The state of California has acquired $540,000 worth of brand-new Ford Fusion Hybrids and other vehicles for use by California’s state senators in the last 18 months.
The new rides are for use by the elected officials while they are in Sacramento, the state capital, the Los Angeles Times reports.
State officials purchased the sweet perks of public office just after sacking some three dozen state Senate staffers due to budget cuts.
Eight of the fresh, new vehicles cost almost $24,000 each.
The new cars replaced old — “old” — cars that had as few as 12,400 miles on their odometers.
Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, has ordered state bureaucrats to purchase more clean-fuel cars and electric cars.
“The excesses and absurdities never seem to end with government,” Lew Uhler, president of the California-based National Tax Limitation Committee, told the Times. “Infuriation never ends with the way that they operate.”
Uhler observed that Democratic legislators, who make up the majority of California’s Senate, often complain about a lack of funding for social services.
Jon Coupal, president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, said he, too, is flabbergasted.
“This is the kind of thing that drives citizen taxpayers crazy,” Coupal told Sacramento NBC affiliate KCRA.
Danny Alvarez, the secretary of the California Senate, defended the vehicle purchases. His fairly bizarre argument is that the state Senate just happened to ask for Ford Fusions and somehow ended up with new cars worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
“We weren’t saying buy new ones or anything like that,” Alvarez told the Times. “That wasn’t our intent. So it was really like if we have cars, make sure they are all Fusions.”
Brian Ferguson, a pen pusher with California’s Department of General Services, also defended the car-buying spree.
“The majority of the vehicles that were rotated out were older-model full-size sedans that were replaced by newer hybrid vehicles as part of the continuing effort to green the state’s vehicle fleet,” he told the newspaper.
California’s taxpayer-funded state employees are nothing if not extravagant.
In 2013, for example, expense records obtained by the Center for Investigative Reporting demonstrated that UCLA Chancellor Gene Block and 17 various deans who oversaw the state-funded school managed to use up approximately $2 million on travel and entertainment from 2008 to 2012. Six of 17 academic deans at UCLA claimed to have been stricken with medical conditions that somehow prevent them from sitting with the hoi polloi in economy class on airplanes. (RELATED: UCLA Deans Travel Like Rock Stars As Tuition Soars Out Of Middle-Class Reach)
In 2012, a state and local government watchdog group showed that total state debt in California is more than $617 billion — more than any other state in the union and considerably more than the debt accumulated by the financially troubled nation Greece. (RELATED: California State Debt Twice That Of New York’s, More Than Greece)
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