The latest six-month review of the distribution of City of Anaheim free stadium and venue tickets by the Voice of OC shows that between mid-May to early November city officials gave away $480,000 worth of tickets.
While nearly a third of those tickets went to nonprofits and local schools, the rest went to city staff, council members, city vendors and to individual volunteers without any explanation on what volunteer work they did.
In this latest tally, city officials also gave out tickets to family members, elected officials from other cities and officials from the local Chamber of Commerce – which is at the center of the city hall corruption scandal.
City Hall is still reeling from Orange County’s largest corruption scandal in recent history, with the FBI and city-hired independent investigators finding that Disneyland resort interests, lobbyists and political insiders exert undue influence at city hall.
Voice of OC published an investigative series in June that found Anaheim loosely tracks who gets free tickets to concerts, hockey and baseball games at the city owned Honda Center, Angel Stadium and convention center.
That free ticket review covering six months found most of the tickets were heading to city staff and a mixture of the city council’s friends and political allies, with the lionshare of tickets going nowhere near the nonprofits the system was set up to benefit.
[Read: Anaheim’s Ticket to Ride: City Leaders Hand Out Thousands of Free Tickets Every Year]
Right after the series, Anaheim officials defended the perk but said they would implement a system so the public could better track who is getting tickets – as opposed to relying on reporters to pour through PDFs of ticket disclosures by hand that are posted by city officials.
That system has yet to be implemented.
Officials say that will take them until next year to roll out.
About a month after the series, city-hired investigators from the JL Group also found that city officials failed to oversee where hundreds of free tickets go each year and there is no penalty for anyone who breaks Anaheim’s ticket policy.
“We believe this is an area that requires greater regulation and scrutiny,” investigators wrote. “The policy has been somewhat compromised by certain public officials potentially not adhering to the enumerated justifications for behesting tickets.”
[Read: Investigators Find Anaheim Failed to Oversee Free Tickets For Over a Decade]
After that report, city council members insisted they were sending most of their tickets to nonprofits.
“I’m not buying people by the tickets,” said Councilwoman Natalie Rubalcava at the council’s Sept. 26 meeting. “Most of the tickets that I distribute, despite what you read in some publications, are going to nonprofits.”
According to Rubalcava’s own disclosures, only around one in three of her tickets went to nonprofit organizations over the past six months.
Christmas All Year Round For Vendors & City Staff
While city council members have the power to give out tickets, they weren’t the ones who handed out the most tickets in the past six months.
That would be Tom Morton, the city’s executive director of the Convention, Sports and Entertainment department.
Morton greenlit nearly $75,000 in free tickets May to November.
For comparison, the city manager and every other department head combined approved only $78,000 worth of free tickets.
Morton’s disclosures show that most of those tickets went to his own department, where staff were treated to a variety of free Angels and Ducks games – along with free tickets to half a dozen conventions.
One convention, the video game event Blizzcon, saw Morton give out $8,000 worth of tickets to city staff.
City spokesman Mike Lyster said Morton’s “frequent,” use of tickets was “simply with the natural flow of events in our city,” in a statement to Voice of OC.
“With baseball season over and a smaller amount of tickets for Anaheim Ducks and Honda Center events, there are fewer tickets overall to be distributed,” Lyster said. “Convention center events have been the most common.”
More than half the tickets Morton gave away were for Angels and Ducks games.
Morton also gave away nearly $15,000 worth of free tickets to Aramark, the city’s contractor for food service at the convention center, giving them free access to events at the convention center and several Angels games.
Separately, over $100,000 went to various city employees, some winning ticket raffles held by the city for employees while others were directly donated to city staff by either managers or city council members.
Berenice Ballinas, Mayor Ashleigh Aitken’s chief of staff, received over $4,600 worth of tickets for events such as Angels Games, a Gwen Stefani concert and Jurassic Park Live.
Aitken’s father, Wylie Aitken, chairs the Voice of OC’s Board of Directors.
Wylie Aitken also received $410 worth of free tickets from Ashleigh Aitken this year, and was credited for his “volunteer work.”
City Manager Jim Vanderpool’s office received over $23,000 worth of free tickets, most of which went to Angels and Ducks games along with one Bert Kreischer comedy show.
Who is Getting Free Tickets?
