00:00LA Mayor Karen Bass is taking some heat for suggesting in a radio interview that the potholes
00:05that have been multiplying across the city are not really her fault because many of them existed
00:10before she took office and because the city's infrastructure has been crumbling for three
00:13decades. Well, that's not really going to fly because Karen Bass wanted this job and if there's
00:18one thing voters expect from a mayor, it's that he or she will fix the potholes. Karen Bass also
00:23cut funding to street services, making it more difficult for the city to maintain the roads.
00:27But there's one respect in which it really isn't Karen Bass's fault and that's because
00:31Measure HLA was passed by the voters in March 2024 and it requires the city to replace everything at
00:36an intersection when it resurfaces at least an eighth of a mile or more of road. It's got to
00:41replace the sidewalk access points. It's got to put in bike lanes. It's got to fix the bus stop access.
00:46It's got to do a major project every time it tries to resurface a simple street. That is prohibitively
00:51expensive and it's one of the reasons that street resurfacing has ground to a halt across LA. But
00:55Karen Bass doesn't talk about that. She just talks about how this isn't her fault. Not a good look,
00:59not a winning strategy. People want the mayor, whoever it is, to fix the potholes. It's probably
01:03the most important thing, aside from public safety, that a mayor does.
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