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- Written by: Tom Philpott
What almost certainly will end, however, is an 11-year string of annual military pay increases that exceeded private sector wage growth by at least a half percentage point.
The House this summer had voted to make it 12 consecutive extra-size pay raises, by including a 1.9 percent military pay hike in its version of the 2011 defense bill, over opposition from military leaders and the White House.
The Senate bill embraces the 1.4 percent raise proposed by the Obama administration, which matches private sector wage growth, as measured by the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Employment Cost Index (ECI). But it also will be the military’s smallest pay raise since 1962.
Pay officials say blame the poor economy for dampening wage growth nationwide. Consumer prices too have been impacted, which is why military retirees, social security recipients and disabled veterans won’t see a January cost-of-living adjustment for the second consecutive year.
With Republican senators opposed to the defense bill’s provision to repeal the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell law, which bars gay military members from serving openly, prospects of passing a final defense bill remained in doubt.
If no defense authorization bill is passed by Jan. 1, existing federal pay law takes hold. It directs that, absent overriding congressional action, military pay is to increase each January based on changes in the ECI, in this case by 1.4 percent.
Even if Senate defense bill is approved, House-Senate conferees tasked to iron out differences for a final bill, are expected to acquiesce to the Senate and administration on the smaller military raise.
Congressional sources cite several factors including the two-year pay freeze planned for federal civilian employees, mounting worries over budget deficits and a jobless rate in the private sector still hovering near 10 percent.
High unemployment helps the services meet and even exceed recruiting and retention targets for quality personnel, despite a grinding pace of operations supporting two war theaters. It also persuades more members of Congress to heed criticism of outside budget analysts that lawmakers have allowed military personnel costs to climb too high.
“Reality has caught up to us,” said a House staff member who has seen support for the larger pay raise weaken.
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) posted a statement earlier this month that a federal pay freeze should impact military personnel too, except for those fighting in Afghanistan, Iraq or elsewhere “serving in harm’s way.”
That’s a sharp turnaround. Rep. Susan Davis (D-Calif.), who next month steps down as chair of the House armed services subcommittee on military personnel, said last May that military people continue to deserve bigger pay raises because “the extraordinary high operations tempo has exacted a high penalty on our service members and their families.”
She took that stand, as did the subcommittee in a unanimous 14-0 vote, despite analysis from the Congressional Budget Office that, if housing allowance are counted, growth in military pay actually has surpassed private sector pay growth by 11 percent since 1982, the year the Reagan administration declared that “pay comparability” had been achieved.
Proponents of the larger raise argue that pay growth comparisons using only military basic pay show a gap of 2.4 percent remains. But the Obama administration, just as the Bush administration did, argues the pay gap is gone and that future across-the-board raises should only match changes in the ECI, not exceed that pay growth measure.
From 2002 through 2010, basic pay rose 42 percent and housing allowances 83 percent, compared to a 32 percent rise in private sector wages, Pentagon pay officials contend. If Congress still wants to boost military compensation, any extra dollars should go into special and incentive pays to fill shortages of critical skills.
Obama in late November called for a pay raise freeze for federal civilian employees this January and again in 2012, in sympathy with out-of-work Americans and as a first step toward getting soaring budget deficits under control.
The pay freeze will save more than $5 billion over two years, and more than $60 billion over 10 years, in part because holding down pay raises also dampens future retirement benefits.
The Office of Management, using the most recent ECI data, projects the size of the lost federal pay raise in January 2012 at about 1.6 percent.
“This freeze does not apply to the men and women of our armed forces who along with their families continue to bear enormous burdens with our nation at war,” the president said. He added, “The hard truth is that getting this deficit under control is going to require broad sacrifice, and that sacrifice must be shared by the employees of the federal government.”
A week later, Obama cut a deal with congressional Republican leaders to sustain for two years Bush-era tax cuts including for millionaires, lower payroll taxes in 2011 on most America workers and extend other tax breaks.
In a glaring contrast to the federal pay freeze, these initiatives would raise budget deficits over the next two years by $900 billion. But also, the president argued, they will spur the economy and create jobs.
