What do Orange County Republican legislators get when not a single Republican works constructively towards a responsible budget solution?

Well they don’t get pension reform, a budget cap, or any help in their plan to gut the state’s clean air laws.

And, in a nice little piece of political payback, in a trailer bill, the State took away 48 million a year that had been going to the county as part of a package to pay back loans issued after the 1994 bankruptcy.

There is much hand-wringing, with threats of lawsuits from blowhards like Assembly member “Spanky” Don Wagner (R,Newport Beach) and State Senator Lou Correa (D?, Santa Ana), who used a previous budget crisis to extort money for Orange County.

So the County will have to find 48 million in cuts, which will hit the Sheriff and the district attorney’s office hard.

In other news, Governor Brown evoked chuckles, smiles, and outright guffaws by appointing OCEA Executive Director Nick Berardino to the Orange County Fair Board. Berardino and OCEA are locked in manichean legal and political battles with Costa Mesa Uber Alles Council Members Mensinger and Righeimer who issued lay-off notices to half of Costa Mesa’s workers (mostly OCEA members). The Orange County Fair, located in Costa Mesa, is directly across the street from Costa Mesa City Hall.

Even in the worst budget, there’s a little Schadenfreude.

Since I am new to Calitics, I can’t figure out how to post my commentary on the OC Fair. So I’ve included a link to a blog at wordpress.com

http://nomoremindgames.wordpre…

Wow.

Attorney General Jerry Brown responds to the festering scandal surrounding the sale of the OC Fair Ground with a stunning move in  a letter dated  December 1st to the Chair of the OC Fair Board.

I wrote about the issue in a Calitics Diary in October, and I even talked to him for a few minutes about the issue at the CADem Eboard meeting in November, and criticized him sharply for failing to act.

The AG’s initial response was as an attorney representing a state agency, with the the 32nd Agricultural District Fair Board as a client. But he put the staff to work, found the relevant section of the law, and has left the eight Fair Board members and Orange County Republican insiders on their own.

In the letter from Matt Rodriguez, the ranking staff attorney in the AG’s office, there’s one killer sentence.

“Given the seemingly intertwined and potentially conflicting interests of the District, the District Board members and the nonprofit, we have determined that we should withdraw from providing legal services.”

This may read like a simple bureaucratic letter, but in fact it’s a stunning rebuke to the political appointees at the Orange County Fair Board. When you’re a state agency, the Attorney General is your attorney. In general, when your attorney quits you, it’s a devastating sign that you’ve really screwed the pooch. When your attorney is the Attorney General of the State of California, and he quits, it’s probably time for a bunch of folks to be looking for criminal attorneys.

Jerry Brown acted decisively and quickly here, given the necessity of acting in the best interest of the state.

Note:Diary updated and expanded

In response to formal requests from legal counsel from the OC Board of Supervisors, the Attorney General’s office has responded by advising that the blatant violations of the law be prosecuted by the local DA, who stood silent as Sheriff Carona became such a cancer that federal prosecutors intervened.

Is Jerry Brown out of touch? How does he think he’ll get the votes of  over half a million Democrats in Orange County if he continues to blow off the scandal surrounding the sale of the Orange County Fairgrounds?

The story is simple yet complex. Eight patronage appointees of the Governor run a state agency, the 32nd Agricultural district, which runs the Orange County Fair. Until scandals erupted, they gave themselves and their friends hundreds of thousand of dollars a year in free passes and front-row concert tickets. Sheriff Mike Carona’s wife Debbie was a Fair Board Director, and there are reports of a concert where 300 of her friends had free tickets to a sold-out concert.

Earlier this year, the Fair Board lobbied to have the state sell the Fairgrounds as part of a budget package and simultaneously created a corporation to buy the Fairgrounds.

The details have trickled out, but it’s an ugly story where the rule of law was a victim.

And the legal representative for the Fair Board has been a Deputy Attorney General, somehow silent or complicit while there was an open conspiracy to violate public meeting laws, as well as clear conflicts of interests, and failure to comply with laws regarding lobbyists.

Does Jerry know about the scandal himself?

Yep, I cornered him at the E-Board meeting, where he admitted he was aware of the issue. He can’t deny that he is protecting his inept Deputy AG’s, while ignoring a conspiracy to defraud the taxpayers of the state, with blatant conflicts of interests, a conspiracy to violate open meeting laws and illegal lobbying by Dick Ackerman.

The story started with coverage of the Fair Board by one local blog, where activists alerted us the stench and we’ve been writing about this since February. This OC Progressive post that was cross-posted at Calitics lays out the story.

Now it’s breaking news on the teevee and reported in the Orange County Register as the scandal grows by the day.

The Attorney General’s office is the legal representative for the 32nd Agricultural district, which controls the Fairgrounds, and the Deputy AG who has been at the meetings has been disappeared, with an email address that bounces back and a disconnected voice mail.

Democrats now have a candidate with a knit hat and a red and white striped sweater, hiding in the background of the picture.

Where’s Waldo, err, Jerry?