Last month, the Sacramento Bee submitted a records request for written communications to or from California Secretary of State Alex Padilla and his chief of staff regarding a batch of around 1,500 registration errors. Padilla’s office responded to the request with 268 pages of material, but half the pages were newsletters Padilla received from news […]

Last month, the city of Los Angeles revealed that Mayor Eric Garcetti’s Los Angeles Police Department security detail has cost nearly $450,000 since 2015 as Garcetti visited other parts of the United States and foreign countries. The figures were revealed due to a lawsuit filed by the Los Angeles Times, which is seeking to determine […]

Last month, the CalPERS Board of Administration awarded Marcie Frost, the chief executive of CalPERS, a four percent raise and an $84,873 bonus. The raise increases Frost’s base pay to $330,720. The raise and bonus also come a month after Naked Capitalism, a financial blog, reported that a consultant-prepared report in Frost’s job application included […]

In 2004, voters passed the Mental Health Services Act (Proposition 63) to help counties pay for the treatment of the mentally ill by taxing high-income residents. The proposition has generated billions of dollars to the counties across the state, but much of it has remained unspent. According to the Los Angeles Times, $1.6 billion was […]

An analysis by the San Diego Union-Tribune found that single-family homes serviced by the city’s water department were collectively overcharged by over $2 million last year. An internal audit of the Public Utilities Department was done after several customers started complaining last year that their water bills had increased dramatically, but authorities downplayed the situation. […]

In July, California sanctioned ten veteran charities that allegedly misused millions of dollars in donations. The worst alleged offender was Help the Vets, which reportedly misused $20 million over four years and did not help veterans. According to an injunction released in July by the Attorney General’s Office and the Federal Trade Commission, some of […]

According to POLITICO, two prominent female Democratic legislators in the #MeToo movement donated a good amount of money to Assemblywoman Cristina Garcia. Assemblywoman Garcia is the subject of an ongoing sexual harassment investigation. The two lawmakers who donated money are Assemblywoman Laura Friedman, chair of the Joint Legislative Subcommittee on Sexual Harassment Prevention and Response, […]

According to an audit released last month, a California DMV data operator slept three hours a day at her desk for three years and despite complaints from her colleagues, the department failed to take disciplinary action. Investigators from the California State Auditor’s office were told by witnesses that the DMV employee consistently slept at her […]

Apparently, even professionals in the San Francisco metro area can qualify as low-income due to the expensiveness of the area. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) annually assesses income limits for how much a person can make per year and still qualify for certain types of federal housing assistance. HUD’s fiscal 2018 […]

The Los Angeles City Council approved a construction and financing plan for a $708 million downtown office tower for city workers. The site of the new office tower is the Los Angeles Police Department’s former headquarters, Parker Center. The council voted unanimously to back a public-private development model that involves hiring an outside development team […]