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CW INTERVIEW - Progressive Marissa Roy is challenging first-term incumbent Hydee Feldstein Soto in the race for Los Angeles City Attorney.
Both Democrats, Feldstein was an upset winner four years ago as a relative newcomer to elective office.
Marissa says she is running to "transform the Los Angeles City Attorney’s Office into the largest public interest law firm in the city."
"Anywhere people are victimized by businesses engaging in unlawful, unfair, or deceptive conduct, Marissa says she will step in as City Attorney and be a champion for justice. And as our city faces constant threats from the Trump Administration, Marissa will lead the charge in court so that Los Angeles is one of the most powerful fighters in blocking his illegal agenda and restoring people’s rights."
HERE IS THE INTERVIEW:
How would you compare & contrast yourself from the incumbent? What makes you the better choice for Los Angeles?
In this election, the people of Los Angeles are presented with a choice: a career public interest attorney who will use the office to fight for equity and dignity for all people in our city, or an incumbent that protects powerful interests. I have spent my entire legal career as a public servant, working in litigation for local and state governments, from my start at the LA City Attorney’s Office to my tenure now at the California Department of Justice.
My opponent doesn’t have the relevant experience or the will to effectively manage litigation, leading to record payouts, and we are all paying the price with hundreds of millions of dollars being spent on expensive outside law firms and liability payouts instead of going to city services. I would bring courage to an office where the incumbent lacks it. The LA City Attorney’s Office could be the most significant public interest law office in the City because it is empowered to sue the Trump Administration and any company engaging in unlawful, unfair, or deceptive practices. Right now, the LA City Attorney’s Office has been largely in the background of litigation against the Trump Administration, while the state, other cities, and organizations have been the primary drivers to protect cities and lead lawsuits, such as those against ICE in LA.
The incumbent is failing to protect workers and renters; despite $2.5 billion in wage theft and tens of thousands of tenant harassment complaints filed, hardly any action has been taken against the corporations and abusive landlords responsible. I would dramatically scale up litigation to protect workers, tenants, seniors, children, and consumers, and be at the forefront of the legal fight against the Trump Administration. Relevance of experience matters. The incumbent’s lack of litigation knowledge has led to gross mismanagement of municipal liability, costing the city millions, while her lack of understanding of prosecutorial ethics has raised alarm with city staff and outside legal authorities.
I know, understand, and respect the duties, responsibilities, and ethics of this role – as well as the expertise of the public servants who work there – and would restore competence and trust in this office. This is the work I’ve done my entire career – suing billion-dollar tech companies, the Trump Administration, and bad landlords – and it’s the work that Los Angeles needs from its City Attorney.
What is your budget for this campaign? Will you spend more than $1 million dollars?
Our budget for the campaign will be informed by our fundraising and will be invested in reaching the people too often left behind in the political process. Currently, we’ve raised over $450K with six more months of fundraising to go. If we raise over $1 million, then we will spend over $1 million.
Name three key endorsements secured thus far in the campaign?
Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, Senator Caroline Menjivar
Why should the city attorney be directly elected versus appointed by the Mayor with the advice and consent of the City Council? What charter reforms do you endorse?
The Los Angeles City Attorney’s Office is unique in that it is a dual-function office. It represents the City in municipal matters – defending the City in lawsuits against it and giving legal advice and counsel to the Mayor, City Council, or city departments. The Office also represents the People, both with jurisdiction over misdemeanor offenses, and also the critical power to protect consumers, workers, and tenants from corporate bad actors under California’s Unfair Competition Law.
This incumbent’s tenure has shown that there needs to be reforms to hold the City Attorney more accountable, to prevent activity like outsized spending on private law firms despite limits from the City Council and lack of transparency.
Reforms to increase accountability could take many forms, from stricter oversight to changing the structure of the position itself. I believe that the best ideas for reform and accountability, however, should be developed in consultation with input from the people of Los Angeles, and the public servants in the City Attorney’s Office, who have experience and knowledge of the unique legal and ethical obligations of this Office.
What experience do you have in municipal law, public-sector work, or managing a large legal office?
I have spent my entire career representing local and state governments, taking on cases to protect the most vulnerable people in our city and state. At the LA City Attorney’s Office, I built large-scale wage-theft cases on behalf of workers, putting thousands of hard-earned dollars back in their pockets. I went on to represent the County of Los Angeles as outside counsel in over a dozen legal actions against the first Trump Administration. Now, at the California Department of Justice, I work on litigation to protect the rights of renters and consumers, including the lawsuit by 30 state attorneys general against tech giant Meta to hold them accountable for making social media platforms that harm our youth. My career has been dedicated to realizing the power of public law offices to serve the People.
