The Brief

Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón has filed eight counts of grand theft labor charges against two Catalina Island business owners for allegedly stealing more than $500,000 in overtime wages from 18 employees starting in 2008.

The married couple, Jack and Yueh Mei Tucey, also known as Nora Tucey, have also been charged with two counts of grand theft of wages, one count of conspiracy to commit grand theft of labor and 15 counts of filing false and fraudulent returns, Gascón said.

“By allegedly underreporting wages and violating overtime pay laws, the defendants not only broke the law but also contributed to the cycle of economic hardship for hardworking individuals,” he said.

It was not immediately clear if the Tuceys had retained legal representation and a manager could not be reached at their business.

It's the second time Gascón has filed criminal charges against business owners after launching a new labor justice unit in September. According to the his office, wage theft is one of the most under-reported crimes in L.A. County.

Boats moored near the short of Catalina Island (Photo by Beth J. Harpaz/AP)

"Nearly a billion-plus dollars are stolen from workers in L.A. County each and every year," Gascón said. "And the consequences of this are significant, not only for the employees and their families, but for our entire community."

According to the California Department of Industrial Relations, which is working with Gascón’s office, the workers were allegedly paid less than minimum wage and worked at multiple businesses in the same day. Some employees reportedly had up to 18-hour workdays.

State officials also said the Tuceys did not accurately record their hours and failed to pay workers for all hours worked. Many of the workers were also tenants of the Tuceys on Catalina Island.

“These employers used sophisticated methods in a fraudulent scheme to pay their workers less than minimum wage, deprive them of essential labor protections and take unfair advantage over businesses that play by the rules,” said California Labor Commissioner Lilia García-Brower.

The workers employed by the couple were mostly Latino and Asian immigrants who worked as bussers, dishwashers, and housekeepers. García-Brower said most were too afraid to speak up in fear of getting blacklisted.

"Many of these employees were also living in the properties owned by these defendants, which placed them in a particularly vulnerable situation" García-Brower said. "Once the employees would separate from the employer, they would be evicted."

The Tuceys own multiple restaurants and a hotel on Catalina Island: El Galleon Restaurant, Mi Casita Authentic Mexican Restaurant, Antonio's Pizzeria & Cabaret, Original Antonio's Pizzeria, Food Brokers International, Catalina Hotel, Catalina Courtyard Hotel, and Original Jack’s Restaurant and Bakery.

The Catalina Island couple are expected to be held in lieu of $590,000 bail each. If convicted, they could face a maximum of 22 years in prison.

Gascón said his office believes there are others who may have been defrauded by the Tuceys. Anyone with information or knows someone who may have been can call the Department of Industrial Relations Hotline at (818) 901-5305.

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

With voting for the June primary well underway, mayoral candidate and reality TV star Spencer Pratt is resurrecting one of the most painful chapters in Korean American history in Los Angeles — and he’s not getting the details quite right.

On social media this week, Pratt’s campaign claimed Bass is racist and accused her of “Asian hate” as she “cheered on the destruction of Koreatown in the riots” — a reference to controversial comments she made after the 1992 unrest about liquor stores in South Los Angeles.

The campaign’s claim blurs two distinct parts of the 1992 story: the devastation Koreatown suffered during the unrest and a separate debate over the oversaturation of liquor stores in South L.A. While Bass’ comments in 1992 were tied to the latter, they have long been a source of pain for the Korean community, as many of those stores were Korean-owned at the time. 

In November 1992, Bass told the New York Times that it felt like “a miracle” that many of the liquor stores community activists had wanted to close in South L.A. were destroyed during the unrest.

Her comments have come up repeatedly in local politics, including during the 2022 mayoral race, when Bass apologized to a group of Korean American liquor store owners during a private meeting.

Bass’ campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and Pratt’s campaign said he was traveling and unavailable to provide comment. 

“The night before the uprising, a lot of us were in a meeting discussing how we might reduce the number of liquor stores in South Central, and a few days later, like a miracle, a large chunk of the stores we wanted to close were burned to the ground,” she told the New York Times in 1992. 

“That’s not the way we wanted it to happen, but the rioting accomplished in a few days what we have spent decades working to achieve.”

She did not celebrate the destruction of Koreatown as Pratt’s campaign said on X.

