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#  An Open Letter to LA Voters: Demanding Specifics, Civic Virtue, and Real Leadership

October 27 2025

Written by Nick Patsaouras.

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OP|ED -

Fellow Angelenos,

As the time approaches for us to cast our votes in the next mayoral election, we owe it to ourselves—as participants in the world’s greatest democracy, and as inheritors of Greek and Stoic traditions—to insist upon more than comforting platitudes and rhetorical flourishes. It is not only our right but our obligation as citizens to demand leadership guided by the classical virtues of equality, wisdom, justice, courage, and self-control. Our city stands at a crossroads, and enduring challenges cannot be solved by empty promises.

We must, respectfully but firmly, call on every candidate seeking our trust to address the following, not with vagueness, but with actionable clarity and honest resolve:

- Housing and Youth Opportunity: How will you make it truly possible for young Angelenos to own a home or pay reasonable rent—beyond repeating, ad nauseam, the empty promise to “expedite the permit process”? What direct steps will you champion so that prosperity is not a privilege reserved for the few, but a reasonable prospect for the many?
- Civic Safety and the Common Good: What remedies will you enact to halt the epidemic of reckless driving—particularly the plague of red-light violations that claim innocent lives? Let us move beyond numbers and towards moral seriousness about the safety of our streets and the value of every person.
- Daylight Crime and Public Confidence: How will you restore security in our neighborhoods, where brazen daylight robberies, sometimes while residents are present, shatter our sense of peace? Statistical reductions are cold comfort when trust in the rule of law is eroded. We look for actions, not reassurances.
- Fiscal Responsibility and Transparency: In the spirit of integrity, how will you address Los Angeles’s persistent structural budget deficit—a concern raised recurrently by civic-minded individuals like Jack Humphreville? Specifics, not abstractions; plans, not postponements.
- Leadership for Justice and Solidarity: How will you use the bully pulpit of the nation’s second largest city to champion economic fairness, social justice, and equality? Will you oppose, without fear or favor, the entrenchment of privilege, discrimination, and the quiet expansion of despotism? Stoic leaders lead not by coercion but by modeling virtue, advocating for the common good, and standing firm against unchecked power.​
- Defending the Public Against Private Tyranny: How will you protect the rights, property, and dignity of ordinary people against the growing dominance of billionaire interests—against the spectacle of the ultra-wealthy exerting control over collective resources, labor, and livelihoods?
- Accountability for Corporate Power: Will you have the courage to challenge the moral abomination of billionaires, such as Jeff Bezos, spending millions on self-celebration while workers are discouraged from organizing and seeking fair, legal wages? Will you commit to supporting labor rights and fair bargaining, recognizing that what injures the hive, injures the bee?

We are reminded by the Stoic tradition that each citizen’s participation in public life is not an act of cynicism, but of care for the common good, not a surrender to division, but a reaffirmation of our shared fate. Living according to virtue demands that we not accept injustice but oppose it with reasoned conviction. We are not seeking perfection in our leaders, but an honest reckoning with the realities we all face together—and the courage to meet them.

Before we bestow our vote, let us see your moral seriousness, your practical intelligence, and your willingness to speak truth even when it is difficult. Let us see in your programs the sort of specific action that honors our city’s diversity, protects its most vulnerable, and sustains both liberty and order. Like the Greeks who built democracy and the Stoics who defended justice against the abuse of power, let us remember that public leadership is a trust—a sacred charge—not to be won by rhetoric, but by virtue and by deeds.

With respectful determination,
Citizens of Los Angeles

***(Nick Patsaouras** is a Los Angeles-based electrical engineer and civic leader whose firm has shaped projects across commercial, medical, and entertainment sectors. A longtime public advocate, he ran for Mayor in 1993 with a focus on rebuilding L.A. through transportation. He has served on major public boards, including the Department of Water and Power, Metro, and the Board of Zoning Appeals, helping guide infrastructure and planning policy in Los Angeles. Nick Patsaouras is the author of the book " The Making of Modern Los Angeles")*

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