How have you previously handled complex litigation, public accountability cases, or high-stakes negotiations?
Every case I’ve ever worked on – from investigating major landlords to suing Trump — has been high stakes. People’s livelihoods and dignity are on the line for everyone; and the cases I have taken often have implications for large populations. The most complex litigation I have ever been a part of is the current lawsuit against Meta, where 30 state attorneys general are suing Meta, alleging their social media platforms, Facebook and Instagram, are designed for compulsive use, and seeking accountability for the mental health harms that these platforms have caused youth. This is one of the most massive consumer protection lawsuits against one of the world’s richest companies, raising completely new questions of law that courts have never addressed. It will have ramifications for generations of children, and it is at the forefront of defining how government law offices can use litigation to hold power to account and protect the people.
What is your philosophy on misdemeanor prosecution in Los Angeles, and how would you balance accountability with alternatives to prosecution?
For me, what matters most is pursuing the strategies that actually make our communities safer – one key goal is reducing recidivism, or the rate of reoffending. When we structure a public safety approach that breaks cycles of criminalization, we are preventing crime and making everyone safer. Here’s how the City Attorney fits in: The City Attorney’s Office has jurisdiction to prosecute the City’s misdemeanor charges, which are more minor criminal charges. The majority of misdemeanor charges are nonviolent and victimless. According to a report from 2019, some of the top misdemeanor charges were public intoxication, vehicle and driving-related offenses, and trespass. Yet when the response to nonviolent misdemeanors is incarceration, people’s lives are disrupted and they are saddled with a lifetime criminal record that can block them from housing, employment, and government benefits; this can lead to subsequent offenses.
This cycle of criminalization can only be broken by addressing the root causes. Across the country, many city attorneys and district attorneys have been using diversion as an alternative to incarceration. Diversion is a tailored, court-supervised program that connects people with the services they need to address the root cause of the misdemeanor offense. Most often, these services are health services, including behavioral health treatment, addiction support, and counseling. Data has shown that when nonviolent misdemeanors are defaulted to diversion, rather than incarceration, people are dramatically less likely to reoffend. Under previous administrations, the City Attorney’s Office had been building new pilot programs so that diversion could become another tool in the toolbox, but we’ve seen a return to more of a one-size-fits-all approach in this administration. My philosophy is more nuanced: develop tools like diversion that are shown to work, collaborate with communities to develop sustainable, neighborhood-centered solutions, and work to break cycles of criminalization by addressing root causes of misdemeanors so that we make everyone in our communities safer.
How would you work with LAPD, the City Council, and the Mayor while maintaining the independence of the City Attorney’s Office?
The role of the City Attorney is to collaborate closely with the City Council, the Mayor, and City Departments to advise them and ensure the City is in compliance with the law. While matters in service of the People – misdemeanors and public interest litigation – are independent, the City Attorney should be trying to cooperate with partners at the city on municipal matters, not substitute her own political judgment to thwart them, like the current City Attorney so often has. For example, when the City Council instructed the City Attorney not to exceed $900,000 over a two-year engagement with law firm Gibson Dunn, the City Attorney should not have signed off on spending $3.9 million in one month.
How would you handle quality-of-life offenses (e.g., vandalism, illegal dumping) in a way that is both fair and effective?
Every situation will be different, but my general philosophy is a nuanced and preventative approach to misdemeanors, seeking first to address root causes and pursue solutions that actually make communities safer. A popular program during a prior City Attorney’s term employed this preventative approach: deputy city attorneys were placed in neighborhoods across LA to provide a link to the City Attorney’s Office and ensure community stakeholders were a part of building solutions. In my time with that City Attorney, I saw how the attorneys who worked with schools would tour every LAUSD campus with principals and teachers, identify the safety risks to the schools, and prioritize services and solutions – for instance, when vandalism rose at a school because all of the lights were out, they’d help expedite the process on the city side to get that fixed. I want to create a Neighborhood Advocates Program that builds on this model, staffed not just by deputy city attorneys, but investigators and paralegals, who can help build relationships and community-based solutions to safety concerns, including quality-of-life offenses.
Homelessness, Housing, and Social Issues:
What role do you believe the City Attorney should play in addressing homelessness-related legal issues? What is your position on illegally parked RV's and unpaid traffic tickets by campers?