Some Korean Americans say they’re sick of their community’s trauma being reduced to a campaign talking point. 

Filmmaker So Yun Um, whose 2022 documentary “Liquor Store Dreams” explores the experiences of second-generation Korean Americans raised in liquor stores in L.A. and the first-generation immigrant parents who operated them, says Pratt is exploiting the community.

Um’s family until recently operated liquor stores in Hawthorne and West Athens. So she understands why some Korean Americans continue to feel anger toward Bass.

“It was insensitive of Bass to say that,” Um said.

But she added, “What’s important to us is that she acknowledged what she said and apologized.”

“As a family who has lived in Koreatown their whole lives and are part of the liquor store community who has experienced the 1992 L.A. Uprising, we know all too well when our narratives get skewed,” she said.

Pratt is fusing two separate grievances into one narrative for his campaign, Edward J.W. Park, chair of Asian and Asian American Studies at Loyola Marymount University, told The LA Local. 

“From the campaign’s point of view, it is a convenient sort of confusion that Karen Bass saw the destruction of these liquor stores in South L.A. as an opportunity to rebuild South L.A. without these liquor stores,” he said.

Park was involved in rebuilding and organizing efforts in the Korean community after the unrest. He has spent decades documenting the political and social aftermath of what happened in 1992.  

The second grievance, Park said, is more current — frustration among some Koreatown residents who may feel the neighborhood has been neglected by the city for years, particularly when it comes to homelessness and public safety.

“I think at the heart of it is this feeling where some residents don’t understand why it is just conventional wisdom that Koreatown is forced to live with rampant homelessness, open drug use, drug trafficking, tents, the outrageous homeless problem that we have in this city,” he said.

A line of Korean demonstrators march north on Western Avenue in Los Angeles calling for peace, Saturday, May 2, 1992. The march, which involved thousands, was organized by the Koreans.

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The South LA liquor store debate

The controversy stems from Bass’ work as a community organizer in South LA in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

At the time, community organizers in predominantly Black neighborhoods across South L.A. were organizing against what they saw as an overconcentration of liquor stores tied to drug activity and crime. 

“Liquor stores were everywhere, but they were incredibly concentrated in South L.A.,” Park said.

A majority of those stores were owned by Korean immigrants, who increasingly entered the liquor and convenience store industry in the 1970s and 1980s as one of the few available paths toward “an American dream” of economic mobility amid discrimination and limited job opportunities. 

Bass, then the director of the Community Coalition for Substance Abuse Prevention and Treatment, wrote in a June 1992 Los Angeles Times op-ed that many South L.A. residents viewed the concentration of liquor stores as contributing to crime and deteriorating quality of life in their neighborhoods. 

Hyepin Im, president and CEO of Faith and Community Empowerment, said Korean liquor store owners felt they were unfairly portrayed in the media and in Bass’ op-ed.  

Im was active in community rebuilding efforts post-1992 and has worked to bridge tensions between Korean and Black Angelenos. 

In the years before the unrest, several Korean shopkeepers were killed during robberies, and fears of violence were a reality of daily life for many store owners, according to the Los Angeles Times. 

“The negative sentiments toward these storeowners failed to consider the reality of these storeowners providing a service while putting their lives on the line,” Im said.

Tensions between the Black and Korean community were simmering before the unrest. In 1991, 15-year-old Latasha Harlins was shot and killed by Soon Ja Du, a Korean liquor store owner who accused her of shoplifting a bottle of orange juice.

Du was convicted of voluntary manslaughter but did not serve jail time, sparking anger in the Black community.

After the acquittal of four Los Angeles Police Department officers charged in the beating of Rodney King, violence erupted across the city. 

“There was almost a targeting of liquor stores that were owned by Korean Americans during the riots and a lot of people said that was related — ‘remember Latasha Harlins,'” former L.A. Mayor Jim Hahn told LAist in 2012.

Koreans made up less than 2% of LA’s population, but they lost roughly 2,300 businesses and sustained an estimated $350 million of the city’s $785 million in property damage during the unrest, according to scholars. Many felt abandoned after police pulled out of Koreatown during some of the worst violence and destruction.

Do Bass’ comments still resonate? 

