The Brief

Editor’s note: This story includes descriptions of sexual harassment and racist language.

In June 2017, Eric Garcetti gathered with a group of his staffers, advisers and lobbyists on a hotel rooftop in Miami Beach, Florida.

At the time, Garcetti was a rising star in the Democratic Party. He had just been reelected mayor of Los Angeles, the second-biggest city in the U.S., and he was actively laying the foundation for a potential presidential campaign.

Garcetti’s staff was in Miami Beach for a meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors. On the final night of the conference, with the sunset fading over the hotel pool, the group posed for pictures.

One of those photos would go on to haunt Garcetti’s political career, from his time as mayor of Los Angeles to his current post as U.S. ambassador to India.

In the middle of the photo, Garcetti is smiling, giving two thumbs-ups.

Garcetti is flanked by people he knew well: a pair of lobbyists, a business executive and a city official.

On the left is one of Garcetti’s closest political allies at the time, a man named Rick Jacobs. Jacobs is a powerful and well-connected figure in LA politics and was part of Garcetti’s inner circle. He had been a political consultant, fundraiser, deputy chief of staff, trusted adviser and friend to Garcetti for years.

In the photo, Jacobs is standing just a couple of feet from Garcetti, posing with his outstretched hand placed deliberately in front of a lobbyist’s crotch.

Garcetti (center with his thumbs up) poses for a photo with staffers, advisers and lobbyists on a hotel rooftop in Miami Beach, Florida.

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Photo obtained via California Public Records Act request

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That lobbyist would later testify that he found the situation upsetting and embarrassing.

“I thought Rick Jacobs should be ashamed,” he said. (NPR is not naming him as a victim of sexual misconduct.)

For years, the photo circulated among Garcetti’s City Hall staff, the kind of photo that people gossiped about and showed at after-work happy hours.

For some, the photo of Garcetti, with his eyes looking toward the camera, functioned as a kind of visual metaphor.

When the photo was taken on that hotel rooftop, Garcetti said, he was looking the other way.

Just a few years later, in 2020, an LAPD officer on Garcetti’s protective detail sued the city of Los Angeles and alleged that Jacobs sexually harassed him over the course of 2014 to 2019 and that Garcetti witnessed the behavior and failed to act. That lawsuit led to the release of the photo, along with a cascade of accusations from people in and around the Garcetti administration.

Multiple city employees testified in depositions that Jacobs subjected them to unwanted massages and hugs, crude sexual comments and racist language without facing any consequences.

Jacobs denied all wrongdoing, calling the allegations against him “pure fiction.” Under oath, Jacobs denied sexually harassing anyone. He admitted, however, that he referred to his Asian American assistant at City Hall as a “Chinaman.” He acknowledged that he posed for the photo next to Garcetti as part of a “really stupid joke.” Asked whether he made “comments of a sexual nature” in front of Garcetti, Jacobs testified it was “possible.”

A screenshot of Rick Jacobs testifying at his videotaped deposition.

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Matthew Garza v. City of Los Angeles

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Garcetti said he never saw inappropriate behavior from Jacobs, in public or private, at any time. He testified he could not even recall Jacobs telling a joke, let alone an off-color comment.

After the lawsuit was filed, Garcetti initially stood by Jacobs and said they would continue to work together while a city-commissioned sexual harassment investigation was ongoing.

“Fundamentally, this is something that should take a process forward, but shouldn’t keep somebody who has been a committed public servant from being able to serve our community and our world,” Garcetti told reporters in July 2020. Garcetti stopped working with Jacobs months later, when additional accusations became public.

Despite the allegations, Garcetti fought to keep his political career on track while maintaining that he was completely unaware of any inappropriate behavior. Ultimately, he narrowly won confirmation in the U.S. Senate as ambassador to India amid questions about what he knew about the harassment allegations and when.

Vice President Harris shakes hands with Eric Garcetti, the U.S. ambassador to India, during his swearing-in ceremony in Washington, D.C., on March 24, 2023.

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Andrew Harrer

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Bloomberg via Getty Images

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Months after Garcetti was sworn in, city leaders approved a $1.8 million settlement to resolve the lawsuit.

Like most settlements, this one did not include any admission of wrongdoing.

Garcetti told NPR, “I was surprised by the settlement. I wish it had gone to trial.”

Dueling investigative reports — one commissioned by the city of Los Angeles and the other by Senate Republicans — came to opposite conclusions. As a result, the truth of LAPD officer Matthew Garza’s allegations remains legally unresolved.

The closure of the case allowed NPR to use the California Public Records Act to obtain more than a thousand pages of unredacted transcripts of depositions of Garcetti’s inner circle.

NPR has also obtained, and is publishing for the first time, excerpts of the video of Garcetti’s deposition, showing his body language, facial expressions and demeanor as he responds to tough questions about the harassment allegations.

The evidence includes new allegations of workplace misconduct and retaliation against those who spoke out against Jacobs and Garcetti. In total, the records raise concern about Garcetti’s truthfulness, as well as the Biden-Harris administration’s decision to fully support Garcetti’s nomination as ambassador to India. NPR’s investigation also reveals the tension at the heart of a Democratic political scandal in the #MeToo era, between political ambition and a commitment to addressing sexual harassment.

The White House declined to answer NPR’s questions for this story.

Jacobs also did not respond to emails and text messages seeking comment. When an NPR journalist reached Jacobs by phone and identified himself as a reporter, Jacobs responded, “Oh,” and immediately ended the call.

Suzi Emmerling (left), Jeremy Bernard and Naomi Seligman, who all previously worked under then-Mayor Eric Garcetti in Los Angeles, have come forward and called into question whether he lied under oath.

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Jessica Pons for NPR

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Multiple former members of the Garcetti administration say that the evidence refutes Garcetti’s consistent denials.

