The Los Angeles City Council will meet remotely on Tuesdays and Wednesdays starting next week, and committee meetings are tentatively being rescheduled as teleconferences, Council President Nury Martinez announced Monday.
“As the city of Los Angeles, the state and nation, grapple with two conflicting realities, a growing daily infection and death toll from COVID-19, and evidence that our quarantine Safer at Home policies are helping us flatten the curve, this City Council must and will continue to do the people of Los Angeles’ business that we are bound by duty and law to execute,” Martinez said in a prepared statement.
The council’s next meeting is set for this Wednesday at 10 a.m. Since the City Council started meeting remotely due to the pandemic, it has met just five times in the last six weeks.
“In that time, we have deliberated in marathon sessions to set strong and sound policy to protect Angelenos to the fullest extent of our jurisdictional ability while calling on our state and federal partners to act on the issues they have legal authority over,” Martinez said, “including rent and mortgage relief, and federal assistance for the working poor, including immigrant families and their children.”
Martinez said she has tasked Councilman Bob Blumenfield, who chairs the council’s Public Works and Gang Reduction Committee, with executing practice runs by using a teleconferencing system, similar to what’s used for the remote City Council meetings.
So far, those efforts have been successful, Martinez said, and Blumenfield will host a special Public Works and Gang Reduction Committee meeting at 10 a.m. Thursday.
If successful, she said she will bring additional committees online.
Martinez has also worked with Budget and Finance Committee Chair Councilman Paul Krekorian to forgo normal budget proceedings and identify a process to respond to Mayor Eric Garcetti’s budget proposal.
That meeting is set to for 10 a.m. May 11, when the committee will hear a report on the city’s financial health and the proposed budget.