The Brief

The Democratic candidate for Orange County assessor has lost her party’s endorsement as a result of complaints from her campaign staff that she repeatedly sought to use campaign contributions to pay for personal expenses, LAist has learned.

Such expenditures would violate state law, which allows candidates to tap campaign contributions only to pay campaign expenses.

The candidate, Janet Keo Conklin, denied trying to misuse campaign funds.

“ I have not done anything wrong,” she told LAist.

Multiple former campaign staffers who spoke with LAist also allege Conklin engaged in sexually inappropriate behavior in the workplace, including taking staffers’ hands and placing them on Conklin’s breasts.

Conklin denied the allegations in an interview with LAist. She acknowledged that during a conversation with a staffer who was working on Conklin’s cellphones — both a work phone and a personal phone — she alluded to receiving a nude photograph from a former client.

Conklin is a licensed real estate broker and La Palma City Council member. She is on the June ballot, where she faces Republican Party-endorsed incumbent Claude Parrish.

Parrish has had his own troubles.

Last year, LAist was the first to report on a workplace misconduct investigation commissioned by the county that found Parrish violated gender discrimination and retaliation policies in the assessor’s office and harassed a subordinate over a medical disability.

Parrish was found to have downplayed the employee’s chronic illness, shared her private medical information with coworkers, regularly commented on her diet and told her to stop taking her medicine and to “drink baking soda mixed with tap water to ‘fix’ her medical condition.” Citing the 2023 investigation’s findings, the county’s HR director sent a letter to Parrish late that year telling him to stop violating harassment policies.

Parrish told LAist he was not at fault.

The primary job of the assessor, an officially nonpartisan office, is to supervise appraisals of all taxable property in the county.

Florice Hoffman, the chair of the Orange County Democratic Party, said in an interview that party activists first told her about Conklin’s alleged improper campaign spending requests in February.

She said she and Lauren Johnson-Norris, the party’s vice chair, quickly met with Conklin and urged her to drop out of the race. Instead, she said, Conklin agreed to give up the endorsement, which the party had made weeks earlier.

Hoffman, who is a lawyer, recalled telling Conklin, “Our advice is you need to get a lawyer, a criminal lawyer.”

Janet Keo Conklin

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Courtesy Democratic Party of Orange County

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Johnson-Norris did not respond to LAist’s requests for comment.

When asked about Hoffman’s advice in an interview with LAist, Conklin said, “ Lawyers, they sometimes get a little too dramatic.”

She added:  ”Lawyers, they get spooked easily over any allegation, seriously, so I'm not concerned. I have not done anything wrong.”

Endorsements removed from campaign website

When LAist began reporting this article, Conklin was endorsed by key figures in the Democratic establishment, including O.C. Supervisor Vicente Sarmiento and U.S. Rep. Derek Tran, according to her campaign website as of April 24.

Tran’s endorsement was removed from Conklin’s campaign website before the entire list of endorsements was eventually removed as well.

Sarmiento told LAist he reached out to Conklin’s campaign to rescind his endorsement on Saturday pending further investigation.

“I certainly don’t want to support anyone involved in any misconduct, especially after my experience with a former colleague who is serving five years in federal prison,” he said, alluding to former Orange County Supervisor Andrew Do serving time in federal prison for his role in a corruption scheme uncovered by LAist.

Tran did not respond to a request for comment.

LAist asked Conklin about losing Tran and the Democratic Party of O.C.’s endorsements.

" Endorsements come and go. If it doesn't come with money, so what?” Conklin said.

Details of the allegations 

LAist interviewed eight of Conklin's current or former campaign staff, including her former campaign treasurer.

Cine Ivery, the former treasurer, said Conklin fired her after she requested receipts for a campaign credit card and rebuffed the candidate’s repeated requests to use campaign money to pay personal expenses, including rent for Conklin’s two-bedroom apartment in La Palma.

Ivery told LAist Conklin was “constantly trying” to use campaign funds for personal use.  

“She was always trying to find a way: 'Can I pay my rent? Can I pay the house bill? Can I do this?'” Ivery recounted from meetings with the candidate.

Ivery recalled explaining federal campaign finance laws to Conklin in detail.

“You can't skate around. You can't pretend. You can't hide,” she said, recounting their back and forth.

Ivery showed LAist email exchanges with Conklin in which she asked Conklin, unsuccessfully, to produce receipts for about $1,100 in charges on a maxed-out $2,500 campaign credit card. She said Conklin fired her after these email exchanges.

Michael Trujillo, Conklin’s new campaign consultant, told LAist in an interview that allegations of misuse of campaign funds are “100% not true.”