“To watch him lie like that is such a betrayal,” said Naomi Seligman, who served as Garcetti’s communications director from 2015 to 2017 and who has accused Garcetti of committing perjury.

“There are a lot of lives and people he left behind him that have been hurt, because of his inability to own his responsibility in this situation,” said Suzi Emmerling, who served as Garcetti’s communications director from 2017 to 2019.

Here are four key takeaways from NPR’s investigation:

1. Concerns about Jacobs’ alleged misconduct at work spanned more than a decade

By the time LAPD officer Garza went public with sexual harassment allegations against Jacobs in July 2020, Garcetti and Jacobs had been friends for nearly two decades. In a 2016 email, Garcetti called Jacobs “a dear friend, as well as one of my most trusted advisors.”

A screenshot of LAPD officer Matthew Garza testifying against Rick Jacobs.

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Matthew Garza v. City of Los Angeles

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Throughout much of that time, people who knew and worked for Jacobs had concerns about his conduct, according to deposition testimony. Multiple employees testified that such concerns were widely known.

Jacobs met Garcetti in 2003, when Jacobs was working on former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean’s presidential campaign, and Garcetti endorsed Dean. Garcetti’s wife, Amy Wakeland, also worked on the campaign and was also friends with Jacobs.

In politics, Jacobs was known as a formidable, and even ruthless, fundraiser. After Dean’s campaign ended, Jacobs created a liberal group called the Courage Campaign, which is best known for its advocacy in support of same-sex marriage. Jacobs is gay.

The organization was small. Jacobs, who led the organization from 2005 to 2013, estimated in his deposition testimony that it had roughly eight employees at any given time.

NPR spoke to six former employees of the group. These former employees asked to speak anonymously, because they said they fear retaliation from Jacobs, who is still influential in LA politics as a consultant and lobbyist.

In interviews, these former employees said that Jacobs frequently made crude sexual comments at work and that he frequently hugged, squeezed and kissed the employees he managed.

“I haven’t seen any other leader I’ve worked for have that level of physical contact in the workplace,” said one former employee.

Another former employee, a gay man, said that Jacobs forcibly kissed him on the lips, touched and “aggressively” hugged him without his consent, and subjected him to “lewd and sexually graphic comments,” according to a summary of his complaint later provided to investigators for the city.

The organization was virtual and did not have a formal office. As a result, former employees said, work meetings often took place at Jacobs’ home and sometimes over alcoholic drinks, blurring the line between personal and professional. Evening fundraisers, which also frequently involved alcohol, made those lines even fuzzier. Jeremy Bernard, who did not work for the Courage Campaign but knew Jacobs socially during that time, agreed that Jacobs could be “handsy” and “aggressive” when drinking alcohol, according to his testimony.

In his deposition, Jacobs denied ever sexually harassing any employee of the Courage Campaign.

When asked whether he had kissed an employee without his consent, Jacobs replied, “I don’t recall doing so. Not without his consent.”

Jacobs is no longer formally associated with the Courage Campaign, which renamed itself Courage California and is now led by Executive Director Irene Kao.

NPR contacted Kao for comment about the former employees’ allegations.

“The allegations you shared happened some time ago, so I don’t think it would serve any purpose to send them to me at this time,” Kao wrote in an email. “Any allegations of any kind of discrimination or harassment is taken very seriously by Courage California, and we believe all parties should be afforded a just legal process.”

Kao declined to comment on Jacobs’ role with the organization, citing concerns about privacy.

During that same era, before Jacobs was hired at City Hall in 2013, Yashar Ali, a freelance journalist and former political fundraiser, said that Jacobs grabbed his face with two hands, forcibly kissed him on the lips at a party and said, “God your lips are so soft.” Ali, who is gay, said the kisses were not consensual and made him uncomfortable. He said he did not push Jacobs away.

“And once he did that, and I didn’t object to it, he continued,” Ali told NPR in an interview. “But not objecting to something is not consent. It’s just not objecting.” He estimates that Jacobs kissed him about a dozen times over the years and that Garcetti was sometimes present at these parties.

Jacobs spoke about this allegation with investigators for the city. “In Mr. Jacobs’ experience growing up and as a gay man, kissing on the mouth was a common way to greet others,” the investigators wrote in their report. Jacobs said that he believed the kisses with Ali were consensual and part of a “cutesy little game.” Ali told NPR that Jacobs’ statement was “absurd” and false.

NPR spoke to multiple sources who said that Ali’s story is consistent with their own experience and that Jacobs was widely known to touch people at parties in ways that made them uncomfortable. The Los Angeles Times and New York magazine both reported additional accounts of men who said Jacobs groped them at parties.

Garcetti’s own description of Jacobs’ behavior at parties has changed over time.

In his deposition, Garcetti testified, “I have no memory of ever meeting” Ali. But he said he witnessed Jacobs kissing people on the lips as a greeting in social environments.

“I think he might have been receiving it as much as somebody giving it,” Garcetti testified.

In an interview with city investigators, Garcetti said the contact he witnessed was appropriate, because Jacobs is gay and Jewish and, as Garcetti put it, Jews are an affectionate “hugging kind of people.”

But in his response to NPR’s questions for this story, Garcetti had a different answer.

“I don’t recall ever seeing Rick Jacobs kiss anybody, aside from social kisses on the cheek to say hello,” Garcetti wrote in an email.

NPR sought clarification of Garcetti’s answer, given that he had previously testified seeing Jacobs kiss people on the lips.

“There’s no contradiction,” Garcetti wrote in a follow-up email. “I only ever saw Rick kiss others during the normal course of social greetings, and I never witnessed any inappropriate behavior. I’ve given this testimony consistently.”

2. At LA City Hall, allegations of unwanted massages, kisses, sexual innuendo and racist comments

When Garcetti began running for LA mayor in 2013, Jacobs raised more than $2 million to support Garcetti’s campaign and attack his opponent.

