Hueso wants Richards to resign?

[Tman]

Really?

Found some interesting stuff on Benjamin Hueso...amazing what a little research will yield.

Can't even make this stuff up....

Long read, but enjoy...this should really piss you off...


Friends helping friends

Case of mysterious nonprofit connected to Hueso underscores need for federal-grant oversight

By Jon Campbell

Ben Hueso helped a questionable nonprofit apply for a grant but then put the kibosh on it.
- Photo by David Rolland

When the South San Diego Planning and Education Project (SSDPEP) applied for a $100,000 grant from the city of San Diego in 2008, the nonprofit had existed for fewer than seven months. The group had no offices and no website, and the contact number listed on its application rang to the cell phone of a local lobbyist. For all practical purposes, the group, which had never carried out any charitable activities before, existed solely on paper. It also missed the deadline for filing its application.
With hundreds of established nonprofits operating in San Diego, SSDPEP would seem like a poor candidate to receive $100,000 in federal Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) funds. But despite its apparent shortcomings, e-mail correspondence released as part of a public-records request indicates that San Diego City Council President Ben Hueso and his staff took an interest in SSDPEP’s application and helped shepherd it through the approval process. With Hueso’s support, funding for the group’s graffiti-abatement project was eventually approved—before ultimately being rescinded by Hueso for reasons that remain unclear, and on which he refuses to comment.
Why did SSDPEP get special attention? Only Hueso can say.
But an examination of the group’s state tax-filing information shows that while it may not have had an exceptional track record—having no track record at all—it did have some notable people on its governing board. The group’s CEO, Whitney Benzian, is a staff member in Hueso’s office, while the group’s principal contact, registered city lobbyist Paola Avila, is currently managing Hueso’s campaign for state Assembly. It’s her cell phone that rings when you call SSDPEP. Janine Pairis, the group’s CFO, is a lobbyist with Southwest Strategies, a political consulting firm in San Diego, where Benzian was also briefly employed.
Even if SSDPEP had received the $100,000 for which the group was initially approved, the connections between Hueso and the group wouldn’t have violated any rules with regard to the distribution of CDBG funds. At the time, City Council members had wide latitude to distribute cash to the groups in their districts they considered most worthy. Even after a major overhaul of the program, prompted by a damning audit from federal authorities, groups applying for CDBG funds still aren’t required to disclose their board of directors, and with no disclosure requirements, time-consuming research is the only way for the public to monitor the links between groups that receive funding and the elected officials that bestow it. Even when new safeguards are put in place, the City Council will still have little practical oversight when it comes to deciding which groups are worthy of assistance.
Kathay Feng, executive director of California Common Cause, which advocates for government accountability, said the case of SSDPEP is an example of a persistent flaw in the CDBG process. Politically connected individuals are able to obtain funding for groups they control, she said, whether or not they’re the most qualified to receive them. She said the advantages gained by connected groups are unfair to the other organizations that may be able to use the money and use it more effectively.
“You have these nonprofits who have been around for 15 years that can’t get a dime” through the CDBG program, Feng said. “And along comes this nonprofit that’s existed for seven months, and it’s loaded up with connected individuals. You just have to question that.”
Dozens of private, nonprofit organizations in San Diego County receive public dollars through the CDBG program every year. In the city of San Diego this year, roughly $9 million will be doled out to help such organizations as the Boys and Girls Clubs and Father Joe’s Villages—all of it for activities described broadly as antipoverty measures.
And it’s not just in San Diego. The CDBG program is run by the federal department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), which distributes grants to cities and counties across the country, to be spent revitalizing low-income neighborhoods. Each local-government body comes up with its own system to distribute the lump sums divvied out by HUD. Until this year, San Diego’s total CDBG fund was divided in a 60-40 split, with 60 percent going to individual council members for use in their districts and 40 percent being allocated by the mayor for projects citywide. Each elected official had a pot of money that he or she could dole out, and while staff vetted every project for basic eligibility under HUD guidelines, the decisions about who actually received the cash were left to the council member’s discretion. The city eliminated the 60-40 split in recent reforms to the program, prompted by a HUD audit, and projects will now be voted up or down by the full council based on need. The system used to dole out equal portions to each council member, regardless of the demographics in each official’s district. Judging from the paperwork it submitted, it would be hard to figure out exactly what the mission of the South San Diego Planning and Education Project was. The group’s generic name could imply anything, and it actually submitted two different applications in 2008, for two widely disparate projects.

