A Cal-OSHA manager ran a side business on state time, with alleged safety violations

Lalo, a 37-year-old worker originally from Mexico, remembered asking his boss for a safety harness before he climbed onto the roof of a house outside Cleveland, Ohio, in the spring of 2022.

He said the roof job had no permit, and the boss wanted it done fast and cheap.

Lalo fell.

“This is safety,” a coworker remembered Lalo pleading prior to the fall. Lalo remembered the boss told him, if he wanted a harness, he could buy one himself.

Lalo, who asked that only his nickname be used for fear of retaliation, had come from California to work on his boss’ project. The boss was Ujitha “AJ” Perera, back in Lalo’s home state. Perera has been an official with Cal-OSHA, the agency charged with protecting California workers since 2015, and the district manager of its Santa Ana office for the last five years. His agency investigates this very type of worker safety issue.

While working for the state, records and interviews show, Perera also ran a construction and real estate business, purchasing and remodeling homes. His private enterprises do not appear on the conflict-of-interest forms, known among state workers as the Form 700, that Perera signs each year under penalty of perjury

His Ohio operations, records show, were cited three times between 2024 and 2026 for code violations including improperly removing a sidewalk and creating a trip hazard.

Court and police records show Perera had a relationship with Jacki Rice, a woman who worked for him doing manual labor and managing his rental business, and that the relationship allegedly turned abusive. In an interview, Rice said Perera still owes her thousands of dollars and that she ended the relationship when she learned he was married.

Cal-OSHA requires harnesses

All Cal-OSHA officials know how deadly working on a roof without a harness can be. A harness clips a roofer to an anchor. A kit costs about $100. Falls kill more than 300 construction workers a year, according to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.

Lalo said that even before he traveled to Ohio, he had concerns about Perera’s safety practices. He remembered confronting Perera at a job site, about exposed wiring at one of his properties in Visalia.

“How can you be an OSHA manager, but everything you do is not permitted?” Lalo said he asked him. “He told me, ‘I’ll fix it later.’”

A Bee investigation also found Perera, in his capacity as a Cal-OSHA manager, has overseen investigations involving life-threatening injuries that ended without interviews of the victim or citations. He also promoted an allegedly unqualified office tech to safety inspector and was listed as his wife’s supervisor in a job application she submitted for a safety inspection position. In the application she claimed thousands of hours of safety related work at perfume business the two owned.

Perera was charged with abuse in 2013 in Tulare County, and Cal-OSHA hired him in 2015 with the charges pending. In his first week on the job, he pleaded no contest to a reduced count and was sentenced to a 52-week batterer’s program and a stay-away order.

Cuyahoga County property records in Ohio show three properties Perera purchased in 2021: two houses and a vacant lot in his own name. Perera also has a connection to four more houses held by a company run by a business partner, Haishan Peiris. Deeds show the two men passing property between themselves. And Lalo said that he worked on multiple homes belonging to Peiris, but said he was always paid by Perera.

Peiris did not respond to request for comment.

The Department of Industrial Relations declined to answer any specific questions regarding Perera’s outside businesses. In a statement, spokeswoman Denisse Gomez said DIR “takes allegations of misconduct seriously and reviews them through the appropriate processes.”

Perera, through DIR, has also not responded to requests to comment.

Stephen Knight, executive director of the nonprofit Worksafe, when informed about Perera’s dual roles as a state official with a shadow private business — as well as his alleged abuse — said that the matter should be addressed.

“Public service is a privilege,” he said. “And California’s worker rights agencies in particular should be staffed with people dedicated to the health and safety of California’s 18 million workers. Action needs to be taken to restore public confidence.”

Both Lalo and Rice detailed their working and personal relationship with Perera. These are their accounts:

A worker’s lasting injuries

Lalo was lucky that spring day he tumbled off the roof. He survived.

Rice, who, like Lalo, had come from California to work for Perera, found him minutes after the fall.

