As CalWatchdog reported in April, supervisors had taken initial steps to mandate that the costs involved in collecting and disposing of unused prescription drugs and syringes be shifted from Los Angeles County to U.S. and international pharmaceutical companies.

The measure wasn’t justified with claims that these companies somehow had a moral and ethical responsibility to pay for disposal of their potentially dangerous products. Instead, officials asserted that it was a costly and difficult task that the county was ill-suited to handle. This type of trash is “one of the things we’re completely ill-equipped to take. … We just had one of our biggest days ever just a few months ago where we had almost 27 1/2 pounds of needles come through the line. The workers up there have leather gloves, but there are no gloves made that can stop a fine, little puncture from a needle,” a Burbank recylcing manager told KPCC.

Board disregards testimony of county health executive

But this week, three of five county supervisors went against the proposal, bucking the testimony of interim county Health Officer Jeffrey Gunzehauser, who linked ineffective drug disposal policies to the nation’s opiate overdose epidemic.

Instead, Supervisors Mark Ridley-Thomas, Don Knabe and Mike Antonovich accepted the pharmaceutical companies’ offer “to pay for an education and outreach program about existing take-back options and to explain how to dispose of unused medications in the trash, a method opposed by county public health officials,” the Los Angeles Times reported.

This didn’t sit well with the Sheila Kuehl and Hilda Solis, according to the Los Angeles Daily News. They wanted the program adopted and hold out hope it can be revived.

While the L.A. County plan is unusual, it has a precedent. In 2013, lawmakers and Gov. Jerry Brown enacted Senate Bill 254. The law requires mattress manufacturers “to create and manage a mattress recycling organization that will provide recycling services to municipalities for free. The program will be financed by a visible mattress recycling charge, or ‘eco-fee,’ which will be collected from consumers at the point of sale.”

Mattress manufacturers complained intensely about the law, but talk of a lawsuit was never followed up on.

“Secretary Julian Castro will be in Los Angeles on Tuesday to meet with Mayor Eric Garcetti, City Council members and county supervisors, HUD spokesman George Gonzalez said,” according to the Los Angeles Times.

Hoping for cash

Despite the crisis, which has drawn unfavorable media attention amid L.A.’s recent boom in homeless-heavy areas like the city’s downtown, expectations were set low. “No major announcement was expected to come out of the meeting. Gonzalez said it was intended as an ‘exchange of ideas’ on the state of homelessness in Los Angeles,” the Times added.

City leaders hope the agency’s concern could manifest in additional funds to fight what Mayor Eric Garcetti has declared a public emergency around homelessness, as Los Angeles city and country governments both prioritized the issue. As the New York Times reported last month, the announcement marked the first time a U.S. city had made such a proclamation. “National experts on homelessness say Los Angeles has had a severe and persistent problem with people living on the streets rather than in shelters — the official estimate is 26,000,” noted the Times.

Uncertain goals

After announcing his initiative, Garcetti said, “he received a call from Castro, who had toured Skid Row earlier this year,” as the Los Angeles Daily News reported.

“The focus on homelessness came after a count conducted this year by Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority showed that the number of homeless people in the county increased by 12 percent since 2013. More than 44,000 people are homeless in Los Angeles County and about 70 percent of them live on the streets, in vehicles or in make-shift encampments.”

Questions remained as to what exactly Castro intended to accomplish through his visit. “He did indicate several times that HUD approved of the way that local elected officials were tackling homelessness,” Southern California Public Radio observed; in remarks, Castro noted that “more than anything else, I’m here […] to listen,” while insisting that “criminalizing homelessness is not the best approach. That is something that HUD has recognized very firmly.”

Despite the focus on L.A.’s significance to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, city officials appeared to place their funding hopes in the Federal Emergency Management Administration. Although former Secretary of Labor and current L.A. Supervisor Hilda Solis recently invoked the agency, the Daily News observed, its spokesman for the area covering Los Angeles threw doubt on the idea. “For homelessness, I’ve never heard that as a cause of an emergency because that’s a local social issue that would generally be handled at the city or county or state level,” he said.

A big pledge

In the interim, Los Angeles has pledged to allocate substantial sums to curbing homelessness, which has become an especially galling problem among veterans. “Members of the City Council say they are working on a $100 million plan to combat homelessness,” SCPR reported. “County supervisors this month voted to boost spending on homelessness to $100 million for the year. Earlier, Mayor Eric Garcetti had said he would release a blueprint to end homelessness in August.”

Garcetti’s priorities around urban issues have not been without their critics. At a recent speech in South Los Angeles, the mayor was confronted by Jefferson Park protesters, some of whom pounded on his vehicle and demanded the resignation of the current Los Angeles Police Department chief Charlie Beck. “I am disappointed that our conversation was cut short when there is so much work for us to do together to make our neighborhoods stronger and safer,” Garcetti later remarked, according to CBS Los Angeles. “I believe in our city and my commitment to our shared concerns continues stronger than ever.”

This week, State Controller Betty T. Yee announced that her office would investigate the financial practices of the 12-square mile municipality, which has come under fire for awarding $326 million in taxpayer-funded contracts to businesses owned by a former mayor and his family.

“Our initial review shows significant discrepancies between the financial transaction reports submitted to my office and the city’s audited financial statements,” Controller Yee said in a press release. “As the state’s chief fiscal officer, I have the duty to bring my office’s expertise to bear to identify potential misuse of taxpayer dollars.”

