{"id":793665,"date":"2026-05-13T14:57:16","date_gmt":"2026-05-13T14:57:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/793665\/"},"modified":"2026-05-13T14:57:16","modified_gmt":"2026-05-13T14:57:16","slug":"l-a-controller-election-zach-sokoloff-aims-to-oust-kenneth-mejia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/793665\/","title":{"rendered":"L.A. Controller Election: Zach Sokoloff Aims to Oust Kenneth Mejia"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tSpencer Pratt\u2019s Hollywood-honed theatrics have made the Los Angeles mayoral race national news. Meanwhile, a behind-the-scenes industry player is attempting to secure the third-most-powerful elected job in the city with a notable campaign that\u2019s so far received little attention.<\/p>\n

\n\tZach Sokoloff, on leave from his top executive role at Hackman Capital, where he manages the firm\u2019s Television City and Radford studio lots, is running for Controller \u2014 L.A.\u2019s fiscal watchdog, independent auditor, paymaster and accountant. A Democrat who\u2019s sewn up a slew of party endorsements, he\u2019s hoping to knock out incumbent Kenneth Mejia, a progressive upstart who took office in 2022.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI decided to run because the city is broken,\u201d Sokoloff says during an interview with The Hollywood Reporter in which he criticized Mejia for being ineffective: too passive in confronting multiple civic crises and too uncollaborative in his dealings with fellow elected officials. \u201cI bring an outsider\u2019s perspective and an outsider\u2019s experience.\u201d He adds, \u201cI think I embody the independent spirit of the Office of Controller \u2014 I\u2019m not beholden to anybody.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe definitions of outsider and independence are in the eye of the beholder. Sokoloff, who\u2019s been a registered lobbyist with the city to pursue his Hackman real estate work, is a scion of the L.A.\u2019s financial overclass. His father Jonathan Sokoloff, a former lieutenant to Michael Milken, is a private equity heavyweight<\/a>. \u201cMy dad is a great question-asker who always taught us that God gave you two ears and one mouth for a reason,\u201d he explains.<\/p>\n

\n\tSokoloff, 37, grew up in a Holmby Hills mansion alongside neighbors like Hugh Hefner and Larry Gagosian, and attended the prestigious local private school Harvard-Westlake before graduating from Yale. He now lives with his wife and two children in Westwood.<\/p>\n

\n\tSokoloff\u2019s list of campaign contributors, which is heavy on non-Angelenos, provides a window into his rarified world. They include maxed-out donations from a slew of billionaires and heirs: Bobby Kotick, Steve Roth, Howard Schultz, Stewart Resnick, Ben Ashkenazy, Eli Bronfman and Matthew Winnick. There\u2019s also plenty of other finance folks, including Saul Goodman, Ken Moelis and Dan Levitan \u2014 plus legendary attorney Alan Grubman, Universal Music Group head Sir Lucian Grainge and several CAA agents.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tMichael Klausman, left, long time lot manager at Radford Studio Center, and Zach Sokoloff, asset manager at Hackman Capital Partners, along New York Street, where \u2018Seinfeld\u2019 was produced at Radford Studio Center on Tuesday, Feb. 14, 2023 in Studio City, CA. <\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tGary Coronado\/Los Angeles Times\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

\n\tThe most notable name, though, is Sokoloff\u2019s mother Sheryl. Since late April, she\u2019s donated \u2014 from her address in the tony ski town of Big Sky, Montana \u2014 $4 million to an independent expenditure committee in support of his candidacy. Her contribution on its own is more than twice the total raised in any previous campaign for L.A. Controller.<\/p>\n

\n\tMejia has criticized the donation, which already paid for a mudslinging ad against him. He\u2019s said that \u201cmy opponent, his rich mom and his billionaire elite friends\u201d are \u201cbuying elections.\u201d To THR, Sokoloff first characterized questions about his mother\u2019s financial support of his run as a \u201cpersonal attack,\u201d then pointed to other examples across the state of wealthy families backing a relative\u2019s bid for office, including current San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie (heir to the Levi Strauss fortune), California lieutenant governor Eleni Kounalakis (daughter of a real estate magnate) and San Diego area U.S. Congresswoman Sara Jacobs (her grandfather founded Qualcomm).<\/p>\n