Steve Kang, the former director of external affairs at the Koreatown Youth and Community Center who now serves as president of the Board of Public Works and as Bass’ film liaison, helped organize a private conversation between Bass and Korean American liquor store owners during her 2022 mayoral campaign.

At the time, Kang said billionaire Rick Caruso’s campaign had gained traction among some Korean American voters, making Koreatown “sort of a centerpiece in one of the key battlegrounds for the mayoral election.”

“And because of that, I think people dug up old archives and things that the mayor said when she was an organizer,” he said.

Bass apologized for the comments during the private meeting, saying “while the concerns about the stores were not about the race or nationality of the owners, I understood how my comments could have been hurtful,” according to reporting from the Los Angeles Times.

Not everyone has accepted Bass’ apology.

In a video posted by Pratt’s campaign, Scott Suh, a former president of the Wilshire Center-Koreatown Neighborhood Council and former city planning commissioner, says Bass tried to block Korean store owners from rebuilding after the unrest. He goes on to say that anyone who supports Bass is endorsing “hate crime and racism.”

Suh did not respond to requests for comment.

Kevin Kang, a pastor at Tujunga United Methodist Church whose family operated a business in South L.A. during the unrest — and whose mother still does — said communities of color are too often politically co-opted. 

“We know that’s out of context,” he added, referring to Pratt’s use of Bass’ comments. “I don’t think he actually cares about Koreans. We just become another tool for them to prove their point.”

For six days over a holiday weekend, a chemical tank in an Orange County aerospace plant threatened to explode, and more than 50,000 people had to leave while crews figured out how to stop it. The tank kept getting hotter. A valve in the tank’s cooling system had failed. Officials used drones to read the tank’s temperature from the outside. Ground crews set up an “unmanned ground monitor” — a portable water cannon — blasting water across the tank’s side.

At the height of the emergency at GKN Aerospace — which makes cockpit windows and shields for military aircraft in Garden Grove — officials feared the tank could explode. California deployed more than 700 people to the city, the governor’s office said.

The company’s tank cooled only after it cracked just enough to relieve pressure without unleashing a chemical explosion. By Tuesday night, the evacuations were lifted — but the questions remained.

The near-disaster exposed gaps among multiple regulatory systems that state and local agencies have not fully addressed.

Air quality regulators had flagged compliance problems years before the crisis. Prosecutors are investigating whether the company violated any laws. And community advocates and chemical-safety experts say residents still deserve a clearer accounting of what state and local regulators knew, what safeguards existed and why the tank came so close to catastrophe.

A history of violations

Even as GKN Aerospace worked to resolve environmental compliance notices, regulators and local planners began considering an expansion of the facility that would increase its capacity to manufacture components for military F-35 fighter jets.

The South Coast Air Quality Management District has inspected GKN three times in the last decade. For much of that time, the facility was classified as a “minor source” of emissions within the district’s permitting program, a designation that meant that regulators weren't required to inspect the facility frequently.

That limited oversight may have contributed to what records show was a yearslong compliance problem.

Those violations did not involve the problematic storage tank that holds methyl methacrylate, regulators said.

But in 2020, GKN self-reported certain issues that led South Coast air regulators to inspect the facility and review its records. The air district’s investigation found that the company was out of compliance with multiple rules stretching back to 2017. The facility, located within a mile of homes and schools, had failed to maintain required records about its emissions, was operating new equipment without permits and was using equipment that didn’t match the description in its existing permits, according to regulatory reports.

It took until April 2021 for the air district to issue a formal notice of violation, and until late 2024 for the agency to sign a settlement requiring GKN to pay more than $900,000. The company did not admit liability in the settlement, which resolved 14 alleged violations.

The district now treats GKN as a “major source” of emissions – a type of facility that the South Coast air district inspects yearly. A spokesman said that the company has applied for a more comprehensive permit, at the direction of regulators.

A community seeks answers

For Tracy La, the timeline told its own infuriating story.

“That delay and allowing GKN to operate with pretty much impunity has caused so many tens of thousands of residents of Garden Grove to pay for it,” said La, director of VietRISE, a nonprofit that supports Vietnamese and immigrant communities in Orange County. Displaced residents have had to pay for housing, replace medication, seek transportation and rack up other costs associated with evacuating their homes, she added.

