The Brief

Before her political career ended in disgrace, former L.A. city council president Nury Martinez was known as a tough-talking champion for the working poor and immigrant families. But after audio recordings were leaked in October 2022 that included her and other Latino leaders making racist and disparaging remarks, she became the poster child for anti-Blackness and colorism in some Latino communities.

About Episode 2 — The Rise and Fall

Episode 2 of the LAist Studios podcast Imperfect Paradise: Nury & the Secret Tapes explores Martinez’s background and her political career, and delves into the tensions roiling the L.A. city council in the months leading up to the secretly-recorded meeting.

In this episode, LAist Studios host Antonia Cereijido details how Martinez’s upbringing shaped her politics and leadership style.

Why you should listen

The tapes exposed problems that have long plagued L.A. politics. A year after the scandal, issues persist over anti-Black racism and colorism within the Latino/Latinx community, Democratic Party divisions, and the struggle to define Latino political power.

Growing up 

Martinez grew up in the northeast San Fernando Valley, the child of immigrant parents from Zacatecas, Mexico. Her mother was a seamstress and her father was a dishwasher. When she was 5, her family purchased a home in Pacoima from one of the last white families on the block — by the late 1970s, the area was becoming a landing pad for Mexican immigrants. Martinez’s parents were undocumented, and her father was deported several times.

A flower shop on Van Nuys Blvd in Pacoima, the neighorhood of L.A. where Nury Martinez grew up.

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While other Latino politicians of her era were galvanized by the 1994 passage of Proposition 187 — which would deny a broad range of social services to undocumented immigrants — and the subsequent vilification of migrants from Latin America by then-Governor Pete Wilson, that was not Martinez’s experience. Her political ambitions weren’t sparked on the streets, but rather at home.

Martinez’s interest in politics began in the fifth grade, when her class was doing a mock presidential election. She asked her father to explain the difference between the Republican and Democratic parties. According to Martinez, he responded, “The best way I can describe it to you is that Republicans tend to be rich, and Democrats tend to be poor. And I said, 'so Dad, I declare that we're gonna be Democrats'.”

After many years of being a seamstress, Martinez’s mother had finally gotten a job on an assembly line at the Price Pfister plant in Pacoima, manufacturing shower heads and faucets. It was a union job with good wages and benefits. After the passage of NAFTA in 1992, the company announced it was outsourcing.

“I remember walking into my mom and dad's bedroom, and my mom was sitting at the edge of her bed crying. I am like, ‘What happened? Mom?’ And she couldn't even get the words out of her mouth,” Martinez recalled. “The company had said that they were gonna shut down and they were gonna move to Mexico.”

At this point, Martinez’s mother, and other employees of Price Pfister, began to organize to keep the company in Pacoima. Martinez said she began to notice how few of the elected officials they contacted were Latino and how even fewer were women. This, she later said, was her political awakening. Her interest in politics sprang from a desire to help working class people like her parents.

"My politics come from a lived experience. That's it," Martinez said. "I know what it feels like to be poor."

Running for office and developing her style 

Martinez first ran for public office in 2003, when she campaigned to be on the San Fernando City Council. Then, she served on the L.A. Unified School District board. Finally, in 2013, she ran for a seat on the L.A. City Council and won. She was the second-ever elected Latina city councilmember in Los Angeles, the first in 20 years. When Martinez was sworn in, she wasn't just the only woman on the council. The mayor, the city attorney and the controller were all men.

Former L.A. city council president Nury Martinez with belongings from her council office, now stored in boxes in the living room of her home.

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Martinez quickly developed a reputation for being a blunt, brash communicator. In 2018, when dockless scooters were first introduced to L.A., she flatly reminded her fellow council members that her largely working-class constituents did not care about them.

“I don't have any dockless bicycles or scooters or any of that fancy stuff you guys got in your districts,” Martinez told the transportation committee. “We're just simply trying to cross the street without getting killed, just to put it all in perspective.”

Mike Trujillo, a veteran Democratic strategist who grew up in Martinez’s part of the San Fernando Valley, said voters felt she reflected them.

“She spoke like she was raised in Pacoima,” he said. “A little bit Valley, a little bit street. I think she's proud of that, and she should be. She got elected.”

Martinez used her brashness to her advantage on the city council, helping her whip votes behind the scenes for then-council President Herb Wesson. But it became a liability once she became council president in January 2020.

