Agent of Change Mayor-Elect Nithya Raman Can Now Make Los Angeles Governable

NICK’S VIEW - The votes are counted, and Nithya Raman is officially our Mayor-Elect. Now, campaign promises will carry grand expectations and face stark reality. Los Angeles cannot afford another administration that manages dysfunction instead of fixing it, accepts bureaucratic paralysis, or offers rhetoric instead of results. The city’s new mandate is clear: rebuilding City Hall around competence, responsibility, and accountability.

For years I have called for the critical restructuring of our city departments and have yearned for it openly in these pages. The opportunity has now arrived to make Los Angeles work again.

Raman campaigned as “an agent of change,” and change is what the times demand. Our new beginning can start by reshaping outdated departments to address budget deficits, as I detailed in April of 2025, and many times thereafter.

Los Angeles cannot meet today’s challenges and prepare for a better future with outdated bureaucracy and an unworkable structure. Raman has an exceptional chance to replace fragmented responsibility with clear authority, measurable performance, and unequivocal accountability.

How truly annoyed I became when Mayor Bass and the City Council proposed higher waste collection fees, massive layoffs, and delayed maintenance and repairs to the city’s crumbling infrastructure rather than restructuring departments to cut costs and clarify their carelessly assigned duties.

Repeatedly, our elected officials chose the easiest path. To address the massive budget deficit, they found it easier to impose a fifty-four percent increase in trash collection fees on homeowners than to challenge the special interests that finance their campaigns and provide hidden rewards.

Indeed, it is very significant that Raman is not simply a politician taking over City Hall, but a trained urban planner, with a master’s degree in the field from MIT. Now she has an extraordinary opportunity to apply that training to how the city is governed.

Merging the Bureau of Street Services (BSS) with the Los Angeles Department of Transportation (DOT) would be a major step towards efficient operations and savings. According to a Chief Legislative Analyst report, “DOT since its establishment in 1979, never implemented the second step of its mission of bringing planning and policy, design, construction, and maintenance responsibilities into a single department, leaving the city with a fractured system.”

The report also stated: “This fractured system is a structural barrier that has impeded the implementation of every major transportation plan or policy adopted by the City Council, from the Bicycle Plan to the Safe Routes to School Strategic Plan to the Mobility Plan to the Green New Deal.”

Mayoral initiatives like Great Streets and Vision Zero have also struggled to advance beyond temporary pilots and spot improvements, falling short of the systems change they were intended to catalyze.

Even the City Council recognized in 2018 that many operational inefficiencies existed, with the most disruptive being the division of responsibilities between DOT and BSS. No other major city conducts key planning, operational and maintenance functions among several departments like Los Angeles. For example, DOT is responsible for traffic signals, street signs, and lane striping, but BSS is responsible for street resurfacing, sweeping, and issuing special permits that require use and closure of our city’s streets.

I have repeatedly advocated merging BSS with DOT to improve efficiency and reduce costs and I was pleased that Raman’s campaign indicated the merger may be feasible.

Sidewalks and crosswalks are part of the path of travel for people, but they are presently excluded from transportation and mobility planning, which comes under the DOT purview. How objectionable it has been to see city departments routinely work for cross purposes, with one agency widening streets to outdated standards while others seeking grant funds to narrow them back for safety and livability. And while different agencies manage the space inside the curb and outside of it, no one is responsible for making sure the curb is in the right place, it was stated in the CLA report.

Los Angeles Daily News reported that according to an audit, the City of Los Angeles failed to meet its goal of eliminating traffic fatalities by 2025, in part due to a lack of support from political leaders and poor coordination between departments. Nearly half of the fifty-six “actions and strategies” outlined in the Vision Zero Action Plan were not accomplished as of 2023, as per an audit from KMPG, which was released on April 11, 2025. Initially, each of the goals had target dates in 2017 and 2020.

A motion introduced in council three years later repeated that under the city’s current organizational structure, one department is responsible for paving streets, and another is responsible for striping that pavement; one department is responsible for placement of bus stops, and another is responsible for bus shelters. One department oversees the operation of personal mobility devices on our streets, and another regulates parking devices on sidewalks.

I am certain the new mayor understands quite well that Los Angeles’s cumbersome government has made confusion systemic. Authority overlaps, responsibility is unclear, and accountability is lost. Without clear ownership, problems persist, costs rise, and government fails to deliver. It is this confusion of responsibility that must be eliminated. I have outlined all of these concerns and have proffered solutions in my book, The Making of Modern Los Angeles.

Of course, an essential restructuring must be undertaken at the Department of Public Works—a wasteful anachronism outmoded by time. That department initially was a reasonable concept, housing all city physical infrastructure projects with multiple obligations. But with age and time, it became a colossal body that futilely oversaw tasks ranging from construction of bridges to wastewater treatment plants, from graffiti removal to trash collection and streetlight maintenance.

The federal government realized the need for such a transformation and decided early to depend on multiple, discrete departments specializing in transportation, general services, and other public infrastructure tasks. Likewise, California followed suit and turned to smaller, specialized groups.

I have been pressing for this change for over two years, and I am pleased that Angelenos voted to amend the city charter and restructure Public Works.

 The third piece of the puzzle is transferring the Bureau of Street Lighting (BSL) to the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) which makes sense on many fronts.

Street lighting is a prime sore point with residents who see darkness as reasons for denigrating neighborhoods and spreading crime. More than 30,000 streetlights are dark on a typical night. This figure likely understates the true extent of the problem, as unreported outages my leave even more areas of the city without adequate lighting. Widespread outages increase the risks of traffic collisions, pedestrian and bicycling accidents, crime, and attacks on vulnerable residents. Currently, BSL and LADWP perform complementary and overlapping street-lighting functions under separate organizations. LADWP already possesses the engineering expertise, skilled field crews,equipment , dispatch systems and procurement capabilities.

LADWP performs streetlight work, with the BSL owing LADWP over $78 million dating back to 2016. In 1998, Mayor Richard Riordan recommended that LADWP should take over streetlighting work. However, the Bureau of Street Lighting with its lobbying and backdoor political maneuvering kept things as they were.

It is my hope that the new mayor will move swiftly, as expected, to make the city efficient and to quash the squandering of tax dollars.

Has the change we urgently need finally arrived? Can the new mayor make Los Angeles government efficient by simplifying City Hall, streamlining outdated departments, eliminating overlapping duties, clarifying authority, demanding measurable results, and holding department leaders accountable?

As an agent of change, she must. The goals are clear: fewer bureaucratic layers, clearer authority, faster decisions and creating a government citizens can understand and trust.

New policies mean little if an outdated system cannot implement them. Mayor-Elect Raman must undertake the Herculean task of restructuring City Hall itself. Confusion must yield to clarity, fragmentation to responsibility, and bureaucracy to institutions equipped to act. Transforming the city begins with making its government governable.--

(Nick Patsaouras is an electrical engineer, civic leader, and a longtime public advocate. He ran for Mayor in 1993 with a focus on rebuilding L.A. through transportation after the 1992 civil unrest. He has served on major public boards, including the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, Metro, and the Board of Zoning Appeals, helping guide infrastructure and planning policy in Los Angeles. He is the author of the book "The Making of Modern Los Angeles.")