“It's just frustrating that regular everyday people are constantly having to pay the price for our government officials unwilling to hold these powerful, rich corporations accountable,” La said.

Garden Grove is a cornerstone of Little Saigon, one of the largest Vietnamese American communities in the United States — a community that includes immigrants and refugees from the Vietnam War.

Some residents know methyl methacrylate not as an aerospace chemical but as a workplace hazard — one they spent years fighting to eliminate.

Lisa Fu directs the California Healthy Nail Salon Collaborative, which represents Vietnamese manicurists across the state. Her members waged a long campaign against the chemical, documenting its effects on workers' lungs, skin and eyes.

In 2015, the state banned the chemical from nail salons and cosmetology schools after workers flagged health concerns. Now the same chemical was leaking from a tank a few miles from Little Saigon. Fu says collaborative members and their neighbors reported nosebleeds, itchiness and the deaths of pet birds.

Air monitors deployed by the Environmental Protection Agency and the South Coast air district around the facility have shown pollution levels within normal ranges. But Fu said the gap between those readings and what residents experienced has deepened distrust of regulators and their enforcement record.

“You hear in the press conferences that there's no fumes, no vapors, no leak, no contamination,” Fu said. “They are saying it is safe. Safe for who? We believe the community when the stories don't stop coming.”

Community advocates are now asking Garden Grove city leaders to shut the facility down and adopt a moratorium on military manufacturing facilities and expansions in the city.

GKN has an application for a more comprehensive permit under consideration at the South Coast air district, and the public may soon have the opportunity to weigh in. A district spokesperson told CalMatters it had aimed to release the permit for public comment by year’s end, but the timeline may shift because of the emergency.

A potential chemical safety gap

California's toughest accidental-release prevention rules do not cover the chemical that nearly exploded in a Garden Grove tank and forced 50,000 people from their homes.

Methyl methacrylate is a volatile compound and one of the most widely used chemicals in plastics manufacturing. Officials feared the GKN tank would rupture as the liquid overheated, spilling thousands of gallons of chemicals or even exploding.

“It’s like a soda can that you left in your car in the middle of a hot summer,” said Andrew J. Whelton, a Purdue University environmental engineering professor. “The pressure built up within the can exceeds the capacity of that metal can.”

When the tank started overheating, it triggered a chemical reaction that responders could not stop — in part because the reaction had “gummed up” the valves they needed to inject a neutralizing agent, Orange County Fire Authority Division Chief Craig Covey said at a May 22 press conference.

Brandon McBride stands outside his tent at an evacuation shelter at the Elks Lodge in Garden Grove, on May 26, 2026. The site was set up for those who were living near a damaged hazardous chemical tank.

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Jae C. Hong

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Methyl methacrylate is not a regulated chemical under either the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Risk Management Program or California's parallel system, known as CalARP. That may mean the tank was regulated under an alternate or lower-tier hazardous-materials program — leaving regulators with fewer tools to oversee its storage.

“If you’re living there — you’re a neighbor — can you go see what chemicals they have stored on site?” said Jane Williams, executive director of California Communities Against Toxics. “No, you can’t.”

The federal program’s chemical list has not added reactive chemicals to its list of covered chemicals, despite recommendations from the U.S. Chemical Safety Board, which investigates chemical accidents. The Trump administration aims to eliminate funding for the chemical safety board after October and proposes to roll back the 2024 Risk Management Program amendments that had begun to expand chemical safety requirements.

The same gap exists in California.

The California Environmental Protection Agency confirmed to CalMatters that methyl methacrylate is not a regulated substance under the state's Accidental Release Program.

Orange County health officials confirmed to CalMatters that GKN had a hazardous materials business plan on file — a lower-tier document listing chemicals stored on site — but no risk management plan. The agency said CalARP does not apply to the facility because methyl methacrylate is not a listed chemical under the program.

CalMatters also asked the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health whether worker-safety rules for high-hazard industrial processes applied at the facility — which would have made it eligible for the accidental release program under a separate pathway. The facility had been the subject of multiple workplace safety and health inspections before the tank emergency. Cal/OSHA did not answer that question by deadline.

