🐦 The LA Reporter, Issue 20: Controller candidate cries foul on process that gave opponent matching funds

Money is the lifeblood of campaigns, and some Los Angeles city candidates just got an infusion of it through Los Angeles city’s matching funds program. Among those who have now received matching funds — after jumping through the various hoops — is City Controller Kenneth Mejia. 

Mejia has qualified for $265,102.98 in matching funds (the maximum a city controller candidate can get in the primary election is $503,000), adding to the $44,084.19 he already had on hand as of last December. Mejia has received additional amounts since, based on the 24-hour filings of high contribution amounts reported.

Mejia was able to get the matching funds after hosting a town hall on Sunday, March 22. That town hall was done in lieu of a debate with an opponent, after that opponent didn’t appear for a debate for the City Controller’s race on March 19.

That opponent is Zach Sokoloff, who had amassed $309,187.17 as of the end of last December, and has raised even more since. Sokoloff had not filed a form to participate in the matching funds program. After receiving the matching funds, Mejia is now operating off of a similarly sized war chest as Sokoloff, as the two duke it out in the primary election on June 2.

Sokoloff’s team, however, has cried foul on the process under which Mejia received the matching funds. That’s because the rules around the debate requirement had changed without much warning, Sokoloff’s team said.

The LA Reporter spoke with Rick Taylor, the campaign strategist for Sokoloff, who explained that under the Ethics Commission’s previous process, the opponent needs to decline a debate in writing, before a candidate could qualify for matching funds through hosting a town hall instead. That criteria had been listed on a certification form that candidates are told to fill out to say they either took part in a debate, or if a debate wasn’t possible, had hosted a town hall. The written requirement is not on the current certification form, but was in an earlier version of the form that Sokoloff’s team sent to The LA Reporter. 

The debate that led Mejia to host the town hall, and to unlocking the matching funds for his campaign, was hosted by the Westchester-Playa Democratic Club, according to Mejia’s campaign manager Jane Nguyen.

According to Taylor, “nothing happened” at that Westchester-Playa Democratic Club debate. “We chose not to go to it because we knew this would be the loophole,” Taylor said. “The way the law was written, if we had written something to them, or had called them and contacted them and said, ‘yes, no, maybe,’ then we would have allowed them, under the old-fashioned way ... to get public funding. We followed the law. We obeyed the law.”

When asked about that law, Nguyen pointed The LA Reporter to the municipal code section governing the matching funds program, which says that one of the things candidates need to do before qualifying for matching funds is to have “either participated in a debate with one or more opponents or, if no opponent agrees to debate, conducted a town hall meeting with the public.” Nguyen also forwarded an email from the debate organizer writing to confirm that Sokoloff did not show up to the Westchester Playa Democratic Club debate.

The Westchester Playa Democratic Club debate, where Sokoloff didn’t appear, can be viewed here.

The most recent poll on the mayor’s race from Loyola Marymount University that’s stirring up a buzz shows City council member Nithya Raman way ahead, beating out LA Mayor Karen Bass, who has typically led such polls.

But another interesting piece of that poll was that out of the 370 registered voters in the city of Los Angeles who responded via text and email to LMU surveyors’ questions (it was a 20 minute long survey and only those who completed it 80 precent of the way through ended up getting included in the results), 47.7 percent seemed to prefer a Democratic socialist candidate.

It was unclear what those surveyed knew about a Democratic socialist platform — the label has gotten a higher profile following New York mayor Zohran Mamdani’s election — but based on a wider pool of 958 respondents countywide, 34.9 percent said they hadn’t heard of such a thing as a Democratic socialist. That label is potentially carrying more weight in Los Angeles as well, with both Raman and another candidate, Rae Huang, hoping to get the endorsement of the LA chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. That chapter, which has endorsed in five other LA city and one LAUSD race, won’t endorse in the mayor’s race, which means they won’t be devoting their resources to that race less than two months before people are set to cast their votes, after a vote on petitions to jump into the race failed.

The poll was something that the Raman campaign could not pass up touting Monday, while the Bass camp did damage control by picking apart the poll, which could have the potential of weakening people’s confidence in Bass’s position in the mayoral race. The poll was already encouraging some to entertain the possibility that the runoff might move forward entirely without Bass, with Raman potentially up against another DSA-LA candidate that’s also left of Bass, such as Rae Huang, who polled at 16.6 percent to Bass’s 17%. Bass’s campaign strategist, Doug Hermon dismissed the poll as a “fantasy board game.”