Shortly thereafter, Garcetti hired Jacobs as his deputy chief of staff and gave him a special title, “executive vice mayor.” Together, Garcetti and Jacobs helped create a nonprofit called the Mayor’s Fund for Los Angeles. The organization raises private, tax-deductible donations from individuals, corporations and charities to help pay for initiatives in the city. Since its founding, the organization has faced questions about whether corporations, wealthy donors and even the government of Qatar, which is known for censorship and repression, were using contributions to win favor with Garcetti. And while the Mayor’s Fund is technically independent from the city government, it had an office at LA City Hall. (After Karen Bass became LA mayor, the organization moved its office out of City Hall and embraced new ethics guidelines regarding donations.)

In addition to the Mayor’s Fund, Jacobs also worked with Garcetti to create a nonprofit called Accelerator for America, which helped boost Garcetti’s presidential ambitions, as well as a political action committee called the Democratic Midterm Victory Fund, which raised money from big donors in Hollywood and business. Among the PAC’s donors were the tech billionaires Elon Musk and David Sacks.

“Rick Jacobs brought Eric Garcetti to the ball,” said Seligman, the former Garcetti communications director. “Rick Jacobs introduced him to the biggest donors he has. Rick Jacobs was his ticket.”

Naomi Seligman, who was Garcetti's communications director from 2015 to 2017, has come forward to say she believes he lied under oath.

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Jessica Pons for NPR

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In Garcetti’s world, Jacobs “had more power than any other adviser,” said Emmerling, the other former Garcetti communications director.

In a 2019 email to some of his top advisers, Garcetti wrote, “I have led a new culture at City Hall that has been recognized as the best in the country.”

Behind the scenes, the picture was much darker, and often beset by internal rivalries.

Jacobs himself told city investigators that City Hall was an environment of “literal hatred.”

Five city employees testified that Jacobs subjected them to unwanted, inappropriate or otherwise discomfiting physical contact at work, including a forcible kiss, massages, squeezes and tight hugs.

Other City Hall employees testified that they witnessed physical contact between Jacobs and other employees. Former Chief of Staff Ana Guerrero, who remains close to Garcetti, told city investigators that Jacobs used hugs to “assert his dominance” with lower-level employees, though she did not describe the contact as sexual harassment. A former press secretary for Garcetti testified that Jacobs sexually harassed her fiancé at a dinner party.

Julie Ciardullo, then chief legal counsel in the mayor’s office, testified about an incident that she said Garcetti personally witnessed, in which Jacobs allegedly cornered her in a cramped elevator and pushed against her body, joking about the “tight fit.” He was “joking around” and “invading my personal space,” even after she told him to “cut it out,” Ciardullo testified. Jacobs stopped only after Garcetti intervened, she said. Ciardullo said that she did not consider the incident sexual harassment. Garcetti’s spokesperson told the LA Times that he did not remember the incident, but Ciardullo’s “description is consistent with how [Garcetti] would handle any situation where he witnesses someone behaving unprofessionally.”

Multiple witnesses testified that Jacobs regularly made sexual comments and jokes to employees.

In addition to Jacobs’ racist reference to his Asian American assistant — which three witnesses testified to — investigators for Senate Republicans reported that Jacobs used the term “yellow people” to describe participants at a U.S.-China summit. Paul Kadzielski, a former digital director in the Garcetti administration, testified that “occasionally [Jacobs] would make jokes of a racial nature that would make me uncomfortable.”

The testimony and other evidence in the case suggest that concern about Jacobs’ workplace behavior was widely known.

“My impression was that Rick’s behavior was common knowledge among people who were my superiors,” testified Anna Bahr, a former Garcetti press secretary, “and my expectation of any repercussions for him was zero.”

Emmerling told NPR that Jacobs was seen as “beyond untouchable,” so people were reluctant to speak out. “Everyone would just say, ‘Well, he’s always gonna win. You’re never gonna push back against him or any of his behavior and prevail. So you truly don’t have a choice but to just accept it,’” Emmerling said.

Garcetti testified — and reiterated to NPR — that he never witnessed any inappropriate behavior of any kind from Jacobs.

“As someone who has spent years advocating for victims of sexual harassment, I was deeply saddened to learn about these allegations during the course of the litigation,” Garcetti told NPR in an email. “What frustrates me most is that I was only made aware of these allegations years later, in [a] lawsuit and through the press during a campaign to damage my political career. I wish these individuals — and their supervisors — had come forward while this behavior was allegedly taking place. Had that happened, I would have taken immediate action to stop it.”

3. A hush agreement kept an allegation of workplace misconduct and retaliation secret

One revelation from the records obtained by NPR is that the sexual harassment lawsuit against the city of Los Angeles was not the first time Jacobs faced a formal claim of workplace misconduct.

Because of a confidentiality agreement, the details of the accusation were hidden from the public. NPR is reporting them now for the first time.

While at City Hall, Jacobs served as the board treasurer of the Mayor’s Fund and also as a kind of liaison between the fund and Garcetti. After he left his city position, Garcetti wrote in an email that Jacobs “will continue to keep me apprised of and engaged in the excellent work the Fund is doing.”

In 2018, Jeremy Bernard, a former social secretary in the Obama White House, took on the role of CEO of the Mayor’s Fund. Bernard had been a close friend of Jacobs. But that relationship changed when Bernard became alarmed by Jacobs’ treatment of Mayor’s Fund employees.

Jeremy Bernard, the former CEO of the Mayor’s Fund for Los Angeles, said he found part of Garcetti’s testimony “hard to believe.”

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Jessica Pons for NPR

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Bernard testified that Jacobs “could be quite rude” to female employees and treated them poorly in comparison with male employees.

According to testimony from the case obtained by NPR, this was not an isolated concern for women in and around the Garcetti administration. Multiple people who worked in and around City Hall said under oath that Jacobs bullied and abused female colleagues.

