An Open Letter to Mayor Bass: Tell the Truth

(Editor’s note: This January 4, 2026 letter was posted on Tim Campbell’s Substack. Campbell is a resident of Westchester who spent a career in public service and managed a municipal performance audit program.  He focuses on outcomes instead of process in his iAUDIT! column for CityWatchLA.)

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass on January 31, 2025.
(Photo by David Crane, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)

An Open Letter to Mayor Bass

Fires, homelessness, and the need to tell the truth

Dear Mayor Bass:

I have a suggestion for starting 2026 on the right foot: Please stop spinning myths and instead tell your constituents the truth. How refreshing would it be to hear truthfullness from our leaders?

Instead of treating the city’s problems as a public relations challenge, you would better serve residents by taking substantive action to address them. The most glaring example of the consequences of your unceasing gaslighting is the recent revelations of attempts to obscure failures associated with the Palisades fire response.

As the LA Times reported, the draft after-action report said extra resources were not assigned as LAFD policies required. But the final version of the report was modified to say the department went beyond policy requirements by assigning additional crews to the Palisades.

The final report was altered so drastically the Battalion Chief who wrote the draft refused to sign it.

As the Times article stated, “Crowley’s comments [about a lack of resources due to budget cuts] did not stand up to scrutiny. To several former LAFD chief officers as well as to people who lost everything in the disaster, her focus on equipment and City Hall finances marked the beginning of an ongoing campaign of secrecy and deflection by the department — all designed to avoid taking full responsibility for what went wrong in the preparations for and response to the Jan. 7 fire, which killed 12 people and leveled much of the Palisades and surrounding areas.” That is a strong statement, especially coming from the Times, which is usually a staunch ally of the mayor’s administration.

The fire cover-up may be the most egregious example of the city’s casual relationship with the truth, but it’s certainly not the only one.

We are constantly told unsheltered homelessness has decreased and the city has established a two-year “trend” of declining homelessness. Yet reviews from the RAND Corporation, an independent court-ordered assessment, and investigations by LAist reveal neither the City nor LAHSA know how many homeless are stranded on our streets, nor how many have been sheltered or housed.

You’ve bragged about thousands of people housed, but the City Controller found that shelters are underutilized and more than 50 percent of those in the shelter system fall back into homelessness. Yet you persist in using unsupported numbers to justify the expenditure of hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayers’ money. When your numbers are challenged, you either maintain a wall of silence or hide behind legal maneuvers to avoid accountability.

Your December 7 op-ed in the L.A. Daily News was an offense against reality and a gross disservice to your constituents and the 46,000 unhoused people on our streets. Let’s be honest: you have no idea how many people you’ve sheltered, and of those who somehow did find their way into a city-run shelter, many found conditions that are no better than the streets.

The brutal reality of life in the shelter system was detailed by Sam Quinones in his investigative report on conditions inside the Riverside Bridge Shelter in Councilmember’s Raman’s District. She is one of your closest political allies and has worked just as hard as you to maintain the status quo by shielding providers from accountability.

You defended Dr. Va Lecia Adams Kellum, LAHSA’s former CEO, even after investigative reporters found she approved contracts for a nonprofit where he husband is a senior manager and for St. Joseph Center, where she was CEO just a few months before taking the position with LAHSA (and where the mayor’s daughter is an employee).

You’ve remained tight-lipped when your appointee to the County’s Measure A governing board, Kevin Murray, was suspended as CEO of the Weingart Center and resigned from the board after revelations of fraudulent property deals using Project Homekey funds.

Your op-ed paid lip service to transparency and accountability, yet it seems like each day brings new revelations of another attempt to quash unflattering news or deflect responsibility for your latest failures.

The problem with that strategy is that it demands a never-ending commitment to obfuscation. If you claim unsheltered homelessness has decreased, you must also say the shelters are managed properly; otherwise you admit the city is pushing people into a broken system.

And if that brokenness includes recycling an unknown number of people through shelters, then you must admit your claims of a decrease in homelessness are based on deeply flawed numbers. You would also admit you are protecting a system where providers aren’t accountable for the statistics they report, which is exactly what the court-ordered review and County auditors found. One lie begets another until the truth is almost impossible to discern.

Here’s the reality you refuse to admit: you don’t know how many homeless people are stranded on our streets. You don’t know how many are sheltered or housed, and you don’t know how long they stay sheltered.

You don’t know (and apparently don’t care) what services providers may or may not be delivering to people in need, but you do your best to make sure they get paid. Because you’ve abdicated program management to each Councilmember, you have no coherent citywide plan to coordinate services, (more on this in a future CityWatch column). Yet you persist in spinning myths that the city is making progress. Each press release or staged news conference is another step farther from the truth.

Each day, more residents lose faith in city government as they see encampments spring up after others are cleared. Potholes crater our streets, and the city hasn’t done major repairs since June.

Fire Department executives are busy denying their own managers’ findings about LAFD’s failures during the Palisades fire. 9-1-1 callers often find themselves on hold for several minutes. Yet you and Councilmembers insist the city is on the upswing and ready for the World Cup and the 2028 Olympics. Do you really think this is the way to run a world-class city?

By consistently prioritizing spin over results, you damage far more than your own credibility.

If you and your supporters were swept from office tomorrow, it would take years for new leaders to rebuild the public’s trust. It may be cliché, but it is still a valid statement: once trust is lost, its extraordinarily difficult to win it back.

You could make a start by abandoning false narratives and telling residents the unvarnished truth; we live in a city that’s lost its way and forgot that it’s supposed to serve all of its residents with equal respect.

The city needs to get the basics right–maintain its infrastructure, keep its population safe, light its streets and deliver efficient services. When you start talking about that, perhaps we can begin restoring Los Angeles to its place as the West’s premier city.