San Berdoo Sunburn - Votes to Secede from California

 AP, cited at Haut Hair, Exodus: San Bernardino to leave California as well?

An advisory ballot proposal approved in San Bernardino County — home to 2.2 million people — directs local officials to study the possibility of secession. The razor-thin margin of victory is the latest sign of political unrest and economic distress in California.

This attempt to create a new state — which would be the first since Hawaii in 1959 — is a longshot proposition for the county just east of Los Angeles that has suffered from sharp increases in cost of living. It would hinge on approval by the California Legislature and Congress, both of which are highly unlikely.

Still, it’s significant that the vote came from a racially and ethnically diverse county that is politically mixed, as well as the fifth-most populous in the state and the largest in the nation by area. San Bernardino’s 20,000 square miles (51,800 square kilometers) is composed of more land than nine states.

The votes speaks to the alienation that some voters feel from a statehouse long dominated by Democrats who have made little progress on the growing homeless crisis, soaring housing costs and rising crime rates while residents pay among the highest taxes in the country.

Capt. Ed snarks  "Won’t happen, and Congress wouldn’t approve it even if California allowed it. The water issue alone would be a deal-breaker. " Yeah, but we can dream can't we? 

At Reason, California's Landmark Environmental Law Finally Comes for the Legislature Itself, Golden State lawmakers have refused to fix the California Environmental Quality Act. Now it could cost them a brand new office building.

California's landmark environmental law has helped thwart state lawmakers' many, many plans for society. They're now thwarting lawmakers' plans for themselves too.

Last week, a California appeals court brought legislators' plans for a new office annex on the state Capitol grounds to a screeching halt when it ruled the $1.3 billion project had been greenlit without the requisite analysis of its environmental effects.

That ruling came in response to a lawsuit filed by Save Our Capitol!—a motley coalition of small business groups, taxpayer advocates, preservationists, and environmentalists—arguing that the public had not been given adequate opportunity to comment on the final design of the office complex and that the state hadn't put enough thought into less environmentally impactful designs.

Giving the unincorporated group the right to sue is the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA).

The 1970 law requires that government agencies study the environmental impacts of their projects and, where possible, mitigate those impacts. That sounds simple enough. The original intent was to force the government to stop and listen to public feedback before paving over wetlands with a new highway project.

But the "citizen-enforced" law gives anyone the ability to file administrative appeals and lawsuits arguing that any of a long list of a project's impacts on natural, physical, cultural, and/or historic resources had not been adequately studied.

Over the decades, court decisions also extended the scope of CEQA to cover even privately sponsored projects (like a new single-family home or apartment building) that government bureaucrats had a minimal level of discretion over.

Today, the law effectively gives anyone with a few hundred dollars to spare the ability to hold up massive projects, public and private, for years or even decades with arguments that this or that impact hasn't been exhaustively examined in reports hundreds of pages long.

By delaying new homes for years (or some cases, decades), CEQA has become a major contributor to the state's housing crisis.

Hoist on their own petard! BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone).

Sex Shop Girls Beat Off Robber with Dildos

Sex Toys Used to Help Chase Off Armed Robber at San Bernardino Sex Shop

Two feisty employees of a San Bernardino sex shop fought off an armed robber, yelling at him and throwing sex toys to chase him out of the store with no money.

The attempted robbery, caught on surveillance video, happened Wednesday around 9:45 p.m. just before closing at Lotions & Lace.

A man walked in with his face covered pointing what appeared to be a gun.

Store employee "Amy" said she wasn't scared. She was convinced the gun was a fake and she was having none of it.

"With the gun, he walked in. I just thought he was trying to be funny, to scare us," she said. "But then I saw the gun and it was like, really? I don't have time for this."

San Bernardino girls . . .



Pirate's Cove links in the weekly "Sorta Blogless Sunday" and links.

The Face of Evil?

The Face of a Terrorist Mastermind?

