On the Water Gravy Train. Prima Ballerina Edition.
Last week the Register’s Watchdog Teri Sforza did a piece on members of the opaque Metropolitan Water District Board who had racked up huge travel expenses soldiering onward for you and me in the great water wars.
Who’s well up on the list? Fullerton’s representative, Jim Blake, for one. Another is Fullerton resident wannabe Linda Ackerwoman who lives in Irvine but tried to carpetbag her way to fame and forune as our Assembly representative. This egregious pair racked up bills of $18,302 and $13,356 respectively, in 2009-2010. The biggest line item was lodging in for both.
It seems that Mrs. Ackerwoman got up on her offended hinders to defend the indefensible – with the usual blather about how hard she works for us, and the rigors of travel to engage herself in all these hyper-complicated issues. Of course the real truth is that if this job were so damn complicated she couldn’t do it in the first place. More truth: these trustees are hand-held and led along by their staff upon whom they are completely reliant. Which is no doubt why Madame Ackerwoman voted to jack up by 20% the rates requested by the aquacrats in the spring of 2009. See, the relationship is pretty symbiotic.
The fun Ackerwoman quote from the Sforza piece? Here it is: “the whole world of water is ballet.”
Wow! Thanks for that, Linda. Now go slip into your swimsuit!
And lest we forget Jim Blake, who has been on the Board since before water was even created, isn’t it time to switch to a more reliable, less expensive model?
Damn, Ackerwoman racked up $18K for travel? Where the hell did she go?
Imagine what expenses she would have racked up if she was in the Assembly?
The voters in the 72nd AD were wise to send her packin’ back to Irvine.
What is the reaction from Fleischman, Cunningham and others on this matter? You can’t go silent too long in defending the indefensible!
2 rules to live by; never confuse cronyism and nepotism with intelligence and talent, never self-promote, if you are any good at what you do others will notice. and if people lived by these 2 rules then they wont get their feelings hurt when they are exposed to be nothing more than a self-promoting slob
“Like most big companies, Metropolitan pays for mileage and lodging when it is business related. It’s a public agency, and I’m a public servant. And I am very mindful of the money our ratepayers have to send and it’s a very complex business. We are encouraging people to conserve water, and when people do conserve water, we don’t sell as much and that hurts bottom line. Ballet. The whole world of water is ballet.”
Bureaucratic crazy-talk. Get this woman to the hospital before she hurts someone.
Relying on my memory alone is risky but it seems that the FIRST official action by our Assemblyman Chris Norby was to introduce a bill to allow “Water Board” members to campaign and raise (unrestricted?) amounts of campaign money (i.e. BRIBES? what else would this be?) for the various phony “public servants” who get paid to represent us in these opaque deliberations, which accomplish such great things as shutting down the water flow to huge areas of California farmland.
Water issues are obviously vital to our State but a system which makes such “public service” into a series of successively and increasingly “enriching” stupid jobs for unqualified political hacks is an actual scandal (this “water business” was one of the several phony things that Ed Royce’s Dad got himself involved in – as part of their phony RINO family business).
I actually thought that ALL of these “public” and electives offices were VOLUNTEER jobs, the old “dollar a year man” type of thing.
It is just a money scam activity which, OF COURSE, leads the various elected officials to view the phony rip off featherbedded over compensation to Police and Fire and Teachers Union “workers” (politicized THUGS) as something none of them will criticize, change or touch.
I thought Norby’s first act was to ratify the appointment of Abel Maldonado as Lt. Gov.
Excellent precision total recall. I think that his first vote was to ensure Maldonado was the PHONY RINO (all set to LOSE) on the ballot as the Republican incumbent Lt. Gov.
But Norby’s first legislative (bill) proposal was the great new “law” letting the water board candidates line up campaign bribes.
“Thanks” – having a lousy memory makes life more fun; everything is always new.
BTW, that picture of Jim Blake is about 20 years old. He’s actually about nine inches tall.