Whipped Cream Difficulties

We have previously noted the election results in the notoriously corrupt California city of Vernon.

Well, there’s a new twist. The Vernon Chamber of Commerce asked the LA County voter’s registrar to throw out ten ballots; the CoC claims that the voter rolls included “more than a dozen people” who did not live in the city and were not eligible to vote. The registrar refused to throw out the votes, claiming the evidence provided by the CoC was insufficient.

So on Tuesday night, the Vernon city council, instead of certifying the election results, decided they were going to conduct their own hearing into the claims.

By the way, the council and CoC supported Luz Martinez, who has ties to the Vernon city government. Martinez lost by four votes to Reno Bellamy.

Of note:

Bellamy also alleged that Vernon used taxpayer dollars to fly one of the current councilmen, William Davis, back from his vacation in Italy so he could vote in favor of the new election ordinance, which passed, 3-0. When asked during Tuesday’s council meeting whether the city funded his flight, Davis said, “I don’t want to answer.”

In other news, the NYT would like for you to know that experts do not see municipal bankruptcy as a trend. However, if it is a trend, experts see it as being mostly confined to California.

“Municipalities operate with a lot of autonomy in home-rule states such as California, and that autonomy leads to the freedom to get into trouble,” analysts for Trident Municipal Research said in a report issued Wednesday.

Two of the indicted Cudahy city officials – former Mayor David Silva and Angel Perales, “the city’s former interim city manager and code enforcement director”, have pled guilty to extortion and bribery charges.

In related news, now that Silva and Perales have pled, the FBI has released some more documents from the investigation.

The documents show that a city official identified only as G.P. asked Perales and others to make non-residents register to vote in elections. They used an address that belonged to a Cudahy city employee. In exchange, that employee was rewarded with promotions and other favorable treatment, the documents say.

More:

Perales said that when absentee ballots were delivered to City Hall, he and G.P. determined through “trial and error” the best way to open the sealed envelopes without defacing them. “Routinely and systematically,” they opened the ballots. If they contained votes in favor of incumbents, they were resealed and counted. Ballots for non-incumbents were discarded.

And here’s a detail I missed, I think in retrospect because I was on the road at the time. Remember Osvaldo Conde, of the bimbo and the badge? I did not know until I saw the links in the LAT article that he engaged in a five-hour long standoff with the FBI. (George Parr, call your office, please.)

The fiscal brink, that is.

From today’s LAT:

Facing the same financial stressors that pushed San Bernardino toward bankruptcy, cities across California are slashing day-to-day services and taking other drastic actions to skirt a similar fiscal collapse.
For some, it may not be enough.

The major examples cited by the LAT are:

• Vallejo, which filed for Chapter 9 bankruptcy in 2009, because “salaries and benefits for its public safety workers were eating up too much of the general fund”.
• Stockton, which filed last month “after it was unable to come to agreement with its employee unions and creditors on a plan to close a $26-million gap in its general fund”.
• Mammoth Lakes, which filed earlier this month because of a $43 million court judgement.
• and San Bernardino, which “couldn’t close a $45.8-million budget shortfall and would be unable make its payroll this summer”.  As noted previously, the city is also claiming that budget figures had been falsified for 13 out of 16 years.

[San Bernardino Mayor Patrick] Morris, a former judge elected on an anti-gang platform, says the city may have to dissolve its Fire Department or portions of the Police Department, an unavoidable reality when public safety accounts for nearly 75% of the general fund budget. The city would then contract with county and state agencies for those services.

Have you ever noticed how it is always the police and fire departments that they threaten to cut first? You never hear them say “We’re going to cut the budget for big-screen TVs and office furniture”. Always the cops and the firefighters. In this case, that may make sense, especially if they can contract out the services cheaper. But:

Steve Tracy, a fire engineer and spokesman for the city firefighters union, said San Bernardino’s labor groups already gave up $10 million in concessions. He blamed the financial crisis on the mayor and former city manager spending money on such pet projects as a new downtown movie theater.

And is filing for bankruptcy worth it? Let’s ask the people of Vallejo:

The Bay Area city of 112,000 was forced to shut down two of its fire stations and today fixes just 10% of its crumbling roads. Its workforce, including police and firefighters, is about half its pre-bankruptcy size and those people left are “insanely” overworked.
Meanwhile, Vallejo spent $10 million on legal fees. It ended up with employee contracts that Osby thinks the city could have struck more cheaply if it had stayed out of bankruptcy court and turned to the bargaining table.

Municipal pensions may be a growing crisis, and there’s certainly some evidence in the LAT‘s coverage to support that. But of the four major examples they cite, one dates back three years, one involves a court judgement against the city, one may involve falsified financial information provided to the city…and that pretty much leaves Stockton, which might be worth more investigation.

And we have news from the notoriously corrupt California city of Vernon:

California’s state auditor has called on Vernon to seriously consider replacing its top leadership, saying the state found it difficult to determine who is in charge in the small city beset by financial problems and corruption scandals.

More:

It was at times unclear who was actually in charge at City Hall, [state auditor Elaine] Howle and her staff said. She noted that top Vernon officials routinely deferred to counsel from their outside law firm, Latham & Watkins LLP, and called the presence of the firm within the city “striking” and “highly unusual.”

