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?
There's a little stick in back that makes my head swivel.
Sometimes its hard to tell whether certain people are stupid or lazy. Or maybe a little of both. Take, for instance, County Supervisor Bill Campbell who is currently the Chairman of the OC Children and Families Commission.
As a commissioner he has approved big PR contracts to his political pal Matthew J. Cunningham whom he also appointed to the County Parks Commission. And I mean really big contracts. And apparently free of either competition or real scrutiny.
Part of Cunningham’s job is to ghost write pro-commission “op-ed” pieces for politicians across the political spectrum who either can’t be bothered, or who are too illiterate to do it themselves. The topic of these scribblings is always the same: protect the tax revenue!
Here’s an invoice where Mr. Conservative Republican Wordsmith is wordsmithing hard for – Bill Campbell!
And looky here, we’ve uncovered the fruits of Mr. Cunningham’s labors in the OC Register.
There are some fun quotes about rigorous audits and Grand Jury approbation that come a-tumblin’ out of the old mannequin’s mouth, but these are my faves:
“I can say unequivocally that if state government emulated the prudent, sensible and farsighted operations and budgeting practices of the Children and Families Commission, there would be no state budget crisis.”
Uh, yeah, like handing out a $200K per year PR contract that enables your pal to put semi-intelligent words in your mouth for $200 an hour.
“…while our commission contracts out as many functions as possible so more dollars go toward funding services rather than bureaucracy.”
See comment above. Contracting out unnecessary PR crap for $200 an hour services like facebook updates, going to lunch with Steve Greenhut, and passing out toothbrushes. Newsflash Bill – that robs funding. Contracting out for unnecessary services is incompetent. Directing that largess to a political crony is despicable.
“Taxpayers should cast a critical eye on the idea of abolishing such county Children and Families commissions, which are locally accountable and manage their budgets responsibly…”
Uh huh. Yeah. Sure, Bill. You pass out hundreds of thousands annually for lobbying and PR most of which seems to be mysteriously directed outside Orange County. Well, Campbell also seems to be one of the masterminds behind the unintentionally hilarious Harry Sidhu for Supervisor campaign. And that, in a nutshell, really tells you all you need to know about that sawdust head.
And finally a free wordsmithing tip to the Wordsmith: when you’re going to put words in the mouth of numbskull try to avoid words like “panoply” and “unequivocally.”
Was a ghost written “op-ed” worth the $3,200 that Cunningham charged the OC Children and Family Commission? You be the judge. Here is the article that found it’s way into some obscure journal. Notice how the supposed writer, Shawn Steel, starts off by announcing his opposition to prop 10. Sound familiar? Then begins the fight to save Rob Reiner’s legacy.
But really. How could this have taken the better part of 20 hours to produce? That’s two and a half freakin’ days! The Declaration of Independence was written faster.
The irony of the “we know the value of a buck” schtick written by somebody billing the taxpayers $200 an hour to hand out toothbrushes is profound.
And why can’t Shawn Steel write his own op-eds if he actually cares about this issue instead of wasting the CFCOC money? Of course he may not be very bright. For some reason he is a supporter of Hide and Seek Sidhu.
Anyway, here’s the Pacific Strategies billing that reflects the effort on that masterpiece. So what does that work out to, ten bucks a word?
This tidbit harvested from the Pacific Strategies billings to Rob Reiner’s OC Children and Families Commission was way too good to pass up.
Here we see Mr. Conservative Pundit Matthew Cunningham hard at work setting up and then eating lunch with former OC Register editorial writer Steve Greenhut back in 2008. Looks like Executive Director Micahel Ruane went along. Maybe Cunningham acted as interpreter between the libertarian Greenhut and the social services bureaucrat Ruane. I guess that’s what they call a business lunch.
I wonder if the suffocating welfare statists persuaded Greenhut of the need for their commission.
