Letter: Abolish COG’s kingdom

Aside from the fact that the joint power authority, VTA-wannabe COG, lacks legal capacity to inflict taxes/fees on the citizens of SBC, taxpayers would be better off if our local elected leaders abolished COG, privatized transit, and let Public Works Department do the streets and roads, like they used to do.
I delivered COG’s response to my Public Records Act request to your office yesterday, and it reveals the same corrupt, illegal and fraudulent data reporting that I cited in my letter (copy attached) about VTA’s corrupt, illegal and fraudulent data in 2002. If your employer or any business in SBC used COG’s accounting methods, then they’d be prosecuted for false financials, tax evasion and violation of the Unfair Business Practices Act. We’re required to use legal accounting by state and federal tax regulations, and the California statutes one finds in the Corporations Code (but applicable to all forms of business).
They say, use generally accepted accounting principles (“GAAP”), and if you don’t there are criminal sanctions, and your competitors and customers could sue you for treble damages.
But our Legislature created a double standard–one for transit agencies, and one for everyone else. The joint power authorities like VTA, COG, Caltrain, etc., can utilize Enron-style, off-book accounting, omitting their capital and fixed costs. By so doing, you get the fraudulent, inaccurate reports like the ones I delivered to you from COG yesterday: exaggerated revenue and understated losses. Even COG’s defenders like COG & BOS Chairman (and former AMBAG Chairman) Anthony Botelho called it “generally accepted government accounting” when I first pointed it out to COG’s directors years ago.
So, using COG’s data, they need about $300 million for their “plans and goals,” which means that SBC’s taxpayers will have to send Sacto (9.9 x $300M) $2.97B because we only get back 11 cents/dollar that we send them (and less from DC).
Why not abolish COG’s kingdom, obey our Constitution, and apply a little common sense to local government. Private sector solutions are the only long-term, sound and sustainable ones. COG’s a proven failure, by any measurement, including their own illegal accounting. The taxpayers of SBC deserve better, which free enterprise capitalism produces. Radical socialist boondoggles ruin a society. Why do local leaders refuse to learn from history?
Joe Thompson, Tres Pinos