City Budgets and Community Accountability: A Conversation w/ LA City Controller Kenneth Mejia and Dinah Manning

FULL TRANSCRIPT

All right, welcome everybody to Due Processing. We are joined by Los Angeles City Controller, Kenneth Mejia, and a member of the Controller's Office and former Federal Public Defender, Dinah Manning. And so welcome, Controller Mejia and Dinah Manning, to Due Processing.

Thank you for having us. And Dinah Manning is our Chief of Strategic Initiatives and Senior Advisor.

Good morning. Thank you for the warm welcome. So excited to speak to you today.

Controllerʼs Role

I'm going to ask the first question, and this is just to tee it up for people who don't know. What does the City Controller do? What's the role of the City Controller?

That's a good question. So in short, we are the city's accountant, auditor and paymaster. We make sure that all the financial statements, all the reports that we have to put out, our revenue forecasts, doing all the things that make the city run, making sure that payroll is paid, vendors are paid.

“I would say our accounting group makes up the most, and then our audit function gets the most attention, though. And so even though that is probably one of the smallest parts of our team because of budget cuts and everything, but essentially there we have our Audit Services Division that does performance audits. We could do financial audits, too.

And we also have a fraud, waste and abuse unit.

Well, I mean, that the first part, the non-audit part sounds like really dry. You know, that sounds like not going to get much excitement. But can you talk about the way in which you've transformed, actually, this office and the way that you've are presenting information or seeking to present information to the public?

Sure. And, you know, it's a good point. You know, when people think of accountants, they are, you know, they think of someone sitting behind a desk, crunching numbers, they think of their tax accountant, they don't think much of it.

But we've been able to use, you know, my background as an accountant, as a CPA, to basically take those numbers and present it to people in a way that's easily accessible, easy to read, easy to understand, make websites for people, so that way they can know how their city is spending their tax dollars, going to what are some performance metrics. And so although, you know, when you think about accounting as dry, we sort of made it exciting. And I think that's how we did it.

We use social media in a way that's creative, because, as you know, financials and accounting can be thousands of pages long and millions of rows of Excel data, but we've been able to communicate in a way that is easily accessible and welcoming, so that way people can make better decisions or, you know, who they want to vote for based on how they fund their city. And so that's how we've been able to do it, is using our experience and using our tech skills, our design skills, and putting it out there in an accessible manner.

Budgeting Social Issues

One of the issues we're thinking about is policing as the kind of main and sometimes only response to various social problems. We think about housing issues, substance use issues, food insecurity, all sorts of issues, and they wind up getting kind of those root cause issues wind up getting funneled into a criminal legal system because the first response is often the police response.

I'd like you to talk about this, both of you, if there's responses on thinking through like what a city actually does, where the money is coming in, where it's going, and if there's ways to have better responses, more efficient responses, more humane responses, whatever the lens is for better, and then how you all think about that in terms of what you have actually been doing.

Dinah, I think this is perfect for you.

Yeah, this is working great for me. I appreciate the question. You know, I joined the Controller's team after spending nearly a decade as a federal public defender, and the Controller and his team wanted someone who had spent a long time sort of interrogating systems of power, interrogating criminalization, both here in Los Angeles, which is my hometown where I grew up in South Central, and in the federal system in DC.

So, what we wanted to do is, the Controller has highlighted, is the Controller has a lot of power, right? It's a citywide elected position. The Controller knows, essentially, and is responsible for tracking the finances of the city, our taxpayer dollars.

And so, what we wanted to do was to put a finer lens on what is the city's financial investment in public safety? What does it look like? We're talking about these core values that the Controller ran on, that he has devoted his time in office to really addressing, you know, homelessness, housing, the criminalization of being someone who the city doesn't have shelter for, doesn't have housing for, you have to sleep somewhere, can't sleep on the street, can't sleep in your car, can't do these types of things, but also, you know, responses to people making their First Amendment rights, you know, be actually honored.

All those things were things that navigated and sort of allowed us to really focus in response to what the community wanted, but towards also what the Controller had set out to sort of bring into office projects that we wanted to pursue. So our first year, we devoted a lot of our auditing to LAPD helicopters and what that means, what's the impact in certain communities versus others, right? What is the sort of policing investment that we make as a city?

“The reason we talk a lot about the budget is because we have to, it's because that's what's our job, but also we look at, wow, if you follow a bar chart or you follow a graph or you follow our data tools, what is the city saying it values and then what is it actually investing in, right? What are folks really gobsmacked about when we talk about what services are cut, what services are depleted, what youth and our elder community members receive versus an entire department that is the law enforcement arm of the city. So our work has been very tailored toward not just the core values that the Controller has, but also what the community has reached out to us about.

