A Voter Writes

A reader, presumably from Pomona, wrote us in response to our posts on Three Valleys Valleys Municipal Water District boardmember Xavier Alvarez:

Dear Claremont Insider,

So many of us are disgusted with Alvarez. A recall would be the right thing to do but who has the time. You have to have 10 to 20 people who don't work to get a recall done. You have to file the paper work and write a statement. The city clerk probably won't like the first or second draft of the statement so you will be writing a third. Gathering signatures, my best guess is that 6,000 or 7,000 might be needed. Xeroxing and making sure the the signatures are truly registered to vote. (Notice I did not say legally registered to vote I just said registered to vote) If this was a city council race we probably could get more active but this slime ball will probably get to ride out his term.

Sorry

Well, no one said doing the right thing is easy. That's how voters get stuck with flim-flam artists like Alvarez or Congresswoman Laura Richardson (D-Long Beach). Richardson, a former Long Beach councilwoman who in eight years has gone from the Long Beach City Council to the State Assembly to the U.S. House of Representatives, partly on the strength of endorsements she earned from former California Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez and Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) for her work within the party.

If you haven't followed the Richardson story, she's been in the news lately because of her reputation as a deadbeat with a pattern of allowing homes she owns to fall into default and for failing to maintain her homes so that they become eyesores. A 5/31/2008 LA Times article gave the background on the Richardson story:

After telling a Times reporter she would be interviewed, Richardson declined the next day and instead offered two prepared statements.

"Earlier this year, I was notified that the mortgages on properties that I own were in default," she said. "At that time, I began continuous and ongoing discussions with the lenders to reinstate and modify these loans and to reinstate my ownership of the properties. Since those discussions were initiated, I was not notified of any preemptive sales of any of the properties."

She might want to tell that to James York, owner of Red Rock Mortgage, who bought the three-bedroom, 1 1/2 -bath Sacramento house at a public auction for $388,000 on May 7. He recorded the deed May 19 and has had a crew at the house fixing it up.

Richardson, who bought the house in early 2007 for $535,000, owed about $9,000 in property taxes. She owes Sacramento $154.03 after the city utilities department put a lien on the house for an unpaid bill.

Asked about the congresswoman's statement that she knew nothing about the sale, York said that's an excuse he hears all the time: "She doesn't know what happened, but she's an educated woman who hasn't made her payments for 12 months and she doesn't know why she lost her house? That's the joke."

Neighbors in the upper middle-class Curtis Park neighborhood said they were glad to see Richardson leave because she had let the house fall into disarray.

"I don't care who it is, that's irresponsible to let it go like that," said Sean Padovan, a retired Sacramento police sergeant who lives three doors away. "This is our neighborhood. It becomes personal when it's a few houses down and you're junking up the neighborhood."

Padovan, 61, said that when the grass grew nearly a foot high, he knocked on her door. "I finally went down there and said, 'Would you mind if I mowed your lawn for you?' She said, 'I've been awful busy. Sure.' "

Padovan said his hand mower could barely make it through the grass.

The Long Beach Press-Telegram, which has been on top of the Richardson story, reported this past week that Richardson is an equal-opportunity deadbeat. Not only did she fail to pay her mortgages while lending money to her various political campaigns, but she also failed to pay her auto repair bills, and then racked up over 30,000 in one year on city vehicle that was supposed to be used only for official city business - a vehicle she continued to use after she was elected to the State Assembly:

LONG BEACH - Car trouble takes on a new meaning when it comes to financially distressed Congresswoman Laura Richardson.

In 2005, when she was still on the Long Beach City Council, she left one mechanic in a lurch with an unpaid bill, then later had her badly damaged BMW towed to an auto body shop but didn't pay for any work and abandoned the car there, owners of the businesses said this week.

The next day, Richardson began using a city-owned vehicle - putting almost 31,000 miles on it in about a year - and continued driving the car five days after she had left the council to serve in the state Assembly, city records show.

....In October 2005, her 1999 four-door 740iL BMW had an odd vibration in the front, so she took it to Signal Hill Foreign Auto Service, according to Leo Labreche, the shop owner.

Mechanics there fixed the car and replaced some worn parts, but when Richardson picked up her vehicle, she said she didn't have the money to pay the $735 bill, Labreche said. Because Richardson was a council member, Labreche let her take the car, assuming that she was good for the money, he said.

"She had picked the car up and was going to come back and pay the bill, and she never did," Labreche said.

