San Luis Obispo’s former chief building official filed a whistleblower lawsuit against the city on Friday. Michael Lowe’s suit describes a “sustained campaign to silence, punish, and ultimately force him out” after he refused to “participate in unlawful conduct.”
From March 2022 through June 19, 2025, as chief building official Lowe was responsible for enforcing state and local building codes, overseeing the building and safety division, managing fee-supported regulatory programs and enforcing building codes.
Lowe’s lawsuit alleges city administrators directed him to doctor financial records.
While California law only allows city’s to charge applicants the actual cost of permit processing and inspections, Lowe’s lawsuit describes city administrators knowingly overcharging through fees and then “diverting fee revenues.”
A 2024 fee study by an outside consultant recommended a 35% reduction in fee rates. That recommendation would have reduced building and safety fee revenues by approximately $1 million annually, according to the lawsuit.
At the direction of city administrators, Lowe developed an entirely new cost-justification methodology fees, one based not on actual historical expenditures, but on an estimate of what it “should” cost to operate at the level its services warranted.
The forward-looking cost model justified maintaining existing fee revenues rather than reducing them to comply with the consultant’s findings.
Another bone of contention was over the safety of a...
WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump resurrected long-debunked claims about fraud and foreign interference in the 2020 election, alleging in an address Thursday that China stole millions of voter...