The City Attorney should be supporting the City in fulfilling its obligations under state law to increase housing supply. The current City Attorney is instead obstructing – one prominent example is her blocking of the Venice Dell project, a project, twice approved by the City Council after more than a dozen community meetings, that would have provided 120 all-affordable units, along with green space and increased parking on a city-owned lot in Venice. The City Attorney’s interference with the project has prevented the City from receiving a $42 million state grant and led to lawsuits costing taxpayers over $1 million — money that could have been used to build even more housing, rather than prevent it. It is not the role of the City Attorney to insert personal political judgment and obstruct the City from progressing toward legally mandated housing goals. For the thousands of Angelenos experiencing homelessness, our goal should be problem-solving to create sustainable solutions. Prosecuting someone for a ticket they cannot pay, including RVs, does not help someone on their path to permanent housing; it actively derails that progress. Instead, we would look at every case with the goal of connecting people with the services or programs they need so that we are addressing the underlying issue to help the individual and make everyone in our communities safer.
How would you approach enforcement of housing, tenant, and landlord laws—such as habitability, evictions, and rent stabilization?
I would establish a housing justice unit that would protect tenants’ rights and hold abusive landlords accountable. In the three years since the LA City Council passed the Tenant Anti-Harassment Ordinance, 13,000 complaints from renters have been filed, but only four citations were issued. Without a City Attorney vigorously enforcing these laws, they are only rights on paper. At the Attorney General’s Office, I am on the tenants’ rights team, investigating and suing landlords across the state for illegally raising rent, perpetuating uninhabitable conditions in units, and discriminating, harassing, and retaliating against tenants. Our team is unique among government law offices – winning recognition from the Attorney General himself – but it shouldn’t be the exception. The City Attorney has the duty and authority to enforce LA’s strong renter protections and is choosing not to. This is a larger issue, as tenants who are pushed out of housing often fall into homelessness, further aggravating our crisis. By holding bad landlords accountable, we will keep tenants housed and disrupt the eviction-to-homelessness pipeline.
How would you reduce the city’s financial exposure to lawsuits, settlements, and judgments?
Last year, Los Angeles faced a $1 billion budget shortfall – nearly one-third driven by liability payouts overseen by the City Attorney. While liability costs are inevitable in a city of this size, the scale of these payouts is not. Past City Attorneys exceeded the litigation budget by $9–$38 million. Since taking office in 2023, Hydee Feldstein Soto exceeded it by $100 million in her first year, $200 million the next, and nearly $250 million this year – contributing directly to layoffs and furlough threats across City departments.
The number of cases resolved each year has remained roughly the same, meaning costs are rising because cases are being handled far more expensively. Two choices drive this spike. First, the City Attorney has dramatically expanded outsourcing to costly law firms, whose billing incentives reward prolonged litigation. Second, the City Attorney has rejected reasonable settlements and pushed cases to trial, resulting in “nuclear verdicts,” like five cases that could have settled for $10 million but that the City Attorney forced to a $40 million verdict.
As City Attorney, I would manage liability responsibly: reducing dependence on outside counsel, reinvesting in deputy city attorneys who resolve cases at a fraction of the cost, adopting proven risk-management practices to avoid runaway verdicts, and investing in compliance to prevent lawsuits before they start.
What reforms would you bring to how Los Angeles handles police-related and civil-rights litigation?
The best way that the City Attorney can represent the City is to ensure every department, including LAPD, complies with federal, state, and local laws, particularly those protecting civil rights. Part of the job is advising city departments on how to follow the law, not help them skirt the law at the expense of taxpayers. Recently, for example, the current City Attorney sought to lift a court order preventing LAPD from using non-lethal weapons against journalists the day before major protests against the Trump Administration had been planned across the city. This had been a recurring issue – the City had been sued for LAPD’s use of non-lethal weapons in 2000, 2007, and again in 2020 leading to a court order still in effect and a new state law passed in 2022.
Instead of advising LAPD on how to come into compliance with that state law and the court orders, the City Attorney tried to fight them (unsuccessfully) and exposed the City to more legal risk because LAPD has not changed its practices. As City Attorney, I would focus on compliance, which would make everyone safer and reduce exposure to lawsuits, so taxpayers aren’t footing the bill.
Is the City Attorney's office understaffed or underfunded and if so, how and why?
Like many city departments, the City Attorney’s Office could benefit from greater funding and investment, but the mismanagement of the City Attorney has aggravated rather than alleviated this situation. The City Attorney has increased spending on outside counsel by over 450% – billing at rates up to $1925/hour – rather than investing in staffing up the Office, which is a far more cost-effective way to build capacity over the long term. Further, the City Attorney’s retaliation against and surveillance of employees has caused many long-term public servants to leave the Office, causing high vacancy rates as of the Office’s last report. My priority would be restoring a culture of respect at the City Attorney’s Office and investing in building a strong workforce to serve the city, not outsourcing to pricey private law firms.
(Nick Antonicello is a thirty-three-year resident of the neighborhood of Venice and covers the politics of the Westside. He can be reached via e-mail at [email protected])
