Pringle’s Cash Cow Stops Giving Milk
Thanks to Friend Tony Serra for providing a link to a Sac Bee story about Anaheim’s former Mayor-for-Hire Kurt Pringle quitting the California High Speed Rail Board.
Could it be true? Sure looks like it. According to the story he wants Governor Brown to be able to appoint someone who represents his point of view. I wonder what that point of view might be. Ethics? Brown, who as Attorney General took note of Pringle’s conflicts of interest over many years may have asked him to go.
So Der Rat is jumping off Das Sinkingboot; timely, too, now that all the revelations of incompetence, waste, misinformation, and decreased funding are dragging the HSR to a well-deserved grave.
The funniest thing in the piece is the glowing valediction to Pringle from fellow HSR barnacle, Tom Umberg, who in the past has proved there is no moral morass too low for a politician to sink into, and who recently penned a pro-HSR op-ed piece in the Register that was so incompetent I’m not going to link to it to save Umberg any more embarrassment.
Oh no! Now we can expect another self-funded tribute for Der Kurtmeister.
The Kurtster made a strategic error here. He miscalculated the amount of money the HSR vendors would be kicking back to him by thinking he’d rake in the same $$$ he did as Anaheim’s Mayor and an OCTA Director. These guys aren’t stupid as they knew HSR would be a disaster, would find no private investment (which the Kurtster pro0ved when couldn’t bring in to fund ARTIC), and then he couldn’t deliver the contracts as he’d done in Orange County.
He’s taken a huge hit on his “reputation” and will fortunately never ever have much clout in California. He’ll just be sitting back chewing his fingernails, a disgusting habit from his childhood, that he’s never broken. Political consulting’s a tough business, Kurtster, and your local competition going to take you apart.
The real deal here is that Pringle wants to score some bucks directly off HSR before it finally tanks which he can’t while on the Board. Plus he needs to be able to work all the angles for the ARTIC boondoggle – lots of OCTA gravy to be scored.
And Anahiem beauracrats, under the astute leadership of Hairry Sidhu , meanwhile push ahread with ARTIC’s futuristic design that includes “a large, covered archway that will rise above the passenger platforms 189 feet high. …… constructed of a modern membrane similar to the “Water Cube” made famous at the 2008 Summer Olympics in China.” Its just dandy when money is no object. Now that’s why we pay our public servants the big bucks