DA investigating Central Basin water district after complaints by board members

The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office is investigating Central Basin Municipal Water District and has ordered the agency to turn over recordings and meeting minutes from a four-year period in which the district was led by controversial General Manager Alex Rojas, according to a letter sent to the district.

The new probe, led by the same prosecutors who charged Rojas with allegedly taking bribes while the superintendent at Bassett Unified School District, suggests the District Attorney’s Office is now looking into recent allegations that Rojas improperly boosted his compensation and gave Central Basin contracts to an employee of his co-defendant in the Bassett case.

Board members have been calling for the District Attorney’s Office to investigate Rojas’ actions as general manager for months.

“I’m glad to see they’re finally looking at all of these things,” said board member Leticia Vasquez-Wilson, whose civil lawsuit against the district led to the discovery of the contracts in question. “Mr. Rojas did not act alone. There are Central Basin employees and directors who colluded with him on all of this conduct.”

Community members, in both Central Basin and Bassett, deserve justice, Vasquez-Wilson said.

Vasquez-Wilson and two board colleagues, Martha Camacho-Rodriguez and Juan Garza, have each contacted the District Attorney’s Office in recent months in light of two scathing reports from an accounting firm hired by Central Basin to review Rojas’ activity as general manager.

The new letter from the District Attorney’s Office is encouraging, Garza said.

“It gives me a tremendous amount of hope that after so many years of acrimony and questionable activities at Central Basin, that the involvement of law enforcement officials now will lead to the agency — sometime soon — being able to move past these activities and move forward with serving the public and serving our customers with integrity,” Garza said.

Multiple district employees have been interviewed by county investigators since July, according to sources familiar with the investigation. Those interviews have included questions about Central Basin’s contracts with Capstone Partners Group, a company run by an employee of Luis Rojas, the co-defendant of Alex Rojas in the Bassett case and the owner of the Del Terra Group.

Prosecutors originally charged Alex Rojas and Luis Rojas, who are not related, in August 2022 on 18 counts, including money laundering, bribery, perjury and embezzlement. The District Attorney’s Office alleges Alex Rojas received more than $400,000 in bribes from Luis Rojas’ sister while serving as superintendent of Bassett Unified. During that time, the superintendent signed off on at least $1 million in payments to Del Terra for work that allegedly never occurred, prosecutors said.

Both men have denied the allegations. The case is still pending and has not progressed past the initial arraignment.

Central Basin, a water wholesaler that serves 1.6 million people from 24 cities and unincorporated areas in Southeast Los Angeles County, hired Alex Rojas as its general manager in 2020. The water board originally opted to allow him to stay on as general manager, despite the allegations of financial impropriety, for two years after the charges became public. He was placed on leave in February 2024, pending the outcome of two third-party investigations.

Those reviews, which concluded in June and October, found that Rojas sidestepped internal controls, including while evaluating and overseeing a construction management contract that went to Capstone in 2020, not long after Rojas took the helm. The certified public accountants at Carr, Riggs & Ingram determined Capstone should have been disqualified from the selection process for an incomplete application and that a last-minute extension benefited only Capstone and no other applicants.

Capstone was formed by Manuel Jaramillo, who would later testify in a deposition in Vasquez-Wilson’s case that he worked for Del Terra and used Del Terra employees to complete Capstone’s work for Central Basin, just three days before before the extended deadline.

Capstone went on to make just shy of $800,000 for managing roughly $7.7 million worth of projects for Central Basin. The company resigned from its contracts the same month that Rojas was charged.

Rojas has denied having any knowledge about Capstone’s ties to Del Terra. CRI’s report found that two of Capstone’s employees had worked for Del Terra in Bassett at the same time as Rojas and that Jaramillo used his Del Terra email address in at least two conversations that included Rojas. At least 100 emails involving Capstone were reportedly deleted from Rojas’ account, according to CRI’s report.

In early October, CRI released its second report, which more broadly reviewed Central Basin’s finances during Rojas’ tenure. That investigation found that lax oversight led to the misspending of at least $123,000, including more than $75,000 in extra pay and benefits that went to Rojas specifically. The general manager’s salary increased by 40% to nearly $280,000 in less than three years as a result.

Both reports were sent to the District Attorney’s Office when they were completed. Rojas has denied any wrongdoing.

In an email, his attorney, Craig Missakian, said he was not aware of the district attorney’s new probe and did not provide any further comment.