The present CHP commissioner is Joseph A. Farrow, who has been with the CHP since 1979 and was appointed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2008 to succeed his boss, Mike Brown, after a series of scandals. In 2007, then-Assemblywoman Bonnie Garcia, R-Cathedral City, accused Brown of tolerating a sordid atmosphere at CHP’s Inland division, including looking the other way when a senior CHP leader seduced a subordinate whose husband was deployed overseas. Garcia said Brown acted to oust two CHP leaders in her district for their gross unprofessionalism only after he was told that she and then-state Sen. Gloria Romero, D-Los Angeles, were going to Schwarzenegger to complain.

Whom did Brown appoint to shape up the troubled Inland division? Tim Clark, a CHP senior officer who had already been implicated in a scandal of his own related to close ties between senior CHP officials and vendors. This is from a Sacramento Bee story in December 2006:

All told, the state spent nearly $50 million on the new equipment, effectively excluding competition from other brands. As a result, California’s sky and highways today are branded: Eurocopters monitor its cities and landmarks from above, while BMW motorcycles patrol below.

 

As the CHP assembled those fleets, its bosses accepted hospitality from the companies, including visits to the companies’ European headquarters, dinner at an upscale Sacramento restaurant and a party at the home of a company lobbyist that featured a flyover by a CHP helicopter, the investigation found.

 

Commissioner Dwight “Spike” Helmick, the CHP’s top boss at the time, even got a jacket from BMW the same month the department awarded a contract to a BMW dealership.

Mass pension-spiking tolerated at highest level

Helmick, who was CHP commissioner from 1995 to 2004, is central to the criticism of the CHP over its internal culture. He and his proteges were the key figures in the biggest CHP scandal of this century. The Bee broke the story in 2004. Here’s the AP summary:

SACRAMENTO – Fifty-five of the 65 high-ranking officers who retired from the California Highway Patrol since 2000 filed workers’ compensation claims within two years, entitling them to lucrative disability settlements and medical pensions with tax-free income.

 

The practice is so widespread among the roughly 150 CHP chiefs and captains that rank-and-file officers have dubbed it “chief’s disease,” boosting costs in a department that pays the highest rate in state government for injuries and medical pensions.

The payments are in addition to routine pension benefits that let CHP officers retire at age 50 with up to 90 percent of their pay.

Nearly 70 percent of CHP officers retire on disability, and the department pays among the highest percentage of workplace injury claims, The Sacramento Bee found. The combination cost taxpayers $75 million two years ago.

“It turns out we need to be policing the police,” said state Sen. Jackie Speier, D-Daly City, chairwoman of the Select Committee on Government Oversight.

CHP Commissioner D.O. Helmick, who is being nudged into retirement next week by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, has asked the Public Employees’ Retirement System to determine if he, too, should be granted a disability pension because of injuries from vehicle accidents in the 1970s and 1980s, said spokesman Tom Marshall.

CHP officials ‘unable or unwilling’ to cooperate in 2007 probe

Acevedo, the well-regarded Austin police chief since 2007, won a $995,000 judgment from the CHP and the state after establishing that he had been subject to egregious retaliation by top CHP officials for objecting to the pension spiking. The California State Personnel Board concluded that he had made a persuasive case of mass perjury among top CHP officials.

But a criminal investigation by Sacramento County District Attorney Jan Scully was stymied. In 2007, her office said top CHP officials were “unable or unwilling” to testify about details related to the mass pension spiking.

I interviewed Acevedo on a number of occasions. He said Helmick and his predecessor, Maurice Hannigan, encouraged a macho, secretive culture in which leaders and rank-and-file officers alike believed it was OK to look the other way when wrongdoing occurred.

Hannigan was notorious for punishing CHP officers who arrested or cited his daughters for driving offenses, including suspicion of DUI.

By Katy Grimes

The current buzz around the Capitol City is Senate Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, will run for Sacramento District Attorney in 2014.

Steinberg, 53, has worked as an Employee Rights Attorney for the California State Employees Association prior to running for public office in 1992. Since then, he’s spent all but two years holding political office: Sacramento city council member, 1992-98; state assemblyman 1998-2004, then the state Senate from 2006 until now. He’s term-limited out of office in 2014. It’s the common musical-chairs routine, staying in office but switching seats because of term limits.

The CSEA, a public employee labor union, is affiliated with the SEIU, and represents more than 141,000 state employees.

His biography says, “Prior to state public service Steinberg worked for ten years at the California State Employees Association as an employee rights attorney, and as an Administrative Law Judge and mediator.” But the dates are not listed.

His bio on the Sacramento Bar Association reads differently: “For the six years prior to his election to the Assembly in 1998, Darrell Steinberg balanced his duties on the Sacramento City Council against the demands of his legal career, first as an employment lawyer and later as an administrative law judge and as a private arbitrator and mediator.”

“When Steinberg was elected to the City Council in 1992, he cut his time at CSEA to half-time in order to meet the demands of public service,” the Bar Association bio says. “In 1994, he left CSEA to become an administrative law judge for the State Personnel Board. Two years later, Steinberg joined Mackenroth, Ryan & Fong, a Sacramento law firm in which one of his law school friends, Rob Fong is a partner. While on the City Council, Steinberg maintained a private arbitration and mediation practice at the firm. Since being elected to the Legislature, Steinberg has remained of counsel there.”

Steinberg’s professional history has little of the relevant experience usually expected of a District Attorney.

