Small Town, Big Money: How a hotel union came to control West Hollywood

Originally published in two parts on Oct. 23 and 24, 2024, in the Westside Current. Republished with permission.

West Hollywood — less than two square miles, with a population of about 35,000 — was founded 40 years ago by a coalition of seniors, gay people and Russian emigres who embraced a culture of tolerance and dedication to the rights and safety of marginalized groups. Since then, WeHo has seen its share of political drama, primarily due to real estate developers eager to empty and redevelop apartment buildings in a rapidly gentrifying city with an aging housing stock and strict rent control. But according to longtime observers of the town’s political landscape, what’s occurring now is on another level.

Since 2020, UNITE HERE Local 11, a hotel union, has flooded the campaign coffers of its preferred West Hollywood City council candidates and launched aggressive negative campaigns against those who would dare to oppose (even question) their agenda.

Over the past four years, the union’s chosen candidates have constituted a three-person majority of the five-person City Council. This has resulted in the rubber stamping of an expanding list of their desired motions. Indeed, the union’s website devotes an entire page to their legislative achievements in West Hollywood.

In this year’s election, the union is trying to maintain that majority with massive donations to two candidates, one the current mayor (a position which rotates among council members) and one a political newbie.

West Hollywood has 11 hotels within its borders, two of which are unionized. 22% of the financially thriving city’s revenue is derived from the hotel transient occupancy tax. In 2020, UNITE HERE was instrumental in electing Current Mayor John Erickson and newcomer Sepi Shyne to the board, and, together with then-Mayor Lindsay Horvath, the three proved reliable allies in passing whatever legislation the union favored. Shyne announced that she would not run for reelection this year, and Mayor Erickson is up for reelection. UNITE HERE 11 is backing him and Danny Hang.

Steve Martin is a former WeHo city council member who told the Current that in 2018, he was allied with UNITE HERE Local 11 in their shared opposition to a large development on Sunset Boulevard. He also agreed with the union on a citywide minimum wage increase and guaranteed leave provisions implemented in 2021; at $19.08 per hour, WeHo now has the highest minimum wage in the country. But over time, his opinion of the Union soured, as they increasingly and aggressively pushed measures that “went far beyond labor relations.”

In 2022, on the advice of her appointed Public Safety Commissioner, 27-year-old Nika Soon-Shiong (the daughter of billionaire LA Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong) Horvath brought forward a motion to slash the number of sheriff’s officers patrolling the streets of West Hollywood. “I had a parting of the ways with UNITE HERE over defunding the police,” Martin said.

“UNITE HERE said that they supported candidates who were for defunding because one of their members had a son who police had shot, and therefore, they felt the only way to deal with all law enforcement was to do radical defunding.” Martin is a neighborhood watch captain.

In 2021, WeHo’s crime rate had nearly doubled. Nevertheless, at a contentious, six-hour-long council meeting in April 2022, Horvath characterized anyone criticizing Soon-Shiong’s proposal as “rooted in racism and othering” before voting to approve the measure, along with Erickson and Shyne. A month later, the LA Times endorsed Horvath for County Supervisor (as did UNITE HERE), and in November, she was elected.

Martin told the Current that UNITE HERE’s increased input into West Hollywood politics coincided with a 2020 change in the timing of the city’s elections from March to November, which resulted in a much larger turnout. In March 2019, just 4574 out of 28,302 registered voters in WeHo voted.

By comparison, in November 2020, more than 20,000 votes were cast. As Martin pointed out, “In the old days, for $5,000 you could send mailers to everybody who was going to vote in a municipal election — the high propensity voters –, but now you need to spend closer to $20,000 to hit the 25,000 that are voting… And the new voters tend to be, in all due respect, low-information voters. They’re people who often weren’t following local issues because they’re busy.”

In the current election, UNITE HERE 11’s various PACS have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars — more than double the amount raised by all the other candidates combined — on behalf of Erickson and Hang.

