‘Notoriously slow:’ Lengthy investigations into California politicians leave voters in the dark

Last year, the FPPC issued the most warning letters and the fewest fines in the past decade

Warning letters have helped the agency reduce its backlog but some advocates worry the practice isn't as effective as assessing fines.

James Lindsay, enforcement chief of the commission, said in multiple public meetings that the increased use of warning letters was partly because the agency prioritized closing minor cases and acknowledged in June that it would become more difficult to find “easy closures.” But he assured the commission in January that the letters were never issued “in scenarios that were not justified in the past.”

Some ethics advocates, however, warned against the practice. 

“Because of a policy to be caught up on mandates, you don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater,” said Sean McMorris, transparency, ethics, and accountability manager at the California Common Cause. “The answer is not less enforcement or diminished fines. The answer is more person power to enforce the law adequately.”

‘We don’t believe in the system’

Galvan — the first Latino to ever serve on the Compton City Council — was a symbol of hope for diverse representation, Blueford said. 

But Galvan’s career was littered with violations, according to state and court records. He failed to file any disclosures before being elected in 2013, drawing a $1,000 fine from the commission that November. That did not stop him: He continued to file paperwork late, until in March 2017, he stopped filing altogether, according to the commission’s investigation, details of which have not been previously reported. 

A month later, he was re-elected. 

He also spent more than $55,000 of the money he raised between 2013 and 2017 for personal use, the investigation said. In 2017, he even posted about one of those expenses at a Beverly Hills winery on social media, according to bank records included in the probe.

During the investigation, Galvan was hard to find, at times promising to provide records he never delivered, and efforts to directly serve him the subpoena for those records failed, commission documents show. Once, he was celebrating the premiere of the movie “Daddy’s Home 2” on the day the subpoena server tried to reach him, according to his social media post. On another occasion, Galvan entered the City Hall through a “private entrance,” documents show.

The commission fined Galvan $240,000 in 2022. But the agency had not received a payment as of Oct. 9, commission spokesperson Jay Wierenga confirmed. 

The agency opened the case in February 2016 and assigned it that September, adding more staff and devising a plan to investigate in June 2017, according to Wierenga and the agency’s own case chronology obtained via a public records request. 

The commission’s leaders acknowledged that Galvan’s case “took too long to resolve and that staff should have been assigned sooner,” Wierenga said in an email. But he said that Galvan’s extensive violations and lack of responsiveness was why the case took longer than normal, and asserted that recent reforms will “prevent significant delays.” 

Compton City Council member Andre Spicer, who replaced Galvan in 2022, called the long duration of the case “a disservice.”

“I think that our lack of engagement is because we don’t believe in the system,” Spicer said. “If you have issues like this that take 10 years, eight years to sort out and damage is done, it reinforces the reasons why people don’t engage.”

Galvan and his then-bookkeeper, Gary Crummitt, did not respond to multiple inquiries over two weeks for comment. When reached by CalMatters last month, Galvan’s attorney during the investigation, Anthony Willoughby, said in an email: “There are a lot of moving parts to the matter you are seeking comment on.”

‘Notoriously slow’

Galvan’s case is among many where, by the time they were resolved, the officials in question had won an election or left office. 

In the city of Campbell in 2017, council members paid for ads with taxpayer dollars to influence election outcomes on three ballot measures about marijuana regulations, the commission found. But the findings were only made public six years later, after most of those officials had left office. 

Former state Assemblymember Bill Brough spent campaign cash on family cell phone plans, hotel stays and a trip to a Boston Red Sox game, according to the commission, which didn’t conclude his case until last year, three years after he left office. Even he complained: “I just wanted to go on with my life,” the Los Angeles Times reported. 

And a three-year investigation into state Assemblymember Diane Papan wrapped in May, resulting in a warning letter for improper reporting of contributions when she ran for San Mateo City Council in 2020, according to records obtained by CalMatters. Papan’s campaign provided records to the agency in 2021, but the staff waited three years before reaching back out — so long that Papan’s attorney, former FPPC enforcement chief Gary Winuk, questioned the lack of action in an email to the staff, and one witness the agency interviewed said he no longer remembered details of the contributions in question, records show.

Delays could create a sense that “there’s justice denied,” said commission vice chairperson Catharine Baker. “If you act too slowly, if there isn’t a resolution, potential bad actors aren’t brought to any real significant justice, and the public can’t have faith that the rules are being enforced — that there is someone watching the henhouse.”

Some open cases have also lasted years. Newsom, for instance, has been under a previously unreported investigation since 2021 for late disclosure of behested payments — donations to a person, nonprofit or a state agency at the behest of the public official that ethics experts say can be another avenue for special interests to curry favor. Another probe for potential campaign reporting violations has also been open since 2021, commission records show. 

Officials are required by state law to disclose behested payments that total $5,000 or more from a single donor in a year, and upon meeting that dollar threshold, the official must report the payments within 30 days. 

Between 2019 and 2021, Newsom’s office failed to file 17 behested payments totaling more than $14 million on time, including one filed more than a year after the due date, according to records obtained by CalMatters via a public records request. 

In emails to the commission, Newsom’s staff blamed the delays on donors notifying the governor’s office of the payments after filing deadlines. They also said the governor takes his “reporting obligations very seriously” and submitted the documents within days of discovering the payments. 

