The Brief

On a warm October morning in 2021, three men and one woman met in a squat, unassuming building in a working-class neighborhood in the middle of Los Angeles.

They were four of the most powerful people in the city: Ron Herrera, the head of a prominent union group, and three L.A. city council members: Gil Cedillo, Kevin de León and then-council president Nury Martinez. They didn’t know it at the time, but everything they were saying was being secretly recorded.

For the next 90 minutes, the four Latino leaders would speak candidly using demeaning and racist terms about colleagues on the council, Black political power, indigenous people and even a child — all within the context of a meeting held to strategize how to advance Latino power in the city.

A year later, on Oct. 9, 2022, that recording was leaked to the public.

When the media began publishing excerpts from the tape, they shook Los Angeles to its core. It led to protests outside — and inside — City Hall and at the homes of the people on the tape. There were calls for resignation from fellow council members, national politicians, and even the president of the United States.

Now, in her first interview since the scandal broke, we pressed former L.A. City Council President Nury Martinez about the racist and offensive things she said.

We also asked Martinez to engage and think through how her comments were connected to the larger systemic issues of anti-Black racism and colorism in the Latino community. Over the course of our six-hour interview, Martinez largely declined to do so.

“I don't even know if I'm the right person to even have these conversations anymore,” she said in Episode 2, “because I've been tainted in such a way where I don't even know if I would even be welcome. Even in this conversation, I feel really scared and nervous to even dive into that.”

She also discussed her experience of the scandal and how it has affected her mental health.

Antonia Cereijido and Martinez spoke over the course of two days at LAist’s Pasadena studio. The conversation below has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Listen to more in LAist Studios’ Imperfect Paradise podcast. The series includes interviews with those who were most impacted by the hurtful comments on the tape including former L.A. city councilmember Mike Bonin, current councilmembers Marqueece Harris-Dawson, Eunisses Hernandez and Nithya Raman, indigenous human rights organizer Odilia Romero, and Professor Tanya Hernández, who has written about anti-Blackness in the Latinx community.

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Host Antonia Cereijido presses former L.A. City Council President Nury Martinez to account for the racist, hurtful comments she made on the secret recording that rocked Los Angeles and led to her resignation. CONTENT WARNING: Sensitive subject matter.

Nury & The Secret Tapes: Part 3

Host Antonia Cereijido presses former L.A. City Council President Nury Martinez to account for the racist, hurtful comments she made on the secret recording that rocked Los Angeles and led to her resignation. CONTENT WARNING: Sensitive subject matter.

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Learning about the tapes, and the decision to resign

Antonia Cereijido: Let's talk about the day when the tapes were published. When did you hear about the tapes and their existence?

Nury Martinez: I was having coffee with my husband at our kitchen table, and it's about 9 or 9:30 a.m. when I get a phone call. My then-chief of staff, Alexis Wesson, calls me and says, “there is a tape.”

And her exact words were, “Do you remember wearing Doc Martens to a meeting?”

[Note: One of the first things Martinez says on the tape is that she’s wearing Doc Martens].

I go, “Doc Martens? Like the shoes? I have Doc Martens, but I don't know what you're talking about.”

She goes, “Someone found tapes of you where apparently you're at some meeting and you're wearing Doc Martens because you mentioned Doc Martens in the meeting.” And I was like, ‘I have no idea what you're talking about.’”

By 8:30 or 9:30 a.m. the next day, which was now Oct. 9, there's a story in the L.A. Times, and now by this time I'm getting phone calls from folks asking me what this is about. By that time it's now clear to me that the meeting they're talking about is the Oct. 18, 2021 meeting that the four of us held at the County Federation of Labor. And now it's like, who taped this? Who could have done this?

By that Sunday, the protesting had begun. I had people at my front door on my driveway shouting just absolute obscenities into my child's bedroom, calling me the C word. “You, you racist C word, you effing B word. We're gonna kill you, you should die.” It was all happening really, really fast.

Protestors demonstrate outside City Hall calling for the resignations of L.A. City Council members Kevin de Leon and Gil Cedillo in the wake of a leaked audio recording on Oct. 12, 2022.

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I had already internally, even though I did not say this to anyone, I had already accepted that this was so big that there is nothing that I could say or do to undo this and that I needed to step down. A hundred percent. I knew that there was gonna be consequences, that I needed to pay for this.

On Joe Biden, Karen Bass and Alex Padilla

Over the next 48 hours, dozens of elected officials called for the resignations of Martinez, Cedillo and de León, including U.S. Senator Alex Padilla and former Congressmember Karen Bass, who was, at the time, running for mayor of L.A. Martinez had recently endorsed Bass for mayor, and she was close with Padilla and his family; they went to the same high school in San Fernando, and Padilla’s brother, Ackley Padilla, was her former chief of staff.

On Oct. 11, 2022, President Biden’s press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, said during a press conference, “the president is glad to see that one of the participants in that conversation has resigned. But they all should. He believes that they all should resign. The language that was used and tolerated during that conversation was unacceptable and it was appalling. They should all step down.”

NM: During the first 24 hours of the tapes being leaked, Karen Bass did reach out to me and we talked several times. She was very supportive. And at one point I said, “if you have to renounce my endorsement, I will completely understand.” She didn't think we needed to do that the first 24 hours.

