Required transparency is absent for millions in OC
Nick Gerda
is an accountability reporter who has covered local government in Southern California for more than a decade.
Published December 18, 2023 4:22 PM
Orange County Supervisor Andrew Do at the Board of Supervisors meeting on Nov. 28, 2023
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Nick Gerda
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LAist
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Topline:
An Orange County nonprofit that got millions in pandemic relief funds earmarked to feed struggling seniors failed to submit federally-required yearly audits detailing how it spent that taxpayer money, according to public records obtained by LAist. The organization has been led at various points over the last year by the 22-year-old daughter of O.C. Supervisor Andrew Do.
The backstory: LAist previously reported that Do did not publicly disclose his family connection before official action to award the group taxpayer funding.
What’s next: Orange County supervisors are scheduled to vote Tuesday on ethics reforms that would require supervisors to disclose any family relationships before voting on funding.
Keep reading… for the details of LAist’s latest reporting.
Key findings
A nonprofit recently led by Orange County Supervisor Andrew Do’s 22-year-old daughter failed to submit federally-required audits showing how it spent millions in taxpayer funds, according to an interview and public records obtained by LAist.
The required audits are tied to $4 million Do played a leading role in allocating to the nonprofit during the pandemic — money earmarked to provide meals for seniors and people with disabilities.
LAist previously reported that Do voted, along with four other supervisors, to award millions to the same nonprofit without disclosing his family connection.
Email records document that a county administrator raised “serious concerns” three years ago about plans to contract with the group, citing concerns about its legal status as a nonprofit.
The OC Supervisors meet again Tuesday, Dec. 19. How to watch.
An Orange County nonprofit that got millions in pandemic relief funds earmarked to feed struggling seniors failed to submit federally-required yearly audits detailing how it spent that taxpayer money, according to public records obtained by LAist.
The organization has been led at various points over the last year by the 22-year-old daughter of O.C. Supervisor Andrew Do. Do voted to direct funds to the group without publicly disclosing his close family relationship. State law allows officials to knowingly award taxpayer money to their adult children — something the state Senate and two Assembly committees voted unanimously in 2016 to make a crime. But the bill never made it to a full Assembly vote.
The money was part of O.C.’s allocation from a wave of pandemic relief funding for local governments provided by Congress under the American Rescue Plan Act, or ARPA. County supervisors each got to allocate part of that money to meal programs in their districts, and Do directed his district’s funding to a nonprofit that was new at the time, Viet America Society.
The missing audits are “a really excellent example of the failure to monitor at the county level,” said Rose Chan Loui, a longtime attorney for nonprofits who now directs UCLA Law School’s program on philanthropy and nonprofits.
“If they would have been required to comply with that, we probably would have a lot more transparency as to what is going on.”
The details of what happened
In April 2021, O.C.’s top elected officials — the Board of Supervisors — voted to devote part of the county’s ARPA funding to feed seniors and people with disabilities who lacked access to sufficient food. The supervisors divided that money equally among each district, with each supervisor then deciding how to spend their district’s funding.
Supervisor Do — who was representing communities with the highest poverty rates in the county — directed his district’s funding to Viet America Society. At Do’s request, the group’s contract was ultimately increased to $4 million in federal funds, split into monthly payments of about $167,000 to cover meal services from May 2021 through May 2023.
Viet America Society has been led at various points over the last year by Do’s 22-year-old daughter, Rhiannon Do, according to a tax filing and other records. It’s a family relationship Do did not disclose before key votes on the group’s funding, according to an LAist review of meeting videos and three county officials — two supervisors and county CEO Frank Kim.
The group was initially led by Peter Pham, an electrical contractor and restaurateur. Before founding the nonprofit in mid-2020, Pham was paid about $21,000 — largely raised by Do — for construction work on statues Do had installed in Fountain Valley in 2015 and 2016, according to a state investigation.
Peter Pham was not accused of wrongdoing. But state investigators found that Do falsely told them under penalty of perjury that he didn’t ask for donations into a nonprofit group he used as a “holding company” to pay Pham and other statue contractors. Investigators also found Do was controlling that nonprofit — the Paracel & Pratly Foundation — even though he wasn’t its official leader.
More recently, Pham has alternated with Rhiannon Do as president of Viet America Society since last December, according to public records.
It’s unknown
how much of the $4 million in taxpayer money went to meals for those who needed them. Records obtained by LAist through a public records request show the nonprofit failed to submit federally-required audits that would detail how it spent the money.
Andrew Do, Rhiannon Do, and Pham did not respond to LAist’s requests for comment for this article. The Dos previously declined to comment on reporting by LAist on other funding Do helped direct to the nonprofit. Andrew Do denied wrongdoing in an interview with City News Service in late November.
Pham initially told LAist last month that he would be available for an interview, but has not returned multiple follow-up calls and text messages to schedule it.
The audit requirement was spelled out in a county contract with Viet America Society that Pham signed in May 2021. It states the nonprofit was required under federal law to conduct an annual audit of how the funds were spent, known as a “single audit,” once it spends more than $750,000 of the funding.
Single audits look at a nonprofit’s finances to make sure they’re using federal dollars for their intended purpose and have an accounting system to accurately document the spending, according to the federal government. They’re “the single most important way” to assess an organization’s ability to manage federal dollars, federal officials say.
Deadlines for filing two of those audits with the county and federal authorities were missed by Viet America Society, according to public records. The first was due to be filed to the county by late June 2022 and the second in June 2023, according to the county contract. And a federal spokesperson told LAist the audits were required to be uploaded to a public database within nine months of the audit period, which corresponds to a deadline of the end of September last year and this year.
And weeks after first being asked by LAist in November, county officials have not answered whether the audits were submitted to the county, as required by the contract. Viet America Society also was unable to provide copies of either audit to the county in October of this year, according to email records. A consultant to the group told LAist they hadn’t been completed at that point.
Viet America Society is the county’s only private contractor for this pandemic meals program that does not have single audits on file in the federal database. The others — Meals on Wheels Orange County, 2-1-1 Orange County and AgeWell Senior Services — all have their audits in the database for the last two years.
Tax records also indicate neither audit of Viet America Society was conducted, at least as of this October. Despite its county contract requiring the single audits — “in accordance with” federal law — the nonprofit marked on its tax filings for the last twoyears that the audits were not required — and left blank whether they were conducted.