It looks like we can add another skill to Clerk-Recorder Tom Daly’s public money squandering resume. As previously reported here, not only does Daly excel at wasting public money and doling out jobs to his contributor’s relatives, it appears that he also hands out no-bid contracts to campaign contributors as well. It turns out that the contracts are more of what we’re used to: highly questionable and unaudited relationships, and of course, ultimate failure.
Get a load of this one.
Between 2002 and 2007, Christopher Townsend, who is the president of Townsend Public Affairs, contributed a total of $2600 to Tom Daly’s campaigns. During this period, Townsend was awarded two $60,000 no-bid contracts for “consulting services.” Townsend was awarded these contracts without bidding because of their supposed know-how in obtaining grants from the California Cultural Historical Endowment. What for, you ask?
In late 2005/2006 the grant application was for $150,000 to go to “planning” the archives expansion in the old Courthouse building in Santa Ana. Apparently the contract and the grant application were approved solely on the authority of Daly himself – that’s right, no Board of Supervisor’s oversight.
The big problem was that the grant application was for a building over which the “Manager of the Year” Daly had no authority. Apparently it is controlled by the Harbors Parks and Beaches Department that lets the Clerk-Recorder use it for some of his functions. And seemingly they had no clue what Daly was up to.
Even though Daly got the grant he wanted, the County had to turn the money back in April, 2006 because of the inability of Daly to communicate what he was doing with the other County bureaucrats. The official excuse was “unanticipated space and stakeholder concerns.” Translated from Bureaucratese into English: Big Daly F-up.
Well, there’s $60,000 down the toilet.
Undaunted by failure, late in 2006 the indefatigable Daly was before the Board of Supervisors asking for another $60,000 no-bid contract with Townsend. The motive was the same, but by now Daly’s covetous eye likely rested on the wretched building at 433 West Civic Center, a $2.1 million liability that he would talk the Board into acquiring in 2007. We shared that mess with you, here. The second grant application ended up with a big goose egg, however the purchase of the money pit on Civic Center Drive proceeded headlong, full speed ahead.
A river of red ink runs through it...
Another $60,000 chunked into the water hazard.
Oh, dear me. Another Tom Daly fiasco; another example of incompetence and cronyism his pals in the media won’t touch; yet another mauve feather in the dismal repuglican headdress of Daly’s admirer, John Lewis (& Co.) who keeps insisting that the egregious Daly is some sort of “fiscal conservative.”
And good grief, we’ve only just scratched the surface. Be sure to stay tuned.
Apparently some Sidhu-supporting John Lewis tool calling himself “Grover Cleveland” has misappropriated my name and is making anti-Nelson squawkings over at the Mauve County blog that seems to have become a haven for the semi-literate backers and hackers of Hide and Seek Sidhu.
This is an imposter, make no mistake about it. Grover Cleveland was tough, smart, and honest – three adjectives that will never be applied to either Harry Sidhu or his leech-like campaign handlers who are only in it ’til Mother’s Milk runs dry.
Better score some while you can...
Lying, carpetbagging, union stoogery? Guess again! Not Grover Cleveland. Plus, he would never support an assclown.
Geez, these dunces are too dumb and lazy to come up with their own blog handles.
I would humbly like to thank the Academy for this recognition...
The other day Orange County’s Most Hypocritical Repuglican (yes, that is one Hell of an achievement) Matthew J. Cunningham coughed up this Red County hairball in criticism of Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez:
How very congressional. And also ironic to listen to Loretta Sanchez speaking to a crowd of immigrants who came here seeking the American Dream,, even as she has been voting to make American more suffocatingly statist like the countries they left.
Is he really that breathtakingly unaware of the irony of the mouthpiece for the OC Children and Families Commission dumping on “statism.” Or could it be that he figures that whoever reads his post won’t know about his real day job; and if they do any comments revealing that fact will be deleted.
Aw c’mon Mr. C from Suite C, ‘fess up. You really, really dig suffocating statism; you profit from it and you shill for it. In fact, it’s just about your only real source of income.
Own it.
P.S. Wordsmiths “at the top of their profession” proofread their copy for embarrassing typos.
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.
View the memo
