Fiscal Rangers

MASSIVE Voter FRAUD during Obama Campaign Disclosed in Houston

The Reuter's Article is HERE. It was posted on Sept. 25th, and already has over 550 comments posted. It seems that a get out the Vote project run by a member of a local chapter of the Houston SEIU union (similar to Acorn programs) resulted in huge numbers of fake voters who voted during the Obama elections in Harris County, TX. Harris County has 1.9-million voters and is the second largest county in the country with almost 900 voting precincts. Read the article to know more. It seems a local activist got 50 friends to monitor voting operations and witnessed much fraud., such as id's not being checked for each voter. They then expanded the search and researched precints where houses listed more than six voters. The average precinct had 1800 - 2400 voters, but they found one precinct with 24,000 voters, and then researched why. Quotes from the article: "But we came across one (precinct) with 24,000, and that was where we started looking." It was Houston's poorest and predominantly black district, which has led some to accuse the group of targeting poor black areas. But Engelbrecht rejects that, saying, "It had nothing to do with politics. It was... Read more →

Lake County Commissioners to Consider Approving New Waste, Fraud & Abuse Hotline on Tuesday

The agenda for the upcoming Tuesday, Sept. 21 Lake County Board meeting includes an agenda item (tab 31 which is HERE) in the County manager comments section asking the Board to approve the implementation of a Fraud, Waste & Abuse Hotline established by the County Clerk's office. GREAT! I have been after the School Board for three years to do this, and they have not. The hotline idea here was added to the referenced audit report after discussions that Lee Johnson and I had with the prior County Clerk Audit Director. The one negative is that it says the Internal Audit Dept. or the County Management would investigate the reported incident. I would prefer it ONLY be the Internal Audit Dept., and not anyone in the County BCC staff. You don't want someone in management reviewing a situation and "fixing" documents (not that I expect it to happen, but you want to prevent any suspicions of staff "fixing" evidence.) Additionally, it said results "would be available" tot he public upon request. A much better, transparent approach would be to publish the facts on the website, written so as to removed ability to identify the person reporting the incident, or anyone... Read more →

Updated: Our Overview & Solutions for the Lake County Hospital Tax District Which Will Give Away $10-million in tax funds without Oversight

Update Friday, Sept. 17: As we forecast in the article below, the five men on the Board of the Lake County Hospital Tax District voted against lone opponent Marilyn Bainter to continue collecting a 1 mill property tax and giving it to the two local hospitals without any requirements on how the approximately $10.1 million would be spent. See below for the Background: Thursday, Sept. 16, 2010 - Tonight, Tuesday the second public hearing for the Board of the Lake County Hospital District will take place. Even though many citizens will provide public input, like they did at last week's meeting, on reasons why the tax should not be continued, I expect the five hospital supported members of the Board will vote against sixth member, Marilyn Bainter, and vote to continue a 1 mill tax on your property (residential and commercial) for another year. That tax, using current North Lake County property valuations, will generate approximately $10-million in tax collections, which will be roughly split into two buckets of money and given to the two local hospitals, Leesburg, and Waterman, without any oversight requirements, or any specific, targeted spending areas that can be verified. Prior meetings have resulted in both... Read more →

Lake County Commissioners Spend $11-million on EOC Center with Little Discussion

This morning, the Lake County Board of Commissioners voted 3-1 to approve the design of the MOST EXPENSIVE option for a new Emergency Operations AND Communications Center Building near the County Court building. Commissioners Jennifer Hill, Linda Stewart & Welton Cadwell offered hardly any justification for their decisions or discussion, and voted against Jimmy Conner to select the MOST EXPENSIVE option offered by the architect who prepared estimates. Board Chairman Welton Cadwell even chided Commissioner Jimmy Conner for "pontificating" when Conner was trying to discuss the merits of different options. Until today, the public and media were told that the cost would be around $4-million for a basic EOC (Emergency Operations Center) building with most of it being paid with Federal grant funds. But, the architect came back to the Board today with harder estimates and a range of options. The basic EOC was now around $6-million, which meant over $2.5 million not covered by Federal grant funds would have to be paid from local taxpayer funds. And, the original expanded version to include space for the Sheriff and EMS dispatch operations was estimated to cost $6-million, but now it is over $11-million. And the Board chose the most expensive... Read more →

Lake County Board to Consider Spending up to $11+million on Unbudgeted Emergency Operations Center (EOC)

Yes, it's true. Tomorrow morning, after 9am, in the Lake County Administration building, with little transparency, and no description of the NEW cost estimates in the agenda, your Lake County Board of Commissioners will vote on moving forward the staff proposal to build a separate Emergency Operations Center (EOC). Only, now, the new estimate from an architect seems to be $6-million to over ELEVEN MILLION DOLLARS for a building that staff originally said would cost around $4-million in Federal funds. The rest has to come out of taxpayer's pockets. If you remember, the County Board authorized an architect to prepare a cost estimate for the original EOC (Emergency Operating Center), estimated at $4-million, plus a second option with Sheriff & EMS dispatch centers for another unfunded $2-million. The EOC center is the one where they wanted to spend $4-6-million on the ops center with mostly “free” Federal money. In the past four years, the County has only needed their current temporary EOC about 15 days total. Well, NOW THE ARCHITECT’S ESTIMATE HAS GROWN TO A BARE BONES budget of $6-MILLION TO a fully optioned construction project costing up to $11-MILLION. You have to look at all the attachments to the... Read more →

Alert: Please attend Thursday's Board Meeting of the North Lake county Hospital District

This Thursday (Sept. 16, 2010) at 5pm is the second of two required public hearings for the Board to listen to public input before voting to: 1) Approve a property tax millage rate of either ZERO or ONE % . For forty years, they have been rubberstamping a request to set the millage rate at 1%. 2) Approve a budget which this year is around $10-million. See our recent, earlier post for agenda docs, etc. As we have posted on this website before, the Board has NO stated requirements for spending the approximatly $10-million that is split between the two large local hospitals, Waterman and Leesburg. There also is no requirement for an "audit trail" of how the funds are spent, so the hospitals put the funds in their general checking accounts and can spend it on just about anything, like high salaries, but tell us it was spent on something else. BE there this Thursday evening for a tailgate party starting at 4pm in the 8 story County parking lot, then go to the meeting around 4:45pm to get a seat, and provide public input as you see fit about issues such as: 1) the tax is not warranted... Read more →

Corporations are Passing More of Health Insurance Costs to Employees

So, who did the Democrat voters think would pay for THEIR health insurance when they voted for Obama and supported Obamacare? Well, the Wall St. Journal says now corporate employers are passing more of the cost increases on to employees, rather than split the cost increases. Now local, state and federal government agencies need to do the same. The day is over when government employees should get a higher subsidy for health insurance than employees of businesses. Favorite quote: Cost shifting has become the norm for many of the roughly 160 million Americans who receive health insurance through an employer. In the latest survey, 17% of workers at large firms had deductibles over $1,000, compared with 6% who paid that amount before their insurer started to pick up the bill in 2006. At small firms, nearly half of workers had deductibles that high this year, compared with 16% four years ago. vj from the Wall St. Journal HERE Employers Sharply Raise Workers' Share of Health Costs By AVERY JOHNSON Employers passed health-insurance costs onto employees at a sharply higher rate this year, and businesses' premiums grew more slowly than they have in a decade, according to an annual survey of... Read more →