Editor's Note
Dec. 20, 5 p.m.: The 2021 and 2022 tax filings originally linked in this article were downloaded from Guidestar.org, which makes IRS data for nonprofit organizations available. Do issued a news release on Dec. 20 falsely alleging LAist had forged the linked 2022 document, citing as evidence the year “2021” appearing in the upper right corner of the electronic copy.
The nonprofit newsroom ProPublica, which also publishes IRS nonprofit filings in a searchable database, told us the raw filings for 2022 from the IRS contained this "2021" label glitch throughout — although the data is defined at the top of the filings as being for tax year "beginning 01-01-22, and ending 12-31-22." ProPublica corrected the label prior to publishing (and that link is now in LAist’s story above.)
Do has not challenged any of the underlying reporting supported by these documents. Those findings: That Do’s daughter was listed in October as the group’s only director or trustee, and that the non-profit’s returns for the last two years indicate “no” to the question whether audits were required.
If any such audits exist, a county spokesperson said, they will be provided in response to a records request LAist submitted over three weeks ago.
LAist also asked county spokespeople if the county has received any accounting at all of how Viet America Society spent the $4 million the county provided for these meal services. They have not provided an answer. The contract terms require the single audits to be submitted to the county, as well as a final financial statement “detailing all program expenditures.” The financial statement was required to be submitted to the county within 30 days of the contract ending on May 31, 2023.
Two months ago, in October, the county required Viet America Society to submit its single audits for the last two years as part of an application for new county funding in a competitive bidding process. In contrast, the group’s previous county contracts were not subject to competitive bidding, according to county records LAist obtained.
Those emails show that after obtaining a one-week extension from the county to disclose the audits in its application, the representative told the county that neither audit could be provided by the extended deadline. And the group withdrew from seeking the new funding.
“I have checked with Peter Pham at VAS and due to the deadline of Friday he could not commit to meet it,” wrote the nonprofit’s representative, Roger Faubel.
“With many thanks, we must withdraw our pursuit.”
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Orange County records
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That representative, Roger Faubel, told LAist that Pham, the nonprofit’s founder and on-and-off president, had told him in October that the audits hadn’t been completed.
“I talked to Peter, and I said, ‘Peter, you know you can’t do this. It’s unraveling here,'” said Faubel, a high-profile county lobbyist, in an interview.
Viet America Society had only gotten part way through the audit process by that point, Faubel told LAist.
“You say that you can meet the timeframe, but it’s not occurring,” Faubel said he told Pham, recommending that he withdraw from seeking the new funding. Emails show Faubel followed up by letting the county know Viet America Society was withdrawing from consideration.
“I realized that he could not comply with all of the information that was required of him,” Faubel said.
In an email to county officials, Faubel said he was Viet America Society’s consultant. He told LAist he didn’t register as the nonprofit’s lobbyist because he wasn’t paid for helping, so he wasn’t required to register as its lobbyist under county regulations.
Faubel’s clients have included AT&T, Waste Management and Enterprise Rent-A-Car. Faubel also lobbied the county on behalf of the landlord for both Viet America Society and Do’s private law office, according to lobbying disclosures by Faubel. The nonprofit and Do’s law office are on the same floor of the same building.
The October emails about audits not being available took place within days of Do’s daughter being marked as the group’s only director or trustee on its tax filing.
What happens when audits are missed
Nonprofits can face
consequences for not submitting their single audits. When it comes to money given directly by the federal government, federal agencies can halt funding until a nonprofit completes their audits, or even cancel the federal dollars altogether.
A spokesperson for the U.S. Treasury Department, which awarded the federal funding the county provided Viet America Society, told LAist in an email that the county is responsible for making sure the nonprofit follows the audit requirements.
“All recipients are required to provide detailed information on how funds are used,” a Treasury spokesperson said of the ARPA dollars that flowed through local governments.
“It is the recipients’ responsibility (in this case, assumably, Orange County) to ensure compliance of their subrecipients,” they added. Viet America Society was a subrecipient.
The county’s contract — pointing to federal law — obligated the nonprofit to submit annual single audits once it spent more than $750,000 in federal funding. That would require audits so far for 2021 and 2022.
County officials can take action if organizations breach their contract terms. In the past, they’ve taken steps like having contractors refund the county from money already provided.
When O.C. Supervisor Katrina Foley was told of the missing audits by LAist, she said she found the situation frustrating.
The audits, she said in an interview, are “a requirement of law so that we ensure that taxpayer dollars are being well spent and used for the purpose they were intended.”
“I’m disappointed that this is happening,” she added. “Because there are those of us that are really doing work to make sure that there’s equity in the way that grants are given out” and that audit requirements are followed.
Supervisor Vicente Sarmiento has called for an investigation into Do. The other two county supervisors, Doug Chaffee and Don Wagner, didn’t return messages for comment on this story. They previously have said they see nothing wrong with Do’s actions.
Tax filings show $276,000 in taxpayer money went unspent
The nonprofit’s tax filings show it grew its cash on hand by $276,000 in 2021 by not spending all of the government funding it received that year — all of which appears to have been paid specifically by the county for the group to provide meals to vulnerable people. That year, the group billed the county monthly for providing meals to vulnerable people.
The county contract, however, required the group to return any funds that were not spent on services.
Additionally, the county meals contracts required Viet America Society to disclose how many meals were provided and the number of meal deliveries. But invoice records obtained by LAist show that for the first 15 months, the nonprofit did not do so on its regular invoices — for which the county paid $2 million during that period.
LAist asked county spokespeople about the lack of disclosure, and why the county apparently did not enforce this contract requirement. No answers have been provided.
‘Serious concerns’ raised early on about the group’s legal status
Email records
obtained by LAist also show a county contract administrator raised concerns three years ago about plans to contract with Viet America Society to provide meals — largely because of its inability to show it was legally registered as a nonprofit.
A county executive approved the funding anyway, emails show. That executive, Dylan Wright, and county spokespeople have not answered questions about why he decided to proceed despite the concerns, and whether Do had a role in that decision. The county went on to pay more than $3 million to the organization over the next two years before it registered with state nonprofit regulators as required by law.
The first $2 million of that money was directed by Do to Viet America Society outside public meetings, under the meal funding for his district. The rest was approved by Do and other supervisors, at Do’s request, in an April 2022 extension of the group’s contract.
