It appears that the plot thickens in to So Cal financial Payton Place scandal. The monetary machinations in Bell have a connection to the next door municipality of Maywood.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/…
Maywood officials say the interim city manager has resigned in the wake of the salary scandal in the neighboring city of Bell.
A city spokeswoman said that Angela Spaccia resigned from her $10,000 per month contract position on Friday.
Last week, she resigned from her post as Bell’s assistant city manager, where she was paid more than $376,000 per year.
City spokeswoman Magdalena Prado says Spaccia e-mailed the City Council to say that she was concerned that the growing media attention would detract from needed financial and structural reforms.
Maywood had devised a plan to layoff all of its all of its employees and contract the services out to Bell. It now appears that Ms. Spaccia was double dipping out of both pots. This gets progressively messier. It will certainly add to California’s entertainment value among other things.
At the very least this drama goes beyond the City of Bell.
There’s nothing new in these stories. There’s a group of corrupt cities in a belt east of LA that have been patronage machines. Some, like Commerce and Industry, were designed to be industrial cities, with very small populations and housing controlled by a few families. Others have been taken over by ethnic political machines, where its all about the spoils.
Good government is a relatively recent invention in the Unites States, and the system we have is not designed to investigate and prosecute actual corruption.
There is plenty of room for Federal investigation of political corruption in California, not just in this belt of corruption but also in cities like Westminster and Garden Grove.