OpenCdA has followed the criminal trials of several public officials in Bell, California.  Their actions have been accurately described as “Corruption on Steriods“.

However, the city of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, will soon be looking for a new police chief, and Bell’s former Chief Randy Adams sounds like he would fit in perfectly in our city.

It will take some creative accounting to match the salary Adams received in Bell, but we’re sure that Coeur d’Alene’s Mayor and City Council has the vision to find a way.

The problem with rubber stamps is that sometimes people use them for the wrong reasons at the wrong time.

That’s what the city of Bell, California, found out when the state controller audited the city’s books recently.  The city’s auditing contractor, Mayer Hoffman McCann, “… audits the books of dozens of government agencies …” according to a December 22, 2010,   LA Times article headlined Audits of Bell were ‘rubber stamp,’ state controller says.  The article quotes California State Controller John Chiang as saying, “”MHM appears to have been a rubber-stamp rather than a responsible auditor committed to providing the public with the transparency and accountability that could have prevented the mismanagement of the city’s finances by Bell officials.”

The headline on the December 21, 2010, article in the LA Times was even more blunt:  Bell’s auditors should have spotted most of the alleged corruption, state controller finds.

Fortunately, what happened in Bell could never happen in Coeur d’Alene.  Right?

In July and August this year OpenCdA put up several posts about the municipal corruption in cities of Bell and Vernon, California.  These posts had to do with municipal officials lining their pockets with exorbitant salaries and benefits at the expense of unwitting, low- and medium-income city taxpayers.

Now an alert OpenCdA reader has provided information that Mayor John (Juan) R. Noguez of Huntington Park, California, may have tried to interfere with the city police department’s investigations of major donors to Noguez’s campaign. The October 31, 2010, The Washington Times article written by reporter Jeffrey Anderson, is headlined Signs of municipal corruption spread in L.A. suburbs.  If accurate, the story explains how public officials use law enforcement and police unions for political purposes.

The scandal that has erupted in the Los Angeles suburb of Bell, California, (population 38,000) is an example of how predatory, self-serving city officials will loot a city treasury if the townspeople trust them too much and don’t pay attention to what the folks at city hall are doing.

On Thursday night, the city’s Chief Administrative Officer (salary $800K), Police Chief (salary $457K), and Assistant City Manager (salary $376K) resigned after a contentious public meeting in front of irate townspeople.  Not surprisingly, the Mayor and City Council initially defended approving the outrageously high salaries, to which the townspeople responded, “Recall them, too!”  (more…)