Vulture lawyers feeding on high-speed rail

Corruption in all directions
High-Speed Rail is nothing more than a "full employment" act for lawyers looking to drain dry both sides.

• By a pure accident of fate, the trial lawyers fully fund the Democrat Party that demands the useless pork barrel rail system that will employ an army of lawyers for years on end.
• A perfect circle of corruption.
• The property rights of local people are being crushed in order to line the pockets of lawyers up and down the state.

Real estate attorneys are seizing a monumental opportunity as the People's Republic of California lumbers ahead with its high-speed rail plans in the central San Joaquin Valley.

The Fresno Bee reports that with 1,100 or more pieces of property in the path of the proposed route between Merced and Bakersfield, lawyers who specialize in eminent domain cases could see business spike over the coming months as the state's High-Speed Rail Authority starts trying to buy land for rights of way.

A sign posted at a home close to the train's proposed
route near Hanford, in Kings County.

Read more here: http://www.fresnobee.com/2012/12/25/3113242/valley-land-a-likely-issue-for.html#storylink=cpy

"I think there's going to be a lot of attorneys who have never handled an eminent domain case who will suddenly be experts," said C. William Brewer, an eminent domain specialist with the Fresno law firm Motschiedler, Michaelides, Wishon, Brewer & Ryan.

Up and down the Valley, the rail authority anticipates spending tens of millions of dollars to buy the land it needs in Merced, Madera, Fresno, Kings, Tulare and Kern counties. The agency hopes to begin construction next year on a stretch of about 30 miles from northeast of Madera to the south end of Fresno -- the first portion of what is ultimately planned as a 520-mile system linking San Francisco and Los Angeles.

But some vocal property owners, including farmers, are loathe to part with their property and have vowed to force the state to use its power of eminent domain -- a potentially costly and time-consuming ordeal.

Read more here: http://www.fresnobee.com/2012/12/25/3113242/valley-land-a-likely-issue-for.html#storylink=cpy

Eminent domain, or condemnation, is a legal process by which a government agency can declare a public need for property and sue to acquire it if the government cannot reach agreement with the landowner. A judge decides whether the agency is entitled to the property; in a second phase, a jury decides the fair market value and other compensation due the owner.

Read more here: http://www.fresnobee.com/2012/12/25/3113242/valley-land-a-likely-issue-for.html#storylink=cpy

KFI 640 AM John and Ken on California's High Speed Rail

The rail authority last week identified four companies that it plans to hire, at a cost of $34 million, to negotiate the rights-of-way purchases in the Valley: Hamner Jewel Associates of Pismo Beach, Continental Field Services Corp. of Virginia, Universal Field Services of Oklahoma, and Golden State Right of Way Team in Sacramento.

Those four companies will be tasked with not only negotiating with property owners to buy their land, but also to survey, appraise and perform environmental assessments on the properties, handle utility relocation, and provide relocation assistance to businesses and homeowners that will be displaced by the line.

Amtrak Rail Map.
California already has a rail system in place.
But leaving the current system in place means
there is no new tax money to steal.

After the state appraises a parcel, it can make an initial offer to a landowner. The owner has the right to have his own appraisal done at the state's expense.

But if there is a chasm between what the state wants to pay and what the owner believes he or she is due, the state can proceed with a public hearing on what's called a resolution of necessity to seize the land. Negotiations, however, can continue all the way through the process, even into a trial.

"These public agencies typically send out a right-of-way agent, and these guys are pretty savvy," Brewer said. "Their job is to try to talk the property owner into accepting the initial offer and discourage them from talking to an attorney."

Attorneys don't come cheap. Some charge based on their billable hours invested in a case. Some charge a contingency fee based on a percentage of the amount ultimately recovered, while others base their contingency percentage only on what they successfully gain for their client above the government's original offer.

In some instances, if a judge determines that the government's offer was unreasonably low, the court can order the state to pay the property owner's legal fees as part of the award.

