Haven’t had one of these in a while now. Let’s open up the bag and see what’s inside.
Caltrans, the state transportation agency, owns “hundreds of houses spanning a corridor through Pasadena, South Pasadena and Los Angeles”. These homes were purchased as part of a plan to extend the 710 freeway, and are supposed to be bulldozed when the extension is built. At this point, it looks like the extension is on indefinite hold.
So?
The agency has spent $22.5 million since 2008 to maintain the homes, but transportation officials are “unable to demonstrate that the repairs were necessary, reasonable or cost-effective,” according to the report by the California State Auditor, which was sparked by a Times investigation.
In one case, the agency spent $103,443 on a new roof. That leaked.
“Bees were also coming in,” Jones said. “It was like a plague.”
The shoddy work sparked a fight with state officials that eventually led to Jones’ eviction from the home he and his wife had lived in for about two decades.
But wait, there’s more!
The state is also losing $22 million per year because tenants, including 15 state employees, are paying far below market rates for rent. Other homes, some of which have been recognized as historical landmarks, have been boarded up and empty for years.
And more!
For one of those vacant houses, state officials recently estimated it should have cost $56,000 to repair a roof and replace the garage. But the cost soared to more than $184,000 after it was expended to include “miscellaneous interior repairs” — a coat of paint and upgrades to two bathrooms. “Caltrans could provide no evidence of the need for additional work,” the investigators said.
And even more: auditors traced the money to the Direct Construction Unit of the Department of General Services. The “Direct Construction Unit” apparently does the general repair work for state owned buildings. So basically, this was one branch of the state government taking money out of the pocket of the other branch. Which is fine; even if you’re just taking money from one pocket and putting it in another, you’ve got to account for it, right?
Except that the Direct Construction Unit was tacking on a 20% “management fee”. And they were hiring subcontractors “for minor chores as a kind of window dressing to ‘achieve the appearance’ of meeting goals to include small businesses in state work. ” It looks like the subcontractors may have known people inside the DCU: one particular subcontractor “repeatedly bought the exact items it would sell to the unit days before the jobs were put out to bid”.
And the punchline: this contractor was buying items at Home Depot and selling them to the DCU at an average markup of 35%.
And a by the way: “Four of the state employees found living in the houses worked for the Department of General Services.”
But, hey, LA isn’t the only city in California, right? Right. There’s also San Francisco. San Francisco has a sheriff, Ross Mirkarimi. Sheriff Mirkarimi has a domestic violence conviction on his record; based on my understanding of federal law, that bars him from possessing a firearm. Which is kind of a problem, if you’re the chief law enforcement officer of a major city.
Yesterday, the San Francisco Ethics Commission found, on a 4-1 vote, that Sheriff Mirkarimi had engaged in “official misconduct”.
Apparently, this doesn’t mean that he’s actually fired: the Board of Supervisors needs at least 9 out of 11 votes to terminate him.
