LOS ANGELES
No Los Angeles household that cannot pay its power or water bill will lose service for the rest of the year, Mayor Karen Bass announced on Tuesday, October 20, after record heat drove Los Angeles Department of Water and Power bills sharply higher across the city.
“No LADWP customer who is unable to pay their residential bill will have their electricity or water turned off for the remainder of this year,” Bass said in a statement reported Tuesday. She has asked the LADWP Board to pause shutoffs through the end of 2026 for residential customers who are unable to pay.
“Running our air conditioners has been a necessity, and for too many Angelenos, the resulting increase in utility bills is a real burden,” Bass said. “Angelenos need swift relief, and I am taking concrete action to provide it.”
What the relief package actually does
The announcement has four parts, according to the mayor's statement. First, customers can pay what they can afford now toward their current bills, rather than facing the full balance at once. Second, the shutoff pause runs through December 31, 2026, for residential customers unable to pay. Third, beginning next month, LADWP will provide every residential customer with information about their electricity and water usage, intended to help households conserve and lower future bills. Fourth, the city is encouraging customers to enroll in programs that already exist: Level Pay, which averages bills over twelve months to smooth seasonal spikes, and — for low-income seniors and households — the Lifeline and EZ-Save assistance programs.
The design of the package matters. A shutoff pause stops the worst outcome — a home losing power or water during a billing crisis — but it does not erase the balance. That is why the pay-what-you-can element and the Level Pay enrollment push sit alongside the pause: the city's stated goal is that households emerge from the pause with a manageable balance rather than a larger one, aided by the usage information LADWP will begin sending next month.
Two weeks before an election, with a challenger at the gates
The timing is not incidental, and neither side is pretending otherwise. The announcement lands two weeks before the Los Angeles mayoral election. On Monday, challenger Councilmember Nithya Raman held a news conference outside an LADWP facility in North Hollywood alongside residents, saying — as a campaign claim — that LADWP rates have risen 40 percent citywide during Bass's tenure, and pledging an audit with City Controller Kenneth Mejia if she is elected, according to LA Reporter coverage. Bass's campaign responded that she has offered financial assistance programs for customers.
Those competing claims frame the choice voters are being asked to make about the utility itself: whether the bill shock Angelenos opened this fall is primarily a weather story — record heat, air conditioners running out of necessity — or a rates story built up over a full term in office. Tuesday's relief package is written to answer the first version of that question. Raman's Monday event was staged to press the second.
The commercial question the announcement does not answer
One gap in Tuesday's measures is already visible in coverage. The shutoff pause covers residential customers, and no parallel commercial program has been detailed. That distinction is not abstract in Los Angeles this fall: Canter's Deli, the Fairfax District landmark, has said publicly, as reported, that its LADWP bill surged nearly $10,000 in four months to more than $34,000, and warned of possible staffing cuts. A deli cannot pay what it can afford under a residential framework that does not apply to it, and as of Tuesday the city had not described what, if anything, follows for businesses facing the same bill shock.
There is precedent for weather-linked protection at LADWP, though narrower than Tuesday's move. In June 2023, according to an LADWP release from that year, the department's board approved suspending shutoffs during National Weather Service extreme heat and cold advisories. The new pause is broader: it runs to the end of the year regardless of the day's weather, tied to inability to pay rather than to a forecast.
What happens next sits with the LADWP Board, which the mayor has asked to formalize the pause, and with the calendar the announcement itself sets: the usage information begins reaching residential customers next month, the pause runs through December 31, 2026, and the mayoral election that frames the political argument over the bills arrives in two weeks. For a household deciding what to do this week, the sequence is enrollment first — Level Pay to flatten the bills still coming, Lifeline or EZ-Save for those who qualify — while the balance question works through the board process the mayor has now publicly committed to.
For households, the immediate facts are simple. If you are an LADWP residential customer who cannot pay, your electricity and water stay on through December 31, 2026, under the mayor's announcement; you can pay what you can afford now; usage information starts arriving next month; and Level Pay, Lifeline and EZ-Save enrollment are the city's recommended routes to keep January's bills from restarting the same crisis. How the campaign argument over a claimed 40 percent rate rise resolves is a question for November — as is the unanswered commercial one on Fairfax, a few miles from the neighborhoods this pause is built to protect. Previously's Los Angeles coverage this week also includes a Malibu restaurant fighting beach erosion at Westward Beach.
