MPV arc 4.7.10 Mona LACCD bonds

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10/15/09
The rest of the City is screaming because the Building &Safety Department is putting them through the wringer on the addition of a broom closet to their garage and the same department doesn’t give a rat’s rear end about the safety of school children...read more

The public school children of Los Angeles just took another one in the chops from the big guys. Will the Mayor and his bunch of school yard bullies....read more

Miki accused of Racism by ???, Community College District’s plan to “stonewall” residents...read more

Quick, what does Downtown Playboy Prince Antonio, uber playboy ex-president Bumpin’ Bill, anti-playboy ex VP Green Al, $50,000 sandwiches and squeaky clean President Cool-O have in common? A hint, two attractive ill fated ingenues are involved, but no sex please - unless you call a three way political deal that insiders are buzzing about, the ultimate politician sex...read more

LOCAL COMMUNITY COLLEGE POLITICOS & BUREAUCRATS ARE ILLEGALLY USING TAX BOND DOLLARS FOR MAYOR!
MAYOR’S PET PROJECTS BIG BENEFICIARIES OF COLLEGE BOND ABUSE. You read it here first and months later they had to admit it was true. Los Angeles Community College District (LACCD) told they are abusing bonds by their own bond attorney.

WE HAVE BEEN TELLING THE LACCD BOARD OF TRUSTEES AND THEIR FIRST AMENDMENT ABUSING PRESIDENT, MONA FIELD, that they are illegally wasting tax payer bond funds by making tenant improvements for the Mayor’s pet projects. We have to admit WE WERE WRONG - It ‘s worse than we imagined, we didn’t think they would go this far !!!

At their March 10th meeting they were told tenant improvements could not be paid out of bond funds, along with a long list of other things they have been throwing bond funds at everything they could think of from self glamorizing videos by
high priced PR
firms to travel
expenses
to pick up
awards the
PR firm
drums up
for them.

Wanted

What has happened to once proud defender of free speech LACCD Board of Trustees President Mona Field? There’s nothing worse than a lefty gone >>right>>>>
...read more

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The Mayor and Mona-Political School Yard Bullies stealing students lunch money

to Illegally

Subsidize the Mayor’s Pet Projects?

The VDK Coalition has unearthed documents showing that, so far, LACCD is spending nearly $7 million in Community College bond funds rushing completion of the Historic Bakery Building while custom building offices and illegally furnishing those non Community College projects with plush equipment, buying computers, copiers and furniture for the Mayor’s pet unemployment projects. All of this is forbidden by the Ca constitution. The document search is still on.

It is illegal to use those bonds to, in effect, subsidize the Mayor’s projects. The Coalition is calling on the LACCD to immediately stop construction and allow an independent investigation to determine the full extent of the bond abuse. Instead they have they only spent more taxes illegally speeding it up, compounding the illegal action. Documents have been found that show that LACCD is paying huge premiums in building costs to rush the stolen Campus to completion before it can be stopped. They are gutting the original state approved class rooms.

There is no evidence of a signed lease - so how do they know what the Mayor’s programs want? Are there back room meetings and shady deals? There has been no Board of Trustees’ vote to sign a lease with the Mayor for the tenancy of these unemployment programs. The only logical (if logic can be said to have a place in the rabbit hole of the LACCD) is that the Board of Trustees (ironic name in this context) have made a decision so firm, in advance of any vote, that they are allowing the spending of millions of dollars to build offices to the specifications of tenants they haven’t officially leased to. This is, at the very least, evidence of a Brown Act violation of enormous magnitude.

There is no sign of any mechanism that would allow the District to recapture these exorbitant costs. The LACCD estimates they will see about $100,000 a year of “profit” from these leases. It looks like they will spend far more than the 5 years -$500,000 (their promised amount of time the site will be leased before returning it to use as Community College satellite Campus) worth of profits they estimate these leases would bring in. It will cost millions to take out the Mayor’s custom offices and buy new equipment for actual Community College students to use. The equipment illegally bought for the Mayor will be pretty beat up and useless at the end of five years. What if there is no more money - it’s going fast at the rate the Board bond spending party is burning through it? Guess the poor students will just be out of luck since the Board has spent their money illegally on the Mayor. It’s not likely he’ll replace it for them.

We are left to try and figure out whether the “Build LACCD “ department headed by Larry Eisenberg is amazingly poor at math or whether it is more “shenanigans” - to put it mildly. In any case the very least the Board can do to show some respect for the laws regulating bond use is to halt everything until they can get a handle on the magnitude of their admitted misuse.

This admission of bond abuse represented a huge vindication for the Van de Kamps Coalition. They are dedicated neighborhood volunteers who have suffered name calling, inaccurate accusations of lying and the distain of the Board and the District...all because, as it turns out, they were right.

The Coalition has stuck with this for 10 years. First saving the historic building and then working to bring a Community College to the underserved Northeast area.

I’ve mentioned this many times and it is in the release, but for full disclosure - I am a proud member of the Van de Kamps Coalition.

