Attorney general issues subpoenas in Bell salary scandal

See all posts on Bell City Hall salary scandal.

UPDATE:
Mayor of Calif. city to stop taking high salary
By JOHN ROGERS (AP)
jULY 26, 2010

BELL, Calif. — The mayor of Bell apologized Monday for the excessive salaries paid to city officials and said he will step down after completing his term without pay.

Mayor Oscar Hernandez said in a statement posted on the Bell city clerk's website that the salaries were indefensible.

Four of the five members of the City Council earn about $100,000 a year for running the blue-collar city of about 40,000 people.

The city's chief administrative officer was earning nearly $800,000 a year before he resigned last week.

Hernandez last week defended the city's salaries...


Attorney general issues subpoenas in Bell salary scandal
July 26, 2010
LATimes

Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown on Monday issued subpoenas for hundreds of salary and employment documents from the city of Bell to determine whether top officials broke laws in awarding out-sized salaries to city administrators and City Council members.

Brown said he was moving swiftly after The Times exposed a pay scandal in the small working-class city to reassure taxpayers that the state was determined to crack down on possible wrongdoing and to warn other cities not to follow Bell's path.

"These outrageous pay practices are an insult to the hard-working people of Bell and have provoked righteous indignation in California and even across the country," Brown said.

Poor City Pays Officials Top Dollars: Where is all Bell's money coming from?

UPDATE: Someone left the following links in the comments section. You can put in the name of a city and find out salaries: for actual salaries, by person, check out www.lasalaries.com or www.sanfranciscosalaries.com

Where is all this money coming from? I doubt that tax rates are unusually high. There must be something going on in the city that is generating a lot of revenue. Are officials being paid to look the other way? This should be an interesting investigation.

Poor City Pays Officials Top Dollars
Source: Los Angeles Times
July 15, 2010

Bell, one of the poorest cities in Los Angeles County, pays its top officials some of the highest salaries in the nation, including nearly $800,000 annually for its city manager. In addition to the $787,637 salary of Chief Administrative Officer Robert Rizzo, Bell pays Police Chief Randy Adams $457,000 a year, about 50% more than Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck or Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca and more than double New York City's police commissioner.

Why innovation will elude Russia

We must guard against our country becoming more like Russia. Here in the land of the free we have problems with "corruption and selectivity in enforcement of the law" and "continuing media restrictions" that "result in an erosion of the accountability of government leaders to the population."...

Why innovation will elude Russia
Joel Brinkle
San Francisco Chronicle
June 24, 2010

..."It's not by chance that I came here," [Russian President Dmitry] Medvedev admitted to an audience at Stanford University. "I wanted to see with my own eyes the origin of success." And it's no wonder: Can you think of a significant Russian technological invention of recent times?

The problem isn't the Russian people. Thousands of them are at work across Silicon Valley creating the very products and services Medvedev came to emulate.

No, the problem is the Russian government, still a brutal, capricious bureaucracy guilty of "contract-style killings," the State Department says, "continuing centralization of power in the executive branch, along with corruption and selectivity in enforcement of the law" and "continuing media restrictions" that "result in an erosion of the accountability of government leaders to the population."...

Whistle-Blower in 'Kafkaesque Nightmare' After Push for GI Safety

Whistle-Blower in 'Kafkaesque Nightmare' After Push for GI Safety
Sharon Weinberger
AOL News
May 24, 2010

Several years ago, Franz Gayl began began pushing the Marine Corps to field urgently needed protective equipment to troops in Iraq. He thought he was just doing his job.

Instead, Gayl, a civilian scientist employed by the Marine Corps, says he has been stripped of his professional responsibilities, denied educational opportunities typically available to federal workers and subjected to a criminal probe he says was instigated as part of the professional retaliation against him.

Franz Gayl / AP
Franz Gayl is pictured in 2006, when he was a civilian science adviser in Iraq.
Tom Devine, the legal director of the nonprofit Government Accountability Project, a Washington-based organization that represents federal whistle-blowers, including Gayl, says that despite legislation that is supposed to prevent retaliation, in reality, people like Gayl face a "Kafkaesque nightmare."

At the center of Gayl's original complaint was what he saw as the mishandling of the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected Vehicle, a replacement for thin-skinned Humvees that proved dangerously vulnerable to improvised explosive devices, or IEDs. In the early days of the Iraq war, those homemade bombers quickly became the leading killer of U.S. and coalition forces.

An urgent call for the MRAPs was signed off on in February 2005, around the time when deaths from the roadside bombs were spiking. But it took more than 16 months for the Marine Corps to actually begin the process of buying and fielding the new equipment.

When the Marine Corps officials in charge of buying equipment didn't seem to be acting fast enough, Gayl made his case for better equipment through reports.

