Top CA Republican vowed to cut waste, corruption. His spending says otherwise
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- Flora claimed more than $85,000 in per diem in 2024 and early 2025 despite doubts over his residency.
- Campaign records show Flora spent heavily on meals, drink, and travel outside his district.
- Court filings detail missed child-support payments and a $16,000 back payment order in 2023.
Heath Flora likes to get along and have a good time.
In his nine years in the California state Assembly, the Republican lawmaker has gained a reputation for being easy to work with, reasonable and down to earth.
He has Central Valley bona fides — the son of farmers, with an unpretentious background growing up in Modesto and attending junior college there. He spent several summers working for Cal Fire and directed sales for his family’s farm equipment business.
As an assemblymember, he rarely makes speeches on the floor, or posts on social media about Democratic dysfunction. Instead, he works behind the scenes to pass what few, moderate bills he can, and leans on relationships, including those built while in his former role as the Republican floor leader.
He seems to like the in-person collegiality of the political system: He raises his microphone to recognize Capitol staffers’ birthdays, gives hugs and fist bumps to people across the aisle, and when Democrats try to push through their agenda, he leads the protest with a noncommittal energy that belies a feeling that really, they’re all on the same team.
For years he’s been the righthand man to Republican Assembly Leader James Gallagher, R-Yuba City.
Now, he has the top job. Flora, 42, took the reins as the party’s Assembly leader earlier this month, saying he was looking forward to continuing Gallagher’s work.
But the affable everyman lawmaker brings some personal baggage to his new role that raises questions about how he will lead a party that touts family values and fiscal conservatism. As a back-bencher for the minority party, he’s quietly enjoyed the benefits of power that he railed against to get elected, and he has routinely ignored questions about his conduct. He also has benefited from a lack of transparency about where he lives and co-authored a recent bill that would throw more mud in the water when it comes to his residence.
Through interviews and public documents, a Sacramento Bee investigation found:
- Flora does not live in the Central Valley home that is registered as his “legal domicile.”
- Public documents show he collects taxpayer-funded per diem expenses during the legislative session despite apparently living full-time in Sacramento.
- Court records show he didn’t pay child support to his wife until a court-initiated wage garnishment.
- While married, he had an affair with a lobbyist, who detailed to The Bee for the first time how her life has changed in the aftermath.
- Expense records show he spent over $600,000 given to his political campaign by special interest groups, with a significant portion going to travel, lodging and meals.
While Flora’s actions do not appear to be illegal, the revelations make him an odd fit to lead a party that claims to represent family values and often bemoans Democrats’ lack of transparency.
A diminishing Central Valley footprint
Flora’s district is solidly red, coming up to the edges of Elk Grove to the north, Stockton to the west and Modesto to the south. It encompasses vast acres of grape and almond farmland to the east. Since the early 1930s, Flora’s family has farmed in the region.
For years, his home base was in Ripon, a conservative city of about 16,000 along Highway 99 with a one-street downtown.
After he and his ex-wife sold their Ripon home in 2022, Flora registered to vote at a Modesto property owned by his parents, the same address as their longtime farming equipment business, a little over 70 miles from the Capitol. A 2018 law clarified that where a lawmaker registers to vote is their “legal domicile.”
A recent visit to that property found the actual resident is a woman who identified herself as the wife of Flora’s nephew. The woman said she thought Flora lived in Sacramento.
Melodie Flora, Heath Flora’s ex-wife, confirmed her daughters stay with the lawmaker every other weekend — including when the legislature is not in session — at a home in Sacramento’s Arden neighborhood.
Flora collects per diem living expenses
Despite his proximity to the Capitol, public documents from the state Assembly show Flora collects “per diem,” a taxpayer-funded stipend for the food and lodging legislators use while away from home. The income is tax-free unless the lawmaker lives within 50 miles of the Capitol, a distinction determined by where they are registered to vote.
The Assembly’s expenditure records show Flora received $46,256 in stipends the first nine months of the 2025 legislative session, and $42,416 during the 2024 session. The money is on top of his regular salary of $142,656.
