Posted on 02/27/2011 12:49:01 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
...effects of decades of neglect were all too visible at the nine far-flung campuses. Roofs leaked...Seismic protections were outdated.
In 2001, leaders of the Los Angeles Community College District decided to take action. With support from construction companies and labor unions, they persuaded voters to pass a series of bond measures over the next seven years that raised $5.7 billion to rebuild every campus.
...money would ease classroom crowding...make college buildings safer....technology would enhance learning...financial oversight would be stringent.
That is what was promised to Los Angeles voters.
....But costly blunders by college officials, contractors and the district's elected Board of Trustees have denied the system's 142,000 students the full potential of one of California's largest public works programs.
This picture emerges from scores of interviews and a review of thousands of pages of district financial records, internal e-mails and other documents.
At East Los Angeles College, construction of a grand entry plaza with a clock tower degenerated into a comedy of errors. Heating and cooling units were installed upside down, inspectors found. Concrete steps were uneven. Cracked and wet lumber had to be torn out. A ramp for the disabled was too steep for wheelchairs, and the landmark clock tower listed to one side.
Fixing the problems helped drive construction costs from $28 million to $43 million.
A new health and science center at Valley College was marred by defective plumbing, cracked floors, leaky windows and loosely attached ceiling panels that threatened to crash down in an earthquake.
The district paid a contractor $48 million to build the complex, but had to hire others to correct the problems and finish the project — for an additional $3.5 million.
At least those buildings were finished, eventually. At West Los Angeles College,...........
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
In 2005 the voters fought back in a Texas school district.
School bond formula faltering - (worried school construction companies campaign for votes)
Taxpayers fought back: Winning enough votes for multimillion-dollar school building programs used to be easy for school districts that followed a few simple rules:
•Schedule the election on a day when there's nothing else on the ballot, ensuring low voter turnout;
•Hit up school construction companies for campaign donations and spend the money on big newspaper ads and yard signs;
•Use school buildings for polling locations and encourage teachers and parents to vote.
It worked perfectly for the Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District's $713 million bond election Dec. 11, in the middle of the holiday season. School construction companies and other Cy-Fair vendors gave more than $70,000 to Citizens for Cy-Fair Bonds. Voter turnout was 4 percent, and the measure passed handily with 75 percent of the vote.
The people who run the Spring schools did all those things before last weekend's vote on a $385 million bond proposal that included eight new schools, a competition swim center and a laptop computer for every high school student. It would have cost the typical homeowner an extra $100 next year and $200 the year after.
But when the ballots were counted, Spring ISD voters had handed the school district a lopsided beating by a 3-1 ratio. Voter turnout was 10 percent, high for a bond election…..”
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The way to slap down these bond election tax hikes???
More VOTERS need to show up. DON'T leave it to someone else because the SOMEONE ELSE voting are UNION members dead set on picking you clean!
Feb 26, 2011: First blow to Emanuel team (transition aide quits after ethics violation revealed)
[excerpt] "[Judy] Erwin, the former executive director of the Illinois Board of Higher Education, admitted using her office e-mail and phone while working on a campaign committee for presidential candidate Barack Obama, using staff resources to plan her trip to the 2008 Democratic National Convention and engaging in campaign fundraising activity while on the job, the state's Executive Ethics Commission ruled in a decision filed Feb. 16.
.....The inspector general investigation found that Erwin repeatedly violated the state prohibition on political activity between July 2008 and February 2009 and "co-opted" her staff by involving them in her activities. "The atmosphere for IBHE [Illinois Board of Higher Education] employees must have been heavily colored by Ms. Erwin's political activity on the job," the ethics board said. It found "particularly troubling" her explanation that she made a campaign contribution to a state representative who was the chairman of the higher education appropriations committee: "This suggests that she was responding to a real or imagined pay to play incentive within state government."
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Her punishment??? (Will she lose her pension from her 30 years employed by state government????)