Gayl's complaints reached Capitol Hill staffers, eventually leading to congressional inquiries and an inspector general investigation of the matter. In 2007, he filed for formal whistle-blower protection.

Since that time, Gayl said, he has faced reprisals. He said he has been removed from dealing with critical technology matters, like MRAPs, and that there was an investigation into information he provided to Congress. Gayl has held on to his job, but his work situation has gone from bad to worse, he says.

Most recently, the Marine Corps denied him what would normally be a routine request -- permission to attend a prestigious graduate studies program. He was also stripped of his formal responsibilities as the Marine Corps science and technology adviser, the job he was hired to do in 2002, after retiring from active duty with the service...

The San Diego Ethics Commission finally investigates real corruption: Nancy Graham's business partners and the CCDC

My wish has come true: the San Diego ethics commission is finally acting on real corruption.

Graham's Ethics Commission Case Advances
by Rob Davis
Voice of San Diego
May 12, 2010

Nancy Graham, the former Centre City Development Corp. president who resigned nearly two years ago, is due before the San Diego Ethics Commission this week and next.

The commission has alleged that Graham broke city laws by improperly making decisions in office that benefited her business associates. It has proposed a maximum $170,000 fine against Graham. While at CCDC, Graham sat in on negotiations about a downtown hotel with Lennar Corp., her former business partner. She hadn't disclosed the more than $3 million in income she received from a business deal with the company.

Graham, who has since pleaded no contest to a failure to disclose her economic interests while president, has a hearing on a narrow set of issues Thursday before the commission.

Her attorney, Paul Pfingst, is contesting the commission's jurisdiction in the case and arguing that the 34 counts filed against her should be condensed to one. He argues that her many meetings with Lennar -- each charged as separate counts -- constitute one event, not many.

The commission argues that Pfingst's questions about jurisdiction amount to a "hypertechnical distinction" in the law. In a legal brief, its attorney, Alison Adema, dismissed Pfingst's argument for condensing the charges as "absurd," and noted that Graham's involvement in the hotel project over a two-year period constituted multiple violations of city law. The law, she wrote, is designed to punish all efforts to improperly influence municipal decisions -- not just the first.

That will be heard at 5:30 p.m. Thursday.

Graham is also due before the commission for an administrative hearing next Thursday, May 20, at 9 a.m. That hearing will allow both sides to present and argue

Environmental firm accused of 'egregious' overcharging of L.A. Unified School; Two school officials involved

It looks like the issues examined in "The Cartel" go well beyond New Jersey. (The movie is currently playing in Los Angeles at this theater.) I'm not the least bit surprised to discover corruption among school officials.

Environmental firm accused of 'egregious' overcharging of L.A. Unified School District
April 21, 2010

Officials have abruptly halted work with the firm that managed environmental work in the $19.5-billion school construction program of the Los Angeles Unified School District.

The move arises from a critical district audit alleging that Palm Desert-based Questa Environmental Consulting repeatedly overcharged and that L.A. Unified managers looked the other way, resulting in more than $2.5 million in questionable billing.

The negative report comes in the wake of an unrelated indictment of a regional construction director on conflict-of-interest charges, tarring the nation’s largest school construction and modernization effort. Officials continue to characterize the overall construction program as clean and successful. To date, 87 of 131 new schools have been completed as well as thousands of modernization projects.

The audit from the office of the inspector general, quietly posted online earlier this month, accused Questa of billing for time unrelated to its district contract, charging higher hourly rates than justified and exceeding maximum annual billings, among other things.

The conduct was “so egregious,” said district Inspector General Jerry Thornton, that his office took the unusual step of recommending Questa’s termination as well as the discipline of two supervising district employees...

Auditors singled out two district managers for particular criticism. L.A. schools Supt. Ramon C. Cortines suspended them with pay March 1 for more than a month, district officials said. A district spokesman confirmed the substance of the action, though not the specific details. Both employees have since returned to work pending further possible disciplinary action. ...

"The Cartel" opens this weekend in Los Angeles

Bob Bowdon
Subject: "The Cartel" opens this weekend in NYC & LA!

Los Angeles Premiere Screening:
This Friday, April 16, 7:40pm PT

After-movie Q&A with:
Ben Boychuk, Education Scholar, Heartland Institute
Brian Calle, Claremont Institute
Marco Petruzzi, CEO, Green Dot Schools
Larry Sand, California Teachers Empowerment Network

Get tickets now.
Laemmle's Sunset 5
8000 Sunset Blvd.
West Hollywood, 90046
310-478-3836

The Cartel
(NR • 105 min.) 1:00pm 3:10pm 5:20pm 7:40pm 10:00pm

"The Cartel" wins Independent Film awards; Documentary is about the huge amount of money we spend to get bad schools

This movie is about the problem that Karen Horwitz refers to as "White Chalk Crime."


