I served as Los Angeles City Controller for eight years. In that time, I learned one fundamental truth about the job: it only works if you do the work.

The Controller’s office has an important job in Los Angeles: to open the city’s books, expose problems, and protect the taxpayers who foot the bill. It is the citywide office specifically designed to ensure accountability and to ensure that Angelenos know exactly how their money is being spent. When I held that office, and when my successors Wendy Greuel and Ron Galperin held it, we understood that responsibility. We built a legacy of audits, investigations, and public data that residents could actually trust.

That legacy is now being dismantled by the very person entrusted to uphold it.

Kenneth Mejia came into office promising to be the most transparent City Controller in history. Instead, he has become the Controller who turned off the lights. In less than three years, he has hollowed out the office’s core functions, buried years of public information from his own website, and left Angelenos in the dark about how their tax dollars are being used.

Let me be specific, because the specifics matter.

One of the most brazen acts of this administration has gone almost entirely unnoticed: the quiet hiding of decades of audits and financial reports from the Controller’s website. These were not dusty archives. These were the documents that allowed the public to compare performance across administrations, track how city finances had evolved, measure what was working and what was wasteful, and determine whether the Controller was meeting his legally mandated responsibilities. They have buried them in a hard-to-find spreadsheet archive link, effectively inaccessible to the average resident. Hiding them was not a technical glitch. It was a deliberate blackout of transparency by the one official whose entire job is to guarantee it. No City Controller in modern history has done anything like this.

The audit numbers tell the story plainly. A Controller’s primary product is audits,  the watchdog’s teeth. Under Mejia, the office has released 7 reports in 2023, 5 in 2024, and 6 so far in 2025. By comparison, Ron Galperin released fourteen reports in 2022 alone. Mejia is producing oversight at less than half the rate of his predecessor, even after expanding his communications and social media teams. This is not a dip. It is a collapse, and it comes at exactly the moment when Los Angeles needs more oversight, not less.

Nowhere is this failure more alarming than in homelessness. For nearly two decades, City Hall has poured billions of dollars into homelessness programs with precious little to show for it. Encampments are growing, not shrinking. And yet the Controller responsible for auditing those expenditures has gone silent on the single largest accountability mechanism we have.

The $1.2 billion Proposition HHH homelessness housing bond legally requires annual financial audits for as long as bonds remain outstanding or funds remain unspent. Prior controllers completed three such audits. Since Mejia took office in December 2022, he has completed zero. Not one, even as the bonds remain outstanding and the legal mandate remains active and posted on his own website. To be fair, Mejia has released some performance reviews related to homelessness. But a program performance audit is not a substitute for a legally required accounting of how $1.2 billion in public bonds has been spent. Mejia knows the difference. So should voters.

We cannot end the homelessness crisis without knowing whether the money already spent is working. Every dollar wasted on ineffective programs is a dollar stolen from real solutions. The Controller is supposed to be the gatekeeper. He has abandoned his post.

That is why I am proud to endorse Zach Sokoloff for Los Angeles City Controller.

Zach is a native Angeleno who began his career as an Algebra I teacher in Boyle Heights and Watts. He understands what it means to work hard for a community and be accountable to real people. He brings the honesty and integrity to call out failures on behalf of Angelenos, and the collaborative spirit to actually fix them. He will follow the money, expose waste and fraud, demand answers, and restore the auditing function for which this office was built.

Los Angeles is facing serious financial challenges. Los Angeles residents deserve a Controller who will balance accountability with results, measure progress, expose failures, and partner with the city government to do better.

Kenneth Mejia promised transparency and delivered a social media strategy. Zach Sokoloff will deliver the real thing.

Laura Chick served as Los Angeles City Controller from 2001 to 2009.