Following revelations in 2022 of the FBI’s investigation of former Anaheim Mayor Harry Sidhu and allegations of a “cabal” influencing City Hall, the city’s sale of Angel Stadium was canceled, residents demanded city leaders do better and a litany of reforms followed.
On Friday, Sidhu was sentenced to two months in prison with one year of probation and a $55,000 fine. His is the first sentence to be handed down in a trio of plea deals connected to the FBI’s investigations.
Federal prosecutors say Sidhu leaked confidential information during sale negotiations, deleted emails related to the discussions and lied to federal investigators about the emails and him telling confidants he hoped to get campaign support from the Angels in return for his efforts to tip the scales in their favor.
Sidhu pleaded guilty to four felonies: obstruction of justice, wire fraud, and two counts of making false statements to a federal agency.
“We look forward to closing the chapter on the Sidhu era and on his era of corruption, and working together on what people are concerned about,” Mayor Ashleigh Aitken said. “I think they’re tired of hearing about the past, and we’re focused on the future and working together for our residents on issues like affordable housing, cleaning up our parks and making sure our libraries have the staff and the resources that they need.”
Aitken said the new councilmembers have made “common sense” reforms and the city is now more transparent — “the most transparent city in Orange County, if not California.”
The reforms that followed the FBI probe and an outside investigation commissioned by the city include:
- City Council and executive calendars are posted online so the public can see who they are meeting with.
- Lobbyist rules were tightened with auditing and a ban placed on lobbyists turning around to work as council aides — at least for a year.
- City Council and executive emails are now kept for two years – preserving records that once had a shelf-life of three months.
- All City Council members and staff must use city phones for all city business.
- There is now a $100,000 limit on how much a City Council candidate can lend to their campaigns and candidates are required to pay off campaign debt within a year of an election.
- Last year, Anaheim hired its first ethics officer.
And, there are more to come, Aitken said, as she looks at bringing back the possibility of a lobbyist gift ban.
“I think it’s important to realize no set of regulations is going to stop a criminal from committing a crime, but what we can do is call out bad behavior when we see it and not stand by and allow people to take advantage of those that they are meant to serve,” Aitken said.
Cynthia Ward, a longtime city watchdog and former council aide, said it is difficult to accept that Anaheim is enjoying a new age of transparency when there is a lack of more accountability for the past.
“Harry Sidhu is going to jail only because the FBI finally caught him,” Ward said. “But how many other people were involved? If we’re not going to hold people accountable for their past actions, how can we trust those who are still in power to do the right thing in the future?”
There’s no such thing as too much transparency, Ward added, and there is always room for improvement.
“I do think that Anaheim would be well served to put additional backstops in place, especially when it comes to things like talking about the next steps for Anaheim stadium,” Ward said. “There doesn’t seem to be a lot of follow-up with auditing the contracts that are in place at City Hall. We have a lot of lease agreements and other contracts that it looks like are not being followed up on. That’s alarming to me.”
Former Councilmember Jose Moreno said the reforms now in place are important, but he also thought they are not sufficient. If the reform rules were in place at the time of the cabal FBI investigators described in some documents, he said they wouldn’t have stopped bad actors in a scheme.
“If someone is determined to use their public position for either personal profit or to be the deliverer of profit and benefits to corporate special interests through raising campaign dollars, they’re going to do it,” Moreno said. “The way that it’s beginning to appear to many of us, it’s become more of a performative task to comply with public perception rather than to authentically and substantively curtail corruption and the undue influence of special interests and big money donors at City Hall.”
The public calendar, for example, falls short of its objective because there is room for inconsistencies and lack of accountability for not adhering to the policy, Moreno said.
“To have a policy requiring having a public calendar is important, but it’s unclear what the consequences are if you don’t publish a calendar, or what the consequences are if you omit a meeting on your calendar,” Moreno said. “We know that you’re meeting with people. That’s what you should do as an elected. What concerns many of us is what is the conversation you are having? Who is in on that meeting? What was the outcome? Was it on the heels of a decision that the City Council is about to undertake?”
As a council member, Moreno previously asked the council to adopt stronger regulations, such as the elected leaders being prohibited from voting on contracts or projects that would benefit a campaign donor or a political action committee that supported them. Former Mayor Tom Tait brought up the idea at a forum last fall to list on City Council meeting agendas if any lobbyists met with the City Council on that particular topic, another good suggestion, Moreno said.
“Any attempt at reform is good. However, when then you take steps that seem to dilute those reforms, or you yourself don’t live by those reforms, that’s where it begins to smack of being performative,” Moreno said. “The goal here is to deter any interest or attempt to make decisions in a predetermined, private, organized, strategic way, which violates the Brown Act. It violates ethics, it violates our sensibilities about democracy.”
Aitken said people who trust their local government are then willing to participate in making their community better. And that is her goal.
“What I want to restore is people’s pride in Anaheim and people’s faith that they deserve the very best,” Aitken said. “And when they call City Hall they will get the very best in service.”