Sacramento is protecting the fraud, not stopping it

May 27, 2026

OPINION by RON CUFF

A 23-year-old independent journalist named Nick Shirley did what California’s legislature wouldn’t. He investigated. He dug into public records. And he exposed billions of dollars in government fraud.

Sacramento’s response? Assemblywoman Mia Bonta authored AB 2624, a bill that would shield the organizations Shirley investigated from exactly the kind of citizen scrutiny that caught them stealing. Critics have taken to calling it the “Stop Nick Shirley Act.” It’s hard to argue with the name.

When legislators stop ignoring fraud and start protecting it, the question of whose interests they actually serve answers itself.

That’s the story nobody’s talking about in this election cycle, but it’s the one that explains all the others.

Take your property tax bill. California homeowners pay annual taxes on the assessed value of their homes. We don’t tax food. We don’t tax medical care. Those are essentials, and taxing them would be recognized immediately as immoral.

But we tax the roof over your head every single year, and the “homeowners exemption” meant to offset that burden exempts exactly $7,000 of assessed value. That figure hasn’t been updated to reflect reality, and the median California home is now worth roughly 100 times that amount. The exemption is a fiction, and the legislature knows it.

To add insult to injury, school districts are able to get around Proposition 13 by saddling property owners with millions of bond indebtedness. The Paso Robles Joint Unified School District just voted to try for another 200 million dollars of debt, plus interest. They did this in spite of overwhelming public comment against it.

Then there’s the question nobody on the ballot wants to answer: how is it not a conflict of interest for public employee unions to endorse, campaign for, and donate money to the very officials who control their pay and working conditions?

SEIU and the California Teachers Association don’t just participate in California politics. They shape it. The officials they help elect sit across the table from them in contract negotiations. In any other context, we’d call that a rigged game.

These aren’t abstract policy debates. They show up in your tax bill, your kids’ classrooms, and the price of every home in San Luis Obispo County.

So what do you do with this in November?

Vote, obviously. But voting is the floor, not the ceiling. The offices closest to home, school board, city council, county supervisor, carry more direct impact on daily life than most people realize, and they’re the ones where a single engaged citizen can still move the needle.

If you know a sharp person under 60 who should be running for one of those seats and isn’t, that’s worth a conversation. So far, the roster of candidates this cycle is not inspiring. The solution to that problem starts locally, and it starts now.

Ron Cuff is a Templeton resident. He served 28 years in the U.S. Navy as a carrier pilot, flight instructor, commanding officer, and test pilot at the Pt. Mugu Pacific Missile Test Center testing and evaluating Harpoon and Tomahawk missiles. He has dedicated 15 years to preventing drug and alcohol addiction through the Safe Launch initiative that he co-founded in 2010.