and ensures that customers are connected to a wide range of support.

Community Utility Support Fund 

Rae will establish RoundUp LA, a voluntary utility bill round-up donation program that allows customers to opt-in to rounding their monthly bill to the nearest dollar. The difference is then deposited into an independent community assistance fund administered through trusted nonprofit partners that offer wrap around services, including utility assistance. This is a program utilized by other utilities to establish a voluntary fund that does not result in rate increases.

Utility Transparency for Tenants 

Some rental buildings use block billing for utilities, and even when they don’t, some tenants find themselves charged for their neighbors’ services, a mess that is very hard to resolve with LADWP. Rae will work with the City Council to enact an ordinance requiring that landlords who bill for utilities give tenants specific accounting of their bills each month, and meter readings upon request. This practice is feasible whether a landlord installs individual meters for units, or does an accounting of their method for dividing charges for a building’s one meter. Rae will also mandate that LADWP demonstrate improved customer service to help residents resolve issues with their bills.

Los Angeles has long served as the entertainment capital of the world, and that identity is under threat from multiple directions at once. Productions are leaving for states and countries with more aggressive tax incentives. Artificial Intelligence is being deployed by studios and platforms to replace the writers, actors, artists, and crew members who built this industry. A wave of corporate consolidation is concentrating ownership of media into fewer and fewer hands, with consequences not just for workers, but for the diversity and independence of the stories we tell. And the line between media and billionaire-dictated state propaganda, once unthinkable, is no longer something we can take for granted.

Rae stands with the unions who are on the front lines of this fight. The campaigns waged by SAG-AFTRA, the WGA, the DGA, IATSE Locals, and their allies to defend creative workers from the unchecked use of AI are far more than labor disputes. These are battles over whether human creativity will remain at the center of culture or be automated away for the profit of a handful of corporations. We support the efforts to combat this fully, and we will use the mayor's office to amplify them.

But we also know that there are many talented and groundbreaking people working in creative fields who are not covered by unions. Creators building audiences on digital platforms, experience designers working in immersive media, game developers, hackers and makers, and the broader ecosystem of people inventing the entertainment and technology forms that don't yet have names: these endeavors must also be protected. 

We will fight to keep production in LA through streamlining permitting and other immediate local actions, but moreover, we will invest in the infrastructure, spaces, and pathways that allow the next generation of creators and innovators to build their work here. We will expand on the promises of the Octavia Lab and Koreatown Media Lab and invest in our public libraries to include small scale production tools, such as sound booths and technology suites, in multiple locations throughout the City. We will explore the possibility of acquiring full scale facilities to put the means of production in the hands of the people, as well as a public movie theater to showcase locally-crafted work. And we will build a streamlined digital portal to make it easy for creative entrepreneurs to file forms, pull permits, get credentialed, and breeze through other administrative tasks.

Creatives have always been the ones who see the future before the rest of us catch up. Our job as a City is to ensure that when the future of entertainment arrives, it arrives in Los Angeles.