In August 2021, the city adopted a hotel ordinance authored by UNITE HERE Local 11. The measure focused on hotel worker benefits, including requiring that room attendants not have to clean “4000 square feet of floor space in any eight hour work day, unless the hotel employer pays the room attendant twice the room attendant’s regular rate of pay”. Hotels are also required to provide their employees “personal security devices” and, unless there is an emergency, never require their workers to work more than a 10-hour day without first providing the worker with seven days’ written notice.

At the end of the ordinance, there is a significant exception: “The provisions of the following sections, or any part thereof, may be waived pursuant to a bona fide collective bargaining agreement.” In other words, the ordinance would enter into the city’s municipal code an incentive for hotels to organize their workers in order to avoid complying with the ordinance’s onerous requirements.

Lauren Meister, who is now and was then a city council member, told the Current, “UNITE HERE had approached me about bringing forward this ordinance, but I told them that I would not. Our hotels were suffering economically due to the COVID shutdown. They said they would bring it to one of my colleagues. I assume they provided the specifics. The model they used was the same as they used in other cities (like Santa Monica). To my knowledge, there was also no attempt to work with the city’s hotels.” In 2022 UNITE HERE formed a PAC to oppose Meister’s reelection, even though they had backed her 2020 campaign.

Should the massive project by Silver Creek development at 8850 Sunset Boulevard get built, it would add another unionized hotel to WeHo, since UNITE HERE has entered into an agreement with the developer. Hence, the union has aggressively pushed this nearly one-acre project between Larabee and San Vicente, which includes 17 affordable units out of a total of 84 residences. 8850 (aka “The Viper Room project”) is by no means a universally popular development; the contentious April 18 hearing before WeHo’s Planning Commission ran until 3:30am before the project was approved, 3-1. On August 26, 2024 the project was heard by the full city council.

One speaker, a city employee tasked with assessing the project’s public benefits, commented that, based on publicly available data on what the developers had paid for the project, it would be financially infeasible without the revenue from a massive billboard on its northwest face.

“So in other words, it’s the city’s responsibility to make the land more valuable, or approve the billboard, because the applicant overpaid?” asked Meister, to the applause of the project’s detractors. Speaking on behalf of Silver Creek was their attorney, from the firm Latham and Watkins. In the end, the project was predictably approved with yes votes from Erickson, Shyne and Chelsea Byers, who had replaced Horvath after her run for Supervisor.

Most of the candidates (except for Erickson) that UNITE HERE has backed have scant political experience and only recently arrived in WeHo. Danny Hang is a county employee with a master’s degree in social work and gerontology. He grew up in the San Gabriel Valley, and in March 2021, before he moved to West Hollywood, he was appointed by Lindsay Horvath to WeHo’s Disability Advisory Board.

In July 2022, Sepi Shyne appointed him to the business license committee – his only political experience. Shyne, who was first elected to the council in 2020, was also a political newcomer. She has a law degree, but her primary career focus before becoming a councilperson was as a reiki master and “energy healer”, serving both humans and pets.

Chelsea Byers’ meteoric rise in WeHo government was perhaps the most astonishing. She arrived in the city just months before her election, and her prior political experience was working for an organization promoting the abolition of the State of Israel and financing student protests on college campuses. Despite outcry from a number of Jewish organizations, she was elected to the council in 2022. Her partner, Austin Cyr, is Lindsay Horvath’s Deputy Director of Community Affairs.

UNITE HERE is closely aligned with StreetsForAll, the Bicycle Advocacy Group featured in the Current’s previous reporting on their proposal to demolish the Marina Freeway and replace it with a bike path, parks and apartments.

In conjunction with them, the union is actively pushing a proposal to dedicate a lane of traffic on Fountain Avenue, between La Cienega and LaBrea, exclusively to bicycles. Because Fountain provides both scarce parking spaces (which would be eliminated), and is a vital traffic artery, especially during rush hour, the motion has proved contentious.

In his candidate questionnaire for StreetsForAll, Danny Hang said that he has already decided to support the proposal and would favor protected bike lanes on Santa Monica, Robertson Boulevard and Beverly Blvd.