Labreche said he spent months leaving messages on Richardson's cell phone voice mail, then he got a collection agency involved, but still the bill went unpaid.

"I couldn't get through to her, and then when the collection agency couldn't do anything, I thought, `There's nothing I'm going to be able to do,"' Labreche said.

But on Tuesday, after the Press-Telegram requested an interview with Richardson to discuss the 2 1/2-year-old unpaid bill, she went to the auto shop and paid Labreche, he said.

Similarly, Richardson last week paid off a $150 printing bill owed to a local company following published reports about the debt.

Richardson also settled a bill Tuesday with another mechanic, Alvin's Auto Body in Signal Hill, only this time she came out ahead, in a sense.

About one month after Richardson had taken her BMW to Labreche for work, she got into a car accident that tore up the front left corner of her car, leaving it undriveable.

She initially had it towed back to Labreche for repairs, even though she still owed him money. But Labreche doesn't do auto body work.

So the car was sent to Alvin's Auto Body, which received the BMW on Nov. 17, 2005, according to owner Bob Lillegard.

But Lillegard never heard from Richardson or her insurance company, he said.

"I'd call her office, and they'd say she was too busy," Lillegard said. "I couldn't get through to her."

With Richardson, as with Alvarez, voters too lazy to look into the history and character of the person they're selecting just rely on endorsements from groups and people they trust. Because Richardson's district is safely Democratic, she only had to get her party's nod to win election to Congress. In Richardson's case, the endorsements came from Democratic Party leaders and from unions. If her district had been a Republican one, the endorsements would have come from that party's leaders, from business groups, and from fiscal and social conservatives (see Randall "Duke" Cunningham, former Congressman from San Diego). Same process, different party.

But then, to bring it all home, is that really so different from voters backing Pomona Mayor Norma Torres for the State Assembly's 61st District seat. Or Claremont voters backing an endless string of candidates like current Mayor Ellen "Cookie Monster" Taylor?

While it's true that neither Torres nor Taylor have sunk to the level of criminality of a Xavier Alvarez or the general irresponsibility of a Laura Richardson, they both exhibit the same sense of entitlement and privilege that comes with being elected on the strength of being a good party loyalist rather than having to earn one's position by being a strong, capable candidate concerned with the welfare of the people they're supposed to represent. With Torres, the party is a political one, with Taylor, it's a social network of Claremont power brokers. Either way, we get stuck with incompetents like Torres or bullies like Taylor, who seems to feel that rules only exist for her to apply to other people.

Voters, let's face it, before you start complaining about political gridlock, the liberal or conservative media, failed schools, taxes, affordable housing, or anything else, look in the mirror. All the information you need to make an informed decision in an election is out there. You may have to turn off the Laker game, get off the couch, and do some actual work educating yourself instead of relying on someone else to tell you what a good person that dead beat is.

In the end, dear voters, there's no one to blame but ourselves for the messes we find ourselves in.

The Real Cost of Patronage

Will Bigham had a follow-up to the Xavier Alvarez story. Bigham's article originally appeared in the Daily Bulletin this past weekend and also appeared in the Whittier Daily News.

Alvarez is the Three Valleys Municipal Water District board member who, among other things, falsely claimed he was a Medal of Honor recipient and who is accused of obtaining health benefits for an ex-wife through Three Valleys, an act that could result in a felony charge against Alvarez.

The article quoted Claremont McKenna College political scientist Jack Pitney, who observed that candidates for higher office receive much more scrutiny than those on the local level:

"If he had been running for the state Legislature, or Congress, opposition researchers would have found this information very quickly," said Jack Pitney, a political scientist at Claremont McKenna College.

"It's not hard to find out, for instance, that someone is not on the list of Medal of Honor winners. That's public information.

"But when you run for a low-level office, you often don't have to worry about opposition researchers."

Of course, here in Claremont, the Preserve Claremont arm of the Claremont 400 researches candidates pretty well and publishes those findings in full-page ads the Claremont Courier. So, we have a safeguard here, even if the 400's findings are fabricated.

Pomona Mayor Norma Torres, whose endorsement of Alvarez during his 2006 campaign was a key to Alvarez defeating incumbent Luis Juarez. Torres' defense of her endorsement was that Alvarez was the only one of the two candidates to approach her for an endorsement.