And she actually thought that somehow this would settle down or blow over in about one or two days. And we were actually expecting President Biden in Los Angeles that Thursday, and I was supposed to have a fundraiser, a Latino fundraiser for her that Saturday as well. When I talked to her on the phone, I'm like, “What do we do about President Biden's visit? Do I not show up? Like, what do you want me to do?” She's like, “No, we're moving forward. You show up.” And, you know, thinking this was gonna blow over.

I wanted to believe her, but I think deep down in my heart, I'm like, there is no way that this is gonna blow over. She also reached out to Ron Herrera for a possible press conference with the two of us. And then that didn't go anywhere. She was discouraged by a group of ministers, I think. But the intent of her standing with us was there. And I appreciate it.

Bass called me afterwards and she said, did you see Senator Alex Padilla's statement? I said, “No.” She goes, “It's bad.”

Alex never shared his statement with me. We did have a conversation. In fact, I was curled up in the bathroom when I took Alex's phone call, like at seven in the morning [on Monday], and he was really hard on me. And I was trying to explain what had happened and I wasn't getting through. And all I kept saying is, “But you know me.” And I might've said, “I don't know if I can withstand this, I'm scared.” And I didn't hear anything back.

U.S. Senator Alex Padilla. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

And soon after that, the cries for resignation were so loud. I then got on the phone with [L.A. city councilmember] Paul Krekorian and told him that I was gonna step down as council president.

AC: What strikes me about how you're describing those couple of days is that it sounds like you were sort of in “logistics brain.” But in terms of sitting down and thinking about why people were upset about the tapes, or processing, was that going through your mind?

NM: Oh yeah. That went through my mind, at night 'cause I wasn't sleeping. And so the first thing I attempted to do is take full responsibility and apologize, which I know was not accepted at the time, and then fix what I had done. Of course, I thought about what this has done. Of course I thought about Mike's baby. Of course. But once phone calls kept coming in, I didn't necessarily feel comfortable with these people on the phone. I didn't know if I was being recorded. I didn't know if they were talking to the press. So I didn't talk about these things with anybody on the phone. The only thing I knew how to do is hand over my responsibilities as a council president and make sure that I didn't mess up anything else.

AC: How did it feel to hear that President Biden had weighed in?

NM: I was in shock. I wanna believe that he had to do it because he was coming into Los Angeles on that Thursday. Maybe he just wanted to get it out of the way. That's what I thought.

Senator Padilla told us he does not dispute Nury’s account of this call. LAist reached out repeatedly to Mayor Bass, described this story to her spokesperson and asked for her comment, but we never heard back. In a later interview with LAist’s Larry Mantle, Bass denied she thought it would blow over, and added, “even if it was, I wanna take a crisis and seize it as an opportunity.”

Redistricting and Black political power

In another part of the tape, the four Latino leaders discuss redistricting, the once in a decade process of drawing new city council district lines. 

They focus on Council District 9, a majority Latino district in South L.A. that’s currently represented by a Black man, Curren Price. They care about this district because it’s become the district with the highest percentage of Latino residents in the city, and they think it will be represented by a Latino in the future. They want District 9 to have some good economic “assets,” like universities, stadiums, airports, etc, that are tied to good union jobs and bring resources into the district.  And they’re concerned the redistricting commission might take some of those “assets” away.

In particular, the four people in the room wanted the University of Southern California – USC – to remain in Council District 9. But that would mean leaving Council District 8, which is also right next door to USC in South LA, with very few economic assets. 

District 8 has the highest percentage of Black residents in the city. On the tape, Martinez proposed that Marqueece Harris-Dawson, who represents Council District 8 take LAX from his “brother,” Mike Bonin, whose district included the airport. Some people interpreted this as the four Latino leaders scheming to keep resources out of the hands of the Black community. 

AC: For me, listening to the tapes, just the fact that you do hear redistricting talked about in these racialized terms and it does sound like there's a zero sum. Like, “us Latinos get this, Black people get this.” I think it was shocking for the average person to hear that. I wanna give you the opportunity to respond to that.

NM: That wasn't the intent, and I think … of course, it's shocking. It makes people angry.

I think the Latino community, particularly that the Latino leaders in Los Angeles, have been incredibly cognizant about not starting a war over these seats, that eventually these seats will flip and they will turn Latino because that's what they're trending. But we as leaders in Los Angeles have never engaged in trying to, for example, run a Latino candidate against an African American candidate. I don't remember the time that I've been on the city council that I have not supported an African American colleague or an African American friend who happens to be running for that seat. And so that is, I think the misperception about why we were in that room is that there is this false narrative that we were meeting to dilute or take away political power from the African American community. And that's simply not true.

AC: Do you think Black people have disproportionate political power in Los Angeles and do you think it's come at the expense of Latinos?

NM: Not necessarily. I think the Latinos need to work on unifying our community. I don't think we have to blame anybody else. I think it's up to us to get people to turn out to vote.

AC: One thing that comes through in the tapes is that there's sort of a positioning of like, it's like white liberals in L.A. are allied with Black progressives and like Latinos seem left out. Do you think that's an accurate–

NM: You know what, I don't, I don't know if that was an accurate description of it.