“If they believe it to be true, they can file an FPPC complaint. They haven't, and they won't because it's not true,” he said.

Fair Political Practices Commission oversees campaign finance laws.

Over email, Trujillo told LAist Conklin terminated Ivery in January and scheduled her last day for Feb. 9.

Conklin told LAist in an interview it was staffers who lost the receipts for expenses they incurred. She added she has since brought in a new treasurer.

LAist reviewed the credit card statement, and the expenses without receipts were mainly incurred at restaurants. Former staffers, who asked to speak anonymously with LAist to protect their job prospects, told LAist those expenses were all incurred by Conklin personally.

In a written statement to LAist, Conklin’s campaign said Ivery “made the transition process unnecessarily difficult and combative.”

Ivery restricted the campaign’s access to fundraising and compliance platforms, according to the statement, and refused to transfer needed information to the campaign’s new treasurer.

The statement goes on to say that the campaign sought legal counsel and has considered filing a complaint with the Fair Political Practices Commission.

Ivery, the former treasurer, refused to transfer campaign funds until the receipts were provided for the outstanding credit card charges, according to the statement.

Conklin asked Ivery to retain $2,500 in campaign funds to pay off the credit card and transfer the rest of the money, according to the statement.

Ivery told LAist she could not use campaign funds to pay off the credit card charges without the receipts. Ultimately, Ivery said, she used her own personal funds to pay off the credit card charges as the credit card was issued through Ivery’s company. And, Ivery said, she transferred over the campaign materials to the new treasurer after making sure she followed federal campaign finance guidelines.

Trujillo, Conklin’s campaign consultant, told LAist, when candidates lose receipts on a campaign, they eat the charges. And, Trujillo said, campaign treasurers can pay off credit card charges with campaign funds without receipts.

Per FPPC guidelines, all expenditures above $25 require receipts.

“ It is literally the craziest thing in the world to try to figure out our credit card charges when the campaign's not even over,” Trujillo said. He said at the end of the campaign when they close out the books, they’ll chase every receipt. If a receipt is not found, the candidate will eat the charge with an in-kind donation to the campaign.

LAist checked the FPPC database Friday. No complaints appear for Ivery or Conklin.

Some of the former campaign staffers also allege that after they left the campaign, campaign payments were made to Conklin’s daughter, Natalie Khay, and to Shauna Harris, a friend of Conklin’s, who they said, did not work on the campaign. Both were reported as consultants on Form 460, a state filing required by people running for office on donations they receive and payments they make with campaign funds.

When asked about these transactions, Conklin told LAist her daughter did some work on the campaign last year and she finally paid her back when she raised money.

“ I took her for granted and I said, look, I don't have any money at this time if you can be patient, please just be patient, and allow me to raise enough money because we're grassroots,” she recalled telling her daughter.

When asked about the payments to Harris, her friend, Conklin first said she rented office space from her friend. Former staffers told LAist they were unaware of any campaign office space. They said they would work out of Conklin’s home office, cafes or over Zoom.

Trujillo, Conklin’s current campaign consultant, told LAist, it is normal for campaign staffers to work from home post-COVID.

The payment to Harris on the Form 460 filed with the Fair Political Practices Commission however was listed as a payment for a campaign consultant.

When asked about that, Conklin said,  ”Well, she gives me advice, too.”

“ She is a silent partner. And if it's a problem with the filing, then we will adjust that. But she has been with me since last year,” she said. “She's been with me from the get go.”

Harris, Conklin said, provided “advice in the background” and “ she looks over the math; she looks over the numbers.”

Harris is a longtime public educator, according to her LinkedIn profile, working over 20 years at Los Angeles Unified School District. She currently runs a Mathnasium in Lakewood. The profile does not list any experience related to campaigns.

Khay and Harris did not respond to LAist’s requests for comment.

Former staffers allege sexually inappropriate behavior

Four former staffers allege Conklin engaged in sexually inappropriate behavior in the workplace. They all told LAist they left the campaign because of these allegations.

In one incident, two former staffers, who asked not to be named due to fears of hurting future job prospects, told LAist the candidate grabbed both of their hands and placed them on her breasts during a campaign meeting at a cafe in Newport Beach.

“She was telling us about how her breasts were not real and that she has, quote, 'she has no feeling in her nipples,' end quote,” one staffer recounted.

“ We hesitated because we didn't want to touch her at all in that aspect, but she proceeds to grab both of our hands and lays them on her breast,” he said.

She then told the female staffer to “give it a squeeze,” he said.

“We took our hands off because we were just in shock,” he said.

LAist spoke with three additional people who had been told of the incident and corroborated the details of the allegations they heard at the time.