The survey was unique in that pollsters took it upon themselves to give descriptors for each candidate. Some took issue with that because while Raman was being described in what many would considered glowing terms, another candidate, Spencer Pratt, was given a shorter description of “reality TV personality.”

Mike Trujillo, a political consultant, also questioned the results on the high preference for a Democratic socialist candidate, saying that other polling indicate that favorability for the Democratic Socialist of America (the group most associated with the label Democratic socialist) is not that high. Trujillo declined to share the full polling data.

In a couple of weeks, on April 14, LAUSD teachers and education workers (such as cafeteria workers), are set to go on strike if a deal is not reached on their contracts. They’re now getting the backing of powerful allies — the unions that are part of the labor umbrella organization, LA County Federation of Labor. The LA Federation of Labor held a press conference on Wednesday morning that was streamed here.

Metro riders can once again reload their TAP cards using their phones and the TAP website, according to a statement Metro released last Friday, on March 27. Alissa Walker of Torched has been reporting on computer systems shutdown that Metro staff has been implementing in order to investigate a security breach. Walker shared an email to staff saying that Metro was proactively shutting down and turning on their systems as part of the investigation. Metro said the public can get service updates using the alerts.metro.net website. There have also been other reported security breaches, including one that the City Attorney’s Office confirmed with The LA Reporter on Saturday, March 28.

At last Friday’s Measure ULA ad hoc committee meeting that kicked off discussions on a polarizing tax on transfers and sales of high-valued properties to fund affordable housing and tenant protection programs, representatives of a new group called the Mend It Don’t End It coalition spoke at public comment to advocate for changes to Measure ULA.

The speakers included Miguel Santana, of California Community Foundation, members of the Carpenters union, and Sarah Dusseault, described in a press release about the new coalition as a housing advocate. Dusseault is a former member of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority and a member of LA County’s Blue Ribbon Commission on Homelessness. Dusseault also served as chief of staff of former City Council member David Ryu. Santana is a former City Administrative Officer for the city of Los Angeles, and the nonprofit he now leads, California Community Foundation, helped to bankroll Measure A, a consequential sales tax measure to fund homeless services.

The coalition consists of Abundant Housing LA, a group advocating for more housing density that also recently endorsed mayoral candidate Nithya Raman, who recently made a failed attempt to place a measure on the June ballot that called for exempting multi-family housing during their first 15 years from the tax, and other changes. The coalition members also include California Community Foundation, California YIMBY, the Council of Infill Builders, the Western States Carpenters, YIMBY Action, Central City Association of Los Angeles (an influential business group led by Nella McOsker, daughter of City Council member Tim McOsker), the LA Business Council and the Valley Industry & Commerce Association.

Their press release states that “the City Council’s formal review of Measure ULA could lead to it placing a reform measure on the November 2026 ballot. The coalition is supporting the council in ensuring policy proposals are grounded in data, reflect real-world market conditions, and deliver meaningful results for Angelenos. In the weeks ahead, the coalition will advance specific policy recommendations and work to educate policymakers and the public on the real-world impacts of Measure ULA on housing production, jobs, and the City’s broader fiscal health.” They point to their website at reformULA.org as the home for more information about their coalition.

footnoted*, an information services reports on SEC filings, recently found an unusual reference to the ICE raids in a recent filing by Home Depot that pointed to “an unsafe environment or negative publicity regarding the company or regarding incidents in or around our stores and/or other facilities, such as civil unrest, raids, protests, or similar activities” that might lead to reduced “trust and confidence with customers, associates, and jobseekers” that could then lead to damage to their business and reputation.

That filing was from March 18. Immigrant rights advocates, clergy and community members on March 26 organized actions at two Home Depots in Los Angeles, one in MacArthur Park and another in South Los Angeles, as part of an effort to raise awareness about their demands to Home Depot, which includes calling on the corporation to “publicly condemn ICE raids on its property, prohibit federal immigration enforcement from using its parking lots to target day laborers, commit to creating safe, welcoming spaces for all people regardless of status, and support citizenship for all.” City Council candidate in the 11th district, civil rights attorney Faizah Malik, joined the protest in MacArthur Park.