Washington DC Independent Film Festival just announced last week:

* The Cartel -- Winner, 2010 Visionary Award

"2010 Visionary Award goes to a film that embodies our theme this year of 'making a difference' in our world. These films and their filmmakers are risk takers, as they explore social, political issues that are important to all of us."


* The Cartel -- Winner, 2010 Audience Award, Best Documentary

"Audience Awards – before each session, our audience members were given a ballot which listed all the films in a session, they were then asked to cast their vote: Excellent, Good and Fair. The ballots were then calculated on a percentage of excellence."



'Cartel' documentary explores NJ schools
Local filmmaker studies tenure, vouchers, and counting Benzes in the parking lot
Hudson Reporter
by Timothy J. Carroll

Is your school sub-par? Are costs for education still high? Bob Bowdon can connect the dots. And he can tell you a story about a janitor making a six-figure salary.

Bowdon is a documentary filmmaker from Hoboken. In "The Cartel," he wants to show "How American public education primarily serves its employees, not its children."...

Former San Bernardino County supervisor charged with corruption

Former San Bernardino County supervisor charged with corruption
North County Times
Associated Press
February 10, 2010

A former San Bernardino County supervisor and an ex-county tax official were arrested Wednesday on charges that they took bribes from a developer to support a $102 million lawsuit settlement, state and local prosecutors announced.

William Postmus, 38, and former assistant tax assessor James Erwin, 47, were taken into custody and the criminal complaint implied that at least one other supervisor was under investigation.

"This is one of the most appalling corruption cases ever seen in California, and we will aggressively pursue this conspiracy until all of the facts are exposed," Attorney General Jerry Brown said in a statement.

Postmus was held on $225,000 bail and Erwin on $380,000 bail, said Susan Mickey, spokeswoman for the county district attorney's office.

Prosecutors contend that while he was chairman of the county Board of Supervisors in 2006, Postmus agreed to accept $100,000 from Colonies Partners, L.P.

The partnership had sued the county in 2002 over county easements for a flood-control basin in Upland. In November 2006, Postmus joined a 3-2 majority of supervisors to approve settling with Colonies for $102 million, even though the county counsel and other attorneys recommended against it.

Erwin is accused of funneling the bribe to Postmus through a political action committee called the "Committee for Effective Government" and of creating and threatening to send out political mailers depicting Postmus as a drug addict and a homosexual to blackmail him into the vote.

Prosecutors contend that Erwin received a $100,000 bribe for his intermediary role along with other gifts, including a private jet trip to New York, prostitution service and a Rolex watch...

Long Island Congressional Candidate Cited for Giving Up JPMorgan Whistleblower

George Demos (dark hair, third from right) made a lot of friends by tipping off JPMorgan about a whistle-blower who was talking to the SEC. It may safely be assumed that none of the folks in the photo above are very concerned about the integrity of investigations into bank fraud.

Long Island Congressional Candidate Cited for Giving Up JPMorgan Whistleblower
01/28/10
Politics Daily


George Demos is a Republican Congressional candidate from Eastern Long Island whose Web site bears the slogan "Fighting for Freedom," and touts his service as an enforcement lawyer in the New York office of the Securities and Exchange Commission. A bio says that he "handled some of the SEC's most significant investigations," including that of Ponzi scheme artist Bernard Madoff, and "worked tirelessly on the cases that never made the headlines."

But one case that never made headlines was his own: Demos' campaign Web site and public statements omit any reference to a report last March of the SEC's Inspector General (IG), which found he had improperly disclosed protected, nonpublic information about a whistleblower to the counsel for that whistleblower's employer, a major Wall Street bank, JPMorgan Chase. The IG's charges of misconduct grew out of an SEC probe that began in 2003 of JPMorgan and other big financial institutions suspected of illegal market practices.

Are the people in charge of your school corrupt? New movie about New Jersey schools: The Cartel.

New Movie Unveils Corrupt New Jersey Public Schools
From Joseph E. Moser on Friday, October 9, 2009

“Teachers punished for speaking out. Principals fired for trying to do the right thing. Union leaders defending the indefensible. Bureaucrats blocking new charter schools. Teens who can't read, parents desperate for change, and teachers struggling to launch stable alternative schools for inner city kids who want to learn.” This is New Jersey and its monopolistic public school system – a system that can spend nearly “$400,000 per classroom, and yet only 39 percent of the state’s eighth-graders are proficient or advanced readers, and only 40 percent of its eighth-graders are proficient or advanced in math.”

These are just some of the people and issues introduced to us in a new movie The Cartel.