Nithya Raman, one of the more progressive council members who often found herself at odds with Martinez, thought Martinez was using her power as gatekeeper of the city council’s agenda to punish people she disagreed with.

“Things that I thought would be a no-brainer would take weeks, even months to get put on the agenda,” Raman said. “We had so many examples where even the most basic things would take a long time to get put through the council. And we couldn't always find any reason for why those delays would happen.”

Martinez’s bid for the council presidency had also put her at odds with former allies Marqueece Harris-Dawson and Mike Bonin — divisions that would deepen during the pandemic.

Divisions emerge during the pandemic 

We interviewed multiple current and former L.A. city council members for this podcast, and they all agreed that being on the council during the COVID-19 pandemic was incredibly difficult. Instead of debating about housekeeping issues like paving streets and picking up trash, council members were debating how to help keep people from contracting a deadly virus and losing their homes. Deep divisions began to emerge between the progressive and moderate wings of the body about issues like whether to cancel rent, and protesters took to the streets.

Many Los Angeles city council meetings were held remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this Dec. 15, 2020 meeting, new city councilmembers from even-numbered districts took the oath of office. Top row, L-R: John Lee, Nithya Raman, Mark Ridley-Thomas; middle, L-R: Paul Krekorian, Kevin De León, Gil Cedillo; bottom, L-R: Nury Martinez

“They descended on my home at six o'clock in the morning,” Martinez recalled. “And they were relentless. My cell phone number was posted on Twitter. So I had thousands and thousands of voicemail messages calling me every name in the book, threatening me, because I wouldn't cancel rent.”

The growing homelessness crisis in L.A. was another point of tension. In the fall of 2021, Martinez and the other moderates on the council voted in favor of maintaining a ban on homeless encampments near schools, parks, daycares and libraries.

The way she saw it, her district and other poor districts (mostly made up of Latino immigrant families) were bearing the brunt of the homelessness crisis. But for the more progressive council members, the ban on homeless encampments effectively criminalized homelessness, and it was another example of the city cracking down on the most vulnerable.

"I had conversations with Nury and I said, 'You know, if we do this [encampment ban] a bunch of Black people are gonna get arrested. We all know that. Even LAPD will tell you that that's what's gonna happen. We just went through that with the war on drugs. Why would we do it again?'" Harris-Dawson recalled.

But for Martinez, the safety and quality of life of her working class constituents was most important.

"The homeowners in my district would work really hard to have that little home," she says in the episode. "People in Sun Valley are housekeepers, hotel workers, janitors, construction workers, they're the people who we rely on for the city to move forward. They don't deserve clean streets or a clean neighborhood? Are we being serious?"

Deteriorating relationships

Over the next two years, relations on the council deteriorated, and Martinez found herself more and more frustrated and isolated.

Being council president, Martinez said, “made me a harder person because I had to defend myself. I developed a wall because no matter how you looked at things, um, no matter the politics of the council, somebody always wanted my job.”

Then, in the summer of 2021, two people walked onto Martinez’s property, spray painted her driveway and vandalized her car, dumping what looked like acid onto it. The political disagreements on the council suddenly felt very personal to Martinez.

“Can you imagine if that thing would've blown up?” Martinez said. “But I heard very little outcry when that happened to me. It almost felt that the two-and-a-half years of being council president and all these protests and all this criticism just became normal. I just needed to take it. Nobody cared. It didn't matter.”

By the fall of 2021, the tension on the L.A. city council reached a boiling point — just as the council launched into the once-in-a-decade process of redistricting, or drawing new council district boundaries based on new census data. For incumbents like Martinez, this process is live or die. You can lose huge numbers of voters who support you, or you can gain them.

Redistricting is the reason Martinez, council members Kevin de León and Gil Cedillo, and labor leader Ron Herrera were meeting that day in October 2021 when they were secretly recorded. They didn’t like the maps that were proposed for Cedillo’s district, voicing concerns that his constituency would be diluted and he would lose his seat.

Protestors demonstrate outside L.A. City Hall calling for the resignations of councilmembers Kevin de León and Gil Cedillo and Council President Nury Martinez in the wake of a leaked audio recording on October 12, 2022 in Los Angeles.

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And the months of tensions, of deepening divisions and growing distrust, the stress of people throwing acid on her car and protesting outside her house — Martinez says she brought all of that into the room, that it set the stage for their conversation.

