When outgoing Beverly Hills Mayor Lester Friedman reflects on his past year in office, one theme emerges repeatedly: unity.
As a candidate in 2022, Friedman ran on a platform of togetherness, and over the past 12 months, many of the initiatives he’s put together and programs he’s championed have had the goal of citywide harmony at their core.
“My theme was ‘Beverly Hills Together,'” Friedman told the Courier. “We need to make sure that we are as inclusive as we can [be].”
Friedman, a practicing attorney, mediator and judge pro-tem, has served on the Beverly Hills City Council for eight years. This is his second term as mayor; first elected to City Council in 2017, he was installed for his first mayoral term in 2020. Immediately, Friedman was tasked with the challenge of leading during an emergency, as the world had just shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The experience, though challenging, was a lesson in working together as a community and as a government, being flexible and embracing growth.
“We are a prepared city, and it really reaffirmed that,” he said. “Not that we were perfect, because we learned [about] issues that needed to be addressed, and we addressed them.”
Friedman had the chance to put those lessons to use in his second term when, in January, wildfires ravaged the city, getting frighteningly close to Beverly Hills. This time around, emergency strategies implemented over the past few years were brought to bear.
Those included the siren system, the Everbridge emergency notification system and a robocall phone system.
“We have progressed so much,” Friedman said, noting that Beverly Hills was one of the first cities to respond to an erroneous evacuation warning sent by the city of Los Angeles during the wildfires.
“Within, I think, five to seven minutes, there was an Everbridge telling people, ‘Hey, that was a miscommunication,'” he said.
During his most recent term as mayor, Friedman has also worked to pull back the curtain on city government in an effort to be more inclusive and help residents understand the way Beverly Hills functions.
Recently, he and other members of the City Council held a Youth in Government Day, during which a group of Beverly Hills High School students were invited to learn how local governance works. Friedman also spearheaded “Day at the Office,” a video series in which he takes viewers behind the scenes to learn what various city departments do.
“Sometimes we take our staff for granted, and I’m not sure the community knows how much work they do,” he said. “That was really important to me, to highlight what government does for our community.”
Friedman has also made it a priority to combat increasing antisemitism. In December 2024, the city hosted the Mayors Summit Against Antisemitism, at which over 200 mayors from across North America came to Beverly Hills to discuss the growing tide of bigotry and how to stand against it.
“It was really a good way of getting information out to communities that may not be as on top of these antisemitic issues as we are,” Friedman said. “This really was a big focus, and I think it’s going to be a focus, unfortunately, for some time in the future, because I don’t see the problem being eradicated yet. We need to be more on top of it than ever.”
He is similarly proud of having launched the Oct. 7 memorial during his term, honoring those who died when Hamas-led militants launched attacks on Israel in 2023, marking the beginning of the current Israel-Hamas war.
“It’s going to be something that the city, the community will be very proud of,” Friedman said.
Despite all he’s accomplished, Friedman notes that there is “always work to be done.” He cites spotlighting even more city departments as something he would have loved to have time to do.
“I would have liked to … expose those departments to the community so that they see that work,” he said. “But you know, there’s only so much bandwidth that you can have.”
As he prepares to leave office, Friedman said he hopes to see the community become even stronger in the coming years. His message of unity is particularly poignant as the country becomes more divided—something he hopes not to see trickle down to Beverly Hills.
“We need to … not allow ourselves to get so divided,” he said. “Our community is intelligent, and realizes that the way that you get to solutions is by meeting at a mid-ground as opposed to taking extremist views.”