Chemicals that fall outside federal and state accident prevention programs may also be left out of community emergency planning and drills, Williams said. That means nearby residents may not know what risks they face or how officials would respond.

GKN did not respond to written questions on deadline. In recent days, the company’s statements have emphasized gratitude for the community and first responders. “We recognize there is more work ahead,” said GKN Senior Vice President Steve Carlin, who oversees the Garden Grove site’s programs.

Angela Johnson Meszaros, an attorney for the environmental group Earthjustice, said neighbors to companies like GKN have every reason to think someone’s enforcing rules.

When something like this happens, people “get angry because they were like, ‘Wait, nobody was paying attention to this and now I'm sleeping on the sidewalk?’”

The system, she said, was built around the wrong goal entirely. “We have a system that's built on the notion of getting facilities to return to compliance, but we need to have a system that's about making sure facilities are operating in a way that is safe — and some facilities may not have a culture that allows us to put our lives into their hands.”

A district attorney may prosecute 

Whether any single institution will provide a comprehensive accounting of what went wrong is unclear.

The Orange County District Attorney’s Office has opened a criminal inquiry, spokesperson Kimberly Edds confirmed to CalMatters. Prosecutors sent letters to GKN ordering the company not to destroy or manipulate evidence.

At an anonymous tipline, the office is seeking information about the chemical release, the facility’s operations and the maintenance of the tanks and systems involved.

Water is sprayed on a damaged tank at GKN Aerospace in Garden Grove, on May 24, 2026, after the tank containing a chemical used to make plastic parts overheated Thursday.

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California law makes it a crime to knowingly or recklessly handle or store hazardous waste in a way that creates an unreasonable risk of fire, explosion, serious injury or death. Edds declined to say what areas of the law the investigation would cover.

In a similar case in 2024, Alameda County prosecutors indicted a scrap metal company after a fire exposed years of hazardous materials violations. They later said they could not prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt and dropped it.

On the regulatory side, no single agency has the task of producing a comprehensive account of the event. Rather than one joint review, each agency involved in the emergency will produce its own separate findings, released according to its own policies and timelines, said Brian Yau, a spokesperson for the Orange County Fire Authority.

Hazardous materials officials, air regulators, environmental officials and the company were developing a site cleanup plan, Yau said. On Friday, the fire authority handed over cleanup and remediation oversight to the county health care agency, said Greg Barta, a spokesperson for the fire authority.

Asked whether he was concerned about industrial facilities operating near dense residential neighborhoods, Gov. Gavin Newsom praised local and state first responders and said the state is reviewing the facility's safety records. Then he offered a candid assessment of the limits of state action.

“As it relates to industrial facilities in and around urban centers,” Newsom said at a press conference Thursday, “that’s a more challenging issue of geography.”

State Sen. Tom Umberg, a Democrat from Santa Ana, said there will be new proposed laws in response to the narrowly-averted disaster.

Williams, of California Communities Against Toxics, said the incident should force a broader look at California’s rules for hazardous industrial sites – not just at GKN, but at every facility storing chemicals that fall outside the state's toughest oversight programs.

“Everyone wants to return to normalcy as quickly as possible, because their nervous systems are all on fire, and the way in which you calm your nervous system is to be in your house and sit on the couch and hold your cat,” she said. “But in a situation like this — where you had a massive near miss — you really need to make sure that the safety systems that failed are not the only safety systems there at risk.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

The number of people with nowhere to call home decreased both in California and nationwide last year, according to a long-awaited federal report.

The data, showing the first decrease in homelessness in years, provided fuel for activists challenging the Trump administration's narrative that current homelessness policies are failing and need to be overhauled.

There were 181,934 homeless Californians counted last year — a 2.8% decrease from 2024, according to the new federal report. Overall, the country saw a 3.3% drop in homelessness, marking the first decrease since 2016. Nationwide, an estimated 745,652 people are homeless.

Those numbers come from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which released its annual homelessness report to Congress on Friday after an unexplained five-month delay. As the country’s main barometer for how efforts to combat homelessness are working, the report plays an important role in allocating funding and shaping policies — and is a major political tool.

The Trump administration used the report to promote its policies, including its crackdown on immigration and efforts to direct funding away from permanent housing. Meanwhile, the National Homelessness Law Center was quick to point out that the decrease in homelessness happened while former President Joe Biden was still in office.

