Yesterday, the FlashReport awarded its 2006 Golden Trash Can Award to Assembly Bill 523 which represents an outrageous effort by the Coastline Community College District in Orange County to make a de facto gift of nearly $20 million in public funds to finance a bid by KOCE television’s Foundation to buy the public broadcast station, which is being sold by the college district to generate funds. I won’t go over all of the details again, but I will encourage FR readers to read the piece. Since writing iy, I have not been provided with the actual Appellate Court rulings which are very clear when you read them. Presiding Justice Sills, who penned the opinion for the court, voids the sale of KOCE to the KOCE Foundation — the bit provided by the Foundation was for much less money than the other bidder, televangelism provider Daystar.
FR REVIEW IN-DETAIL THE APPELLATE COURT RULINGS
My eyes hurt this morning from spending a bunch of time reading through Appellate Court rulings, and so read the next two paragraphs at your own peril. It’s all complicated, but can be summed up by saying that it is clear that the District decided that they would pick the Foundation bid even though it was a financed deal, and for significantly less cash for the District than the Daystar bid.
In the documents, Justice Sills makes it clear in his first ruling that Daystar made a $40 million cash bid, as opposed to the KOCE Foundation bid of $8 million in cash plus payments of $16 million over thirty years (interest free and no payments at all for the first five years). Existing law says that ‘surplus property’ such as KOCE, under state law, had to have been sold to the ‘highest cash bidder’ — which was be Daystar. Actually, these numbers above for the Foundation bid don’t include a further reduction in $4 million that they will pay the district. In the second ruling, the court disallowed any post bid changes and compared Daystar’s 25.1 million dollar bid against the present value of the Foundation bid between 19.5 million and 23.5 million at the highest (and lets not forget Daystar’s bid was all cash, no financing at all). So it is clear that Daystar’s bid was still the highest.
**There is more – click the link**
August 29th, 2006 at 12:00 am
“Sweetheart Deal” anyone? All involved are busy preparing “plausible excuses”. Even the Libertarian leaning OCR. Shame on all of them.