How do you just wake up one day and find you’re 70 million short when you’ve been the goddamn sheriff for six years?

<–‘Follow the money’; the infamous directive from ‘Deep Throat’ in All the President’s Men should also be applied to Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department’s Sheriff Douglas Gillespie and his obliteration of Metro’s budget.

Suddenly, Metro is 70 million in the hole and he had the gall to demand increases for civilian employees— always Metro’s favorite place to start with cutbacks—so that the Fiscal Affairs Committee would take the heat that Doug Gillespie himself earned. 

This from the Las Vegas Sun last month:

http://m.lasvegassun.com/news/2012/may/24/metro-budget-planning-gives-insight-troubles-down-/

 ‘…During a closed-door session to discuss contract negotiations with Metro’s civilian employees union, sources said, Sheriff Doug Gillespie recommended 3 percent merit pay raises in the first year and 1 percent in the second year of a two-year contract. Seeing he wouldn’t get that, he switched to 1 percent and 1 percent.

Then came the surprise. The city’s two representatives, councilmen Stavros Anthony and Ricki Barlow, drew a line in the sand. They said no union merit increases, no benefits increases, no increases at all for a contract that would extend from July 2013 through June 2015…’

Here is your textbook and poster-child example of why all public union matters should never again be conducted during a ‘closed door session’! 

Why wasn’t this meeting held in public under bright sunshine to begin with?

That Councilman Stavros Anthony gave a firm ‘no’ didn’t surprise me; he may be the Council’s resident hirsute Gorilla in the Mist with hair everywhere but on his head, but he does have a brain and he saw first-hand the waste and Metro’s lucrative ‘crony-contracting’ every single day of his Metro career.  The real surprise was Milk Dud-head Ricki Barlow who not much is expected from and if he’s aware of all things Metro, you know its way worse than 70 million bucks in the hole too!

<–But there was our grossly incompetent Sheriff Doug Gillespie demanding 3% ‘merit’ increases when he was 70 million in the hole!

Funny too that that 70 million is on the higher end of what Metro-types have been telling me for over a year that Doug Gillespie has pissed away on their under-performing Desert Sky digital radio system where current and former LVMPD employees are lavishly lighting cigars with taxpayer money and the system still isn’t working correctly and now is requiring an even greater capital investment.

All the warning signs were there—subordinate personnel were jumping up and down like their uniforms were on fire about the system’s flaws and failures to Assistant Sheriff ‘Radio’ Greg McCurdy, perhaps the biggest waste of $276,000.00 taxpayer dollars that Metro has! 

<–Incompetent Assistant Sheriff ’Radio’ Greg McCurdy didn’t respond to their concerns because he simply doesn’t give a shit and then unbelievably, he was promoted to Assistant Sheriff with a very strong assist from his West Side preacher protectors as a reward for his failure!!!

Name MCCURDY GREGORY Position ASSISTANT SHERIFF

Las Vegas Metro Police Department  Year 2011

Base Pay $168,187.84 Overtime and Callback Collected $0.00

Other Pay $26,411.32 Total Pay $194,599.16

Benefits Accumulated $81,417.95

Total Pay & Benefits $276,017.11

http://transparentnevada.com/salaries/2011/las-vegas-metro-police-department/mccurdy-gregory/

…add his 2^nd or 3^rd old lady; I can’t remember which wife she is—Susana McCurdy—promoted to a department ‘Director’ last year at $166,000.00 smack-a-roos, and we taxpayers have between the two of them over $442,000.00 in salary and benefits going to just these two bottom-feeders!

Susana McCurdy is so greedy that she apparently has a nice little lucrative side home-based business hauling in another 100K+ in the private sector too that dodges Nevada required licensing by calling herself an ‘independent contractor’ with an apparent out-of-state travel concern, but you can’t run a subsidiary of another business concern from your home without your own licensure and the licenses listed are apparently not the McCurdy’s.  The McCurdy’s are apparently paying nothing to Clark County or to the State of Nevada for this lucrative little side enterprise.

Where is the LVMPD’s IAB on this?  Mrs McCurdy should be fired for allegedly lying and defrauding county and state taxpayers shouldn’t she?

