Arnold Schwarzenegger, Budget, Jerry Brown

Just Who Are The People Trying to Buy Our State Buildings?

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The deal would sell the building that houses the California Supreme Court
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Arnold Schwarzenegger was quite keen to get the sale of buildings through before he left office.  That’s no surprise, considering that Jerry Brown was never really a fan of the deal.  His latest statements have been somewhat ambivalent, essentially saying that he wants 30 days to review the deal before he does anything.

But the deal is now rapidly losing investors, and the Bay Citizen (a website you should be reading), notes that in addition to the shrinking pool of investors, there is also the question of who the investors are that are left paying the up-front costs.  Well, turns out it isn’t that easy to find out:

Most of the members of a shadowy investor group that agreed to finance the sale of tony state office buildings last year appear to have dropped out of the deal, and those that remain are tight-lipped about their involvement in the transaction, which is being challenged in court as an illegal gift of state assets to a group with political pull in Sacramento.

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The identities of the people and companies behind California First LLC have been a mystery. And the increased public scrutiny and court challenges have done little, thus far, to shed light on them. The group declined to participate in the legal battle to close the deal, a stance that Renne finds “extraordinarily unusual. I think, frankly, they cannot stand to see the light of day on their transaction.”

The Bay Citizen reporter continued to follow the trail of money, but ended up with more questions than answers.  People avoided her calls, said they weren’t really helping, merely advising, and generally being unhelpful.  That being said, the three “main partners” in the deal have long history in government and ties to past administrations.

Even if you were to look at this deal from a totally outside perspective, without this information, the deal would look like a bad one.  We aren’t really getting enough money to make this worthwhile.  It’s a short-term fix for a long-term problem. Oh, and it leaves us with a huge pile of debt to deal with over the next generation.  Adding on the mysterious and rather shady nature of this deal, you really have to question Schwarzenegger’s motives for this deal.

We still have a while before we get a decision from Gov. Brown, but one hopes that we can once and fully put this stinker of a deal behind us.

3 thoughts on “Just Who Are The People Trying to Buy Our State Buildings?”

  1. With the commercial real estate market as much in the tank as the housing market, the state would hardly be getting top dollar for its assets either I suspect. The Sacramento market is particularly bad. So the properties there would really take a hit. Nobody really expects property values to return to pre-bubble levels, but I’ve seen little about whether the deal even recoups building costs, or if the sale prices were at market value–whatever that is these days.  

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