A former Republican. Two decades defending employers against their workers, cities against civil rights claims, police departments against accountability. A campaign built on $1.2 million from landlords, police unions, and MAGA donors in 2022. Now, heading into 2026, the same forces are back with even more money. This is the record that explains everything.
Traci Park’s public persona is built on omission. Ask her office and you’ll hear about a pragmatic neighborhood advocate, a public safety moderate, a local representative looking out for the Westside. But trace her actual biography, the firms she worked for, the clients she defended, the votes she cast, the donors who funded her rise, and a far sharper picture emerges.
She is a former Republican who spent two decades defending employers against their workers, shielding police departments from civil rights accountability, and minimizing corporate liability. When she finally ran for office, her campaign was powered by real estate empires, right-wing financiers, and the LAPD union. The politics she practices in Council District 11 are not a departure from that history. They are its logical conclusion.
Raised in a union household. Built a career against unions.
Park was born in Downey in the mid-1970s and raised in Southern California. Her father was a U.S. Army veteran who worked in telecommunications as a member of the Communications Workers of America. Her mother was a public-school secretary who participated in organized labor activity among classified school employees. Park grew up in a home shaped by collective bargaining, public-sector work, and the protections unions provide.
That is not the biography she emphasizes in office. The reason why becomes obvious when you take a look at her legal career.
After graduating from Johns Hopkins University in 1997 and Loyola Law School in 2001, Park went to work at Littler Mendelson, one of the country’s most prominent management-side labor and employment firms. Her work involved representing employers in discrimination, retaliation, and wage-and-hour disputes. While there, she co-authored guidance warning employers that California’s paid family leave law could produce absenteeism, productivity losses, litigation risk, and new union-organizing pressure.
Paid family leave is the kind of policy working families depend on when a child is born or a loved one gets sick. Park’s legal work framed it through the eyes of employers worried about disruption, exposure, and labor organizing. It’s clear from Park’s anti-labor voting record that her legal practice deeply influenced her worldview.
Park then moved to Ogletree Deakins, another management-side firm, before joining Burke, Williams and Sorensen, where she became a partner. Her practice focused on labor relations, employment defense, and defending cities, police departments, and corporate employers against claims brought by workers and residents.
This was not occasional legal work, but the core of a two-decade career. Park defended municipalities in cases involving allegations of racial harassment, retaliation, whistleblower claims, disability discrimination, wrongful termination, and excessive force. Her clients included the cities of Anaheim, Pasadena, Oxnard, Hemet, and Alhambra, as well as corporations like Raytheon and Federal Express.
Workers sued. Residents filed civil rights claims. Employees alleged discrimination, retaliation, harassment, and abuse. Traci Park always represented the institutions working to defeat those claims.
And in office, she has aligned herself with the same forces. VICA, one of Southern California’s most powerful anti-labor lobbying groups, known for opposing living wage laws, paid sick leave, and pandemic hero pay for grocery workers, is a vocal Park backer. Its president has praised her “law and order” agenda while attacking unions and tenant protections. The LA Chamber of Commerce, which has fought living wage laws, rent control, and the mansion tax, is another financial ally. So is the California Restaurant Association, a corporate lobby that spent millions trying to overturn the FAST Recovery Act raising wages for fast-food workers. Park took their money and touted their support on her campaign website.
The workers she left behind
When hotel and airport workers pushed for a $30 minimum wage ahead of the 2028 Olympics, workers who keep the city’s entire tourism economy running, Park did not ask what it would take to lift them out of poverty wages. She warned the increase would cost jobs and sided with hotel industry arguments, while union workers filed out of Council chambers chanting “We’ll be back.” One airline catering worker, Nelly Hernandez, told reporters she earned $20 an hour and was hoping for the raise to save for retirement and send money home to her sister in El Salvador. Park tabled the discussion.
Notably, the hospitality workers’ union Unite Here has since put more than $220,000 behind Park’s challenger Faizah Malik in the 2026 race. The workers Park abandoned in those Council chambers are now funding the campaign to replace her.
The Olympics connection gets worse. Park also put forward a motion that would have granted Olympics-related construction projects a blanket exemption from city planning approval, zoning regulations, and environmental review. It was a sweeping giveaway to developers, met with overwhelming opposition from residents and neighborhood councils, and ultimately rejected.
The landlord who funded her. The tenants she abandoned.
The Barrington Plaza story is the clearest illustration of how Park’s donor relationships translate into governing decisions, and who pays the price.
Douglas Emmett Inc. is a real estate investment trust that controls approximately 4,500 West Los Angeles apartments. Over a nine-year span, two fires at its Barrington Plaza complex in Sawtelle left one resident dead. When former Councilmember Bonin demanded the company install fire sprinklers without evicting tenants, Douglas Emmett refused, invoking the Ellis Act to displace residents while privately admitting plans to re-rent the units later.