The group initially sought $150,000 from Hueso’s district funds to build three single-family units of affordable housing. That application was denied by city staff before it even made it to Hueso’s office. According to a letter from CDBG administrator Angela Nazareno, dated March 18, 2008, SSDPEP’s original project was deemed ineligible because CDBG funds can only be used for renovation, not construction, of affordable housing. So much for that idea.
The next application the group submitted, though undated, like all of the other applications, apparently arrived late; in the city’s records, it’s filed under the category “submitted after deadline.” This time, the group sought $100,000 to paint murals on utility boxes in South San Diego neighborhoods as a way to combat graffiti.
Nazareno declined to comment specifically about SSDPEP, but she confirmed that the only way a late application could have moved on in the CDBG approval process would have been through the intervention of a council member.
When the annual allocations were being prepared in the spring of 2008, at least one city staff member questioned the application for SSDPEP. In March of that year, CDBG administrator Anita Pyle sent an e-mail to Ana Molina-Rodriguez, Hueso’s chief of staff, asking for more details about the SSDPEP application.
“What is ‘South SD Planning and Education – Affordable Hsng’ project that you are allocating $100K to? I don’t see an application in the FY09 binders that we gave you, am I missing something? Was there an application for this? Pls respond asap.”
Less than an hour later, according to time stamps on the e-mail messages, Molina- Rodriguez responded to Pyle’s inquiry.
“It’s #110,” Molina -Rodriguez wrote, “the one I spoke to you on the phone about. Paola Avila will contact you this week (or may have late last week) to revise.”
Pyle, who’s still with the city but works in a different department, said she doesn’t remember why she questioned the application and didn’t want to speak for attribution. Molina-Rodriguez didn’t return calls for comment.
Avila is the only person associated with SSDPEP that was willing to speak for this story. She denied that Hueso had given her group any preferential treatment, saying she didn’t know Hueso well at the time SSDPEP applied for the funds.
“I didn’t have any sort of connection to him at that time,” Avila said. “I wouldn’t say I knew him better than a lot of other people.”
Avila said the group had chosen a graffiti-abatement program because that issue was of particular interest to Hueso.
“It’s something that Whitney [Benzian] and I had been talking about, and we knew that Ben has been really working hard on graffiti removal in his district, so we thought that approaching him would be a good idea. We knew that he would be really supportive,” Avila said. Benzian was not working in Hueso’s office at that time but had worked for him previously.
Avila said she wasn’t sure why the project was ultimately not funded but speculated it was because CDBG was “changing their guidelines” at the time. During an interview in April of this year, Avila said SSDPEP was no longer active and hadn’t been active since the project was denied its CDBG funding, but she denied the group had been created solely to receive CDBG funds. Avila did not return more recent phone calls for an update on the group.
Jeff Sturak, a deputy director in the office of the Independent Budget Analyst, helped draft some of the reforms to the city’s CDBG allocation process. Sturak also declined to comment specifically on the case of SSDPEP but said the reforms would remove a degree of an individual council member’s discretion in making allocations. Beginning in 2011, he said, a citizen’s advisory committee will provide “advice and recommendations” on which allocations would best serve the community, though it’ll have no decision-making authority.
The nine-member board, referred to as the Consolidated Plan Advisory Board, will be made up of representatives nominated by the various city councilmembers, and appointed by the mayor, subject to the approval of the full council. The ninth representative will be appointed by the mayor himself, the ordinance states, until a ninth council district is created in the city. The members of the board should be knowledgeable, the ordinance declares, about issues like affordable housing and economic development, the nominal purpose for CDBG funds in the first place.
The board will be governed by some ethical safeguards: Members may not be officers or contractors of a group that receives CDBG funds; they may not have financial interests in any of the decisions they weigh in on; and former members of the board must wait at least a year before lobbying other members or city officials in relation to CDBG activities. But the panel also won’t have any responsibility to oversee ethical entanglements. The board’s goals, as outlined in the ordinance that created it, are to consider individual projects in the context of the city’s Five Year Consolidated Plan. That document, submitted to HUD, outlines the city’s broader, long-term revitalization vision with regard to CDBG funds.
Beth Murray, an administrator in the city’s CDBG office, said the creation of the panel wasn’t prompted by conflicts of interest but was just a part of the larger reforms begun after HUD’s audit in 2008.
The advisory panel “was a part of the program’s overall reform. There are other jurisdictions that make use of an advisory board….
It’s just another set of independent eyes,” Murray said.
Sturak said the City Council deserves credit for abdicating some control over CDBG allocations.
“I think the process that we put in place is a good process…. It was huge for council to put it in place,” he said.

and more of the same...

