"Mob behavior." "Rampant corruption." "Strategic manipulation of the electorate."
These are some of the phrases that have been used to describe the wide array of potentially unethical and even criminal behavior uncovered at Anaheim City Hall. But, for years before an independent investigation revealed the broad extent of pay-to-play politics in the city, a small group of community activists called out many of the same alleged misdeeds.
They filed public records act requests, compiled campaign finance data, and gave piercing speeches at city council meetings.
Some worked together, while juggling full-time jobs, coordinating messaging and organizing protests at City Hall. Others left their jobs entirely, determined to bring wrongdoing into the light.
These residents, described as "a small, rag-tag group of rebels" by a former city manager, were largely ignored and sometimes gaslighted by the elected officials they targeted and those who supported those officials. But now, the results of a year-long independent investigation released at the end of July has corroborated many of their allegations.
"I had so many people calling, saying, 'You were right, you were right. Doesn't it feel great?'" long-time activist Cynthia Ward said after the investigators' final report came out. "I'm like, 'No, I'm horrified,’ because this is the public image of my city ... My heart is broken."
Ward and most of the community activists included in this story were among more than 120 witnesses interviewed for the report, which was carried out by the investigative firm JL Group at the behest of Anaheim's previous city council.
The report builds upon the FBI’s investigation into former Mayor Harry Sidhu and several other key players in Anaheim and Orange County politics for corruption and other alleged crimes.
The report's main findings include:
To date, no city official or staff member has been charged with any crime in connection with the alleged misdeeds laid out in the report or in the preceding FBI allegations. Two prominent civic figures, former Anaheim Chamber of Commerce president Todd Ament and former OC Democratic Party leader Melahat Rafiei, were charged and pleaded guilty to a variety of crimes stemming from the FBI investigation. Neither has been sentenced yet.
Sidhu did not return LAist requests for comment for this story.
[Read more from LAist about the independent investigation.]
Anaheim neighborhood: Little Arabia
By the numbers: Estimates he reads at least 10,000 pages of documents from public records requests to the city of Anaheim each year.
Why'd you get involved? "Because I want to change the world. Simple as that."
How do you feel now? "At least I'm finding out somebody's listening to what I have to say."
Civics tip: "Go to a city council meeting and see what's being discussed. Because sometimes what happens in a city council meeting is completely different than what's reported in newspapers, or it's not even reported at all."
Duane Roberts said he sat with the city-contracted investigators for 5 ½ hours of interviews and gave them 500-800 pages of documents that he had collected "on one case alone." That case was the city council's denial of a permit to open an Arco gas station across the street from an existing gas station, a Shell, owned by a friend of — and campaign donor to — former Mayor Sidhu.
The gas station case takes up 26 pages of the investigators' recent report on pay-to-play politics in Anaheim. It’s one of several issues in the report that are bolstered by information Roberts gathered on his own and passed off to investigators.
Roberts writes the blog Anaheim Investigator, where he makes ample use of the California Public Records Act to document ties between local politicians and business and union leaders. Roberts estimates that each year he reads at least 10,000 pages of documents from his public records requests to the city of Anaheim.
"Some people like to collect postage stamps, some people like to watch Monday night football, some people like to ride roller coasters, I like to file public records act requests," he said, "and seeing what our public officials are doing behind closed doors."
Roberts dove into activism in Anaheim after he graduated from the University of California, Irvine in 1997, organizing protests against police brutality, then moving on to advocate for affordable housing and immigrants' rights, he said. For decades, he attended and spoke up at city council meetings — the now-shuttered OC Weekly named him Best Gadfly in 2013.
He also had four unsuccessful runs for public office over the years: twice for Anaheim City Council (2012 and 2018), once as a Green Party candidate for U.S. Senate (2010) and once for a spot on the Anaheim Union High School District school board (2000).
Since the pandemic, when he lost his job teaching English at a private language school, Roberts has largely focused on writing up the results of his public records requests and other investigations on his blog. "You scare the hell out of the power structure when you know what's going on," he said.
