The city of LA’s budget is $14 billion. That’s enough to pay the salaries of the Dodgers, Lakers and every other MLB and NBA team for next season, with a few billion to spare.
The City Controller’s office, led by Kenneth Mejia, is tasked with investigating how that money is spent.
That spending is supposed to show up in your daily life: street sweeping, road repairs, and yes — even LAPD helicopters buzzing above your head.
“Nothing’s really boring,” Mejia told The LA Local. “Everything we spend on is impactful. The question is how and where we’re spending it.”
I sat down with Mejia to break down how city spending affects your daily life — and why you should care.
Q1: What’s something that you don’t have the control to do that people might think you do?
A1: A lot of people think I control the budget, like I can increase or decrease people’s budgets. People think I can pass legislation or pass laws, but I can’t do that. As the accountant auditor, I provide the transparency and accountability and the recommendations, but that is up to the mayor and city council to actually do the actual controlling, increasing, decreasing or what laws they create.
Q2: Why should an average resident care about the work that you are doing as the LA City Controller?
A2: People should care because it’s your tax dollars. The city of LA annually, when you include every department, including the proprietaries, like the airports, the harbor — it’s over $35 billion annually that the city tries to spend on making life better. If we’re not paying attention to what government is doing with that money, then that’s why we’ll see things happen or not. Such as whether your streets aren’t clean, the lights are off, the pot holes never get fixed. Where’s that money going? That’s why people should care and participate in their budget process so they have to say where the money goes.
Q3: How does city spending first show up on folks blocks? What are things that they’re going to notice first?
A3: When you wake up and you go outside and you see your road, your sidewalks, when you go outside and you look up in the sky and you see a police helicopter. I think everyone has heard or seen one every day in LA — it might even come up during this interview, but that’s what you see. You’ll notice whether you call 911 for a fire or medical emergency, that’s our departments. But yeah, there’s a lot you can just go outside and see — that’s our city tax dollars at work.
Q4: What’s one thing that people complain about that’s actually a budget problem?
A4: Broken streets, broken sidewalks, lights, trees not getting trimmed.
Q5: What’s one thing the city spends money on that would surprise some people?
A5: We spent like half a million dollars to install Olympic flags in City Hall and move some other artifacts to the convention center, during the middle of a budget crisis. Olympic flags, half a million bucks right there.
Q6: What’s a city bill that keeps getting paid even though it shouldn’t?
A6: I mean last year we were paying tens of millions of dollars in excess pension contributions when we didn’t need to at the time. Just think about tens of millions of dollars that the city is paying out for pensions and we’re in the middle of a budget crisis, right? And we didn’t have to do it at that time, especially while we’re struggling financially and we’re at risk of laying off people. I would say that’s a specific example. We’re paying more than we need to.
Q7: [During the Q&A an LAPD helicopter interrupted the interview] How much did your office find that it costs the city to fly the helicopters for an hour?
A7: $3,000 per flight hour. To some that may be an example of a question that people ask like, ‘We just keep paying for it?’ You know we found out that over 60% is not even used on high priority cases.
Q8: If there was one budget issue you could get people’s attention on and really have them pressure the city on, what would that one budget issue be?
A8: I mean, there’s so many — I’ll give you a shameless plug. I mean funding our office. I think the controller’s office does so much for the city to provide oversight, but the city doesn’t really invest in oversight. We always hear about it. We always talk about accountability and oversight. And, you know, my office is so underfunded, I only have seven auditors for the entire city. I only have five fraud, waste and abuse investigators, and everyone always wants us to audit this, audit that, ‘Oh, look at this fraud claim I sent you the other day,’ and I have 700 claims. I only have five people so, I think the city is lacking in an oversight role and that’s sort of what we were elected to do.
Q9: If you had more people looking into fraud, waste and abuse, how would someone in Koreatown, for example, feel the impacts of your department?
A9: If people knew that there were more people watching their tax dollars, then they could feel more comfort and have more trust in government. A specific example is recently our fraud, waste and abuse team led this investigation, or initiated an investigation, that found that a homeless service provider was charged and arrested for fraudulently obtaining $23 million. If you’re someone who lives in K-town and if that shelter was in your home, and you’re supposed to see folks get the help they need and you don’t see it going there, well, that’s an example of the money not being overseen in an effective manner. Because we just don’t have enough folks to do it, we’re acting in a reactive mode, and we’re not being proactive about making sure that the city is safeguarded, right? If we had more folks to do that, we’d be able to protect us and have more trust in city government.
Q10: How much of your success do you owe to the corgis?
A10: A lot. They’re the watchdogs. They get all the attention.
Do you think there may be fraud, waste or abuse of city dollars happening in your neighborhood? You can let the LA City Controller’s office know by visiting their website or emailing them at controller.mejia@lacity.orgwith as much information about your claim as possible.
Note: This article was updated Feb. 24 to clarify the role of the City Controller’s office.
