The Brief

The memorial to Vietnam veterans in Mile Square Park was supposed to be a smaller version of the revered Vietnam War Memorial in Washington D.C., with an Orange County addition: the memorial would pay special homage to the South Vietnamese army and allies — tens of thousands of whom settled in O.C. as refugees after communist forces took over South Vietnam 50 years ago.

Former Supervisor Andrew Do awarded $1 million in taxpayer dollars for the memorial in 2023 to a nonprofit where his daughter, Rhiannon Do, was an officer. Now, Andrew Do is in prison on a federal bribery charge; the head of the nonprofit is a fugitive; and the memorial stands unfinished, surrounded by caked dirt and dry grass. The county is suing for damages, alleging that most of the money allocated for the memorial was diverted for personal gain.

A hairline crack runs down the surface of one of the black granite-looking slabs that make up the memorial (neither the county nor the monument maker has confirmed the type of material used). The eternal flame sculpture at the center of the memorial is covered in bird poop. The names of soldiers were never etched onto its surface.

“I’m very sad, very, very sad,” said Doàn Trọng upon seeing the unfinished memorial this week. Trong is an Orange County resident and local television host who worked with U.S. troops in Vietnam during the war.

“Who’s going to take responsibility for this?” he said.

Trong and other reporters, including from LAist, saw the memorial up close for the first time on a media tour organized by Supervisor Janet Nguyen, who won Do’s former seat in an election last year. It’s in an area of Mile Square Park currently closed to the public for renovations.

The granite surface of the monument is starting to crack, only about a year after the walls were erected. The etching of soldiers' names was never completed.

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Jill Replogle

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LAist

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LAist was the first to report on the unfinished memorial and raise questions about its $1 million price tag in August 2024. One architect who visited the site with LAist at the time estimated the work cost around $185,000 or less.

Pham returned $150,000 of the initial $1 million to the county last year, saying the project came in under budget. (Pham’s lawyer at the time said the memorial was on track to be unveiled in October 2024.) But that still raises questions about the rest of the funds — and why the project remains unfinished.

On this week’s visit, the tarps and fence had been removed, leaving the memorial exposed to the elements. Vinyl stencils that had previously covered the blocks, printed with the names of Orange County-based Vietnam veterans, had also been removed.

Nguyen called the unfinished memorial a “disgrace.”

“This is not how we honor our veterans by any means,” she told LAist.

Nguyen said the memorial would likely be demolished, given the high cost of repairing or relocating it.

“Let’s restart and do it right,” she said.

How the memorial came to be

In September 2023, the county signed a $1 million agreement with the nonprofit Viet America Society, or VAS, for the "design, construction, and maintenance" of the memorial. Do later posted a video featuring himself and others reviewing plans for it.

Do did not publicly disclose that his daughter, Rhiannon Do, was an officer of VAS at the time. The failure to do so would be at the heart of an unfolding scandal involving millions in taxpayer dollars that have yet to be fully accounted for.

A mockup of the planned Vietnam War memorial in Mile Square Regional Park, provided in 2024 by Pham's previous lawyer. The memorial was never completed.

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Courtesy Mark Rosen

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The former supervisor would ultimately direct at least an additional $12 million in taxpayer funds to VAS, according to an LAist investigation. Those funds were supposed to be used to pay for meals for needy seniors. But federal prosecutors and county attorneys say most of that money was diverted for personal gain by using VAS as a cover.

The money for the memorial came from federal pandemic relief funds, a portion of which was assigned to each supervisor to dole out in their respective districts to organizations supporting veterans and infrastructure projects, among other work.

Do is currently serving a five-year prison sentence in Arizona on a federal bribery charge stemming from the misuse of millions of those funds, though not including the $1 million spent on the memorial. Meanwhile, the county is still seeking to recover the money allegedly misspent by Do, including the memorial funds, through a civil lawsuit.

LAist tried to contact Do’s lawyer, Eliot Krieger, by phone but has not heard back.

Pham’s lawyer responds

Peter Pham, the founder of VAS, was indicted earlier this year for allegedly bribing Do to keep the money flowing to VAS. Pham left the U.S. on a one-way ticket to Taiwan in December 2024 and is still a fugitive.

Pham, through his O.C.-based lawyer, Hoa Truong, has denied wrongdoing, alleging he was tricked by Do into creating VAS as a shell organization through which to funnel county funds back to Do. Truong also told LAist that Pham left the country on bad advice from his previous lawyer.