Read more here: http://www.fresnobee.com/2012/12/25/3113242_p2/valley-land-a-likely-issue-for.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.fresnobee.com/2012/12/25/3113242_p2/valley-land-a-likely-issue-for.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.fresnobee.com/2012/12/25/3113242_p2/valley-land-a-likely-issue-for.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.fresnobee.com/2012/12/25/3113242_p2/valley-land-a-likely-issue-for.html#storylink=cpy

(Fresno Bee)

Chevron moving 800 California jobs to Texas

Texas gets 800 more California jobs

• More taxpayers leave the People's Republic.
• Insane Socialist Democrats attack and attack the "evil" oil companies that provide natural gas to heat our homes, oil for our economy and good paying jobs.
• Being of low intelligence, Democrats fail to understand that you need taxpayers if you want to fund your la-la land Socialist welfare state.

SAN RAMON, Calif. — Chevron Corp. is moving 800 jobs in the San Francisco Bay area to Texas.
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The shift of about a quarter of the petroleum giant's San Ramon headquarters staff will take place over two years.

The San Francisco Chronicle says the employees, most of them in technical positions dealing with information and advanced energy technologies, will be transferred to Houston.

Chevron notified employees in an email.

Chevron was founded in California in 1879.



San Ramon will remain Chevron's corporate headquarters, where there are currently about out 3,500 employees. Another 3,000 Chevron employees work elsewhere in the San Francisco Bay area, most of them at the company's refinery and technology center in Richmond.

The jobs that will move to Houston come from five organizations within Chevron dealing with information technology, advanced energy technologies and business development.

In recent years, Chevron and its competitors have placed more emphasis on oil exploration and production, known as the "upstream" end of the oil industry. High petroleum prices have made pumping and selling oil far more profitable than refining it into gasoline, known as the industry's "downstream" side.

Chevron's business investments reflect that trend. The oil company, America's second largest, plans to spend $36.7 billion on large capital projects next year. About 90 percent of that money will go toward upstream operations - building facilities to extract oil and natural gas from the earth - while 7 percent will be devoted to downstream.


Read more: (sfgate.com)          (KTVU.com/news)

The future of California

$483,581 in pay for one policeman

The Rape of the Taxpayer
Police are supposed to stop rape.  Instead police around California eagerly join in a rape of the taxpayers.

• Outlandish pay and pensions for government workers with no money to pay for them.

California Highway Patrol division chief Jeff Talbott retired last year as the best-paid officer in the 12 most-populous U.S. states, collecting $483,581 in salary, pension and other compensation.

Talbott, 53, received $280,259 for accrued leave and vacation time and took a new job running the public-safety department at a private university in Southern California. He also began collecting an annual pension of $174,888 from the state reports Bloomberg News.

Union-negotiated benefits, coupled with overtime that can exceed regular pay and lax enforcement of limits on accumulating unused vacation, allow some troopers to double their annual earnings and retire as young as age 50.

The payments they get are unmatched by those elsewhere, according to data compiled by Bloomberg on 1.4 million employees of the 12 states. Some, like Talbott, go on to second careers.

Comrade Governor Brown hasn’t curbed overtime expenses that lead the 12 biggest states or limited payouts for accumulated vacation time that allowed one employee to claim a $609,000 check last year for accrued leave at retirement.

California’s liability for the unused leave of its state workers has more than doubled in eight years, to $3.9 billion in 2011, from $1.4 billion in 2003, according to the state’s annual financial reports.

Inflated Earnings

California’s highest-paid state troopers make far more than those in other states, with overtime and lump-sum payouts that inflate earnings, data compiled by Bloomberg show. They also enjoy a retirement benefit that allows them to leave after 30 years with annual pensions totaling 90 percent of their salaries, a standard that became the model for police departments throughout the state.

While more than 5,000 California troopers made at least $100,000 in 2011, only three in North Carolina did, the data show.

Talbott’s $483,581 in total pay -- adding six months of his $174,888 annual pension, based on his June 30, 2011, retirement date -- is almost four times as much as the $122,950 collected by the top-paid officer in North Carolina, a commander, the data show.