As we've point out in the past, we suspect there's more to the Torres endorsement than a simple favor to the first person in line. Like Vito Corleone in the Francis Ford Coppola movie "The Godfather," certain types of politicians love to build loyalty networks through patronage. Those pyramidal networks depend on stocking the lower tiers with weaker, more pliable people dependent on the largesse of the person at the top.

Call it multi-level marketing; call it a pyramid scheme.

* * *

Of course, Pitney's supposition that higher office automatically guarantees higher levels of scrutiny doesn't take into account the timelag factor. It can take news media years to catch onto some stories.

Nancy Vogel in a series of articles in the Los Angeles Times in October and November has focused her attention on California Assembly Speaker Fabian Núñez (D-Los Angeles). Núñez is a 1997 Pitzer grad with degrees in political science and education.

In October, Vogel wrote about Núñez's junkets to Europe, paid for by your tax dollars, which Núñez defends by saying that he's doing the people's work on those sorts of trips, generating trade with Spanish and Italian companies.

Those work trips, naturally, get expensive, what with the dollar at an all-time low against the euro and all, which probably explains the $5,149 meeting cost at wine merchant Cave L'Avant Garde near Bordeaux, France. Of course, the $2,562 in shopping trips for "office expenses" at Louis Vuitton are harder explain.

Last Friday, Vogel had an article about Núñez's use of a charity called Collective Space to raise money from special interests. The article went on to say that Nuñez personally directed some of the charity's expenditures. By donating to a non-profit, the interest groups and individuals were able to give more than the $7,200 limit that would have applied to donations to Nuñez's own campaign fund. And, the donors could deduct the money because it went to a charity:

Those donors include Zenith Insurance Co., AT&T, Verizon Communications Inc., the California Hospital Assn., the state prison guards union, Pacific Gas & Electric Co. and Blue Cross of California -- all groups with high stakes in legislation.

The money was used for events including "Assembly Speaker Fabian Nuñez's Toy Drive," "Assembly Speaker Fabian Nuñez's Soccerfest 2006," "Assembly Speaker Fabian Nuñez's Inaugural Legislative Youth Conference" and airplane flights for 50 children from Nuñez's district for "Assembly Speaker Fabian Nuñez's Sacramento Student Summit," according to state documents.

According to Vogel's article, the amounts run through Collective Space totaled almost $300,000. The charity, was suspended as a non-profit corporation by California officials for failing to file tax returns.

Is this really a bad thing, though? Didn't the money go to a good cause? Yesterday, an LA Times editorial titled "Patronage for Sale" put the entire matter into context. The editors write:

It's great that kids got iPods and airline tickets. It's not so great that his office, rather than the charity,dictated what events his corporate and labor donors paid for, or that they were advertised as "Assembly Speaker Fabian Nuñez's Toy Drive," "Assembly Speaker Fabian Nuñez's Soccerfest 2006" and "Assembly Speaker Fabian Nuñez's Inaugural Legislative Youth Conference." The speaker, and the many lawmakers who engage in similar practices, stand on the wrong side of the line that divides conscientious constituent support and blatant, discredited political patronage.

We see this all the time here in Claremont. Look at all the fine charities and non-profits in town: the Claremont Community Foundation, the Claremont Educational Foundation, Uncommon Good, the League of Women Voters, and others all doing good works, yet all being used as resume builders for up-and-coming, ambitious Claremont 400 candidates. At that point, you have to question the reason for the good works and the sincerity with which they are done.

This sort of behavior is scalable, occurring at every level of government and on both sides of the political aisle. And lest Republicans begin to gloat at Nuñez's unmasking, the right is just as guilty of peddling favors. People in glass houses, you know.

Which leaves all of the rest of us out in the cold. All those special interest donations, whether $1,000 or $10,000, or whatever, amount to bits of sand and gravel in our governmental works, adding friction bit by bit to decision-making, until the whole thing seizes up.

Is it really any wonder, whether we're talking about the Claremont City Council, the California legislature, or the U.S. Congress, that things have come unmoored, and the average citizen has little or no connection with those doing the governing and that voter participation rates have fallen (29 percent in the last City Council election, even lower in today's school board vote)?

Voter disaffection and alienation are side effects of the patronage business, and community engagement continues to erode in the face of an ethically challenged political process. We can, like Fabian Nuñez, pretend that there's nothing wrong with this, that it's just a cost of doing business, but we here at the Insider are more inclined to trust T. S. Eliot, who had Thomas à Becket say to his tempters in "Murder in the Cathedral,"

The last temptation is the greatest treason:
To do the right deed for the wrong reason.