Question: What’s as potentially dumb as Mayor Bob Filner’s pay-to-play scandal involving his alleged extortion of funds from a developer?
Answer: The developer letting the world know by admitting it in a voice mail message. In a general city council voice mail box, no less.
Sunroad’s Tom Story should be credited for his honesty and openness, however unintended it might have been.
Comments 13
The $100,000 to Sunroad has been returned. The civic event and public gathering monument will require other funds.
Yesterday SDCERS voted AGAINST saving the City’s General Fund $20 million starting July 1, 2013. Therefore the FY-2014 Budget approved by the City Council has to cut $20 million.
Including $3 million from the General Fund Reserves for the two homeless tents, and the homeless check in center.
“The $100,000 to Sunroad has been returned.” — All is ok, then, huh La Playa? Move along, nothing to see here.
Not at all. There is a solution which is good.
Mayor Filner also released an email from Tom Story of Sunroad to Alen Jones that stated the same thing. Investigate away.
Maybe next time instead of the City Council giving away the City’s public easements for free, Mayor Filner wiill sell the easement at the going private rate. Bringing money into the general fund. Instead of giving away the farm, for free. Just to be nice and pro-business.
The original City Council vote was unanimous. Therefore the mayoral veto would have been overturned. There was little leverage.
Actually the facts seem to be (pretty much) in evidence without the Sunroad “smoking gun” phone message. One just has to review the recordings of the city meetings. And whatever is missing can be verified and confirmed via sworn testimony.
This is serious business. No one can say for sure what happened at this point. But these disclosures of Filner allegedly “requesting” $100,000 from Sunroad to be “donated” for two pet Filner projects in exchange for the Mayor effectively repealing his veto should result in a formal investigation into whether or not this is a CRIMINAL violation of the Hobbs Act.
At the VERY least, this “pay to play” is bad policy — political payola more frequently associated with the long-corrupt older cities such as NYC and Chicago.
But the bigger question is the LEGALITY of the mayor’s policy, and his personal actions. It’s possible that this deal may meet the legal definition of “extortion” under the Hobbs Act. Or not.
Conjecture can only take us so far. It’s now up to the County DA and other legal authorities to investigate this matter. I certainly hope that they do.
Apparently the mayor finally got around to checking the law (and, after all, as a Congress critter and attorney, who would expect him to know anything about the law?), and likely figured out that the $100,000 he received as a “donation” could very well be defined as extortion.
So he’s giving back the money. He’s scapegoating an aide he fired last week, while claiming he (Filner) had no knowledge of the connection of the “contribution” and the end of his opposition to the Sunroad project.
Filner has enough gall to float a battleship. More important, IF what he did was illegal, I doubt that then giving back the money makes the wrongful act go away. He’s done what he’s done.
We shall see.
A week ago, when questioned on the $100K, the mayor said “if someone needs something from the city, they need to give something to get it.” So now it’s a dismissed aide’s fault? Now the mayor says he only found out about the connection between the donations and the project changes yesterday?
UPDATE: Fired aide says Filner knew full well what the donation was for. The noose tightens.
http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2013/jun/28/allen-jones-bob-filner-sunroad-donation/
Richard,
Not questioning the seriousness of this, but one correction: Mayor Filner is not an attorney.
Damn. Hypocrisy is right.
I was hoping to make it to mid-year without making an error. I was SOOOO close! Rats.
Yes, a review of Filner’s history shows the man has never had any significant role in life — outside being a political activist, staffer, part-time (govt school) college professor, or office holder.
He is NOT, nor has ever been, an attorney. Indeed, his lack of knowledge of — or interest in — the rule of law is the stuff of legends.
My abject apologies to both the legal profession and Mayor Filner. I’m not sure which entity is more insulted by my faux pas.
NOTE: I threw in the French phrase to hopefully assuage Filner’s feelings — given that he’s spending so much time in Paris these days.
Richard,
Thanks for the opportunity to go off topic again (I have no argument with you on the topic): Do you really want to say that Filner has had “no significant role in life?” Seriously? Are you that jaded that you don’t you believe marching with the Freedom Riders, being a school board member, city council member, congressman and now mayor of the country’s 8th largest city isn’t significant? I would hate to have you judge my life’s accomplishments.
Almost forgot… Do you really want to insult all the alumni, many of whom contribute to Rostra, by dismissing San Diego State as a “govt school?”
Hypocrisy, the point I made is that he has always worked for government. Thankfully he never worked in the private sector, which would have sullied the reputation of private colleges and businesses everywhere.
SDSU grads — suck it up. Yours IS a govt school As was mine — UNC-CH.
But you can overcome such handicaps. I certainly did — having to “unlearn” the liberal propaganda that was dumped on us students by liberal professors — even back in the fabled sixties.
If you were in a STEM field, you probably got a fine education at SDSU. If in the liberal arts — not so much.
Richard, as an SDSU Alum, I agree, thank myself and other taxpayers for subsidizing my B.S. degree. I did have some unlearning to do also, and thankfully, I never had Filner as a prof.
Hypocrisy, Filner did one good thing in his life by walking with Nixon and Charlton Heston in the south, it is sort of like the old saying ‘even a blind squirrel finds a nut every once in while’. Filner’s past is not filled with a lot of accomplishments to be proud of, but hey, he was a congressman and ‘can do whatever he wants’.