“I have serious concerns about issuing a contract to this organization that appears to be a home based business and can’t verify their non-profit status,” wrote Heather Condon, a county contract administrator who was processing the group’s first county contract, in an email to other officials at her department on Dec. 23, 2020.
She then asked her colleagues if Viet America Society had been approved at the state level as a nonprofit. Follow-up emails show the concerns were raised up the chain that day directly to Wright.
State Attorney General records reviewed by LAist show no registration until two years later, in January 2023. And even then, state regulators said the group was still not in compliance.
After learning of the legal status concerns in December 2020, Wright decided later that same day to move forward, according to the emails. The emails back do not show an explanation back to Condon responding to her specific concerns.
Condon told LAist she never received an explanation addressing her concerns.
“Just a direction to proceed,” said Condon, who retired from the county earlier this year.
“I don’t know what went on in the discussions to go ahead and approve issuing the contract.”
The state charity registration is required in order for the state attorney general to ensure nonprofits are doing the work they said they’d do when they obtained their nonprofit tax exemption, said Chan Loui of UCLA Law School.
“It’s essentially your pact with the public,” she said.
“You’re getting benefits as a nonprofit from the state of California, and the attorney general is charged with making sure that those funds are in fact being used for public good,” she added.
“The attorney general can’t do their job if you’re not filing.”
Foley, the county supervisor, told LAist it’s important that the county is only paying entities that can legally receive the money. Foley said she’s worked hard to make sure that the nonprofits she directed funding to were in compliance with legal requirements.
“No matter what kind of contract we're entering into with the county, we need to be entering into these agreements with organizations that are lawfully able to partner with the county agency,” she said.
“I feel like we have to have standards. Right?” she added.
Even after it registered, the attorney general found the nonprofit still was not legally compliant because it hadn’t filed its long-overdue annual registration and financial disclosures for 2020.
While the group was still declared delinquent, Do voted for another $2.5 million in county funding for his daughter’s group, without disclosing the family connection. Viet America Society resolved its status in June when the AG’s office received its overdue 2020 paperwork, according to the AG’s records.
Supervisors to vote on new policy to require family member disclosure
Supervisor Sarmiento is proposing county ethics reforms that would require supervisors to disclose any family relationships to people or groups seeking county funding approvals that come before them. It would also require more public transparency about who supervisors divvy up their districts’ discretionary funding to, by posting online a quarterly log of all agreements that have been approved.
“As elected officials, we have an obligation to be as transparent as possible with the public and disclose any potential conflicts of interest, especially when voting to spend taxpayer dollars,” Sarmiento said in a statement to LAist.
That item will be up for a vote at Tuesday’s board of supervisors meeting, which starts at 9:30 a.m.
How to watch
The meeting starts Tuesday, Dec. 19 at 9:30 a.m. You can watch the meeting online, by visiting this page while the meeting is in session. The video recording also will be posted online after the meeting, on the same page.
Street Food Cinema puts on Boo-ze, Bites & Frights two weekends in a row.
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Courtesy Street Food Cinema
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In this edition:
A witch walk through Beverly Hills, Come From Away at a Noise Within, Street Food Cinema and more of the best things to do this week.
Highlights:
Bring your pointy hat and broomstick, then join your coven for a witchy walk through the spooky (but also… sun-spackled) streets of Beverly Hills. Hosted by women’s walking group Los Angelistas, the walk features historical landmarks like the Spadena House and wraps with 30% off treats at Sweet Angeles Bakery.
Spooky season is upon us, and the next two weekends you can get your fill of scary movies and bites to go with them at Street Food Cinema's fourth annual immersive Halloween experience, Boo-ze, Bites and Frights at the historic village of Heritage Square Museum. They'll be screening horror classics old and new, including Nightmare on Elm Street, Sinners and Blade.
Come From Away is one of the best musicals of the 2010s, with a heartfelt score and a story that has stood the test of time through runs on Broadway and in the West End, plus a successful filmed version on Apple TV. The show follows the story of the town of Gander, which played host to passengers stranded when flights were shut down mid-path following the attacks on Sept. 11.
We’re getting pretty close to the midterm election, so get ready to fill out your ballot. If you’re a mail-in voter, you should be receiving your ballot soon if it hasn’t come already (mine showed up last week). As usual, there are many complicated props to read through, but we’ve got you covered with our L.A. and O.C. voter guides. After all that hard work, you’ll need to get out and do something fun.
Elsewhere on LAist, you can get a preview of Saturday’s Taste of Soul festival in South L.A.; check out an inside view of an event we’ve featured here before, the Sh*tty Movie Club; and Dave Grohl talks to us about the Soundstage of Hope fundraiser.
Saturday, Oct. 17, 9:30 a.m. 503 N. Palm Drive, Beverly Hills COST: FREE; MORE INFO
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Courtesy Love Beverly Hills
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Bring your pointy hat and broomstick, then join your coven for a witchy walk through the spooky (but also… sun-spackled) streets of Beverly Hills. Hosted by women’s walking group Los Angelistas, the walk features historical landmarks like the Spadena House and wraps with 30% off treats at Sweet Angeles Bakery.
An Evening on Journalism & Public Safety in Los Angeles
Monday, Oct. 19, 6 p.m. L.A. Press Club 2535 W Temple St., Downtown L.A. COST: FREE; MORE INFO
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Courtesy Los Angeles Reporting Collective
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Los Angeles Reporting Collective (LARC) and the Association of Gun Violence Reporters (AGVR) host a discussion about journalism and public safety at the L.A. Press Club. Join reporters from The Trace, The Guardian, LA Local and Southern California News Group for the talk, preceded by a screening of the short documentary about surveillance, Flock Walk.
No Fest
Saturday, Oct. 17, 12 p.m. to 9 p.m. Beyond Baroque 681 Venice Blvd., Venice COST: FROM $21.99; MORE INFO
Save poetry in L.A.! No Fest features an open mic, poetry readings, art, music and local vendors, all in support of Beyond Baroque, the historic Venice space that has supported poetry in Los Angeles since its founding in 1968. The event will also be streamed on YouTube.
Cynthia Erivo: 'Let Me Sing to You'
Thursday, Oct. 15, 7:30 p.m. Hollywood Bowl 2301 Highland Ave., Hollywood COST: FROM $33.39; MORE INFO
Cynthia Erivo returns to the Hollywood Bowl.