Conklin denied the incident happened.

“No, no, no, no, no, no,” Conklin told LAist when asked about the allegation. “That's really ridiculous.”

Another former staffer alleged in a separate incident Conklin asked her to organize files on two cell phones, and in the process, she said Conklin joked to avoid “d*ck pictures” while going through the phones.

When LAist asked Conklin about the allegation, she told us she had a nude photograph on her phone that she received from a client during a prior job as a salesperson.

“He sent me a d*ck pic,” Conklin told LAist. ”That's the only thing that I alluded to, OK, is that story. But no, I wouldn't say anything inappropriate to a staffer because it's not a thing.”

Conklin said she believed the former staffers are “pulling things out of context to villainize me, and I'm not comfortable being staged as this person who is acting inappropriate.”

Conklin added that she viewed her staff as family and would sometimes share personal details with them.

“Trauma dumping is emotional bonding.  That's how you bond with people when you're vulnerable,” she said.

Resources for abuse victims

LAist’s Ted Rohrlich contributed to this article. 

My grandfather, Charles Echternacht, came of age during the Great Depression, and it never left him. I don't think I ever saw him eat at a restaurant. But there was one exception: a boxed pint of Thrifty Ice Cream, orange sherbet or Rocky Road, that my grandmother, Betty, would bring home during her weekly shopping trips. He'd share it with us when we visited their house in Belmont a few times a year.

For many Angelenos, Thrifty Ice Cream stirs a kind of multigenerational nostalgia that's increasingly rare, with memories of summer, family trips, or weekday treats. In summer 2025, when Rite Aid announced it would close all of its locations, there was a howl of despair — how could the ice cream of our youth disappear? People made their case for favorite flavors — Black Cherry, Mint Chip, Medieval Madness — and reminisced about the cool, weird scooper shape and how much they appreciated the truly thrifty prices.

But Thrifty Ice Cream did not melt away. Instead, an investment group tied to Monster Beverage Corporation executives stepped in with a $19 million purchase, and now sells the iconic containers in supermarkets and a few scattered scoop shops. For many, the brand's continued existence since its start back in 1940 feels like nothing short of a miracle.

So when I got an email recently inviting me to tour the factory — SoCal's version of Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory — it was as if I'd received my own golden ticket. (The brand is expanding onto Shakey's Pizza Parlor menu.)

75,000 gallons a day

When I saw the address, I was surprised to realize that I’d driven past it more times than I could count. It is located in El Monte, only a few neighborhoods over from my hometown of Whittier, off Rosemead Boulevard. The plant has been there since the 1970’s, having moved from its original location in Hollywood. Off a little stretch of winding industrial road, it’s not really visible to passersby until you pull up in front and see their modest signage.

Tim Briggs, a longtime quality assurance manager at Thrifty Ice Cream, leads a tour of the plant's production floor.

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Gab Chabrán

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LAist

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Leading the tour was Tim Briggs, the quality assurance manager, who's worked there since the '80s. He had a long white beard (enclosed in a hairnet that matched the one on his head), and a warm smile, like Santa Claus if Santa had grown up surfing and listening to rock 'n' roll. He wore a custom white coat, embroidered with the Thrifty logo and his name, and walked about with a quiet pride.

I was fitted with a synthetic hairnet, just like the one Briggs wore, and led onto the production floor — the most visceral part of the whole tour. I couldn't believe I was standing on what felt like hallowed ground. If the tasting room was Wonka's chocolate room, this was the factory floor — conveyor belts running in every direction, workers pouring dried milk into massive steel vats, machinery loud enough to feel in your chest.

It's staggering, watching it happen. The plant employs nearly 100 people, though only a handful were on the floor the day I visited — this small crew cycling through Thrifty's current lineup of 64 flavors, based on the month's demand. At full capacity, the plant can turn out up to 75,000 gallons of ice cream a day — something like 2 million scoops, if you're counting. Rocky Road is always saved for last. It's the only flavor in the lineup that isn't kosher, Briggs explained — the marshmallows contain gelatin from animal by-products — which means every line has to be fully cleaned before production can start again.

That day, they were mixing Chocolate Malted Krunch. I'd never been much of a fan before, but once I caught the smell of fresh malt going into the mix — and watched the little white balls that give it its crunch get shot through metal piping before being folded into the rest of the ice cream — I understood the appeal. It's officially my next purchase.

Small malt balls await mixing into a fresh batch of Chocolate Malted Krunch on the production line.

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Gab Chabrán

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LAist

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Watching it all come together, I thought of the old Mister Rogers' Neighborhood episode where he tours a crayon factory — big vats of raw material, slowly turning into something wonderful.