The Pat Brown Institute’s “On the Record” mayoral candidate interviews can now be viewed on their YouTube Page. Mike Bonin, the executive director' of the Institute, conducts the interviews, which so far have been with Adam Miller, Rae Huang and Nithya Raman. Bonin, a former City Council member representing the 11th Council District who also served as a high-level staffer of the same district for two previous council members, also interviewed with Rae Huang and Adam Miller. Bonin told The LA Reporter that Spencer Pratt was invited to do an interview, but has yet to reply. Bonin also pointed to his October 2025 interview with Karen Bass, who officially launched her re-election campaign last December. The interviews often give an insider’s look into City Hall, with Bonin’s conversations often delving into what happened behind the scenes on major events. In an interview with Huang, the pastor and housing advocate discussed an interaction she had, while a member of a coalition called HealthyLA, with Bonin’s council office at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, in which they issued a set of demands that Bonin said later grew into a countywide eviction moratorium. Raman’s interview was being recorded on Wednesday, and will go up soon after. Huang and Miller’s interviews are posted. Audio versions of the interviews also go up on the podcast, What’s Next Los Angeles, where Bonin has long hosted a steady series of interviews with candidates for Los Angeles city and other local offices.

After a light polishing of the wording and key additions of what could be done to rectify the situation, a community impact statement introduced by Andres Perkins of the Reseda Neighborhood Council was approved by fellow board members at their Tuesday night meeting, on March 31, that argues against a effort by a city bus shelter vendor and the city department, StreetsLA, to remove the back panels of several bus shelters in Reseda, as a way to address graffiti damage to those shelters.

The resolution states that “in previous months, the Reseda Neighborhood Council requested that the busiest transit stops in our neighborhood be cleaned more frequently, and for the issue of tagging and graffiti in our area to be addressed. Since then, it appears the city has moved to sweep these problems under the rug with the removal of rear panels and benches from our bus shelters, in turn worsening the the quality of our transit services and amenities.

“StreetsLA has claimed that the rear panels on many of our bus shelters do not provide sufficient shade or protection from the weather to remain in place. While this is true for a small number of them that are located against walls, many of these shelters are used in unconventional ways. For example, it is not uncommon for users of the northbound stop on Reseda Bl. at Victory Bl. — which has been targeted for alteration — to stand in the bike lane to hide from the afternoon and evening sun.

“Weather conditions in the San Fernando Valley can be more unpredictable and extreme compared to elsewhere in the city. It may be known for heat, but Valley winds and rains get brutal and these panels offer critical protection from the elements. Another case involves a bus bench removed from beneath a canopy, and the southern bus stop on Tampa Ave. at Vanowen St. that would, at times, be occupied by an unhoused individual. It appears that the city responded by removing the bench so no one can use it. Whatever the justifications are, removing these amenities is not a productive solution …

“… The removal and exclusion of amenities from transit shelters is counterproductive to these goals. In some ways, it is a greater offense than the litter and graffiti that appears to have prompted these decisions. The removals already put in place of only degraded the quality of these stops. Now, they are dirty, tagged and subjected to more sun, wind, and rain. This neglect for our community’s issues and needs exemplifies the city's unwillingness to invest in productive solutions to address the root causes of our problems.”

Read the full impact statement here.

Amos Marvel, the vice president of the Reseda Neighborhood Council, told his fellow board members that the letter was expected to be delivered to Council District 3, Council District 4, Streets LA (which is the city’s Bureau of Street Services) and other members of Los Angeles city government.

Westside LA City Council member Traci Park files motions to pay for $197,417 overtime on CARE+ encampment sweeps, and the creation of an LAMC 41.18 anti-camping zone at 220 Rose Ave.

The Los Angeles City Clerk has found that the signatures submitted for a ballot initiative to repeal the city’s business gross receipts tax are sufficient.

The Los Angeles Neighborhood Council’s Budget Advocates have submitted their white paper to the Council Files, ahead of the April 20 release of the mayor’s proposed budget. The advocate’s paper this year is entitled: “Los Angeles City Budget Merry-Go-Round: Round and Round it Goes, Where It Stops Nobody Knows.” The advocates explain that the metaphor used in the title “captures the city of Los Angeles’s fiscal condition with uncomfortable precision. Every year, the City Council debates rising expenditures, moderating revenues, pension pressures, homelessness investments, infrastructure backlogs, and legal liabilities. Every year, a technically balanced budget is adopted. And every year, structural imbalances quietly persist beneath the surface, waiting for the next economic slowdown to expose them.”

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