If you pay taxes and you have not been reading Will Carless' (Voice of San Diego) ongoing articles on happenings at the Southeastern Economic Development Corp (SEDC), then you need to. A brief summary with some links:

From re-reading his more recent articles Carless appears to have started looking at the SEDC over the topic of the Valencia Business Park, a questionable land deal they approved, which he details in an insightful July 2 article.The project had come under public scrutiny some months before because of a Carless/Andrew Donahue article.

Then in a July 8 article "Without Oversight, SEDC Officials Award Themselves Raises" Carless drops the boom: SEDC President Carolyn Smith had been paying herself and her top deputies tens of thousands of dollars a year, with totals running into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. From reading that article, and all the articles that followed, I still wasn't sure why these massive expenditures were not detected by routine outside audits, unless such audits do not exist, which would be an outrage.

Carless (and Donahue) followed the July 8 bombshell with a July 12 article "SEDC Bonuses Could Raise Serious IRS Issues" (Donahune),  a July 15 article "Mayor Widens SEDC Inquiry, Slashes Funds" (Carless), a July 16 article "Mayor Queries SEDC President's $30,000 Plus Paydays" (Carless), a particularly insightful July 19 article "SEDC's Bonus Answers Dont Add Up" (Carless), and a disgusting July 19 article "SEDC President Resists Push to Resign" (Donahue).

The last article mentioned above states that if President Chase is terminated, then the taxpayers are going to have to fork over 200k to 300k as a parting gift unless she was terminated for dishonesty. As someone from Chula Vista where we had a recent employment issue where the person in question was given a golden handshake (later stopped cold by the state government) I think it is an outrage that if Chase is wrong in all this (1) she is given a dollar more of taxpayer money; and (2) she and her pals are not forced to pay every dollar they wrongly took.

There is plenty more to read, with plenty of documentation, over at the Voice of San Diego website. I suggest also checking out Scott Lewis' SLOP on the topic.

This whole incident really makes two points:

First: it is time the officials we elect to know the budget and where our money goes actually learn the ins and outs. It makes the case to elect more officeholders like accountant April Boling and budget guru Carl DeMaio. If reporters can figure out this kind of mess, that means our officials and their enormous staffs can too. Does anyone really think there isn't much more of this going on? Not to mention a thick layer of waste overall? Why can't our officials even find a dollar to cut?

Second, the fact that this was exposed by the Voice of San Diego points out the decline of the mainstream media and the rise of the internet. Compare the budget and staff of the Union Tribune to the Voice, let alone Red County, and the difference is enormous. But the real news isn't being broken by the Union Tribune any more. For the most part the reporters are out of touch with politics and government here on the ground. Will Carless drove that point home over the last few weeks. Good job.