Brilliant reporting! The Water Agency has historically been a BS operation, and the BOS have always taken advantage of it.

I understand the critics, but please identify the target before you fire.

Someday soon the BOS will face a huge crowd of County employees and retirees.

Strikes are a last resort, abd not always bad if there is just cause.

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14  8

Yes, the money is stolen from us. Its our money stolen by a gang of criminals who call themselves “authority.”

10  6

Or you can just waste your time posing comments and being jealous and hope that social security will be there when you retire. Good luck.

14  15

And this time it’s not just taxpayers who are holding the bag: it’s the County’s employees.

The Supervisors and the Water Agency have been using County Pension Funds as their private piggybank. They’ve invested $45 million of those funds against Fund policy, the deal turned sour, and the Supervisors and the Water Agency are trying to cover it up. This is large scale fraud.

Here’s what happened.

The Water Agency operates as a kind of Automated Teller Machine (“ATM”) for the Supervisors and their bosses, the campaign contributors and private interests who actually decide who gets what in Sonoma County.

The Water Agency in the ordinary course confects bogus no-bid contracts as the disguise for its role as bagman for County insiders. The Water Agency’s $95,000 payment to our erstwhile Assemblyman just scratches the surface of this practice.

This practice continues.

Witness the current $115,000 consulting contract on Sonoma Clean Power. No real work was done; and when challenged to explain this no-bid/no-work contract, the Water Agency attempted to cover it up with clumsy fabrication. The problem with this one-off approach to payoffs is its modest scale. It’s hard to keep the County’s system of white collar fraud in minor key when the opportunities are so great. As in, the $45 million fraud in Sonoma County Energy Independence (“SCEIP”); as in, SCEIP as a pilot project for the billion dollar fraud in Sonoma Clean Power “Clean Power”).

The facts are stranger than fiction.

SCEIP is County program to lend homeowners and businesses money to install solar panels and energy retrofits. Clean Power, the next step, is the billion dollar version of SCEIP.
The Water Agency and the Supervisors borrowed $45 million from the County Pension Fund to jump start SCEIP. This loan was against County Pension Fund policy. This policy says: only invest in short term liquid investments that are highly secure. The Fund’s loans to SCEIP are effectively 20 year private loans that have no liquid trading market. Why would the Supervisors approve this exception to Fund policy? Because the Water Agency said: don’t worry, this is just a bridge loan; we’ll get the banks to refinance this loan and you’ll get the pensioners’ money back quickly. Besides: this money will create investments that will lower unemployment and will drive down CO2 emissions in the County—everybody wins.

That’s not quite how it worked out:

• The federal housing authorities blacklisted SCEIP loans from secondary market trading in the mortgage finance markets
• The banks won’t finance the repayment of loans back to the Pension Fund
• The County Pension Fund is stuck in a bad deal and can’t get its money back
• The County Pension Fund already has an unrecognized loss on its books from this loan but the County is concealing this loss from the pension holders and the public
• This act of concealment is fraud
• Market funding sources, as it turned out, can fund energy efficiency projects more cheaply than SCEIP
• SCEIP is commercially dead with almost no new loan activity
• With respect to its promised benefits, SCEIP has increased County jobs by 70, at a cost of $400,00 per job; this has driven down unemployment by .4% (.004)
• SCEIP has decreased C02 emissions by 6000 metric tons annually, or .4% of the annual CO2 reduction goal of 1,500,000 metric tons
• The Water Agency has propped up SCEIP by investing an added $15 million of its rate payer money and increased administrative headcount
• SCEIP’s overhead is crushing its modest revenues; SCEIP is a money loser

SCEIP isn’t a clean energy initiative; it’s not an employment booster; it’s training wheels for the Water Agency’s billion dollar piggybank—Sonoma Clean Power– for dispensing bogus no bid contracts to County insiders.

A senior Water Agency executive at a recent Taxpayer’s Association meeting stated publicly that the Water Agency had no role in these events: that the Water Agency was just a passive investor. The Water Agency and the Supervisors are now at pains to pretend SCEIP never existed.

SCEIP should not disappear. The $60 million wasted in SCEIP—in an environment where we can’t muster $60 million to repair our roads—is a window into the culture of white collar fraud by which the County is governed. It’s a precursor to fraud on a vast scale: the empty promise of Sonoma Clean Power.

SCEIP is also a clear signal to every citizen in the County that County governance is predicated on insider advantage—and that nobody else, not the public; not the tax payers; not the rate payers; and not our County employees and retirees, matters.

20  4

Where I work for the County we have a manager that only has “One” employee to manage, this person receives well over 100k with all the perks, nice huh?

We need this changed ASAP! The line staff are not the issue, the over bloated fat management is and the are the foxes guarding the hen house so to speak. Let’s get smart taxpayers – this has to stop!

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13  9

http://www.sacbee.com/2013/02/02/5159901/calpers-worker-arrested-in-identity.html

An employee of the public employee pension system is right now being accused of identity theft / taking out loans in another person’s name.

12  10

The BOS needs, as a first step, to be removed from the pension system totally. They also need their pay cut to $600 per month and thats it.

24  8

Yet NOBODY is upset with their Unions!

I wonder if that will change once the checks stop coming?

I suspect not.

No, it will be MY fault for not paying enough taxes!
Go figure??!!

If I lost my income because my boss was so lousy at his job that nobody would do business with our company anymore, can I file a “Union Grievance” demanding that customers come back anyway?

Are you starting to see the difference between Public Employee Unions and Private Sector Unions?

30  8

Hey…anyone catch the criminal in Chicago stating he’s going to push the unfunded retiree medical cost to Obamacare? Sweet, now us taxpayers in CA, who obvious don’t pay enough already, will have to shoulder the bill for people who never worked for us and no longer work at all! Just wait until EVERY city and county in America does this. Thank goodness Obamacare is budget neutral! And thank goodness government programs are funded with money that grows on trees.

Anyway, the Stupid Bowl is Sunday. A great distraction from reality.

24  6

So I guess more unfunded pension obligations is what would make them happy? Tell county employees to grow up and face reality. The public at large is not getting pay raises, or doesn’t that count? Should we be going on strike also??

Have the BOS grow a pair and start doing something about this problem besides stalling and delaying. Or would that be asking too much??

37  10

Still waiting for the Board of Supervisors to cut their ridiculously high pay and completely eliminate Pension Benefits for Board Members.

Being a board member is not a career so why they get a Pension is beyond me.

State Legislators are paid far less and haven’t received Pension Benefits since they phased them out in 1999.

44  4

As a SC retiree (23 years, non-mangement)I can agree with your comment.

But I would point out that past and current members of the BOS are voting on their own retirement pay – and they are paid a whole lot more than line employees.

I KNOW how they operate. They don’t earn it.

I’d also point out that the stock markets are approaching all-time highs again. I question the investment strategies of retirement fund managers, who also recieve pension benefits.

If you have a vested interest in your own pension, you better the hell perform or get your ass fired.

And then there are the private sector thieves who are NOT IN JAIL. We’ve got to fix that, too.

I still don’t understand why a pension fund worth over $2 billion needs any help from current government budgets.

The PD – or someone – needs to explain why this is so. Retirees are not greedy takers – pensions were part of our employment agreements for decades.

NOBODY wants to fix this situation more than retired employees!

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