Several Sacramento-based lawmakers opted not to receive per diem in 2025. Assembly members Maggy Krell and Stephanie Nguyen and state Senators Angelique Ashby and Roger Niello, all of whom live in Sacramento County, forwent the roughly $47,000 in pretax funds they could have collected. Folsom-based Assemblymember Josh Hoover and West Sacramento state Sen. Christopher Cabaldon accepted that amount of per diem.
Flora did not respond to several emailed requests for comment about where he lives and why he collects per diem. When asked at the Capitol about his living situation, he said he had no comment and would not be responding to The Bee’s emails before walking away.
Most lawmakers have homes in their districts, but no law requires them to do so. They must have been a resident of their district for at least one year before running to represent the community.
That lawmakers would be able to live outside of their districts and still represent the people who live there is certainly not what the writers of the California Constitution had in mind, said Dan Schnur, a politics and communications professor at UC Berkeley and USC.
“The state Legislature has done everything it possibly can to give its members a loophole that allows them to avoid what seemed to be the original intent of the state Constitution,” Schnur said.
He also questioned why Flora would not respond to clarifying questions about his residency.
“When it appears that you may have violated campaign and election law, intentionally or unintentionally, it seems a pretty good idea to explain yourself.”
Flora co-authored Assembly Bill 1392, which would keep the addresses where lawmakers are registered to vote, already relatively privileged, even more guarded. Only people with a true governmental or journalistic purpose would be able to request a lawmaker’s address, and journalists who want to do so would need to submit an application, a letter of authorization, and a declaration under penalty of perjury to an elections office.
According to co-author Assemblymember LaShae Sharp-Collins, D-San Diego, the bill is intended to protect lawmakers in a climate of increased political violence. It passed both the state Senate and Assembly during a marathon last day of session this year, and is awaiting the governor’s signature.
Affair with a lobbyist and a divorce
Flora has been able to bypass questions about his behavior in the past.
In 2022, California Medical Association lobbyist Emily Hughes sent a series of tweets that caused a buzz in the Capitol, alleging she had an affair with the assemblyman.
News outlets, including the San Joaquin Valley Sun and The Bee wrote about the alleged affair. At the time, Flora said he would be releasing a statement – but it never materialized.
Hughes, who showed The Bee letters and photos to corroborate the two-year affair, said she’s still waiting for that statement.
In an interview, Hughes, 37, said she sent the tweets to extricate herself from her relationship with Flora.
She described a deteriorating relationship that was causing extensive stress, and necessitated her taking an action to end it in a way that she couldn’t “walk back.”
“It was a way of, like, stopping myself when I knew that I didn’t have the ability to,” she said of her social media posts.
In the years following, Hughes left California politics and started a second career as a mortician in Oregon. She said she loves the work and helping families find closure, but still thinks about her years at the Capitol. She says she feels she was blacklisted in the Capitol after she posted the tweets.
“I could have absolutely spent my entire career (lobbying),” she said. “It impacted my life so drastically and impacted his none at all.”
At the time of the affair, Flora was still with his longtime partner, Melodie Flora, whom he married when he was 24, and with whom he had two daughters.
In the years since, Hughes and Melodie Flora have become friends.
“I’m proud of Emily for bringing to light the moral integrity of (the) representative,” Melodie Flora wrote in a text.
$16,000 in past-due child support, healthcare expenses
Melodie Flora filed for divorce in the aftermath of the affair, and a year later, filed to receive child support from her former husband. Court documents show the two parties came to an agreement for Heath Flora to begin paying $2,000 per month in June 2023.
But two months later, her lawyer filed a request to the Assembly for Heath Flora’s income to be withheld from the state for lack of payment of child support.
A San Joaquin County superior court later ordered that, in addition to one-half of the proceeds from the sale of their shared house, Melodie Flora was to receive over $16,000 in past due payments for child support and uncovered healthcare expenses for the girls.
Melodie Flora declined to comment further.
Republican leadership didn’t have much to say about Heath Flora’s living situation, affair and past-due child-support payments.
Gallagher did not respond to a voice message, text message and an email request for comment. His communications director, George Andrews, deferred all questions to Flora’s staff, saying it was the first they’d seen of the information.