Enrique Marquez may not look like a terrorist, but he is now a focus of the FBI investigation in San Bernardino:

As federal officials scour the backgrounds of the couple who went on a terrorist rampage here last week, they are looking carefully at Enrique Marquez, a childhood friend and relation by marriage of the husband, Syed Rizwan Farook. It was Mr. Marquez, 24, who bought the two assault rifles that Mr. Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, used to carry out the attack, which killed 14 people and wounded 21 others.
Mr. Marquez, who works at a Walmart store, bought the weapons legally in 2011 or 2012 and either gave or sold them to Mr. Farook, federal officials said. Investigators have spoken with Mr. Marquez and were keeping close tabs on him; although they have not named him as a suspect, they believe he has knowledge about the Farook family and its recent activities.
In November 2014, Mr. Marquez married Mariya Chernykh, whose sister, Tatiana, is married to Syed Raheel Farook, brother of Syed Rizwan Farook. Tatiana Farook is a hairstylist and makeup artist who also goes by the name Tatiana Gigliotti. She and her husband were witnesses at the wedding of Mr. Marquez and Ms. Chernykh, according to a marriage certificate released by the California Department of Public Health.

Mariya and Tatiana Chernykh

Another of Mr. Farook’s siblings, Saira, is married to Farhan Khan. For some period of time the Khans attended the same mosque as Mr. Marquez, who is a convert to Islam, according to people who know them.

My guess is that he's a loser who got tangled with the terrorists the way the Beach Boys Brian Wilson got tangled with Charles Manson, but the FBI will have to sort that out.

Wombat-socho has the weekly giant mother of all Rule 5 posts: "Rule 5 Sunday: Farewell To The Slave Princess" and "FMJRA 2.0: Flowtation" ready for perusing at The Other McCain.

I Wouldn't Want to Prejudge, But. . .

Syed Farook, 28, and Tashfeen Malik, 27, Named in #San Bernardino Massacre

The Los Angeles Times reports:

The suspects in the shooting rampage were a married couple who had just dropped off their 6-month-old daughter with a grandmother, family representatives said.
Syed Rizwan Farook, 28, and Tashfeen Malik, 27, were married two years ago, according to Malik’s brother, Farhan Khan . . .
On Wednesday morning, Farook and his wife dropped their daughter off with Farook’s mother in Redlands, saying they had a doctor’s appointment, said Hussam Ayloush, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ Los Angeles office.
The grandmother grew worried when she heard of the shooting attack in San Bernardino, and “she started calling. No answer,” Ayloush said.
The family was worried the couple were shot in the attacks, but then they started receiving calls from media outlets indicating Farook was a person of interest.
Farook was born in Illinois, and his parents immigrated to the U.S. from Southeast Asia, Ayloush said.

UPDATE: More from the Los Angeles Times:

As the holiday gathering got underway Wednesday morning, Syed Rizwan Farook joined dozens of his colleagues from San Bernardino County’s public health department. Farook, an inspector, seemed quiet during the early hours of the event, then vanished just as a group photo was about to be taken.
Shortly afterward, gunfire erupted at the Inland Regional Center where the employees filled a conference room. By the end of the day, police had identified Farook, 28, as a suspect in the massacre and said he was one of two people shot to death in a gun battle with officers. The other was 27-year-old Tashfeen Malik, who a family member said was Farook’s wife. . . .
Co-workers told The Times they were shocked to hear Farook’s name linked to the shooting. . . .
They said Farook recently traveled to Saudi Arabia and returned with a new wife he had met online. The couple had a baby and appeared to be “living the American dream,” said Patrick Baccari, a fellow health inspector who shared a cubicle with Farook.
Baccari and Christian Nwadike said Farook, who worked with them for several years, rarely started a conversation. But the tall, thin young man with a full beard was well liked and spent much of his time out in the field.
They and other colleagues said Farook was a devout Muslim, but rarely discussed religion at work.
“He never struck me as a fanatic, he never struck me as suspicious,” said Griselda Reisinger, who worked with Farook before leaving the agency in May.

(Via Memeorandum.) The talking heads on TV are asking, “Was this terrorism?” As if the word “terrorism” requires an official designation to fit the definition. Given the apparently meticulous planning that went into this attack, and considering that it was committed by devout Muslims, all we need is common sense to say that this was Islamic terrorism. Is there any indication it was anything else?

While it's remotely possible that  Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik were motivated by a devotion to Tea Party politics and Sarah Palin, Occam's Razor would suggest that we rule out Islamic terrorism first.

Our thoughts go out to the victims in San Berdoo, a city I have had some passing acquaintance with.

