Last week, Los Angeles City Controller Kenneth Mejia put out a call for back-up. He told his audience over social media that his office – which keeps the city’s financial books and serves as an elected, independent watchdog – was under attack.
A proposal being floated in the Los Angeles City Charter Reform Commission would “decimate the controller’s office,” he said in a video post. In a second post a few days later, he called on people to “fight back” by urging commissioners to drop the proposal, and to instead take up their office’s recommendations to strengthen their powers.
Mejia’s call was answered. People turned out to defend his office. More than 260 people flooded commissioners’ inboxes with letters, mostly delivered over a span of two days. “The controller is the only person I trust at this point because he cares about this city and its people,” one person wrote.
Mejia also gave people the address of the meeting where the proposal was being taken up. Dozens of people showed up, cramming themselves into available seats and standing in the back of a small community room at the Valley Plaza Branch Library in North Hollywood, last Saturday, Jan. 10. The proposal was being taken up by the commission’s Planning and Infrastructure Committee.
They urged commissioners to drop the proposal, which would take paymaster and accounting duties away from the controller and hand them to the City Administrative Officer, which would be converted to a Chief Financial Officer. Something similar had been proposed in 2024, but it was shelved after the controller’s office opposed it.
The CAO is an appointed position, selected by the mayor and confirmed by the City Council. Many were concerned about the idea that those elected officials, who have the authority to prepare and approve the city’s budget, would be given further power to oversee the city’s financial books. Many pointed to the controller’s duties as serving an important “check and balance” role in city government.
Gabe Jensen, who lives in the Hollywood area, told the commission that one of the things he’s “been made aware of because of the current, independent city controller's office, is the overuse of our city's budget on the police.” He said he was worried that those efforts by the controller to shed light on the city budget in this way has made that office a target. He added that he would want the city to have funds for “things like the infrastructure that we need … public bathrooms, bike lanes, public transportation.”
“I feel like a lot of us are here to protect … [the] independence of the city controller and the power of the city controller, and I ask that you do not take that power away,” Jensen said.
The committee is part of a 13-person commission that began meeting last year to review and suggest changes to the city’s charter, which is Los Angeles’s version of a constitution. The panel could also tackle ways to clean-up outdated parts of the charter that may be causing roadblocks for how the city functions. Any changes could also shift how power is distributed across city government, including potentially placing more power in certain elected officials' hands, such as the mayor or the City Council.
Many of the people who showed up to the 10 a.m. Planning and Infrastructure Committee meeting to defend the controller’s office said it was their first time doing something like this. Among them was Renata Flores, who later told The LA Reporter she felt so insulted by what was happening that she drove an hour from San Pedro to give public comment.
She didn’t like what was being proposed, which she feels would making the city less transparent to taxpayers like herself, but she said what really got her out to the meeting was a feeling that the public was being disrespected. “It just feels like they don’t feel as a community, as citizens that we’re intelligent, or [they feel] we’re not smart, that we’re not going to pick up on this,” Flores said. “That’s what makes me upset.”
In the end, the proposal to remove duties from the controller’s office didn’t make it past the current round, although there are future stages in the charter reform process during which the idea could be brought back. Two of the three members on the committee, Melinda Murray and Ted Stein, indicated they were uncomfortable taking the paymaster and accounting responsibilities away from the city controller.
The buzzsaw of heated statements by the controller’s defenders had been directed at a couple lines in one of three proposals that were part of a lengthy proposal package submitted by Commissioner Martin Schlageter, who is the third person on the three-person Planning and Infrastructure Committee. That proposal was primarily focused on creating a multi-year Capital Infrastructure Plan (usually shortened to CIP), to better coordinate how the city builds and maintains city infrastructure, such as streets, parks and sidewalks.
Most major cities have a centralized, long-range plan for its infrastructure projects. Los Angeles does not. Some have pointed to this as a reason for frustrating inefficiencies and a lack of coordination in getting public infrastructure projects done in the city of Los Angeles.
The group Investing in Place, which advocates for improving public spaces, describes the way the city handles budgeting for infrastructure projects – for sidewalks, streets and parks, for example – as “fragmented and reactive.” Such a plan would also make the prioritization of such projects a more transparent process, since it would be laid out in an agreed-upon document. It would also help the city make a better case if they want to secure or ask voters for funding for projects, thanks to that transparent, planning processes that the public can access and evaluate.
Representatives of that group and others who were urging for such a plan were a slightly smaller, but dedicated, contingent at the meeting, and they also submitted letters to the commission The committee voted to move forward with including language about the city needing a capital infrastructure plan, within the charter, which is akin to the city’s constitution.
The reason the role of the chief financial officer and the controller were part of the proposal is because budgeting and finances are widely seen as playing determining roles in whether a capital infrastructure plan leads to anything.
Investing in Place submitted a letter advocating that the CFO position be created, with the group’s executive director Jessica Meaney writing that “public infrastructure and municipal finance are closely linked, and without long-term financial leadership, even the best infrastructure program will struggle to be realized.” The letter didn’t weigh in on whether the role should go to the CAO or the controller, or how else the role might be designed.
Schlageter ended up proposing and getting passed a motion at Saturday’s meeting that called for there to be a chief financial officer whose leadership would help guide the financial aspects of the plan, but it did not define how that role will look like, and who would fill that role. His motion also called for a citywide executive coordinator who manages the projects.