The California legislature is considering a bill that would require all new table saws sold in the state to be equipped with something called “injury mitigation technology”. The basic idea behind this technology is that the saw will stop, instantly, whenever it encounters human flesh (or something like human flesh, but more on that later).

That sounds like a good idea if you’re not a libertarian like me, right? Who can be opposed to protecting fingers?

Well, the problem is that there’s only one company that makes saws equipped with “injury mitigation technology”, SD3, who markets the SawStop.

And the inventor of this technology holds 90 patents on it. By the way, he’s also a patent attorney. So no other company can use this technology without paying for the patents.

…adding finger-saving sensors could boost table-saw prices by hundreds of dollars per unit, says the Power Tool Institute, a Cleveland trade group.

And the way the SawStop works is that it basically fires a stop into the blade, which kills the rotation almost instantly. However, every time the SawStop goes off, you’re looking at a $175 replacement bill for the blade and other parts of the device.

And because of the way the SawStop works, it can be fired even without fingers being present; for example, if the wood is wet. (The wisdom of cutting wet wood is debatable, of course.)

Overlawyered has been covering the SawStop, and attempts to make it mandatory for table saws. It is interesting to see the LAT pick up on this issue.

My take?

1. Stupidity should hurt.
2. If the government wants to make it mandatory on table saws, fine; let them do so after the patents expire, or require the inventor to license the patents for free. After all, what’s more important; safety, or money? Come to think of it, if he was really concerned with safety, he’d already have made this offer to saw makers. Right now, this looks like rent-seeking.

Earlier this week, I noted the goings-on in the notoriously corrupt California city of Vernon. One thing I mentioned was the $1.6 million salary of one Eric T. Fresch, a Vernon city official until this past May and one of the people behind Vernon’s failed natural gas hedge.

Mr. Fresch was found dead Thursday night in Angel Island State Park.

According to the LAT, the coroner’s office does not suspect foul play.

Amy Brees, an Angel Island State Park superintendent, said rangers began searching for Fresch after receiving a call Thursday afternoon that he had been cycling on the island but never came home.
“He hadn’t returned on the boat he was expected to return on,” said Brees, adding that Fresch’s body was found in the water near the shore.
The island features a mix of trails and terrain, including some cliffs. Water is accessible from various points all around the island.

Also interesting: remember that audit?

The auditor said her staff could not reach him for an interview despite a deposition subpoena and repeated attempts by process servers to track him down.

The LAT has a story about a state audit report on the notoriously corrupt city. Some of the things in the audit were touched on the other day, like the natural gas hedge deal. There is some new stuff:

…the audit called into question the government reform plan Vernon enacted last year, after it was nearly disincorporated by the state Legislature. The auditor said the city has failed to develop policies to actually implement some of the reform proposals, and that other key initiatives — like increasing the city’s residential population — are still years away.

Since 2005, Vernon has paid out more than $60 million in taxpayer dollars under contracts that had no caps on total expenditures, the audit said. Some of the agreements reviewed did not even define specific work product.

The auditor also noted that Vernon provided “legally questionable” retirement benefits to some of its top officials. The California Public Employees Retirement System has already moved to slash some of those benefits, but it is unclear whether any legal action will be taken against the city or the individual employees.

And we have a couple of stories from the municipal beat.

Story #1: The last ballots cast in June’s election in the notoriously corrupt California town of Vernon have been counted…and Reno Bellamy has been declared the winner. Bellamy’s opponent, Luz Martinez, was endorsed by the Vernon Chamber of Commerce. Of course, the Chamber “has vowed to pursue further legal action”.

Story #2: A while back, the town of Moberly, Missouri, agreed to guarantee $39 million in bonds through 2025. The bonds were intended to help a Chinese company, Mamtek International, build a plant to manufacture sucralose in Moberly.

Guess what happened next? If you said, “I bet the project fell apart”, take two gold stars and advance to the next blue square.

The hook here is that Moberly is refusing to make payments on the bonds, basically claiming that they were “misled” by Mamtek. (Mamtek claimed they already had an operating sucralose plant in China; it turns out that plant never opened, and that Missouri state development officials were aware of this before the bonds were sold, but nobody told Moberly officials.)

In a related NYT story:

Surprised local taxpayers from Stockton, Calif., to Scranton, Pa., are finding themselves obligated for parking garages, hockey arenas and other enterprises that can no longer pay their debts.

This is particularly interesting:

Residents of Pennsylvania’s capital, Harrisburg, recently learned from a forensic audit that their city’s fiscal woes could be traced to a guarantee issued in 1998, for the bonds of a trash incinerator project. Every few years after that, the authority running the project issued more bonds, and the city guaranteed those as well.
The audit showed that the authority had been selling new bonds for the cash to pay its older bonds — saving unwitting residents from having to honor their guarantees for a time, but blowing up their debt from the incinerator to an impossible $310 million. That’s more than three times what residents owe on the city’s own bonds.

If you or I did this, they’d call it a Ponzi scheme, and we’d be going to Federal pound you in the ass prison.