Another Request for Public Documents

Here is a copy of another public record request form that I submitted to the city on Friday. I don't know why I bother, I suspect that the finance officer is supportive of the mayor, I don't expect her to be too eager to disclose all of the expense records that they have.

Documents that I requested this time are:
1. Proof that the mayor has reimbursed the city for his wife's travel expenses. (2nd request)
2. Expense records showing how much the city paid for the mayor's wife's airfare (2nd request)
3. Current R&F wastehauler agreement. This will be posted to the website to provide evidence against the lies in the anonymous flyer that was circulated around town.

http://www.shafterchevron.com/resources/012706+Request.pdf

Letter from a concerned McFarland resident

A couple of weeks ago I received a phone call from a concerned McFarland resident named Jessie Ramos. He shared his concerns and desire to have our community come together to elect good leaders. Over the past two months, my wife and I have had the opportunity to speak with many other great McFarland citizens, like Jessie, who truly care about our community. At his request, I am posting a letter that he has written to the editor of a local newspaper.

http://www.shafterchevron.com/resources/jramos.pdf

South Korea Airfare

Despite our repeated requests for paperwork showing the amount the mayor spent on airfare for himself and his wife to travel to Korea, we have not received anything. But this document shows how much the city administrator's airfare cost, roughly $2,500. I would guess that this is roughly the same amount that the city paid for the mayor's wife.

http://www.shafterchevron.com/resources/korea_airfare.pdf

Viva Las Vegas!

Looks like the mayor and councilman Santillano took a nice, expensive trip to Las Vegas for 4 days! Check out the $300/night room that the mayor billed to the city. They stayed at the New York New York hotel and spent nearly $2000 just on the hotel rooms alone. But I'm sure it was money well spent for the good of our city and our people.

http://www.shafterchevron.com/resources/lasvegas.pdf

Questionable Travel Expenses?

We just received some of the documents that we had requested from the City of McFarland. The document below shows that the city paid $600 to cover the mayor's wife's (Lorraine) lodging and meals for a recent trip to Korea. It also shows an American Express statement for a city credit card that was charged for $432 to pay for her plane ticket to Washington D.C. I didn't know the city offered such nice travel benefits for family members of city officials.

http://home.earthlink.net/~rrodartejr/mcrg/expense/amexstat2.pdf

This is just a preview of what we have received so far. There are over 100 pages of documents to review. Stay tuned.

The $200 Letter from the City of McFarland

Last month I submitted a public records request form to try to obtain financial statements and records listing what the city has spent on the mayor and his wife for travel expenses. Here is a copy of a letter that I received from the city attorney in response to my request. To summarize the letter, the city attorney is simply telling me that I have to obtain all of these documents directly from the city finance officer. Was it really necessary to have an attorney that charges more than $200/hr write a letter to me to tell me this? This is exactly the type of wastefulness that we are trying to end. No wonder our legal costs have increased so much, these people at city hall can't make any decisions that simply require common sense. Couldn't the city administrator have typed up a letter like this or simply call me?

http://home.earthlink.net/~rrodartejr/mcrg/letters/letter.pdf

By the way, last week I was told that my documents would be provided to me on Wednesday, January 18th. Today I was told that the finance officer would be calling me next week. The countdown continues and now about 38 days have passed since I submitted my request.

Delano Record Article - January 19th

Here is a copy of an article that was published in the Delano Record on January 19th. The primary subject was our recall effort.

http://home.earthlink.net/~rrodartejr/mcrg/articles/012006Record.pdf

Recall Petitions Are In!

If anyone would like to sign the recall petition or obtain a blank set of petitions to collect signatures, feel free to call us or send us an email. Requirements for people that would like to volunteer to collect signatures are:

1. Person collecting signatures must be a registered voter in the City of McFarland.
2. Person collecting signatures must sign the bottom of the petition stating that they are the sole person that collected signatures for that particular petition. The person must not allow anyone else to distribute their petition and collect signatures on it.

rrodartejr@earthlink.net
(661) 330-2290

Reimbursement of Mayor's Wife's Travel Expenses

A couple of weeks ago I received the following message from a county official who is looking into the mayor's inappropriate use of city money for his wife's travel expenses.

"Mr. Rodarte:
In regards to the Mayor Melendez and his travel expenses for his wife. As of December 20, 2005 the Mayor has repaid the City of McFarland for his wifes travel expenses.Thank you for bringing this to our attention."

I think it is interesting how quickly the mayor decided to pay after I confronted him about it at the December 8th council meeting and after he was questioned about it by Jose Gaspar from Eye 29 news. 12 days after we brought this to the community's attention he decided to pay it back. I think I should put a copy of the video clip for the news broadcast on this website. What a great idea!

But I still wonder how much money he was trying to get away with. Well stay tuned. As soon as I get the documentation on his itemized travel expenses I will post them to this website. That's if the city ever decides to give me the documents. I wonder why it is taking so long for them to provide me with this documentation, it's been more than 36 days already. I bet it's those pesky guys from the previous administration messing with those computers again. Hmmm...

Copy of Flyer Distribution

To inform any new visitors to the blog, I thought I should add a copy of the flyer that we distributed to the entire community a couple of weeks ago. This lists most of our complaints against the mayor and the two council members that follow him. We distributed close to 1500 flyers and I hope that we have sparked enough interest in these issues that people will begin to ask tough questions and investigate these issues for themselves.

http://home.earthlink.net/~rrodartejr/mcrg/flyer/FlyerDist.pdf

Blog Abuse

Ok, it looks like some people have been abusing the blog site and posting comments under other people's names. If you people can't prove your points without having to resort to these kinds of tactics then I guess I'll just have to treat you like the children that you are and moderate the comments.

Recall Petition Approval

Good news today. It looks like the mayor and city administrator were not able to find anything wrong with our blank recall petition. They denied our first draft because it was only written in English. We got it right on the second try with our bilingual version. Here is a copy of the approval letter.

http://home.earthlink.net/~rrodartejr/mcrg/letters/PetApproval.pdf

City of McFarland Financial Statements

On December 12, I requested several documents from the city including financial statements for the last five years and documents listing travel expenses for city officials. Here is a copy of the form I submitted to the city.
http://home.earthlink.net/~rrodartejr/mcrg/docreq/DocReq.pdf

I wasn't surprised when city officials told me that all they could provide to me was financial statements up until the end of the fiscal year in June 2003. The mayor took office sometime in March 2003 and I guess for some reason they are unable to find their financial statements for the rest of the fiscal years from this point on. I wonder if they were even completed at all. They also haven't provided me with any documents listing what the city has paid out for the mayor's travel expenses.

Looking at the financial statements that they were able to provide, it appears that the city was making steady progress. Net income was growing in the range of ~$200-300k per year before the mayor came in. Net assets for the city nearly doubled from approximately 6 million to 12 million dollars over a 3 year period. So I wonder why the current mayor's administration is unable to provide these statements to prove to us that they are improving our city. Could they be hiding the fact that they are squandering the surplus left by the previous administration? Hmmm....

http://home.earthlink.net/~rrodartejr/mcrg/docreq/fs2001.pdf
http://home.earthlink.net/~rrodartejr/mcrg/docreq/fs2002.pdf
http://home.earthlink.net/~rrodartejr/mcrg/docreq/fs2003.pdf

Anonymous Flyer on Recyclable Garbage Issue

I came across a flyer that is being recirculated around town. The flyer appears to be written by someone who is supporting the recycling contract that was signed with Sunset Waste and it basically amounts to being a personal attack on R&F Disposal and the previous city council.

The flyer was circulated in Spanish and we had it translated into English:
http://home.earthlink.net/~rrodartejr/mcrg/garbage/Flyer_Spanish.pdf
http://home.earthlink.net/~rrodartejr/mcrg/garbage/Flyer_English.pdf

Key Points that the anonymous author attempts to make:

1. McFarland residents are paying $17.25 per month per home for garbage and green waste service. Delano residents are paying $14.00 per month per home for the same service. The author claims that McFarland residents should be paying less than Delano residents because of the simple fact that McFarland has less residents. The author's logic here is so simplistic that I am convinced that this person has never owned their own business or taken a basic course in economics.

My response: Any business or organization with a larger volume of sales has more room to adjust and drop their pricing because the larger sales will offset a good portion of the lost profit margin. So because the company that services Delano can count on revenue from over 45,000 residents it can afford to take more risk and reduce their pricing. Where a company that has to rely on only 9,000 residents needs to be more careful and be more conservative to make sure they don't price their services too low. Also, the author failed to mention that the City of McFarland gets a 5% franchise fee from R&F. So in reality we actually pay ~$16.39 and the city keeps the rest.

Another thing, why does the author assume that this justifies the council's decision to approve a service contract that is twice as expensive as the one that R&F proposed? Are they implying that this is a good manner of punishing R&F because they charge a bit more than Delano for our regular garbage service?

2. The author states that the contract that R&F has allows for 5% annually increases in their service charges and they have a contract with the city that will allow them to increase our rates.

My response: This is totally misrepresented and shows the author's lack of experience in negotiating service contracts. The 5% increase is a consumer price index (CPI) that is built into the contract to protect the company against years when our economy experiences large rates of inflation and when energy prices rise. The 5% is a maximum cap. So if our economy experiences a CPI increase of 10% in one year, R&F can only increase their service rates by 5%.

3. The author complains that the city awarded a 20 year contract to R&F.

My response: Most businesses that invest a significant amount of money expect long term contracts. No competent business person would invest half a million dollars and sign a short term contract of less than 10-15 years unless they had guarantees that their investment would yield a good return in that short period of time. The city council just approved a 40 year lease option on the community center. Consumers typically sign off on 15 and 30 year mortgages. Does a 20 year contract really sound unreasonable? Maybe for someone that has never put their own money on the line with a large investment.

4. The author complains that the city loaned $300,000 to R&F for the purchase of a fleet of trucks.

My response: The $300,000 was actually an interest free loan from Kern County. The county provided this loan to R&F along with a grant for free trash cans during the time when the county decided to shutdown the Delano-McFarland landfill. The shutdown of the landfill had a negative impact on R&F's costs, R&F petitioned the county for assistance and their effort was rewarded. The city of Delano also received some grants from the county for this same reason. The loan disbursement is being administered by the City of McFarland. Proof of this can be found in this following page from the 2003 financial statements for the city. It clearly shows that Kern County Waste Management (KCWM) loaned $300,000 to the city for this purpose.

KCWM Note Payable:
http://home.earthlink.net/~rrodartejr/mcrg/garbage/finstat.pdf

Bottomline on this flyer, it is a bunch of garbage! No pun intended. I understand why the author was ashamed to print their name on this.

Audio Clip from December 8th Council Meeting

I received a set of micro-cassettes with the audio recording for the December 8th council meeting. I am posting a clip with one of the highlights from the meeting.

1. The mayor admits that he is using city money to pay for his wife's travel expenses. He states that he believes he is entitled to have us pay for these personal expenses because he spends a lot of time from home serving our needs. Sounds more like he is serving his own needs.

2. Councilman Manuel Cantu stands by the mayor and makes comments suggesting that the mayor's behavior is acceptable because McFarland is like a multi-million dollar company with lots of money to spare.

3. Toward the end of the clip the mayor makes a statement that the council approves of his use of city money for personal travel and the audience in the council chamber speaks out in protest.

Link to audio clip in mp3 format:
http://home.earthlink.net/~rrodartejr/mcrg/audio/clip1.mp3

If anyone would like to receive a free copy of the complete recording of the entire meeting on CD just send me an email at rrodartejr@earthlink.net. Make sure to provide your name and mailing address.