And we've been really, really fortunate to be able to dive in and dig in and bring as much transparency as possible to a very complicated city system, to a very complicated budget system, to a very complicated city structure that not a lot of people, I'm an LA girl, I grew up in LA. You know, I knew my national politics, I knew my state politics, but getting into the local government of it all and how that all interplays with the things that you're concerned with and what we are concerned with was very important to us.

So on that, I just want to talk about this tool that you created, this interactive tool for people in LA to respond to how they want their city dollars spent. What has been the feedback from that? What was, first, describe the tool.

Public Budget Tool

Sure, sure. So we wanted to make budgeting accessible for people in a way that, you know, we'll just look at what the city does with the budget. We wanted actually for them to give their input on if you had the chance to make your own city budget for 4 million Angelenas, what would that look like, right?

And so pretty much we did see, you know, a lot of folks try to give to departments that deal with, you know, community services, social services, targeting basic necessities for having a functioning city, right? More money for infrastructure related departments, more money for housing, more money for the departments of disability, aging, community investment, things like that, right? And we saw more money for the fire department, and we saw sort of a shift to more care models, and then, you know, less funding for law enforcement because they...

And so we saw that from a lot of the inputs that we received in the results. So, you know, we hope that this could be a tool that people could use because constituents can then send their results to their council member and say, hey, this is what I like to see my tax dollars go. So it's just another way on how we use our financial acumen, our technology, you know, background to make city finances more accessible and make people participate in the process.

Have you sent this information? Do you send this information, say, to the office of the mayor or to the city council?

Besides constituents sending it themselves, because it's more powerful than, you know, for him to send it, then it's like, hey, I'm telling you, this is from the Controller. We know we have it public. It's these things are public.

But we feel that the most tool will probably come from the constituents themselves. But, you know, once we get more results, we could, you know, give those results to the other electeds too.

Just broadly speaking, do you think that the, can you say whether the results that you're receiving from the constituents, from your constituents, are reflected in the Mayor on the City's budget?

You know, not as to the degree, as to what these, you know, what the constituents want based on the results. This latest budget cycle, you did see a little bit of more funding, you know, compared to the prior year, to, you know, sort of departments that deal with providing care, social services, or, you know, and whatnot. But it was still not a good fiscal year, mainly because we are in budget deficits, where we're paying out in massive lawsuits.

And so although the cuts weren't as big as they would have been in the prior year, it was still a bad year, but there were small pieces of, you know, increases here and there. But, you know, when I put them side by side, it's still a sharp contrast between what people want and what the city actually budgets.

Yeah, your mention of lawsuits, I read in the news about this huge lawsuit involving the foster care system, which is kind of from years and years ago, which is kind of a way in which, you know, those care related items and how we make sure we protect people, winds up being, you know, you can spend those dollars for the humane and appropriate and dignified reasons to do it. But then if you don't, how that can be painful and just economically painful later. I love this site, by the way.

I'm on the Your City of LA budget right now. I'm fixing the whole budget, you know, as we speak. And I just like how you guys designed it.

You all designed it. It's like the NBA trade machine. You know, you have to get it so it's green.

Otherwise, it doesn't work. There's something very satisfying about this and illuminating.

Click on the submissions tab at the top, and then you can see how the results compare so far to the actual city of L.A.'s budget. And there you could see, you know, where people want their money to be spent.

Yeah, so here, I'm just on the submissions tab, and you can see kind of the city budget's in green, and the your budget is in like a orangey color for my screen. So the police budget right now is 1.98 billion, and the city budget from the people is 929 million. So it's about a half-ish number that you're getting in terms of submissions.

Yep.

And am I reading that right?

Yeah. And then on the bottom, if you want the actual to see it in a spreadsheet, you can see the actual difference in everything, in the percentage and everything.

People want more resources to aging, animal services, building and safety, cannabis regulation by large numbers. And then on the decline, I'm looking for policing, negative 53 percent. Kate was asking, is there interaction with policymakers that you've noticed in terms of this site?

Do they ever chat with you about it or say, hey, the numbers don't reflect what the reality is? You know, we have these, you know, we have to have the helicopters and the body cameras and the staffing levels and all that.

We always communicate with, you know, electeds, but I think there's the mindset that, well, you all elected me and you gave me the power to make budgetary decisions. Because you elected me, I'm going to adjust the budget the way, you know, I see it because you elected me to do that. So, you know, we give out a lot of, hey, participatory information from people who gave their own input, but, you know, they might do something else or they might ignore it.

