Los Angeles mayor announces he won’t be joining Biden administration

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti (D) said Thursday that he has turned down an unspecified role in President-elect Joe Biden’s administration.

“I let them know early this week that my city needs me now, I want to be here, and I need to be here,” Garcetti, who served as a campaign co-chair for Biden and is on his inaugural committee, said Thursday.

The mayor added that he had entered quarantine after his nine-year-old daughter tested positive for the coronavirus, although he said he and his wife have both tested negative.

“Our family is incredibly careful and what’s happening in my home this week is playing out across Los Angeles and this country,” he said in a live address Thursday, according to Deadline.

Garcetti was reportedly among the names floated for Biden’s Secretary of Transportation, a role for which he nominated former South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg this week.

Los Angeles-area Black Lives Matter activists have spoken out against the possibility of Garcetti joining the administration, citing his response to protests in the city this year.

“It’s beyond disheartening that Biden would ignore the calls of Black organizers who helped elect him and appoint Garcetti to any position the very day after [Los Angele Police Department] LAPD violently assailed protestors in front of the mayor’s mansion,” BLM L.A. co-founder Melina Abdullah told Deadline earlier this month. “We hope that this will be no more than a consolation prize and that Biden will heed the calls not to appoint one of the most problematic mayors in the nation to his cabinet.”

Garcetti, who was re-elected in 2017, is term-limited and will leave office in 2022.