Hang and Erickson have also publicly expressed support for a minimum wage for all West Hollywood businesses as high as $40 per hour.

In 2022, 34-year-old Zekiah Wright (who is nonbinary and goes by they/them pronouns) was one of UNITE HERE’s preferred candidates for WeHo’s city council. A Florida native who moved to West Hollywood in 2017 and opened their own firm specializing in Labor and Employment Law, Wright was introduced to Sepi Shyne and representatives of UNITE HERE by their partner, Jackie Steele, a West Hollywood Public Safety Commissioner.

In June 2022, Shyne appointed Wright to the city’s west rent stabilization committee. In that year’s November election, Wright lost to long-time city council member John Heilman with just 13 votes.

According to two sources with knowledge of the matter, Wright’s relationship with UNITE HERE and Shyne went south shortly thereafter.

As Wright worked on the high-profile rent stabilization committee, they were increasingly at odds with Shyne over Shyne’s relentless requests for Wright to publicly support motions backed by UNITE HERE, some of which Wright disagreed with.

In February 2023, Wright was approached by Shyne and Erickson, who demanded that Wright not run for office in 2024. When Wright wouldn’t make that commitment, Shyne removed them from the rent stabilization committee, citing an unacceptable number of absences. Complicating matters was Wright’s recent breakup with Steele, who was honored by Shyne and the city council upon her departure from the public safety committee in July 2023 – the first appointed city official to be so recognized.

On June 5, 2022, Wright announced, “Yesterday, my campaign social media accounts, the Instagram and Facebook were targeted, hacked and deleted. And so, we lost all of those followers that we’ve gained and earned last time around.” In between May and August, Wright vacillated between running and not running, and finally decided to do so in early August. The West Hollywood Chamber of Commerce promptly endorsed them.

At 9:30am on September 12, Wright was detained on felony charges of falsification of documents. According to exclusive reporting in WeHonline, Mayor Erickson had opened an investigation into Wright that Spring upon discovering that his name and the address for City Hall were listed on corporate documents belonging to a company Steele owned. On September 13, Wright’s attorney issued a statement pointing out that the errors had been corrected as soon as they were made aware of them and the changes were made at Steele’s behest and instruction. They also pointed out that Steele was the only other person with access to Wright’s social media and campaign website passwords.

Once again, Wright has vowed to continue running for office, and the West Hollywood Chamber of Commerce has re-upped their support for both Wright and fellow candidate George Nickle, stating they “represent a new way forward for West Hollywood.” On September 16, at a hearing determining whether to accept a grant to install the bike lanes on Fountain, Wright was among an impassioned majority speaking against the project. According to WeHonline, Wright “expressed frustration over what they perceived as the predetermined outcome of the vote. Wright criticized the lack of community involvement in the planning process and pointed out that many of [their] neighbors were unaware of the project. While supportive of bike lanes in general, they argued that the current proposal is flawed.” The motion passed, 3-2, with yes votes from Erickson, Byers and Shyne.

Wright’s fellow candidate George Nickle spoke out against the bike lane proposal at the meeting as well. “I do agree that outside special interests, UNITE HERE Local 11 especially, have had control of our City for 4 years now because they endorsed and spent heavily to get the current majority elected and they are again spending a small fortune to get their chosen candidates, John Erickson and Danny Hang, elected,” he told the Current. “The decisions that the current majority (Byers, Erickson, Shyne) make are often what those interests want and not what we, the residents, want and need. And those decisions are around serious issues like our public safety, the strength of our local businesses, the safety of our streets, and development. So yes, residents know something is wrong. They feel it. And they are right because decisions are being made to benefit these outside interests and not them.”

“I’m living in an occupied country,” Steve Martin told the Current. “My voice doesn’t matter, and my voice has been excluded. Elections are something of a farce, and the public processes are totally skewed, as if we were in some sort of fascist state. And Unite Here does not care about democracy. Unite Here cares about power. And any group that is willing to undermine democracy, the way they have in West Hollywood, is not progressive.”

Angela McGregor covers Venice and beyond for the Westside Current.