\n\tSokoloff \u2014 who is wonkish, earnest and spreadsheet-centric \u2014 has garnered other supporters, too, including local Democratic clubs and politicians, as well as a passel of union chapters. (Notably absent are any of the major Hollywood unions, including SAG-AFTRA and the WGA, which threatened legal action over their picketing conditions<\/a> at the Radford lot during the 2023 dual strike.) Most meaningfully, he\u2019s earned endorsements from the former L.A. controllers Laura Chick and Wendy Greuel.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cLaura is not known for being a go-along-to-get-along type \u2014 she\u2019s very forceful,\u201d Sokoloff observes. \u201cBut she says the most important relationship that a Controller can build is with the Mayor, because it\u2019s the Mayor\u2019s team which executes the recommendations and the findings that the Controller produces.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tSokoloff believes that politically strained relationships between Mejia (a former Green Party member who is now a registered Independent) and City Hall\u2019s elected Democratic Party leadership have hamstrung the Controller\u2019s office. He points to retaliatory budget cuts \u2014 by Mejia\u2019s own accounting, of 25 percent during his first year in office \u2014 which resulted in less auditing personnel.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWhen you have your budget being set by the Mayor and the City Council, it is not in the interest of the people of Los Angeles to go around pissing them off,\u201d notes Sokoloff. \u201cYou have to balance accountability with collaboration. You can speak truth to partners and have hard conversations about the efficacy of a program or a department. But there does need to be an understanding that you\u2019re trying to find common ground and you\u2019re working in the same direction.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tLos Angeles City Controller Kenneth Mejia was elected in 2022.<\/p>\n

\n\tFor his part, Mejia tells THR, \u201cWe\u2019re working collaboratively with the Mayor and City Council on issues like stabilizing the City\u2019s affordable housing portfolio and updating our antiquated $1 billion procurement process. When we disagree with what\u2019s happening in City Hall, like in 2023 when they signed an LAPD contract the City can\u2019t afford, we\u2019re not going to stay silent. We have been advocating for a Charter change to protect the independence of the Controller\u2019s Office by ensuring a fixed budget for the Controller, insulated from political retaliation.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tMejia, who shocked L.A.\u2019s political establishment with his landslide 2022 victory over a term-limited city councilman, has touted his efforts in office to investigate fraud at a homelessness services provider, push the LAPD to be more transparent about its use of military equipment and force the Department of Transportation to refund incorrectly issued parking tickets.<\/p>\n

\n\tSokoloff scoffs at Mejia\u2019s first-term record. \u201cI believe that the office is much more capacious,\u201d he says. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot more you can do within the chartered authority of Controller.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tSokoloff believes Mejia should\u2019ve wielded his office more proactively, especially by leveraging its bully pulpit, to address the city\u2019s homelessness and production crises. He becomes most heated when THR brings up how Mejia has knocked him for presiding as asset manager at Hackman over a $1 billion valuation loss of the Radford lot in recent years as the streaming boom went bust and more competitive tax incentives in other states and countries led to tanking local shoot days. (Netflix is now in talks to purchase<\/a> Radford; Mejia tells THR, \u201cIt\u2019s clear big banks don\u2019t trust Sokoloff with their money, and neither should the people of L.A. While Zach was raising rents on his stages, we\u2019ve been working with City Council, labor, and industry groups to make it easier to film in L.A.\u201d)<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI would ask him to look in the mirror,\u201d Sokoloff responds, \u201cand question whether during his time in office, when he had the power to help an industry that was so clearly struggling, did he do anything to make a difference? Did he even have the judgment to identify that this was an issue that his office should be looking into? The answer clearly is \u2018no.\u2019 So, I think he bears responsibility himself.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tSokoloff continues, \u201cthe fact that we have had incumbents who did not clearly see this issue early enough and act swiftly and aggressively enough was for me part of the calculus in feeling like we need new blood. We need folks who will change the way that business is done in L.A.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Spencer Pratt\u2019s Hollywood-honed theatrics have made the Los Angeles mayoral race national news. Meanwhile, a behind-the-scenes industry player…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":793666,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5123],"tags":[1582,276,2961,224,5337,281011],"class_list":{"0":"post-793665","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-los-angeles","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-california","10":"tag-la","11":"tag-los-angeles","12":"tag-losangeles","13":"tag-production-news"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116567857585020203","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/793665","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=793665"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/793665\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/793666"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=793665"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=793665"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=793665"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}