- Miki

LACCD Board President Mona Field Admits To Misuse of Bond Funds As The Van de Kamps Coalition Demands Expedited Investigation Of Its Allegations Of Other Abuse Of Bond Funds

Coalition Alleges LACCD Board Illegally Handed Bond-Funded Community College Satellite Campus Over To Charter School And Non-Profit Workforce Centers Supported By Mayor Villaraigosa’s Office 
(March 12, 2010 Los Angeles) At its Board meeting on Wednesday, March 10, 2010, after revelation by the district’s bond counsel of District staff’s misuse of unknown amounts of bond funds, the Los Angeles Community College Board of Trustees (“LACCD”) admitted to problems with administration of its $5.7 billion dollar bond fund capital construction program. The stunning admissions by Board President Mona Field and Trustee Georgia Mercer of routine and daily misuse of voter-approved bond funds led the Van de Kamps Coalition, a community-based advocacy group, to renew its call upon the LACCD Citizens Bond Oversight Committee to take immediate proactive action.

“We believe the Citizens’ Bond Oversight Committee must urgently bring in California’s Attorney General, Jerry Brown, and Los Angeles County District Attorney, to commence a proper independent investigation of alleged wrong doing in the conversion of the $72 million Los Angeles City College Satellite Campus at the former Van de Kamps Bakery into a general fund money making scheme of District officials,” said Coalition Steering Committee Member Miki Jackson.

The Van de Kamps Coalition is a community-based organization that acted to save and preserve the historic Van de Kamps Bakery when it was threatened with possible demolition more than a decade ago. In 2000, former State Senator Richard Polanco, bolstered by a study that showed an urgent need for adult, for-credit educational opportunities in Northeast Los Angeles, obtained $3 million in seed money from the State of California to help LACCD purchase the site and develop a Northeast Satellite Campus. In 2001, the LACCD Board, Los Angeles City College Academic Senate and Shared Governance Groups endorsed and began planning to construct and open the Northeast Satellite Campus of Los Angeles City College at Van de Kamps.

Just last month, at the last Citizens’ Bond Oversight Committee meeting, Polanco accused District officials of “shenanigans” in the last-minute conversion of the Van de Kamps campus from a community college facility to a commercial tenant-leased facility. “It’s a bait-and-switch,” Polanco told tight-lipped Bond Oversight Committee members. At the end of that meeting, the Oversight Committee voted to merely ask the District’s General Counsel if the Oversight Committee could begin an investigation of the Van de Kamps situation with access to its own independent investigator and legal counsel. State law requires a community college district to provide reasonable assistance to bond oversight committees from non-bond funds and unlike LACCD, the bond oversight committee for Los Angeles Unified School District has its own investigator and legal counsel.
  At Wednesday’s meeting, bond counsel Lisalee Anne Wells, of the law firm of Fulbright & Jaworski, told the Board of Trustees that large sums of bond money had been spent “on matters not directly related to campus construction, such as travel and public relations.” Wells did not indicate whether the improper expenditures she identified included the hundreds of thousands of dollars now being spent to redesign the Van de Kamps Bakery building to suit the desires of Mayor Villaragosa’s unemployment programs. Unless halted by current investigations, those unemployment programs are slated in just a few months to go into the Van de Kamps building instead of community college classes.

“Since last summer, our group of community volunteers has been ringing the fire bell of potential misuse of bond funds. District officials, especially Board President Mona Field, have disparaged our organization and ignored the improper redirection of bond-funded community college facilities at Van de Kamps,” said Laura Gutierrez of the Coalition. “The vote of the Bond Oversight Committee to commence an investigation at Van de Kamps, and the public statements of the district’s bond counsel that funds are being misspent, contradict claims by Board President Field that the bond program is ‘a success, although the District missed a few details.’ Hundreds of thousands of dollars and the misdirection of a $72 million campus into the hands of the Mayor’s pet projects and favored non-profit organizations is not a few details,” she said, “it’s wholesale fraud.”

Perhaps in an effort to politically paper over its own neglect, on Wednesday the Board of Trustees took an action to create a new Office of Inspector General, reporting to themselves. “Things are closing in on the Board,” observed Coalition member Andrew Garsten. “For months, the LA Times has been preparing a multi-part series regarding misspent bond funds. Our Coalition filed an environmental lawsuit to halt changes at Van de Kamps without proper review. The Bond Oversight Committee agreed that an investigation of Van de Kamps is warranted. Does anyone think an Inspector General appointed and fired by this Board of Trustees will have any real credibility to conduct impartial investigations?” he observed.

Attorney Daniel Wright, who was retained by the Van de Kamps Coalition and who also spoke last month to the Citizens’ Bond Oversight Committee, suggested that the creation of the Office of the Inspector General is a sleight of hand by the District. “The Oversight Committee asked the District’s General Counsel Camille Goulet if there were funds to pay for an independent investigator and separate legal counsel as LAUSD has. She said she would get back to the Oversight Committee at the next quarterly meeting, but one wonders if the creation of the Inspector General under the thumb of the Board of Trustees is a prelude to denying funding to the Oversight Committee to have its own investigator and legal counsel.”

Netty Carr, one of the founding members of the Van de Kamps Coalition, remains skeptical of the Board’s sincerity. “Why isn’t the LACCD Citizens’ Bond Oversight Committee calling a special meeting and asking us to present the substantial evidence we have gathered?” she said. “And we know that Attorney General Jerry Brown’s office agreed that there was a problem at Van de Kamps, but then Brown’s office claimed it had no money to continue an investigation. This makes no sense to us as state law gives the Attorney General the power to recover the cost of an investigation from LACCD!” she observed. Shaking her head, “It seems today that elected officials can rip off the taxpayers and Bond Oversight Committees and the elected law enforcement officials just turn a blind eye. Where is the integrity our government once had?”

Read more about the Van de Kamp’s saga, click here
the drawing of the building to go to their web site

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