By Jose Navarro, MBA | San Diego | The Navarro Report
Los Angeles is two years from hosting the 2028 Summer Olympics, and its transit build-out, public safety staffing, and venue commitments are being locked in now, on budgets that assume the state government will keep partnering the way it has under Gavin Newsom. That assumption has an expiration date: November 3, 2026, when California elects a new governor, in a race that is genuinely competitive and whose administration has not yet been settled either.
What LA is actually counting on
Newsom’s most recent state budget pledged up to $1 billion to help finish “critical” Metro transit projects — the D Line subway extension, the East San Fernando Valley light rail line, and the downtown rail connector — in time for the Games. LA Metro says it needs more than 1,700 buses for its Games Enhanced Transit Service to move an estimated 750,000 daily spectators and workers; as of this spring, only about half that fleet was secured. None of this is a contractual guarantee. It is a governor’s spending priority, renewed budget cycle by budget cycle, and it sits inside a state government that a different governor, with different priorities, could revisit.
That is not hypothetical. Congressional Democrats spent this spring lobbying the Trump administration after Olympic transit funding was initially excluded from the president’s 2027 federal budget request — a $2 billion ask that only resurfaced after the House Appropriations Committee restored $875 million months later, following what transit trade press called “weeks of uncertainty.” If a change in federal administration was enough to strip Olympic transit money from a budget proposal for a season, a change in state administration is a comparable risk LA planners have not publicly priced.
The governor’s race is not settled
Republican Steve Hilton, a former Fox News host endorsed by President Trump, is running against Democrat Xavier Becerra to succeed the term-limited Newsom. Public polling this year has been inconsistent on the margin: a CalMatters-commissioned poll in May showed both candidates with commanding leads within their own parties heading into the primary, while an August poll commissioned by Hilton’s own campaign showed Becerra leading 49.2% to 41%, with nearly a third of voters still undecided or uncommitted. Hilton has built his campaign explicitly around reversing what he calls “one-party rule” and redirecting state spending — he has been sharply critical of state infrastructure and homelessness outlays, the same category of spending that funds Olympic transit prep. Whatever one thinks of that platform, the practical point for Los Angeles planners is arithmetic, not ideology: the person controlling roughly $1 billion in discretionary state transit commitments to LA28 is not yet known, and the leading Republican in the race has campaigned on spending less of it, not more.
The mechanics of the election itself are also contested
Two separate, well-documented disputes are shaping how this election will be administered, and both are worth naming plainly rather than assuming their outcome. First, voting-rights organizations, including UnidosUS and Common Cause, along with Democratic lawmakers, have raised concerns — backed by documented incidents of ICE agents appearing at or near polling locations in Texas, California, and New York earlier this year — that immigration enforcement activity near polling places could chill turnout in immigrant communities. The Department of Homeland Security has denied any plan to station agents at polling sites. California responded with legislation, including a bill Newsom signed in May strengthening ballot-security protections and a subsequent measure to bar immigration enforcement within 200 feet of polling places. Second, a Trump administration executive order and related U.S. Postal Service rule attempted to require that mail ballots be physically received, not merely postmarked, by Election Day for federal races — which would have squeezed California’s seven-day mail-ballot receipt grace period. That specific rule is currently enjoined for the 2026 election in ongoing litigation, including a suit California’s attorney general filed in August. Separately, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5–4 in June, in a Mississippi case, that federal law does not bar states from honoring postmark-based grace periods — a decision that, as it stands, protects California’s mail-ballot rules from that particular legal theory, even as the executive-order fight continues on other grounds.
None of this settles who wins or by how much. It does mean Los Angeles is finalizing multi-year, multi-billion-dollar Olympic infrastructure commitments while the state government it is counting on to co-fund them faces a change of leadership through an electoral process that is itself the subject of active, unresolved litigation over how ballots get counted and how polling places get policed.
The fiscal stakes if the assumption breaks
The county is not positioned to absorb a state funding gap gracefully. Los Angeles County’s own FY 2026-27 budget already shrank 7%, to $48.8 billion, after tapping its rainy day fund for the first time since the Great Recession to help cover roughly $2 billion in wildfire recovery costs and a sex-abuse settlement liability that has climbed past $4.8 billion. The City of Los Angeles separately carries a near-$1 billion structural deficit of its own. Neither government has slack capacity to backfill a state transit commitment that shrinks or disappears under new state leadership with different spending priorities.
The verdict
Good capital planning stress-tests its funding assumptions against realistic downside scenarios. LA28 planning documents account for construction delays and cost overruns; they do not appear to publicly account for the possibility that the state’s co-funding partner changes hands, or that the November election that decides it unfolds under contested administration rules. A billion dollars in transit commitments resting on one governor’s budget priorities, headed into an election this close, is not a hypothetical risk. It is the kind of funding assumption a financial controller would flag in any organization spending public money — and Los Angeles taxpayers deserve to see that contingency planned for, not assumed away.
Jose Navarro, MBA, is a financial controller and public affairs analyst based in San Diego with more than two decades of experience in public finance, government contract compliance, and nonprofit management. He publishes The Navarro Report, an independent outlet covering fiscal accountability and government spending.
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