San Berdoo Stiffs Lenders

San Bernardino has defaulted on $10 million in bond payments

The southern California city of San Bernardino has defaulted on nearly $10 million in payments on its privately placed pension bond debt since it declared bankruptcy in 2012, according to documents seen by Reuters.

In addition, the city has not negotiated with its bondholders since September, according to a person familiar with the stalled negotiations.

The missed payments illustrate the trend among cities in bankruptcy to favor payments to pension funds over bondholder obligations, which has increased the hostility between creditors and municipalities.

San Bernardino declared last year that it intends under its bankruptcy exit plan to fully pay Calpers, its biggest creditor and America's largest public pension fund with assets of $300 billion.

The city continues to pay its monthly dues to Calpers in full, but has paid nothing to its bondholders for nearly three years, according to the interest payment schedule on roughly $50 million of pension obligation bonds issued by San Bernardino in 2005.

The non-payment of the bond debt and the city's lack of interest in talks with its pension bondholders just weeks before it must produce a bankruptcy exit plan should serve as a wake-up call to Wall Street issuers of debt to struggling cities, according to Michael Sweet, a bankruptcy attorney with Fox Rothschild in San Francisco.
. . .
"Bondholders should be realizing that in Chapter 9 cases those who will invariably get better treatment by the cities are former and current employers, who are part of the community, and not the faceless bankers holding commercial paper," Sweet said.

But Sweet said San Bernardino's treatment of its bondholders could come back to haunt it. "Down the road, the city may find that the capital market is unavailable to it or that it will be penalized at a very high rate when it seeks to borrow," he said.

But I'm sure President Warren will just force the banks to lend to bankrupt cities at favorable rates.

Previous posts on San Berdoo's bankruptcy:

San Berdoo Goes Bust

San Berdoo Death Spiral Continues

And another chorus of San Berdoo Sunburn:

San Berdoo Death Spiral Continues

Fighting Over Scraps in the Ruins of San Bernardino

Police and firefighter unions in bankrupt San Bernardino want to sue the city for cutting members’ pay and benefits. Last year the city became the first in California to unilaterally stop paying into the California Public Employees Retirement System (Calpers), and the unions who represent these pensioners aren’t happy. Since the city’s bankruptcy hearing is still pending, none of its creditors, Calpers included, are currently allowed to sue for money owed. But the unions are trying to change that. Reuters has the details:

In December, the bankruptcy judge ruled against an attempt by Calpers to have the bankruptcy stay lifted so the pension fund could sue the city in state court to collect pension arrears.

Asking for the stay to be lifted is what the police and firefighters unions will do later this week. The public employees union, representing about 54 mid-level city officials, made the same move last week.

San Bernardino—the third California city to declare bankruptcy last year—has now become a battleground in the war between pensioners and other creditors trying to collect payments from a defunct city. It’s a sadly familiar story: The various blue constituencies are going to war with each other as they each try to extract the last bit of money from near-empty coffers. The city faces stark trade-offs: does it slash services to the young in order to pay pensions to the old? San Bernadino’s schools are in terrible shape and its budget can no longer support basic police and fire protection—but the geezers still want the money they’ve been promised. As more cities go bankrupt, what happens here could set a precedent for similar cases around the state and the county.

I posted about San Berdoo at the time of the original bankruptcy and it's been fun interesting to watch a place I know fall into pension hell. Coming soon to a city near you.

San Berdoo: Lock Your Door, Load Your Guns

This is what happens when you let the bureaucrats and public employee unions bankrupt a city:

City Attorney Tells San Bernardino Residents To ‘Lock Their Doors,’ ‘Load Their Guns’ Because Of Police Downsizing

The city attorney of San Bernardino is under scrutiny for telling residents to “lock their doors and load their guns” during a city council meeting. The official explained that because the city is bankrupt and slashing public safety budgets people will need to start protecting themselves.

City Attorney Jim Penman said he doesn’t regret what he said. “You should say what you mean and mean what you say,” Penman said.

The city attorney said approximately 150 residents came to a council meeting to voice their concerns about recent crimes in the area, including the murder of an elderly woman last week.

