After much controversy, the Lynwood City Council has appointed former Mayor’s Aide Castro’s son and current business partner, Luis Gerardo Cuellar, to the position of City Treasurer.

According to Cuellar’s application, he has business finance experience, including a Masters of Business for Veterans (MBV) from the University of Southern California. He also included his budget management experience with United States Marine Corps (USMC).

More relevant for his new position, Cuellar included on his resume that he is currently a Managing Partner at ASM Premier Consultants. He wrote that his experience with ASM involves providing the cannabis industry with “services to assist clients with vertically integrating their companies by guiding them through the license, permit, and building process.”

While Cuellar stated that ASM Premier Consultants is based in Los Angeles, its latest filing with the Secretary of State, from August 2022, shows that the consulting firm actually operates out of the same Lynwood address that Cuellar has his voter registration.

The manager of ASM Premier Consultants is Aide Castro, the controversial former Mayor profiled by the L.A. Times for her failure to disclose financial information as required by law. Castro is now a major cannabis lobbyist, describing herself on her website as “The Cannabis Policy Queen.”

In addition to be being a business partner with Cuellar, Castro is related to Cuellar. She is his mother. The two are seen in each other’s social media posting dating back many years, including Cuellar’s Instagram post of his commissioning as a Second Lieutenant in USMC.

How will this conflict of interest affect Lynwood residents?

In its official press release on the appointment, Lynwood failed to disclose Cuellar’s relationship with the former Mayor Castro, who is known to exert influence over some of the Council Members even while out of office—notably in her relationship with Council Member Solache.

A resident who notified us of the connection said, “What I’m wondering about is, what kind of Treasurer is Cuellar going to be? Is he going to use his new position to benefit the company he manages together with his mother? How will his work as City Treasurer benefit his business clients? And how will Solache profit from all this?”

SELA Report will monitor the situation closely.