Traci Park wants you to think she is an environmental champion. Her latest “#Better11 Legislative Update” video, filmed against the backdrop of a Dodgers victory, opens with talk of “moral clarity” and “protecting our sacred coastline.” She thunders against the idea of offshore oil drilling, promising that “Los Angeles will never allow drilling off our shores, not now, not ever.”
What she does not say is that Park has taken tens of thousands of dollars from the oil and gas industry, including $89,000 linked to Chevron, one of the largest fossil fuel polluters in California and a company that has spent years fighting environmental protections. Her donor list also includes executives and lobbyists from SoCal Gas and Marathon Petroleum, the very industry she claims to be standing up to.
Now Park is trying to use this one easy position, opposing Trump’s offshore drilling plan, to make herself look like an anti Trump moderate when in reality she is one of the most MAGA aligned politicians in Los Angeles. Her donor base includes Trump supporters, Republican PACs, and far right real estate interests, and her record mirrors the former president’s agenda: criminalizing homelessness, opposing affordable housing near wealthy neighborhoods, and pushing a “law and order” vision that pours money into LAPD while gutting social programs.
In the video, Park tries to greenwash her record by invoking 1960s oil spills and quoting former Councilmember Marvin Braude, the environmentalist who led the fight for Measure O. But Braude’s legacy was public ownership and climate responsibility. Park’s is corporate contributions and political opportunism. The difference is that Braude fought the industry while Park cashes its checks and uses the photo op to pretend she is fighting Trump.
She wraps her anti drilling stance inside the same “protection” narrative she uses to justify anti housing policies and aggressive police expansion. When she says she is “fighting for the public good,” it is the same rhetoric she uses to defend sweeps of unhoused residents and to oppose SB 79, the state’s new law to build affordable homes near transit. Even her environmentalism is framed through control and exclusion, deciding who belongs on the coast, who gets to live near it, and who gets to speak for it.
It is no coincidence that her so called “coastal protection” agenda lines up perfectly with the interests of her donors: real estate developers, fossil fuel companies, and right wing power brokers who want to keep the Westside frozen in time. Park’s video might play like a postcard from the beach, but it is paid for by the same corporate and MAGA money driving her political machine.
