City of Santa Ana finding odd ways to blow $111 million

The City of Santa Ana is preparing to spend over $111 million dollars on its parks, roads and water mains, according to the O.C. Register. However, the devil is in the details:

  • The streets are in such bad shape that the City Public Works department wants to start the repairs on the streets that aren’t so bad, before they get as bad as the rest of the streets. You might want to buy tire insurance in the interim as the bad streets don’t figure to get fixed until 2009, according to the O.C. Register. Question – why not do all the repairs concurrently? If the City Council were to stop doling out giant raises to the City Manager and the City Clerk, perhaps they would have more money to fix our streets? And what about the millions that were spent on unnecessary street medians and the palm trees over by Mater Dei? Not to mention all the money being blown in Floral Park. Couldn’t that money have been spent on street repairs?
  • Over $1 million will be spent on a new giant anteater (see drawing above) exhibit at the Santa Ana Zoo, but the O.C. Register did not mention any other park repairs, and there certainly are no new parks on the way. The anteater project is one that Assemblyman Jose Solorio has been pimping, as he is a graduate of U.C. Irvine, which uses the anteater as its logo. The diminutive Solorio no doubt is proud of the anteater, in comparison to the huge bear used by U.C. L.A.
  • Over $6 million is ticketed for water and sewer main repairs…but didn’t they raise our water rates through the roof to pay for these repairs? We should not be surprised to see them spending the money now. The real question is why they let this system fall into disrepair in the first place, and why does the City of Santa Ana spend 33% of its water budget on administration, as compared to other similar sized districts that spend about 19% on administration?
  • “The city has almost all of the money in hand – with the exception of the $14.1 million it wants to spend on a streetcar and transit study,” according to the O.C. Register. Not true! Per the OCTA Transit Committee Agenda for this coming Thursday, OCTA is handing over $5.9 million to Santa Ana for their ridiculous streetcar to nowhere. Nice money for George Pla and Cordoba Corp. I suspect.

By the way, hold on to your wallets. Word is leaking out of City Hall that the City Council wants to put a parcel tax increase on the November ballot, ostensibly for parks and roads. Yep, this would be the Ream Assessment II. We beat the last one, but will we get lucky again?


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"Admin" is just editors Vern Nelson, Greg Diamond, or Ryan Cantor sharing something that they mostly didn't write themselves, but think you should see. Before December 2010, "Admin" may have been former blog owner Art Pedroza.