Earlier this year, Truong filed a cross-complaint on behalf of Pham in the county’s civil lawsuit against Do, Pham, VAS and others. In that complaint, Truong alleged that Do took advantage of his friendship with Pham to involve Pham in the scheme to steal taxpayer money.

Truong told LAist that even though Pham is credited on the Vietnam War Memorial as the designer and builder, Pham merely signed the contract, relegating the rest of the work to his longtime business partner, Le Dan Hua.

Hua, who also served as an officer of VAS, is also a defendant in the county’s civil lawsuit over the memorial and other allegedly misused taxpayer funds. LAist left a voicemail for Hua’s lawyer.

“His English is very limited,” Truong said of Pham. ”Do asked him to sign, he just signed because he saw so much money coming in.”

Hua and Pham also did renovations on the North Tustin home that Andrew Do shared with his wife, Orange County Superior Court Judge Cheri Pham, in 2021, according to records obtained by LAist.

Orange County Supervisor Janet Nguyen called the abandoned memorial a "disgrace" and vowed to replace it, perhaps at the future veterans cemetery planned for Gypsum Canyon.

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Jill Replogle

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LAist

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The memorial’s uncertain future

The new section of Mile Square Park where the memorial is located is scheduled to open by the end of 2026. It’s unclear whether the memorial will still be there by then. Nguyen, the county supervisor, estimated it would cost $25,000 to $30,000 to demolish, and might be unfeasible to move elsewhere.

If the memorial were to remain in place, the county would likely have to come up with even more money to repair it and put in pathways and other infrastructure to make it compliant with accessibility laws. Nguyen thinks a better option is to build a new memorial, perhaps at the new O.C. veterans cemetery planned for Gypsum Canyon in Anaheim.

Nguyen is among the some 130,000 Vietnamese refugees who settled in Orange County after the Fall of Saigon. She said she’s determined to come up with a new plan for a memorial, though she’s not yet sure where the funds would come from.

“The 58,000 American soldiers who sacrificed for the land I was born in, that’s why I’m here,” she said. “This is not how we honor them, by any means.”

How to watchdog your local government

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

• Read tips on how to get involved .
• The Orange County Board of Supervisors typically meets on alternating Tuesdays mornings at 400 West Civic Center Drive, Santa Ana. You can check out the O.C. Board of Supervisors full calendar here for exact dates.
• Learn how to submit a public comment to the O.C. Board of Supervisors.

When the head of the nation’s largest publicly operated health plan worries about the looming federal cuts to Medicaid, it’s not just her job. It’s personal.

Martha Santana-Chin, the daughter of Mexican immigrants, grew up on Medi-Cal, California’s version of Medicaid, the government-run health care program for people with low incomes and disabilities. Today, she is CEO of L.A. Care, which runs by far the biggest Medi-Cal health plan with more than 2.2 million enrollees, exceeding the Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program enrollments in 41 states.

“If it weren’t for safety nets like the Medi-Cal program, I think, many people would be stuck in poverty without an ability to get out,” she said. “For me personally, not having to worry about health care allowed me to really focus on what I needed to focus on, which was my education.”

As she begins her second year steering L.A. Care, Santana-Chin is grappling with federal and state spending cuts that complicate her task of providing health care to the poor and medically vulnerable enrollees in Medicaid. The insurer also provides Affordable Care Act marketplace plans through Covered California.

Santana-Chin warns that the GOP’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, enacted last year and also known as HR 1, could result in 650,000 enrollees falling off L.A. Care’s Medi-Cal rolls by the end of 2028. This will strain the plan’s finances as revenues decline. The insurer had revenues of $11.7 billion in the last fiscal year.

HR 1 is expected to cut more than $900 billion from Medicaid over the next 10 years — including $30 billion or more in California, according to the Department of Health Care Services, which runs Medi-Cal.

Like other states facing big deficits, California has reduced its Medicaid spending through such steps as freezing new enrollments for immigrants without legal status and reintroducing an asset limit. And that’s before the state reckons with the spending cuts that likely will be required by the withdrawal of so many federal dollars under HR 1.

Santana-Chin oversaw Medi-Cal and Medicare operations for the for-profit insurer Health Net before taking the helm of L.A. Care in January 2025, nearly three years after state regulators fined L.A. Care $55 million over violations they said compromised the health and safety of its members. L.A. Care paid $27 million in penalties to the state and agreed to contribute $28 million to community health projects.