“He’s breathing heavy, and he’s like, ‘I just fell off the roof,’” she recalled in a recent interview. “I’m seeing him bleeding in different places.” She drove to a Walgreens for peroxide, splints and bandages.

Patched up, Lalo climbed back on the roof the same day. However, the next morning, he couldn’t get out of bed. He aches four years later. “Almost every day when I wake up, I try to get up from the bed, but my back is still hurt,” he said.

Connections began in California

Before Ohio, Rice said she met Perera through a mutual friend. In the spring of 2021, a few months after Perera started as district manager in Santa Ana, at Perera’s invitation, she said she left a job at a halfway house in Washington state and moved to Visalia to work as a property manager for him.

After a few months, Rice said, “He told me, ‘I need you in Long Beach,’” where Perera was living and also working on several construction projects including at his own home there.

He called her his fiancée, Rice said.

“I thought I was in love,” Rice said. “He was very charming. I started going to real estate school. Ujitha hooked me with this dream that we would start a real estate company together and get married in Sri Lanka. He even asked me to name the company.”

She said she did. Jaya-Sri Investments LLC, “Ja” for Jacki and “Sri” for Sri Lanka, where Perera was born, though it was never formally incorporated.

Rice said that beginning in July 2021, she worked full-time for Perera: finding tenants, putting up drywall in Long Beach and, with Lalo, at another job that Perera was overseeing at his Buddhist temple, the Maithree Vihara Buddhist Meditation Center in Sun Valley, where Perera dropped her off on his way to the Santa Ana office. The temple did not respond to a request for comment.

While Lalo was paid, Rice said she was not. “He told me he was keeping track and deducting for rent and food. I never seen any money from it.”

Perera frequently used his state email for communications with Rice involving his real estate business, according to emails provided by Rice. Tenant applications arrived in his DIR inbox. On Feb. 15, 2022, in an email from [email protected], he reviewed a vendor contract naming Jaya-Sri Investments LLC as the client. On March 17, he scanned a tenant’s lease on the district office scanner.

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Under California law, state employees may not use public resources, including computers, equipment and state-paid time, for private gain or an outside business. The statute, Government Code section 8314, carries civil penalties, and violations beyond incidental use can be prosecuted as felonies.

DIR did not respond to questions about Perera’s outside business. Gomez in an email said that “State-issued resources, such as computers, cell phones and email, are intended for official business. Under Government Code section 8314 and applicable memoranda of understanding (MOUs), minimal and incidental personal use is permitted, subject to restrictions that include not interfering with an employee’s work, creating costs for DIR, involving unauthorized users or otherwise misusing state resources.”

Work on Ohio business

In early April 2022, Perera drove with Rice and Lalo from Visalia to Ohio in his pickup truck, according to the account of the two workers and court documents. The three of them stayed at 91 Best St. in Bedford, a suburb southeast of Cleveland, a house Perera purchased in November 2021.

Rice and Lalo went to work on it and on the others, the workers said. At Best Street they added a bedroom and bathroom in the basement along with a new sewer line.The Bedford building department said it has no permits on file for the work..

Michael Greer, the building commissioner for Bedford, said that the property had not registered as a rental property. “No such document are on file,” Greer said in an email, adding that his department is investigating whether unpermitted work occurred.

According to Rice and Lalo, among the work they performed at the Best Street property was an unpermitted sewer line. In 2024, the city cited Perera for removing the public sidewalk to replace the sewer line and leaving it that way. Other code enforcement violations were sent to Perera in 2025 and 2026 involving allowing trash and debris on the property and a “trip hazard,” a frequent OSHA citation.

That April, Perera fell ill with sepsis and was admitted to the hospital. On a form he filled out, he listed Judith Perera as an emergency contact. Rice said the doctors asked him who that was. He said, according to Rice, “That’s my wife.”

“I staggered,” Rice said. “I’m a faithful person. I wouldn’t have an affair with a married man.”

She said she realized he had been splitting his time between Long Beach and Visalia with a wife in one place, a fiancée in the other. “I realized the whole thing was a lie, and I started seeing all the ways I had been taken advantage of.”