Jacobs was “mean spirited and condescending,” was “very disrespectful and very demeaning” and “created a hostile work environment,” testified one senior adviser to Garcetti. He was “dismissive of women in general” and was “generally disliked among women at City Hall,” said a fundraiser for Garcetti. “He was belittling, demeaning, at times, cruel,” said a former press secretary for Garcetti. He was “short-tempered, very snappy and snide,” testified one former administration official. He was “controlling” and “made my life more difficult,” said another former official.

Bernard testified that he reported concerns about Jacobs’ treatment of female employees to the chair of the board of the Mayor’s Fund, Kathleen Brown, in April 2020. (Brown is a former California state treasurer, and her father, Pat Brown, and her brother, Jerry Brown, both served as governor of the state.)

A few days later, Bernard participated in a conference call with Brown and Jacobs. On that call, Bernard said, he was fired.

Bernard testified that he was “shocked and dismayed” by what took place and that he believes his firing was an act of retaliation for reporting workplace misconduct.

“Did you form an impression that Rick Jacobs retaliates against people that complain about him?” Bernard was asked in his deposition.

“Yeah. I think that is a fair assumption,” he replied.

There’s a reason this complaint has not been publicly reported before.

Bernard and Jacobs were bound by a “bilateral confidentiality” agreement surrounding the circumstances of Bernard’s firing, deposition testimony indicates. Bernard declined to comment to NPR in any way about the circumstances of his departure from the organization.

An attorney representing the Mayor’s Fund for Los Angeles, Lisa Von Eschen, told NPR in an email, “It is the policy of the Mayor’s Fund for Los Angeles not to comment on personnel matters,” and said that because of changes in the board membership, no current board members were involved in the decision. She did not answer a question about whether the organization still intends to enforce any confidentiality agreement about Bernard’s dismissal.

Brown, the former board chair, did not respond to multiple messages from NPR seeking comment.

Bernard testified that “I assume [Garcetti] knows” about the reason for his firing, but he was not certain.

Garcetti told NPR that he was not involved in personnel decisions of the Mayor’s Fund and was not aware of the circumstances of Bernard’s exit.

“Aside from one instance of a colleague complaining that Rick had taken credit for their work, and Rick calling that person territorial — a professional conflict which I helped resolve — no complaints about Rick were ever raised with me,” Garcetti told NPR. “As I’ve said too many times to count over the years — if anyone had ever made me aware of any inappropriate behavior, I would have acted to stop it.”

4. Multiple allegations that Garcetti lied under oath

Two eyewitnesses testified that they heard Garcetti personally express concern about Jacobs’ behavior before the lawsuit made allegations of misconduct public.

“The mayor and his wife had a conversation in the car about Rick Jacobs’ inappropriate behavior,” testified LAPD officer Matthew Garza, who often drove with Garcetti around the city. “I believe they used the wording that it was going to eventually ‘bite them in the ass.’”

Garcetti and his wife testified that they did not have this conversation.

Bernard, the former CEO of the Mayor’s Fund for Los Angeles, testified that Garcetti told him something to the effect of, “I can’t believe Rick worked out at City Hall and that we got through it without a lawsuit.”

“I have never said that to anybody, publicly or privately,” Garcetti testified in his own deposition.

“And were you ever concerned that while Rick Jacobs worked at City Hall, that he might cause a lawsuit somehow?” asked Greg Smith, the attorney for Garza.

“No, I was not,” Garcetti replied.

NPR showed Garcetti’s testimony to Bernard.

“I’m surprised that he denied it. I heard it. And I heard him say it numerous times,” he said. “I find it hard to believe that he doesn’t remember it.”

Garcetti told NPR that he stands by his testimony.

He was also asked in his deposition whether he could recall Jacobs telling jokes at work.

When asked in his deposition whether he made “jokes of a sexual nature” in front of Garcetti’s LAPD protective detail, Jacobs replied, “Oh, it is possible.”

“Have you ever done it in front of the mayor as well?” Smith asked Jacobs.

“I don’t recall,” Jacobs responded.

Garcetti was more definitive.

“I can recall him laughing at jokes, but I can’t recall him telling a joke,” Garcetti testified.

“Did he ever tell any jokes dealing with men’s body parts that you recall?” Smith asked Garcetti.

“In my presence, no,” he replied.

“And you would have never laughed at — never laughed at anything. If you never heard it, you never laughed, right?” Smith added.

“I would’ve — not only did I not laugh, I did not hear it, I did not laugh. Had I heard it, I would not have laughed, and I would’ve taken action,” said Garcetti.

Emmerling told NPR that in her position as communications director, she attended a meeting with both Garcetti and Jacobs in which Jacobs made a joke “about snorting cocaine off of a man’s penis.”

“I think we all laughed,” Emmerling said, including Garcetti.

Garcetti denied Emmerling’s account to NPR.

Suzi Emmerling, who was Garcetti’s communications director from 2017 to 2019, has come forward to say she believes he lied under oath.

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Jessica Pons for NPR

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“Absolutely not. This didn’t happen,” Garcetti wrote in his email to NPR. “I can say with certainty that I would remember a grotesque joke like that, and there’s simply no world in which I would allow that kind of a comment in a professional setting.”

Garcetti maintains that he honestly addressed all questions about the harassment allegations. He told NPR that any criticism that he failed to properly respond to harassment allegations as LA mayor was “silly.”

“I have personally supported victims of harassment my entire life and will continue to do so until the day I die,” Garcetti told NPR in an email. “I have been very honest even as this touched my own office that every one who has made an accusation deserves to be heard and investigated. What I cannot do is lie about my experience — what I have witnessed, what I have heard, what I have known.”

Emmerling told NPR that she “absolutely” believes Garcetti is lying.

“Once you tell your first lie, then you’re dug in,” she said. “And he has no choice now but to continue lying.”

