Whipped Cream Difficulties

We have previously noted the election results in the notoriously corrupt California city of Vernon.

Well, there’s a new twist. The Vernon Chamber of Commerce asked the LA County voter’s registrar to throw out ten ballots; the CoC claims that the voter rolls included “more than a dozen people” who did not live in the city and were not eligible to vote. The registrar refused to throw out the votes, claiming the evidence provided by the CoC was insufficient.

So on Tuesday night, the Vernon city council, instead of certifying the election results, decided they were going to conduct their own hearing into the claims.

By the way, the council and CoC supported Luz Martinez, who has ties to the Vernon city government. Martinez lost by four votes to Reno Bellamy.

Of note:

Bellamy also alleged that Vernon used taxpayer dollars to fly one of the current councilmen, William Davis, back from his vacation in Italy so he could vote in favor of the new election ordinance, which passed, 3-0. When asked during Tuesday’s council meeting whether the city funded his flight, Davis said, “I don’t want to answer.”

In other news, the NYT would like for you to know that experts do not see municipal bankruptcy as a trend. However, if it is a trend, experts see it as being mostly confined to California.

“Municipalities operate with a lot of autonomy in home-rule states such as California, and that autonomy leads to the freedom to get into trouble,” analysts for Trident Municipal Research said in a report issued Wednesday.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 13th, 2012 at 7:31 am and is filed under California Über Alles, Clippings, Law, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.