Assemblyman Ben Hueso, D-San Diego, has agreed to pay a $2,000 fine for transferring campaign money last year to a labor-backed group that supported his brother’s unsuccessful bid to replace him on the San Diego City Council.
The penalty from the state Fair Political Practices Commission follows an Oct. 29 report by The Watchdog that showed Hueso shifted $25,000 in campaign funds to help his brother, Felipe, in violation of state campaign finance laws.
At the time, Ben Hueso’s campaign acknowledged the move was illegal and the money was returned a few hours after a reporter questioned the transaction. He then self-reported the violation to the state agency a week later.
The FPPC board is scheduled to vote Sept. 22 on the proposed fine.
The assemblyman was traveling in Mexico as part of a legislative delegation Tuesday and was unavailable for comment, said Paola Avila, his spokeswoman. Hueso has previously said there was “no intent — absolutely whatsoever — to get around the laws” in the case.
The transaction in question occurred Oct. 7 when Hueso, who was then City Council president and running for state Assembly, gave $25,000 from his campaign coffers to a group called San Diegans for Healthy Neighborhoods and a Strong Economy. That group was created by the San Diego-Imperial Counties Labor Council for the purpose of electing Felipe Hueso to City Council.
The FPPC investigation found that the labor council’s committee spent nearly $19,000 on an Oct. 12 mail piece for Felipe Hueso and that at least $3,294 of that money came from Ben Hueso’s contribution. That transaction took place before the contribution was refunded by labor at Ben Hueso’s request.
State law prohibits candidates from giving their campaign funds to a separate group for the purpose of spending that money to support or oppose another candidate. Such laws are intended to limit influence on campaigns and make clear who is funding them. Each violation can result in a fine of as much as $5,000.
“Limits on the amount that a person may give a candidate or that an officeholder may contribute or transfer to another candidate would be rendered ineffective if a candidate-controlled committee could make an unlimited amount of independent expenditures to support or oppose another candidate,” the FPPC stipulation said.
The stipulation also noted that Ben Hueso reported the violation himself and cooperated with the investigation, both mitigating factors that lowered the amount of the penalty. Factors in aggravation were previous campaign violations and the fact that the money wasn’t returned until he was contacted by the media.
Felipe Hueso, an attorney, eventually lost his District 8 council bid to current officeholder David Alvarez. Ben Hueso defeated Derrick Roach, a Republican, to represent South Bay’s 79th Assembly District.
Previously, the San Diego Ethics Commission levied a $17,000 fine against Hueso for raising money for a 2006 runoff election that was not necessary because of the primary election results.

and, yes, more...

Hueso decision: He should be ashamed Nov 20, 2010

Departing San Diego Councilman Ben Hueso’s decision to put three people who worked on his brother’s failed City Council bid on the city payroll for his final few weeks in office reeks. It’s a perfect example of why people are deeply cynical about politics. The three each will be paid $1,154 a week to allegedly work on projects and participate in “archiving.” Here’s hoping this abuse of power comes up every time the Assembly-bound Hueso runs for re-election or seeks a new office.

This crook is everywhere...wonder who else he is linked to?

Stay tuned for more...

[PAL]

^Yep. Western Outdoors is shining light on Hueso's stained record:

WHO SHOULD RESIGN? It should be Assemblyman Hueso, not Richards

We think that a simple resignation of office is far too light a sentence for what this man has done.

First, he illegally tried to funnel $25,000 in campaign funds to a sibling. Then, thousands of dollars of taxpayer money were used to pay his sibling's former campaign workers to work in his office. And then, he requested $11,000 in taxpayer-funded bonuses to several staffers. He was fined $17,000 by the Ethics Commission for raising money for a 2006 election that never took place.

Now, if you think we were talking about Dan Richards, the newly appointed President of the California Fish and Game Commission, you’re wrong. Oh no, he's clean, and well-qualified for his current position. He hunts, he fishes, he’s served as a commissioner and is fair on fish and game issues.It's current Assemblyman Ben Hueso we're talking about, the same assemblyman who is calling for Richards’ resignation, even though Richards never broke a law.

All of those "trangressions" occurred while Hueso was with the San Diego City Council.Now that he's an assemblyman, we can only guess at his questionable activities. Except for this one: it's obvious he's been bought and paid for.

The stone that Assemblyman Hueso threw at Fish and Game Commissioner Dan Richards on Friday would be amusing if it weren’t being taken seriously. It is. Despite the factHueso has a long, long list of questionable and even illegal activities, he was only one signature short of putting Richards on the firing line on a vote.It is a sign that animal rights activists have the money and pull to make this happen.

The worst thing about all of this is that he somehow coerced 39 other California assembly members to sign on to his letter! That's right, 39 other members of the California Assembly feel that a man who works hard for California wildlife should be penalized for being totally legal in all respects during a lawful hunt in Idaho.

It's no wonder that politicians are at an all-time low in approval ratings by voters. There is something we can do here: vote the bums out! And support Richards: someone who is ethical, caring, and wants the best for California's wildlife.

To make your voice heard, go to the website http://keepamericafishing.salsalabs....ction_KEY=4066.

Photo: California State Assembly

Link to story: http://www.wonews.com/Blog.aspx?id=1...not%20Richards

[blitzburgh]

What a friggin' DIRTBAG. Unfortunately, this goes on in all forms of our governments and some how these people keep getting re-elected.

[mtnbykr2]

can you say "Calicorrution"...