Commentary: In race for L.A. mayor, no winners but one big loser: The voters

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I’m going to start this story on a quiet tree-lined street in Mar Vista, where a couple I met with on Thursday — the day after the L.A.mayoral debate — have a problem.It’s not an unusual matter, as things go in Los Angeles.

On both sides of the street, the sidewalk rises and falls, uprooted and cracked by shallow roots because over many decades, the trees were not properly maintained.John Coanda, 61, who grew up in Los Angeles, was never bothered by torn-up sidewalks as a kid.“In fact,” he said when he first emailed me about his predicament, “my friends and I sometimes used the ramping pavement as jumps for our bicycles.”But his wife, Barbara, was diagnosed in 2024 with ALS, and she uses a wheelchair.When John pushes her, they can’t use the sidewalk if they want to go to the store or meet with friends, or just enjoy a nice pass through the neighborhood without getting into a vehicle.Blight mars Hollywood neighborhood, to residents’ ire.

Councilman asks for “patience and grace.”So John pushes Barbara’s wheelchair in the street, which creates an obvious safety problem.And despite John’s best efforts to get City Hall to fix the sidewalks, he’s not expecting help anytime soon.I’ll circle back to this story, but first, about that debate.I recruited a half-dozen L.A.

residents to watch and send me their thoughts about how the candidates tackled the important issues.And then I felt guilty for having done so, because the candidates didn’t do much tackling at all.They hit their talking points, for sure, and Mayor Karen Bass, Councilmember Nithya Raman and TV personality Spencer Pratt each had their moments.

But by the end of the debate, and two straight nights of gubernatorial debates as well, I came away thinking there were no clear winners, but there was a definite loser.Voters.This is the fault of the format more than of the candidates themselves.T...