Rick Caruso Will Talk with Family Again, Decide on LA Mayoral Run

Rick Caruso just walked back into the political conversation in Los Angeles.

The billionaire developer, less than a month after announcing he would not enter L.A.’s mayoral or California’s gubernatorial races, is rethinking that decision. Caruso offered that up in an interview with KNX News on Wednesday after the Los Angeles Times published a report alleging Mayor Karen Bass requested certain information be removed or “softened” in the Palisades Fire after-action report. The story cited two anonymous sources.

Caruso said he needs time “to process” the story but told KNX he’s “worried about the city.”

“I don’t have a lot of time to decide, obviously, because we’ve got a looming deadline this Saturday,” he went on to say. “But I’m going to be meeting and talking to the family and we’ll see, you know, what we decide to do.”

Saturday is the deadline for mayoral hopefuls to file formal paperwork declaring their run for office.

This reverses course from the announcement Caruso made last month in which he underscored the significance of the private sector in serving communities and said that would continue to be his focus rather than elected office. Should Caruso change his mind, it sets the stage for a rematch between himself and Bass after the two ran against one another for the mayor’s seat in 2022.

It would also shake up a mayoral race that just saw Austin Beutner, a former L.A. deputy mayor and Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent, drop out of the race on Thursday. That leaves a landscape of mostly longshot candidates that include civil engineer Asaad Alnajjar, Democratic Socialists of America member Rae Chen Huang, former “The Hills” reality TV star Spencer Pratt and more than 20 other hopefuls.

A spokesperson for Caruso did not respond to requests for comment Thursday.

Bass’s office called the Times report “muckraking journalism at its lowest form,” in a statement to The Real Deal.

“The mayor has been clear about her concerns regarding pre-deployment and the [Los Angeles Fire Department’s] response to the fire, which is why there is new leadership at LAFD and why she called for an independent review of the Lachman Fire mop-up,” the statement said. “There is absolutely no reason why she would request those details be altered or erased when she herself has been critical of the response to the fire — full stop. She has said this for months.”

The mayor’s office declined to address Caruso’s comments on what he finds problematic with the city and its leadership.

While Caruso shied away from explicitly saying whether Bass should resign based on the claims of the Times story, he clearly thinks the city is lacking on a few fronts.

He pointed to potholes on the street, dirty sidewalks, public safety concerns and Downtown Los Angeles’s unfinished residential and retail project Oceanwide Plaza. The $1.2 billion mixed-use development is known as the graffiti towers after Oceanwide Holdings ran out of funding to continue construction and the towers became marred with graffiti.

Last week, Bloomberg reported a deal may be in the works with a buyer. Still, after years sitting in its current state, Caruso likened the towers to a beacon to the world “that this city is somehow in crisis.”

“I don’t understand why we have leadership that somehow feels that corruption and doing bad things is OK, and we need to hold people accountable,” he said. “We just shouldn’t be allowing our leadership to be doing the kind of things that, frankly, embarrass the city and don’t represent the greatness and goodness of the city or the people of the city.”