Barrie Hardymon edited this story, and Monika Evstatieva produced it. Research from Barbara Van Woerkom, with art direction and photo editing by Virginia Lozano and graphic by Juweek Adolphe. Copy editing by Preeti Aroon with help from Desiree Hicks. Audience engagement support from Danielle Nett and Ameera Butt.
Copyright 2024 NPR

Solar developers say they’re facing crippling losses and potential bankruptcy amid a stall in a state-funded solar power program.

California’s “self-generation incentive program,” or SGIP, was reworked in 2024 to help low-income households install solar and battery-storage systems for free.

But SGIP has been plagued by delays, bureaucracy, poor communication and stalled payments, according to five developers LAist spoke with. Small developers say they’ve been hit especially hard by a lottery system that they argue favors larger developers.

And customers who stood to benefit the most from free installation of solar and battery storage — low-income households in the hottest and most fire-prone areas of the state — are in limbo, waiting months for the bill savings and energy reliability they were promised ahead of what is expected to be a record-hot summer.

The issue highlights the challenges to expanding access to clean energy as fossil fuel pollution continues to accelerate climate change and is another hit to an industry that has faced significant setbacks in recent years from changes to state-level rooftop solar programs and the Trump administration’s cuts to clean energy incentives.

How we got here 

The state has offered incentives to large electric customers to install battery-storage systems since the energy crisis of the early 2000s. The latest version of the SGIP program aims to prioritize qualifying low-income residents.

In 2024, the state allocated $280 million in state funds to install solar and batteries for free on qualifying homes and apartments. The program is administered through the state’s investor-owned utilities and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. It officially launched last summer.

Here’s how it’s supposed to work: Developers identify projects they can take on, then apply for funding via a first-come-first-served reservation system. If requested funds exceed the total funding, then a lottery is triggered. If their project is approved, the developer does the work and covers the upfront costs of the installation with the understanding they’ll get paid back through SGIP within a year.

What’s happening in LADWP territory?

Solar panels dot the parking area at the DWP building in downtown Los Angeles.

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Lawrence K. Ho

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Getty Images

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As soon as the SGIP program launched last June, large developers quickly flooded the application system.

Sunrun, one of the nation’s largest solar developers, submitted applications requesting as much as 97% of the total funds available in Los Angeles Department of Water and Power territory, according to public data reviewed by LAist. (Sunrun declined to be interviewed for this story. LADWP didn’t agree to be interviewed about the breakdown of applications.)

LADWP said it is in the process of reviewing the 451 applications it received. So far, DWP officials have approved one: $28,000 for a single-family home project, the utility told LAist.

Smaller developers told LAist they’re concerned that there is no cap on how much any single developer can receive through the program. General market versions of SGIP not targeted for low-income properties have developer caps of 20% of the incentive funds, according to the program’s handbook.

“The purpose of the program, I believe, is not to just enrich the biggest players or to allow them to have free project financing,” said Aaron Eriksson, owner of Escondido-based Solar Symphony Construction, which applied for projects in LADWP territory. “We all got kind of left out in the cold on that one.”

Robert Cudd, a research analyst with UCLA who has studied SGIP, said the program does incentivize developers lining up as many projects as possible ahead of time to “claim the largest possible share of that rebate pool.”

That’s often the case for similar programs that aim to serve low-income customers.

The state “is agnostic about who is doing this work,” Cudd said. “They just want to accelerate the energy transition.”

Only a few large companies — including Sunrun and GRID Alternatives, as well as growing startup Haven Energy — have developed specialized expertise in these kinds of complex programs that have higher upfront costs.

Small companies on the brink 

Delayed reimbursements have developers worried about projects in the works and about new paperwork requirements.

In February, the California Public Utilities Commission — five governor-appointed regulators who oversee the program — abruptly paused SGIP. In their ruling, they said that projects submitted varied widely in costs, with many exceeding incentives “significantly.”

The ruling flagged discrepancies such as the same wall battery reportedly costing as low as $8,600 and as high as $21,000. So the CPUC decided to require developers to submit additional receipts and documentation of their costs.

But developers LAist spoke with said only a fraction of applications were at the state’s predicted costs. The developers argue costs have gone up due to inflation, tariffs and cuts to clean energy tax credits. Projects serving low-income households also often require upgrades because of the buildings’ age.

Joshua Buswell-Charkow, deputy director of California Solar and Storage Association, a trade organization that represents more than 70 companies that participate in the SGIP program, said work is already underway in some cases.

“Some of our contractors are out literally millions of dollars right now,” he said. “ I'm worried that we're going to have folks go out of business because of this.”

That could be the case for Eriksson’s company, Solar Symphony. More than 100 of the company’s applications to install solar and battery systems at no cost to qualifying customers were approved by Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric. Now, Eriksson said, they don’t know if they’ll be paid for projects they’ve already installed.

“We were very excited by the potential to deliver truly no-cost, home-sited solar and batteries to California ratepayers,” Eriksson wrote in a statement to the public utilities commission. “The regulators effectively induced us to commit under one set of rules; we accepted and delivered — and now the terms are changing.”

Eriksson told LAist he could be out of business by June if the state doesn’t release the payments.

Other companies have indefinitely paused installing systems approved by program administrators.

“We've signed contracts with hundreds of low-income families. We've purchased the equipment,” said Vinnie Campo, co-founder of Haven Energy, one of the state’s largest SGIP installers, at a Public Utilities Commission meeting in late April. “Our crews are ready to install, but systems sold in good faith to customers … are sitting in warehouses instead of on homes.”

Seven representatives of solar companies, including a lawyer representing multiple companies in Southern California, expressed their concerns at that meeting.

Lionel Rodriguez of Glendale-based Solar Optimum was one.

“Many people are hurting,” Rodriguez said, “and it's destroying the integrity of our company and also the customer's trust.”

