San Bernardino hire has twice declared bankruptcy

Tim Reid , Reuters ? ? ? 11 hrs.

LOS ANGELES - The bankrupt city of San Bernardino has hired a new city manager who, according to court filings, has twice declared personal bankruptcy and was recently ousted from the board of a small community's water company after being sued by shareholders.

The city council voted unanimously on Tuesday night to hire Allen J. Parker, 71, as its city manager on an annual salary of almost $222,000. He replaces an interim city manager who resigned last month because, according to friends, she was exasperated by the city's internal divisions.

The interim city manager, Andrea Travis-Miller, could not be reached for comment.

Pat Morris, the mayor of the city in California, praised Parker's "wealth of city management experience" and expressed "great confidence" in his ability to oversee the city's affairs. Parker, who began working in the job on Wednesday, will be crucial in guiding the city of 210,000 people through municipal bankruptcy, in a case that could set a national precedent for Wall Street bondholders and pension funds in future municipal bankruptcies.

The mayor and council members knew about both of Parker's personal bankruptcies -- the first in 1991 and the second in 2011 -- and the litigation surrounding his water board tenure before they interviewed him, according to the mayor's chief of staff. They discussed both issues with him when they interviewed Parker last Friday. They say the issues were no impediment: the council interviewed two final candidates but voted unanimously to hire him.

The California newspaper The Press-Enterprise reported on Thursday that Parker filed in 2011 for personal bankruptcy. In comments to the paper, Parker said that his bankruptcy and his ability to handle the city's fiscal problems were "apples and oranges."

Calls and emails to Parker asking about his bankruptcy filings and his tenure on the water board went unanswered. An email to Parker asking if his wife Sara, with whom he jointly filed for bankruptcy in the 2011 petition, would comment also did not elicit a response.

The bankruptcy of San Bernardino, a city 65 miles east of Los Angeles, is a national test case as to whether the pensions of government workers take precedence over other payments in a municipal bankruptcy -- a high stakes issue for pension plans and their beneficiaries, and for the Wall Street bondholders who lend money to governments.

City managers are central to any city's quest to seek bankruptcy protection, because they have a pivotal role in answering questions from creditors and the court. The judge overseeing San Bernardino's case must still rule on whether the city is eligible for bankruptcy before the case proceeds.

Legal dispute
A 2009 lawsuit brought by a shareholder in the Banning Heights Mutual Water Company, where Parker was a director and then president of the board between 2004 and 2010, resulted in Parker being voted off the board in February 2010 after a court-ordered special election.

Banning Heights is a tiny unincorporated community 85 miles east of Los Angeles. The water company was formed in 1913 to provide water and today it serves about 250 residents.

Despite its small size, the water rights and land upon which the community sits are worth millions of dollars, according to John McClendon, the water board's general counsel. At one point under Parker's tenure on the water board, an entity called The Tahiti Group had placed $7 million in an escrow account to purchase the company, according to correspondence attached to court filings.

Court filings in the 2009 lawsuit, and a subsequent separate lawsuit brought by the water company allege that Parker, along with others, used their position on the board to try to sell the water company, against the wishes of shareholders.

Parker and others were also accused of withholding information from shareholders, according to those court filings. The shareholder sued in 2009 because he said Parker and others ignored the results of previous shareholder elections when they were voted off the board. Parker is not a defendant in the second lawsuit which is still active.

According to one court filing by the water company dated September 20, 2010, when shareholders gained access to the water company's office after Parker and others were voted off the board, computers were missing, hard drives had been wiped and bags of shredded documents sat on the floor.

In a deposition dated November 9, 2010 relating to the 2009 lawsuit, Parker said he never shredded documents and did not believe anyone "during our regime" on the water board shredded any documents.

After a judge ruled against Parker and others in the 2009 lawsuit and ordered a special shareholder election, they were voted off the board by shareholders in February 2010.

Background check
According to his resume, which does not mention Banning Heights Water Company, Parker has long experience as a local manager in several other California cities such as East Palo Alto, Half Moon Bay, Seal Beach and Compton.

Jim Morris, the son and chief of staff to Pat Morris, San Bernardino's mayor, said the city had done its own thorough background check on Parker before he was interviewed by the council, last Friday. His bankruptcies, and the Banning Heights Mutual Water Company litigation, were known about by the time the interview took place, Morris said.

"We talked to the attorneys involved, and pulled the court filings. These were disputes over election results," Morris said. He said the Banning Heights litigation did not involve serious issues, and that such disputes occur on small entities such as the water board all the time.

Morris said there was no reason why Parker should have included his tenure on the water board on his resume. "He wasn't employed by the water board," Morris said. "His resume was an employment resume. If someone was a member of their local homeowners' association you wouldn't expect that to be on their resume."

Parker filed for personal bankruptcy in 1991 in San Mateo, Calif., according to court records. No further details were available. In February 2011, he filed for bankruptcy with his wife, in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court, Central District of California.