I will tell you that the conversation and other conversations we've had as Latinos is, Latinos are becoming more and more invisible.

And that is something that I saw not only in the media, but I see in politics. I see in everyday life. When you turn on the television, our stories are not being told. And when we do tell them and when we are frustrated, even in a private conversation, it's turned against us. Like we don't have a right as a community to advocate for ourselves because somehow that goes against another ethnic group. I don't know why we do that.

AC: The way the Latino and Black community were talked about was like a zero sum game. Like there's a Latino seat and there's a Black seat, and that would negate Afro-Latinos as a community. I don't know if when you say Latinos, if you think of the Afro-Latino community.

NM: No, I can't say I do, but it's not on purpose. ‘Cause Afro-Latinos, particularly in Los Angeles ... I think you see more Afro-Latinos in Florida and New York and DC.

On L.A. District Attorney George Gascón

On the tape, Martinez disparages L.A. district attorney George Gascón, saying, “F*** that guy. I'm telling you now, he's with the Blacks.” Gascón was elected in 2020 on a platform of criminal justice reform and ending mass incarceration in the city. 

L.A. district attorney George Gascón,

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AC: You said, “Gascón, he's with the Blacks.” What does that mean?

NM: You know, I walked in there really angry and frustrated and it was, it was a mean and insensitive thing to say, and I didn't mean anything by it.

The conversation that we were having didn't have to do with Gascón himself, just had to do with so much of the frustration and anger that I was carrying with me inside me when I walked into that room. And that is no fault of the African American community.

It's just everything that was going on during COVID, with me as council president, the lack of support for what we were trying to do on the council, the amount of personal attacks against me, my leadership and my family were taking a toll on me. And that was it. There is absolutely no excuse for us. I think I let my anger and my frustration get the best of me, and that was it.

AC: There was no policy issue that you –

NM: No. I have absolutely no relationship with him whatsoever.

Racist comments about former Councilmember Mike Bonin's son

On the tape, Martinez told a story about being on a float during L.A.’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day Parade in 2017 with a number of elected officials and their family members, including Karen Bass, Karrie Harris-Dawson, who is married to councilmember Marqueece Harris-Dawson, former city councilmember Mike Bonin and his son, Jacob, who was then a toddler. According to Martinez, the women were discussing Jacob’s behavior on the float. In recounting the story during the meeting that was secretly recorded, Martinez described Jacob, who is Black, by saying, “parece changuito,” which means, “he seems like a little monkey.” 

Martinez and the other leaders on the tape also described how Bonin would bring Jacob to city council and other events during Black History Month, which Kevin de León compared to Martinez bringing her designer handbags to council meetings. Herrera suggested the child was a prop and a statue on a plantation, and Martinez compared him to an accessory. Martinez later said, “Ahí trae su negrito, like on the side,” which means, “there he brings his little Black one.” 

AC: What did you mean when you said, about Mike Bonin’s son, “parece changuito”?

NM: The way I grew up with that word, “parece changuito." It has nothing to do with skin color. It has more to do with behavior. You're sort of just playing around. You're horsing around. Another word that we use in Spanish, “es travieso” [mischievous], you can’t stay put.

It's a conversation I should not have repeated. And I think that's an example of a bunch of moms sitting around you know, being critical of little boys' behavior. That was my mistake.

It was insensitive. It was mean. I never meant to hurt Jacob, and I'm going to have to live with that for the rest of my life, you know? I've never romanticized motherhood. Anybody who knows me and has been around me knows my child is also pretty wild. And now she's a teenager and it's even crazier at a different level. I've never romanticized parenthood. It's really, really hard. And I've been around those moms who sometimes we're critical of other children and we kind of talk smack about with one another. We're moms, right? I never meant to hurt Jacob. I thought about this a hundred times of what I would say to him if I would see him.

Former councilmember Mike Bonin photographed in his home.

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AC: What would you say?

NM: I would hug him. [I would say,] “I never meant to hurt you baby. That was never my intent. It was a conversation I had with four women that I should not have repeated.”

AC: Had you used that particular word [changuito] to describe children before?

NM: Yes, in my family, yes. In fact, my mother said that to me. It was common when I was growing up, and my mom actually pointed that out to me when the tapes broke. She said we used that word at home. [I told her] my mistake was that I was referencing an African American baby and I shouldn't have done that.

AC:  Why do you think it's different to say it about a Black kid versus a kid of another race?

NM: I did not mean it in a derogatory way, and it wasn't meant to describe him as a Black child. That was not the intent of the word.

AC: But do you understand why is it that that word specifically is offensive when talked about a Black kid versus another kid?

NM: Oh, a hundred percent.

AC: No, just the why –

NM: The word was not meant to be derogatory, and I was not describing him in that way because he is a Black child. I was simply referring to his behavior and that was it.

AC: Mike Bonin and [councilmember] Marqueece Harris-Dawson told me that the way you were talking about Jacob on the float is what a lot of people do to Black boys, treating him like he's older, like he has more agency or responsibility than he really does. What do you think about that characterization?

Councilmember Marqueece Harris-Dawson photographed near USC.

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NM: No, I think it was just moms just being critical of you know, a rowdy kid. Just like they would’ve been of my own kid. That was just us being moms.

AC: Would you have used that word in English?

