The Legislative Analyst’s Office is out with a smashing revelation: the spendthrift state legislature and Gov. Gavin Newsom have run up massive deficits that will force the next governor – Democrat, Republican or whatever billionaire Tom Steyer is today – to cut spending dramatically.
Even when it was painfully clear that “the state could not afford to sustain its existing services,” the LAO reports, state lawmakers and the governor added a “suite of expansions and new programs under the same tax revenue structure. Addressing these deficits will likely require at least some—if not significant—spending reductions. In short, in the years ahead, policymakers will have difficult decisions to make.”
That sort of recklessness ought to be headline news, the first question in every campaign debate, the alarm that would send candidates running toward cameras to explain in detail how they’ll identify the perps and manage the state out of this catastrophe.
But among those perps, state Sen. Tom Umberg, D-Orange County, has decided the most pressing public issue is hundreds of miles south of Sacramento. On March 24, he rallied his Democratic allies in the state capitol to demand an audit of the Orange County Board of Education.
Umberg has been pressed into this fight by the local teacher unions that back his perennial campaigns for public office. California’s teacher unions aren’t accustomed to losing elections, but they’ve completely lost control of the Orange County Board of Education, the state’s third-largest county board. In just five election cycles, the Orange County board slipped the grip of teachers unions and is now a 5-0 board of average citizens laser-focused on student achievement and parent rights.
In a commentary in this very paper, Umberg predicts the state auditor will find that “the board has engaged in a pattern of costly, often unsuccessful litigation at taxpayer expense.”
In fact, a truly rigorous audit will discover something quite different.
To understand the fight, you have to grasp the weird architecture of the role of California’s 58 counties in local government. County departments of education are meant to oversee the various school districts in their jurisdiction. But they do that inside an unwieldy power-sharing arrangement that pits an elected superintendent against separately elected trustees who sit on each county’s board of education. Because both are elected and neither is superior to the other, the only resolution of potential conflicts is at the ballot box or in the courts.
In Orange County, beginning in 2018, Orange former Orange County Department of Education Superintendent Al Mijares – like Umberg, a teacher union supporter – was suddenly confronted by a board that did not share Mijares’s Umbergian affection for teacher unions.
Mijares did not accept the normal power-sharing arrangement. A rigorous state audit will show that he spent hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars – in payments to a Democrat law firm and consultant, and in district staff time – in a failed attempt to undermine the board and to centralize power in his own office.
Umberg either does not know this history – or knows it but hopes that you don’t. In calling for the audit, he identified four legal cases as supposed evidence of the board’s “costly” spending. In fact, these cases provide all the evidence you need for the case against Mijares and his allies in the California Teachers Association.
Umberg begins his prosecution of the case in 2018. That, he says, is when “the board sued its own County Superintendent [Mijares] over control of legal counsel, a dispute that dragged on for years and ultimately resulted in approximately $3 million in taxpayer-funded legal costs.”
Blaming the board for suing Mijares is like blaming a crime victim for fighting back. None of the $3 million spent by both sides would have been necessary if Mijares hadn’t attempted to keep the board from selecting its own legal counsel – including in its disputes with Mijares over the proper roles of a county superintendent and the board of education. Mijares could have capitulated to the plain language of California law and common sense. Instead, he spent the taxpayers’ money pursuing a case he ultimately lost – a fact that Umberg weirdly fails to mention.
If the board’s suit was frivolous, as Umberg claims, California Judge James Crandall seems not to have gotten the memo. In tentatively finding against Mijares at trial – and therefore against Umberg – Judge Crandall said, “It appears to me that the board was right in picking their own counsel because … they have a right to a lawyer they can trust.”
Mijares quickly settled on terms very favorable to the board.
A year later, Umberg continues, the board “went back to court, filing a writ of mandate against the County Superintendent [Mijares] and State Superintendent [Tony Thurmond] over authority to alter and approve the county education budget before submission to the state, a case it would ultimately lose in 2022.”
“Ultimately”? In fact, the board appealed that 2022 decision. Two years later, in 2024, the California Court of Appeal sided with the board, reversing the 2022 court order that Umberg celebrates as its conclusion. Despite that decision, Mijares fought on, spending more of the taxpayer money that Umberg claims is the central concern of his request for a state audit. In March 2025, Mijares’ replacement, Stefan Bean, settled the dispute. The board had won its statutory right to participate in department budgeting.
Knowing none of this apparently, Umberg continues like a man stepping on a hundred lawn rakes in his own back yard. “In 2022, the pattern escalated further,” he writes. “The board sued the Orange County Committee on School District Organization and the Orange County Registrar of Voters over who had authority to draw election maps, a case that was ultimately dismissed after prolonged litigation.”
Here as elsewhere, Umberg does not reveal the context. Unable to beat the board of education at the voting booth or in court, Mijares hoped to redraw the boundaries of the districts from which the board’s five trustees are elected by making them friendlier to union-backed candidates.
His goal was entirely partisan. Orange County Department of Education records show that Mijares deployed three staff attorneys to fight his case in court. When that wasn’t enough, he also paid Redistricting Partners $37,500 to redraw the district electoral maps; that firm, which accepts only Democratic Party-aligned clients, recently made headlines as the architect of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s Proposition 50 campaign to eliminate congressional Republican representation. When the board sued to block the map, Mijares paid Olson Remcho – a law firm that represents government unions, Democratic Party officials and their allies – $264,415 to defend it.
We have these records involving Mijares’s partisan spending only because the board filed another lawsuit – one that Umberg weirdly cites as his fourth example of the board’s questionable spending.
That story began when the board simply asked Mijares for documents associated with his spending – documents that would, in any normal American government, be available not merely to the board that is statutorily required to oversee the department but also to journalists and citizens.
But for some reason – perhaps fearing that those documents would reveal his partisan campaign to undermine the board of education – Mijares stubbornly refused. The board of trustees turned to the state’s Public Records Act to shake them loose. When the department still refused to produce the spending documents, the board sued to force compliance with state law. Only then did the board get the Olson Remcho and Redistricting Partners invoices.
Umberg’s audit will cost taxpayers at least $840,000. But it has already given Umberg’s allies in the California Teachers Association the thing they really want: a headline. Election Day is just weeks away, on June 2. Though the audit will take many months beyond that, the CTA now has a headline for direct-mail and video advertising that create the false impression of wrongdoing at the Orange County Board of Education.
This might have been Umberg’s last attempt to serve the unions that have bankrolled his multiple successful campaigns for state legislature. Term-limited out of the capitol, he’s moved on to a race for the state board of equalization. That agency sits like Iran on the Strait of Hormuz – at a choke point of tax policy and the public revenue that is the lifeblood of government payrolls and programs. In that race – and in return for his good service – he has won endorsements from multiple government unions, including the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), California Teachers Association, California Labor Federation (the coordinating organization for most of California’s unions), and the California School Employees Association.
Will Swaim is CEO of the California Policy Center and cohost of National Review’s Radio Free California podcast.