CA: State Tomato Board is dissolved (after state audit reveals board lived it up real good)

LA Times ^ | 4/9/08 | Jordan Rau

[NormsRevenge]

GONZALES, CALIF. -- Melanie Horwath phoned the California Tomato Board with what she assumed was a simple request. She needed promotional materials that her family's tomato packing company could display at a Salinas Valley agricultural event called Taste of the Valley.

Do you have posters or recipes? she asked.

We don't have that.

What kind of promotion do you guys do?

We don't do that kind of promotion.

That's odd, Horwath thought. Her company paid thousands of dollars a month in mandatory dues to finance the board's research and marketing efforts: its legal purpose. She started digging into the board's business to find out how it was spending her money.

More than a decade later, the tomato commission has shut down after her findings prompted a state audit.

The commission misspent members' dues on lavish conferences in Arizona and Mexico, where its families traveled free, according to the audit. It bought perks for directors and employees -- thousand-dollar dinners, a $653 Hummer stretch limousine ride, $190 bottles of wine -- and made other questionable expenditures.

The audit also detailed how the commission abetted a group of Horwath's competitors intent on setting the prices and rules for California's $505-million tomato market.

"They ran it like it was . . . their own little fiefdom," said Brian C. Leighton, the attorney for Horwath's company, Gonzales Packing Co.

[Eurale]

Pureed.

[fella]

"They ran it like it was . . . their own little fiefdom,"

Geee imagine that? Petty little appointed bureaucrats, unanswerable to anyone, acting like that.

[pas]

Lettuce help you get rid of other Plum jobs.

[rednesss]

"You know, I’m a federal contractor, and everytime I have to visit a federal client, there is always some sort of meeting or conference going on. That’s about all the government likes to do when its not actively trying to screw the public, have lots of meetings and conferences."

[mallardx]

This reminds me of the last days of the Roma empire.

[traviskicks]

"California and the Legislature need a wake-up call that these programs are either corrupt or easily corruptible,"

Libertarian ping! To be added or removed freepmail me or post a message here.

[traviskicks]

nice find

[M203M4]

Multiply this by the tens of thousands and you will have a pretty good picture of the total nature of government bureaucracy.

[Smokin' Joe]

We have this romanticized image of the "family farmer," but the fact is, agriculture nowadays is dominated by giant companies as big and corrupt as anything in any other industry...all under the eye of a government that's even more corrupt.

There are still a lot of family farms, but many have had to increase scale to be able to stay afloat through years of stagnant commodity prices, and those have had to incorporate in order to avoid being sold off piecemeal to pay the death tax. So it does not look like it used to at that level except for specialty crops.

Then there are Monsanto, ADM, ConAgra, ...

[383rr]

Every single one of the crooks who was on this comittee needs to do hard prison time.