NM: Never. Never have I ever used those words in English. I think in Spanish, then I speak in English. And so my vocabulary comes from me being an English learner. And I think for me, those words are not meant to hurt anybody, or to sound racist at all. I think it's just words that I grew up with.

Racist comments about Oaxacans

The four leaders discussed Koreatown, a neighborhood in Los Angeles that has a large Indigenous Mexican population. On the tape, Herrera says, “my mom used to call them indios.” 

Martinez says, “I see a lot of little short dark people,” and, “I don’t know where these people are from, like I don’t know what village they came out of, how they got here, but, tán [short for están] feos!,” which means, “they’re ugly.”

Protesters dance outside City Hall while calling for the resignations of L.A. City Council members Kevin de Leon and Gil Cedillo in the wake of a leaked audio recording on Oct. 12, 2022 in Los Angeles.

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AC: So the next part of the tapes I want to talk about is actually the part that, knowing your personal and political history, I was most surprised to hear, and that was your comments about Oaxacans. What did you mean when you called them ‘tan feos’?

NM: Oh my goodness. That's another thing that I will never forgive myself for. That was just a horrible, insensitive thing to say. I certainly don't have anything against the Oaxacan community. I feel horrible for having insulted the community.

AC: Do you think there's a colorism problem in Latino communities?

NM: Yes. Yes. I think there is. I think we're getting better and certainly my comments didn't help.

AC: So you, you don't think though, that you harbor a bias against people with darker skin?

NM: No way.

Anti-Black bias in the Latino/x community

AC:, I'm curious, looking back, why do you think you said that? Where was it coming from? Have you thought about why you said what you said?

NM: I've thought about that particular day, God, a thousand times, if not more. I was so frustrated. It's so angry and so alone and so abandoned by, by just, by everyone, particularly other members. And I think that over the two and a half years that I was council president, I just grew more frustrated and angry and pissed off at everything. And that's what you saw. That's it.

AC:  I understand the frustration, but I think there's like a difference between being frustrated and saying things that are insensitive, like you said. And so what I'm trying to do with this interview is unpack where the things were coming from. Because I think that there are a lot of internal biases that we as Latinos hold in the community that people picked up on, and they wanted to use it as an example to talk about this larger conversation about race. Do you think there's an anti-Blackness problem in the Latino community?

NM: I don't know. I mean, that's a really good question. I never felt we had one, um, on the council. Just speaking personally. My personal experience, that's all I can speak to.

AC: Do you think that there is a conversation to be had about anti-Blackness in the Latino community?

NM: Not in my household. Those conversations, um, have never, we've never had to have those conversations 'cause we've never felt that way. And that's just me personally. I don't know about other households or what else is happening in other communities, but I certainly have never felt that.

AC: One of the things that did happen was this larger conversation about how we talk about race in our communities and in many ways I think that part of it is good, like that we have to try more to have–

NM: You know, I wish I could dive more into that, because what this has caused for me is I don't even know if I'm the right person to even have these conversations anymore. 'Cause I've been tainted in such a way where I don't even know if I would even be welcome on a panel or in a group conversation to really dive into these issues, to figure out how we really feel about this. Because of what, how I've been perceived and characterized, that I could even in this conversation — I'm very worried, um, and feel really scared and nervous to even dive into that, if that makes any sense.

I'm not avoiding your question, but I'm just really scared to answer it. What if I say the wrong thing and now we're back to square one? I do not know if today I'm the right person to have those conversations. Do I believe they need to be had? Yes. I'm just being honest. I just don't know how to answer that.

The tape leak

In California, secretly recording a private conversation is a crime. The LAPD is investigating who recorded the meeting. Over the summer, Los Angeles Magazine and the L.A. Times reported that the police were investigating a former employee of the LA County Federation of Labor and his wife, who also worked there. The LAPD declined to comment or provide LAist with an update into the investigation.

In October 2022, a Reddit user named Honest-Finding-1581 posted nine pieces of audio – portions of various conversations that were secretly recorded in the L.A. County Federation of Labor a year or so earlier, which is how journalists discovered the tapes.

NM: I have always felt that as a Latina, I have never really been given a fair shake by the media. The coverage of these tapes in and of itself, says it all. I think there was a deliberate concerted effort to take snippets of the conversation and put them out to the general public. I have not found anyone who said to me, “I actually listened to the entire thing to get some context about what was taking place.”

AC: So you think if it had been presented whole, it wouldn't have blown up in the same way?

NM: Yeah, I do. [NOTE: The LA Times posted the full audio on YouTube within a week of publishing their first article about the tapes, and later published an annotated transcript of the full conversation.]

AC:  So what I hear you saying is that you feel like this is something that happened to you, not something you did.

NM: No, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying, this is a conversation that took place in a private setting out of frustration and anger for whatever, everything that was going on. And I take full responsibility for it. And there's nothing that I'm ever gonna be able to do to express how horrible I feel about it. That's what I'm saying.

On Kevin de León

Kevin de León speaks to council member Paul Krekorian on Oct. 12, 2022, during the first L.A. city council meeting after the media began reporting on the secret tapes.

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AC: What do you think about Kevin de León's decision not to resign?

NM: I think it was the right decision for him. Kevin didn't commit a crime. I think we can count how many members on the city council have been indicted to date for really troubling corruption charges. But Kevin did not commit a crime, and Kevin is not a racist.

