Layoffs resulted from plunder of literacy program

Contra Costa Times

Rebecca Rosen Lum
TIMES STAFF WRITER

RICHMOND -- The city's Employment and Training Department managers drained $221,447 in restricted cash from the city literacy program to pay their own salaries, then laid off nearly all the literacy teachers for lack of money.

Department records obtained by the Contra Costa Times show that city literacy funding, plus state and private matching grants, were tapped to help pay 11 employees with salaries up to $133,285 a year who do not work in the Literacy for Every Adult, or LEAP, program.

An incoming grant of $98,922 could delay pink slips sent to seven of nine literacy staffers, although there is no immediate plan to do so.

Irregularities do not end there. Records show that at least one LEAP worker was directed by a supervisor to falsify a timecard.

The wife of the department's deputy director makes $80,000 yearly as a top-level information technology specialist assigned to the department. SEIU Local 790, which represents LEAP employees, says that flouts the city anti-nepotism policy, which is in its contract with the union.

City officials recently decided to lay off more than 100 city workers to close a yawning budget gap.

The literacy misappropriations could spell big trouble for Richmond. The state library, which issues the grants, has tight rules for spending and overseeing the money.

"At the very least, I know the state would pull its funding if they knew about this," SEIU Local 790 shop steward Linda McPhee said. "Literacy programs all over the state compete for these grants, partly dependent on their history. This does not look good for Richmond."

Cities may eye literacy programs during hard times "because they are a magnet for funding," said California State Library consultant Valerie Stadelbacher Reinke. "But there are certain minimum standards for using these grants, and if they are not following those standards, we would hold Richmond responsible."

One is that the program must be run by the city library. Here, it is not.

"That alone is equal to fraud," McPhee wrote in a Nov. 25 letter to assistant city manager Leveron Bryant.

Not true, said Employment and Training assistant director Sal Vaca.

"This is a total misunderstanding," he said Monday. "LEAP is paying its fair share of the Employment and Training Department overhead. It's a cost allocation plan, and it has been negotiated with and approved by the finance department."

Studies show that in Richmond and across the state, one in four residents can barely read, as dismal a showing as three of the lowest-ranking states: Alabama, Florida and South Carolina. Only Louisiana, with 28 percent adult illiteracy, and Mississippi, with 30 percent, are worse.

More than one-fifth of Richmond's population has reading problems, according to a recent survey by the National Center for Education Statistics.

After Upesi Mtambuzi, the Employment and Training Department director, issued the pink slips, closed satellite offices and bumped the main office from its longtime home, she left for a monthlong trip.

"The level of their conduct is surreal," teacher Mark Trotter said. "Funds were taken unconscionably. Two staffers isn't hardly enough to give this city literacy."

Tonight, the City Council expects an explanation of the concerns raised by LEAP staff members earlier this month.

None of the Employment and Training workers whose salaries were subsidized with LEAP funds take home less than $65,000 a year. The list includes office helpers, bookkeeping assistants and secretaries.

Mtambuzi earns more than $133,000 year; $25,725 of that is LEAP money.

According to the city's agreement with SEIU Local 790, employees can only be laid off for lack of work or lack of money.

Demand for literacy help continues to soar, and minus the misappropriations, there would have been plenty of money, McPhee said.

Of LEAP's $845,000 budget, the city contributes $385,000 from its general fund. The state library fund and other private sources ante up matching funds.

After long meetings with City Manager Isiah Turner, Vaca proposed changes to Mtambuzi's plan, with only one tutor-coordinator losing his job.

"Upesi (Mtambuzi) tried to fulfill (both departments') objectives and also reduce dollars, but her restructuring has disproportionately affected the LEAP staff," Turner said.

"The city doesn't have much experience laying off people," Vaca said. "It's awkward and uncomfortable for a lot of people, but it needs to be done to preserve the financial health of the city."

SEIU members slated for layoffs have muddied the waters: "If they go down, they want to drag everyone down with them," he said.

Meanwhile, many LEAP clients will watch the outcome of today's council meeting to see what will come of the proposed cuts.

