Starting in 2020, left-wing activists in Los Angeles – American social democracy – became a powerful force in local elections, after almost seven decades in the electoral desert. Some of their representatives ran for electoral positions and some of them won. His local popularity emanated from the promise of big changes in the City Council’s approach to policing and homelessness, social justice and solidarity with immigrants.
The social democrats
The DSA-LA party had historic achievements. In 2024, its candidates held four of the 15 seats on the Los Angeles City Council: Nithya Raman (District 4), 2020; Eunisses Hernández (District 1), 2022; Hugo Soto-Martínez (District 13), 2022 and Ysabel Jurado (District 14), 2024.
In 2022, Kenneth Mejía, then a Democrat, with the support of DSA-LA won the comptrollership of the city of Los Angeles.
The new candidates were on the right track. The thing is that big changes were, and still are, necessary. While not reaching the extremes of ICE agents, the LAPD has its own history of police violence; It is extensive and painful.
And although Mayor Karen Bass made an effort to contain the growth of homelessness, successive crises and a concatenation of factors contributed to making the problems last and seem eternal. While in 2022 LAHSA, the joint County and City agency to deal with the homeless, counted 69,144 of them in the county and 41,980 in the city, in 2025 the number grew to 72,308 and 43,699 respectively (with an undercount of 7,200 according to RAND research), despite some millions of dollars invested. In 2022 alone, LAHSA’s budget was $856 million. Additionally, the city of Los Angeles directly spends between $600 and $660 million per year on homelessness.
That was the precise moment for a candidate with no name, contacts or elected positions to win an important election.
And that is where he possibly scored his best achievement: the inspection, monitoring and publication of redundant, unnecessary or direct expenses from funds available but not used in the fight against homelessness.
What the Los Angeles comptroller does
The Comptroller is a position of enormous responsibility and impact. It does not report to the mayor or the City Council. It is an independent position. That’s what citizens elect him for.
Their role is to audit the city’s finances, review contracts, oversee payroll, investigate waste and pursue fraud. Although it does not manage the municipal budget, it verifies whether it is spent justifiably. His office has about 160 employees.
Assemble recommendations and conclusions, and the mayor’s team is tasked with executing them.
This presupposes a condition of understanding between both departments, for the benefit of the city’s finances.
In times of crisis, it is a position that requires cooperation rather than confrontation. And what it does not require is to appear in the headlines, nor to expand on issues beyond your work that require your full attention.
Mejía’s election
It was in that repercussion of protests, in that wave of enthusiasm, that Kenneth Mejía was elected in 2022, replacing the retiring incumbent Ron Galperin.
That November 8, 2022, Kenneth Mejía, 31, beat Paul Koretz, 67, for the position of Comptroller.
Koretz seemed destined for victory; He had been a West Hollywood city councilman, a member of the California Legislative Assembly from 2000 to 2006, then a Los Angeles councilman between 2009 and 2022. In those positions he was a recognized progressive.
But Mejía’s campaign was full of originality. He won with surprise and youth, with a core of dedicated and professional activists who later accompanied him to the offices of the Comptroller’s Office. It was a picaresque campaign: the candidate would appear dressed as Pikachu, the pet rodent of the Pokemon series, or hidden among the branches. He used TikTok and social networks in a massive and accessible way. His corgis were characteristic of his career.
At that moment in Los Angeles history, when the scandal of racist recordings broke out in the City Council, he became fashionable personifying the protest. It did not matter that Koretz was perhaps the first councilor to demand the resignation of Kevin de León, Gil Cedillo and Nury Martínez. He was also affected by the scandal. Mejía, on the other hand, enjoyed the status of outsider.
On December 12, 2022, he assumed the position surrounded by curiosity and sympathy, full of promises. He had won the elections by more than 20 points. He had earned the most votes of any comptroller candidate in the city’s history. Precisely, he won because he was unknown. It was the option of discontent.
those who know
Did Mejía comply?
If there is anyone who can understand and analyze the actions of the owner, it is those who were already comptrollers of the city, at different times. They know, beyond the hit lists that appear on candidates’ sites.
Rick Tuttle, from 1985 to 2001; Laura Chick, from 2001 to 2009 and Wendy Greuel, from 2009 to 2013. And each of them opposes Mejía’s re-election. Together with Galperin, they were also against his election in 2022.
Recently, Chick said of him: “For almost three years, [Mejía]elected to be the taxpayers’ watchdog, has barked loudly but done little to improve the city or the lives of its people.” In short, they know the details and do not believe that their work benefited the city.