Before the committee meeting, Schlageter said in an interview with The LA Reporter that he’d written the motion at the request of other commissioners, during a previous meeting that had been running long. They wanted him to get down in writing the ideas he had been formulating, so that they could be up for debate.
The members of the Charter Reform Commission, who serve in an unpaid capacity, are typically unable to really exchange ideas outside of meetings with others on the same committee, each consisting of three people, due to Brown Act rules. Those rules are aimed at ensuring that any discussions on matters are done in public and with enough time for people to be notified so they can have a chance to give input on those matters.
Schlageter, who said he based his ideas off of his time working at the Bureau of Street Services and in a City Council member’s office, said at Saturday’s meeting that he disagreed that the Controller should be the CFO, and that he didn’t think a CFO should be elected, but that he was interested in debating the issue. He also said he supports the controller’s role as a watchdog and auditor, including efforts to strengthen that role. Mejia has said, however, that the majority of the office’s staffers — 90% — work in accounting departments, and staffers in the auditing departments representing only a a couple handfuls of people, which was why he described the proposal as one that would gut the controller’s office.
In the interview with The LA Reporter before the committee meeting, Schlageter also argued that despite concerns about giving the mayor more power, there is value in structuring a city government in this way because the mayor could then be held more responsible for what ends up happening with public projects laid out in a capital infrastructure plan.
And he pointed to the city having three appointed offices involved in city finances – the city treasurer, the office of finance and the Chief Administrative Officer – and the elected office of the City Controller, as a concern, saying that it is better for holding elected officials accountable, if those functions are united into one office and serving under fewer elected officials.
“The mayor's CEO power is carried out through executive power over general managers, and I think that's how you get accountability in a city structure,” Schlageter said. “And I think that's your vehicle for accountability, is you identify who's in charge. And right now you have four different people in charge.”
The controller’s office meanwhile has argued that their accounting duties are being downplayed in Schlageter’s motion and they aren’t merely “routine” as Schlageter had described it in his initial proposal. Their accounting duties play an important role as a check and balance in city government, and they also argue that this creates a healthy tension with other elected officials.
Mejia argued in his letter to the commission on Schlageter’s proposal that the accounting duties in their office is less about cutting checks, but more about maintaining independent control of those payments and granting approval based on whether the money being paid out follows the proper process, and are lawful and reasonable. And as part of his duties as controller, Mejia keeps the “official books” of the city, which helps him deliver this information to the public quickly. “The only way to ensure that the controller has all of this information in a timely, accurate and complete manner is to maintain the controller as the holder of the official books of the city,” his letter said.
“If that authority was entrusted to a political appointee who answers to the mayor and council, then the mayor and council would essentially be in charge of what information they release about their spending and how they release it,” Mejia writes in his letter. “The charter wisely recognizes this tension, which is why it gives the mayor and council the authority to decide how money gets spent, but entrusts a separate independently elected controller to keep track of how they spent it.”
Mejia in an interview with The LA Reporter pointed to the need for a financial officer to be independent, and to not have other elected officials be their masters.
He pointed to their ability to deliver a tougher analysis because of their independence, which he argues was borne out when they predicted a year earlier than the CAO had in 2024, that the city should prepare for revenues to come in short. The city has since had to try to fill a $1 billion gap it needed to close in its budget.
“The goal of this CFO position is to have someone who can make the city's finances work better, and it can't be done at the behest of 16 politicians,” Mejia said. “Then, it's basically the CFO is just doing whatever someone tells them to do, without any financial analysis, or judgment, or pushback, right?”
While Schlageter’s proposal to transfer the controller’s accountant duties to a separate CFO office, one that currently functions as the CAO, was not specified in the motion the committee approved, the Charter Reform Commission may still take it up if ideas for changing the structure of the Controller’s Office, including those the office recommends, makes it through the upcoming rounds, including a major one taking place tomorrow.
Six members of the 13-person Charter Reform Commission this weekend is getting ready to select what issues to focus its remaining, limited time on, during an all-day, ad hoc policy committee meeting scheduled for tomorrow, Saturday, Jan. 17, 2026 at Los Angeles City Hall, in Room 1010. The meeting is set to last from 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m., and will focus on the matters advanced by two of the commission’s four committees - the Government Structure Committee and the Planning and Infrastructure Committee.
The ad hoc committee’s chair, Commissioner Ted Stein, said their goal will be to make a big cut to their workload — by taking a metaphorical “electric saw” to the list of proposals — so that they can have a shorter list of proposals for charter changes to recommend to the City Council in April, for placement on the November 2026 ballot.
A full list of proposals going through the ad hoc committee’s grinder is anticipated from the Charter Reform Commission staff. For now, a group that has been following and tracking the meetings closely, Fair Rep LA, this week released its own tracker of proposals that have been placed in front of the commissioners over the past several months. They also conducted a Zoom teach-in about what they are describing as the upcoming “purge” round. They have made a recording of that teach-in here.
Thank you for reading. If you have any tips, corrections, suggestions or musings for The LA Reporter, please send them to [email protected].
If you like what I do and want to keep The LA Reporter in the field, you can provide financial support to me here. And if you want a sticker with my logo on it, include your email in your Ko-Fi tip message to me! Feel free to make the message private.