UPDATE:
Ms Black reports to Betty Gould. Earlier this year Betty came to testify in an official capacity on a Shared Parenting Bill. Wisely she signed herself as having neither a pro /con position- however I was there and her testimony was to the effect of- this bill is a complete nightmare.
http://www.leg.wa.gov/pub/billinfo/2007-08/Pdf/Bill%20Reports/Senate/5234.SBR.pdf
I haven’t blogged in a while, but this one is a doozy.
Washington Shared Parenting has the scoop
History:
My posse has been bird dogging the Child Support Work Group for 2 years now. They are making some crazy and outlandish requests like getting more accountability for how child support payments get spent. In other words, too many times child support payments go to the nail salon, casino, or tropical vacations while the children starve and get dressed in rags. Our agenda is to get DSHS to enable common sense accountability mechanisms like enabling payments in the form of basic needs like pre-paid school lunch tickets, direct payments to day care, school clothes....you know the things that child support is actually awarded for.
Thus far- DSHS and the assorted Gregoire cronies have been doing nothing but looking for ways to instill LESS accountability...to the point of graft, noted by my friends above.
More Background:
Gregoire selects the non legislative members of the work group. According to the letter of bill, there is supposed to be an equal number of custodial and non custodial parents as well as a hodge podge of family- law civil servants (judges/DSHS etc). A couple of the parents are supposed to represent lower income families (though DSHS refuses to tell us which are serving in that capacity).
Last year the (dis)honorable Judge Wickham served on the work group. He spent the entire series of sessions trying to jack up child support payments for middle/upper income children to attend private school. You may know this crook as the guy who was smacked down 9-0 by the State Supreme Court for having no comprehension of the first amendment. BTW- he's that wrong on every case that comes his way- unfortunately few have the cash to get their cases to the State Supreme Court level.
Last year the "minority" representative was Rev Marvin Charles- who has received multiple DSHS grants to help fathers, but instead uses them for his personal expenses.
This year Judge Pomeroy serves on this committee.
This year all but one of the appointments have been Gregoire or Thurston County Court cronies/donors as mentioned in the link above. DSHS has yet to respond to which parents represent lower income and have doing their best to avoid disclosing email chains on the subject- including actively notifying people of which email addresses are getting hit for public records requests (we have the email on this).
More locally, I sent a note to the County Commissioners as to what the county’s agenda is in having a public employee serving as a private citizen in a legislative workgroup while on the public pay roll. Odd that she is working in the same building as Pomeroy and Wickham.
Nope- no corruption here.
