CALIFORNIA’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: “California Board of Equalization Chairman Jerome Horton should apologize to Rob Lowe for anti-Semitic slur,” the Sacramento Bee reported in March:
Horton should have one two-word response to actor Rob Lowe and his wife, Sheryl Berkoff: I’m sorry.
In a year when politicians seem to think crass is cool, Horton embarrassed himself and the constitutional office he holds as an elected Board of Equalization member by asking Lowe and Berkoff in a private meeting whether they had “Jewed down” contractors who had built their house.
In an email reported first by Bloomberg BNA, Lowe explained: “Appalled, we asked him to explain his comment. He doubled down, saying, ‘C’mon. You know what I’m saying. Did you Jew them down? You must have.’ ”
The Los Angeles-area Democrat invoked a term that is at once an example of casual anti-Semitism and reflective of ancient prejudices toward one ethnic group. Horton should have known better, having spent 20 years in public life, first as an Inglewood City Council member and later in the Assembly. Clearly, he doesn’t.
But it gets better: “California tax official got $130,000 worth of office furniture,” the Bee reported last week:
Last fall, more than $118,000 of designer furniture rolled into to a new downtown Sacramento high-rise office suite for Jerome Horton.
Then the chairman of the tax-collecting Board of Equalization, Horton had moved operations a few months earlier from the ninth floor of U.S. Bank Tower to its 21st floor. The new space offers a stunning view of the Statehouse and grounds out his office window, 300 feet above Capitol Mall. Some board staff privately call the office “Jerome’s aquarium” for its conference room’s floor-to-ceiling glass walls embossed with the agency’s seal.
Horton’s new furniture, some of it stashed away unused in another building as of last week, reflected the office upgrade.
According to purchase records obtained by The Sacramento Bee, more than 150 items on one invoice from Sacramento-based Miles Treaster & Associates included 24 white-leather-and-walnut chairs ($1,172 each), a matching couch ($2,267) and 21 wall-mounted cabinets with frosted-glass doors and “grooved edge top-silver undertrim” ($11,248 total). A separate invoice listed, among other items, eight satin-finish metal coat racks for $88 each and one “Blomus Symbolo Umbrella Stand (Stainless Steel, 20” tall)” for $115.
With delivery and installation of $12,000, taxpayers spent slightly more than $130,000 to outfit Horton’s office.
Related: “SBOE Chair Jerome Horton (D) has reported $731,835 in donations by organizations at his request, with that money going mostly to or through nonprofit organizations tied to his wife, a Bloomberg BNA analysis found,” in a piece from December titled, “California Scheming? Funneled Donations Raise Ethics Queries.”
“And you’re working for no one but me,” as a wise Beatle once sang about his country’s tax collectors. That sounds like Horton’s motto as well.