City officials have given staff over $164,000 worth of tickets in the last six months, which accounted for 34% of the tickets given out – the most any other group has received in the same time period.
Elected officials and staff also dished out $151,000 worth of tickets to nonprofits, over $102,000 to volunteers and and more than $22,000 for their own personal use.
In total, nonprofits and schools represented just over 30% of the total tickets given away.
Rubalcava gave herself the most tickets out of any other city council member.
She utilized close to $7,000 worth of tickets for her own personal use in the last six months.
She was also the council member who gave herself the most tickets between Dec. 2022 and mid-May.
About 35% of Rubalcava’s tickets went to nonprofits and about 32% went to volunteers, with most of the remaining tickets being split between city staff and her own personal use.
But many of the tickets cited as going to “volunteers,” didn’t end up in the hands of volunteers across multiple council members’ disclosures.
City Councilmembers Norma Campos-Kurtz and Jose Diaz, along with City Manager Jim Vanderpool, all gave tickets to Linda Newby, a former member of the Chamber of Commerce’s Anaheim First nonprofit that city-hired investigators said may have been used as a political data-mining operation.
Read: Was an Anaheim City Hall-Funded Nonprofit Used as a Political Data Mining Operation?
The combined worth of the tickets was over $2,000, all citing her volunteer work in the city.
Councilwoman Natalie Meeks gave 16 tickets to her daughter-in-law citing the volunteer label.
Mayor Aitken also cited the “volunteer,” exemption when giving tickets to her father Wylie Aitken.
Overall, Mayor Aitken gave just over 30% of her tickets to staff and another 24% apiece to nonprofits and volunteers. Around 9% of her tickets were for her own personal use.
Meeks gave 45% of her tickets to nonprofits and another 36% to volunteers, with the remaining tickets largely going to volunteers and a few city staffers.
City Councilman Jose Diaz gave 42% of his tickets to nonprofits and 30% to volunteers, with most of the remaining tickets going to city staff or to himself.
Diaz also gave over $100 worth of Gwen Stefani concert tickets to Matt Cunningham for doing business on behalf of the city. Cunningham is a pro-Disneyland resort blogger and husband of Anaheim Chamber of Commerce CEO Laura Cunningham.
Out of the entire city council, Councilwoman Norma Campos-Kurtz gave the most to nonprofits – 62% of her tickets distributed.
City Councilman Carlos Leon gave 47% of his tickets to nonprofits and 33% to staff, with most of the remainder going to volunteers.
City Councilman Stephen Faessel gave 41% of his tickets to his nonprofits and 40% went to volunteers in the past six months, with most of the remainder going to city staff and a one time gift of over $1,400 in tickets to the City of Cypress.
Will Ticket Disclosures be Easier to Navigate?
In a June interview after the ticket series was published, Mayor Ashleigh Aitken said city staff internally are looking at making the ticket disclosures easier for residents to navigate and search.
“I have asked the CM’s (city manager’s) office to look into how we can make information regarding our ticket disclosures more accessible to the public,” she wrote in a follow up text message to the Voice of OC earlier this year.
“The current system-while it exceeds FPPC requirements-could be more navigable.”
At the end of July, city-hired independent investigators called out the Anaheim ticket policy in a 353-page corruption report and suggested the city limit how many tickets city leaders get an ethics officer to oversee ticket disbursement.
They also suggested the city make it easier for residents to find out who is getting the tickets.
In response, Mayor Aitken and Councilwoman Rubalcava called for a public discussion on the city’s ticket disclosure policy among several other reform proposals to be hammered out this past fall.
In September, the city council unanimously directed staff to create a searchable database for the ticket disclosures.
The new ticket database is expected to roll out in early 2024, according to city spokesman Mike Lyster.
Currently, residents still have to download PDF documents to see who their elected officials are handing out free tickets to for sports games and concerts at city owned venues.
Noah Biesiada is a Voice of OC reporter and corps member with Report for America, a GroundTruth initiative. Contact him at nbiesiada@voiceofoc.org or on Twitter @NBiesiada.
Hosam Elattar is a Voice of OC reporter and corps member with Report for America, a GroundTruth initiative. Contact him at helattar@voiceofoc.org or on Twitter @ElattarHosam.
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