Methods and corrections

Data sources

• Agendas, staff reports and approved minutes (Pico Rivera Speaks public meeting records) for contract decisions and roll calls.
• Official city pages (council bios, press releases) and LA County Registrar-Recorder election results.
• Campaign disclosure filings (Form 460 and Form 497) posted by the City Clerk on the city website and its Laserfiche public portal, read in full by OCR (see Campaign money); FPPC decisions and reports.
• LA County District Attorney releases and news coverage for legal matters; no court records were retrieved.
• Warrant registers (check payments) from agenda packets.
• Council meeting videos on YouTube, transcribed by automatic speech recognition (99 meetings). Transcripts may contain errors.
• News: local and regional outlets; editorials and AI-generated meeting summaries are labeled.

307 sources are recorded. By type:

Evidence labels

documented

Shown directly in a primary or official record (approved minutes, official filing, agency document), or reported by a news outlet as fact.

inferred

A reasonable link that the documents do not state outright: for example a video timestamp matched to a consent-calendar roll call, a secondary or AI-generated summary, or a circumstantial tie.

unverified

Self-reported, read by OCR without checking the page image, taken from a business-data aggregator, an allegation, or otherwise not yet confirmed.

Connections between council members and vendors or donors are described as a documented connection, not evidence of impropriety. The site does not publish home addresses or private family details.

Meeting pages: summaries, comments and transcripts

Each meeting page has three tabs: Summary, Public comments and Transcript. Timestamps, item boundaries and summaries come from an automatic (speech-to-text) transcript of the city’s YouTube recording. Times may be off by a few seconds, the transcript has no speaker identification, and names and numbers may be misheard. Item boundaries were found where the chair calls each agenda item, checked against the posted agenda.

Written item-by-item summaries are prepared by hand for recent meetings only. They use the video, the agenda and, when available, the minutes; each page says whether the minutes are pending, in draft or approved. Where something could not be made out, the page says so. Speaker names are given as on the record (minutes or the chair’s call); home addresses are removed from the transcript. Votes described as heard on video are not the official record; the approved minutes are.

Meetings with a written summary: 2026-10-27, 2026-10-13, 2026-09-22, 2026-09-08, 2026-07-28, 2026-07-14, 2026-06-23, 2026-06-09, 2026-05-26, 2026-05-12, 2026-05-05, 2026-04-28, 2026-04-14, 2026-04-07, 2026-03-24, 2026-03-10, 2026-02-24, 2026-02-19, 2026-02-10, 2026-01-27, 2026-01-13.

Open gaps

• 10 contract decisions where the approved minutes were not located (agenda only).
• 11 contract records labeled unverified overall (including items awaiting a vote).
• Several campaign statements were never posted by the city (listed on the Campaign money page); 2009-2018 election vote counts not found.
• All campaign filings are scanned paper forms read by OCR; rows not confirmed by a page subtotal are labeled unverified. See the gaps list on the Campaign money page.
• Business-ownership details for most vendors come from aggregators of California Secretary of State data, not the SOS record itself.
• Video links for most contract votes are inferred (consent-calendar roll calls); transcripts are auto-generated and speakers are not identified.
• Court records for the 2020 criminal case were not retrieved; the reported 2023 dismissal rests on one secondary source.
• Two KTLA articles could not be fetched directly (date of one not confirmed); two SGV Tribune items are aggregator excerpts.
• Video review: Actum, LLC consent item 8 (Jun 10, 2025): Lara and Sánchez recusals (Not covered by the recording).
• Video review: Smith Park Aquatic Center award / Swinerton (Feb 19, 2026): inconsistent minutes (Unresolved by video).

Request a correction

If something here is wrong or missing, please send the page link, what should change, and a public source.

Email a correction request

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Languages

The site is published in English (default) and Mexican Spanish (es-MX) at /es/. The Spanish version was translated by hand from the English text and reviewed for meaning; nothing was machine-translated. Official records are not translated: agenda titles, staff recommendations, motions, article headlines, meeting transcripts and quotes are shown as written or spoken, in their original language. Each Spanish page links to the matching English page.

Update log

• Oct 31, 2026: added the Campaign money section: every Form 460 and Form 497 filing for the five members posted by the city (2016 to 2026), read in full, with per-member totals by year, top donors, spending by category, a searchable list of all transactions, and donors or payees who also do business with the city.
• Oct 30, 2026: added the Oct 27, 2026 council meeting video and transcript; outcomes for the Oct 27 agenda items from the video (approved minutes still pending); new vendor LCR Earthwork & Engineering; the FY 2026-27 Chamber of Commerce MOU; a corrected Syserco Phase 1 amount ($5,989,324); a video finding on the Changting County sister-city item; and four city news items.

Build

Last built October 31, 2026 from the database as of October 31, 2026. Static files only: no server, no login, no cookies, no third-party scripts or trackers (the graph library is served from this site).