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LAURENT HOU/Hans Lucas
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AFP via Getty Images
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When Wicked star Cynthia Erivo last took the stage at the Hollywood Bowl, she was playing Jesus in Jesus Christ Superstar, and she received a minutes-long standing ovation in the middle of the second act after “Gethsemane.” It was — I am not exaggerating — one of the most astonishing performances I’ve ever seen at the Bowl or anywhere else. Relive the magic with her solo show, featuring favorites from Wicked and much more.
Street Food Cinema: Boo-ze, Bite and Frights
Friday and Saturday, Oct. 16-17; 23-24. Heritage Square Museum 3800 Homer St., Montecito Heights COST: FROM $53; MORE INFO
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Courtesy Street Food Cinema
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Spooky season is upon us, and the next two weekends you can get your fill of scary movies and bites to go with them at Street Food Cinema's fourth annual immersive Halloween experience, Boo-ze, Bites and Frights at the historic village of Heritage Square Museum. They'll be screening horror classics old and new, including Nightmare on Elm Street, Sinners and Blade.
Come From Away
Through Sunday, Nov. 8 A Noise Within 3352 E Foothill Blvd., Pasadena COST: FROM $52.75; MORE INFO
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Craig Schwartz
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A Noise Within
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Come From Away is one of the best musicals of the 2010s, with a heartfelt score and a story that has stood the test of time through runs on Broadway and in the West End, plus a successful filmed version on Apple TV. The show follows the story of the town of Gander, which played host to passengers stranded when flights were shut down mid-path following the attacks on Sept. 11.
Narsiso Martinez
Through Saturday, Nov. 7 Charlie James Gallery 969 Chung King Road, Chinatown COST: FREE; MORE INFO
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Narsiso Martinez
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Charlie James Gallery
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I first saw Narsiso Martinez’s work when he won the Frieze LA Impact Prize in 2023. Since then, his stirring portraits of migrant workers emblazoned on CSA boxes and Whole Foods bags have been showing up everywhere, from the Hammer to the new Lucas Museum of Narrative Art. Don’t miss this solo show at Charlie James, where Martinez explores the stories of farmworkers and California kitchens across a variety of mixed media.
The Peterson Show
Through Monday, Oct. 26 Echo Theatre Company Atwater Village Theater 3269 Casitas Ave., Atwater Village COST: $46.90; MORE INFO
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Cooper Bates
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Lucy Pollack Public Relations
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I heard about The Peterson Show from one of my favorite L.A. newsletters, Tasbeeh Herwees’s No Bad Days, which spoke to writer Janine Nabors about her new play. It takes inspiration from '80s sitcoms and is loosely based on the Bill Cosby scandal, reuniting five former child stars when the legacy of their TV dad goes bust. It’s only on through Oct. 26, so don’t miss it.
This is about the time of year when the country engages in the Great American Biennial Polling Freakout.
What's happening: A few weeks before an election, lots of people start to really engage. They read headlines showing this candidate or that candidate leading a race. People wonder who's going to win and whether the polls are right or wrong. And it all often leads to a blend of anticipation mixed with confusion and anxiety.
What it means: Polls are not meant to be predictive. They are snapshots in time of when those surveys were conducted. They're also not as precise and specific as people want them to be. Remember: Polls have margins of error. So when someone has a 2-point lead, that's not a lead at all. If a poll has a 3 percentage-point margin of error, this means that candidate could have a 5-point lead or be losing by a point.
This is about the time of year when the country engages in the Great American Biennial Polling Freakout.
A few weeks before an election, lots of people start to really engage. They read headlines showing this candidate or that candidate leading a race. People wonder who's going to win and whether the polls are right or wrong. And it all often leads to a blend of anticipation mixed with confusion and anxiety.
Stop and breathe. All that needs to be known from the polls at this point is that over the last several months, the compass needle has moved more in Democrats' direction. That's it. They are the favorites to win the House and are within striking distance of winning the Senate, something that was seen as a long shot when this election cycle began.
That's based not just on the polls but on conversations with campaigns and on-the-ground reporting. But here are some tips and things to remember as the deluge of polls comes your way:
1. Polls are not meant to be predictive.
They are snapshots in time of when those surveys were conducted.
2. They're also not as precise and specific as people want them to be.
They're more like fuzzy targets. Remember: Polls have margins of error. So when someone has a 2-point lead, that's not a lead at all. If a poll has a 3 percentage-point margin of error, this means that candidate could have a 5-point lead or be losing by a point.
3. Look for transparency.
There has been a proliferation of not-so-great polls this cycle, some driven by AI, others without long track records and even a pollster exposed to be fake. Good pollsters show their work with detailed methodology pages. If you can't find a methodology, that's a red flag.
4. The quality of state-level polling is not very good.
With the decline of local journalism, there has been a decline in well-conducted, rigorous and frequent state polls. There is less money for those local outlets to pay for polling, which can be very expensive. So take those state poll averages with a grain of salt.
5. Go beyond the top lines.
Horse-race polling isn't the best use of polls. Polls are best when measuring attitudes over time to help inform us of how Americans are feeling and thinking about key issues. There is so much more underneath those top-line numbers, from job approval ratings and who is most motivated to vote, to which party is more trusted to handle the issues people care about most — and so much more.
The fact is that many of these races are expected to be close. Millions of votes are not yet cast, and anyone professing to know exactly what's going to happen is lying.
When you're looking at who's up and who's down, just remember that horse-race polling is like sprinkles on top of a bowl of ice cream. Lots of people like sprinkles, but if all you eat is the sprinkles, you just wind up with a mouth full of wax without ever getting to the good stuff.
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Topline:
Many Californians probably think about the state insurance commissioner once every four years, when the job is on the ballot, if they think about it at all. But the race for that this November has new relevance for Angelenos. It comes after the Palisades and Eaton fires devastated thousands of people — and at a time when California’s home insurance market has been showing strain for years.
Why it matters: Ensuring that Californians have access to affordable insurance falls to the elected insurance commissioner. The commissioner regulates the companies that provide fire, home and auto coverage in the Golden State. Over the last eight years, the incumbent insurance commissioner presided over what parties on all sides have called a “disaster,” a “crisis,” and a “collapse” in the state’s home insurance market.
The context: Climate change and decades of poor forest management have turned California’s woodlands into tinderboxes, and the problem will only get worse as the planet continues to warm.
What's next: Whoever wins in November — a state senator who represents the Palisades and other coastal communities, or a former San Francisco supervisor with a bold vision for the future of insurance — will inherit an insurance system battered by a decade of devastating wildfires, insurers pulling out of the state and other upheaval.