<–The indignity of having to bed Radio McCurdy should not be a free-pass for Susana McCurdy!

http://lebamvacations.com/the_INTRO.php

http://www.manta.com/c/mm09n9q/lebam-vacations

http://transparentnevada.com/salaries/2011/las-vegas-metro-police-department/mccurdy-susana-s/

$442,000.00!!!… with all kinds of nice escalators for both of them too and a side business that apparently pays absolutely nothing but hauls in over 100K annually?

Go ahead and choke on your Cheeseburger as you read and reread and read again this appalling amount as you struggle at 40K to feed your kids and keep a roof over their heads.

<–This is the McCurdy Family motto!

Hey, I really wouldn’t mind this amount if either Mr or Mrs McCurdy were worth a shit and anywhere near worth a half million dollars in compensation; they’re not, especially AS McCurdy who spends our money at Metro’s Homeland Security Division without any consideration to anything other than making the current and two recent former sheriffs and their friends happy!!!

I’ve long called McCurdy ‘the bagman’ and he’s just one of Doug Gillespie’s stooges and stoolies who helps ensures that the pockets of those favored in and out of Metro are duly stuffed full with our money!

…and the band plays on and on and on; no one holding Metro to any reasonable standard—no one demanding the comprehensive audit and constant vigilant oversight of contracts so very necessary at the LVMPD either.

No one is preventing favored current and former employees from cashing in on the booty and now Metro’s civilian employees will feel the brunt of Sheriff Gillespie’s gross incompetence and malfeasance first…as is always, and has always been, the case at the LVMPD.

Again, how do you just wake up one day and find that you’re 70 million short when you’ve been the goddamn sheriff for six years?

I feel for the civilian staff as they are treated like shit and are largely ignored or disrespected by many of the commissioned/sworn officers, though a number of officers also treat them very well and understand their irreplaceable value helping them correct out the colossal f-ups of the corrupted brass under Sheriff Doug Gillespie—America’s very worst police chief!!!

The gross excesses of our firefighters may be a picnic in the park compared to what’s going on at Metro and though salary and benefits are a particular sore spot with taxpayers; it is abundantly clear that the entire department is going to have to forgo any increases for the next 2-3 years if Dougie is to continue helping his friends with greasy contracts and unfettered access to our money with rare competitive bidding or anyone questioning anything that he does.

It could also very well be that Stavros Anthony and Ricki Barlow were the very first people to ever tell Metro ‘no’; that in and of itself is simply remarkable. 

<–For this feat, I’m going to use their real pictures just this one time to salute both men for their gigantic balls!

70 million is no small amount in a half billion+ plus budget and projections should have spotted falling revenue trends and shifted the entire department into an austerity mode way back in early 2009 if there were any competent Public Administrators paying any attention at all at the LVMPD.  There are a few good ones at Metro, but they are completely ignored because the graft and corruption must come first above all else under Sheriff Douglas Gillespie, and the bad ones are assisting in directing Gillespie’s graft and corruption for a piece of the action!

Take a look at the leases, the softwares, the ‘executive coaching’ outlays; from bullets to three ring binders, supplies to sofas, Sheriff Doug Gillespie has turned wasting money enriching his friends and cohorts into a high art form!

For more than seven years, Metro employees have taken me to school and provided documents and internal communiqués on what’s really going on with our money at Metro and though salaries and benefits have always been their top expenditure, the enormous waste on their lavish new headquarters, within its hyper-wasteful Homeland Security Division, the dozens of crony contracts, the cut-of-the-action landing into so many LVMPD associated pockets, is all right there for anyone in city or county government to see!

…if they’d only stop long enough to take a look and that would include Las Vegas’s United States Attorney, Daniel Bogden, who has subordinate staff who have wanted to tear into Metro corruption for years, but he personally cuts them off.

<–Metro believes we’re blessed in  Las Vegas having America’s worst US Attorney in Daniel Bogden!

But hope may lie with two Las Vegas City Councilmen and a County Commissioner who have demonstrated recently that not only do they have the ability to say ‘no’; they may also have the backbone necessary to shine the bright Keogh lights so needed on all that is the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department under the very worst police chief in America in our own Doug Gillespie—who is apparently also America’s most corrupt police chief too!

Again, how do you just wake up one day and find that you’re 70 million short when you’ve been the goddamn sheriff for six years?

Do your duty Stavros; your oath didn’t end with your retirement from the LVMPD and we’re counting on you to do your most important police work now!

Michael Zahara
6/20/2012
www.WatchdogWag.com