As the law quoted in the original article says, it's not considered significant amount if:
> The ownership of less than 3 percent of the shares of a corporation for profit, provided that the total annual income to him or her from dividends, including the value of stock dividends, from the corporation does not exceed 5 percent of his or her total annual income, and any other payments made to him or her by the corporation do not exceed 5 percent of his or her total annual income.
It's quite plausible that $10k-$100k does not meet that criteria.
Here's why San Diego is so corrupt.
On 12/16/16, when this contract was approved by the City Attorney and Council, she was in violation of the city charter, which says any elected official cannot own stock in a company if that transaction is before them. If they do she should have forfeite her office and the contract void.
On 12/19/16, the charter language was changed to state law, that brings a 3% ownership threshold allowing her to be within the law.
So with my back of the envelope calculation at a 100 billion dollar market cap you would need to invest 3 billion dollars into GE, any less would be considered insignificant. I'm assuming my math is absolutely wrong, as this law seems wildly and completely corrupt.
I do not understand making the city attorney the scapegoat. Here, this GE contract was entered into by the city because of an ordinance passed by the city council and signed into law by the mayor. The attorney's job in "approving" the contract is probably limited to reviewing it for form and making sure that its provisions are aligned with the city's interests and goals. The people to blame here are the city council and the mayor.
"Should"? According to the San Diego charter, article 7, it is. From the article,
>... no officers of the City, whether elected or appointed, financially interested in any contract made by them in their official capacity... contracts entered into in violation of this Section shall be void and shall not be enforceable
This is weird. The exact sentence in the article is:
> Pursuant to state law, no officers of the City, whether elected or appointed, financially interested in any contract made by them in their official capacity.
That's not a complete sentence. It either needs something inserter before "financially" or after "capacity".
Thinking the article just misquoted, I looked at copy of the Charter that is shown in the embedded viewer later in the article...but that's got the same incomplete sentence.
Searching for that section online, I found a PDS copy at sandiego.gov [1]. In that, the sentence is complete with "shall be" in front of "financially":
> Pursuant to state law, no officers of the City, whether elected or appointed, shall be financially interested in any contract made by them in their official capacity.
A sibling comment already pointed this out, but technically it may not be in violation. I don't particularly care about this, because I agree with the sentiment that the appearance of impropriety is almost as important as actual impropriety. Without that, confidence in leadership and the systems that govern us are eroded significantly.
Depending on timing, this may fall under insider trading. But for non sec violations, kickbacks are the name of the game in government contracts. Look no further than the senate launch system (SLS rocket).
This is proof that government should never get involved in business or the free market. It engenders cronyism and inept government bureaucrats getting rich off of unnecessary regulation.
Besides, this article is an manifesto/editorial. Some person running for city attorney did a document dump of mostly irrelevant stuff.
Lots of ranting, but very little actual content. What data has been collected from a partially implemented streetlight program in San Diego that was sold to “Wall St” for a billion dollars? Who is “Wall St” exactly? Lighting systems like this are administered by a NOC maintained by the vendor. Is that the data in question
There isn’t enough information to form an opinion about the “inept bureaucrats”. City attorneys don’t enter contracts, they advise those who do. It’s fair to critique the terms of the contract, but ignorant to accuse someone of violating the law without any merit.
That's, frankly, impossible. This is one of those things that government has to buy -- streetlights and standards for them. Either the government creates government-owned companies for everything public or it participates in the market. If this were just handed to a private contractor, the same problem would be likely to occur, although the private contractor might be smarter about getting their cut of selling surveillance data.
Most large companies depend on government contracts for a substantial part of their business. The government is after all the single biggest consumer in many markets. This, and revolving doors between businesses and government, probably means that corruption of this kind is hard to eliminate.
The city attorney that approved the GE contract owns significant GE stock. This whole thing should be null and void.