The effect of the tape scandal on her life

NM: If it wasn't for my mom, I wouldn't even be alive. There were so many times during the first three months of what had happened where I didn't get out of bed. And I remember my mom was so scared that I would hurt myself, that she would call me every hour on the hour.

She couldn't come over 'cause there were so many cameras. And I was so ashamed that I have — I still can't talk about those horrible, dark, dark days. I would go to sleep and, I remember this, I don't wanna wake up tomorrow.

And then I would have visions of my mom burying me. And I just couldn't, I just couldn't do it. I couldn't see my mom burying me. I am not at all suggesting that all should be forgotten. Absolutely not. I think these conversations need to be had. Um, but the sense of not being worthy enough to be forgiven or to be listened to was so hard.

People make mistakes. I would hope that after this people would find a different way to hold people accountable. Um, I hope you do it differently. I don't want this to happen to anybody.

AC: What is a typical day like for you now?

NM: I see my daughter off to school and make breakfast, have a cup of coffee with my husband, talk about the day. He's also not working. So we're constantly trying to figure out what our finances are gonna look like the next month, which has been really, really hard.

On the really, really difficult days, I'll just go to church. My mom, to get me out of the house, told me, “You need to go to church and you need to go ask God to forgive you. Man isn't gonna forgive you. God is. You own up to everything you said and what you meant, and that's all you can do.”

When I would have these dark thoughts, I would get so scared that I just would jump in my car and go to church, and oftentimes I would sit there by myself and just cry. For hours. I would come home around dinner time, and I would start making dinner or lunch for my daughter after she got home from school. And that would be my day.

I journal just to get some of these things off my chest, to remind myself that I'm still a good person even though I didn't hear it at the time. That I'm worthy. That I did a lot of good work, that I helped a lot of people, that I loved my career, my job. It was my passion. And that this too shall pass. I don't know what's next, but I do believe this too shall pass. But, I just gotta just be honest. What this has done to me and my family has completely destroyed us. I don't know what's next. I know that this took my passion and my light. I don't know how to describe it in any other way besides, I'm lost.

Rebecca Katz contributed to this story.

May gray skies will continue to keep the mornings on the cooler side, but come later this afternoon we'll see some sunshine and slightly warmer temps.

High temperatures along the beaches will stay in the mid 60s to around 70 degrees, and reach the lower 70s for the inland coast.

For the valleys, temperatures will reach the upper 70s. Meanwhile the Inland Empire will see highs up to 83 degrees.

Coachella Valley will see highs from 95 to 100 degrees.

Looking ahead to the weekend, the National Weather Service is forecasting high surf and dangerous rip currents for nearby beaches.

Come Saturday afternoon around 3:00, Ventura County will be under a high surf advisory. That will last until 9 a.m. Monday. Waves could be five to eight feet tall.

Meanwhile, the Malibu coast and L.A. County beaches will see dangerous rip currents and breaking waves starting Saturday evening through Monday morning. Swimmers, surfers and beach goers should be careful.

Since staunch conservatives achieved full control of Huntington Beach’s seven-member City Council in 2024, they have voted in lockstep to fight state mandates to build more housing, and for the right to censor books in the children’s library. They also voted unanimously to install a commemorative plaque at the library that spells out “M-A-G-A” and to commission a public mural to honor slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

But the city’s once-solid MAGA coalition appears to be fracturing, largely over allegations of “cronyism” — contracts, deals, favors and political appointments that appear to benefit friends and family of the city’s leaders. In April, several members of the council publicly lambasted the mayor’s plan to award a lucrative contract, seemingly out of nowhere and without competitive bidding, to the fiance of his appointee to a city commission.

The public backlash was swift from across the political spectrum — an unusual occurrence in the politically polarized city. An equally unusual display of dissent arose from the once-allied council. One of the dissenters, City Councilmember Chad Williams, told LAist he was outraged by “the audacity of our own mayor to push through this sweetheart deal for his commissioner’s fiance. Our city deserves better,” he said.

The mayor, Casey McKeon, told LAist he didn’t “understand the pushback.” He said the consultant who would have benefited from the contract, Tyler Wolff of Wolffhaus Studio & Creative, “happens to be one of the best in the industry. Why should we not engage in his services?”

Wolff, for his part, told LAist he merely saw problems with the city’s “brand ecosystem” — including events, merchandising and media outreach — and proposed solutions. “There’s no creative leadership, there’s no oversight, and there’s no accountability,” he said. Wolff said he was caught off guard by the controversy over the proposed contract for his company. “I know nothing about the RFP procurement process,” he said.

Ultimately, McKeon withdrew the contract with Wolffhaus under pressure, and the city is currently evaluating alternative bids (including from Wolffhaus).

The rift comes at a fraught time for the MAGA movement: Nationally, the coalition is splintering over the war in Iran; Locally, a deepening budget crisis in Huntington Beach has caused some residents and local leaders to look more closely at the city’s recent spending decisions.

At the heart of the city’s problems is cronyism, critics say. But not everyone agrees on what falls into that category.