“I've thought about that particular day, God, a thousand times, if not more,” Martinez said. “I was so frustrated. It's so angry and so alone and so abandoned by everyone, particularly other members.”

But there is a difference between being frustrated, and saying insensitive, racist things.

In the next episode of Imperfect Paradise: Nury & The Secret Tapes, which will be released on Wednesday, Oct. 11, we press Martinez to respond to the worst things she said on the secretly recorded tapes.

Listen to the latest episode

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Before the L.A. City Council tape scandal, Nury Martinez, the former council president, was known as a champion of working class immigrants. After, she became the poster child of anti-Blackness and colorism in the Latino community. Host Antonia Cereijido examines how Martinez's upbringing influenced her politics and the divisions that emerged within the council under her leadership, leading up to the secretly-recorded conversation.

Nury & The Secret Tapes: Part 2

Before the L.A. City Council tape scandal, Nury Martinez, the former council president, was known as a champion of working class immigrants. After, she became the poster child of anti-Blackness and colorism in the Latino community. Host Antonia Cereijido examines how Martinez's upbringing influenced her politics and the divisions that emerged within the council under her leadership, leading up to the secretly-recorded conversation.

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Voters in November will decide whether to make a sales tax increase, geared toward funding public safety, maintenance and youth programs, permanent.

In 2018, voters approved a 1.5% sales tax increase — dubbed Measure X. That rate was designed to decrease to 1% in 2029 before being eliminated in 2039. The tax provides more than $80 million in annual revenue. City officials said the tax dollars account for about 20% of the general fund.

LAist breaks down where those dollars have gone so far.

How much money has come in through the tax? 

The city has received nearly $500 million from the sales tax so far.

A large portion of the Measure X money — $166 million — went to “unrestricted” general revenue purposes. This is anything from building repairs and city events to arts programs and City Council aides.

The second-highest expense — sitting at nearly $123 million — went to public safety, which includes retaining firefighters and police officers.

Nearly $69 million falls under the third category called “Maintain Effective 9-1-1 Response,” and most of those dollars went to the Santa Ana Police Department.

About $57 million went toward addressing homelessness since 2019. Records show a large share of that money went to police response — about $48 million.

In the other categories, $14 million went to fix streets, $39 million to park maintenance and $12 million went to youth services.

You can find the full breakdown of Measure X dollars here.

General spending is the largest pot of money

Tim Johnson, chair of the Measure X Citizen Oversight Committee, said the tricky part of the sales tax is that it is general-purpose, unrestricted revenue, meaning the city can spend it however it sees best for residents.

“I don't know that all the voters understood that this truly is unrestricted revenue that's coming in though, and that's kind of probably the biggest issue,” Johnson told LAist. “The city, I think, is trying to do our best to let our residents know where the dollars are being spent. But it's a virtually impossible task to be able to track every single dollar that comes in and where it exactly is going because of this unrestricted general revenue.”

It’s especially an issue considering the ballot language led with firefighters, police, homelessness and youth — all categories that mean a lot to Santa Ana residents, Johnson added.

“That is the category that gets the bulk of this funding, and yet it was at probably the back end of most of our voters' [minds] when they were casting their ballot,” Johnson said. “And probably the same thing with the upcoming election. It's important to understand that this truly is unrestricted revenue.”

With this tax, he said, residents are putting a lot of trust in the City Council, city manager and finance department to be good fiduciaries of these funds.

“We're not only voting for the additional tax on ourselves, but we're voting to put our trust in the City Council that they're going to spend it wisely,” Johnson added.

Why it matters

Before the sales tax was approved in 2018, the city adopted a budget that required a $10 million dip in its reserves to maintain city services. At the time, the city was facing a growing structural deficit that, if ignored, could have ballooned to more than $30 million by 2020, according to city records.

Despite revenue generated from Measure X, the city has faced multimillion-dollar budget deficits in recent years.

This year, the city managed to close a $13 million deficit by making cuts across several departments, including police, public works, and parks and recreation.

Without the sales tax dollars, officials have warned that the city will have deeper cuts to make.

“The residents of Santa Ana have come to expect a certain level of service from the city that is largely dependent on Measure X dollars,” Mai Do, a Santa Ana resident and member of the Measure X Citizen Oversight Committee, told LAist. “So many of the services that we depend on and enjoy, including community improvements to parks and also library personnel, are funded through Measure X.”

