MarkTalk.com News & Commentary

I just moments ago broke on Sacramento’s CBS 13 Early News a story from the embattled Western Placer Unified School District.   That is the district in which is Twelve Bridges Elementary School.   (MarkTalk readers and listeners have been following the saga of the school’s publication of the students’ personal information and parent’s subsequent discovery, through a MarkTalk investigation, that they had all given their permission to the school to do just that)

Now  the little weekly newspaper that covers the area has scored a major coup of its own by revealing that a grand jury may now look into the district finances.

Those of us who live in the area have been watching with great interest the nearly 40 projects, totaling hundreds of millions of dollars, in progress not just in the school district but in the county and individual towns.  This has been fueled by the unexpected windfall that accompanied the area being the fastest growing in California, and one of the fastest in the nation.   Just as the Dot-Com bubble burst erased a similar windfall at the state level, plunging California into Third World fiscal status, the housing bubble burst is causing like problems in the town of Lincoln, the county of Placer and especially in the school district.  (It is causing a whole other set of problems for those of us who bought homes there too….MarkTalk’s abode was valued at $150,000.00 more when finished in September 2005 than we paid for it that same January…. it is now worth $150,000.00 less than what we paid and some genius on a Real Estate web site has figured out that homes in our development are bleeding out at a rate of $300.00 per day.)

Several determined residents, led by Twelve Bridges resident Steve Pounds, have been agitating for an investigation since the district announced that a long anticipated, new 50-million dollar high school would not be built  (20-million of the 50 was earmarked for just the athletic field… that’s right, $20,000,000.00 for a playground).  Now the newspaper reveals that the district somehow managed to misplace a total of at least $189,000,000.00 — One-Hundred-Eighty-Nine-Million-Dollars.  

I remarked on TV this morning that maybe somebody just left it in the pocket of their suit when it went out to the cleaners.   Somebody is being taken to the cleaners here, but it ain’t no suit.  

Pounds and other parents have been ripping the school board and administrators at meetings and on an Internet message board maintained by a local Realtor.   Now there are two demands for a grand jury, and a list of 50-specific questions prepared by facilities managers for the district.  Some of those questions have to do with substandard construction and materials, along with money issues.

MarkTalk has no inside knowledge of how this will turn out but our experience with these kinds of things in Boston, Providence, Philly and New York indicates to us that Club Fed may have some new inductees in the pipeline.  

Oh, and some other folks might swing by Sears this morning and have remote starters installed on their vehicles…  I would also be disinclined to hang around any where that a bunch of union guys show up to pour fresh cement.