The backstory

The latest controversy started when a proposal to award a $720,000 contract to Wolffhaus appeared on the city’s April 7 council meeting agenda, proposed by Mayor McKeon. The two-year contract was for revamping and maximizing the city’s “brand,” including ramping up sales of HB merch, opening a film commission, and improving the city’s public relations. The ultimate goal is to generate more revenue to help close a looming budget gap.

Several council members said they had no prior knowledge of the initiative before it appeared on the agenda — nor did they know that the city had already paid Wolff $30,000 to “audit” the city’s branding and communications strategy.

Critics, including Councilmember Williams, pointed out what they characterized as a number of other red flags, including Wolffhaus’ unfinished website which included a contact number that went to an adult hotline. (Wolff said it was a mistake and is now fixed.) The contract also contained a clause stating that, should the city want to cancel the contract at any time without cause, it would owe half of the remaining allocated funds to Wolffhaus. Williams called it a potential “windfall for work that was never done.”

“This was tailor made for Tyler [Wolff],” Williams said of the contract.

City Councilmember Andrew Gruel sided with Williams in vocally opposing the contract, calling its road to near-approval “sloppy.” Gruel told LAist he has a high regard for Wolff’s work, but was concerned about the transparency leading up to the contract’s sudden appearance on the council’s agenda. “I think the whole process was upside down,” Gruel said.

The council’s usual critics were livid, lambasting the personal connection between McKeon and Wolff and the lack of a competitive bidding process, which is generally required for large contracts.

“The whole thing just smacks of cronyism, backroom deals, sloppiness, lack of accountability, fiscal responsibility, I mean, pick some adjectives,” said Cathey Ryder, co-founder of the group Protect HB. The group has been a frequent foil to the current council’s agenda, including spearheading a ballot initiative last year that overturned the library censorship measure.

But indignation came in equal measure from the other side of the proverbial aisle, including from former backers of the mayor and his allies.

“I’ve supported most of the people on this city council for a long time,” resident Domnic McGee said during public comment at the April 7 meeting. “But it seems that certain people are ruling by fiat,” he said, referring to McKeon.

McGee, who serves on the city’s planning commission, told LAist he worried that the communications contract would give the mayor a direct line to “spin” the messaging coming out of the city during election season. McKeon is up for re-election this fall.

“Casey [McKeon] will be able to override anything he doesn't like and overemphasize what he does,” McGee said. “And he could pretty much use this for his campaign.”

McGee said he campaigned for McKeon in 2021 but would now “never vote for him again.”

Following the outcry, McKeon withdrew the proposal from consideration and the city put out a request for competitive bids. An ad hoc committee made up of the mayor and two allied council members will review the proposals in private and recommend their top choices. Williams said the bidding process had been “utterly tainted.”

A pattern of 'cronyism' complaints

The rift over the Wolffhaus contract may have temporarily shaken up Huntington Beach’s conservative factions, but the faultlines are blurry. At their latest meeting, the city council voted 6-0 to shift $10,000 in federal grants from an afterschool care program in the city’s Oak View neighborhood, and $5,000 from a local program for at-risk youth, to a nonprofit where Councilmember Gruel, a vocal critic of the Wolffhaus deal, is the executive director.

The organization, Save the Brave, which is based in Temecula, takes veterans on deep-sea fishing trips. Gruel left the city council chambers when the vote was taking place, but did not formally recuse himself, or publicly disclose his ties to the organization. Under California’s Political Reform Act, elected officials are required to publicly disclose and recuse themselves from voting on any issue that represents a potential financial conflict of interest.

Gruel told LAist he had disclosed his ties with the organization from the start of the grant process — well before the money came to a vote before city council. He said he takes no money for his work with Save the Brave, and that he didn’t know he was supposed to publicly disclose his ties to the organization at the time the vote took place. “I’m still learning all this stuff,” said Gruel, a chef and TV personality who was appointed to his seat last year after former Councilmember Tony Strickland won a seat in the state legislature in a special election.

Asked whether he thought the council’s vote to give his organization additional funds was a bad look, Gruel said “Of course.”

“Especially in the framework of previous council decisions, there’s this reputation now that there are these backroom deals,” he said.

Longtime critics of Huntington Beach’s city government say it has become commonplace to reward people with political and family ties with funds, contracts, and prominent positions in city government. They point to the following examples:

• A decades-long, multi-million dollar settlement with the operator of the city’s annual airshow, who staged campaign events and printed signs for several of the city councilmembers who approved the settlement. The city has been fighting a state effort to audit the deal. But Williams and Gruel recently proposed settling the case and letting the audit go forward.
• A special street renaming for a local conservative donor, Ed Laird, who helped fund the campaigns of several city council members. (Laird also helped negotiate the airshow settlement.)
• The appointment, by Gracey Van Der Mark, of City Councilmember Gruel’s wife to the city’s Community and Library Services Commission in 2023. Gruel said he had nothing to do with the appointment, which is unpaid.
• The appointment in 2022 of Kelly Gates, wife of Michael Gates, the former city attorney and now deputy assistant attorney, to the city’s Finance Committee, also an unpaid position. Van Der Mark also made that appointment. 

California’s Fair Political Practices Commission, the state ethics body, has found legal violations related to some of these incidents. The commission recently ruled that former city attorney Michael Gates, and City Council members McKeon, Van Der Mark, and Pat Burns violated disclosure rules by failing to report that they had received free VIP passes to the airshow in 2022 when they were negotiating a settlement with the event’s operator. A similar complaint is pending against Kelly Gates — city finance commissioners are also required to disclose their income and gifts.