So, that's why I said it's more convincing as if their constituents reached out to them, right? We're just creating the tools for people to make government participation easier.

Office Independence

You know, I can imagine that a tool like this and some of the data on your website really angers some department heads. I can imagine it really angers some, you know, city officials. Being an elected official, I suppose you have a certain amount of independence, but couldn't the city also say, hey, thanks, Controller Mejia, we are going to cut your budget by 50 percent?

What kind of power do you have over your own budgeting, your own department?

We have no power over our budget, so if we do an audit, if we give transparency, if people like our reports and they say, hey, the Controller, give these recommendations, they found this out, and they're telling their elected officials, like, do something. So if people don't like what we do, then they could cut our budget, right? We got our budget cut last year.

We lost 27 positions and we're short staff, can't even pay the bills, pay the employees. So, you know, it's, that's why we're really fighting for an independent budget. Because how can I be an independent oversight arm of the government if people just, you know, defund us, right?

It makes no sense, right? And then you get elected officials who always reach out to us and be like, how come you haven't paid this yet? How come you're not auditing this?

And I'm like, you know how many auditors I have? I only have like seven out of the whole city that oversees, you know, 30 billion dollars. Like, what are you talking about?

So that's sort of what we're trying to fight for is that independent budget.

I think something that is very remarkable and the community has seen over the past two years is that even with the realities of our budget being not within our hands, the Controller has remained faithful and committed to bringing the level of transparency and accountability and oversight to topics that might rankle some folks, might draw some eye and it's because the commitment is to just being able to get our community the information that they deserve. You know, folks can't take off work, folks can't sit through numerous committee meetings, commission meetings, budget hearings, things of that nature.

And so what the Controller does and what our teams do is extrapolate all this information and try to get it in a digestible manner to folks so that they know exactly what's sort of happening in their city, what is before their leaders, what is before the people who rely on them for votes, and how they can make their voice heard.

And so, you know, the foot is still on the gas pedal here and we're still doing the work despite the fact that there could be, you know, negative consequences for the budget.

I'm looking at the website. It looks cool in a tech way. The communications are all very resonant.

Is that attributed to the people? The kind of DNA that came into the Controller's Office? I don't get the sense that Controller's Offices normally operate this way.

Is that part of having an organizing background? Like, what would you both say to that?

Yeah, yeah, we have, you know, our main graphic designer is our Chief of Staff, and she models out what a website could look like, and she comes from that background. And, you know, I too from a user experience type of mode want to make sure that if I, you know, if I wasn't in government and I was going to use a government website, how would I want it to be? And so we bring in that, you know, that combination.

And then our tech team is just, they're really, really good at building these websites, right? We have coders, we have programmers, and they're able to make these things on the fly. And so that's also a huge reason why these websites exist and why they're so easy to use and they look, you know, pretty cool.

Yeah. And then just into that, we have these like subject matter experts, right? We have a Director of Homelessness who has been in the homelessness space, has advanced degrees in that space, and knows identifying real information that folks want to know.

What are the performance metrics we should be looking at? What are the numbers that are important? What are things that really should be amplified and platformed?

Me with my public, defendant by background, what are the things that we want to be looking for when we're talking about policing, when we're talking about stats, when we're talking about a whole host of things, including even we had an arrest maps and just sort of distinguishing what it means to be cited versus being arrested, but how all of those have consequences for folks, particularly if you are marginalized, if you are under resourced, and if you are now involved in any way with the court, right? So, in addition to all the tech and sort of deep bench of knowledge that we have, we pull from all those resources as well.

And I just have one specific reaction to that one, Dinah, that you just mentioned, which is, so in California, we have the Racial Justice Act, which allows us to scrutinize implicit bias, explicit bias and disparities that are systemic or, you know, related to kind of non- kind of appropriate policy distinctions, right? So, people who are similarly situated being criminalized more based on race, ethnicity, national origin.

And one hard part for public defenders, I'll just say this while I have you two here, because I think you're already doing it, but so I want to just support what you just said, is it's, I think that local governments have a role to play and state governments have a role to play in gathering the data that allows the scrutiny of the Racial Justice Act and the value of the Racial Justice Act to be made real. And we don't often interact with people in the positions to make that happen who are doing it. So I just want to pause on what you just said and say, imagining a world where state and local government is, and national government, but you know, but where state and local government, for now, is asking the questions about how people are being treated and how they're policed so that that Racial Justice Act can get over the line on the data question.

