By Katie Shapiro
As we face the task of electing leaders for the next four years, do we really want to return to the mean ethical and moral corruption that I witnessed from the public seats from 2021 to 2024: the slow kind, like water working into a beam for years before anyone hears the floor give.
During Anne Mallari’s tenure on city council, residents who asked for fair elections or demanded transparency were recast as enemies. While she was mayor, the city described Dr. Malini Nagpal and me as two residents who had merely “lent their names” to a Malibu law firm, and her news release called us “special interests from outside Cypress.”
I live in Cypress. When someone claiming to be a city employee sent me chilling threats in obscure texts and emails, I asked the council, Mallari among them, for help, and the silence from that dais was its own answer. Now her campaign promises to bring decorum and decency back to City Hall, as though someone else had carried them out the door.
Mallari joined the council in December 2020 and left it in 2024, having served a turn as mayor. Her tenure is easy to summarize because the record keeps itself. In June 2022 she voted to censure a fellow council member.
In September 2022 she voted to censure her again, over a talk she gave to students at Cypress High, and this time the majority suspended her pay. The censured council member sued in federal court in 2024 and named Mallari personally. Judge Otis Wright pruned the case but let the retaliation and breach of contract claims proceed. This spring the city settled to avoid obscenely expensive litigation. Cypress taxpayers paid lawyers to defend what Mallari and her allies did to a woman whose offense was dissent, and then paid again to make it go away.
In 2022 the council voted behind closed doors to refuse a demand that Cypress switch to district elections. I was one of two Cypress residents who signed that demand. Two years later the council settled the voting rights case for $835,000, and Mallari seconded the motion, acknowledging that no court would rule in the city’s favor. She had known the odds and resisted anyway, running up the city’s own legal bills before handing the Malibu law firm its settlement. This paper estimated the final cost to taxpayers could reach $2 million.
Every household in Cypress pays a monthly bill that carries Mallari’s mark. In November 2021 she joined a 4-1 majority that rewrote the city’s agreement with Valley Vista, its trash hauler.
The changes raised residential rates 32 percent, loosened the cap that had held annual increases to about three percent, and extended the contract to June 2037 without asking any other company to bid. By 2024 this paper reported that residential trash rates had climbed 67 percent since 2021. That same year Los Alamitos put its own trash service out to bid, and of the seven companies that competed, Valley Vista proposed the highest rates. Cypress never learned what competition might have saved its residents, because the majority, Mallari among them, never asked.
The ethics are a separate wound. For most of her time on the council, Mallari was the salaried CEO of the Boys & Girls Club of Greater Anaheim-Cypress, and the chairman of its board was Jon Peat, who sat beside her on the dais and championed every concession Valley Vista received. When the rate increase came back for a later vote, resident George Pardon asked them both to step aside, citing Valley Vista’s donations to the Club. Peat refused.
Mallari had already voted to set the contract amendment in motion; only then did she recuse herself, under protest, insisting that donations had no bearing on her opinion or her vote. The Fair Political Practices Commission reviewed Pardon’s complaint and found no illegal conflict of interest. A ruling like that only tells us what an official is permitted to do, and plenty of what the law permits is still wrong. Something can be legal for years and never once be ethical. Cypress residents will be paying for this one until 2037.
Cincinnatus left his plow to save Rome, gave the power back within sixteen days, and went home to finish the furrow. Washington stepped down after two terms, and when Roosevelt stayed for four, the country made the limit law. It is a little comical to hold these men up against a Cypress council member, but here we are. An office, like a field, needs rest before anything new can grow in it.
Mallari has never been able to leave the field, and the longer I watch, the stranger it looks. A council seat in Cypress pays a modest stipend and asks for long weeknights of staff reports and the steady scorn of people like me. Most who serve four hard years and step away are glad to hand the gavel to someone else and get their evenings back. She keeps circling the chamber the way some people circle a house they used to own, peering in at the new furniture, certain the place was better kept when the keys were hers.
In 2024 Mallari and two of her colleagues adopted a district map that cut residential streets in half and conveniently separated Mallari from her political ally Bonnie Peat. At the time, Mallari told the council she was no longer in a district.
That October a resident predicted in this paper that the map had been drawn so she could run in 2026 against David Burke, the council member who had questioned the old majority most persistently. This November she is on the District 1 ballot, running against Burke, as predicted, in a district system she spent two years and a great deal of public money trying to prevent.
Cypress is a city of fifty thousand people, many of them younger, many of them newer, many of them never once asked to serve, and every cycle the same few names arrive to fill the same few chairs. Every city has ambitious people, and Cypress would be poorer without them. The trouble starts when one of them comes to regard a seat as hers, and every newcomer as an interruption.
When Peter Grant resigned as city manager amid misconduct allegations, Mallari defended him, said he had been pushed out for political reasons, and lectured the new council on leadership.
I wrote about Grant in this paper in May 2025, after the city attorney cut former Public Works Director Doug Dancs off mid-sentence during a council meeting before Dancs could elaborate on “unlawful acts of misconduct” by Grant.
Only after Dancs came forward did residents learn that the city had agreed to pay him $183,000 while Mallari was in the council majority. After the Grant saga I called what Cypress had become a small geography of fear. I will admit that quoting Mallari’s lectures on leadership back to her gives me a pleasure that is not entirely civic.
I should say how I came to know all of this. I became a regular in those public seats during Mallari’s tenurebecause the meetings had grown impossible to look away from. Week after week the chamber filled with discord and a vindictiveness so petty it seemed to feed on itself, and week after week Cypress turned up in the regional news.
It was never good news. A quaint city, one of the best-kept secrets in a crowded county, became for a few years a cautionary tale, and neighbors learned to sort one another by which side of the dais they cheered.
When she left, I think a lot of folks collectively sighed with relief, and I am a little ashamed of how readily I let my own participation lapse once the danger seemed to pass. Wonderful things have happened in Cypress these past two years, and some less wonderful ones too. What is plainly true is that the city found its way back to its roots.
We have a police department under Chief Mark Lauderback that residents can count on, and schools that families move here for, from our elementary district to Oxford Academy, routinely ranked among the best public high schools in California.
The new majority, elected under the district system I had fought for, let any two members put a question before the public. Residents could see where the money went and why each member voted as they did. People who came to the podium were met with dignity and respect, and for the first time in years I trusted the people running my city.
I never could while residents were routinely vilified from the dais. The shame is in the relief itself. A resident should never feel unsafe in her own city hall, and how deeply I exhaled told me how far things had fallen.
I have no wish to drag Cypress back into those years, or to spend the next four refighting them. This city has moved forward, and it deserves to keep moving. Now the same names are back on the ballot, and the same weather is gathering. Cypress deserves better.
Mallari fought transparency behind closed doors, and left taxpayers to pay for an unwinnable voting rights case and for her own punitive actions against those who challenged her. On November 3 her name will be on the District 1 ballot, and I hope every voter in that district reads the record she left behind before deciding whether she deserves a turn. Again.
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