Talbott, who retired last June, took a job the following month as director of public safety at the University of Redlands. The university declined to release his pay.

Talbott’s former colleague James P. Leonard, 51, was the second-highest paid trooper in the country when he retired last year, collecting earnings of about $392,000, including salary, pension and a lump-sum payout of $201,555, according to data provided by the state controller and Calpers.

Talbott declined a request to be interviewed, said Patty Zurita, communications manager at the University of the Redlands in Redlands, California, where he now works.

For the full article go to Bloomberg News.

California's failed education system and the little red schoolhouse

The Old Leona Valley Schoolhouse was built around 1915.
The school was built by volunteer labor at a cost of only $1,500.

Too much money is the problem with education

• Strange as it may sound, the more money that is spent on California education, the higher the rate of kids dropping out and of illiteracy.
• These endless billions are not spent on education.  The money is stolen by special interest groups from businesses to bureaucrats to administrators to unions.  Everyone is feeding at the trough.

By Gary;

Let's get down to the basics.  What is really required for a child to learn?  Simply you need a room with four walls, a roof, a book and a teacher.

So the next question is, "Where the Hell are the countless billions spent on education going?" 

Stolen by interest groups is the answer.  Education spending has nothing to do with education.  The spending has everything to do with lining the pockets of businesses providing overpriced services, administrators, labor unions and pensions.

The articles below caught my eye.  The articles are about a simple one-room schoolhouse in Los Angeles County.

My mother and millions of other kids were educated in a one-room schoolhouse.  Somehow the world managed to survive and even learn.  Today many kids are being homeschooled.  That is as close to a one-room school as you can get.  Plus they are scoring well on tests.

So when the Education Lobby demands more taxes to feed their broken machine, remember the little red schoolhouse and just say no.

Leona Valley Schoolhouse Seeks Historical Status

 

LEONA VALLEY - A one-room schoolhouse could receive historical status. The Old Leona Valley Schoolhouse was built around 1915 by volunteers for about $1,500, according to the West Antelope Valley Historical Society.
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It is one of the only schools still standing from the region's homesteading boom, when pioneers settled what was then the Leonis Valley. On Tuesday, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors agreed to ask the state to grant historical status to the schoolhouse.

The wood-frame building, once bright yellow with a red roof, reflects the Victorian ``little red schoolhouse'' tradition and was also used by local ranchers for dances, prayer meetings and other social events. It was moved from its original location in about 1938 and served for a time as a gun club, hosting Hollywood stars who came to the area to hunt and fish.
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The simple structure sits at the top of hilly rural property on Elizabeth Lake Road, next to a museum that houses period artifacts and ancient wine making equipment from the Ritter family's winery. The Ritter family were among the first settlers in Leona Valley.
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The historical society plans to submit an application asking the California Office of Historic Preservation to designate the schoolhouse as a California Point of Interest.
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(avnewstodayonline.com)


97-year-old who taught in one-room schoolhouse


The LA Times spoke to Martha Forth, who obtained her teaching credential at USC, about starting work at a rural one-room schoolhouse in 1938 in an article titled, “Group aims to restore 1915 schoolhouse, teach local history inside.”

Forth, who is now 97, says that her heart sank when she saw the building. “I thought, I can’t do this,” recalled Forth.

The building stood in a field in the remote Leona Valley, about 10 miles west of Palmdale. There were a couple of outhouses, a windmill that pumped water to the building and no electricity.

Forth knew she had to take the job. It was August. City schools had already hired their new teachers in the spring. And with the country still in the Great Depression, it wasn’t wise to be too picky, she figured.

Decades later, Forth, now 97, described her teaching days at the Old Leona Valley Schoolhouse as some of the most rewarding of her life. Today she is among several old-timers, local history buffs and descendants of area pioneers who are supporting efforts to restore the heirloom structure and get it designated as an official California Point of Historical Interest.

