The agenda for the August 20, 2013, meeting of the Coeur d’Alene City Council notes that the time allowed for public comments is being reduced from five minutes to three minutes.  This reduction emphasizes the importance of preparing and rehearsing public comments if the purpose of your comment is to inform, persuade, or seek action from the Council.

After addressing the Council on May 18, 2004, on the issue of the Idaho Department of Correction’s placing felons on probation or parole in illegal group homes in Coeur d’Alene, I prepared this guideline to help others prepare to speak.  (I’ve lined out the information that is no longer applicable.)

I’d note that our community’s efforts back then to resolve the State’s illegal placement in violation of City ordinances were and remain ignored by the City, so one can make an argument that preparation is of marginal value when the City chooses to ignore the public input.  While that may be true with the present Mayor and some members of Council, that will hopefully change with the installation of a new Mayor and Council in January 2014.  Preparing and rehearsing will still be more effective than “winging it.”

The question posed in the illustration is “Who cooked the books?”   Apparently, the answer is “Attorney General Eric Holder.”

According to the website Main Justice , “The Justice Department vastly overstated the number of people it criminally charged in a mortgage-fraud crackdown in fiscal year 2012, the department conceded Friday.”

Bloomberg.com’s article was even more blunt in stating, “What a charade. No wonder the government found it so difficult to bring a meaningful number of accounting-fraud cases against bank executives after the financial crisis. Its own books were cooked.”

In short, Holder lied.  And as the Bloomberg.com article went on to explain, “The Obama administration has been on the defensive for years over its lack of decisive, high-profile prosecutions related to the financial crisis. So it leads one to believe that might help explain why the feds have occasionally inflated their fraud statistics: to persuade the public that they were being tough on financial crimes.”

At Monday’s Public Works Committee meeting, Coeur d’Alene City Councilman Dan Gookin proposed that the City Council should have the authority to vote on merit pay increases for City department heads.  In today’s skewspaper article headlined Proposal gets no merit, Press skewswriter Tom Hasslinger sought to portray Gookin’s proposal as nothing more than a potentially unlawful intrusion on the Mayor’s authority.

Look a little deeper and closer at what Councilman Gookin’s effort accomplished.

First, based on Gookin’s effort the public should now clearly understand that the responsibility for high merit pay for City department heads rests squarely on the Mayor and City Administrator’s shoulders.   If the merit pay is unwarranted but has been routinely given, blame the Bloemster and Gabriel.

Second, and this may be of greater importance, Gookin’s raising the issue clearly informs the public that the Council does have and has for years had the ability to control pay through the budget process.    So why hasn’t the Council exercised this stewardship in the past?  Because until Dan Gookin and Steve Adams were elected to the City Council, none of the Council members had the will or the skill to do the diligent line-by-line examination necessary to try and understand where the public’s money has been going.  If they had, and if the City’s Finance Director/Treasurer Troy Tymesen was as competent as the Mayor and some members of Council would like people to believe, then the embezzlement by Sheryl Carroll would likely have been caught earlier or completely prevented.

Well done, Councilman Gookin!

Yeah, I see the similarity now.   Don’t you?

]]Cost to Coeur d’Alene:  About $100,000 – $110,000  (until the first

]]wet then hard freeze of winter annihilates the LEDs…)

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ADDENDUM on August 10, 2013:  Our local skewspaper, the Coeur d’Alene Press, finally reported the story today in an article headlined Like a rainbow in the park.

This morning’s Idaho Statesman skewspaper out of Boise has a story headlined Idaho lands takeover panel to hear from lawyer.  Predictably, the Statesman seeks to diminish the credibility of the speaker, Professor Donald J. Kochan, by referring to him as “a law professor from a private California university.”  Here is Professor Kochan’s curriculum vitae.

The “private California university” is the Chapman University School of Law in Orange, California.   The Chapman University School of Law has a full time enrollment of approximately 480 students, and in 2013 it granted a total of 221 juris doctor and master of laws degrees.

In contrast, the University of Idaho Law School had a full time enrollment of approximately 340 students, and in 2013 it granted at total of 96 law degrees.

Let’s hear it for the Idaho Statesman for trying to uphold the best traditions of news distortion in Idaho.

Outside the political boundaries of Idaho, federal agents and federal prosecutors aggressively strive to protect the integrity of our government by investigating and prosecuting bribes and gratuities alleged to have been offered to public officials or solicited or accepted by them.  Here are some examples of public corruption investigations undertaken by the Internal Revenue Service in FY 2013.

Doing its part to educate and inform the public inside the political boundaries of Idaho, OpenCdA will explain what the federal statutes pertaining to bribery and gratuities.   It won’t change the feds’ political cowardice here, but it will help explain why corrupt officials outside Idaho go to jail. (more…)