Read on ... to learn about how California's insurance market got to where it is and the candidates who want to try to fix it.
Insurance is a social contract. When you sign up with State Farm or Allstate for home insurance, you confirm your membership in a community — your money will go to fix someone else’s burned or flooded home, and their money will in turn support yours. We let insurance companies sell policies on a private market, and we elect or appoint government officials to oversee that market to protect the interests of homeowners.
That’s how it’s supposed to work, but that’s not how it worked for Lynn McIntyre.
About this article
This story was produced by Grist and co-published with LAist.
Jake Bittle is a staff writer at Grist, covering climate change, energy, and natural disasters.
When McIntyre’s mother died in 2022, she willed McIntyre her longtime house in the “Alphabets,” a charming neighborhood not far from the coast in western Los Angeles. McIntyre and her daughter had only lived there for a year when her insurance company, Liberty Mutual, withdrew her fire coverage. She couldn’t find another private company to cover the home’s fire risk, so she enrolled in the California FAIR Plan, a state-backed “insurer of last resort,” paying another $5,000 a year in addition to her regular home insurance from Liberty.
After the Palisades Fire raged through the Alphabets in early 2025, McIntyre’s small bungalow was still standing. But it was full of smoke and ash that had crept in through vents and windows, and her belongings were stained beyond recognition by smoke. When she filed a claim with the FAIR Plan, the plan adjusters told her she was out of luck. They would pay for a temporary apartment, but nothing else.
Lynn McIntyre stands in front of her damaged home in the Alphabet Streets. McIntyre’s home suffered extensive smoke damage during the Palisades Fire, but the California FAIR Plan offered her almost no rebuilding assistance.
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Jake Bittle
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Grist
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McIntyre, who had worked for years as a real estate broker, spent months battling with 10 different adjusters and dozens of FAIR Plan representatives. It didn’t work. The employees batted her away at every turn, hiring third-party adjusters failed to get her anywhere, and her attorney professed himself confounded by FAIR’s obstinance. Even as most of her neighbors cleared their debris and started building new fire-resilient homes, many of them much larger than their old properties, her old bungalow sat stained with smoke.
It was only in late August, more than 18 months after the wildfire, that she was about to start repairing her home — not with insurance money, but with a nearly $200,000 loan from the federal government that she will someday have to pay back. To make matters worse, FAIR has been trying to cut off her apartment expenses, telling her that power and water have come back online in her area and that she needs to move back home — never mind that her house still has boarded-up windows and a scorched exterior. Meanwhile, Liberty Mutual informed her this summer that they would be canceling her non-fire coverage.
“The next time a fire comes through, I'm just going to light it on fire, because I'm not going to go through this again,” McIntyre said wryly as we stood in her doorway, construction machines rattling at the other houses around us.
An aerial view of reconstruction efforts underway in Pacific Palisades after the Palisades Fire. Many residents of the community lost insurance coverage before the fire, forcing them to enroll in the California FAIR Plan.
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Qian Weizhong
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VCG via Getty Images via Grist
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Ensuring that Californians like McIntyre have access to affordable insurance falls to an elected official that many Californians have likely never heard of: the insurance commissioner. The commissioner, one of eight elected state officials in California, regulates the companies that provide fire, home, and auto coverage in the Golden State.
Over the last eight years, the incumbent insurance commissioner presided over what parties on all sides have called a “disaster,” a “crisis” and a “collapse” in the state’s home insurance market. Now, as the current commissioner terms out, two Democratic candidates — Ben Allen and Jane Kim — have emerged claiming they can fix it. These candidates embody a debate in the Democratic Party about the best way to adapt to climate change. Allen, an established legislator representing Pacific Palisades, wants to rebuild the market, and Kim, a left-wing organizer from San Francisco, wants to ditch the idea of a private market altogether.
Whoever wins in November will inherit an insurance system battered by a decade of devastating wildfires, insurers pulling out of the state, and other upheaval. Climate change and decades of poor forest management have turned California’s woodlands into tinderboxes, and the problem will only get worse as the planet continues to warm. The current crisis in the insurance market began with a series of unprecedented wildfires between 2015 and 2020. These fires scorched around 4 million acres and destroyed 35,000 homes, many in areas that had never been known to burn. Insurance companies like State Farm and Farmers had to pay out billions of dollars in claims, enough to negate the profits they had made from writing fire insurance policies over the previous two decades.
The companies believed they were charging Californians far too little, but the price of insurance isn’t elastic like the price of gasoline or paper towels. Insurers have to seek permission from the state insurance commissioner to raise their prices. California was strict about those price hikes, and it blocked insurers’ attempts to pass their post-fire bill onto the state’s homeowners. The insurance industry’s response was to ditch California. They dropped tens of thousands of customers across the state, and companies like State Farm announced they would withdraw from the state altogether and cease writing any new policies.
“There's something broken that so many of us are facing the same issues,” McIntyre said, “and they just think they can just ride roughshod right on over all of us.”
The lack of available insurance is starting to hurt the state’s economy: Around 1 in 7 California realtors said they had a home sale fall through in 2024 due to insurance issues, the state’s FAIR plan ran out of claims money last year, and average premiums could rise by 16% this year. The trend is now spreading out of the most flammable zones, and many homeowners even in low-risk areas are struggling to get insurance.
The outcome of the November election could determine the trajectory of insurance bills for millions of Californians and decide the fate of fire-prone areas around the state. The election will also serve as a bellwether for how voters in the United States want to approach the expensive and difficult process of adapting to a warming world, and whoever wins will have to turn that mandate into a policy that can offer short-term relief. This would be a daunting job under the best of times, and these are not the best of times.
A sign in front of a State Farm insurance office in Pinole, California. State Farm is one of several insurance companies that dropped policies in risky areas following California’s spate of large wildfires.
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Justin Sullivan
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Getty Images via Grist
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The roots of the insurance crisis
The current insurance crisis is new, but its origins are very old. Over the last century, California has built millions of homes in the “wildland-urban interface,” the flammable zone outside the state’s major cities. Developers rushed out into the mountains around Lake Tahoe and the desert hills east of San Diego and built without any thought for fire mitigation, throwing up homes with wooden sidings and flammable fences on crowded lots. These are the areas that are burning up in the state’s recent wildfires, and the areas that insurers are dropping en masse.