"I could see if it was a place where no one succeeds, but everyone comes out of here benefiting," said Kareem, 19, an aspiring electrician who came to LEAP to improve his math skills.

"There are jobs where you can get out there and work your body to death, but I want to use my mind. It's already a struggle to get hired. It's crucial to get the skills."


LEAP called a godsend for nonreaders

Contra Costa Times

Rebecca Rosen Lum
TIMES STAFF WRITER


RICHMOND -- John Tate's cell phone rings with a Bach fugue. A slim, well-spoken man with wire-framed glasses and a neatly clipped goatee, Tate could easily pass for a writer.

But Tate, 54, never learned to read. Born in New Orleans, he grew up picking cotton, then migrated to Richmond in 1983 to work construction. He had "mother wit," black Southern parlance for the moral sensibility learned from one's mother, but no education.

That's a gift Richmond's Literacy for Every Adult Program, or LEAP, gave him.

"All my life I've been pretending I could read," Tate said. "LEAP is like a family for people like me who come in scared to let the public know I can't."

After an on-the-job injury ended his work life, he sat down with a tutor and learned to sound out long vowels and short vowels. How to break down words. How to sound out the letters of the alphabet. How to form sentences.

"Oh, lord!" he said. "I'm 54. It's hard to absorb all the fundamentals at my age."

LEAP program staff have patiently prodded, inspired and cajoled hundreds of people like Tate to learn to read long after most others have given up or mistakenly assumed they could read.

But those days could end soon. The program is slated to shrink drastically in January.

Although LEAP pays its own way by landing state and private grants, another city department has tapped those funds, leaving little to run a program that serves more than 100 clients a year.

"If they close this program, they close down hope," Tate said. "Of all the things in the world. Man! Something so small, yet something so large."

According to a national survey, nearly one in four Richmond residents struggles with literacy.

Literacy specialist Mark Trotter said program clients create ways to navigate a literate society. "It's, 'I lost my glasses,' or 'I have arthritis in my hands, could you write this for me?'" Trotter said.

"I'd always watch people reading the newspaper," said Fred White, 43. "Now, I can do that. It felt so good to read a newspaper in front of other people. When I came in here three years ago, I couldn't read a children's book."

Education has been a disappointment for many adult literacy students, said Trotter, 30, now in his sixth year at LEAP and his fourth as a staff member. "In order not to dash their hopes, you've got to have a lot of patience. A lot of it is frightening. (But) one's life can change, even though it might seem like it's unchangeable."

A smile playing over his face, he added, "Since I've been working with Fred, he's penned two plays."

Clients include an executive chef at a four-star hotel whose wife read menus aloud to him so he could memorize them.

One woman successfully kept her functional illiteracy a secret from her husband.

"Some, at one point, could read to some degree when they were younger, but over time their skills diminished," Trotter said. "For some, where they lived, education wasn't valued. A woman from Fiji told me in her culture, women really weren't expected to learn to read. They were just expected to cook, clean, care for the children. It didn't matter if they didn't learn."

It mattered in Tunami Eaton's family; many had attended college, and she hoped to follow.

But Eaton, 26, and the mother of four young children, had reading disabilities. Like other adult learners, she bluffed well.

When her 9-year-old daughter showed signs of reading problems, she got help.

"She would say, 'My stomach hurts,' or 'I'm tired,'" Eaton said. "Then at a certain point, she didn't want to go to school anymore. I realized I was no help to her unless I could assess my own disabilities."

At LEAP, "The hardest thing was letting my guard down," she said. "I was in a private room so I didn't have other eyes looking at me or judging me. It made it easier for me to say, 'I can't read.' This was the only place I could go to find some assistance.

"It really opened my eyes that I didn't have to stop with a GED; I could go to college and reach my dreams."

Lighthearted, Sympathetic Look at Local Mosques Finds Much Diversity

It's a very traditional community and doesn't abide by Western traditions of table manners. Everyone did have their own plate, but since there were no spoons, you had to dig in with your hands to get your food. I was a bit reticent at first, but a man encouraged me to help myself, saying this is exactly how the army did it.
                              — "30 Mosques in 30 Nights"
 

Zuhair Sadaat, 25, knew the Bay Area Muslim world was more varied than his parents’ 3,000-member, suburban Santa Clara mosque, where the congregation encompasses doctors, engineers, and other successful professionals.

