for the next year. He attributed his ouster to retaliation for ending a lucrative maintenance contract with one of Perez’s companies and for his attempts to publicly challenge the family’s invoices to the city.
Depending on who you ask, Perez was either a puppet master, pulling the strings of the city’s leadership for decades, or simply a well-respected businessman and politician committed to seeing Industry — and his companies symbiotically tied to it — flourish. Perez was investigated by the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office on multiple occasions for potential conflicts of interest and cleared each time, but allegations around his power in Industry persisted until his death in 2020.
Hill and Perez’s friendship dated back to the 1980s, when Hill was a legislator for the area. In 1991, Hill authored a law that exempted Industry from state affordable housing requirements in exchange for the city paying into a county-run fund that would build such housing elsewhere. The law kept Industry’s housing stock low and prevented an influx of new voters.
Hill found work as a consultant in Industry after his release. Perez later even personally arranged for Hill to receive a separate consulting gig with the Industry Manufacturers’ Council, the city’s de facto chamber of commerce, that paid Hill more than its own executive director, according to public records and interviews.
How could it possibly have happened