This history of unwise development has created a bizarre situation that the scholar Carolyn Kousky has dubbed “a tale of two markets.” Prices ticked up in places that weren’t risky, like wet San Francisco and low-lying Fresno, but the market went haywire in risky areas like Malibu and the High Sierras. Nearly half of all households in high-fire-risk areas lost their insurance between 2018 and 2024. The California FAIR Plan, which was intended as a fringe supplement, became the only option for thousands of homeowners. Since 2018, it has swallowed up a huge share of policies in risky areas, growing from less than 1 to 5% of the market today. In some places, it reached 80% of market share.
In theory, California voters have some influence over their haywire insurance market. Every state has an insurance commissioner, but California is one of around a dozen states where that is an elected position. The fact that it’s elected at all is a testament to the strength of the state’s pro-consumer slant — in 1988, voters who were incensed about high car insurance prices passed a measure that turned it from an appointed position into an elected one.
In practice, this is a job no one should want. The commissioner has the power to approve or deny rate increases, and to police the industry’s compliance with state law. They also oversee the FAIR Plan, the state-backed insurer, which offers limited and expensive coverage to people like McIntyre who can’t get it on the private market. But the commissioner can’t do much else to make private insurers offer coverage or to reduce overall fire risk in wildland areas.
“The insurance commissioner has a lot of power and authority himself or herself that they should use, but the insurance commissioner alone cannot address these challenges,” said Dave Jones, who served as commissioner between 2010 and 2019.
California’s incumbent insurance commissioner Ricardo Lara, right, talks with homeowner Bruce Breslau following a 2024 public hearing in Los Angeles. Lara has faced criticism for failing to prevent private insurance companies from pulling out of risky areas.
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Robert Gauthier
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Los Angeles Times via Getty Images via Grist
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The outgoing commissioner, Ricardo Lara, has been in office for almost the entirety of the state’s fire-induced market collapse. Lara vacillated between cozying up with the insurers or clamping down on them and running the risk that they might flee the state. First he pledged to reject all insurance industry campaign money, then accepted some of that money, then appeared to cover for it by stalling on rate increases, which led insurers like State Farm to drop more policies.
Lara’s attempt at resolving the crisis was to strike a deal with the companies. He allowed them to pass on the cost of their reinsurance (or insurance for insurance companies) to customers, and he also allowed them to use forward-looking catastrophe models to predict future risk, something every other state had already allowed. That would translate to higher rates, and in return the insurers had to commit to writing more policies in the risky fire areas they wanted to abandon. But the deal turned out to be full of loopholes — insurers can meet their mandate without returning to the riskiest areas, and the state FAIR Plan has kept absorbing more market share after the Los Angeles fires in 2025. Lara said in an interview with The New York Times earlier this year that the industry had “bullied” him. (His office declined interview requests, and representatives for the FAIR Plan did not respond to requests for comment.)
The next insurance commissioner
Despite the entrenched nature of the state’s insurance problems, a dozen candidates piled into the election to replace Lara. This led to a crowded primary between four Democrats, five Republicans and two independents; none of the candidates had the funding to run a full statewide campaign, and there was limited public polling. The results were surprising even to the candidates. The top two candidates who advanced to the November runoff were Democrats. In first place with around 27% was Kim, a former San Francisco supervisor and Bernie Sanders ally who had pitched a government-run single-payer program for disaster insurance. In second place was Allen, the state senator who represents the Palisades and is one of the legislature’s foremost experts on insurance.
Allen and Kim agree on a lot. They both believe in simplifying typical insurance policies and forcing companies to be transparent about their spending and investment in fossil fuels. They both believe in beefing up the FAIR Plan so it would cover smoke and other damages, which would have saved McIntyre from months of confusion and delay. They have both vowed to crack down on insurers who delay and nitpick claim payments after disasters. And they have both rejected campaign contributions from the insurance industry.
Where they differ is on the question of how to get people off the FAIR Plan and stabilize the market — in other words, on the fundamental question of the state’s insurance system. Allen believes that if the state allows insurers to raise rates on risky homes, invests to harden homes in vulnerable areas, and takes a data-driven approach to measuring wildfire risk, it can entice insurers back and restore a healthy market. Kim would prefer to discard the market altogether. She proposes creating a state-run public insurance program for all homes and all disasters, replacing private companies and the FAIR Plan. Rather than doling out profits to investors, this program would spend its excess revenue to harden old homes against wildfire. Private insurance companies could still write coverage for burglary and other perils, but the state government would collect all fire insurance and pay out all claims, a model based on similar programs in New Zealand and France.
The philosophical debate in the election is much deeper than a question of state policies or affordability — it’s about whether the private market can protect us against climate change at all.
State Senator Ben Allen hosts a discussion with local leaders and residents to mark 100 days since the Palisades Fire.
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Carlin Stiehl
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Los Angeles Times via Getty Images via Grist
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Allen believes it can. He decided to run for commissioner after the Palisades Fire scorched a good portion of his district, plunging many of his close friends and acquaintances into a hell of displacement and insurance litigation. (Indeed, many of the Palisades homeowners I met knew him on a first-name basis, including McIntyre, who is supporting him in the election.) Even before that, he had already spent several years leading state legislative committees on insurance, energy, and wildfire risk, making him arguably the most qualified person in the state for the commissioner job.
“I think we need someone in this office who really understands climate science, who understands the markets, who understands the legislature,” he said. The Palisades Fire, he said, gave him a “level of understanding from going through the experience that is just different” — he heard about friends trying to itemize vaporized dining room furniture and saw phosphate pollution harming marine mammals in the water off his home in Santa Monica.
Rather than use the insurance commissioner post to push for a major statutory change like Kim’s public fund, Allen speaks about the commissioner as having a poder de convocatoria, a Spanish phrase that translates to “convening power.” He wants to bring together the state agencies and the insurance industry to have a real conversation about reducing fire risk and cajole the state’s market back into existence. He has just passed a bill that offers low-interest loans to homeowners who want to fire-harden their homes. He wants to pursue a sort of grand bargain with the industry, speeding up rate increase decisions while also disciplining the insurers who delay and deny claims.
Kim’s audacious proposal may be gaining more traction than Allen’s proposed compromise. She outperformed Allen in the primary in almost every county, including in his home county of Los Angeles, and given her progressive background, she did fairly well in the rural and red parts of the state. She admits her strong performance is partially “a mystery to me,” but attributes it to the fact that many voters are fed up with the insurance industry.