In 2010, he set out to discover just how diverse it was.

The result: “30 Mosques in 30 Days,” a blog that's clicking with American-born Muslim millennials.
Sadaat (rhymes with Zagat) visits a different mosque each night of the holy month of Ramadan, sizing up everything from shoe shelves and parking to the imam’s ability to inspire when leading the nightly taraweeh prayers.

He began the blog last year. This year he's visiting some of the same and some new mosques during the current Ramadan, which began Aug. 1.

Sadaat compiles a droll, candid and revealing catalog that sizes up everything from shoe shelves and parking to the imam’s ability to inspire when leading the nightly taraweeh prayers.

All in all, it's another one of those oases in a pretty rough neighborhood. And man, it is rough because this place is imposing from the outside. If that iron gate's closed, you're shiz out of luck. Come during prayer time or don't come at all.

Sadaat is a UC Berkeley-educated grant writer. (He calls himself “a nonprofiteer.”) He began his odyssey in his hometown of Santa Clara and now lives in Richmond, where he devotes plenty of space in the blog to rectifying misconceptions about his beloved adopted city. He worked his way north, then East across the Bay, before stopping to tell it like it is in six counties.

The three mosques in Richmond, and many more in Oakland, pull members from different strands of Muslim culture and ethnicities in the East Bay.

I wasn’t even planning on visiting this mosque tonight. I mean, sure, it was on my radar, but I was aiming for an entirely different Oakland mosque. Yes, there are so many mosques in Oakland you can shoot for one and land in another.  

Some included only a handful of worshippers; others, hundreds. Some were spacious and beautifully architected; others a grim use of available space.

In a word, eclectic.

A building in the middle of the warehouse district. A building in the middle of the warehouse district surrounded by a tall wrought-iron fence with spikes on top. Welcome to Richmond, son.

One thing inside the masjid which stuck out was that they had El Corán on the shelves. No, not just one Quran in Spanish, but 12. Surprisingly, however, I did not see any Hispanics in the crowd.

What's cool about the prayer space is that the mosque wasn't leveled properly so everyone is praying uphill. It's a strange feeling praying on a surface which is angling upwards. I really don't think I could get used to it even if I came here every day.

Three messages lie behind these light-hearted thumbnail sketches, all maddeningly simple: Muslims are human. Muslims differ from one another, as do mosques. And many, many Muslims call the Bay Area home.

He throws his hands up at some of the attitudes he encounters, especially in regards to the role of women. If lots of women came to pray here in one mosque, men stare blankly at another: Women? What would women be doing here, there's no kitchen.

His journey to Mecca on the Hajj informed his feelings about gender: “In the pilgrimage, men and women do pray next to each other,” he said in an interview. “It’s not even logistically possible not to. So I don’t understand why people get upset.”

Sometimes blog visitors take issue with his observations, like when he despaired that a mosque sunk money into a new minaret instead of something more practical, like a men’s room (the money had been earmarked for a minaret, they argued). But mainly he gets thumbs-ups.

He said there's much more he could be doing to promote his blog, but he's been cool to the idea. For one thing, he doesn't want to become recognizable.

I'm meeting guys who are struggling to make ends meet because they've been relegated to part-time jobs while supporting entire families. There's plenty of cases like that in the South Bay too, but I guess it took me relocating to a new neighborhood to become familiar with them.

His varied mosque explorations beyond his home town mosque, "MCA" (Muslim Community Association in Santa Clara), form the heart of his blog, which he hopes will "educate the general populace about the number and diversity of Muslims in the San Francisco Bay Area."

The stark contrast between this mosque and the mosque in which I was raised made me think I made a good decision wrapping up this project here and not somewhere else. The whole point of me burning dozens of gallons of gas this month was to see just how different the communities of the Bay Area are. Well, it doesn't get much different from MCA than this. 

