Okay Friends, fight the gag reflex as you peruse this column written in something called The Washington Examiner under the by line of Hugh Hewitt, sanctimonious repuglican blabbermouth. I say “under the by line” because we recently disclosed how this allegedly literate yakmouth had stuff written for him by Children and Families Commission Scribe/Flack and $200 an hour Toothbrush Distributor, Matthew J. Cunningham, and it would now be risky to assume Hewitt writes anything for himself.
Hugh is a very busy man. He can't write all that stuff himself!
“Enough!” Hewitt loudly admonishes his ignorant readers at the end of his drivel. Ignorant? How so?
If they are reading anything attributed to this hypocrite they are almost certainly unaware that he serves on the biggest Tax and Redistributionist Commission in the history of California – the OC Children and Families Commission; and no doubt unaware that his words may very well be written by someone else – Cunningham, perhaps – his protege, and the fellow whose $200,000-a-year PR contract with the Commission Hewitt annually votes to approve.
The Face of First Five: Go ahead, keep blogging. Just more work for me.
FFFF has documented how the Orange County version of Meathead Rob Reiner’s First Five Commission known as “The OC Children and Families Commission” has squandered hundreds of thousands of dollars over the past several years on PR and lobbying contracts to political operatives. We have shared how the Riverside County chapter of the Tax and Redistribute Society was busted for numerous conflicts of interest and was finally corralled by the RC Board of Supervisors. Here’s a link generously provided by Friend “Max” to a news report in May about the Contra Costa County Grand Jury about more misbehavin’ by their First Five Commission.
The key recommendation is the employment, by competitive bid, of an independent external auditor (i.e. not hired by the staff and Chairman with a wink and a nod) to clean up the cronyism and self-interest.
I really have to wonder what would happen if all 58 county grand juries did their jobs vis-a-vis the First Five Commissions. Would a single county emerge unscathed from political corruption and “jobs for the boys” kickdowns of the sort we’ve seen right here in OC? Or Riverside? Or Contra Costa?
Check this out. Here are a few days in the life of supposed conservative pontificator, Matthew J. Cunningham as he dishes out his stellar wordsmithing on behalf of the uber-liberal Prop 10 funded “OC Children and Families Commission.”
I’ll let you tally up the big bucks this hypocrite pulled down doing battle with the forces of…well, forces like the “Flash Report” of which he was a blogger, its editor Jon Fleischman, and of course those insensitive beasts at the OC Register.
And be sure to enjoy that monthly $800 catchall bill for, well, who knows what it’s for? Just stuff. But Hell, when you’re milking the cash cow be sure never to leave anything on the table, right?
A while back we posted a story about the OC Grand Jury callying for a lobbyist registry. They also attacked the practice of government agencies paying lobbyists to lobby other government agencies. Teri Sforza at the OC Watchdog did a post, here.
Yes, it certainly seems even more disturbing when practiced by opaque agencies like Water Districts and of course, by our old pals at the Children and Families Commission.
God bless America, land of opportunity!
As we have amply documented, this commission has paid Curt Pringle to lobby on its behalf and it has also employed the services of former State legistalor Phil Isenberg. Just yesterday we did a post about wordsmith Matthew J. Cunningham raking in some big bucks getting ready and attending a lunch for legislative staffers. Presumably the whole thing was a lobbying sales job.
The worst part of this of course, is that the OC commission is not lobbying for itself. No point in that – unless there’s a call to change the money distribution formula to benefit OC. No, all these hundreds of thousands of lobbying dollars are going to defend Prop 10 revenue in general. In other words, the OC Children and Families Commissions is spending all this dough lobbying for the other 57 counties’ First Five Commissions.
Yeah, but those other counties don't have a wordsmith of my caliber!
Are these other counties lobbying themselves? Who knows. Not unlikely. But this just emphasizes the point that the whole thing is out of control – no matter how many times Cunningham ghost writes blather about how well run they are.
And while we’re at it, let’s remember The White House Writers Group and their six-figure contract to promote the commission outside around the country!