The mere appearance of a conflict of interest is problematic for good governance, said Tracy Westen, a public interest lawyer who has expertise in government ethics. For example, appointing the spouses of government leaders to key positions in city government. “It could be they were the best people for the job,” Westen said, “but it raises an appearance issue.”

Some Orange County cities, including Irvine, Westminster and Laguna Niguel, prohibit appointments of family members to city commissions. Huntington Beach does not have a similar rule, although the city council is prohibited from appointing relatives to salaried positions.

What it all means for the November election

Those looking to unseat the current city council majority see opportunity in the rift over the Wolffhaus contract. “We are pleasantly surprised to see that there's a crack in the cabal, for lack of a better word,” said Ryder of Protect HB. The group is backing a slate of four candidates in the November election in hopes of unseating the council majority. One of the candidates is Erin Spivey, who sued the city over the book censorship policy and won, including a $1 million judgment against the city for attorneys' fees. The city is appealing.

If elected, Spivey said she would propose a ban on contracts and city appointments for individuals with close ties to city councilmembers. “This has got to stop. The government is not the plaything of elected officials,” Spivey said.

Some of the city’s most controversial figures are seeking higher office this year. Michael Gates is running for state Attorney General in the June primary. Van Der Mark is also hoping to make a jump to Sacramento — she’s one of four candidates to represent State Assembly District 72 on the primary ballot.

At the local level, McKeon and Burns are up for re-election this fall, and Gruel will face his first test on a ballot.

McKeon, Burns, and newcomer Brian Thienes are running as a conservative slate, with signs reading “Don’t split the vote!”

But Gruel has chosen to run solo — distancing himself from the trend in Huntington Beach, over the last two election cycles, of Republican-backed council candidates running as a bloc. “I don’t necessarily look at everything through a party filter,” Gruel told LAist, adding that he considers himself a small-government libertarian.

Gruel said he shared critics’ concerns about the lack of daylight on some of the city’s recent contracts and decisions. “Generally speaking this is why I’m so frustrated by the look, because my whole thing is transparency,” he said.

Orange County will stop spraying local flood control channels with toxic chemicals — an environmental issue that has morphed in recent months into a major theme in the June 2 primary race to represent South O.C. on the Board of Supervisors.

In an emailed announcement, Supervisor Katrina Foley, who represents District 5, wrote that “following months of community outcry,” O.C. Public Works would halt spraying and “instead observe the growth patterns of invasive species to evaluate the safest and most effective procedures for removal.”

The backstory

The environmental activists who make up the three-person Creek Team OC began raising the alarm earlier this year about the county’s practice of spraying toxic chemicals to keep vegetation down in local waterways and flood control channels, which flow out to the ocean. Brent Linas, the group’s founder, had become concerned about the issue while noticing what he characterized as “dead” ecosystems during his runs along San Juan Creek, which empties into Doheny State Beach.

The political context

The herbicide spraying had become a major issue in the race to represent District 5 on the Orange County Board of Supervisors. Katrina Foley, a Democrat, is running for reelection against state Assemblymember Diane Dixon, a Republican. The conservative Lincoln Club, through its PAC, has spent around $200,000 thus far to try to influence the race. The PAC has latched onto the herbicide issue to attack Foley in ads and mailers.

The Lincoln Media Foundation, which shares an address and officers with the Lincoln Club, has simultaneously published content critical of Foley’s handling of the herbicide issue through the affiliated publication, California Courier.

Linas of Creek Team called Foley’s announcement about the countywide pause on herbicide spraying “a huge, huge victory for us.” Linas, who described himself to LAist as a lifelong Democrat, said his group ultimately used the political jockeying over the issue to their advantage. “ We took this firehose of money that exists and we redirected some of it towards what we saw as an urgent issue,” he said.

What’s next?

Orange County Public Works could still use herbicides in conjunction with maintenance work if they identify an “immediate need of vegetation management,” according to the announcement. But the county would give the public seven days' notice in advance of any such use. A pilot project along San Juan and Trabuco creeks is underway to evaluate the viability of replacing chemical spraying with manual and mechanical weed removal.

How to watchdog your local government

One of the best things you can do to hold officials accountable is pay attention. Your city council, board of supervisors, school board and more all hold public meetings that anybody can attend. These are times you can talk to your elected officials directly and hear about the policies they’re voting on that affect your community.

• Read tips on how to get involved.
• The Orange County Board of Supervisors meets on alternating Tuesdays at 9:30 a.m. at 400 W. Civic Center Drive, Santa Ana. You can check out the O.C. Board of Supervisors full calendar here.
• Learn how to submit a public comment to the O.C. Board of Supervisors.

U.S. domestic air travel has boomed in recent years, except for one segment. Short flights of a few hundred miles decreased over the past decade, while longer flights became more popular, according to data gathered by the aviation analytics firm OAG for NPR.

Nearly 4 million short flights are scheduled for this year. But as of mid-April, the number of flights spanning less than 250 nautical miles had declined by 11% from 2016 to 2026 — the biggest drop of any route length. The decline comes as no surprise to John Grant, a senior analyst at OAG.

