Miles Morton
Miles Morton founded The Basin in 2026 to report on Los Angeles government from its own public records: campaign money and who gives it, how the City Council votes and who shows up to vote, where the budget goes, how the city answers a call for service, and where crime stands.
From 2024 through early 2026 he was a legislative deputy for Council District 4 at LA City Hall, where he worked on unarmed crisis response, custody services reform, and citywide emergency dispatch. He left City Hall in early 2026 and started The Basin a few months later.
Miles is an Angeleno, born and raised in the San Fernando Valley. He doesn't own a car, and he's obsessed with transit, aviation, food, and data, much of which shows up in the work on this site.
Before working in local government, Miles built communication, research, and competitive debate programs. He worked with Campbell Hall's debate team, the Irvine Unified School District, and the Stanford National Forensic Institute, and served as president of Kentucky's statewide collegiate speech and debate association.
His piece on Metro's escalators reached the front page of Hacker News, which sent it more than 2,000 readers in a day, and it led Naked Capitalism's daily links. City Controller Kenneth Mejia has shared The Basin's council roll-call tracker, and NoHo Nick's newsletter featured its map of LA's worst intersections.
Selected work
- LA Metro has some of the slowest escalators on earth… Why?
- 302 LAPD officers cleared $300,000 last year. At the NYPD, four times the size, 15 did.
- About 1% of the money in the CD9 runoff comes from CD9
- One LAFD administrator made 950k last year and he'll probably make $1.1 million this year
- Los Angeles has 94,767 street palms, and 219,553 empty spots where a tree could stand
- LA's parks department said the city needs 71 new dog parks by 2050. It has opened one in the last seven years.
Latest
- The California company that has made $158 million off Trump's ICE raids (and that LA still contracts with)
- Waymo’s crash rate in LA fell 41%… After the feds changed what they had to report
- Woodland Hills hits 100 degrees 43 days a year… Santa Monica, less than once
- LA’s bus lane cameras issued $42.8 million in fines last year
- LA's speed camera plan mostly skips the Valley's worst intersections
Every week Miles sends a newsletter with The Basin's newest pieces and a few from the archive. You can sign up for it here.
The Basin's journalism seeks to avoid personal opinions, with the overwhelming majority of our coverage resting on public data, allowing the public to serve as a final check on the accuracy of everything we produce. We welcome and encourage corrections to any of our analysis at data@basin.la.
Disclosure. Council District 4 is Nithya Raman's seat, and she is on the November 2026 ballot for mayor. Miles worked in her office. That changes nothing about the data journalism The Basin conducts, but transparency is important to us, and our readers should be aware.
Reporters, producers, and event organizers can reach Miles at miles@basin.la or on X at @MilesOMorton, and tips are welcome at the same address. The Basin is @TheBasinLA on X and Instagram, and its methods, corrections policy, and legal terms are on the About page.