Other cities, including Orange and San Clemente, are looking to voters for approval of their own sales tax measures to help bolster city coffers. Do said Santa Ana luckily is not panicking as much as other cities.

“Folks are expecting more from their local governments … in terms of providing services to everyone,” Do said. “When there's an expectation of having these services, cities need to be able to figure out how to actually meet that demand.”

What’s next? 

Santa Ana voters will be asked in November to make the sales tax permanent. If the measure fails, the tax rate will drop to 1% in 2029 as originally planned, meaning the city could miss out on about $30 million in revenue.

An astronaut who made news piloting a NASA spacecraft around the moon earlier this year is now planting his feet on the ground on the Central Coast.

Victor Glover is joining the executive staff at his alma mater, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. He’ll serve as an advisor to the university’s president and help shape research programs.

Glover graduated from Cal Poly in 1999 with an engineering degree. He was also on the football and wrestling teams.

Glover also met his wife, Dionna, while attending the school. All four of their daughters graduated from, or are currently attending, Cal Poly.

Glover was a Navy fighter pilot who became an important part of America’s modern-day space program. He lived on the International Space Station for 168 days, flew the SpaceX Crew Dragon, and piloted NASA’s Artemis II lunar orbit mission earlier this year.

Glover recently retired from the Navy and NASA.

This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.

California regulators ordered Health Net to fix how it’s handling the termination of assisted living services for low-income residents after the insurer’s abrupt decision left patients and providers scrambling. The state’s corrective action plan requires Health Net to extend services for all members until the end of the year, rather than stopping some as soon as October.

Health Net, one of the largest Medicaid insurers in the country, notified providers several months ago that it was ending its assisted living and home care services contracts. The services are optional under Medi-Cal — California’s version of Medicaid — meaning an insurer can decide annually whether it will continue coverage. Providers and family members said they got little or no warning, leaving them confused and panicked about finding other arrangements.

In an August letter to Health Net, the Department of Health Care Services cited eight deficiencies in the insurer’s handling of the change, including failure to submit transition plans for members, failure to move members to other medically appropriate care, and denying services to members. Regulators wrote that violations “jeopardize member safety, disrupt continuity of care, and endanger medically vulnerable members.”

If Health Net does not extend benefits and create individualized transition plans for each affected member, the state may fine them $25,000 per member per day of violation, the letter states.

Advocates and providers estimate about 3,500 Medi-Cal patients rely on Health Net to pay for assisted living costs. Most are elderly, and many have cognitive issues like dementia. Health Net operates Medi-Cal plans in 10 counties: Amador, Calaveras, Fresno, Inyo, Los Angeles, Mono, Sacramento, San Joaquin, Stanislaus and Tulare.

In a statement to CalMatters, Health Net spokesperson Beatriz Lopez said the company still plans to end the services next year, but will now cover all members through the end of the year.

“Health Net and DHCS share a commitment to advancing the health and well-being of Medi-Cal members,” Lopez said.

Health Net has previously told CalMatters the assisted living benefit “has not led to better care” in terms of fewer emergency room visits or days hospitalized. The benefit is part of CalAIM, a broad state initiative to improve Medi-Cal services and save money by stabilizing high-cost users who frequently end up in emergency rooms. Lopez said Health Net would continue analyzing data and supporting services that result in better health outcomes.

Providers confirmed to CalMatters that their contracts would run through the end of the year.

Thousands still face January deadline

Hagar Dickman, director of long-term services and supports at Justice In Aging, said the state’s corrective action plan resolves the immediate crisis but fails to address the long-term problem: “Thousands of older Californians are still set to lose their housing on January 1st.”

Allowing health insurers to cancel housing-related benefits creates problems, Dickman said, because most assisted living residents have no other home to return to. Additionally, the Department of Health Care Services has stated that if a member moves to another insurer that still covers assisted living, continuity of care protections would no longer apply, meaning the new insurer might not approve the member's assisted living costs.

"It’s disingenuous to say there are protections and then say the protections don’t apply,” Dickman said. "So the option is skilled nursing or homelessness.”

Pauline Shatara, deputy director of California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform, agreed that state protections are inadequate.

“It doesn’t sound like we found a solution to help pay for these people to remain where they are,” Shatara said.

Supported by the California Health Care Foundation (CHCF), which works to ensure that people have access to the care they need, when they need it, at a price they can afford. Visit www.chcf.org to learn more.