I have one question. You know, so we also come out of like legislative reform organizations or, you know, we've done that. And I think one thing that we also understand, and I think it's Avi just alluded to, you know, for, you know, working in the court, is you can pass great laws, but if there's not implementation and oversight, it doesn't matter, you know.

So like the state passes a law on the police, you know, limiting police use of military equipment. The local, you know, governments pass laws around police use of surveillance or police militarization. But if there's not oversight over that, like it's consistent, it's daily, it's yearly, then it's like the law is a dead letter, you know.

It's just words on a piece of paper. So you are providing that consistent oversight, but you also, I mean, need, how much information do you like seek out from people to allow you to provide that oversight, if that makes sense, like, or seek out from people either in departments or your constituents?

Yeah, all the time. We're always meeting with, you know, whether it's every week or every month, we're meeting with departments, asking them for updates on their financial situations, on performance metrics to see, like, you know, what are we paying for you for and what are we getting? And then, you know, we're also making those connections, too.

Like, we just passed this law about, you know, tenant anti-harassment. How are we doing with that? You know, what are our statistics?

You know, things like that. Or, you know, when it comes to, you know, any enforcement armory trying to help people, you make a good point, because if we were trying to implement something to help people, right, you would then need city council to then budget for those positions. And then since we're in a budget deficit, like, you know, you pass great laws, but there's no way to hold people accountable, right?

Or hold corporations or landlords or anything accountable. So, but I would say we're always requesting data to see that information. And, you know, it's just constant nonstop of attorney of information to be able to then give that to people and then to policymakers to give them an update as to, you know, hey, you passed this law, but nothing's really happened or something's happened.

Vulnerable Populations Focus

You are focused on the issues that affect the most vulnerable, like who's paying parking tickets, who's being cited for parking, where are drinking fountains, where are public bathrooms? I mean, who's reliant on public bathrooms? Of course, it's people who are unhoused.

You know, who's being affected by the policing budget? I mean, who, you know, in terms of what's not being funded, it feels so unusual for a citywide elected official to be like, I'm going to put, you know, the vulnerable at the center of my platform, of my work. How do you make that decision?

How much support is there for that? What are the pushback? And without like naming names, do you see other departments, not within LA, but other controllers in other cities doing the same or similar things?

Or are you just, you know, sui generis, just one of a kind doing this?

You know, like Dinah said, we have a lot of people in our office that come from a background in organizing homelessness in particular, people in housing justice, people from an accountability background, like Dinah, right? And from the criminal justice area too. And so, you know, we came in here and we ran on ways in which we can make government better.

I believe that if you help the most vulnerable in society, then society could thrive much better. And if, you know, if you're in LA, everyone knows the number one issue is homelessness. And so we want to make sure that we are using our time here in our, you know, for four years, every term that we get and making sure we let people know, you know, what are the root causes?

Here are our recommendations to truly fix this. Here is how to maximize the number of shelter beds or maximize the number of affordable housing units that you have. So, you know, when you come with that lens on helping the most vulnerable, that sort of drives our work and what we put out, right?

Like the fact that no one knows where drinking fountains are or what public bathrooms there are or the fact that there's so little because, you know, we were able to get that information from departments, right? I think, you know, that is how we see our role is to not just be an accountant and just put data out, but to use it in a way that actually makes systemic change for society. Before we got in here, any department could do this.

Any elected official could do this. That's the thing, like, this is not, these tools weren't, you know, the data was always there, it's just who's going to take it and then do the work and provide that for the people and for the policy makers. And that so far has been us.

I appreciate you guys, Kate, Avi, Dinah and Diana. Thank you.

Diana, can you stick around with us for a minute or two? Yes, I can.

And I, you know, just if I can just follow up, you know, he's very humble. People could do this work and other elected officials could do this work, but he came in with a mandate from everything that he campaigned on to ensure that we had sort of the firepower to just run with trying to get as much done in the limited time that we have. He's like, I have 40 years to get these things done, right?

This is the goal. And so we really, really have to give kudos. His executive team is not big.

You know, we have less than a dozen folks in our executive team, but we pull together to be able to really bolster getting information out to folks so that they feel empowered to know what is going on in their city and to make that change. You can't legislate. The Controller doesn't legislate, doesn't make policy, but we can inform those stakeholders and the people.

So the data is out there, but as you all know, we have to dig in and try to pull things out from data, right? Try to figure out what is actually going on. And we've done that on so many different fronts because it's a human-first, care-first model over here.