Tasting memories 

Eventually, we were led to a small tasting area, where a cooler of tubs sat ready to be scooped. Behind it were two rolling coolers decked out in Thrifty ephemera, and on top sat a row of boxed pints. As I looked closer, I realized they were vintage containers, just like the ones my grandfather used to share with my brother and me. And there it was: Rocky Road. I found myself studying the font, the imagery, getting lost in my own little palace of nostalgia.

A vintage Thrifty Rocky Road box, priced at 79 cents for a half gallon — the same flavor Gab Chabran's grandfather used to bring home.

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Gab Chabrán

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LAist

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It was around that point that Briggs pulled out a small photo album of glossy photographs from when the factory was first built, in the same sepia-toned style as the photos that hung on the walls around grandparents' house.

While I didn't sample any Rocky Road this time around, I did get to try some Chocolate Malted Krunch fresh off the line — some of the softest, creamiest ice cream I've ever had. I also sampled their Red, White and Blue sherbet, along with their new Circus Animal Cookie flavor, another one that pulled at the heartstrings for anyone who grew up eating the actual cookies from Mother’s back in the day.

An employee holds open a photo album of archival images from the plant's early years in El Monte.

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Gab Chabrán

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LAist

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After completing my visit, I'm still in awe of what I witnessed that day, off that stretch of Rosemead Boulevard I've driven past countless times. Except now I know exactly what's there — a piece of SoCal history that has touched so many, and continues to, generation after generation, one scoop of Rocky Road and Chocolate Malted Krunch at a time.

The Los Angeles Clippers were fined $30 million and star player Kawhi Leonard was hit with a $700,000 penalty by the NBA on Wednesday for violating salary cap circumvention rules.

The league came down hard on the organization after a nearly year-long investigation.

Owner Steve Ballmer has been suspended for one year, president of basketball operations Lawrence Frank has been suspended without pay for six months and president of business operations Gillian Zucker was suspended for one year, all for their involvement.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

Researchers estimate that close to 6,000 unhoused people live within a mile of Olympic and Paralympic venues in Los Angeles County, and could be affected by security plans for the 2028 Summer Games.

That figure, published this week by a team of academics at USC and UCLA that study homelessness, is more than three times an estimate the L.A. County Department of Housing and Homelessness gave LAist earlier this year.

Carter Hewgley, that department’s chief strategy officer, told LAist in July that his office had been told to plan for security perimeters as wide as 1 mile for the Olympics, and that around 1,600 unsheltered people could be affected.

“That just seemed obviously low,” said Randall Kuhn, a UCLA professor and demographer who co-runs a monthly survey of unhoused people in L.A. In total, there are around 49,000 unsheltered people countywide, according to the 2026 point-in-time homeless count.

Kuhn and his colleagues came up with their higher estimate using numbers from that count, which estimates the number of unhoused people by census tract. They then adjusted those figures based on how much each tract overlapped with a potential Olympic security perimeter and the length of walkable and major streets where unhoused people were likely to be located.

The researchers acknowledged recent reports questioning potential errors in the recent point-in-time count, but said it still provides the best estimate available.

The result — an estimate of 5,975 unsheltered people within 1 mile of Olympic venues — excludes Pasadena and Long Beach, which do their own homeless counts, meaning the number is likely even higher.

The researchers published their findings on a website called Home 2028, where they plan to post studies and discussions related to the upcoming L.A. Olympics. They say they want to emphasize the potential magnitude of the challenge the region faces hosting the Olympic and Paralympic Games in areas where homelessness is prevalent, like downtown Los Angeles.

“ We do want to highlight how the number of people who could be affected could be quite high,” said Jessie Chien, a research data analyst with UCLA’s California Center for Population Research, who put together the estimates.

Carter Hewgley with L.A. County responded to the report, saying his department was reviewing the methodology to understand how it compared to the county’s, and that he welcomed the additional analysis.

In a statement, Hewgley noted that the county’s 1,600 estimate was attached to an application with the state for $93 million in funding to address homelessness ahead of the Olympic Games.

“Importantly, our application was designed to address needs far beyond our initial 1,600 count,” Hewgley said, adding that the funds would go to more than 4,000 unhoused people in the county. Whether the county will receive that money is unclear.

Local officials have said they expect security plans will require unhoused people to vacate areas around competition venues ahead of and during the Olympics. That’s because the Secret Service will establish security perimeters around competition spaces where access will be restricted, and if unhoused people are within those perimeters they may be forced to move.

Those boundaries are not yet set. Less than two years out, there is also still not a concrete plan for how local officials will address homelessness in security perimeters or who will pay for those efforts.