Anaheim neighborhood: Stoddard Park
By the numbers: Mike — "A lot of times I'm up at three in the morning writing stuff, researching stuff, looking at the numbers again and again."
Why'd you get involved? Jeanine — "I care about the city, I care about the residents of the city."
How do you feel now? Jeanine — "It thrills me that we were in the right all this time."
Civics tip: Jeanine — "Look at the [city council] agendas and find one issue that you are interested in. And then you should attend the city council meetings."
For Mike and Jeanine Robbins, investigating Anaheim became a family affair. Mike Robbins said he started sending information to the FBI and California Attorney General and asking them to investigate the Angel Stadium deal at least as early as 2020. He would compile news clippings and add bits of his own analysis and tips he got from community members. The Robbins' adult son researched campaign contributions to Sidhu and other city councilmembers and fed the information to be included in the documents.
Mike Robbins never got a response and doesn't know if his prodding helped lead to the FBI's investigation. But he and his wife Jeanine, along with a small group of activist friends, applied constant pressure to Anaheim officials, showing up to nearly every city council meeting or tuning in when meetings were held remotely during the pandemic. They asked questions, lobbed accusations, gave patriotic speeches and crafted stinging poems and songs.
"In Anaheim, everything is done with bribes," Robbins said at the city council podium on July 16, 2019, comparing the city to developing countries. "This is the disruption of the American system of government that men and women died for … It is a disgrace to those who fought for a great ideal to have it slashed by corporate interests and the people that acquiesce to this system of government."
Robbins' eyes twinkled recalling the many times he and his wife got under the skin of Anaheim officials. "The best thing we could do is just make them mad up there," he said.
"When you just don't think you're getting anywhere … if you just get their goat every time you've done something," he said.
Mike and Jeanine Robbins are part of an organization, the People's Homeless Task Force Orange County, that filed a lawsuit in early 2020 against Anaheim alleging that the Angel Stadium deal violated state transparency laws. An Orange County judge dismissed the case (it's now under appeal) but the stadium deal was ultimately voided in 2022 after the FBI made public its allegations against then-mayor Sidhu.
The People's Homeless Task Force Orange County and their lawsuit are cited numerous times in the independent investigators' report. In one section, investigators allege that former Mayor Sidhu "may very well have" violated transparency laws, including by failing to hand over public records to the People's Homeless Task Force Orange County, and to the L.A. Times, as required by law.
Jeanine Robbins, who ran for city council in 2020 and came in third, said she felt vindicated by the investigators' report. "All the time that the city council and city staff put us down personally and as an organization — they belittled us, they mocked us — all of that was just done in their own sense of self-defense, I guess, self-preservation.”
Robbins also said the independent investigators uncovered new potential misdeeds that surprised them. These included alleged irregularities in the accounting for a temporary homeless shelter built soon after Sidhu was elected in 2018.
"The corruption in Anaheim, I mean, it's been going on so long and I don't think we realized it was so pervasive in all aspects of what they were doing," she said.
Anaheim neighborhood: Anaheim Colony District
Why'd you get involved? "I want to protect the future so that my kids and my grandkids can enjoy the same kind of a place that I enjoyed as a kid and as an adult."
How do you feel now? "My heart is broken and so I'm not really looking to spike the football …[But] to have outside sources verify that, no, I wasn't imagining this, this really was happening, that was very validating to me."
Civics tip: "Set up something as simple as a Google Alert so that when something's happening at City Hall, you're alerted to it."
Cynthia Ward said she began paying attention to City Hall in the early 2000s. Later, in 2007, she was a founding member of Save Our Anaheim Resort (SOAR), which started as a campaign against a proposed housing development near Disneyland and later turned into a political action committee through which Disney funnels large sums of money to support favored city council candidates.
Ward left SOAR in 2010 because, she said, she realized the organization was more interested in serving special interests than residents. "When I found out that I was being used to lie to people, it infuriated me," Ward said. "I had to make up for the misinformation that I participated in selling to them."