Longtime Republican Assemblymember Tom Lackey, R-Palmdale, said that during a transition in power, “personal attacks are inevitable.”
“I don’t think that they are relevant to the leadership task that he’s going to be faced with,” Lackey said. “They’re all irrelevant to leadership.”
Big spender of campaign cash
Former Gov Jerry Brown galvanized voters when he campaigned for the Political Reform Act of 1974. He said lobbyists should only be able to buy lawmakers “two hamburgers and a Coke,” instead of lavish dinners and gifts. That voters approved an overhaul to the law signaled a distaste for politics as usual following the Watergate scandal that ended Richard Nixon’s presidency.
In 2016, when Flora ran for office for the first time, he wrote on his website that he’d “cut waste and fight corruption.”
“I’m a firefighter, farmer and small business owner who is tired of watching slick politicians live high on the hog at our expense,” his website read for the next seven years.
Meanwhile, Flora was raking in big money from special interests, and spending it loosely, on far more than “two hamburgers and a Coke.”
Campaign finance records show that in 2024, Flora received $624,304 to his Flora for Assembly 2024 account and spent $606,213 of it.
That money came largely from corporations that have an interest in how California crafts regulations and legislation.
The 1974 law forbids companies and labor groups from contributing more than $5,900 at one time to candidate campaign accounts. Records show Uber, Walmart, Chevron and energy company Edison International are among the dozens that gave just under the limit to Flora’s account in 2024.
In 2024, of the more than 450 credit card charges of over $100 on his campaign expenditure report, the majority were for drinks and meals at various Sacramento restaurants and bars such as Chargins’ Bar & Grill, Karma Brew and Prelude Kitchen & Bar. Those charges were labeled as “district meetings” and often happened on weekends and during legislative recess – though the eateries aren’t in Flora’s district.
Statements show that on one Sunday in March 2024, for instance, Flora charged $260 to the account for a district meeting at the Crow’s Nest restaurant in Santa Cruz, $152 for a district meeting at Chargins’ in East Sacramento, $212 for staff meeting drinks at Karma Brew, and $129 for Ubers for district travel.
In September 2024, Flora flew himself and seven members of his staff to Las Vegas for a staff retreat, putting them all up at the Aria hotel for a night and renting a cabana. He charged the campaign account over $5,200 for the trip.
A month or so after, he spent about $1,630 on another staff retreat at the Wine and Roses hotel in Lodi.
In other instances, transactions had no explanation — neither a code to describe what they were for, nor a description of the payment.
Spending campaign funds ‘a gray area’
Schnur calls the spending of campaign funds “a massive gray area,” and said it is commonplace in current politics.
“As long as an elected official can proclaim some value to their job,” he said, of copious spending, “there’s not much to hold them down from enjoying the ancillary benefits themselves.”
In addition to large sums donated to campaign accounts, groups with a special interest in California policy can also provide gifts to lawmakers and fly them to conferences or to learn about policies of other countries.
Legally required statements of economic interests from elected officials, otherwise known as Form 700s, show that in 2023, Flora accepted over $24,000 worth of sponsored travel and $2,444 in gifts, including a $12,000 trip to Denmark, and multiple trips to Dana Point and Monterey. He was the second most-traveled legislator out of 120, according to CalMatters’ Digital Democracy database.
In 2024, he took trips worth $24,717 and accepted $4,000 worth of gifts.
By contrast, former Republican Leader Gallagher’s Form 700s show he accepted less than $2,000 worth of travel and gifts in each of those years.
Flora has previously come under scrutiny for his spending of lobbyists’ cash. A California Globe report from May 2024 showed the assembly member had accepted tens of thousands of dollars from pharmaceutical and correctional facilities’ interests into a ballot initiative committee “for safer communities,” and spent it almost exclusively on purported fundraisers at the Kentucky Derby.
Flora has never addressed those allegations.
Both Schnur and former LA Ethics Commission Chair Jessica Levinson agree that very little of what Flora has done seems illegal. However, they say it falls into ethically questionable buckets.
“When you’re a back-bencher in the minority party, not a lot of people pay attention to these types of questions,” said Schnur.
As a leader, he added, “the spotlight tends to get brighter.”
This story was originally published October 7, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