The Greening of Richmond

EAST BAY EXPRESS

March 09, 2011 News » News

By Rebecca Rosen Lum

Roses once grew in vibrant profusion in Richmond, the products of Japanese-American nurseries that thrived from the turn of the 20th century until World War II. 

Later, the remaining greenhouse growers were put out of business by the soaring costs of diesel fuel, and by NAFTA, which rewarded their competitors in Latin America. 

Weeds and wildflowers now blanket the abandoned greenhouses, and shards of glass litter the ground. But Richmond, long known for its hardscrabble image, may bloom once again thanks largely to the efforts of City Councilman Tom Butt.

The struggles that urban farms face in the East Bay have been well documented over the years, but Richmond's experience could prove to be different. Butt, an avid gardener, will soon host an urban farming summit, and his efforts to help urban farmers thrive have the backing of a majority of the Richmond City Council. It's also somewhat unusual for an elected official to take the lead in shepherding urban agriculture projects through the maze of local government. 

"In general, it's a group of citizens or one farmer" who presses for, and wins, the changes needed to help urban farmers survive, said Janelle Orsi, an Oakland lawyer who pilots the Sustainable Economies Law Center.

At home, Butt tends his own herd of three goats and two sheep, and keeps honeybees, and grows fruit and vegetables. The career architect describes it as "a large piece of property that's virtually useless because it's essentially vertical." His yard, nonetheless, is a can't-miss stop each year on the local Bringing Back the Natives garden tour.

After a visit to the seven-acre Sunnyside Organic Seedlings, which operates in several of the old Richmond greenhouses, Butt came back to his office and fired off a missive announcing the urban farming summit, a brainstorming session that would explore how small farming enterprises could thrive with better access to  credit and capital, available land, and markets — plus more cooperation from regulatory agencies. Butt is  inviting lawmakers, growers, and urban farming nonprofits to the summit, along with people in the food business, including chefs and restaurateurs.

After contacting Annie's Annuals, EcoVillage Farm, The Watershed Nursery, Urban Tilth, Richmond Library Seed Bank, Richmond Garden Club, and The Watershed Project, Butt concluded that they face common  challenges. His agenda: Identify every urban agriculture operation in West Contra Costa County and create a list of contacts; find potential areas of collaboration among existing organizations that can strengthen the movement; identify regulatory constraints throughout the county that can be modified to benefit urban  agriculture; and identify potential markets. 

"I wasn't raised on a farm, but you know something about fresh fruit and vegetables when you grow up in Arkansas," he said.

An affable man, Butt is plain-spoken and has won over voters with his tough political stances. For years, he was one of the few Richmond city leaders with the courage to stand up to Chevron while the oil giant dominated city politics. Butt also has a vision for Richmond, and was talking about smart growth, green energy, and sustainability years before they became part of the modern lexicon. 

"It frustrates me to no end that most of the food we buy in this country is brought here from someplace else," he said. "Pick a vegetable — let's say broccoli. Guaranteed, somebody is growing broccoli within twenty miles of where you live, but when you go to the store, what you'll buy is broccoli that was grown 1,800 miles away. There's something wrong with this picture here."

People in the urban farming movement say not only is it unusual for an elected official to take the lead in advocating for growing policies, but that local legislators and staff often stymie plans to green urban areas and plow under lawns in favor of food-bearing plants. 

"A common wish of urban agriculture supporters is for local government officials to be less skeptical about their work," wrote Jerry Kaufman and Martin Bailkey in a working paper on land policy for the Lincoln Institute, a Massachusetts think tank. Residents who wish to grow food face constraints as well. Orsi said local laws often require uniformity, especially in the front yards of residences. Green lawns and landscaping are believed to promote property values. The City of Berkeley fined a resident in 2009 for growing fruit and vegetables in his front yard, which violated zoning law, she said.

But urban farming proponents say Butt and Richmond enjoy an advantage. A majority of the council shares his vision, including retired cardiologist Jeff Ritterman, who sits on the board of Richmond Ecovillage, a five-acre teaching farm, and Jovanka Beckles, who put urban farming in her campaign platform. Mayor Gayle McLaughlin also is applauding the summit. The city, she said, can help provide matching funds, which attract private funders, and can write grants.

