Here’s something nobody’s mentioned yet.
John Erickson, the West Hollywood City Councilmember currently running for State Senate, was born in Oshkosh and raised in Ripon, Wisconsin. He’s said so many times. He once wrote a blog called “From Wisconsin, with Love.” He still has family there.
Helen Krieger, the newest candidate for West Hollywood City Council, was also born in Wisconsin. Her family is still rooted there. Her sister lives in Hartford, about 80 miles from Erickson’s hometown. Both were born in the early 1980s. Both ended up in the same 1.9-square-mile city 2,000 miles from where they grew up.
Two people from the same small state. Same generation. Same city council. Maybe that’s just a coincidence. Maybe it isn’t. We have questions. We’ll get to them.
But first, a different question: Who is Helen Krieger?
Eleven Years of Nothing
Krieger moved to West Hollywood around 2014. She’s a television writer with credits on Black-ish and Grown-ish. By all accounts, she’s lived here for over a decade.
In that decade, she never attended a city council meeting. Never submitted a public comment. Never appeared in a single WeHo news article. Never served on a committee. Never volunteered for a city program. Never donated to a political campaign — not in West Hollywood, not in California, not anywhere in the country. Not a dollar. Not once. Federal records: zero. State records: zero. Local records: zero.
Search her name on the city’s official website. Nothing. Search the council minutes archive. Nothing. Search WEHOonline. One result — a written comment about bike lanes from April 2025, after she was already on the commission. Search WeHo Times. Nothing before 2026.
Eleven years in West Hollywood. Not a single trace of public life.
Then Everything at Once
On March 1, 2025, Councilmember Chelsea Byers appointed Krieger to the Transportation and Mobility Commission. It was a direct appointment. In West Hollywood, each councilmember places one person on each commission. Byers picked Krieger. There was no public application process for Krieger to go through. She was hand-selected.
Of Byers’ 16 commission appointments that cycle, 13 were reappointments of people already serving. Only three were new. Krieger was one of them, and the only new appointee placed on a policy commission relevant to a council run.
Within months of receiving that appointment, Krieger announced her candidacy for City Council. She is now positioned as part of the anticipated UNITE HERE Local 11 slate alongside Byers and Mark R. Edwards. If all three win, UNITE HERE controls all five votes on the council.
The sequence: eleven years of nothing, then a commission seat, then a council campaign. No organic entry point. No community groundswell. No record of caring about city government until someone handed her a title.
The Appointment
It’s worth understanding how this works. The commission appointment is not civic service in the traditional sense. It’s a patronage mechanism. Each councilmember gets one pick per commission. No interview panel. No public vetting. The appointee serves at the pleasure of the councilmember who placed them.
For candidates running for council, the appointment does two things: it puts “Commissioner” on the ballot next to your name, and it gives you a credential you didn’t earn through public engagement. It’s a shortcut.
Byers used it. She took someone with no public history, placed her on a commission, and created a candidate. Erickson used the same mechanism in the same cycle. He appointed Jordan David Slack to the same Transportation Commission where Krieger now sits. Slack was tagged in Krieger’s campaign launch event at Javista Coffee.
The pipelines are connected. The networks overlap. The appointments serve the slate.
The Questions
We said at the top that we’d come back to the Wisconsin thing. Here’s where we are.
We don’t know what town Helen Krieger grew up in. We don’t know where she went to high school. She doesn’t talk about it on her campaign site. What we know is that she’s from Wisconsin, Erickson is from Wisconsin, and her family is rooted about 80 miles from where he grew up.
Did they know each other before West Hollywood? We don’t know. We’d like to.
But the Wisconsin question is the smaller one. The bigger questions are these:
How does someone live in West Hollywood for eleven years without a single documented act of civic participation and then get appointed to a city commission?
Who identified Helen Krieger as a candidate? Was it Byers? Was it UNITE HERE? Was it someone else in the network?
Why would a councilmember use her direct appointment power to place a politically blank individual on a commission, rather than selecting from residents who had actually shown up?
And why should voters trust that someone who showed zero interest in city government for over a decade suddenly wants to serve?
These are real questions. We’d be happy to hear real answers.
If Councilmember Erickson or candidate Krieger would like to clarify the nature of their connection — when they met, who introduced whom to West Hollywood politics, and how a decade of civic silence became a city council campaign — we welcome their response.