“It would be wonderful if they could restore enough of it so that people realize what it really was like when it was a one-room school,” said Forth, speaking by phone from her home in Laurie, Mo.

Leona Valley is in the mountains to the west of the Mojave Desert
community of Palmdale in Los Angeles County.

Leona Valley is still rural today.

Government Psychiatrists Paid $822,000

Just drop your pants and bend over 
Idiot Democrats need more of your money to pay for $822,302 a year government psychiatrists

• The psychiatrist was paid almost five times as much as Comrade Governor Jerry Brown.
• Mentally ill Democrats could care less about spending.  After all, it is all "magic" money that appears on command after periodic gang rapes of taxpayers who work of a living. 

The lunatics have taken over the mental asylum called the People's Republic of California.

Last year government employee Mohammad Safi took home $822,302, all of it paid by taxpayers.

Mohammad Safi is a graduate of a medical school in Afghanistan.  He began working as a psychiatrist at a California mental hospital in 2006, making $90,682 in his first six months.

Bloomberg News reports Safi benefited from what amounted to a bidding war after a federal court forced the state to improve inmate care. The prisons raised pay to lure psychiatrists, the mental health department followed suit to keep employees, and costs soared.


Last year, 16 California psychiatrists, including Safi, made more than $400,000, while only one did in the other 11 most populous states, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

The jockeying between agencies for the same doctors demonstrates a payroll system run amok and chronic mismanagement, said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, senior associate dean at the Yale University School of Management and founder of a training institute for chief executive officers.

“Even though this all took place in California, such apparent recklessness is almost too over the top for Hollywood,” Sonnenfeld said. “These irresponsible public officials have artificially constrained the market with an unnaturally limited supply pool, either due to laziness, incompetence, corruption or all of the above.”

Safi’s compensation was almost five times as much as Governor Jerry Brown’s last year.

(Bloomberg News)

 

California - Free Cell Phones for Homeless

A Karl Marx Wet Dream  -  Free taxpayer paid for crap for everyone

• Assurance Wireless' Lifeline taxpayer funded plan will provide 250 "free" minutes of talk time and 250 "free" text messages per month to the poor and homeless.

 

 

From each accord to his ability, to each according to his need for wireless services.

Now we have some sick Socialist wet dream come true.  The homeless and other poor people in the People's Republic of California are on track to get virtually free cell phones so they can keep in touch with family and others "crucial" to improving their lives.

The cell phones would be handed out through a Federally funded Lifeline program - already operated by service provider Assurance Wireless in 36 other states - that is likely to win final approval in the next couple of weeks from the California Public Utilities Commission reports the San Francisco Chronicle.



State PUC officials have been reviewing the Lifeline proposal from Assurance Wireless for three years. Word came that all but a minor detail had been approved, ending years of effort by advocates for homeless people.

"This is great - it is transformative for homeless and low-income people," said Bevan Dufty, San Francisco's head of homeless initiatives, who has been one of the program's most ardent advocates. "I expect San Francisco to be in the forefront and a model city for this program.

Dufty said if the program launches as expected, it would greatly help an initiative he is trying to start that would let the homeless call a 311 number to find out where and when a shelter bed is available. This would reduce staff work and save the homeless hours of waiting in line and walking miles between booking offices.

"This cell phone program is an exciting change for homeless people and for the state of California," said Jennifer Friedenbach, who as head of the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness also urged approval.

The state's decades-old Lifeline program pays for all but a few dollars of the monthly phone bill for poor people, generally meaning those whose annual income is below $14,702.

(San Francisco Chrolicle)

Bankrupt Los Angeles votes to build a $125 million streetcar



Los Angeles had the finest public transportation system in the world
until the government tore it out in order to spend money on buses.

Democrat Los Angeles votes to go deeper into debt

• The bankrupt city of L.A. wants to spend $125 million on a new streetcar that will travel only four miles.
• New taxes would be placed on property owners.

Downtown Los Angeles voters have approved a streetcar funding measure aimed at helping the city get people out of their cars.