Butt also is making his push at a propitious time, growers say. The annual Scion Exchange by the California Rare Fruit Growers, held recently in El Sobrante, "was really swamped with people this year — lots of new people, lots of people from these various other groups, with a lot of cross-fertilization going on," said member Gail Morrison. "This frenzy of activity is new in the last year or two."

At Sunnyside Organic Seedlings, Pilar Reber sells young plants to large farmers' markets and retailers. She fills trays with her own soil recipe, seeds them using an electric seeder, then wraps stacked trays until they sprout. The company's profits increased by 14 percent last year and are likely to increase by as much again in the coming year. 

"People are always looking for an emerging market," Reber said. "Here it is."

But Reber was nearly a casualty of the bureaucratic resistance to urban farming. At one point, a local redevelopment official insisted that she obtain a use permit that required a costly consultation with an architect. But $2,000 and one laid-off employee later, another county staffer told her the use permit was unnecessary. 

"The county really jerked me around," she said. "We want to make sure people going down this road don't have to deal with this. There are government constraints on this at every level."

Butt also is reaching beyond the city to county lawmakers to help farms in unincorporated areas — like North Richmond, where Sunnyside grows lettuce in an aquaponic garden. "We want to make sure in the county general plan, we support that purpose," said county Supervisor John Gioia, who will also participate in the summit. "This is an issue for the greater Richmond area."

Park Guthrie, former director of the nonprofit Urban Tilth, also cheers the idea of a summit that "will get everyone in the same room, talking." The challenges facing urban farmers are considerable, he said. "People don't have any idea how hard it is to make it profitable," he said. "With more space you can be more efficient. In urban areas, the biggest cost is land."

On a recent Sunday, volunteers joined staff from Urban Tilth for a workday in a flat, lush meadow, with volunteers preparing the soil for early spring crops: potatoes, mustard greens, spinach, carrots, beets, radishes, chard, arugula, lettuces, and fava beans for the nitrogen they contribute to the soil. Surrounded by a terraced suburb, the property is owned by Adams School. Urban Tilth also has a teaching garden at Richmond High School that yielded 6,000 pounds of food in just one semester. Its other projects include a medicine garden, watershed, school gardens, and plots along the Richmond Greenway.

Butt said the first summit, scheduled for May, will look at what farmers have done to succeed, and then start crafting policy. Eventually, grocers in the Richmond flatlands could be required to carry produce along with chips and pork rinds, he said. 

"I dream of the day when there is no such thing as a vacant lot," he said. "You either have a building that's fulfilling some important function, or growing food for the community. What an asset."

Freelance journalists getting nickeled and dimed?

The Guild freelance unit has a plan.

By Rebecca Rosen Lum

“Citizen journalism." The phrase has a certain democratic, Mr.-Smith-Goes-to-Washington ring to it.

But publishers’ beeline away from skilled journalists toward Everymen who will work for free or cheap is part of a larger trend that serves ultimately to torpedo democracy. For without a robust, untethered and principled news media, the idea of democracy is just that – an idea. An exercise in theory.

It should come as no surprise that enterprising, rigorous journalism — the kind that nourishes a democracy — is costly. It’s costly because it is time-consuming and labor-intensive, and requires skill, both depth and breadth of knowledge, resourcefulness, vetting. That’s before we even get to writing with elegance and impact.

Seldom a day goes by that a posting does not appear on Craigslist seeking skilled writers so bursting with “passion” for the topic at hand that they are willing to devote hours of investigative reporting for the thrill of “exposure.” Ironically, many of these employers represent do-good nonprofit organizations, such as “JustMeans,” which offers roughly two cents a word for the thrice-weekly, quality postings it demands.

Resist, cries news media analyst Alan Mutter.

Mutter (“Reflections of a Newsosaur”) lit a match to a combustible topic this week when he pilloried publishers, including online content providers, for failing to pay journalists an honest buck for an honest day’s work – and challenged journalists to reject substandard pay. Read his full column here.

“It’s time for journalists to stop participating in their own exploitation by working for a pittance – or, worse, giving away their valuable services for free,” Mutter wrote.