It gives the impression that during his administration Mejía considered the city leaders as rivals, scoundrels, involved in a crusade to deceive the people and derive unjustifiable budgets. Confrontation was everything. And while individual cases show errors and perhaps favoritism, that does not justify subverting or dismantling the entire apparatus of city government.
That is to say: Mejía, at no time did he think about building coalitions.
Mejia and Bass
Emblematic is the clash between Mejía and Bass, who opposed the Comptroller auditing the performance of Inner Safe, his flagship child care program. homeless.
To get out of the quagmire, Mejía last October proposed an amendment to the city’s charter that would allow him to audit programs run by other elected officials without needing their approval.
The collaboration between both officials declined over time. At the mayor’s request, the Municipal Council cut Mejía’s budget by 15%, with a loss of 27 positions.
For Mejía, the opposition to him is because he is doing his job. For Bass, to his inability to collaborate. This is what makes its oversight ultimately ineffective and the conflict noisy.
Mejía’s campaign does not seem to have ever been interrupted in the last three years, with its unorthodox methods, its media originality and its non-public sympathy.
In doing so, he disdained balance, stability, collaboration.
The paradox that his critics now point out is that the same energy that earned him support as outsiderso effective in winning, turned out to be an obstacle to governing.
Deficit budget
Looking for the negative aspects, Mejía turned to analyze the consequences of the budget deficit of the city of Los Angeles, which was almost one billion dollars, aggravated by the costs of the fires, 287 million for legal responsibilities, and structural problems of income, demographic processes and other impediments.
Last April, the mayor proposed a spending plan that included more than 1,600 layoffs to reduce the deficit, caused by dwindling revenues. In September it was approved, but managing to close the deficit and avoid layoffs “through budgetary maneuvers, unpaid voluntary days and transfer of employees to other city departments,” as Fox11 explained. But the causes of the deficit persisted and at the end of February it was estimated at $263 million. We are already at the end of May and the real numbers are changing rapidly.
The supposed solution had been nothing more than a patch.
The Comptroller’s office exists precisely to be a solid and effective inspector in this type of environment. Personal and concept collisions hampered the audit.
Mejía and Sokoloff
Now, Kenneth Mejía faces Zach Sokoloff. And the relationship between the two is an example of everything said.
Since Sokoloff’s opposition candidacy emerged, Mejía’s campaign has attacked him for his work overseeing Tv City and Radford Studio Middle, two of Los Angeles’ most historic production studios, as asset manager when the streaming boom collapsed and more competitive tax incentives in other states and countries caused a decline in local filming.
What has been said: Mejía and his team are good at finding the problems inherent in our system and bringing to light failures, injustices and irregularities. But from outside. That’s why Sokoloff’s response was correct: “I would ask you if during your tenure, when you had the power to help an industry that was clearly struggling, did you do anything to make a difference?”
Ultimately, the platforms of both candidates do not differ much. Mejía insists on transparency and removing the veil of secrecy. Sokoloff says he will be the auditor of every wasted dollar.
This leads to an interesting conclusion: Mejía is now the insiderthe one whom his critics hold responsible for his actions. It is no longer the outsiderthe one whom they hold responsible for their promises.
The controller’s job cannot be focused on itself. And political orthodoxy cannot become a distraction instead of a help. Los Angeles needs a coalition of the main elements that sustain the city.
Behavioral complaints
I write all of this without needing to delve too deeply into the allegations of Mejía’s reprehensible conduct toward his subordinates, allegations that emanate from the testimonies of three of his original collaborators who lost their jobs and have accused him of, among other things, harassment.
In April 2023, the LA Times reported that according to these former collaborators, Mejía made repeated sexual comments toward a young employee in front of her colleagues, even after they asked him to stop. Que Mejía fired its chief technology and innovation officer, Kyler Chin, and its director of community engagement, Shekinah Deocares. And that both had been key members of his campaign.
That’s what catches my attention: it is not the old non-public from the office that denounced Mejía, but rather members of the group of left-wing activists who made his victory possible, with intense field work, calls and canvassing. These former campaign volunteers say the then-32-year-old accountant blurred the line between friendship and employment.
Without stating that the allegations are true and reliable: when there are accusations of sexual abuse, at least initially, we believe the victims. It is the starting point.
Detract from the good message
And finally, if there is something I regret in this mess that Mejía got into, it is that it distracts and distorts the good message, the roots of his criticism and the scope of his vision. He was good as a propagandist, but less so as comptroller of the city of Los Angeles. What a pity.