In a special election, voters supported creation of a tax-assessment district to raise as much as $85 million of the $125 million needed to build a 4-mile trolley loop.

The tax would only be levied on property owners if the project passes an environmental review and receives matching federal funds.

If approved, it could be running by 2015 and would link the Civic Center and far-flung destinations such as Staples Center arena, Disney Hall and the fashion district.

It would run mainly along Broadway, Hill and Figueroa streets. Proponents believe it could see 10,000 riders a day.

The area is already served by buses, shuttles and light-rail lines, but residents say it's still hard to get around. Civic boosters see public transit as one key in restoring the luster of an area that was a thriving center decades ago for dining, theater and shopping.

The last streetcar trundled along downtown streets in 1963 before being supplanted in popularity by more flexible choices provided by cars and freeways.

Read more: San Francisco Chronicle

Pacific Electric had over 500 miles of inter urban track in Los Angeles in the early 1900's. The image shows the "Red Cars" stacked for sinking in Los Angeles Harbor - sunk ostensibly for "fish habitat", but really sunk for General Motors Corporation profit.

The Los Angeles Red Car Rail System Built in 1901.
.
Government Insanity
#1)  First you build an extensive light rail system.
#2)  Then you tear down that extensive light rail system.
#3)  Now you raise taxes to build another light rail system
to replace the light rail system you just tore down.
.
Yes, the Government is run by idiots.

Republican lose yet another Assembly seat

A new Democrat elected by 145 votes. 
There will likely be a recount in the Fox-Smith race, which could push out the final election results even further. Ron Smith was a well-funded Republican out-fundraised Fox better than 10 to 1.  The GOP candidate was defeated in what had been a fairly conservative district.

More Republican Weakness
High Desert district of Palmdale and Lancaster goes Democrat

• Demographic changes in the once Conservative and Anglo Antelope Valley.
• Palmdale is now 54% Hispanic and 15% African-American.
• Lancaster is now 38% Hispanic and 20% African-American.

The final vote update from Los Angeles County on Sunday gave Democrat Steve Fox a slight lead over the presumed Republican victor in the 36th Assembly District, putting the seat in the Democrats' column by a margin of just 145 votes.

Fox trailed Republican Ron Smith by about 2,000 votes the day after the Nov. 6 election, according to local reports, but the gap narrowed in recent weeks as remaining absentee and provisional ballots were counted. The final count by Los Angeles County, one of three counties in the district, put Fox ahead with just over 50 percent of the vote.

A win in the 36th Assembly District gives Democrats control of 55 seats in the lower house – one above the supermajority Assembly Speaker John A. Pérez secured with another Election Day upset reports the Sacramento Bee.

Fox is unlikely to be a sure vote for Democrats in the 2013-14 Legislature, however. The attorney and teacher ran as a Republican in a 2008 Assembly contest and has signed the Americans for Tax Reform pledge against raising taxes.


Ron Smith for Assembly 

Smith said Sunday that he plans to seek a recount. He said a stronger-than-usual Democratic tilt for provisional ballots in his district and other races has left him with the belief that "there is a political group that has learned how to manipulate the election by playing with provisionals."

Those are ballots cast in cases in which a voter who has requested an absentee ballot has moved within a district without updating his or her registration, or when a voter not on the polling place roster shows up in person to cast a ballot.

"No one, including myself or any consultant, could have conceived that I was over three percentage points ahead after the election … and now the provisionals came in … that it would overturn the (results)," he said. "Mathematically, statistically, that just doesn't happen."

Given his lead, Smith had been preparing to be sworn into the state Legislature along with the other 79 members of the Assembly today.

"I had most of my staff getting ready to be hired, my picture was up on the wall, I had my office that was assigned to me, and I already had two pieces of legislation that were going to be introduced Monday," he said.

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2012/12/03/5026015/pefpeojfesopf-poepo-jpof-efpeof.html#storylink=cpy

Republican Ron Smith had already been assigned an office.