California insurance commissioner candidate Jane Kim speaks to reporters during a rally in San Francisco. Kim is pitching a single-payer disaster insurance model that would replace the private market for wildfire coverage.
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Stephen Lam
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“There's this sense of immense unfairness, and once we articulate the problem, and then on top of that, actually propose big policy ideas, I think that that resonates,” she told me. We were speaking at a home in San Francisco’s Presidio Heights, where Kim was attending a fundraiser for the radical climate activism group Climate Defiance.
Some experts are skeptical of a government takeover in the style Kim is proposing. Jones, the former insurance commissioner, said the program has two key flaws. First, Kim’s promise to keep insurance affordable could mean keeping prices too low on mansions in fire-prone areas, where homeowners may currently pay premiums that are inadequate to their risk. Second, insurers in California are required to have tens of billions of dollars in extra cash to pay during big loss events, and Kim’s new fund would have to find that money in a state whose public budget is already strained.
“Not only does she not come clean as to where the money's going to come from, if her thought is that it's going to come from the general fund of the state of California, good luck,” said Jones. He pointed out that the model Kim cites in New Zealand is far smaller than California’s, has low coverage limits, and doesn’t cover fires. (Allen described the proposal as “red meat, sugar rush stuff,” and said taxpayers would end up footing the bill if the public plan lost money.)
Kim allows that the legislature might not jump for her public insurance fund, but she has a compromise in her back pocket — one not dissimilar from Allen’s own agenda. Instead of creating a single-payer insurance program that would use profits to fund fire resilience, the commissioner could turn the FAIR Plan into such a program. The plan already pools money from all the state’s big insurers, and Kim could force them to pay an extra fee that would fund hardening for FAIR Plan homes. She returned to this theme when she delivered a stump speech to the activists in the Presidio Heights living room, saying that private companies would never act on their own to reduce the state’s fire risk.
“What the insurance industry does is that they price risk, but they don't actually address it,” she said. If that’s the case, she argues, then the industry shouldn’t be the one charged with keeping Californians safe from climate disasters.
For all their other points of alignment, this question represents the major philosophical disagreement between Allen and Kim. Allen agrees that the industry has not yet acted to reduce California’s enormous fire risk, but he believes that it can fill that role — and he can be the one to make that happen.
“The insurance commissioner is uniquely positioned to bring the insurance to the table … and actually say to the insurance industry, ‘OK, guys, you've got to be a part of the solution here,’” Allen said.
A daunting challenge
The problem for both Kim and Allen is that reducing risk is very difficult.
Take the case of Tony Byers. He is a retired electric utility worker and a longtime resident of Placerville, an old mining town high in the forest-covered hills east of Sacramento. He bought insurance from AAA for years, but the company dropped him after a 2022 fire burned a nearby stretch of the Sierras. State Farm gave him a quote, but then rejected him because it claimed he didn’t have a fire hydrant near his house, even though he did. Byers ended up going with Lemonade, the online insurer, and even paid to have some flammable trees removed at the company’s request, but last year they told him they were leaving California. He ended up on the FAIR Plan, and he now pays $3,400 a year for fire insurance alone, triple what he used to pay. Byers lives at the end of a narrow mountain road, and if he wants to get back on a private insurance plan, he’d likely have to spend tens of thousands of dollars to retrofit his property, which is a lot more than he can afford on a retiree’s budget.
The only people who can opt out of this gauntlet of risk reduction are those who can pay for elite coverage. That was the case for Kevin Roberts, a retired golf course owner who lives in Huntington Palisades, a wealthy neighborhood on the edge of the Palisades Fire burn scar. Roberts likely couldn’t get fire coverage for his two-story Spanish colonial from bigger insurers like State Farm, but years ago a former fraternity brother told him about a company called Chubb that offered boutique insurance at high prices. The company now charges him more than $30,000 a year for his coverage on a “surplus lines” policy that isn’t subject to state regulations. It’s an eye-watering payment, but the company came through with a $2.65 million payout for smoke damage after the fire. Many of the state’s wealthiest homeowners are already on this unregulated market: the number of surplus lines policies in California has doubled over the last four years to around 1.3 million.
“You'll pay more, but if you need them, they'll deliver,” said Roberts.
Neither Byers nor Roberts expressed strong feelings about the insurance commissioner’s election, and indeed, both candidates will face tremendous barriers before they can address the issues that someone like Byers faces in Placerville. That’s because scaling California’s efforts to reduce more than a century of fire risk is one of the most daunting adaptation efforts faced by any place in the United States. The challenge is not just in finding the money to help homeowners who can’t do it themselves, but in figuring out how to reduce risk for millions of old and ill-built homes.
The day after Kim’s fundraiser, I met two employees from North Coast Opportunities, a poverty-fighting organization that serves Lake County, north of San Francisco. The organization is the first to receive money from a $117 million state grant program designed to retrofit whole communities against wildfire. The organization chose to focus on a tight-packed community called Kelseyville, where hundreds of homes cluster on small lots against the side of a windy mountain ridge. As the employees from North Coast drove me through the area, it became clear just how hard it will be to achieve the scaled-up resilience that both Allen and Kim want.
Lake County has an urgent need for this. The mountainous area is among the state’s most vulnerable to wildfire — some 85% of its land area has burned since the turn of the century — and it is also one of its poorest counties. Insurers have abandoned the area en masse, forcing many people onto the FAIR Plan, or causing older homeowners to go without insurance altogether.
The state program is the exact kind of intervention that insurers have long said will induce them to offer more coverage and stop raising rates. The nonprofit can give each participating home in Kelseyville about $70,000 to fund easy tweaks that will stop ignitions — such as removing trees from around homes, replacing vinyl siding with fiber cement, and deconstructing flammable wooden decks. The mitigated houses don’t look much different from the old ones, except for the emptier yards and fresh paint, but even these tiny fireproofing changes required painstaking work. North Coast has had to ask contractors to redo flawed retrofits and cajole local hardware stores into selling fireproof equipment. Many homeowners aren’t interested in participating at all.
“What creates an insurable community is for the whole community to have buy-in,” said Deanna Fernweh, the program manager. “It's changing the mentality, because they're like, ‘Well, we've always done it this way.’” She said she’s cautiously optimistic that companies will come back — insurers have been reaching out to learn more about her work, but they’ve also pushed for full neighborhoods to meet the strictest fire standards.