"That is an awful distance to be operating," he says, because short flights are more expensive for airlines than flights with a longer cruise time.

In contrast, every domestic flight category of more than 500 miles saw notable gains over the same 10-year span. The numbers depict the U.S. hub-and-spoke aviation system moving toward longer "spokes" for some routes.

The trend was well established even before rising fuel prices from the Iran war rattled U.S. aviation. It could now accelerate, as airlines raise prices and trim less-profitable flights due to jet fuel supply constraints.

Domestic jet fuel costs have roughly doubled since early February, before the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran. U.S. airlines spent more than $5 billion on jet fuel in March, a 56% increase from February, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. Spirit Airlines blamed the soaring fuel costs when it announced it would shut down last weekend. Prices are even higher for Asia and other markets that rely more heavily on supplies transiting the Strait of Hormuz.

"Any time there is pressure like that, particularly a cost pressure, but also a resource pressure, airlines are going to concentrate flying where they can move the most passengers with the fewest pilots," says Faye Malarkey Black, CEO of the Regional Airline Association.

Short-hop flights are the most frequent, and least efficient

Every day, thousands of U.S. airline passengers step off planes without needing to check the local time and weather, because they've traveled less than 100 miles, on flights lasting less than an hour.

For example, there are dozens of flights between Milwaukee and Chicago each week, even though they're separated by less than 80 miles and have been connected by rail lines for more than a century. But there's a key snag for travelers in the Milwaukee area who might want to take the train to O'Hare International, says Joshua Schank, an urban planning professor at UCLA who's also a partner with the consulting firm Infra Strategies.

"Remember, that rail is going between the [cities'] two downtowns, and it's not between the airports," he says. "And that's the key distinction," he adds, noting that a majority of the route's passengers are likely connecting to other destinations beyond Chicago.

For routes like that to make economic sense, they require enough people willing to pay, says Black, of the airline association.

"It's not the distance, it's the density," she says. "If you have a short flight that has a lot of density because it's between two urban centers and it's a viable option, then people will take that option."

It's one of the shorter spokes in the U.S. hub-and-spoke system that helps airlines concentrate their traffic. That's why the sub-250-mile distance remains the second most popular domestic route, even with its double-digit decline. The most popular flight category over the past 10 years isn't much longer, with the 251 to 500 nautical mile distance scheduled 2.1 million times in 2026, despite a roughly 4% dip.

But all those repeated shorter flights come at a cost.

"A lot of the fuel is used in the takeoff and landing processes," Grant says. And every landing, he notes, adds wear and tear on the planes' equipment.

To hit the sweet spot of revenue versus cost, Grant says, "airlines typically try to be in that two-hour block time" – a category that includes flights over 500 miles, such as Washington, D.C., to Atlanta.

At airports, short flights also add to the workload for understaffed air traffic control systems and congested gates. A small regional jet carrying 50 people, for instance, is just as important to a controller as a wide-body airliner. And it takes up gate space repeatedly, as it shuttles passengers back and forth to a hub airport. As Black notes, the impact of all those short flights adds up.

"Regional airlines have always been the backbone of air service to smaller communities," she says. "In the early 2000s, they were the only source of scheduled air service for roughly three-quarters of U.S. airports. Today, that figure is closer to two-thirds."

Prices for U.S. jet fuel have nearly doubled since before the Iran war began, shaking up the aviation industry. This file photo shows a worker preparing to fuel a United Express jet at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, in Grapevine, Texas.

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Tony Gutierrez

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AP

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Where are we heading? 

Despite their recent decline, short-hop flights are integral to the hub-and-spoke network, taking people from Colorado Springs to Denver, for instance, or from Birmingham to Atlanta.

But airlines have shifted more toward longer flights over the past decade, thanks largely to a new generation of narrow-body aircraft that are more efficient, making them an enticing option for longer-range routes. That's why the trendline favors routes such as the 501 to 750-mile category (e.g. Portland to Las Vegas, or Houston to Tampa), which grew by 11% to nearly 1.7 million scheduled flights in 2026. Flights of more than 750 and 1,000 miles each saw double-digit percentage gains, as well.

"Unfortunately for short-haul routes, the economics are not in their favor," says Ahmed Abdelghani, professor of operations management at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida. He notes that a smaller jet's higher costs must be borne by fewer passengers than a larger plane, prompting higher fares.

"Those new generation narrowbody aircraft will have much better economics than the smaller 50-seater, 70-seater aircraft," Abdelghani says, citing the newer jets' ability to spread costs over more than 160 seats, depending on how they're configured.

The newer planes align with airlines that prioritize route profitability, Abdelghani says. But he and Black both say that larger narrow-body planes aren't a good fit for every market – and as a result, smaller communities could see fewer flights and connectivity.

"The airports with the sharpest service losses tend to be small hub and non-hub airports," Black says, "and those markets are often built around shorter-distance flying." She notes that other problems, such as pilot shortages, are also affecting small markets. "As pilot availability tightened, airlines had to make decisions about where limited flying could be sustained," Black says.

As Abdelghani puts it, "The airline decides, OK, since now I'm going to fly only efficient aircraft, I'm going to sacrifice the routes that this aircraft doesn't fit."
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