It wasn’t the first time I heard a politician complain about an attack mailer.
At a campaign event in Highland Park last month, Los Angeles City Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez grumbled about shady fliers landing in her constituents’ mailboxes ahead of the June 2 primary. They didn’t come from the campaigns of her four opponents, or even a group supporting one of them, she told me, but a self-described “local” nonprofit called Neighbors First.
No big deal, I thought – harsh attacks come with the job, especially in a race as contentious as Hernandez’s City Council District 1.
Shadowing a campaign door-knocker in Glassell Park later that day, I got a sense of how deep Neighbors First had reached into the district. Every few homes, a resident would grab a glossy mailer they had received – one had a scowling mug of Hernandez beneath the declaration, “THIS IS WHAT FAILING TO ACT LOOKS LIKE” – and ask the canvasser: What about this? Who sent it?
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Good questions. The canvasser said they were from an outside group that’s difficult to identify, and she was right about that. I set out to get answers, because state law doesn’t require groups like Neighbors First to provide them. What I discovered is that the mailers are what politicos and journalists call astroturf – well-funded influence campaigns posing as grass-roots movements.
I spent more than 14 years as the Los Angeles Times’ letters editor, and part of my job was to screen out writers who weren’t really who they said they were. In some cases, a little digging would reveal that, say, the mom-and-pop restaurateur decrying natural gas restrictions was actually tied to a campaign funded by a $60-billion fossil-fuel company. Or the dialysis patient’s plea for better safety sent by a labor union backing a ballot measure targeting dialysis clinics.
Real people persuade voters more easily than corporations and special interests. Efforts to disguise one as the other are often clunky and fall apart with the barest of inspections. And it’s no different with Neighbors First.
In the mailers, Neighbors First describes itself as a “Local Non-Partisan, Non-Profit 501C(4) Organization.” The “local” does a lot of heavy lifting, because according to paperwork filed with the California Secretary of State, Neighbors First operates out of a law office in Marin County, just north of San Francisco.
Mariel Garza
In a Substack piece, Mike Bonin, executive director of the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs and a former L.A. council member, details the byzantine legal arrangement that allows the “public benefit corporation” to hammer Hernandez over housing, homelessness and crime without having to disclose who’s funding it. Marin County lawyer Steven J. Lucas, a partner at the Sacramento-based political law firm Nielsen Merksamer who controls several other political organizations, set up Neighbors First, according to a state filing. But as long as Neighbors First never explicitly endorses or opposes any candidate – even though it obviously doesn’t want Hernandez to win – it’ll never have to report the people who are funding the mailers.
Neighbors First is trying to influence voters in other L.A. council races: It has sent mailers supporting Traci Park, the West L.A. councilmember in a tough reelection battle against progressive civil rights attorney Faizah Malik. In District 9, its mailers draw charged comparisons between the two candidates running for the open South L.A. City Council seat: Jose Ugarte wants to build “the homes that people can afford,” while the more progressive Estuardo Mazariegos “supports expanding state investment in publicly owned and maintained housing.”
I wanted to find out more about the motivations behind Neighbors First, so last week I contacted Wilson Gee, the Chinatown neighborhood council chair whom many assumed was the same Wilson Gee listed as CEO of Neighbors First in the organizations’ initial statement of information filing on Oct. 7.
He sounded surprised by my inquiry.
Jon Regardie
“I am not the CEO of Neighbors First, or affiliated in any way with that group,” he wrote to me in an email.
He also didn’t seem to be a fan of the mailers blanketing District 1.
“I absolutely do not agree with any attacks on Eunisses,” Gee wrote. “The only disagreement I have with her is ‘which junior high school is the best.’ She went to Burbank and I went to Nightingale.” (Both campuses are on Figueroa Street in Northeast Los Angeles.)
I called and emailed Lucas last week to try to get an explanation. His assistant said the lawyer would try to get back to me, but he never did. Understandable, because Lucas was evidently busy naming a new CEO of Neighbors First. About an hour after I called on April 15, the secretary of state’s office received a sworn statement from him identifying Melinda Jeannette Ramos as the new CEO.
Ramos has not responded to messages seeking comment about her involvement with Neighbors First, so I don’t know if she is the former field deputy for Councilman Gil Cedillo (whom Hernandez defeated in 2022) with the same name.
In the meantime, the misleading pitches from groups pretending to be something they’re not will keep coming – after all, it’s “election deception season.” My advice, as a journalist who’s seen so much of this? Do your own “editing” and take it all with a grain of salt.