Many of those behested payments were made during the pandemic, “when the Governor’s office was focused on the quick mobilization of resources,” Newsom spokesperson Izzy Gardon said in a statement last week. “Our office remains committed to transparency and complying with FPPC requirements.”

Lara — who accepted money in 2019 from donors with ties to insurers his agency oversaw — has been under investigation for two years for allegations of laundering campaign donations, records show. Between 2021 and 2022, insurance companies funneled $122,500 through the leadership fund of the California Legislative LGBTQ caucus — where Lara served as vice chairperson and remains an ex-officio member — to support Lara, according to a complaint filed by Carmen Balber, executive director of the advocacy group Consumer Watchdog, which has also faced criticism for not disclosing its donors. 

The last time she heard from the commission, Balber said, was when it opened the investigation in May 2022. 

Lara told CalMatters last month he was not in touch with the agency and referred questions to his campaign attorney. The attorney, along with other groups named in the investigation, did not respond to a CalMatters inquiry.

Former commission chairperson Ann Ravel said while some cases are complicated and time-consuming, late filings of behested payments and campaign finance forms should be easy cases to close. “We know there are deadlines,” Ravel said. “If they cannot monitor that, what are they monitoring?”

Even with complex cases, Ravel argued, swift resolution is possible. Right before the November 2012 election, the agency under her leadership forced Koch Brothers-associated groups to disclose $11 million in illegal spending on a pair of propositions through an emergency ruling from the California Supreme Court. The groups were fined $1 million a year later. 

“That transparency was so important to the public, to the press, in order for there to be fairness in the system and also for people to have trust in government,” she said.

But speed is not all, Silver argued. “Just because you are spending a lot of time on one case doesn’t make it a waste of time,” he said. “It could have the effect of limiting complaints and violations in the future.”

And cases must be investigated fully for due process, even if no violations are ultimately found, said commission executive director Galena West, who led the enforcement division for five years.

“Isn’t exonerating someone also valuable for the public to know?”

The agency’s goals are to ensure public officials “act in a fair and unbiased manner,” promote government transparency and to build public trust in the political system, according to its website. State law and commission regulations do not explicitly require staff to resolve cases before elections. 

But frustration lingers among campaign finance attorneys, those who filed complaints and even politicians under investigation. 

“The FPPC is so notoriously slow that it’s not worth bugging them,” Balber said. “If campaign violations are not identified and prosecuted in a timely manner, then after-the-fact penalties have no impact on the elected officials who are being investigated.”

Delays create loopholes for officials willing to chock up the penalties as the cost of winning an election, said McMorris of California Common Cause, who likened the state campaign finance laws to “a tube of toothpaste under pressure.” 

“There’s multiple holes in it. You plug one, those bad actors immediately go find the other hole that they can exploit,” he said. “It diminishes public trust in the democratic process and in our representatives.”

And for public officials who “inadvertently” made a mistake or who are innocent, the lengthy probe is “like a sword hanging over your head” even after leaving office, said Glazer, the state legislator.

State Treasurer Fiona Ma — who was fined $11,500 earlier this year for failing to disclose more than $860,000 in payments in her 2018 campaign — said the yearslong investigation meant extra costs to retain her treasurer and attorney. 

“I’m just going to have to pay a fine at some point, so just send me the bill,” Ma, a 2026 candidate for lieutenant governor, told CalMatters. “But you know what? This is … the cost of doing business in elected office. It just is. Everybody gets fined, just how much.”

What caused the backlog?

Anecdotes of backlogs and delays reached Baker before she was appointed to the commission in 2021, she said. And early in her tenure, she quickly noticed how old cases were by the time staff presented them for commission decisions. 

“I said ‘Look, there’s a problem. It’s severe. And we must do something,’” Baker said in an interview with CalMatters, joined by Wierenga, the spokesperson. “If we don’t, our tenures on this commission … will be partly a failure.”

The influx of complaints and referrals from state and local agencies contributed to the backlog, Baker said. Over the past decade, the number of complaints and referrals has generally crept up and surged in election years, peaking in 2022 with 3,103, compared to a low of 1,205 in 2015, according to the CalMatters analysis.

Lawmakers also assigned the agency more duties over the years, Baker and Wierenga noted. Wierenga said the agency’s caseload jumped in 2015 when the California Secretary of State began referring campaigns that failed to file a $50 annual fee. The commission received 2,460 referrals on May 1, 2015 — almost five times the number of referrals from all other agencies combined that year, he wrote in an email. In 2021, the enforcement of the law was transferred back to the Secretary of State.

Laws increasing disclosure of donors in campaign ads — including a 2018 law that regulated the text, color and font size — added more work for the commission, Wierenga said.

Additionally, staff responsible for parsing out complaints and referrals worth investigating sometimes opened cases when they shouldn’t have, especially under the pressure of high caseloads, Lindsay told the commission in January. Inexperienced staff also lacked understanding of the law, leaving the manager scrambling to train them, according to a 2022 memorandum by unit manager Tara Stock.  

“If you’re overwhelmed, you’re not sure what the right answer is, the thought process is: ‘There’s no harm in moving that case forward,’” Lindsay said. 

Burdensome “red tape” — including layers of reviews and approvals required to escalate a case — and a digital recordkeeping system that’s hard to navigate compounded the problem, staff said. In a 2022 letter, staff described the system as “slow, cumbersome, and sometimes, downright tedious.”