She "flipped" and began questioning resort-friendly policies and supporting candidates who did the same.
Ward said when she first started speaking up at city council meetings to point out what she saw as disparities, she thought her diligence would be appreciated. Instead her input on topics such as the negotiations over the Angels baseball team were belittled.
"I thought we were all on the same team and they'd be glad that I had caught something that we could fix together," Ward said. "And instead, they'd blow me off and disparage my credibility. 'Oh, this woman is politically motivated and misinformed, and there's no basis for her statement.' … That was horrifying to me to realize, no, we're not all on the same team necessarily."
Ward later served as a policy advisor to former city Councilmember Denise Barnes and then ran for mayor in 2018, landing in fourth place.
Ward said she was interviewed multiple times by the city-contracted investigators, plus follow-up calls and emails in which they asked her to back up her assertions with documents.
"In one case, I had an email that was a screen capture and they wouldn't use it until I found the original email," she said. "I had my kids pulling boxes out of my attic to try and find this email."
Despite feeling validated by the report, Ward said she's not celebrating. "In large part, the folks responsible for this behavior are still exactly where they were when they were working with Harry Sidhu," she said. "So the potential for this to continue happening is there. And that's terrifying."
Ward wants to help the city make changes. Anaheim Mayor Ashleigh Aitken has appointed her to an advisory committee tasked with reviewing the independent investigation and suggesting reforms.
"We've got a lot of work to do to fix this, then I'll be ready to party," Ward said.
Larry Rosenthal, a Chapman University law professor and former assistant U.S. attorney, said community watchdogs have become increasingly important to exposing corruption as the media landscape shrinks. According to a 2021 Pew Research Center study, newsroom employment in the U.S. fell 26% between 2008 and 2020, equivalent to about 30,000 jobs.
"Traditionally, local journalists were a far more important vehicle by which local corruption was exposed than community groups," Rosenthal said. "With the decline of local journalism, however, community groups are one of the few remaining sources of pressure for transparency in local government."
The best way to keep tabs on your own local government is by attending public meetings for your city council or local boards. Here are a few tips to get you started.
Find meeting schedules and agendas: City councils usually meet at least twice a month, although larger ones may meet weekly. Committees and boards tend to meet less often, typically once a month. You can find the schedule and meeting agenda on your local government’s website, or posted physically at your local city hall. Find more tips here.
Learn the jargon: Closed session, consent calendars and more! We have definitions for commonly used terms here.
How to give public comment: Every public meeting allows community members to give comment, whether or not it’s about something on the agenda. The meeting agenda will have specific instructions for giving public comment. Review more details here.
Nevertheless, the Anaheim report by independent investigators cites the Voice of OC and L.A. Times several times each, and community activists noted the role these publications played in uncovering new information about alleged improprieties in the city's government.
The investigators hired by the city had much greater access to information and significantly more resources than most community activists or local journalists — the city paid JL Group $1.5 million for the work.
Former Anaheim city manager Chris Zapata praised community activists for asking questions at city council meetings that, he said, city councilmembers should've been asking themselves. Zapata is cited extensively in the investigators' final report, including his recollection of events leading up to his ouster in 2020. He was fired after questioning some of former Mayor Sidhu’s directives, including how to spend COVID-19 relief funds.
Zapata said he's also been interviewed by the FBI.
Remembering the community watchdogs, Zapata said their tactics were sometimes "pretty rough," referring to those who yelled and spat profanity into the microphone at city council meetings. But they watched out for democracy, he said.
"They were, in effect, the loyal opposition, loyal to the community," he said. "They were there from the standpoint of trying to ask questions, speak truth to power, do things that, frankly, I admired."
On Tuesday, the Anaheim City Council will meet for the first time since the independent investigation was released. They’re set to discuss several recommendations made by investigators in their report, including auditing COVID-19 relief money given to the local chamber of commerce, adding a hotline where employees can report misconduct and strengthening the city’s lobbying rules.
Brianna Lee, engagement producer for civics and democracy, contributed to this story.
