Pork spending, by its very nature is misused money. Instead of money going to the highest and best use, it is redirected to politicians’ pet projects. This is bad enough. What’s worse however is when this wasteful money doesn’t even reach its pork target. Below are some examples from the golden state of California but you can bet that this situation is played out in every state, county, and city in the country. Yes, it’s easy to be cynical when wasteful spending is squandered.

Let’s remember that California is in a budgetary crisis. Taxpayers are already taxed (some would say soaked) at some of the highest levels in the country and even with that services are being cut. Despite this, California lawmakers have at their descretion the ability to hand out millions of dollars of taxpayer money with little administrative oversight. Not surprisingly, a lot of it is wasted. For example:

The Western Center for Archeology is constructing a museum and have received $30 million in state grants. That alone is troubling but how the money has been spent is worse. A board member was paid for work with no evidence that he ever completed the work (what does he think he is, a King/Drew physician?).

The Color Me Freedom Foundation received $221,625 to create an MLK/Chavez memorial at a Los Angeles High School. For this money a portable storage building was secured. It has no utilities and is inacessable to students and public. What a touching memorial. The executive director of the foundation, Rev. Willie Bellamy, wrote checks to himself with the grant money for personal reasons. (Investigators should have been tipped off by the project’s name as anyone who has spent time at a Las Vegas casino knows that “color me” is slang for “cash me in” which is exactly what Rev. Bellamy did).

And the best example of wasted pork was in Redlands, CA, where $700,000 was spent to develop a name and logo for a sports complex that couldn’t be built because a lack of permits. Now some people would have postponed the naming/logo development until after the permit process was completed but such measures are evidently not necessary in the public sector.

So the next tme you wonder why in times like these money is going into less-than-necessary projects, you can relax as there is a good chance that the money will never make it there anyway.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 6th, 2005 at 7:50 am by Insider and is filed under Brilliant, but uncategorizable, Your Tax Dollars In Action. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.