If you think about it the whole thing really stinks. Time to pick off the scab on the commission and see what’s supperating underneath.
Well, they’re at it again. The Voice of OC which is funded by (drum roll) the OCEA and the OCEA PAC Treasurer Chris Prevatt have coughed up yet another load of happy horse shit about Shawn Nelson.
Here is Tracy Wood of the Voice of OCEA; and here is Prevatt, picking up the ball and running even farther out of bounds. Of course Matthew Cunningham passes along the story as a “top story”, too, just as if the Voice of OCEA were a real news source.
They are deliberately mischaracterizing Nelson’s statements about a possible new Coyote Hills meeting, trying to make it look like Nelson was trying to lobby for a new meeting so he could change his vote.
At the Council meeting last Tuesday at a “second reading” of the Council denial (BTW, that’s a new one on us!) discussion arose about additional information that the Council had not heard. Whether there was any real merit to that claim remains to be seen. Nelson was dubious, but basically volunteered to attend one last special meeting before swearing in as Supervisor if his colleagues felt inclined to do so.
Quirk and Keller declined, and on a vote of 3-2 the original denial was confirmed. Story over.
What’s funny is that Prevatt is spinning this as some sort of issue that Hairball Sidhu can use in the fall against Nelson. Did he let slip the official union position on the fall election? Hmm.
If you take a doggie bag you can actually feed your whole family on the Commission's dime - and get paid, too!
Looks like about $2,540 billed for activities leading up to and including a Republican legislative “staffer lunch” back in March of 2009. Hope there were some crusts left over to help feed the children.
All that dough to persuade GOP staff aides about how wonderful the Rob Reiner commissions are? You’ve gotta be kidding!
Note that third item about Riverside County making their “first Five” Commission a county agency. I wonder what that sort of scrutiny would mean for our Commission. No more Campbell crony contracts?
I was just too doggone busy to be bothered with it.
UPDATE: Gustavo Arellano has weighed in over at the OC Weekly.
Here’s a compilation of invoiced time Matthew J. Cunningham spent ghost writing for the supposed conservative Hugh Hewitt,who is a proud member of Rob Reiner’s Children and Families Commission.
Hewitt is Cunningham’s blog mentor who encouraged him to start what is today called “Red County”.
As noted above Hewitt is also a commissioner on the CFCOC, and thus Cunningham’s boss.
It’s odd that the presumably literate Hewitt can’t write his own letters and “op-ed” pieces if he believes so strongly in the Commission. He needs his buddy Cunningham to do it at a cool $200 an hour; and he’ll do it too, dammit, no matter how many hours it takes.
Hugh believes in the Commission almost as much as I do! I know because I wrote it.
Of course it’s also odd that Hewitt is on this ridiculous commission in the first place, unless one recognizes it as a platform to dispense patronage to old pals.
If you’ve been reading our blog, during the past few months, you will have encountered many posts detailing all sorts of misfeasance.
In the government of Orange County, we have shared stories about cronyism, waste and mismanagement at the County Clerk Recorder’s department; about Rob Reiner’s Children and Families Commission that diverts hundreds of thousands each year to dubious PR and lobbying services provided by well connected political operatives; about a Cemetery District that paid out $60,000 a year just to find a new graveyard site; and of course these tales of waste are accompanied by the day to day operations of various county agencies, including the sheriff’s department that are propelled along by their own inertia, year after dismal year; no matter how many times they change its name the County Planning Department remains a model of inefficiency, complacency and incompetence.
All this is just a prelude to the point of this post, which is that we need, finally a county supervisor who is able and willing to actually supervise something and that person is Shawn Nelson.
Nelson’s record on the Fullerton City Council, while not perfect, has demonstrated his recognition that elected office holders are there to represent the constituents, not the bureaucracy, and that governments must be held accountable for what they do and how they do it.