In early May, in response to such concerns, the Public Utilities Commission released another ruling saying administrators can start paying developers when certain documentation has been submitted but that they still could audit any company that receives funds. Meanwhile, utilities have until the end of June 2028 to spend the funds, or else they’ll be returned to the state’s general fund.

When Eduardo Mira started his senior year at Ánimo Pat Brown Charter High School, he thought politics was a “fool’s game.”

“All I saw from the media was just negativity and division and, like, political violence,” Mira said. “Nothing good, but now I do see the beauty in it.”

Mira credits government and economics teacher Joel Snyder with helping connect the problems he sees in the Florence-Firestone neighborhood surrounding the school, including pollution and sidewalks littered with dog feces, to potential solutions in local government.

“We focus on some of the nitty-gritty work of democracy that's not as election-focused,” Snyder said of his curriculum. “Then hopefully we are able to turn those skills into an argument for why their legislators matter, which translates to voting in the future.”

For example, Snyder asks local elected officials and their representatives to visit his class and his students have traveled to the State Capitol. Last school year, his classes participated in a program where community members 16-and-up got to vote on how Los Angeles County spent $500,000.

However, research on civics education indicates classes like Snyder’s are the exception, not the norm at many schools.

Researchers who study youth civic engagement, including Mindy Romero, director of the Center for Inclusive Democracy at USC, point to a lack of related education as one factor in persistently low youth voter turnout.

“[Students] turn 18, and all of a sudden we magically expect them to not only know how to vote, but to think it's important and want to vote,” Romero said.

Schools struggle to teach civics

American schools are struggling to teach the basics of democracy.

One indication is that students' proficiency on the National Assessment of Educational Progress civics test is dropping— only 1 in 5 eighth-graders met the standard in 2022, the most recent results available. Students’ civics understanding is also declining globally.

California requires students to take a one-semester American government and civics course to graduate, but the quality of the class and student engagement varies. For example, schools that enroll low-income students are less likely to offer related extracurricular activities, including student media and government.

In 2020, the California State Board of Education created an award for students who “demonstrate excellence in civic learning,” in response to legislation signed in 2017.

In L.A. County, about 3.7% of graduating seniors earned the State Seal of Civic Engagement in the 2024-2025 school year compared to about 5% of graduates across California.

“We somewhere along the line disconnected the notion of high schools and K through 12 schools as like, bedrocks of teaching democracy and democratic practice,” said Snyder, the social studies teacher in South L.A. “I think a lot of that nationally is a real fear of folks looking or feeling like they're being partisan.”

More than a third of teachers who responded to a recent survey by nonprofit iCivics reported changing or removing lesson plans because of the current political climate and 1 in 5 have considered leaving their job.

“Whatever we can do to support teachers to feel comfortable and safe to prioritize talking about civics period … I think is really important,” said Romero, of USC.

Even Snyder, who's been a teacher for more than two decades and written publicly about his approach to civics education, paused during our interview to consider whether to share that as part of his class, students register to vote. He estimated about 1,000 students have registered to vote in his class since California started allowing students as young as 16 to sign up to be automatically added to the voter rolls at 18. An LAist review of the state’s preregistration program found relatively few eligible teens participate.

School as a ‘primary connector of American democracy’

Snyder said the 2016 election marked a shift in his approach to teaching civics.

“The last decade has been a lot of thinking of myself as the primary connector of American democracy to not only my students, but to their families in our broader community,” Snyder said.

Residents of the Florence-Firestone neighborhood are primarily Latino and Black and about 40% were born outside the United States. More than half of adults have not graduated from high school, according to data compiled by L.A. County.

Eduardo Mira, 17, said Snyder's class changed how he viewed politics. "Now's my chance to intertwine with politics because eventually politics will intertwine with your life,” Mira said. “I know that every single choice really does matter and can affect your life.”

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Jacky Hernandez, 18, said homelessness and rent are top of mind as she thinks about voting for the first time this year. “We have all these houses, but people can't afford to rent or buy a house in this economy right now.” Hernandez said.

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About five times a year Snyder asks students to start conversations with family members about class topics from the principles of democracy to the three branches of government and the legal immigration process.

Mira, the graduating senior, said as a result he’s talked about politics with both conservative and liberal members of his family.

 ”You'll be surprised by how much Democrats want the economy to get better and how much Republicans want to increase education too,” Mira said. “It's really engaging. It shows that we really do care for the same issues, but we're just divided. We're not united.”

Mira, and another senior Jacky Hernandez, said discussions about current events are part of what makes Snyder’s classes so interesting.

“ I feel like sometimes in certain classes, we just get, like, packets or books and just told, ’Oh, just read it and look over it,’” said Hernandez, who’s taking AP government. “But we're not getting told about, like, what's actually happening in the current times that does affect our future.”

Both remembered talking about the No Kings protests and Charlie Kirk’s killing in class. The latter topic contributed to the investigation of hundreds of educators nationwide, including in California.

“It really did get me engaged and really made me realize, like, ‘wow, politics really is everywhere,’” Mira said.

He and Hernandez also signed up as student poll workers for the upcoming election.

“Honestly, I didn't care about voting [before],” Hernandez said. “I didn't see the importance of it. I just thought it was like, ‘oh, you find a candidate, you pick what you like, and that's what you do.’”

Now she feels differently. Hernandez said homelessness and expensive rent will be top of mind when she votes for the first time in June’s primary.

“We do make a difference,” Hernandez said. “Eventually we are gonna take the role of the older people and our voice does matter.”

Three candidates for the job of leading Los Angeles laid out competing visions this week for how they would handle the city’s homelessness crisis and disagreed about Inside Safe — Mayor Karen Bass' program for moving people off the streets.

During part of a two-day forum Monday, Bass defended her signature program, which clears tent encampments by offering motels rooms and other temporary shelter, as well as her administration's record on homelessness.

She promised, if she won a second term, to build a larger temporary shelter system and to fix problems that have slowed payments from the city to nonprofit organizations.