Rice said when Perera was released from the hospital, the working relationship unraveled as well as the romantic one.

On April 13, Rice wrote to Perera on his state email that she had “put in over 50 hours looking for houses for your friend and you guys told me you were going to pay me hourly.” “You play villain gone victim,” she wrote. “You literally tell me these things to build me up to get my hopes up just to watch me get hurt because you enjoy it.”

She said Perera returned to California and watched through cameras he had wired into the house at 91 Best St. “AJ wanted to know, why I was coming home so late? Why was I making so many trips to the bathroom,” Rice said.

“He would explode, then apologize,” she said. “It was a cycle of abuse.”

After Rice tried to stop the surveillance, turning the cameras around or unplugging the internet, Perera, Rice said, began calling the police in Ohio from 2,300 miles away in California, to request welfare checks.

Twenty-two pages of Bedford police records corroborate Rice’s account. On April 20, officers found her fine; “they broke up and now the male keep calling,” the dispatch log said. Four days later, he reported a “bi-polar episode,” which officers found no evidence of. By the third or fourth visit, Rice said, “They were like, ‘We’re sick of this. If he was here, we would arrest him.’”

Paul Kellerman, a Bedford police spokesperson, declined to discuss the calls but said “misuse of welfare checks may happen from time to time…”

Uses state email for relationship matters

In May 2022, Perera used his state email account to send Rice a legal-like document, offering her $2,000, “in order not to be homeless,” if she would give up the keys to all his properties. He also demanded that she surrender the keys and title to a car she owned. In the email, Perera gave Rice an ultimatum: “This offer will expire at 5:00 pm on 05/19/2022 if not signed and returned by Jacki Rice via email, and Ujitha A Perera will proceed with legal action and eviction. “

Two days after his first demand, on May 11, Perera went to court seeking a domestic violence restraining order. He later abandoned it.

Even though Perera filed the 27-page document, several statements he makes corroborate the account of Lalo and Rice:

• Provides the details of the trip: On April 6, 2022 Rice, Lalo (my contractor) “and I left via vehicle to Bedford Ohio,” to remodel the Bedford house “and two more house that I was going to acquire.”
• Acknowledges the relationship: “Currently she lives in my house in Bedford Ohio,” he wrote. “She went there with me to help me do some repair work.”
• Describes the surveillance: “I have everything recorded on the living room camera.”
• Calls Rice unstable: Cites a Washington court that “deemed her mentally unstable.” The attached order does not show that finding.
• Describes his hospital stay in Ohio: He said he was in the ER and then hospitalized in April, and released on April 15. He describes Rice, during this period, as “aggressive” and “very unstable.”

Allegations of abuse

On consecutive days in late June 2022, according to Rice and Lalo, Perera put his hands on her neck.

The first time, Lalo heard noises in the hallway and opened his bedroom door. “I see AJ and Jackie in the hallway… he has Jackie from the neck,” he said. “When he sees me, he let Jackie go right away.”

By then, he said, she already had marks on her neck and hands. Perera retreated to the living room, where he had been sleeping.

Afterward, Lalo said Perera tried to explain. “I told him, it doesn’t have to be that way, going around wanting to hit people,” Lalo said. No one called the police that night.

The second time, June 28, Rice had locked herself in her room. “He started banging on it, and then he started to try to break it down,” she said. “So I opened the door and I said, ‘You need to stop.’ And that’s when he grabbed me by the neck.” She said she pepper-sprayed him in the face.

Perera called the police, telling dispatchers his friend had maced him and was “acting out due to a mental disability.” The officers’ report included both stories: According to her account she opened the door to tell Perera to stop and he “grabbed her neck”; Perera told police after he was sprayed with pepper spray, “in self-defense he grabbed her.” Neither pressed charges. Perera agreed to leave for the day.

Perera remains the district manager in Santa Ana, where he oversees a staff of 15 which investigates up to 600 worker safety cases per year.

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