“Homelessness is down because President Biden funded things that we know work, like housing and support,” law center spokesperson Jesse Rabinowitz said in a news release. “Sadly, the Trump administration is doing everything they can to backtrack on this progress.”

The federal government downplayed the small one-year decrease in homelessness, instead focusing on the fact that homelessness has increased 27% nationwide since 2013. That’s when the country started following a practice called “housing first,” which moves people into housing right away instead of requiring them first to get sober or meet other conditions.

"The data is clear that the status quo of ‘housing first’ has failed to meaningfully reduce homelessness, resulting in crisis levels of people living on the streets," said HUD Secretary Scott Turner. "HUD is restoring its programs to advance recovery and self-sufficiency and to ensure that taxpayer-funded benefits serve American families.”

The Trump administration wants to end housing first and instead prioritize housing that requires people to stay sober. The administration also has tried to divert homelessness funds away from permanent housing and into temporary shelters. California is one of 19 states suing the Trump administration over that change.

The federal administration tied the 2025 drop in homelessness to immigration, saying in a news release that it was “attributable to decreases in sanctuary cities.” The full report never mentions sanctuary cities, but it says some communities in New York and Illinois attributed their decreases in homelessness “in part” to changes in federal immigration policy.

Where homelessness declined

California was among the five states that reported the largest decreases in homelessness last year, though there were more significant drops in Illinois (44%), Hawaii (41%), Florida (11%), and New York (8%).

In California, 17 communities reported decreases in the number of people who were “chronically homeless,” meaning they have a disability and have been homeless for a year or longer. Los Angeles County reported 2,394 fewer such people. Officials from communities that saw those declines attributed the trend to opening new housing, placing people in housing more quickly, using a coordinated system to match people with available units and increasing street outreach, according to the report.

The data comes from the federally mandated homeless point-in-time count, which tallies people sleeping in shelters and outside on a given day in January. Volunteers count people they see sleeping on the street, in cars or in other places not meant for habitation. The effort is generally viewed as an undercount, as it’s easy for volunteers to miss people tucked away in hard-to-reach areas.

The federal government requires each community to count the people sleeping on its streets every two years. Counts are conducted by “continuums of care,” which include a county (or multiple counties), cities and local service providers. In California, 14 of the state’s 44 continuums of care did not count last year. HUD used 2024 data for communities in which no 2025 data was available.

Each community is required to submit its point-in-time count data to HUD, which reviews, verifies and analyzes the data before publishing a report. That report typically comes out in December of the year of the count.

How Trump changed point-in-time report

When the federal report finally came out Friday, the Trump administration put its stamp on it in several ways, including by scrubbing all references to gender. The prior report from 2024 broke out homelessness by gender (39% of people counted were women and 60% were men), and included categories such as transgender, gender questioning and non-binary. The 2025 data includes no such breakdown.

And while the previous report referred to “people experiencing homelessness,” the new report instead referred to “homeless persons.”

While the drop in nationwide homelessness last year is a “relief,” there is trouble on the horizon, according to Ann Oliva, CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness.

“So much of the progress reflected in the 2025 (point-in-time) count is due to targeted housing and service resources that were available in 2024 to rehouse people,” she said in a news release, “including the highly successful Emergency Housing Voucher program, and new funds to address rural and unsheltered homelessness. Unfortunately, the Trump Administration has largely deprioritized these tools and worked to dismantle the very systems that drove these reductions.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

When a candidate invests their personal fortune in running for public office, does it represent a rich person trying to buy a seat or does it grant them independence from powerful special interests? Voters will decide on Tuesday in an election that has seen candidates spend more of their own money than any previous election.

Liberal billionaire Tom Steyer put up $213 million to fund his campaign for governor. All together, more than 200 candidates have contributed about a quarter billion dollars of their own money this year. That’s an eight-fold increase since the last time Californians voted for governor in 2022 and the most since California started keeping digital campaign finance records in 1999.

The last time a candidate spent anything close to Steyer was in 2010 when Meg Whitman gave over $140 million to her own unsuccessful campaign for governor, setting a record at the time.