Sacramento’s current District Attorney, Jan Scully, “worked as a deputy district attorney in the Sacramento County District Attorney’s Office. “Five years later, Jan became a supervising attorney, supervising various prosecution teams including Adult Sexual Assault, Sexual Assault and Child Abuse, Felony Trials, and Research and Training,” her bio says. Scully was and is the real deal.

With the significant rise in crime across the state thanks to Gov. Jerry Brown’s prison realignment law (AB 109), Sacramento needs a tough-on-crime DA, and not a political office placeholder, waiting for higher office.

It is important to note Steinberg also has taken out a committee to run for Lieutenant Governor. It is obvious that he is not going back to the private sector, either way, despite his affiliation with Mackenroth, Ryan & Fong.

The music is playing and we’ll soon see where he tries to sit down.

By Katy Grimes

The crime is one thing — the cover up makes it worse. But in the case of the state Parks and Recreation agency, it could be that the lack of prosecution of the crime is the real crime.

Late in the day on Thursday, the Sacramento County District Attorney Jan Scully announced she would not pursue criminal charges against California state parks officials “because of a ‘failure to identify any crime’ by the state attorney general.”

“At the outset, we note that both the reason and the basis for referral to our office is unclear,” Scully said in a letter to Deputy Attorney General, Michael Farrell. “There is no indication who your office considers to be suspects, and if so, what crime they may have committed.”

If the DA can’t identify who committed the acts of fraud and covered up the millions, did the Attorney General’s office even do their job?

Attorney General does incomplete investigation

“The Attorney General’s Office in this instance clearly asserted that authority when it assigned a deputy attorney general to question individuals regarding the unreported funds.  It is thus unclear why the matter has been referred to our office at all, and whether your office intends to retain its historic authority in the prosecution (if that be warranted here) of such cases,” Scully said.

“The referral to us contains only transcripts of some of the witness interviews; not the final report (apparently for reasons discussed below), and no supporting or related documentation.”

Scully continued: “Second, the investigation was not conducted in a manner consistent with or conducive to its use for criminal evaluation purposes.  Specifically, the investigation consisted of the interview of 40 current or former state employees.1

“Thus, your referral package to us does not include the compelled statements.  Still, it does not appear that any effort was made in this process to identify and differentiate potential targets or defendants from mere witnesses, nor to assure that statements taken from targets did not serve as the basis for developing further information as the investigation progressed, nor to meaningfully segregate out any such ‘product’ information.”

The Attorney General’s office handed the DA an incomplete file, and never bothered to identify who the perpetrators were.

Ironic crime

While the State Parks and Recreation department, under agency Director Ruth Coleman’s leadership, had been soliciting private donations to keep state parks open, top agency employees were bilking the state for vacation pay buyouts, and covering up a stash of cash totaling more than $54 million.

I wrote about the illegal vacation buyout scandal in the State Parks and Recreation agency in “Scandalous state parks department needs privatization.” I questioned who it was that authorized the checks that were paid to the parks employees, and said that everyone involved should be brought up on charges.

It doesn’t take an Attorney General to peel back the layers of this onion. So was this negligence or another deliberate cover up by the AG?

The scam(s)

The scam goes like this: In the past, state employees have been allowed to sell unused vacation time back to the state for cash payouts. But these employees hadn’t received the proper authority to do this from the California Department of Human Resources.

They did it anyway, and someone at the state approved the checks cashing out the vacation time.

The allegations of stashed $54 million have greatly upset the many groups that worked tirelessly with state and local officials to try and save these parks. The discovery that the budget situation wasn’t as they were told merely added insult to injury. A quarter-cent sales tax measure in Sonoma County was even recently shelved in light of the secret special fund discovery.

“The alleged multiyear misreporting by DPR officials of tens of millions of dollars of fund balances in Governor’s Budget documents is unacceptable,” the Legislative Analyst Office stated in a recent report about the ongoing special funds issue. “The Legislature must be able to rely on the accuracy of such budget documents, which are an important part of the annual decision making process.”

Statewide, park volunteers, donors and non-profit organizations entered into public-private partnerships to save the parks.  They raised funds, donated their time, and performed maintenance on state parks.

During this time of crisis, the Parks Department Director Ruth Coleman testified to the Legislature about the need to close the 70 parks and lay off agency staff. She has since resigned, and placed the blame on senior administrative employees, while insisting that she did not know about the secret special funds accounts or the vacation buyout scandal.

But as I wrote in “State Parks Director: Negligent or Incompetent?,” there are numerous current and former Parks Department employees who claim that Coleman knew about the special fund accounts, and knew about the vacation buyout scheme. The Parks and Recreation Department scandals were common knowledge in some state government circles.

 ‘Special funds’

The state has more than 500 “special” funds, which are funded through fees that we all pay for services, schools, environmental issues, on products, in our utility bills, and at the checkout counter at many stores.

These special funds were ostensibly created to help pay for specific programs. However, with the spotlight on the Department of Parks and Recreation’s two secret special fund accounts, which the Department of Finance and State Controller insisted they had no idea existed, it is clear that investigations and audits into these funds are desperately needed, as well as the other 570 special funds.

DA tosses case back to Attorney General

After the AG punted the incomplete case to the Sacramento DA, with little or no information, , the DA obviously had no choice other than to toss the case right back.

“If your office conducts a criminal investigation and then determines that it appears a crime has been committed, that a specific suspect or suspects are identified as having committed the crime, and that the case can be proved without Lybarger information (or its product) from the target suspect(s), our office will then consider whether it is proper to file the charges and issue the warrants that you request,” the DA said.

Case closed on one of the biggest scams in California state government?

read Scully’s letter here