“L.A. has decreased street homelessness two years in a row, 17.5%,” Bass said, speaking to a gathering of homeless-service providers. “The only reason that happened is because of everybody in this room.”

A day later, Councilmember Nithya Raman and tech entrepreneur Adam Miller suggested alternatives to Inside Safe, noting its cost.

Raman said she would scale up a different city program — Time Limited Subsidies, sometimes referred to as rapid rehousing. The program provides temporary rental assistance at about one-third the cost of Inside Safe, according to the city administrative officer.

Miller said he would phase out Inside Safe entirely and replace it with tiny-home villages at a fraction of the price of Bass' program.

Homelessness is a major issue for voters in the June primary. More than 43,000 people remain unhoused in the city of L.A. despite years of record city spending — about $1 billion annually in recent years, according to the City Controller’s Office.

Fourteen candidates are running for L.A. mayor. The top five leading contenders were invited to the forum held in downtown L.A. and hosted by homeless shelter operator Hope the Mission.

Candidates Spencer Pratt and the Rev. Rae Huang declined to participate.

Mayor Karen Bass spoke Monday at the Original Pantry Cafe in downtown L.A. at at event hosted by homeless shelter Hope The Mission.

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Housing First?

The candidates disagreed on “housing first,” an approach to homelessness assistance that prioritizes getting unhoused people into permanent housing without first requiring them to be sober, employed or meet other conditions.

Bass said she believes in the policy but argued the city has applied it too rigidly for decades, leaving people unsheltered while they wait years for permanent housing to be built.

“I agree with the notion of housing first, but I don't think people should be on the street waiting for you to build something,” Bass said.

Raman, an L.A. City Council member since December 2020, said the question isn't what comes first but what each person needs. The biggest gap right now is mental health resources, she said.

“When I see someone who's on the street who has deep mental health challenges, I can't get any help for them,” Raman said. “I can't get somebody out there to help them.”

Miller, who is CEO of homelessness nonprofit Better Angels, said L.A. needs to move away from housing-first policies in favor of more temporary shelters coupled with treatment and other support.

“Housing first doesn't work,” Miller said. “We have to stabilize them in interim housing first with services and then move them to permanent housing.

"That's the only way we're gonna keep people off the street.”

L.A. City Council member Nithya Raman spoke Tuesday at the Original Pantry Cafe downtown.

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Inside Safe

Since late 2022, the city has spent more than $390 million on Inside Safe to clear 121 homeless encampments and place about 5,800 people into interim housing, according to the regional Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, known as LAHSA.

About 25% of those people are currently living in permanent housing, according to LAHSA. About 30% of them reside in temporary shelters. About 40% have returned to homelessness.

According to a February report by Los Angeles' city administrative officer, the average nightly cost of an Inside Safe motel room is about $225.81, or roughly $82,420 a year. That’s compared to $86.37 per night for other shelter options.

Bass defended the program but said it needs to bring down costs. She said she’s exploring the possibility of building and operating shelter sites on city-owned land to reduce leasing costs.

Raman said people are staying in temporary shelter for more than a year — comparing it to being left in an emergency room.

“I believe in encampment resolution,” she said. “What I don't believe in is bringing people indoors and then just leaving them there with no support and no resources.”

Miller said he would try a different approach, tiny-home villages, but acknowledged that ending Inside Safe would take time.

“You can't turn it off Day 1 because we’d have too many people that are back on the street,” he said.

The average construction cost of a tiny-home village is about $42,000 per unit, according to the nonprofit A-Mark Foundation.

Adam Miller, CEO of homelessness nonprofit Better Angels, argues L.A. needs a political outsider to get the homelessness crisis under control.

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Ending homelessness 

Each of the candidates expressed a desire to make big reductions in the city's unhoused population over the next few years, and perhaps eliminate it entirely.

Bass pointed to a 17.5% reduction in street homelessness over two years and said her goal for a second term is to end unsheltered homelessness — meaning those living on the streets — not just manage it.

“There's no reason for us to have street homelessness by the end of the next four years,” she said. “There just really isn't.”

Raman said she shares that ambition. She had already pledged to reduce street homelessness by at least 50% before the 2028 Olympics and "eliminate long-term encampments."

“I think we can end street homelessness in this city," she said, "but we cannot just pay lip service to it.”

Miller’s campaign platform includes a goal to reduce street homelessness by 60% and reduce homeless encampments by 80%. Miller has not previously held an elected government office, but he argued the city needs fresh leadership more than it needs political experience.

“L.A. has lost hope,” he said. "We need to have the belief that this is a problem that can and should be solved.”

The primary is June 2. If no candidate receives more than 50% of the vote, the top two vote-getters will advance to face each other in a November runoff.

Esther Mejia and Kelly Merchant had a question Friday afternoon for their professors: Where were you?

The UC Riverside public policy students were among the likely hundreds of thousands in California who lost access to the all-important academic software Canvas when it was brought down by a hacker group Thursday afternoon. Losing Canvas meant losing assignments, tests, and required reading material along with a way to communicate with instructors. The timing was especially bad for UC students, who were hunkering down for midterms or finals.

“This is a very crucial time for students to be able to access their coursework. So I definitely do think that professors should reach out,” Mejia said in an interview. “And they did not.”

Merchant heard from only one professor by Friday who addressed the downed website. She learned about the hack attack on the social media site Reddit after she was logged out of her account while finishing an assignment.

The Riverside students’ experience underscores just how central Canvas has become to higher education in California — the outage likely affected more than 1 million of the state’s university students. The hack has raised serious questions about how schools should be vetting and balancing their use of online platforms, to what extent they may be held liable for breaches, and what role policymakers should play in protecting student data and regulating edtech.