[excerpt] "The ethics commission said she cooperated with the investigation by the executive inspector general, reimbursed the state, agreed to pay a $4,000 fine and promised to never work for the state again. She resigned Aug. 15.
... "We had not seen the decision," Emanuel spokesman Ben LaBolt told the Tribune late Friday. "Judy Erwin is a friend of Rahm's with a wealth of experience and he'll continue to consult her public policy knowledge." [end excerpt]
My guess is the work was so shoddy as it was done by either unions or illegal aliens.
Or maybe both.
Who could doubt millions of these billions have ended back up in Democrat pol pockets?
Teachers union dues in CA work to overturn voters while at the same time picking their pockets and dumbing down their children.
PART TWO: A new complex riddled with ills that are costly to cure
""I was speechless," says Don Gauthier, who teaches in the Allied Health and Science Center, about the district's celebrating an award recognizing the contractor for its work on the complex. "These are the people who have ... caused us so much agony." "
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2008: LOS ANGELES [excerpt] A steel tower wrapped in a spiraling ribbon is one of the most striking features of a new arts high school set to open next year.
Its $230 million price tag is another.
The Los Angeles High School for the Visual and Performing Arts, with space for some 1,600 students, most from surrounding low-income neighborhoods, is the architectural crown jewel of the district’s ambitious $20 billion building campaign.
Its spacious studios and 995-seat theater encased in austere concrete are enough to make anybody wish they were a young clarinetist in the district.
Supporters call the five-acre campus a beacon for a reformed educational system, a magnet for good teachers, and a means of raising dismal student performance in the nation’s second-largest school district.
“Do these kids deserve this school? Absolutely,” said Monica Garcia, board president of the Los Angeles Unified School District.
Extravagance?
Critics, however, see the school as a wasteful extravagance for a district where more than a quarter of the 700,000 students remain in temporary classrooms and many existing buildings are in dire need of renovations and repairs...... [end excerpt]
Democracy is a bad form of government that uses a massive PR campaign to convince us that a candidate should get office because he/she shares the goals and aspirations of the majority of the electorate. What we are seeing playing out in this instance and Wisconsin and elsewhere is that even as bad as Democracy may be, governance by unelected bureaucrats is worse.
The larger government gets (a DEMOCRAT PARTY GOAL), the more removed our elected officials become from the actual role of governing. The faceless bureaucrat managing other bureaucrats takes the written laws and translate them into regulations and semi-decipherable language in the law books and then enforces them.
SIZE MATTERS and in this case of our civil masters, we need to bring them to heel. Large government is almost always incompetent government because they are not spending their own money and as such they fall prey to crooks and flim-flam contractors. It is the very nature of the beast and if we don’t stop it now we will face the whirlwind.
Voters better wake up and realize that this is just the tip of the iceberg, that this sort of racket is being perpetrated all over our country.
Sounds normal. Waste, fraud and abuse doesn’t produce firings, arrests and jail time but it does bring exposes’, excuses and demands for more money.....Yep, just normal.
Please do not continue to post excerpts past the basic initial limit. Especially from this source.
Indeed!
They’ve gotten so fat and full of themselves on our money that they feel they can pass laws telling us how to live our daily lives — very nook and cranny of our being belongs to them now. I guess if we keep letting them, they figure we certainly can’t do it ourselves.
Elites!
Enough!
Okay. I won’t.
In my disgust at the illegal spending and jobs given to family members that is described later in the article, I posted beyond the allowable text from the source. And FR’s Administrator correctly pulled those posts.
But as good as the LA Times is for exposing this criminal activity, they put WASTE in their headline not THEFT, nepotism and political kick-backs.
Follow the source link and get an eyeful of this corruption.
“My guess is the work was so shoddy as it was done by either unions or illegal aliens.”
I doubt either. I’ve had plenty of work done by illegals (only way to get houses built in Texas) and they do fine, as long as their lead speaks English and they get paid fair. Union boys can also do a good job and some of them are very skillful (overpaid, but skilled).
