Our Scott Martelle weighs in at AOL News on a string of corruption scandals in a handful of small cities southeast of Los Angeles. From his piece:
Call it the New Jersey of the West.
Recent revelations of exorbitant salaries paid to top officials in the Southern California city of Bell are only the latest developments in a long-running saga of corruption embroiling a string of cities along the Los Angeles River.
The scandals encompass city councils paying themselves and city officials exorbitant salaries, but also involve the alleged conversion of city funds for personal expenses, Third World-style elections and, in one case, a police department so bad that insurance companies jacked up the coverage rates, sparking a fiscal meltdown.
The most recent scandals involve three cities that form an arc of alleged corruption and bad government from the industrial enclave of Vernon through the essentially employee-less Maywood into immigrant-heavy and working-class Bell, where until recently city officials were raking in CEO-level salaries.
Municipal corruption is nothing new, of course, but the spate of problems in three adjoining cities has made this corner of Southern California a model of government gone wild, sparking state-level investigations and broad calls for reforms.
Comments