By Monday evening, the company behind Canvas had told customers, including the University of California, that it had struck an agreement with the hacking group. In an email shared with CalMatters by UC's systemwide Office of the President, the company's CEO stated that “we reached an agreement with the unauthorized actor involved in this incident” that returns data and assures it is no longer held by the attacker nor any other outside parties. Further, “we have been informed that no Instructure customers will be extorted.”

CalMatters asked the company, Instructure, if it paid a ransom, but did not immediately hear back.

The attack seems to have begun on or around April 29, when Instructure “detected unusual activity,” according to a class-action suit filed in a Texas federal court. The attack exploited a vulnerability in Canvas’s free tool for teachers.

On May 4, some Cal State campuses experienced a brief shutdown but were operational within 20 to 30 minutes, the university system said.

By May 7, Thursday, the platform was offline. The University of California system blocked access to Canvas the same day, and wrote on its website that it won’t “be restored until we are confident the system is secure. We understand this disruption is concerning.”

The hackers, a group calling itself ShinyHunters, claimed to have obtained sensitive data, including billions of messages, and threatened to release the data if they weren’t paid a ransom. The CEO of Instructure has said that core “learning data (course content, submissions, credentials) was not compromised” and Cal State has said that Canvas does not store social security numbers.

On the evening of May 7, one of Merchant’s professors, she said, shared the material students needed to complete an assignment due Friday. The professor did so using a Discord group they created for the class at the beginning of the term. Merchant appreciated the initiative, but observed that not every student checks Discord as regularly as they would their email account.

By May 9, Saturday, UC Riverside mostly restored access to the platform, with other universities coming online in the following days. Mejia had a quiz and assignment due Monday at 2 p.m. She received a note from the professor of that class only at 9 a.m. that day through Canvas, she said. The professor granted a two-day extension.

Merchant wants more professors with a communication back-up plan, especially since Canvas has been down before. “Whether it’s a cybersecurity thing or routine Canvas maintenance, it’s going to continue to be a risk. And we have to prepare for it.”

“These situations are fluid and campuses and UCOP communicated as quickly and completely as feasible,” said UC Office of the President spokesperson Stett Holbrook.

For many colleges and high schools, Canvas has become indispensable, with teachers using it to give quizzes, message students, post grades, and more.

Almost 9,000 colleges, K-12 schools and school districts, and offices of education around the world were reportedly affected by the Canvas outage, according to the hacker group and other media, along with likely millions of students and teachers. California seemed to be hit especially hard. The institutions relying on the system and affected by the cyberattack included Stanford, at least some campuses at the University of California, USC, all 22 California State University campuses and all 116 of the state’s community colleges.

The number of students ultimately affected by the breach could be staggering. The Cal State system alone enrolls more than 400,000 students. The UC system, where hackers claimed to hit six of 10 campuses, enrolls about 300,000. The hacker group listed the Los Angeles Unified and Fresno Unified school districts as among their targets — they too enroll more than 400,000 students combined.

Deputy chancellor of the LA Community College District, Nicole Albo-Lopez, told CalMatters that Canvas was being used by students in thousands of courses, including as a “repository for gradebooks, sharing of course materials, and messaging.” The district is among the largest community college districts in the country, with nearly 200,000 students annually.

Canvas, she said Friday, still hadn’t informed them of what’s been exposed in the hack. “We’re supposed to receive specific information about what was accessed in our specific system, but we have not received that yet,” she said.

‘Eggs in one basket’

One expert said the incident highlights the problem of relying on “all-in” solutions for online education tools.

The attraction of software like Canvas is that it allows institutions without technical expertise to easily manage everything on a single platform. But the hack shows the danger of relying on such centralized systems, where a breach of one company exposes the data of the countless institutions that rely on it.

“The beauty of these software as a service systems and what they sell is, ‘Hey, your staff members don't need to run this, we'll just handle it,’” said Jake Chanenson, an education technology researcher and PhD student at the University of Chicago.

In the best case, those companies have diligent cybersecurity teams protecting student data.

Many schools without tech departments, by contrast, may only be equipped to give any new tools “a cursory, at best, privacy and security assessment,” Chanenson said. Small schools, especially, may then struggle to recover from a breach or outage.

But a centralized system also means that only a single point needs to be hacked for every school that uses the software to be affected.

Chanenson, who is currently researching “critical infrastructure" in schools, said that “when you put all your eggs in one basket across schools, it makes these targets very attractive.”

One state lawmaker wants a legislative audit into California's heavy reliance on Canvas. “The Canvas breach exposes the growing risks of concentrating massive amounts of student records, academic systems and institutional operations into a single platform," said Sen. Melissa Hurtado, a Democrat from Bakersfield, in a written statement.

What now?

It may be too early to identify the consequences of the hack for schools and for Canvas. It’s still not clear, for example, how the breach happened, or the full extent of data that was compromised.

At minimum, schools will want to reassess how much information they’re willing to give over to third-party software companies in the name of efficiency. Those companies, Chanenson said, should also take a look at their policies around data collection and retention to minimize how much sensitive information they store.

“You think in your head that any data set that you have has a non-zero probability of being leaked or breached or some sort of privacy loss, then you want to start thinking about things like data minimization,” he said.

Past data breaches have led to legal consequences for the companies and institutions involved, including action by state attorneys general. There are federal legal protections for data belonging to children under 13, through the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, as well to students, under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. In California, the Student Online Personal Information Protection Act protects data for K–12 students. Lawmakers in the state are also actively considering additional data protections.

The state has grappled with previous compromises of school data. Los Angeles Unified School District has faced a series of class-action lawsuits related to data privacy breaches. Most recently, the district disclosed last year that a telehealth vendor it worked with experienced a breach.

Chanenson points out that schools are prime targets for hackers since they hold immensely sensitive data but often lack the technical prowess of other large institutions, like banks.

“They’re happening with enough of a frequency that it’s more of a when, not an if,” he said.

CalMatters reporter Adam Echelman contributed to this story.

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