Whew – been a few days since hitting the keyboard, and there’s plenty to blog about.
Let’s start with our favorite media-hog, Todd Spitzer. Kudos to Todd – he managed to squeeze news stories in two separate newspapers, on the same reckless accusation -- 4 days apart! Headline-grabber high five there, Todd!
Yesterday’s LA Times piece was basically a re-hash of the June 17 OCR story – albeit with more detail.
But the additional details only confirm that Spitzer is taking a molehill and trying to turn it into a media mountain. Mike Schroeder is exactly right – Spitzer’s motivation has nothing to do with good government and everything to do with softening Tony Rackauckas up for a 1996 challenge. You’d have to be a fool to believe otherwise.
OK – so a few people wound up wearing the electronic bracelet who apparently weren’t eligible. That decision was made by the judges in those cases – why isn’t Todd going after them?
Besides, this is a PILOT program – meaning it’s a trial run to work out the bugs before authorizing it as a permanent program, so it stands to reason there will be some process errors.
There seems to be no dispute that this program saved the taxpayers thousands of dollars – and every cent counts in this cash-strapped county government – and saved space in crowded jails for the scarier violent types.
Isn’t that the bottom line here? Excluding your own county from a cost-saving pilot program because (supposedly) of procedural errors, a late report and because one offender actually served 12 more days than he should have (that’s a bad thing?) – well, the phrase “cutting off your nose to spite your face” is an understatement in this instance. OC Blog is sure Spitzer’s Assembly colleagues could barely conceal their snickers when they went along with barring Orange County from the program. Maybe somebody can remind Todd that OC only gets back 7% of its property taxes from the state, and ask why he’s driving that percentage even lower.