Local pols and their “real” jobs

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A friend just pointed out this Los Angeles Times story to me that ran on Friday. The piece looks at the side jobs of legislators, including some local ones like Mike Eng, D-Monterey Park and Ed Hernandez, D-West Covina. It’s defintely worth a full read, but here’s a little bit of the text…

By Patrick McGreevy
November 28, 2008

Reporting from Sacramento — Assemblyman Mike Eng, one of more than two dozen California lawmakers who hold outside jobs, was a steady vote for the Los Angeles Unified School District’s interests this year at the same time his law firm was working for the district under a $550,000 contract.

A Democrat from Monterey Park who sits on the Assembly Education Committee, Eng voted multiple times for legislation sponsored by the district that allows it to obtain $267 million in extra state money.

His five-man law firm, meanwhile, collected $321,000 as part of its three-year deal from L.A. Unified, sometimes in payments made just weeks after Eng’s vote. The payments were reported in district records as compensation for help in getting visas and processing paperwork for foreign teachers.

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Assemblyman Edward Hernandez (D-West Covina). He and his wife are optometrists with private practices; his is in La Puente, hers in Duarte. Hernandez is also past president of the California Optometric Assn., which lobbied this year for legislation that significantly expanded the procedures optometrists can perform. Hernandez voted for the bill (SB 1406) in June as a member of the Assembly Business and Professions Committee and in August on the Assembly floor. Ophthalmologists, who are medical doctors able to perform more extensive treatment, including surgery, opposed it.

I found this to be very interesting because these are issues that come up in the newsroom and among our readers all the time.