The Los Angeles City Council met on June 25, 2025, to consider a range of items including business improvement districts, housing programs, settlements, and community recognitions. The meeting featured presentations on Alzheimer's awareness, a farewell to Chief Deputy Controller Rick Cole, and testimony from a family affected by an ICE raid.
Raids and the ICE presence families are afraid. They're concerned for their safety, for their rights, and what tomorrow may bring. And so we have assembled our team here to make sure that families are aware of their rights. We have a know your rights campaign and are issuing red cards. We are conducting workshops and trainings for service providers as well as community residents so that they too are aware of what rights they have. And so we have put together measures in place, and you'll see across the city a number of organizations are finding ways to distribute food directly to families without putting them in harm's way. Improving safety for transit riders starts on the sidewalk. A citywide improvement program is giving bus shelters the upgrades needed to connect people to their bus. In Koreatown, the 150th bus shelter transformation was a cause for celebration. We're here in Koreatown at the intersection of Olympic and Vermont Boulevard, celebrating the 150th installation of our staff bus shelter. Koreatown is the most densely populated neighborhood in all of Los Angeles with over 100,000 residents. And we're so excited to celebrate with the community a phenomenal transformation of an existing bus shelter from a static to a much more modern amenity featured bus shelter. Welcome to Not Your Mother's Bus Stop, right? This is not what the bus stops look like when I was in school and depended on them. It has lighting, it has Wi-Fi. If you've ever been on a bus stop and missed your bus, that surge of frustration is not knowing when the next one's gonna arrive. But this tells you, it tells you when your next bus is coming. That's a sigh of relief. We're talking about improved infrastructure for transit dependent riders, many essential workers in a neighborhood that's been overlooked for too long. The technology aspect of this investment is huge. But as summers get warmer, sometimes the most important thing is shade. A shelter to catch a bus and make our constituents' lives a little bit easier. Moving forward, I'd like to see more public and private partnership. When the city does the good work, we as a community need to amplify that message and let people know what's happening in the city of LA in particular things that affect public transportation and infrastructure. We want to help get the message out. So STAP program is a very community-driven process. It was born out of the need to provide shelters to many of our seniors and our young people riding the bus and other public infrastructure, but also in communities like Koreatown, where it's been very underserved for many many generations that the community of Koreatown has requested for these types of infrastructure being made here.org. From bus shelter glow-ups to making improvements elsewhere. Today we're at Lakeview Terrace Rec Center where we are engaging in the park needs assessment. Something that I fought for while I was on the budget and finance committee because I want Angelinos to be able to give direct feedback to the city of Los Angeles about their priorities and needs for their local parks. So we want a park system that reflects what we're hearing from the community, but also what we think they want to do going forward into the future. We have a team, 13 different firms that are working to help the city on this under our leadership, and all of them are coming together with different knowledge sets and different expertise. So we have people that are experts at water, we have people that are experts at equity, we have people that are experts around public art, we have people that are experts around stormwater. And when that is coming together, we're able to map around the city where different priorities really show up. It's really great data, but then when we support it with what we're hearing directly from the community, I think that's where it's most interesting. Everyone comes to their parks for different reasons. Some might come for youth recreational sports, some might come for child care. So there's a number of needs that need to be met at our parks facilities, and we want to encourage families to be able to give their input so that we design a system that works for them. It's really important for people to be able to voice their concerns, and this is giving them that space and for us to prioritize the funding so that we can invest in those improvements. Many students at this event are the first in their families to go to college. So the community investment for families department is adding some support into the festivities. We're thrilled to celebrate our second annual college signing day brought to you by the Community Investment for Families Department in partnership with the Youth Development Department in our network of Family Source Centers. We have 19 centers throughout the city, and one of our signature programs within the Family Source System is the College Corner Program. The College Corner Program helps young people apply for college. They help them apply for financial aid, they organize campus visits, and they do so much more to encourage not just the students but their families to pursue a post-secondary education. I am the first in my family and the first out of three siblings to go to university, and the university that I will be attending is Yale University. The College Corner Program is a program that is available to any student that resides in the city of Los Angeles. So that is really the only criteria. It's open to every student, and we want more students to take advantage of these resources. I'm here to celebrate my enrollment at Cal State Long Beach.