Paradise Valley mayor Vernon Parker got caught red-handed submitting false information and documents to get his consulting firm certified.
People, this is just another in an endless list of examples of the kind of shysters, con men, and scumbags who inhabit Scottsdale, Paradise Valley, and increasingly Fountain Hills.
Might as well just chop off the entire NE Valley and send 'em all to prison.
Hey, what else do you expect from the mayor of a town that not only has a ton of photo radar vans, but hides them extra-stealthily, and refuses to have them calibrated or tested, resulting in thousands of false tickets?
It's a CESSPOOL, Frank...the country's repository of nitwits,dimwits and halfwits who can't make it anywhere else.
What's comical is that these phonies, convince themselves of their importance and because of the low-level of education and real world smarts here, are able to convince others.
The Lowest Common Denominator is the ruling benchmark.
Posted by: raven | July 23, 2008 at 08:23 PM
Frank,
Did you even read the article?
“I have a letter from the USDA…that states that Vernon Parker was brought on as a consultant,” he said. “Consultants are not employees of the agency.”
If he wasn't a federal employee, then what was the harm done?
Posted by: Tyler B Harvey | July 23, 2008 at 08:51 PM
Umm, maybe because professional certifications MATTER?
I'd have big problems, for example, if my clients found out that I really am not a Google-Certified Professional and that I'd been lying to them all along.
Would you go to a doctor who isn't board-certified, even though that's not a government certification and doctors are not government employees?
Or, are you of the crooked Arizona mindset and you think it's okay for someone to lie about their certifications as long as they're not government employees?
Not only is what he did totally unethical, but he can also be sued by the certifying organization. All I can gather from your comment is that you think it's okay for someone to lie about something like this.
Posted by: Frank Rumbauskas | July 23, 2008 at 10:39 PM
Of course it's another betrayal of the public trust.
When shysterism corrupts the political class, then you have the wholesale wanton disregard of civic responsibility in favor of monetary gain, at the expense of the hard-working taxpayer who must foot the bill.
Why don't they just put block monitors on every street, like in communist Cuba, and fine people for the dumbest-ass infractions, and be done with the pretense of freedom and democracy.
I didn't vote to put cameras all around the valley to spy on me. Yet, I've been ticketed on questionable evidence.
It's a free-for-all and I'm watching the middle class be obliterated (myself included) through death by a thousand financial cuts: taxes, fines, fees, price increases, wage stagnation, outsourcing, insourcing of cheap Mex. labor, etc.
In the final analysis, perhaps the death of Scottsdale is an apt metaphor for the middle class, since its facing the same extinction by the same causes.
Who will save us?
Certainly not Obama, whom the masses adore as their new savior.
I'm trying every day to at least save myself...
Posted by: joe jacari | July 24, 2008 at 08:28 AM
I don't think this is a Snottsdale /PV type of thing, it's a government thing. This goes on every day, political back scratching, affirmative action BS, you name it. Show me a city with government contracts going out, give me a day to rifle through the files and I will find the fraud.
Posted by: Dean Kennedy | July 24, 2008 at 12:49 PM
Funny, I didn't know PV even had a mayor. Was he elected by the Board of Directors at Crown Realty?
Posted by: More like Photo GAYdar | July 25, 2008 at 12:07 AM
This is a bit off topic. I come to this site pretty often for a good read, a good laugh, and to see that maybe I don't have things all that bad where I live in the valley.
I was randomly blog surfing, which I do sometimes and came across this absolute gem that epitomizes the Scottsdale attitude of entitlement. Here, we have someone who paraphrased documents that are readily available to anybody working for the Superior Court in Maricopa county and now, because she wrote a very short summary of this, is now magically a...PUBLISHED AUTHOR!!!
This is a fine example of an inferiority complex gone wild combined with the good ol' classic attitude exemplified by the typical Scottsdale phony who is compensating for everything.
http://hipchecks.blogspot.com/2008/07/this-has-nothing-to-do-with-hockey.html
The best part is how when she was confronted on this blog by an actual published author, she did what any self disrespecting Scottsdaler would do. Point out that she's better than everyone and look like a complete moron in the process. The funniest part is how the author changed the comments section to be completely moderated, just like the Chinese are censoring anything to do with Tibet during the pre-Olympic period through sometime after the Olympics.
It's just another example of everything that has been talked about on this site.
Posted by: Bill Jones | July 31, 2008 at 12:47 AM
Classic!!! A "published author!"
Just like how every fly-by-night realtor and mortgage broker in Scottsdale was a "business owner."
On the moderated blog comments though, that's really an unfortunate necessity to anyone who owns a blog. A few times I've tried to turn off moderation here and literally within minutes the viagra and porn posts from spam robots would begin to appear.
Posted by: Frank Rumbauskas | July 31, 2008 at 01:05 AM