It’s no secret that Angelenos are struggling to make ends meet. Between skyrocketing grocery bills, unaffordable housing, and the rising cost of just about everything else, people are barely scraping by as it is. So when LADWP bills suddenly spiked this summer, in some cases reaching thousands of dollars per household, it was just one more expense that many people simply couldn’t afford. And people are angry.

One San Fernando Valley resident who received a $2,115 bill launched a petition demanding an investigation, which has attracted more than 28,000 signatures. And the outrage has now spilled into City Hall, where Mayor Karen Bass and City Controller Kenneth Mejia are clashing over how to investigate the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP).

LADWP is blaming the spike in bills on unusually high electricity use during the summer heat waves. But the utility’s complicated rate structure makes things much worse. Customers pay progressively higher rates as they use more electricity, with an additional premium for the highest usage tier during summer months. According to the city’s independent Ratepayer Advocate, median billed residential electricity consumption spiked about 67% between May and August 2026. And electricity rates themselves have been going up too due to infrastructure costs and other expenses.

On Monday, Bass called for an outside audit of LADWP’s rate structure and urged the utility’s Board of Commissioners to provide immediate relief to struggling customers. She also announced a temporary pause on residential utility shutoffs through the end of the year and expanded customer assistance and energy-efficiency programs.

But Mejia is asking a pretty obvious question that’s become a familiar one at City Hall: Why is the city spending millions on outside consultants when it already has public employees whose job is to do this work? Back in 2024, Mejia criticized the city for spending $500,000 on an outside consultant to audit its Vision Zero program, rather than having his office do it. That same year, he offered to have his office conduct a court-ordered audit of the city’s homelessness programs, but the work went to a private firm instead, at a cost of nearly $3 million. And it’s not just auditors. The city has also been spending millions on outside lawyers, including more than $2 million to a private law firm fighting litigation over the Venice Dell affordable housing project between 2024 and 2026, despite having its own City Attorney’s Office that taxpayers are already funding. Meanwhile, Bass’s administration has been cutting the Controller’s budget, leaving the office that is responsible for holding city departments accountable without enough staff to do its job.

In an October 26 press release, Mejia’s office said it had received thousands of complaints from frustrated LADWP customers and started looking into the utility’s rates during the first week of October, weeks before Bass announced her proposal. His team is trying to figure out why certain charges have increased, how the tiered pricing system contributes to higher bills, and what could be done to lessen the burden on residents during peak seasons, which are becoming the norm and not the exception. Mejia has already met with LADWP leadership and is still waiting for the department to fully respond to his request for data.

The Controller’s Office currently has just eight auditors responsible for overseeing more than $46 billion in annual city spending, including major public utilities like LADWP. For some perspective, back in 2004, the Controller’s Audit Division had 51 positions.

And Mejia has been raising concerns about this for a while now. In an April letter to the City Council’s Budget and Finance Committee, he requested approximately $3.7 million to fund 40 additional audit and fraud investigation positions for nine months. Bass’s proposed budget funded none of them.

With so few auditors, Mejia says his office can complete only two or three performance audits a year, even though it’s supposed to oversee dozens of city departments and hundreds of programs. His five fraud, waste, and abuse investigators received 749 cases in 2025 alone, which means many complaints have to be referred elsewhere rather than investigated by the Controller’s Office itself.

“If the Mayor is serious about continuous transparency and accountability on our tax dollars, she should fund the independent watchdog elected by the people, instead of spending millions on outside companies that are not beholden to the people of Los Angeles,” Mejia said.

Of course, there’s the political dimension to all of this. Mayoral challenger Nithya Raman proposed an LADWP audit in collaboration with Mejia last week, along with a review of executive compensation and a requirement that utility leadership publicly explain its rates. After Bass announced her own proposal Monday, Raman’s campaign accused the mayor of responding to political pressure while neglecting the city’s existing oversight infrastructure.