Gov. Jerry Brown Funded By OC Unions For 2014; Loretta Sanchez Nabs Dentist Support

Pay to play

​Gov. Jerry Brown's trip to Orange County last month for a speech to Democrats nabbed $30,000 mostly from local organized labor unions, according to a report this week in the Sacramento Bee.

Among those contributing were the Orange County Employees Association, which organized "a small, private" meeting and donated $10,000 to Brown's campaign coffers, a union official told the paper.

The Bee's David Siders notes that the Orange County Professional Firefighters Association and the Association of Orange County Deputy Sheriffs also wrote checks to Brown's campaign committee.

Surely coincidentally, on the date of the contributions, the Los Angeles Times reported this: "When the dust settled on Gov. Jerry Brown's first legislative session in nearly three decades, no group had won more than organized labor, which heralded its largest string of victories in nearly a decade."

That Times article went on to report that Brown caved into food workers' union demands to thwart increasing use of automated checkout machines in grocery stores, granted firefighter union demands to thwart attempts to reform employment contracts and "guaranteed" public union wages for employees at libraries that are privatized.

Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez, another pro-union politician, has registered her own 2014 campaign committee for governor of California and, according to disclosure reports, raised $700 in recent months--including $500 from Santa Ana dentist Arturo J. Lomeli.

Sanchez

​Sanchez, Orange County's lone Democrat in Congress, has served in Washington, D.C. since her upset defeat of legendary Garden Grove Rep. Robert K. Dornan in 1996. Rumors have persisted over recent years that Sanchez, a pal to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, is open to other job possibilities. Despite raising money in her official governor's race account, it is highly unlikely she will challenge an incumbent Democrat like Brown for the seat. So why is she accepting contributions into that account as well as her congressional campaign fund? 

--R. Scott Moxley / OC Weekly