Previous statewide races also saw big spenders: Steve Poizner gave $14 million to his campaign in 2006 running for insurance commissioner; Eleni Kounalakis shelled out upwards of $8 million when she ran for lieutenant governor in 2018; Yvonne Yiu dropped nearly $6 million on her campaign for controller four years ago.

Candidates running for state Senate this cycle have given nearly $4 million to their campaigns – the highest amount recorded for the chamber and more than double the $1.7 million candidates put up 20 years ago. Likewise, current congressional candidates have contributed more than $29 million to their campaigns, the most of any cycle in the past two decades.

And this year, some congressional candidates have set records for self-funding their campaigns.

Two of the five congressional candidates who contributed the most money to their campaigns over the last 20 years are running this election. In the competitive contest to succeed Nancy Pelosi in her San Francisco-based congressional district, Democrat Saikat Chakrabati gave nearly $9 million to his campaign, the most of any congressional primary candidate in state history. Eric Jones, who wants to oust fellow Democrat Mike Thompson from his district representing the North Bay, transferred over $5 million of his personal fortune.

Chakrabarti said the money he’s putting up is to counter the millions being spent against him by opponents and that self-funding his campaign is his best choice in a bad system.

“To go up against that kind of money I have two options,” he said. “I could either spend my time calling big donors for money and then I can go to DC and owe a million people a million favors…so I chose to put in my own resources.”

The increase in self-funding may reflect the need for more money to compete after the Supreme Court in a 2010 decision known as Citizens United lifted restrictions on campaign spending by wealthy people and corporations, said Jeremy Mack, executive director of the nonprofit advocacy group The Phoenix Project.

In other words: more money in politics begets more money in politics.

“In California," he said, "it’s often been corporations, real estate and police unions that have often worked together to [fund] similar candidates.”

Maria Colon, a voter in Sacramento who attended a Steyer rally last week said she views corporate donations as implicit corruption, and while self-funding might be a reason to warrant further scrutiny of a candidate, she understands why some like Steyer are pouring money into their own campaigns.

“Frankly, I think there needs to be caps on how much money needs to be raised,” Colon said. “[Corporations] are not giving you their money for free, bro.”

Money is critical for political campaigns and so candidates who can contribute their own cash might have an advantage, said Dr. Wesley Hussey, a professor of political science at Sacramento State University. “A candidate who’s able to put in enough of their own money to start off is a great way to be a viable candidate.”

Andrew Coolidge, a Republican running for Assembly District 3 in the northern part of the state who is the biggest donor to his campaign, said voters should be skeptical of candidates who can fund their own campaign but chose not to.

“I think a candidate who doesn't have some skin in the game is a candidate you have to worry about," he said. "I can feel very comfortable making every decision based on my conscience rather than based upon the opinion of someone else.”

Chris Anderson, a candidate for Lodi City Council who has contributed to his own campaign and attended the Steyer rally, said he likes candidates who can self-fund while raising some questions at the same time.

“There is a part of me that likes the fact that a person is funding their own campaign because they’re less likely to be beholden to a special interest,” he said. “But on the other hand, what special interests got them to where they are?”

Money doesn’t buy everything. Hussey said voters will look at other factors in deciding how to view candidates who spend their own fortunes on their campaigns.

Take Steyer and Whitman. Both had different degrees of involvement in politics before they ran for office. Whitman was involved in both Mitt Romney's and John McCain's 2008 presidential runs, while Steyer has been active in environmental causes for over a decade.

Voters might get more suspicious when a rich candidate shows up without a political track record, Hussey said. “Tom Steyer gave a lot of money to politicians for a long time and tried to kind of enter the political world himself for a while.”

When asked if voters should view his hundreds of millions of dollars as a rich person trying to buy a political office, Steyer said at last week's rally that he believes voters should judge him by the amount of money being spent against him and not as much by the hundreds of millions of dollars he’s put into his campaign.

“In this race there is only one person who isn’t conflicted by taking money from corporations,” he said. “That’s me.”

At a recent public event at Stanford University, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Katie Porter said she doesn’t think being rich means you’re immune to lobbying.

“That is the same argument that Donald Trump made,” she said. “'You can trust me not to take special interest money because I'm so rich'–I find that unsettling in a democracy.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.