Publishers are also seeking more secondary rights for the same buck that once secured one-time rights, a critical change for freelance journalists, who maximized their earnings by reselling stories in multiple markets. Magazine fees have been on a downward slide for decades (One of the nation’s top-paying publications, Good Housekeeping, paid $1 a word for 40 years). Trails.com pays $15 for articles about the outdoors; livestrong.com $30 for 500-word pieces on health, writes the L.A. Times’ James Rainey in his recent piece “Freelance Writing’s Unfortunate New Model.”

“The crumbling pay scales have not only hollowed out household budgets but accompanied a pervasive shift in journalism toward shorter stories, frothier subjects and an increasing emphasis on fast, rather than thorough,” Rainey writes.

Of course, students and recent grads have long produced stories to get clips and exposure. Nothing new about that. But add to that population the number of out-of-work, experienced professionals and tanking advertising dollars, and you’ve got a set-up for exploitation.

Mutter writes that part of the problem is that we don’t value ourselves as professionals. As a reality check, we can try on the idea that it makes good sense in this tanking economy to promote legions of “citizen urban planners” or “citizen surgeons.”

Are we joining that range of low-paid workers Barbara Ehrenreich chronicled in her groundbreaking book “Nickel and Dimed,” doomed to toil at umpteen low-paying jobs to make ends meet? Is being paid per click the journalist equivalent of the sweatshop in which seamstresses are paid by the piece?

Not always, cautions San Francisco tech writer Bill Snyder, who has done well with at least one pay-per-click website.

“The only way to know whether this is essentially legitimate, or potentially exploitative, is to have some experience with the company,” Snyder said. “Without it, who knows? Which is why it makes a great deal of sense to track freelance employers and share the intelligence.”

At Guild Freelancers, that’s the plan.

One of our primary goals is to develop a “Fair Freelance” seal, modeled after Free Trade certification, for publishers who value our work . The sites that pay two cents a word — if that — will find themselves listed on our Wall of Shame — and the recipients of an Amnesty International-style, polite-but-frank letter barrage.

And thanks to Mutter, who thoughtfully provided a spreadsheet template for with his rant, we can calculate our worth.

“Journalists need to stand together – and stand tall – to reassert the stature of their profession,” Mutter writes. “The reason is simple: If they don’t put a value on what they do, then no one else will, either.”

Rebecca Rosen Lum is the chair of Guild Freelancers.

Bill would end journalist lockout at state prisons

By Rebecca Rosen Lum, special to Media Workers Guild and Fog City Journal

February 1, 2012

Bills loosening restrictions on media access to prisoners have been vetoed eight times by three California governors, but the latest version stands a chance to become law.

This month, the Assembly Appropriations Committee unanimously passed AB 1270, also known as the “California Prisons: Media Access” bill, and it is expected to sail through the Senate in March.

Of course, lawmakers have repeatedly approved nearly identical legislation in the past, only to see it fall victim to vigorous lobbying by the Department of Corrections and victim rights groups.

But neither opposes the current bill, which was sponsored by Assemblyman Tom Ammiano.

The prisons have been operating virtually free from public scrutiny, a travesty given the nearly $10 billion the state prisons take in each year in taxpayer dollars, Amminao says.

The bill would not only allow journalists increased access to inmates, both randomly and in pre-arranged visits, it would also prohibit corrections officials from retaliating against those who talk or correspond with reporters.

Since the last legislative go-round, an inmate hunger strike delivered a public relations pounding to the corrections department and its use of extended isolation in underground, windowless cells and other abuses in Secure Housing Units (SHU).

Prison officials barred reporters from interviewing the inmates during the July action, which grew out of the maximum-security Pelican Bay Prison and spread to include more than 6,500 prisoners.

“It was near impossible to get unbiased information about what was happening due to these restrictions,” Ammiano said in his statement. “Inmates kept in secure housing units (SHU) have no visitation or telephone privileges and information about their solitary confinement punishments are largely unknown to the public even though a disproportionate number of inmate suicides occur in the SHU.”

The state clamped down on media interviews in 1996, abruptly closing the curtain on the state’s penal institutions, ostensibly to avoid glamorizing convicted felons and re-traumatizing their victims.

