Being a Board Member, That's the Ticket

Ah, the hard work of promoting cultural events.

Orange County Fair Board members may have to face the music for giving themselves 8,892 free tickets worth $376,532 for top-name concerts at the Pacific Amphitheatre during the last two years. Auditors have warned the board twice that excessive freebies could be construed as a gift of public money and could result in the state withholding $30 million a year in funding. ...

But so far the OC board is digging in its heels and refusing to give up the concert tickets. "Unless someone forces a change, it's not likely to change," said board chairman Dale Dykema. "No one has given us a directive that says, 'This is what you have to do.'"

No, because expecting some semblance of judgment from officials with their hand already hovering over the till is like appealing for fairness to a pack of ravenous wolves.

The (excuse me) leader of the pack is Fair director Deborah Carona, and what an example of fine governance she sets.

Carona, who faces unrelated federal corruption charges with her husband and his mistress, is by far the biggest ticket taker on the board, collecting 1,227 tickets valued at nearly $51,000. She received 1,118 free seats directly over the two-year period and got another 109 as part of a ticket-swapping system among board members.

The single largest recipient of her largesse was the Orange County Sheriff's Department, whose top officials received at least 261 free tickets worth $11,867.

And now kindly pay attention to how these law-enforcement beneficiaries have been known to behave once they find their free seats.

Jim Branagan, a concert-goer who paid top dollar for a front row seat for Crosby, Stills and Nash in 2003 ... ended up sitting behind Mike Carona and a wall of boisterous off-duty sheriff's deputies. One of the deputies demanded Branagan turn over a guitar pick that was tossed from the stage, he said.

Nice. Note, by the way, that the face value of the freebie tickets amounts to roughly $200,000 a year. Now compare that to the number that the concert series is in the red since 2003: about a million dollars total. An eight-year-old could probably do the math, and suggest an easy fix.