According to the 2011 bankruptcy filing, Parker and his wife listed among their debts two home mortgages with unsecured balances of $267,500, as well as bank and credit card debt of $137,252.

Copyright 2013 Thomson Reuters.

Source: http://www.nbcnews.com/business/bankrupt-san-bernardino-picks-twice-bankrupt-manager-1C8499972

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Vibrant mix of marine life found at extreme ocean depths

Feb. 21, 2013 ? The first scientific examinations of data recorded during a record-setting expedition have yielded new insights about the diversity of creatures that live and thrive in the cold, dark, and highly pressurized habitats of the world's deepest points and their vastly unexplored ecosystems.

Natalya Gallo of Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego will present preliminary findings from the DEEPSEA CHALLENGE expedition, a project led by James Cameron in collaboration with Scripps, and supported by National Geographic and Rolex, on Feb. 22 (GS09: Community Ecology Session, 8:45 a.m. PST) at the 2013 Aquatic Sciences Meeting of the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography in New Orleans.

Gallo, a graduate student with biological oceanographer Lisa Levin's group, analyzed 25 hours of video captured during Cameron's historic March 26, 2012, solo dive 11 kilometers (6.8 miles) below the ocean surface to the Challenger Deep in the Pacific Ocean's Mariana Trench, as well as separate dives (also during the DEEPSEA CHALLENGE expedition) to the New Britain Trench and Ulithi, also in the Pacific Ocean. The footage was taken from five cameras equipped on the DEEPSEA CHALLENGER submersible that Cameron piloted to the Challenger Deep. Additional footage came from specialized "lander" deep ocean vehicles developed in collaboration with Scripps engineer Kevin Hardy that captured samples at various depths.

Early results of Gallo's analysis reveal a vibrant mix of organisms, different in each trench site. The Challenger Deep featured fields of giant single-cell amoebas called "xenophyophores," sea cucumbers, and enormous shrimp-like crustaceans called amphipods. The New Britain Trench featured hundreds of stunning stalked anemones growing on pillow lavas at the bottom of the trench, as well as a shallower seafloor community dominated by spoon worms, burrowing animals that create a rosette around them by licking organic matter off the surrounding sediment with a tongue-like proboscis. In contrast, Ulithi's seafloor ecosystem in the Pacific atolls featured high sponge and coral biodiversity.

As the submersible and landers pushed into deeper waters, the variety of species declined, with each depth dominated by a handful of key organisms. At shallow depths in the New Britain Trench, Gallo observed strange rotund but graceful animals called sea cucumbers swimming in the water column. Different species of sea cucumbers were present even in the great depths of the Challenger Deep but appear to have adapted to these depths by decreasing in size, not swimming, and feeding by orienting themselves with the currents. The sea cucumbers seen in the Challenger Deep at approximately 11 kilometers (approximately 36,000 feet) likely represent a new species and are the first recorded abundant population of the animals found in the deepest part of the ocean.

Proximity to land also played a role in the makeup of the deep-sea environment. Deep in the New Britain Trench, located near Papua New Guinea, Gallo identified palm fronds, leaves, sticks, and coconuts-terrestrial materials known to influence seafloor ecosystems. The Challenger Deep and Ulithi, both more removed from terrestrial influence, were absent of such evidence. Gallo also spotted a dive weight in the Challenger Deep footage, likely used as ballast on another deep-submergence vehicle.

"These data add valued information to our limited understanding of deep-sea and trench biology," said Gallo. "Only a small fraction of the deep seafloor has been fully explored, so this expedition allows us to better understand these unique deep-sea ecosystems."

Gallo and Ralph Pace, a master's student in the Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation at Scripps, are compiling an image reference collection of all organisms identified during these dives to help expand the scientific impact of the expedition.

"New knowledge about life in the deep sea becomes increasingly important as humans ramp up their exploitation of the fish, energy, mineral, and genetic resources of the deep sea," said Levin. "Natalya's observation of a dive weight from a past expedition in the Challenger Deep reminds us that our presence in the ocean is pervasive."

Gallo noted that her findings were largely consistent with discoveries made in the 1950s, '60s, and '70s, the first "golden age" of deep-sea exploration. New high-definition video capabilities used during Deepsea Challenge expand exploration potential by allowing scientists to view organisms in their natural habitat and observe how these unique biological communities function, she said.

"The DEEPSEA CHALLENGE expedition made possible the discovery of the deepest examples of gigantism known thus far," said Doug Bartlett, a Scripps marine microbiologist and chief scientist of the expedition. "Among the many values of collecting deep-sea samples is the possible isolation of microbes adapted to the extreme conditions of life in the trenches. These microbes inform us of the evolution, diversity, and adaptations of life and perhaps even life's origins and its possible presence elsewhere in the solar system."

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Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/~3/LQ4b4eauh-I/130222103006.htm

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