The project underscores the scale of the challenge the next commissioner will face in reducing fire risk. The project only touches around 300 of the 1,200 eligible homes in the neighborhood, and the grant typically isn’t even enough to do full mitigation on each home. The funding came from the federal government after years of delay. The best possible result is to bring insurers back to just a few streets, a fraction of the risk in Lake County alone. For millions of homeowners who don’t have access to grant funding, resilience is still out of reach.
“A home is only as strong as the weakest link,” said Steve Hawks, a longtime California fire official who is now the director of wildfire at the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety, which develops standards for fire hardening. “If you leave a weak link on the table, a fire of [significant] magnitude can exploit any vulnerability.”
Hawks describes the challenge as “daunting,” and that may be an understatement. Retrofitting a home for fire can cost several times as much as building a new fire-resilient home, and the bill for hardening the millions of homes in California’s fire zones would run to the double-digit billions at least. This money has to come from somewhere, and Allen and Kim both acknowledged that their biggest challenge is to find out where.
This is the irony of the fact that both candidates are appealing to voters by talking about “affordability.” No matter which path one takes through the maze, one arrives at the same conclusion — to fix this crisis will take money, and much of that money will come from the people of California. As Allen says, “risk doesn't disappear, it gets allocated.” The “affordability” challenge in this case is not to help voters keep up with inflation but to pay down a massive debt of risky development that has been accumulating for decades. The challenge is to remake a society that was not designed to be remade.
“I think we’re still at the beginning,” said Holly Sacks, the director of underwriting for Mercury, a California-based insurance company that has committed to remain in the state and to help incentivize risk mitigation. The company is selling in burned places like Paradise and Altadena, but only for hardened homes, and Sacks says it’s one of the only companies doing so. “We are out there, and we don't hear about a lot of other carriers getting out there,” she said. “I think there's still a ways to go … to really make the market more stable.”
The scale of this work is enormous, but the stakes are even larger. When we purchase insurance, we purchase not only the privilege of owning a home or driving a car, but also the privilege of belonging to a community in which all support all. Insurance, as Kim likes to say, is a prerequisite for participating in the economy. A healthy insurance market is also an indication that society can still hold together, that there is no home so vulnerable to the ravages of global warming that the rest of the community can’t afford to protect it.
Of all the things that climate change may take from us, this guarantee might be the most dear.
Here are three takeaways from the hour-long NBC4 and Telemundo 52 debate in Universal City. Each candidate was given about a minute to answer a question, with another 30 seconds each for rebuttals and follow-ups.
What did the candidates say about homelessness?
Bass has repeatedly pointed to a drop in homelessness under her tenure — a trend that faltered this past year, according to the results of the annual homeless count. After two years of declines, homelessness jumped 3.4% in the city of Los Angeles.
During the debate, she acknowledged the recent increase, but pointed to several council districts where homelessness dropped, including Raman’s.
“ The main reason homelessness went down is because our efforts with Inside Safe,” Bass said, crediting the program for removing three large encampments from Raman’s district. Raman represents Council District 4, which stretches from parts of Silver Lake to the Hollywood Hills and Reseda.
L.A. Mayor Karen Bass took shots at her challenger, at one point describing City Councilmember Nithya Raman as " contemptuous of her constituents."
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Courtesy NBC4 and Telemundo 52
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Inside Safe is Bass’ signature homelessness program that moves people from encampments into motels and interim housing. Raman has criticized the program, arguing it has wasted money and its approach had not changed since it launched nearly four years ago.
“ Under this mayor's leadership, we have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into an incredibly expensive program, Inside Safe, which has been unaccountable to the public, for which she has refused audits," she said. " And it looks exactly the same as it did on day one.”
Both candidates seemed to agree that there needs to be more transparency in the city’s homelessness system.
Bass said the city needs to be in complete control: “ No more joint working with the county.”
Raman said every homelessness dollar needs to be monitored and every service performance tracked to actually respond to Angelenos’ needs.
What did the candidates say about policing?
Raman confirmed during the debate that she wants to replace Jim McDonnell as chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, saying he had lost the trust of Angelenos, especially in response to federal immigration raids.
Asked whether she would replace McDonnell before the 2028 Olympics, Raman didn’t give a timeline. She said it would depend on other factors and decision makers, such as the Police Commission and L.A. City Council.
“ I promise you, Angelenos, I promise you, there is no decision that I will take as your mayor that will put you in danger,” Raman said. “Everything will be done with care, and with the advice of all of the people that are involved in making sure that you are safe as these Olympics approach.”
L.A. City Councilmember Nithya Raman criticized L.A. Mayor Karen Bass' signature homelessness program, Inside Safe, and her administration's response to major fires.
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Courtesy NBC4 and Telemundo 52
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Bass pressed Raman on the issue, saying the council member doesn’t have “any idea” what it takes to pick a police chief.
“ We are 640 days away from the largest sporting event to ever take place — a major national security event — and if you think that you're gonna find a police chief, you would send the department in disarray by doing that,” Bass said.
Both candidates weighed in on the LAPD’s use of Automated License Plate Readers, otherwise known as ALPRs.
Raman said she’s been “very skeptical” of these kinds of mass surveillance technologies and would want to see hard proof that the data would not be shared with ICE.
Bass said she thinks ALPR’s have a place in crime prevention, but she does not support a renewed contract with Flock, describing the company as “completely uncooperative.”
What did the candidates say about emergency response?
Bass has been heavily criticized for her administration’s response to last year’s Palisades Fire, and she apologized during the debate for not being in L.A. “when my city needed me.” Bass was in Ghana when the fires ignited as part of a Biden administration delegation for the inauguration of the country’s new president.
Bass said the city would be ready to respond to the next catastrophic wildfire, in part under new leadership from Fire Chief Jaime Moore.
“ As a matter of fact, we're preparing for what is a potential Red Flag daythis Thursday,” Bass said. “He has already reached out to the state for additional resources. He is planning to pre-deploy in the Palisades and other high-risk fire areas.”
Raman honed in the Palisades Fire, as well as this summer’s Lineage warehouse fire in Boyle Heights, describing both as a “failure” of leadership from the mayor. Raman said she would have handled the Lineage fire differently.
“ I will make sure that our community is met with resources, evacuation support and the information they need in the languages that they need, which this community did not get during these fires,” she said.
