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By Brian Hews
Publisher | Follow X
December 12, 2025
Compton Mayor Emma Sharif is already on the front page this week for a separate developing controversy. But her role in another major governance failure is equally damning: as chair of the California Cities for Self-Reliance Joint Powers Authority [CCSR], Sharif directly presided over — and failed to stop — the transformation of a public agency into a private operation controlled entirely by Central Basin District 4 Director Juan Garza.
Part One of LCCN’s series, High Stakes, Dirty Water, Red Flags, revealed that Garza ran CCSR through his private consulting company, Six Heron. Public solicitations for bids listed his personal email, personal cellphone, and personal Bellflower P.O. Box as the JPA’s official address — a setup that would be unthinkable in any properly functioning government agency.
Graza calls himself a “seasoned public servant with years of experience on public boards,” yet he consolidated communications anyway.
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But Garza insists Sharif knew. Garza told LCCN, “All of these contact points have been publicly disclosed in JPA agenda reports as the official channels for agency correspondence.”
If that statement is true, then Sharif knowingly allowed a publicly funded JPA to be operated entirely out of a director’s private business.
If it is false, she failed to notice it — a level of negligence that borders on abandonment of duty.
Either way, the responsibility is hers alone. She was the chair.
Under Sharif’s leadership, the JPA had no office, no public phone line, no government email system, no administrative staff, no independent audit, and no public records infrastructure. No transparency system of any kind.
Sharif did nothing to correct this.
Instead, she presided over a structure in which Garza personally received, controlled, and evaluated public-agency bids using his private email and P.O. Box — a procurement collapse that never should have been possible under even minimal oversight.
Public Records Act compliance also vanished under her watch. The JPA is legally required to maintain a PRA contact and records officer. Under Sharif, the agency had neither. All correspondence — including PRA-related communication — flowed through Garza’s private Six Heron pipeline, a blatant violation of transparency norms.
Sharif’s failures did not stop at transparency.
She also permitted Garza to serve as the JPA’s public spokesperson, speaking at rallies, political events, and legislative hearings — again with no record of authorization or oversight. Under her leadership, the JPA functioned more like a personal advocacy vehicle than a public agency responsible for protecting the financial stability of cities dependent on card-room revenue.
The consequences were not abstract.
The cities depending on the JPA — including Compton — rely on card-room revenue to fund police, fire, parks, and core services. Allowing the JPA to operate informally, privately, and without controls exposed every one of those cities to unnecessary risk.
Sharif was the only person in a position to stop it.
She didn’t.
Garza built a private pipeline. Sharif allowed it to function.
A public agency became a one-man shop because the chair failed to perform the most basic obligations of oversight.
Questions into Sharif went unanswered.
High Stakes, Dirty Water, Red Flags is a continuing LCCN series exposing how Central Basin Director Juan Garza, a politically connected lobbying JPA, and the elected official charged with oversight became entangled in a system with no transparency, no controls, and no accountability. The series also reveals how Garza’s dual roles — running the JPA while serving as a water director and MWD delegate — place him squarely in the territory of incompatible public offices, raising serious questions about whether he can legally continue to hold either post.
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