[PenultimateManStanding]

Of course they are innocent until proven guilty, but San Diego is going financially belly-up and 6 city officials have been charged with conflict of interest. These officials were on the city pension board. They have jobs such as comptroller, auditors, union mucky-mucks, fire captain, police firgerprint experts, human resources directors, etc. They were involved in increasing pension benefits for city workers. They wound up giving themselve big increases in their own benefits. Check out the numbers: the pension monthly increases they voted for themselves were all about 10% resulting in monthy pensions of $9,703, 5,636, 4,016, 7108, 10,862, 5,096. Their pictures are all on the front page of the San Diego Union Tribune and they aren't smiling. Now it just so happens that huge pension benefits are a major factor in the financial distress of the city. Now if guilty, what should happen to these greedy yuppies? If I were the judge I would sentence them to ten years picking lettuce under the hot sun in Imperial Valley.

[heyhoser]

Public officials should be punished twice as hard as a citizen for "terrorist actions against public trust" or whatver Bushian term they want to use.

[PenultimateManStanding]

Evidently, the pension board is not supposed to have any input in benefit levels and they worked out a deal involving underfunding of the pension fund which upped the benefits as part of the package and then voted themselves exempt from state conflict of interest laws. Its all a murky legal grey area and such cases rarely go to trial. I'll bet you dollars to donuts that if there were no financial crisis that they never would have been charged. The closer you look at this stuff the more you wind up scratching your head and saying 'huh?' They may be guilty of nothing more than gross incompetence and greedy folly. I don't know.

[AlCzervik]

Pen, you've got nothing on Detroit's so called hip hop Mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick. The City is almost in receivership. The City is paying out $25,000 per year to lease a Navigator for the Mayor's wife, when the car would cost $57,000 to purchase.
http://www.detnews.com/2005/editorial/0 ... -68655.htm

He is also running wild with the City credit card.
http://www.freep.com/news/locway/kilp17e_20050517.htm

I also must mention the fact that he allegedly had a party with strippers at the mayoral mansion and one of the strippers who was allegedly at that party is now dead.

Nice earring, idiot.

[PenultimateManStanding]

Reminds me of that old song 'Detroit City':

Home folks think I'm big in Detroit City
From the letters that I write they think I'm fine
But by day I make the cars
By night I make the bars
If only they could read between the lines!

It a race to the financial bottom. Who will win, San Diego or Detroit? Place your bets folks. Any other towns out there on the brink?

[Tyler_JC]

Like my school's Superintendent who wants to update his office and hire a secretary while the school is 8% overbudget for the year (and it's only getting worse). He also recently bought a new car and a new Plasma TV...

[PenultimateManStanding]

Somebody is culpable here but the criminal charges may offer the city a way of getting out of the huge pension benefit deal agreed to in 2002. Again the deal was made because the city, reeling from the dot-com bust, couldn't cover their funding obligations to the pension funds. The fund trustees agreed to allow underfunding in return for the increased benefits which wound up enriching many members of the pension board. If you follow the money, it may be that the pension board folks were duped and are now taking the fall. But they won't really take the fall if the past is any guide. Its evidently a shell game, the pension board members wqill get a slap on the wrist and the taxpayers will get the shaft.

[PenultimateManStanding]

Lookee Here! More song lyrics. Tombstone Blues by Bob Dylan:

The sweet pretty things are in bed now of course
The city fathers thay are trying to endorse
The reincarnation of Paul Revere's horse
But the town has no need to be nervous

The ghost of Belle Starr she hands down her wits
To Jezebel the Nun she violently knits
A bald wig for Jack The Ripper who sits
At the head of the Chamber of Commerce