In a wide-ranging interview, Santana-Chin talked to KFF Health News senior correspondent Bernard J. Wolfson about the financial headwinds facing L.A. Care and why she believes health care shouldn’t be restricted based on a person’s immigration status. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: You grew up on Medicaid. How has that shaped your views now that you run one of the largest Medicaid plans in the country?

What really motivates me is knowing that many of the people that we’re serving are just like my family. They’ve struggled and have had to have their own children translate things that were very difficult to translate. I remember doing that for my own mother. You know, basic human dignity requires that you have access to health care.

Martha Santana - Chin, CEO of L.A. Care, is the daughter of Mexican immigrants and was a beneficiary of Medi - Cal throughout her childhood. Because of that experience, she says, the concerns of L.A. Care members resonate with her on a personal level.

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Bernard J. Wolfson

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KFF Health News

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Q: Has anything you’ve dealt with at Health Net or L.A. Care reminded you of your childhood experiences in Medi-Cal?

Back then they didn’t cover transportation, and we didn’t have a vehicle. Today, one of the issues we’ll hear from our members is the need to make sure we have trustworthy transportation that shows up on time, where the drivers treat them with respect. Had I had that, had my mother had that, life would have been much easier.

Q: What do you think the impact of HR 1 will be?

It’s going to devastate the delivery system. The state obviously isn’t going to be able to make up for the shortfalls in federal funding, and over the course of the next several years, funding is going to be less and less, and the people we cover are going to decrease significantly. We are expecting between now and the end of 2028 that we’re going to see 650,000 people drop off the rolls. That’s just L.A. Care.

Q: That’s over a quarter of your Medi-Cal enrollment.

Yes, it’s very, very significant. The reductions in payment and the rise in uncompensated care are really going to impact our delivery system. As the delivery system gets destabilized and hospitals and other health care providers are forced to close services or reduce the number of sites they have, it’s going to impact access. And it’s not only going to impact those that lose coverage.

Q: How will L.A. Care respond?

Obviously, we’re going to see a significant drop in revenue. We’re very focused on making sure that we are operating as efficiently as we can operate. And we are looking at creative ways to use technology to empower our people to do higher-level work. Mostly supporting our call center agents with smarter technology that helps them answer questions and resolve problems more quickly. Some of it is automating processes on the claims payment side.

Q: What do you have to say to congressional Republicans who passed HR 1?

We are at a point of inflection in the health care delivery system. And we have to recognize that some of the components of HR 1 will have long-term unintended consequences — maybe they were intended; I’ve got to believe that some of these things are not. There’s probably a need to reconsider some of the things that were passed.

Q: Such as?

Work requirements are an example of something that many people did believe was the right thing to do to be good stewards of the health care dollar. It is very complex and is going to cause people to lose coverage that actually do qualify. It’s unfortunate, and that would be something that I would urge folks to reconsider.

Q: What impact do you expect from California’s decision to freeze Medi-Cal enrollment for immigrants without legal status?

It doesn’t matter what immigration status you are. If you are a human being and you need health care, you’re going to try to access health care wherever you can. That’s going to put a strain on the delivery system if you’re uninsured.

Q: What has L.A. Care done to address the state’s concerns in 2022 that it delayed authorizing care and addressing patient grievances?

There has been quite a bit of investment in the L.A. Care infrastructure over the last several years — our IT platforms, our data. There’s also quite a bit of investment in adding new capacity, adding bandwidth to many of the teams, more folks to help support the work.

Q: How have federal immigration raids in L.A. affected L.A. Care members and the broader community?

It absolutely has had a chilling effect. Families are afraid to come in. They’re not taking their children to get vaccinated. I’ve had numerous providers in emergency departments say that they have experienced a drop in the volume of individuals coming in. One of our case managers was really distraught because there was an individual that decided to forgo serious lifesaving treatment because of fear.

Take accountability and move forward.

Those were the two points Los Angeles Fire Chief Jaime Moore hit repeatedly when speaking with LAist’s Larry Mantle this week.

On taking accountability, Moore said hazardous conditions and decisions made before the Palisades Fire erupted a year ago meant “our firefighters never had a chance” to arrest the fire that killed 12 people and destroyed thousands of structures.

On moving forward, he emphasized that reform is already in the works.

“Things have changed since the Palisades Fire, and we're going to continue making big changes in the Los Angeles Fire Department,” said Moore, who was selected for the LAFD top job by Mayor Karen Bass in November.

Here are three takeaways from the interview, which aired on AirTalk on Tuesday.

1. Staffing decisions hampered fire response

The LAFD uses a so-called pre-deployment matrix to set firefighter staffing levels ahead of high-risk weather.

