By Jose Navarro, MBA | The Navarro Report
Curren Price has represented the Ninth District on the Los Angeles City Council since 2013. In June 2023, he was charged with 10 felony counts — embezzlement, perjury, and conflict of interest — alleging that a consulting firm owned solely by his wife received more than $150,000 from developers before he voted to approve their projects. Price pleaded not guilty and has denied wrongdoing.
In August 2025, the Los Angeles County District Attorney filed two additional public corruption charges. The new allegations are distinct from the original counts and involve two public agencies: LA Metro and the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles. According to the DA’s office, those agencies paid Price’s wife more than $800,000 combined during the same period that Price voted to award those same agencies multimillion-dollar contracts. Price is prohibited by city ethics rules from having a financial interest associated with any project that comes before the City Council.
A financial controller reads the new charges as a structural accountability problem, not just a misconduct problem. Consider what the allegation requires to be true: a councilmember votes to award contracts to public agencies. Those agencies, in turn, pay his wife. The payments and the votes overlap in time. The councilmember’s staff flagged the conflict of interest before one of the votes, according to the DA’s office. The vote happened anyway.
That sequence describes a failure of multiple systems simultaneously. It describes a council member who allegedly proceeded despite a flagged conflict. It describes public agencies that entered into payment arrangements with a person directly connected to a council member voting on their contracts. And it describes an oversight environment in which this pattern persisted long enough to accumulate $800,000 in payments across two agencies before the DA’s Public Integrity Division brought charges.
Price’s case is the most recent in a series that has reshaped how Los Angeles is understood as a governance environment. Before him, Jose Huizar was sentenced to 156 months in federal prison for a pay-to-play scheme involving real estate development approvals. Mitch Englander pleaded guilty to scheming to falsify records. Mark Ridley-Thomas was convicted of bribery and fraud in a scheme involving USC. Three sitting or former council members have now been convicted on federal charges. A fourth — Price — faces two rounds of state charges and remains in office.
The pattern that emerges across these cases is not primarily about individual bad actors, though individual decisions and individual wrongdoing are at the center of each. The pattern is about a contract approval and vendor management system that creates repeated opportunities for officials to extract personal benefit from votes that are supposed to serve the public. Each case followed roughly the same structure: official votes on contracts or approvals, official or official’s family member benefits financially, the connection remains undisclosed or improperly disclosed.
The city’s ethics rules require disclosure and recusal. Those requirements exist because the temptation to conflate public power with private benefit is documented, recurring, and evidently not deterred by rules alone when enforcement depends entirely on someone choosing to investigate.
Price has not been convicted. He is entitled to the presumption of innocence, and the charges represent allegations that will be tested in court. But the system that allowed the alleged pattern to develop — contracts flowing through a council member whose wife was simultaneously being paid by the contracting agencies — is a design problem that new charges do not, by themselves, fix.
Jose E. Navarro, MBA, is a financial controller and founder of The Navarro Report, a public finance and government accountability publication based in San Diego, California.
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