Taxin Troy Edgar is the Real Squish in the 72nd Assembly Race
Posted by OC Insider on July 26, 2012
Let’s get real. Since we’re down to name calling (hey, it’s politics), Taxin Troy Edgar is the REAL SQUISH in the 72nd Assembly Race — a true weasel according to everything we know about him. Let’s do some of Troy’s inventory:
Edgar, the self-labeled “Tax Fighter” has raised taxes at least TWELVE times while on the Los Alamitos City Council. As Mayor, Edgar has recently proposed a massive utility tax increase. When the city of Vallejo tried this same scheme Edgar is trying, the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers’ Association called it a “massive tax increase.”
November is all about taxes — who might raise them (and screw the Party along the way, as did Doris Allen) with a little arm twisting, or someone who’s signed Grover Norquist’s ATR Tax Pledge? Troy Edgar can’t be trusted in this area (ask his City Council colleagues and his legion of non-fans in Los Al) as he simply won’t sign with ATR — the “gold standard” when it comes to keeping one’s commitments. Nor will he adequately explain why. The proof above makes it obvious — Edgar lies about taxes, he’ll raise them as he chooses — his personal pledge is proven a lie by his history in Los Alamitos. Travis Allen signed the ATR Pledge without hesitation.
There’s more here Taxes, Lies. And Troy Edgar, and here where the Flash Report’s Jon Fleischman also discusses “the importance to taxpayers of being able to vote for candidates for office that are willing to pledge, in writing, that they will oppose tax increases” before Allen even entered the race. The Allen campaign won its place in the General Election with a set of very successful mailers: Travis Allen Sends Out Brutal Hit Piece On Troy Edgar, nailing the Edgar campaign with truths about its candidate and his ability to raise taxes in his small, struggling city.
It’s believed that Travis Allen wants this job, in part, to “give back” and use his significant financial skills (he owns a successful wealth management firm) to concentrate on the State’s financial mess. Troy Edgar appears to need this job — it looks like he’s “all in” with his personal funding of his campaign, and NO ONE can tell if his two businesses, Global Conductor and Global Conductor Construction (web site recently taken down) are generating any revenue. As these are both private businesses, no one can determine if Edgar’s really making what he needs to support himself and his latest family, much less fund a competitive political campaign that might cost a half million dollars. Does the District need a pogue, or someone who’ll never raise taxes, and not fold the minute a Democrat approaches him with a deal?
Real Conservatives like Travis Allen don’t propose multi-million dollar elevated maglev trains to run through your town. Troy Edgar’s resume includes his role a few years ago as Vice Chairman of the Orangeline Development Authority, a Joint Powers Authority which includes cities of notoriety like Cudahy, Bell, Vernon, Bell Gardens, Bellflower, Cerritos, Maywood and a handful of others that wanted to commandeer the extremely valuable Pacific Electric Right-of-Way in Orange County to run this overhead monstrosity to Irvine. Maglev only succeeds as a single transportation system in Shanghai, China, and is costing them a fortune to operate. Other implementations have failed, or worse,killed dozens in recent testing. Against Edgar’s vigorous lobbying, Los Al voted themselves out of OLDA a few years ago and denied Troy a number of trips he’d been planning for the JPA.
In a transaction that would make Tony Soprano proud, Troy Edgar is accused of taking campaign contributions from Consolidated Disposal Service, a trash hauler that would later be awarded the contract for garbage collection in Los Alamitos. After a citizen’s lawsuit, Edgar’s malfeasance ended up costing the city $215k, yet he still manipulated his council majority into modifying the vendor selection process that awarded the can collecting and dumpster dumping to Consolidated. Travis Allen doesn’t hang with Trash Haulers.
The 72nd Assembly District needs a honest, real Conservative candidate, not the REAL SQUISH that runs little Los Alamitos like New Jersey before Chris Christie
OC Political 
jb said
Global Conductor Construction website: http://www.globalconductorconstruction.com/Company.html
Gilardo said
So let me get this straight, this guy wanted to build a heavy, elevated magnetic levitation system on pylons above the most active earthquake fault in the world?
Any idea who was going to pay for it? Or ride on it? Wouldn’t this compete with the equally ridiculous “Browndoggle”?
Troy Edgar Watch said
Taxin Troy Edgar is currently pushing a massive Tax Increase in Los Alamitos and thought no one would notice. This guy is not only a Tax and Spend Liberal, he is not very smart.
Chris Emami said
It appears OC Insider seems to be having a bit of an identity crisis. Attacking both Troy Edgar and Travis Allen in the same week is interesting. I wonder if readers have caught on to what is really going on.
met00 said
Where to start?
How about with a clarification. There were two parts of the lawsuit by the Citizens against the City of Los Alamitos and Poe, Stephens and Edgar.
The first was the actual lawsuit on the trash, which the Citizens won. The City Council did NOT follow their own law and the Judge ordered them to do so. The Majority of Edgar, Poe and Stephens then removed the portions of the Municipal Code that they violated and gave the exact same contract back to the bidder that was in excess of $600K/yr more than “the lowest responsible bidder” as the law defined the required winner, before they changed it (after the fact).
The CDS contract have the City about $120K more per year, but they collected $600K more per year from businesses in Los Al. So, one way of looking at it was a 100% tax on business in which less than 20% of the tax went to the City and the balance of it was kept by the tax collector.
The second was a 1090 claim against the individual members (Edgar, Poe and Stephens).. This is a claim that there was a quid-pro-quo in which their votes were paid for. The Court ruled that the Citizens didn’t have the right to file that and it was enforced by a anti-SLAPP motion.
Troy’s claim is that he took his THOUSANDS of trash dollars at least three years before the trash contract was up to bid, and therefor he was not paid off for his vote, since the law says “1 year”. That would make sense if no one knew that the Solid Waste Franchise agreement was coming up in year three of Edgar’s term. But CDS knew that the Trash Contract was coming up in the third year of the term, and that there would only be two seats available in the election prior to the trash contract being negotiated and that they needed at least three votes.
Therefore it is reasonable to expect that any attempt to stack the council would have required that CDS purchase a minimum of one council member from the election PRIOR to the election just before the contract was to be negotiated (assuming that they could buy the two incoming council seats in the election just prior to the contract negotiation [Poe and Stephens]). That council member was Troy Edgar who was funded in his first run by the trash hauler.
So, was Troy for sale? It seems that way. And his claim that the TUT couldn’t win on the fact that the City of Los Alamitos needed to (1) correct the current law and (2) ensure tax fairness, and that the only way to win was to buy the voters off with a 1% decrease in the tax rate certainly indicates that the “buy them off for their vote” is a deeply ingrained part of his character.
Rather than explain that we had to re-write the code to extend the tax fairly and ensure that the tax was paid equally on all telecommunications, Troy feels that the only way to “sell” the idea of doing the right thing is to buy off the peoples vote with a 1% reduction, and a campaign of fear (loss of police and city services if they don’t agree). The carrot and the stick of dishonesty rather than an honest and straightforward explanation of the way telecommunications has changed since the 6% was established and how those changes have hurt the city in the last dozen years, and how basic fairness should dictate that we all pay the same 6% for out telecommunications without concern for the transport mechanism. This is not an issue of Taxin Troy, but just straight out lying BS and attempts to purchase the votes with a fictional fear threat and a 1% carrot that may actually cost the City of Los Alamitos tax revenue, and thus would actually make the fictional fear threat a reality.