Officials with the city and county say they want to focus on offering people in these areas shelter. But the researchers behind Home 2028 say they’re worried people will simply end up forced out of Olympic zones and into other neighborhoods.

“ I don't know what sort of capacity there is to actually do all that work,” said Benjamin Henwood, a USC professor and the director of university’s Homelessness Policy Research Institute. “And so at some point, you are concerned that more brute force criminalization might be at play.”

Henwood pointed to other work he and the same group of academics have done looking at the negative effects of encampment sweeps.

“ Because we're doing the research, we want that to be relevant to the conversation,” he said.

The report indicates that tighter perimeters could reduce the number of unhoused people caught up in the Olympics security apparatus. According to the researchers’ numbers, around 2,200 unhoused people live within a half-mile of venues.

Still, even that smaller number makes up 5% of the county’s unsheltered population.

During a summer in which West Nile virus has jumped to record levels statewide, 17 Long Beach residents have contracted the mosquito-borne illness — far surpassing this time last year and the highest in more than a decade, according to the city’s health department.

Cases have been unusually severe: 69% involved neuroinvasive West Nile, the form that attacks the brain or nervous system, and 81% of those infected required hospitalization.

The first cases surfaced in late June, but officials detected mosquitoes carrying the disease as early as May, a sign the season — which typically runs July to October — may be stretching longer than usual. Health officials expect infections to continue through early fall, typically peaking in September.

This comes after repeated years of virtually no infections seen in the city. Last year there was one human case of West Nile citywide, with zero cases in 2024, one in 2023 and four in 2022.

Since the disease was first detected here in 2003, the number of cases has reached double digits in 2015, 2017 and a high of 56 cases in 2014.

Dr. Cliff Okada, Long Beach’s city health officer, said the virus tends to fluctuate unpredictably from year to year. “I can’t really give you a straight answer as to why this number is so high this year,” he said, but cited climate change and rising temperatures as potential factors, as well as improved surveillance locally.

With the exception of a high concentration of cases in the 90803 ZIP code, Dr. Okada said infections are dispersed fairly evenly citywide. He didn’t want to reveal locations as it would create the impression that some parts of the city “are more dangerous than others.”

Three agencies share responsibility for mosquito control in the city: the Los Angeles County Vector Control District covers the northern and eastern areas, and Long Beach’s own district manages the remainder.

Suzanne Kluh of the Greater Los Angeles County Vector Control District, which handles parts of North Long Beach as well as some of the city’s eastern neighborhoods, attributed much of the surge to the “warmest winter on record,” followed by a punishing summer heat wave.

It’s really just a numbers game. Those conditions, paired with unusually high humidity, have made it ripe for mosquitoes to multiply. A decline in bird immunity over the past five or six years has compounded the problem, since the virus circulates primarily between birds and mosquitoes before spreading to people.

In response, workers have intensified efforts to kill down the number of Culex mosquitoes — the species responsible for local transmission — by targeting the larvae that fester in storm drains, street gutters and smaller estuaries like marshes and ponds.

They’ve also tried to disperse or move crow roosts, such as one at El Dorado Park, so as to limit the spread among birds that later forage in nearby neighborhoods. Even so, mosquitoes are resourceful.

“They’ll breed in a bucket if it has enough water in somebody’s backyard,” Kluh said

The outbreak in Long Beach mirrors a broader spike across Los Angeles County and California. The county, whose case count excludes Long Beach and Pasadena, reported 15 cases and its first death of the year on Aug. 20.

“This tragic loss is a reminder of the serious threat posed by mosquito-borne diseases, including West Nile virus and dengue,” said Dr. Muntu Davis, the county’s health officer. He urged residents to take basic precautions.

Statewide, West Nile activity has reached a five-year high, with 65 human cases and five deaths confirmed across 16 counties as of Aug. 28, according to the California Department of Public Health. Since 2003, the state has recorded more than 8,000 cases and over 400 deaths, making it California’s most common and serious vector-borne disease.

How to recognize West Nile symptoms

West Nile is transmitted to humans by infected mosquitoes; symptoms typically include fevers, headaches or stomach pain, which generally pass after a few days. The virus can be fatal for those with weaker immune systems, particularly the elderly.

Most infections go unnoticed — about 80% of people show no symptoms — but in about one in 150 cases, the virus turns serious, causing brain inflammation, meningitis, encephalitis or paralysis. There is no vaccine or specific treatment.

Those over 55 and people with diabetes, high blood pressure, chronic kidney disease or weakened immune systems face the highest risk, and officials urge anyone with a high fever, stiff neck, confusion or muscle weakness to seek care immediately.