Asaad Alnajjar, Los Angeles mayor candidate, 2026 primary election questionnaire – Daily News

Ahead of the June primary election, the Southern California News Group compiled a list of questions to pose to the candidates who wish to represent you. You can find the full questionnaire below. Questionnaires may have been edited for spelling, grammar, length and, in some instances, to remove hate speech and offensive language.

Name: Asaad Alnajjar

Current job title: Senior Engineering Manager – City of Los Angeles

Age: 61

Incumbent: No

Other political positions held: Porter Ranch Neighborhood Council (elected until 2027)

City where you reside: Los Angeles

Campaign website or social media: LAMayor2026.org

What are the three most urgent challenges facing Los Angeles, and what actions would you take in your first year to address them? (Please answer in 200 words or less.)

The top 3 issues are homelessness, public safety and business and economy recovery. As listed on my webpage, my first-year priority:

1. Budget accountability: Implement a 90-day plan to audit the current homelessness budget and spending as matched to the veteran benefits cycle.

2. Housing-first strategy: Prioritize mental health and addiction recovery access and expand on centers.

3. Development reform: Impose a moratorium on luxury developments until affordable housing benchmarks are achieved.

4. First responders: Commit to fully equipping and staffing police and firefighters with modern training and resources to meet emergency incidents.

5. Fire prevention: Optimize LAFD programs specifically for wildfire-prone areas and expand on CERT program.

6. Community: Ensure Los Angeles remains a safe environment for all residents and encourages civilians to be part of the active emergency operations center team.

7. Regulatory streamlining: Support small businesses by reducing red tape, introducing incentives, providing local contracts and improving district infrastructure.

8. Good-paying jobs for working families: Create competitive wage jobs, open clear career pathways for new graduates, ensure safe workplaces and make it easier for entrepreneurs to start and grow.

9. Once the budget is adjusted, unfreeze vacant positions that were eliminated to repair the infrastructure.

Los Angeles faces ongoing budget pressures while demand for funding continues in areas such as public safety, homelessness and infrastructure. How would you approach balancing these priorities? (Please answer in 200 words or less.)

First approach implements a 90-day plan to audit current budget and spending and eliminate the areas in which waste has been clearly identified by me back in April 2025.

The city is rich, but the budget is being wasted. As a mayor with an engineering background, I will be able to redirect these wasted funds to improve LAPD and LAFD staff through both sworn officers and civilian personnel to meet all safety needs. For the infrastructure, I will unfreeze the positions that were eliminated by the mayor and councilmembers, which destroyed our 311 response system and caused massive delays.

The issues and challenges our city faces today is we have incompetent mayor and councilmembers managing the city without any leadership skills. All we hear are hollow slogans by career politicians.

For 37 years, I have been part of the City Design — build and maintenance teams — and have delivered multi-billion dollar projects in transit, infrastructure and now working to get LA ready for LA28 Games.

In the aftermath of the Palisades fire, questions were raised about emergency preparedness and transparency. What changes, if any, would you support to improve disaster response and public accountability after major emergencies? (Please answer in 200 words or less.)

In my past 37 years at LA City, I have been for almost 26 years volunteering and active with LAFD and LAPD as a first responder and have established and trained many civilians to get our city ready for earthquakes, fires, floods, pandemics and many other disasters.

Emergency preparedness needs a team of experts and true leaders to face obstacles and challenges. However, under the current administration, we are setback almost 20 years backwards, and most talented experts such as me have been isolated.

My first step is to overhaul and change all levels from general managers to supervisors to prevent us from having another negligence disaster such as Palisades, which could have been prevented if our mayor, her deputies and councilmembers would have listened and acknowledged the threat back in December 2025.

I would reinstate the CERT program, hire more firefighters, reinstate train the trainers programs, reinstate the air support budget, get more advanced equipment and gear firefighters to resist fires, and of course, a priority for prevention measures and brush reduction, such as the goats to eat the dry bushes and controlled cleanups.

Our mayor appointed an incompetent team that indirectly caused Palisades, crippled prevention and destroyed Palisades.

If elected/reelected, which city department or agency would you prioritize for reform or improvement, and why? (Please answer in 200 words or less.)

Many departments within Public Works need reform and restructuring. I would start with sanitation to improve on the existing operations in which I have already identified many operational waste procedures, drop zones, pick up routes and so forth, costing the city close to $800 million per year.

I would also expand on the existing private-public partnerships that have been running adequately from Bradley to days but have not been expanded to improve city operations.

Within sanitation, also need to enhance the cleanup operations when clearing out homelessness encampments in order to facilitate a well-planned citywide approach to resolve our sidewalk issues and clear overtake parking lots.

What steps would you take to improve transparency and public trust in City Hall? (Please limit your answer to 200 words or less.)

The first step is to ask, “Where is our tax money? How was it spent it? How to recover what is lost and how to prosecute all this wrongdoing?”

This effort will include a massive audit to rebalance our checkbook and provide all the departments, operations, infrastructure improvement, safety needs and many more of the left-out expenses that are essential for our daily living.

Once that is achieved, then I will build our budget comparable to the ones I worked on 20 years ago when Los Angeles was golden and when we didn’t have so much waste and over-inflated budgets.

For transparency, I will have a real-time dashboard displaying expenses by department, by item, by council, by district and so forth so that Angelenos know exactly how their dollars are being spent and invested.

This is the only way to secure a strong Los Angeles for the next generations to come.