According to the department’s after-action report, however, staffing levels on the day the Palisades Fire began fell short of the LAFD standard for extreme weather conditions. The National Weather Service had warned of low humidity, high winds and dry vegetation, what it calls a “particularly dangerous situation.” It’s the highest level of alert the agency can give.

Despite the high risk, the LAFD report said the decision not to deploy more firefighters in advance was in part made to save money.

Moore said Monday that the department has updated its policies to increase staffing for especially hazardous conditions, but he said he doesn’t believe additional resources would have stopped a fire of the magnitude that leveled the Palisades.

To suppress that kind of fire, he said, the department would need to pre-deploy resources across the city’s vast geography — to places like Baldwin Hills, Franklin Canyon, the Hollywood Hills, the Palisades, Porter Ranch and Sunland-Tujunga.

Moore said the department has already made new policies to call for more resources when the Weather Service issues a “particularly dangerous situation” alert.

2. LAFD is mostly an urban firefighting department

Moore referenced a key finding of the after-action report regarding a lack of training in wildland firefighting, which contributed to confusion and struggles to effectively utilize resources during the fire.

Wildland fires pose a number of challenges that are different from what firefighters face in urban environments. Those include the need to coordinate a large number of resources over vast areas, all while dealing with fast-moving flames that can rapidly tear through dry plants and structures.

The department found in its report that fewer firefighters were trained in fighting these wildland fires in recent years and that “leaders struggled to comprehend their roles.”

Some leaders in the department had “limited or no experience in managing an incident of such complexity,” the report said. And some reverted to doing the work of lower positions, leaving high-level decision-making positions unfilled.

“What we're doing now is really furthering that training and reinforcing that education with our firefighters so that they could be better prepared,” Moore said on AirTalk.

3. Changes to the after-action report

Early versions of the after-action report differed from the version released to the public in October, a fact that was first reported by the Los Angeles Times. The Times also reported that Battalion Chief Kenneth Cook, who wrote the report, wouldn’t endorse the final version because of the changes.

Moore acknowledged to the L.A. Board of Fire Commissioners at a Jan. 6 meeting that the report had been watered down.

“It is now clear that multiple drafts were edited to soften language and reduce explicit criticism of department leadership in that final report,” Moore told the commissioners. “This editing occurred prior to my appointment as fire chief, and I can assure you that nothing of this sort will ever again happen while I am fire chief."

Some changes were small but telling. A section titled “Failures” later became “Primary Challenges.”

Moore told LAist that changes between versions “ made it easier for the public to understand,” but an LAist review found the edits weren’t all surface-level.

In the first version of the report, the department said the decision not to fully pre-deploy all available resources for the particularly dangerous wind event “did not align” with their guidelines for such extreme weather cases. The final version said that the initial response “lacked the appropriate resources,” removing the reference to department standards.

The department also removed some findings that had to do with communications.

One sentence from the initial version of the report said: “Most companies lacked a basic briefing, leader’s intent, communications plan, or updated fire information for more than 36 hours.” That language was removed from the final report.

LAist has asked the Fire Department for clarification about why these assertions were removed but did not receive a response before time of publication.

Fans who want a chance to buy tickets to the 2028 Olympic Games have until March 18 to enter the draw, which opens at 7 a.m. Wednesday.

Locals will get the first bite at the apple. A pre-sale for people in L.A., Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, and Ventura counties will run April 2-6. Certain Oklahoma residents where some Olympic competitions are taking place also will be eligible for the pre-sale.

The first round of ticket sales for all fans will launch April 9. The first round will include tickets to the Opening and Closing ceremonies.

Those selected to buy tickets will get an email with a time slot. After the first round, LA28 says there will be rolling ticket drops. Each person who registers will be able to buy a maximum of 12 tickets.

"Fans are encouraged to register today for the best choice of tickets and events, as capacity may be filled or limited in subsequent drops," the private Olympics organizing committee said in a press release.

Registering once will enter applicants into all future draws to purchase Olympic tickets until they've maxed out ticket purchases, according to LA28.

At a press conference Tuesday outside the L.A. Memorial Coliseum, Olympics organizers also provided more details on ticket prices for the first time. One million tickets will sell for $28 a pop and around a third of tickets will be under $100, according to LA28 Chair Casey Wasserman.

That means the majority of tickets to the Olympic Games will run into triple digits. If the World Cup is any indication, some tickets could get astronomically pricey.

Tickets to the Paralympic Games will go on sale next year.