After Bonin opposed the plan, Douglas Emmett poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into electing Traci Park.
Once in office, Park’s response to the ongoing tenant crisis was a single vague motion asking for a report on the status of the Ellis Act process. She never challenged the legality of the evictions. Tenants described harassment, intimidation, and fear as they faced forced displacement, at the hands of the same landlord that had bankrolled Park’s rise to power.
The pattern repeated itself in February 2025. As the Palisades fires devastated CD11, Park rushed through more than 20 emergency motions in response. She singled out exactly one to oppose: a temporary eviction moratorium for tenants who had lost income because their homes or jobs had been destroyed. She argued the measure would “cause serious harm to rental housing providers,” language that mirrored what landlord lobbyists were saying as they celebrated her vote. Even as fire victims faced homelessness, Park voted to protect property owners.
$1.2 million in 2022. And the money keeps coming.
Park’s 2022 campaign raised approximately $580,000 through the runoff period, more than double progressive challenger Erin Darling’s $228,000. But the full picture of what backed her was far larger.
Douglas Emmett funneled $566,000 to Park through a police union PAC, the same landlord whose tenant had died in a fire and whose evictions Park later refused to challenge. The Los Angeles Police Protective League ran an independent expenditure committee, “Residents for Safer and Cleaner Neighborhoods Supporting Traci Park for City Council 2022,” that spent over $500,000 on her behalf. Kilroy Realty, a major developer and top funder of the recall effort against Governor Newsom, contributed $330,000. The California Apartment Association added $265,000. Billionaire Jerry Greenberg put in $128,500 and subsequently secured direct access for development-related meetings. Fifteen members of the Nagel family of Decron Properties, including executives, spouses, and grandchildren, donated the legal maximum on a single day, funneling over $12,700 in one coordinated wave. Chevron dumpted $89,000 into her campaign. In total, Park accepted millions of dollars from corporate landlords, developers, police, and their lobbying arms.
Now, heading into 2026, the same machinery is running again and at greater scale. Park has already raised about $1.4 million through contributions and matching funds, the most money of any council candidate in the city. Her challenger Malik, a housing justice attorney at Public Counsel who is also the lead attorney in a Venice Dell fair housing lawsuit against Park, has raised about $632,000. But the most striking number is the outside spending. About $972,000 has already been spent in support of Park by outside groups, including $634,000 from the Los Angeles Police Protective League alone. That is more than the police union spent on her entire first campaign, and the June primary has not yet happened.
The New Majority PAC, California’s largest Republican political action committee and a group whose website recently featured far-right House Speaker Mike Johnson, backed her 2022 campaign despite its explicitly partisan GOP focus. That network remains intact.
Republican who ran as a Democrat
Voter records show Park was registered as a Republican into her 30s. She changed her registration before running for City Council as a Democrat, but failed to earn the endorsement of the LA County Democratic Party or a single Democratic club. When she claimed to have organized for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, Obama field coordinators publicly disputed the claim.
Her campaign advisor was Bill Simon, a Republican gubernatorial candidate and longtime trustee of the Heritage Foundation, one of America’s most powerful right-wing think tanks. She worked on the Recall Bonin campaign alongside dark-money Utah Republican Mike McCauley. She was a vocal supporter of disgraced former LA County Sheriff Alex Villanueva, appearing at his campaign rally. When Trump visited LA following the fires, rather than push back on his administration’s failures, she welcomed him.
In office, her politics look less like Westside liberalism than rebranded conservatism. She has opposed sanctuary protections, backed punitive homelessness policies, resisted tenant protections, and leaned into public safety messaging that fits neatly with right-wing narratives about crime and disorder.
The throughline
Traci Park’s public story asks voters to see her as a reasonable neighborhood advocate, a pragmatic centrist who gets things done for the Westside. Her actual biography tells a different story. She has spent her adult life defending the powerful from the people beneath them, and she has governed exactly that way.
That is why she sided with business interests against low-wage tourism workers. Why she defended a landlord’s right to evict fire victims. Why a tenant died at a building whose owner later bankrolled her campaign, and why her response in office was a motion asking for a report. Why her donor list reads as a directory of Southern California’s most aggressive real estate interests, Republican financiers, and corporate lobbying arms.
She arrived at City Hall backed by a network of donors connected to federal corruption investigations, coordinated campaign finance violations she chose to pay off rather than contest, and $1.2 million in landlord and developer money. Now she is asking for a second term, and the same forces that bought her first one are already spending nearly a million dollars to secure it.