Public Defenderʼs Perspective

How did your, you know, you come, can you just talk about yourself? Talk about your background. I mean, you talked about, you know, born and raised in LA and a federal public defender.

But how did being a federal public defender like in, you know, let's talk about it.

Yeah.

Inform your work.

It was the love of my life. I love being a public defender. I love standing up and being by my clients.

I was a trial attorney, had always been a trial attorney. And at the time that I left DC., I was a public defender at the Public Defender Service, which, as you all know, has, you know, long been held in a sort of the gold standard because of a really wonderful situation there for attorneys where we don't have as many cases as other public defender's offices who are just sort of drowning in cases.

And the expectation was that you would work up cases like your clients deserve because you don't have that many and you have resources and you have holistic defense. And so in my role as a trial attorney, I was interrogating these systems, these systems of power, law enforcement agencies, law enforcement officers, trying to identify systemic issues versus just bad actors who got a badge, right? And often what I found, which was very frustrating due to protective orders or just because it was in my client's best interest, is that I would get a lot of juicy information, which is really tragic information, really nasty information about bad actors or systemic issues.

And I couldn't do anything about it. I couldn't amplify it. It couldn't address a systemic sort of issue on a broader scale.

So when the opportunity presented itself for me to be able to join the Controller's team, and when I knew that they wanted someone, it's very easy to find someone who's been part of law enforcement and have them do some public safety oversight, but to take on wanting someone who had sort of been raging against the machine and trying to look at holding folks accountable and making sure they're in compliance with the law or with policies or with sort of just general values. I was so pleased to be able to transition over. I think doing 10 years at a high level of felony trials was a lot, and I found myself just sort of needing to be able to do something on a larger scale where I could bring information and shed light on things.

So that's sort of how I ended up here, and that's been my trajectory thus far.

Yeah, I mean, that's so in line with one of the things we're talking about, so much subject matter expertise or purported subject matter expertise in these spaces that are critical spaces for how people are treated and how government shows up for people, aren't voices of public defenders or people in those spaces. So in media narratives or in policymaking, taking those trial practice experiences or those client-centered, holistic experiences, taking like holistic models of criminal defense into a policy realm can make it real impactful change. Credit, props to doing that.

I mean, Kate can probably speak to this more than I can. I'm still in the trial court. Kate's in the policy arena, has been in the policy arena before as well and continues to be there.

It's like, there's different lens we can bring, can and should.

For sure, and I think, you know, what I've learned, you know, or in the policy realm is people aren't coming, necessarily coming from our perspective. You know, a lot of the stakeholders that you have to work with, the other department heads, the other city officials, they do not have the same lens at all. And you got to bring them along, you know, somehow or other.

It can't be adversarial all the time. You know, sometimes it is, but it's very different. And how do you navigate that?

That was always, you know, an issue for me in a lot of ways. So how do you navigate that?

I think the ultimate goal here is, you know, there is a level of professionalism, there's a level of the Controller sort of setting the tone for his team and saying, look, this is data anchor, data driven stuff, right? And what we're doing and what we're looking into and what we're trying to achieve is just what is the information? What is behind, you know, what's under the hood, right?

Let's look at that. And so what I have found is there's obviously a certain level of defensiveness when you have someone who people might have preconceived notions and things of that nature. But we're just asking the questions, trying to get the information, trying to understand so we can share, right?

So it's not without its difficulties, it's not without having to fight against some biases. And as we, I think all three of us have noted, there's such a limited perspective in terms of how we talk about public safety. What does that mean?

You know, how do we talk about what policing means in certain communities versus other? What it means to be confronted with an armed officer if you live in one quadrant versus another? What it means to feel a certain sense of trepidation when you're confronted with certain systems and certain...

I've been able to, given my background as a public defender, I've had to deal with prosecutors. I've had to try to reach an agreement or talk to them or be able to get jurors to understand your side of the events, right? So my scars are ones that allow for me to be able to deal with any entities that might have trepidation, but ultimately it's making sure that we're doing our work in a way that accords with all professional standards, whether it's our audits, which I'm in charge of sort of leading our audits, but our independent, well, there are civil service auditors who are professionals who were here before Controller Mejia came in and will be here after Controller Mejia.

Those folks are leading our audits and any assessments that we go and do through our executive office or projects that we lead are anchored in the data, are anchored in actual information and not just what people would like to paint us as, which is just, they're just espousing whatever they believe.

Well, Dinah Manning, thank you so much for joining us here on due processing. This has been a real illuminating discussion for me, not knowing much about the Controller's Office before coming into it. And keep doing all the good stuff.

Thank you very much, I really appreciate it.