The audit will begin with a review of local, state and federal programs administered by the city dating back to 2012. Yee’s office alerted city officials that it reserves the right to broaden its investigation at a later date.

$326 million paid to former mayor’s businesses

Earlier this year, an outside, limited-scope audit conducted by KPMG found that, over the past two decades, the city had awarded $326 million in government contracts to former mayor David Perez and his family. The city, which has just 99 registered voters, generates $140 million in annual revenue. Much of the city’s revenue comes from taxes paid by roughly two thousand businesses that have set up shop in Industry to avoid the high taxes and regulatory burdens of surrounding cities. 

According to the San Gabriel Valley Tribune, which first obtained a copy of the KPMG audit, the City of Industry paid one company $133,000 a month for street sweeping and parking lot maintenance — a rate that is six times higher than the city’s current contract. In one case, the company, which is partially owned by the former mayor, billed taxpayers “the equivalent to six street sweepers running for a total of 216 hours in one week.”

In addition to outrageous billing, the audit revealed that the city paid out $7 million arising from a sexual harassment lawsuit and water fine by Zerep Management Corporation, the company owned by the former mayor and his family members.

“This is crony capitalism at its worst,” Douglas Johnson of the Rose Institute of State and Local Government, told the San Gabriel Valley Tribune. “This isn’t why cities exist. They exist to provide service and structure, not for the benefit of one family conglomerate.”

City of Industry’s checkered past

Corruption at the City of Industry has been an open secret for years. In 2009, the Los Angeles Times detailed the by then self-dealing Mayor Perez.

“Everyone who does business in the city of Industry is required to sign up with Mayor David Perez’s company,” read the opening sentence of a 2009 investigation by Los Angeles Times reporter Rich Connell. “For years, a firm partly owned by the mayor has held an exclusive, multimillion-dollar franchise to pick up trash from the warehouses, manufacturing plants and other commercial enterprises packed into this oddly configured, avidly pro-business San Gabriel Valley city.” 

Perez and his family have maintained control over the city, which rarely holds elections and instead hands off City Council seats to one of the 400 residents. The city currently has just 99 registered voters. In previous years, residents have claimed “to live in churches, houses that can’t be found.”

“If this were the old Soviet Union we were talking about – or current-day Russia, for that matter – we would understand that we’re not really dealing with a democracy here,” the local newspaper editorialized in 2012. “It’s an oligarchy, a clique of family and friends with enormous sums of money at stake.”

In 2009, the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office opened an investigation into claims that elected city officials had filed fraudulent voter registration forms and were residing outside of the city. However, that investigation concluded without charges being filed. 

“I can’t say that we absolutely were sure that all the city officials really lived where they said they lived, but I know we didn’t seek criminal charges,” Dave Demerjian, the then-head of the D.A.’s Public Integrity Division, told the San Gabriel Valley Tribune’s Ben Baeder.

Antonovich, Solis demand answers

This time, the scandal appears to have reached a critical mass of support to finally force the City of Industry to clean up its act. On Tuesday, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, led by Supervisors Hilda Solis and Michael Antonovich, stepped into the fray by demanding a grand jury investigation.

“The recent audit of expenditures by the City of Industry revealed millions of dollars in questionable payments to the former mayor and his family members,” the L.A. County Board of Supervisors stated in its draft motion. “Given the magnitude of the audit findings, a Grand Jury investigation into possible corruption and back-room deals is warranted.”

The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office launched an investigation into the matter last Friday, according to the Pasadena Star-News.

The scandal in Industry is only the latest in a long line of Southern California municipal corruption cases. In 2010, the tiny city of Bell was caught paying city employees excessive salaries. Earlier this year, a former employee at the city of Pasadena was arrested as part of a 60-count indictment for embezzling $6 million in taxpayer funds.

The ruling’s potential impact on California public education — and public education nationally — could be immense. Even if it doesn’t stand, it will inspire similar lawsuits everywhere, and similar concerns about the proper balance of power in public schools between unionized employees of those schools, and students and their parents.

But to just focus on the California politics angle, the Vergara effect could also be immense.

From now on a litmus test for every Latino politician is whether they agree with Judge Rolf M. Treu’s comparison of California’s public school system with the formally racist segregated school systems that existed in much of America before the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education ruling.

Will Latino pols stand up for Jim Crow Lite?

Treu goes farther than even Latino reformers like Gloria Romero in depicting the fight over teacher tenure and teacher union power in a starkly racial fashion.

I look forward to seeing how John Perez, Hilda Solis, Lorena Gonzalez, Juan Vargas, Xavier Becerra, Joe Baca, Loretta Sanchez, Linda Sanchez, Tony Cardena, Gloria Negrete McLeod, Raul Ruiz, etc., react to Vergara.

This is not a question they can finesse.

Do they want to keep an education system that the judge called functionally anti-Latino so as to stay on the CTA’s and the CFT’s good side?

Or do they want to blow up the Jim Crow Lite system the unions have built for poor Latino students?

We shall see. I will set up Nexus alerts to keep tabs on what these pols are saying — and to see if California’s Democrats have a cleansing civil war that will force party members to wrestle with the fact that the CTA and the CFT stand for a lot of things.

But social justice isn’t one of them.