I never thought I’d live to see the day that big-city blue-enclave Democrats would slash a local department’s budget — and cut it three years in a row. Such a rare event should start your antennae twitching, especially when you learn that it happened in Karen Bass’ Los Angeles.
But then we get to the part where I tell you that the budget cuts hit the city’s comptroller office — you know, the guy in charge of looking into where the city’s money goes.
“Ah, now I get it,” you’re probably saying.
Just reelected to his second (and final) term, City Comptroller Kenneth Mejia is a former Green Party activist who tried running for Congress a couple of times, cofounded a volunteer community organization providing food and hygiene items to Los Angeles’s homeless and low-income residents, and is also a member of the Los Angeles Tenants Union, which I only learned today is even a thing.
L.A. Public Express called Mejia “part of a wave of progressive candidates who won victory over establishment Democrats who ‘shunned’ him” during his first Comptroller campaign in 2022. He left the Democratic Party in 2024, due to the Biden administration’s military aid to Israel during that country’s so-called “genocide” in Gaza. “I couldn’t support a party that preferred to spend our tax dollars on bombs while Americans struggle to put food on the table,” he said at the time.
In other words, the 35-year-old is hardly a MAGA type. In any other context, I’d probably describe Mejia as a left-wing loon.
Nevertheless — and I found this tidbit to be an interesting piece of trivia — Mejia appears to be the only certified public accountant to serve as Comptroller. You’d think that having a CPA might almost be a prerequisite.
But here’s where it gets interesting. During his first term, Mejia looked into the city’s liability payments, particularly for the LAPD. It turns out, annual liability payouts are a $320 million black hole that’s more than tripled just since 2022. In a city with a [dr_evil_voice] ONE BILLION DOLLAR [/dr_evil_voice] deficit.
Talk about getting your antennae twitching, right? When government spending goes up like that, you’d think it would warrant some forensic accounting — even if, as I suspect, Mejia’s politics leave me cold.
But somebody (or somebodies) in Los Angeles apparently doesn’t want Mejia looking into the city’s soaring liabilities. According to a City Watch L.A. report, Mayor Bass’s budget cuts include “reducing positions tied to accounting, payroll approval, and financial reporting” in Mejia’s comptroller office, weakening “the city’s ability to monitor spending in real time, manage long-term fiscal planning, and maintain accountability when every dollar matters.”
“In a detailed letter to the Commission, Mejia warned that the proposal could effectively decimate nearly 90 percent of the Controller’s Office, reducing it largely to an audit function and stripping it of the authority that provides day-to-day financial oversight,” the report continued.
So in a city with a billion-dollar deficit, a sudden and seemingly unaccountable $230 million jump in liability payments will remain unaccounted for.
“People can understand what they’re getting out of the tax dollars on a monthly basis,” Mejia said during his reelection campaign. “But there are powers that be that are obviously not a fan of the radical transparency that we’re bringing on city finances and what City Hall is doing.”
Maybe there’s some perfectly innocent explanation for those soaring liability costs. But when City Hall makes it impossible even to just look into them, Angelenos have every reason to wonder.
“Forget it, Jake — it’s Chinatown.”
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