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

This story first appeared on Long Beach Post.

Long Beach will make a slew of parking tickets more expensive and charge higher cannabis taxes to avoid cutting library hours and some specialized police officers. The last-minute change, proposed hours before a City Council vote, reversed a controversial plan city leaders laid out in June to lay off nearly a dozen library employees to help balance its budget.

Facing a $58 million shortfall, the city will still lay off roughly 180 other employees and cut hundreds more vacant positions. But it will spare library staffing and hours, after the original budget — which would have cut Monday hours at five city libraries, the only ones open that day — prompted fierce public backlash.

Long Beach City Council members voted 7 to 2 on Tuesday for the revised $4-billion city budget.

Councilmember Cindy Allen, who objected, called the increased parking fines “predatory fees,” arguing that library funding shouldn’t come at the expense of unfairly targeting people already struggling financially. Allen represents a district that includes the densely populated Alamitos Beach and Rose Park neighborhoods, where parking is already scarce. “We don’t have driveways,” she said.

Kristina Duggan, who represents southeast Long Beach neighborhoods like Belmont Shore, also voted against the budget because it cut Fire Engine 14 near Colorado Lagoon, a move that’s expected to save $3.88 million but drive up response times.

Duggan and Allen both tried but failed to delay the budget vote, with Allen saying the changes were put together in a “slapdash manner” without a chance for the public to weigh in.

She warned her colleagues before the vote that if they approved the budget “without substantial discussion” then they were “complicit in rubber-stamping” a plan that would “affect people’s livelihoods.”

Under the plan, 18 categories of parking citations — including for blocking bike lanes, hydrants, double parking and crosswalks — will rise to a flat $100, up from $74 or $90, to generate $1.5 million. Street sweeping tickets would also get a $5 bump, to $80 — a difference that raises $700,000 in revenue.

In the last fiscal year, which ran Oct. 1 to Sept. 30, the city issued more than 100,000 parking citations and 201,000 street-sweeping tickets, Public Works Director Josh Hickman said. More than a fifth of street-sweeping tickets were written in Allen’s district, and more than half of all parking tickets citywide were issued in the first two council districts, which include downtown and Alamitos Beach.

John Edmond, a local lobbyist who sits on the board for the Library Foundation and spoke in support of the plan, said the $100 rates are on par with cities like San Francisco ($108), Oakland ($110), San Diego ($117). He argued this applies to the “most serious parking violations.”

“We can’t say we’re serious about pedestrian and bicycle safety without accountability,” he said.

The budget also raises the city’s cannabis retail tax from 7% to 8% and increases the cultivation tax to more than $15 per square foot, changes expected to bring in roughly $1.15 million.

The proposals came from Councilmember Joni Ricks-Oddie, who chairs the city’s Budget Oversight Committee. Ricks-Oddie said earlier Tuesday she had spent weeks preparing these and dozens of other recommendations in concert with city staff, continuously updating them to accommodate new requests that came in from the public and fellow council members.

“If we can’t do this … then we can’t fund the libraries,” Ricks-Oddie said in response to Allen’s concerns about pricier parking citations. “If we reject that, we’re saying no to our library hours on a Monday.”

The budget also sets aside $1 million for the city’s immigration legal defense fund, the Long Beach Justice Fund. That’s well short of the $2.2 million immigration attorneys and local immigrant rights groups say is needed to sustain it amid rising caseloads. Gina Amato Lough of Public Counsel’s Immigrants’ Rights Project said “the need has never been greater,” citing prolonged detentions, warrantless raids and difficulty accessing counsel.

Since Public Counsel’s $919,000, one-year contract to provide legal services began in November, the group has taken on more than 55 consultations and 46 full-scope cases through the Justice Fund.

After hearing repeated pleas for more money Tuesday, Allen proposed reallocating all the funding for Long Beach’s new Vibe City marketing campaign — which some have derided as a waste of money — to the Justice Fund. She was quickly shot down, with a representative from the City Attorney’s office saying they’re not sure that would be legal, considering the Vibe City campaign is funded by tax revenue earmarked for advertising and promoting the city.

City Council leaders called the budget cuts a necessary, if painful, step toward stabilizing Long Beach’s finances after years of instability papered over with one-time cash — a bet that higher fees now will spare deeper cuts later.

“It’s hard, and it’s personal for everyone, and it will be really difficult on families across this community,” said Councilmember Megan Kerr.