Great Park Auditors Seek Another Quarter Million at This Afternoon’s Irvine Council meeting

Great Park Ballon Ride - Photo: Violeta Vaqueiro
Great Park Ballon Ride - Photo: Violeta Vaqueiro
Great Park Ballon Ride – Photo: Violeta Vaqueiro

The Forensic Audit of the Great Park was designed to do one thing — generated negative headlines and mailers to help Republicans in the 2014 election.  And those mailers were duly produced and paid for by developers intent on keeping the council majority Republican.  Most experts agree, the audit should have taken no more than six months to complete yet here we are on year two and its not yet over.

This afternoon, at a Irvine city council meeting being held in the mid afternoon, the council will like give the auditors another requested $240,000 which brings the total cost to nearly $1.5 million.  We see this as right out of Rep. Darryl Issa’s playbook but even Issa had to run his Benghazi hearings in the open with Democratic opposition.  In this case, the Great Park Audit is actually worse because all the witnesses are selected by the city council’s subcommittee and questioned by their attorneys with no opportunity for anyone in the council minority to ask questions.

The audit is now more than six times over its original budget, and is more expensive than any audit conducted by a public agency in Orange County. Council member Christina Shea doesn’t even refer to it as an audit any longer and keeps calling it an “investigation.”

Who’s going to audit HSNO, the forensic auditor, for their preliminary audit report that was filled with errors, misrepresentations and outright lies (ie: $38 million in funds unaccounted for or $12,000 to change one word on a single report) both of which have been totally discredited.  Here’s the agenda: http://www.irvinequickrecords.com/sirepub/mtgviewer.aspx?meetid=4780&doctype=Agenda

It’s against the law to use public funds for political purposes, yet the new Republican council ought to be asking HSNO
“why aren’t you done with this yet?”  Spoiler alert: they won’t.

1 Comment

  1. 1.5 million is that right. Well, the Council only has to spend 198.5 million more and they will equal the taxpayer money Larry Agran wasted at the Great Park. It is unfortunate that the money had to be spent to audit the books of the Grat Park, but that is the promise that was made to the public. The public wants to know, where that 200 million dollars went , who got it and for what?

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