Cal­i­for­nia law­mak­ers received $30,000 in free tick­ets, rais­ing con­cerns about pol­i­cy influ­ence

A lit­tle more than half of Cal­i­for­nia law­mak­ers received more than $30,000 in tick­ets to places and events, includ­ing Dis­ney­land, a San Fran­cis­co 49ers game, and pos­si­bly a Tay­lor Swift Eras Tour con­cert.
While it is legal for a law­mak­er to receive gifts val­ued up to $590, these find­ings by Politi­co raise ques­tions about whether any of these 66 law­mak­ers may have been influ­enced by these gifts in their leg­isla­tive work. 
For instance, Demo­c­ra­t­ic Assem­bly­woman Buffy Wicks intro­duced a bill in April that would ban exclu­sive con­tracts between sell­ers and venues. This move was prompt­ed by the Tay­lor Swift Eras Tour tick­et sale deba­cle that unfold­ed on Ticketmaster’s web­site, which crashed.
While Ticketmaster’s par­ent com­pa­ny, Live Nation, blamed the site’s crash on the unprece­dent­ed num­ber of peo­ple on its serv­er, cus­tomers com­plained of poor ser­vice and accused the tick­et com­pa­ny of price fix­ing. The Sen­ate Judi­cia­ry Com­mit­tee held a hear­ing on the mat­ter in 2023. 
Wicks’s bill received the sup­port of third-par­ty resellers, such as Stub­Hub …