Penman said the city is dealing with bankruptcy, which has forced officials to cut its police force by about 80 officers. Consequently, there’s been growing criticism about the police department’s response time. “Let’s be honest, we don’t have enough police officers. We have too many criminals living in this city. We have had 45 murders this year…that’s far too high for a city of this size,” Penman said.

The city attorney said it’s important for people to be smart about protecting themselves and their families. “I’m not advocating that people go out, who don’t have any training, and buy firearms. I certainly strongly caution anyone who has children at home not to have a loaded gun in the house,” Penman said.

“We need to take our streets back, we need to take our neighborhoods back and we need to protect our homes, and that’s what I think Jim was trying to say,” McCommack said.

The city of San Bernardino has seen a 50 percent increase in murders this year compared to 2011.

Coming soon to a city near you.

Previous posts on San Berdoo: A View from the Beach: San Berdoo Goes Bust, A View from the Beach: San Berdoo Picks Up the Pieces

San Berdoo Picks Up the Pieces

So what happens after a city goes broke?  Everybody doesn't just pick up and go away (although I'm not sure that wouldn't be a good idea in this case).  Nope, you have to try to figure out what comes next.

Bankrupt San Bernardino cuts $26 million, tries to stay afloat

Saying it had little choice, the San Bernardino City Council voted to cut $26 million in spending in an effort to keep the bankrupt city from dissolving and being governed by the county. The city is already in bankruptcy proceedings and facing a $45.8-million budget shortfall. The $26 million in cuts will help the troubled city stay afloat.

The austerity plan is a required step in the federal bankruptcy process. It freezes vacancies in the Police Department even as the city deals with an increase in violent crime. The Fire Department’s overtime budget also was slashed by 35%. The city already had stopped making payments to CalPERS, the state's public employee pension fund, since filing for Chapter 9 bankruptcy protection Aug. 1, a move city officials estimate will save San Bernardino more than $12 million.

It will be instructive to see how the broke municipalities  deal with bankruptcy, because it's pretty clear the nation is going that direction. Maybe we can find a some tricks to make the process less onerous. I doubt it, but hey, it doesn't hurt to do research.

San Berdoo's official song, "San Bernadino" by Christie



San Berdoo also inspired Frank Zappa to write this song about it:



My first post on San Berdoo's bankruptcy.

San Berdoo Goes Bust

San Bernardino seeks bankruptcy protection

San Bernardino on Tuesday became the third California city in less than a month to seek bankruptcy protection, with officials saying the financial situation had become so dire that it could not cover payroll through the summer.

The unexpected vote came at the suggestion of the interim city manager, who said the city faces a $46-million deficit and depleted coffers.

"We have an immediate cash flow issue," Andrea Miller told the mayor and seven-member City Council.

Mayor Patrick Morris called the decision, passed on a 4-2 vote, a "stain" on the city. But he said the only other option was "draconian cuts" to all city services, including the police and fire departments.

"It means the bills will be paid," said a dejected Morris, who is not a voting member of the council.

The city's fiscal crisis has been years in the making, compounded by the nation's crushing recession and exacerbated by escalating pension costs, lucrative labor agreements, Sacramento's raid on redevelopment funds and a city reserve that is tapped out, officials said.

Another city done in by rotten accounting and a pension problem.

San Bernardino, known as San Berdoo, or even just Berdoo, to locals, was a step on the route to my parent's cabin in the San Bernardino Mountains.  As a kid, and even into young adulthood, before they eventually sold the house, I must have driven through hundreds of times.  I don't remember much, except heat and gas stations, which pretty much seems to be a fair summary:

A city in southern California bereft of fun. The best thing to do there is to pack up and get the fuck out. It smells like urban decay and broken dreams. It also smells like raw sewage for some reason, though after careful investigation you won't find any processing plant. More likely it's the high concentration of ghetto-ass people.

Only notable for being the origin of the McDonalds franchise in 1940. Nothing significant has happened since. Not that it matters, because most of the inhabitants here are so ignorant and shallow that it wouldn't matter if the most important human discovery had taken place here; no one would care.

Oh, and according to Wiki, the city is also close to the home of the original motorcycle club with grew to become the Hell's Angels, the Pissed Off Bastards of Bloomington (later of Berdoo).

Oh, and a couple of songs about San Bernardino: