The county board of supervisors hasn't had a new member since 1995

We have some off-the-wall school board members out here in East County (I'm thinking of Jim Kelly), but we have a fine representative on the County Board of Supervisors. I think Dianne Jacob is the most conscientious supervisor on the board.

On the other hand, I think Greg Cox is just one small step above Bill Horn. Why do candidates like these keep getting reelected?

Mary Salas, why don't you run?

Randy Dotinga at Voice of San Diego notes:

"...The county board of supervisors hasn't had a new member since 1995, and if three board members have their way, it'll stay like that for at least a few more years. The U-T says incumbents Pam Slater-Price, Dianne Jacob and Greg Cox are all sending signals that they'll run again in 2012..."


County supervisor races continue to take shape
By Christopher Cadelago
SDUT
January 10, 2011

Supervisor Pam Slater-Price has signaled her intention to seek re-election in 2012, joining an early slate of candidates that includes two board colleagues and a pair of familiar faces.

Slater-Price, who represents the county's District 3, was first elected in 1992. Steve Danon, chief of staff to Rep. Brian Bilbray, is also vying for the seat and has been actively running for several months.

The San Diego County Registrar of Voters office has also received initial paperwork from Supervisor Dianne Jacob, who represents the county’s District 2, and Santee’s Rudy Reyes.

Reyes mounted an unsuccessful campaign against Jacob in 2008 and lost bids for the Santee City Council in 2008 and 2010.

Supervisor Greg Cox, who represents the county's District 1, has made it clear he would run again. Jacob was first elected in 1992 and Cox joined the board of supervisors in 1995.

Did San Diego County make a big mistake by investing almost a billion dollars in hedge funds?

Jacob's Jaw Dropping Worry Spreads to Other Issues
Voice of San Diego
Scott Lewis
March 16, 2009

This month's Vanity Fair is almost wholly devoted to financial stories...

But most interesting to locals is this story on hedge funds and "why hedge funds are imploding by the thousands..."

Obviously, the story is interesting from the perspective of San Diego County's pension fund, which has something less than a billion dollars now invested in hedge funds. But the story also helps explain one of the attributes of these hedge funds that has apparently caused some alarm among those who oversee the county's retirement system.

You might remember that when the trustees of the pension fund accepted the resignation of their chief investment officer, David Deutsch, they also talked about their potential losses in the hedge fund WG Trading. WG Trading, of course, is under scrutiny from federal prosecutors who accuse its principals of fraud. And San Diego asked for its $78 million back from the fund late last year.

But they can't get the money back for several more months. Why?

From Seth Hettena's story (emphasis mine):

The pension terminated its relationship with WG Trading on Dec. 31 after the hedge fund refused to cooperate with an SDCERA consultant. Under its agreement with WG Trading, SDCERA is not entitled to receive its money until June 30.

Such restrictions on hedge fund redemptions, known as gates, have caught many investors by surprise, including SDCERA. Board member Dianne Jacob, chair of the County Board of Supervisors, requested a review of all similar restrictions SDCERA might face with other investments.



Take note of that word: "gates."

Vanity Fair helps illuminate Jacob's worry about hedge fund gates:

There are many managers who argue that the industry's problems are at least in part of its own making. Says Leon Cooperman, who founded the $3 billion hedge fund Omega Advisors in 1991, after a 25-year career at Goldman Sachs, "Hedge funds have shot themselves in the foot. They have not treated investors correctly." Atop his list of sins: refusing to allow investors to take their money out, which is known in the industry as "gating" investors.



The author explains more about gating later in the story, which focuses on Fortress Investment Group, a hedge fund that evolved into a publicly traded company.

Managers who employ gates defend the practice on the grounds that it's within their legal rights, and that selling their positions to meet redemption requests would be unfair to those investors who wanted to stay. But the widespread impression among investors is that managers broke a social contract and are doing it to save their own skins. And there may be another reason for the gates. Fortress's documents, for instance, disclose that "our funds have various agreements that create debt or debt-like obligations ... with a material number of counterparties. Such agreements in many instances contain covenants or 'triggers' that require our funds to maintain specified amounts of assets under management."



In other words, gates may mean that the money invested in a hedge fund simply isn't accessible -- or worse, that the assets simply don't exist...

Greg Cox defends grants to daughter's employer, Elite Racing Foundation

Cox defends grants to daughter's employer, Elite Racing Foundation
By Eleanor Yang Su
San Diego Union Tribune
February 6, 2009

County Supervisor Greg Cox is defending his decision to award grants that top $100,000 to the Rock 'n' Roll Marathon while not disclosing that his daughter works for the company that stages the event.

Cox, whose district encompasses much of the marathon route through downtown San Diego, Hillcrest and Mission Bay, helped provide a $12,500 community enhancement grant this year to the Elite Racing Foundation for Children, Education and Medical Research.

He has recommended similar amounts since 1999 for the charity, which co-hosts the marathon with the privately held Elite Racing Inc. Cox also received $750 in campaign contributions from Elite executives in 2007, when he was running for re-election.

The San Diego Union-Tribune reported on Sunday that Elite Racing Inc. has been profiting from the marathon while its affiliated nonprofit has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in public subsidies and grants.

Elizabeth Cox has worked at Elite Racing Inc. since August 2002, and is responsible for development and community relations.

Supervisor Cox said he started supporting the marathon a decade ago because it helps boost the local economy and community involvement.

“I wasn't going to penalize the Rock 'n' Roll Marathon because of the fact that my daughter works there,” he said. “Nor was I going to reward them. . . . My decision has been to hold them to the same dollar amount for the past five or six years.”

Cox did not disclose his relationship when voting on the grant awards “because there was no legal reason to,” said Luis Monteagudo, an aide to Cox. Only the financial interests of dependent children and spouses must be disclosed, Assistant County Counsel Tom Montgomery said.

Bob Stern, a government ethics expert, said Cox should have recused himself and allowed other supervisors to recommend and vote on the grant...





UPDATE 1:

Race organizers hire independent auditor
02/06/2009
By Eleanor Yang Su


Background: The for-profit Elite Racing Inc., organizer of the Rock 'n'Roll Marathon, has an affiliated foundation that collected more than $600,000 in public subsidies and grants, according to city and county records analyzed by The San Diego Union-Tribune.

What's changing: Elite Racing's parent company has hired an auditor to look into finances. It has also withdrawn an application for city tourism promotion funds for next year's marathon.

The future: The audit is expected to be completed within three weeks.

...Elite Racing was acquired 13 months ago by a private equity firm, Dickey said, and the new management was unaware that the grants and subsidies were flowing in through the Elite Racing Foundation for Children, Education and Medical Research.

In naming the foundation as a co-host for the event, Elite benefited from a city policy that allows nonprofits to pay about half the cost for police services used race day. Those subsidies have been worth $40,000 to $45,000 a year. County supervisors also gave grants of about $20,000 annually to stage the marathon.

During the past year, the company has reported profits ranging from nothing to $275,000 in its applications to the city and county to stage the event and collect community grants...

Board members at the San Diego Tourism Promotion Corp., the nonprofit entity that will grant an estimated $25 million in hotel fee revenue to promote tourism this year, had mixed reactions about the withdrawn application.





UPDATE 2:

Marathon Organizer Rescinds Application For Tourism Funds
02-06-2009
Metro Networks Communications

The organizer of the San Diego Rock 'n' Roll Marathon has rescinded an application for 375-thousand dollars in city tourism/promotion funds. It has also announced it's hired an outside auditor to investigate questionable payouts associated with an affiliated charity. The actions come after it was discovered Elite Racing Inc. profited from the race while its charity foundation acted as a co-host for the race. The charity has also received over 600-thousand dollars in city subsidies and county grants over the race's eleven-year history.

San Diego County uses worn-out excuse of attorney-client privilege to keep investigation report secret

Did gifts cause CCS therapists to favor certain vendors of wheelchairs and other medical devices?

The Investigation the County Doesn't Want You to See
By WILL CARLESS
Jan. 4, 2009

At some point in 2007, a whistleblower at California Children's Services, a program run by the county of San Diego that provides wheelchairs and other medical devices to children with physical disabilities, filed a complaint with the county alleging improprieties within the program.

The county launched a widespread investigation into the allegations that continued for at least 13 months in 2007 and 2008, records show. The investigation led to disciplinary action against county employees and changes to the county's ethics policies, but the report the investigators produced, and all the information it contains, is being kept a secret.

... Minutes from meetings show staff discussed allegations that therapists at the CCS program received gifts from vendors in violation of county ethics rules and may have favored certain vendors over others because of those gifts.

But exactly what was alleged, who was investigated and how deep any problems at the program went, are all things the county's top officials have decided shouldn't be released to the public...

One public records expert said attorney-client privilege is consistently used by public agencies to avoid releasing embarrassing documents, and pointed out that the county could chose to waive its privilege and make the document public.

The county has also refused to provide a copy of the report to the state of California, which provides the bulk of the $20 million budget for the CCS program. A spokesman for the California Department of Health Care Services, which oversees the CCS program, said county officials told the state that the investigation only concerned "personnel issues" and that they had not found any evidence that the program had been negatively impacted by the individuals investigated.

...A county spokeswoman said in an e-mail that the medical therapists work with the family's physician to provide the best piece of equipment available to the child from a list of possible vendors.

The selection of vendors, and the possible undue influence placed on county therapists by vendors who gave gifts to county staff, appear from documents to have been the subject of the internal investigation sparked by the whistleblower...

...In San Diego, public bodies regularly hand over such reports and documents.

But, in response to a request from voiceofsandiego.org media partner NBC 7/39 for the investigative report, County Counsel John Sansone claimed that the document fell within one of the law's exemptions and therefore did not have to be provided...