Republican candidate for governor Meg Whitman Shows Her Sleazy Side
Meg Whitman, the Republican candidate for governor, is airing a 60-second radio ad that tries to link the financial scandal in the city of Bell (Los Angeles County) with her opponent Jerry Brown's tenure as mayor of Oakland - the state's eighth-largest city.
What happened in Bell
Chief administrative officer Robert Rizzo resigned after the Los Angeles Times revealed that he was paid more than $1.5 million a year in salary and benefits by the city of about 40,000 residents, which is one of the poorest in the nation.
The police chief made more than $450,000 a year and the mayor and three City Council members pulled down $100,000 a year for part-time work.
Public employee salaries in the city are being investigated by Brown, the state attorney general, and Steve Cooley, the Los Angeles district attorney, along with other state and local officials.
Whitman's ad says:
What happened in Bell "happened before - when Jerry Brown was mayor of Oakland."
One of its claims:
-- Brown supported $500 million in higher property taxes and "pushed for higher fees and taxes on garbage collection, parking and even cable TV."
Facts:
-- The new fees and parcel taxes required a two-thirds vote of approval from voters in Oakland - and some received nearly 80 percent approval for funds to improve Lake Merritt and pay for the city's museums and cultural institutions. They were not imposed by fiat.
Another claim:
-- "In Jerry Brown's Oakland, city workers were paid for 22,000 hours that they never worked."
Facts:
-- The figure comes from a wrongful termination lawsuit filed in 2008 by former Oakland city controller Larae Brown. A trial is pending. But the office of City Auditor Courtney Ruby, in an independent 2007 performance audit, said the city never made such a finding. Likewise, officials in the city administrator's office said, "We have no data to support that claim."
Another claim:
-- "The total number of workers making $200,000 a year went up 700 percent."
Facts:
-- It rose 740 percent, a jump attributed to a small pool of employees - most of them firefighters - who were chalking up more than $100,000 annually in overtime in the 2005-06 fiscal year. Two years before that, five Oakland city employees made more than $200,000. In 2005-06, that number jumped to 42. Of Oakland's top 25 earners that year, all but four were firefighters. The others were police officers, an engineer and former city administrator Deborah Edgerly, who Jerry Brown hired.
Another claim:
-- "Under Jerry Brown, the Oakland city administrator gave herself $60,000 in bonuses. And she cashed in over $180,000 in vacation days. Not in comp time but in a very big check."
Facts:
-- City officials say Edgerly, a city employee for 20 years, had hundreds of hours of vacation and sick time accrued when she was terminated - and for which the city was contractually obligated. But the city administrator office's final accounting shows that Edgerly's total payout for benefits and time accrued from the city was $90,000 - not $180,000.
So to recap - when right-wing conservative Whitman is not lying about Brown she is writing another check to herself for millions to buy herself a governorship, she's making economic plans that would cripple California's economy. Whitman seems to be another typical Bush/Cheney conservative - no ideas and no honor.