The county government is a contraption glued together by patronage and by its own dead weight. It’s a 19th century edifice in a 21st century reality. Nelson realizes this and he realizes the need for not only an overhaul but for a complete re-evaluation of the structure.
On June 8th, you have a chance to actually affect real change at the county; make the most of it because you won’t get too many chances.
One of the things we here at FFFF stand for is the idea of government accountability.
So naturally we were pretty sore when we saw the memo from County CEO Tom Mauk to the Board of Supervisors downplaying the disastrous purchase of the money pit at 433 W. Civic Center Dr. here.
Those clouds seem to be getting darker
Mauk finally produced the smoking gun—three years too late—an RDMD analysis estimating the needed cost to make the building functional. The amounts reached into the millions but for some reason this critical information, which was known to staff in June 2007, was withheld from the Board. Any guesses as to why?
Evidently Mr. Mauk is not interested in accountability. But we are, so please take note of the names of the people in the County Clerks office and the RDMD who were copied on this June 2007 memo. They are:
Phil Brigandi, Paul Lanning, Jean Pasco, Bob Wilson, Clark Shen, Mark Browning, Tony Ferrulli, Tony Mason, Michael Stein.
See any familiar names ? Jean Pasco in particular stands out since she was the clerk employee who acted as liaison with the Board in the matter of the building at 433 W. Civic.
This is not the story of an inadvertent error; no this was a deliberate attempt to mislead the Board of Supervisors and the evidence lies in the statements contained in the staff reports that deliberately mischaracterized the condition of the building and that were in fact untrue.
Hopefully the Board of Supervisors will be more interested in finding out what really happened and why crucial information that staff had been aware of for many months was intentionally withheld from them.
It’s not easy to look like you’re taking responsibility for some screw up or other when in reality you’re trying to spin as fast as you can to avoid accountability. But that’s exactly what seasoned bureaucrats do, and that’s precisely what County CEO Tom Mauk is up to now. It’s same old song: mistakes were made (passive voice, no subject of sentence), but corrective action is being implemented.
I have gotten hold of Mauk’s report to the Board of Supervisors about the massive fiasco in the County’s acquisition of the money pit at 433 West Civic Center – at the behest of the other Tom, County Clerk Tom Daly.
It would seem that the Board was never given crucial information about the true costs of remodel and remodel/expansion of the building. This data is shown in Attachment A to Mauk’s report, and is damning. Mauk doesn’t really even say he’s sorry for not passing critical cost information to the Board. The projected amounts developed by the County RDMD were significant – in the millions – and congruent with the ultimate figures presented by Kishimoto Architects, hired by Daly after the sale went through.
What information the Board was given was rosy: work on the building would be relatively minor, that the building was “reasonably maintained,” and that renovation would be done by Daly.
Wrong on all counts.
But everything is still okay, see, because the County has been using the lot for parking and has saved a whopping $26,000 a year. Mauk wraps up his report with this whopper:
“In the meantime, it does appear that having the property in our inventory is a positive outcome.”
Well only in government bureaucracies is wasting $2,100,000 on a near worthless property considered a positive outcome. I can only hope some Supervisor who really wants to supervise something will ask Mauk to quantify that statement. Mr. Moorlach?
Mauk may choose to do the Texas two-step around the truth, but I won’t. Check out the list of people CC’d at the bottom of that RDMD memo. The County Clerk was well aware of the millions needed to make that building functional and yet disclosed none of it to the Board; neither did the RDMD staff who created it. How come this happened? Mauk doesn’t bother to inform his readers. Hopefully the Board will be curious.
Ooops!
Was Daly hoping his $60,000 investment in Townsend and Associates was going to pay off with a big State grant that would cover the true costs to relocate the archives? If so that idea sure bombed big time.
What is inescapable is the conclusion that both the Clerk’s Department and the RDMD deliberately withheld the true financial implications of this acquisition in order to get the Board to go along with it. Is there another explanation? It would also appear that Mr. Mauk would now like the whole thing whitewashed.
So that’s the story. Now, who’s going to do something about it?
View the memo
