Southern California: City Corruption in Maywood

For those who have lived in Los Angeles county for a few years, I'm sure you remember the situation at the city of Bell and the political scandals that occurred there. The LA Times reported on the scandal starting in 2010. One part of the story was that Maywood outsourced municipal services to Bell. Now I don't think that is necessarily a bad thing to do. Economies of scale should work when you're talking about such small cities. The problem, of course, was that it wasn't all above board. Now over a decade later the story continues with a focus on Maywood. The Los Angeles Times (Feb 4) reports:

Los Angeles County prosecutors announced bribery and corruption charges Thursday against Maywood’s former mayor and a slew of ex-city officials and vendors after a years-long probe into allegations that city leaders engaged in pay-to-play practices, misused public funds and twisted the tiny city’s purse strings for their own benefit.

The article goes on to list these allegations. Using city funds to pay for construction work on private residencies. Using land that was set aside for affordable housing to build a bingo hall. The investigations into these alleged crimes started in 2018 and appear to focus on a time frame from 2016 - 2017. So the situation that occurred in the city of Bell were well known and yet they still thought they could get away with it?

Anyways, why do these small cities think they can get away with these illegal activities?

Many of the small cities tucked in the shadow of the 710 Freeway — including Bell, Vernon and Cudahy — have long been plagued by municipal corruption. Some say a lack of civic engagement, low voter participation and absence of local media outlets that might otherwise keep tabs on government officials have allowed government dysfunction to flourish.

My solution: these cities should be required to merge into larger cities. That would hopefully allow media to pay closer attention to what is going on as media wouldn't be stretched thin by covering so many local cities. Also, there would likely be significant improvements provided to the residents of these cities due to various economies of scale. With the advancement of technology since these cities were first set up, I am sure that there could be significant cost savings as well as better utilization of various city services. 

This wouldn't solve all corruption scandals, but would hopefully reduce the number of scandals. Los Angeles is a perfect example of a much larger city dealing with political scandal -- Los Angeles City Councilman Jose Huizar being example number one.