Apparently Sukhee Kang, formerly Mayor of Irvine and now carpetbagging State Senate candidate in north Orange County has been going around telling people that no public money was wasted on the Great Park.

That is a blatant lie, of course, but with Suke you never know whether he’s deliberately lying on his own, or whether he’s just lazily repeating what Boss Larry Agran told him to say.

Here’s an interesting link provided by commenter Carpetbagger to a Register story from 2010 that talks about the Grand Jury’s scathing review of the Great Park disaster, a disaster that at the time was still unfolding.

The key part is the recounting of early financing, in which the City of Irvine lent the Irvine Redevelopment Agency $134,000,000 for some acreage that was supposed to be the genesis of the Great Park and a veritable cash cow. The money was transferred to the Great Park Corporation to pay for ongoing fun and games, principally paying for no-bid consulting contracts to the friends of Larry Agran’s political machine – the machine that got Sukhee Kang in office and kept him there.

Of course the Redevelopment Agency had no wherewithal to pay back the loan or the interest because it had virtually no tax increment coming in and by 2011 that prospect was doomed by the death of Redevelopment.

Even with Redevelopment the GJ correctly pointed out, there was probably NEVER going to be enough dough to pay off the loan.

The story goes on to say that Agran and Sukhee, despite earlier pledges of no public money, applied for those free Federal bucks, even as shameless Sukhee’s story changed to say that he promised no NEW taxes, a completely meaningless spiel.

Anyway, the Grand Jury had seen enough and recognized what a shell game the whole thing was: the Irvine City Council who paved the way for the fiasco – Agran, Beth Krom, and our old friend Sukhee simultaneously sat on the Great Park Board, and the Irvine Redevelopment Agency. What a scam and all legal!

Of course money isn’t free. Somebody has to work for it and pay the taxes that let incompetent politicians like Sukhee Kang play Monopoly. The City loan and the interest on it have a cost, and put the City at risk.

The consultants, lawyers and planners all made a killing off of the Great Pork debacle. The public trust was violated. And that’s the Sukhee Story.