...Naa, we forget things that are not in the news as much these days. The real question is quotas and set-asides. Just how many of these business had to be “minority-owned” (which works fine for small operations, like home construction but falls on its face for large jobs - and generally minorities out there for large jobs means people politically-connected), or “women-owned” (which is so sick it’s not even worth commenting on).
Watch what happens in California when there’s a big earthquake and you’ll get an idea of what the contractors out there can do, if they’re free to do it. In the Bay Area, in 1989, after the Oakland Earthquake, a upper section of the Bay Bridge dropped on to the lower section. In one year, they had that rebuilt and also got about 5 years worth of other work done (lots of it get-ahead)...mostly because the bridge was closed. But it would have taken AT LEAST a year just from request for proposals to work authorization, had they followed the ‘usual’ process.
In Los Angles, an overpass section of the Santa Monica freeway dropped on to the street below (Northridge Earthquake, 1994). If you’ve seen that part of the freeway, especially from underneath, you realize this is not your typical I-70 freeway in rural Kansas, it is MASSIVE and it dropped a huge chunk down. It took a phone call from the governor and ONE MONTH to have it removed and rebuilt and re-opened.
There are two Rolodexes in the California governor’s office. One is a list of the steps needed to perform a public works project, the other is a list of companies that can get a job done practically overnight with zero mistakes after one phone call. They usually use the first list (except for emergencies)...let them go back to using the second list and the problems will end...but fat-chance with the Democrats in charge.
I've been in Commercial Construction in the Chicago Metro Area for 41 years now. I went from 'low;y Draftsman' (/s), to 'practical engineer'(1), Project Manager and Chief Estimator. I have been involved in the construction of everything from 54 Story High Rise buildings (57 with the Mechanical Penthouse), to small additions for a Village city hall - and NEVER heard of something as completely messed up as this.
The things mentioned in the article are almost unbelievable. I'm 'series'. If one went on a mission to sabotage these projects you couldn't do all these things if you tried.
And I don't blame the Trade Unions. Every person goes through a long apprenticeship - except Laborers, and the Union work is TOP NOTCH. They DO take pride in their finished work. And the Main Contractor mentioned in the article is no dummy, I've worked with them and they are experts at Construction Management, and tough SOBs if you fall behind or your work, or it doesn't meet the Spec's. (NOTE: the Trade Unions are not the SEIU hacks)
So if anything, it has to go back to The School Board and the individual College Administrators. But someone should have stopped their nonsense pdq, like the Architect(s). After the 'Owner', it's the Arch who is the ultimate Boss. And trust me - they let you know it!
So I really am at a loss how these things could happen. In the Chi Metro Area I know they wouldn't. And that's a fact.
(1) 'Practical Engineer' is (was) a Chicago term. It's used (or was) for people who've learned Mech Engineering on their own w/ OJT. They just don't have that sheepskin that says BSME (I've always been embarrassed to use/say it).
ps; The charge of nepotism mentioned in the article is a straw man IMO. The Construction Trades are a tight community as there's only so many contractors. People recommend 'put a word in' for each other, or friends and relations, all the time. It is not illegal.
“And the landmark clock tower leaned to one side” - ummm...would that be to the left?
How does having a grand entry plaza and clock tower improve student learning?
The plaza and tower were built because the government has the police power to take the money for it from the citizen.
As you drive by any government building ask yourself, “If that were a private business, doing similar work, what would the building look like?”
Think about the type of work that is actually done within the:
legislatures
courts
schools
libraries
Answer: If the above were private business this work would probably be located in very modest offices that look like very ordinary industrial park buildings!
The government's business is not done in modest building because they have the police power to take the money from the citizen. Business can't do that.
Oh...Isn't it amazing that our oldest and most prestigious universities manage to lovingly keep up and use modest buildings that are 200 or more years old? Yet...Our county had to have a new $70 million dollar taj mahal for its high school students and a building that is a mere 50 years old now sits vacant.
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