Theoretically, the state already provides media access. But to interview an inmate, a reporter must wait for weeks as the request percolates through the prison bureaucracy. If and when the request is approved, the reporter may have to conduct the interview under the watch of a prison employee. Notebooks, records and camera are forbidden. And prisoners are not entitled to write to journalists in confidence.

Crime Victims United has “fought and fought” to keep similar bills from becoming law, said president and chair Harriet Salarno. But the statewide organization has withdrawn its opposition since the current incarnation requires crime victims to be notified of interview requests.

“That’s the way it is in Sacramento,” Salarno said. “You work things out. It was going to go through without any notification. We fought hard. We had to compromise.”

While Gov. Jerry Brown in a previous term created the Inmate Bill of Rights, which included media access to prisoners, journalists and free speech advocates say there is no guarantee Brown will sign Media Access, presuming it passes.

“That’s the $64,000 question,” said Jim Ewert, legal counsel for the California Newspaper Publishers Association, which supports the bill along with the Pacific Media Workers Guild.

“Fast forward to 2011, 2012, and you have a governor who has taken a very hard-right turn,” Ewert said. “In a post-mayor mood has aligned himself with law enforcement in a way he never would have done in the past. That gives me extreme pause.”

Ammiano’s office calls Media Access “an extremely modest bill.”

“This bill makes it possible for the media to have access to prisoners, but it in no way guarantees it,” said aide Quintin Mecke. “Victims are going to be notified, wardens still have discretion.”

Supporters include the American Civil Liberties Union of California, California Broadcasters Association, California Newspaper Publishers Association, California Public Defenders Association, Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, California Families to Abolish Solitary Confinement, Drug Policy Alliance, Fair Chance Project, Services for Prisoners with Children, Media Workers Guild and the California Correctional Peace Officers’ Association, which includes prison guards and parole officers.

Copyright FogCityJournal.com, 2006-2012. All Rights Reserved.

National real estate title insurance scandal widens

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Florida probes alleged kickbacks at 50 companies

Friday, February 25, 2005

By Janis Mara
Inman News

Florida regulators are investigating more than 50 title insurance companies for alleged illegal referral fees and other improper practices in a growing national scandal over title insurance kickbacks.

Florida's Department of Financial Services is investigating 50 title insurance companies for alleged referral incentives that violate both Florida statutes and the federal Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act, said Dean Andrews, a senior attorney with the department.

Illegal incentives paid to real estate agents to steer insurance their way have become an "epidemic," Andrews said.

The Florida news comes on the heels of similar developments in California and Colorado. California's Insurance Commissioner, John Garamendi, Wednesday announced an investigation into alleged title insurance kickback schemes in that state.

Last week, First American Title Insurance Co. agreed to refund about $24 million to consumers nationwide while under investigation by the Colorado Department of Insurance. Fidelity National Financial, under investigation in California, has discontinued the reinsurance agreements that came under scrutiny.

Kickbacks are so common in Florida's title insurance and real estate industries they are considered everyday business practice, Andrews said.

The practices under investigation include:

Paying advertising costs to advertise and promote the listings of Realtors and/or real estate salespersons; sponsoring and hosting or paying for the sponsoring and hosting of open houses for Realtors and/or real estate salespersons; and entering into affiliated business arrangements in an attempt to provide kickbacks to builders, Realtors and/or real estate salespersons or mortgage brokers.

Andrews said he couldn't name the agencies his agency is investigating.

"We're investigating title insurance agencies that are licensed by the state of Florida. We are not permitted by law to reveal matters under active investigation," Andrews said.

Wally Senter, formerly Florida's top title insurance regulator until his 2002 retirement, told the Tampa Tribune that until the state starts disciplining real estate agents and brokers for demanding and accepting incentives, the practice will continue.

While in office, Senter told the Tribune, he warned title insurance company executives not to engage in compensating real estate agents and brokers for sending business that way. "I told them, 'you better not get in bed with the Realtors. It will be never-ending.'"

***

Send tips or a Letter to the Editor to janis@inman.com or call (510) 658-9252, ext. 140.