John Gage, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, called it “unconscionable to attack the wages of federal working people while the millionaires and billionaires on Wall Street not only get their bailouts and astronomical bonuses; they also get their tax cuts.”
Reagan, in 1986, was the last president to impose a federal pay freeze President Clinton proposed a pay freeze for both civil servants and the military in 1994 but Congress refused to enact it.
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- Written by: Lake County News reports
Reaching adulthood used to mean getting married and having children; today it means completing school, living independently and/or having a full-time job – but that’s increasingly difficult say researchers at the National Center for Children in Poverty (NCCP), who say the trend has resulted in more young adults than ever before who are still living with their parents.
“The transition to adulthood is becoming increasingly protracted and delayed,” says Vanessa Wight, PhD, a senior research associate at NCCP, a poverty think tank at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. “Children are living at home longer than they were 30 years ago.”
In 1970, according to a new NCCP report analyzing data from the U.S. Current Population Survey, Annual Social and Economic Supplement, March 2010, 47.3 percent of young adults aged 18 to 24 were living at home.
By 2009 52.8 percent were living at home. In 1970 less than 30 percent were enrolled in school; by 2008, the percentage had increased to 45.5 percent.
NCCP also found that:
Young adults are also delaying marriage and childbearing. In 1970, the median age at first marriage was 20.8 for women and 23.2 for men. By 2009, median age had increased by about five years for both women and men to 25.9 and 28.1, respectively.
The average age of mothers at first birth has increased from 21.4 years in 1970 to 25 years in 2006.
“Amidst the backdrop of these dramatic changes in school enrollment, marriage and childbearing, there is a growing number of young adults for whom the transition is considerably more difficult,” write the report’s authors.
“If one of the primary goals of a successful transition to adulthood is the ability to be self sufficient apart from parents, then a growing share of the young adult population … is not connected to any of the various activities that might lead to economic independence, such as being in school, working, or serving in the military,” the study's authors said.
Disconnection varies by age, race, ethnicity, and nativity say the researchers.
Disconnection is highest among young adults aged 19 to 21.
The rate of disconnection is highest among American Indian and Alaska Native young adults (28.8 percent).
Black, Hispanic and other young adults also face a high likelihood of being disconnected relative to their white and Asian counterparts.
Asian young adults have the lowest rate of being disconnected at 7.4 percent.
The likelihood of being disconnected is higher among young adults who were born outside the U.S. (18.8 percent) compared with their native-born counterparts (14.4 percent).
Disconnected young adults, when compared with their connected counterparts, are more likely to experience a range of factors that only amplify their precarious economic standing.
They are more likely than connected young adults to be poor, to have a child and to be raising the child outside of a marital union, to be uninsured, and not surprisingly, to be receiving some kind of public assistance.
Since a large number of young adults who wind up disconnected are in school until at least the eleventh grade (the majority receives a high-school diploma), NCCP says high schools can play a role as important sites of intervention and recommends that states take steps to increase school-connectedness and mentorship programs along with providing school-based behavioral health screening and services.
Beyond high school, community colleges and other two-year institutions are positioned to provide educational development and employment training to young adults who might otherwise be barred from pursuing higher education due to academic under-preparation or financial and time constraints.
Another opportunity to improve access to and success in higher education, according to NCCP, is through significant reforms to the current financial aid system.
The study suggests that policymakers can improve the effectiveness of academic financial aid by increasing performance-based scholarships, reevaluating and reorganizing the grants, loans, and text credits programs, and simplifying their application processes to ensure that assistance reaches those students most in need.
The publication can be accessed free online at www.nccp.org/publications/pub_979.html.
The National Center for Children in Poverty (NCCP) is the nation’s leading public policy center dedicated to promoting the economic security, health and well-being of America’s low-income families and children. Part of Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, NCCP uses research to inform policy and practice with the goal of ensuring positive outcomes for the next generation.
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- Written by: Elizabeth Larson
LAKEPORT, Calif. – A woman who police said is a person of interest in the 2002 Barbara LaForge murder has been sentenced to state prison for failing to repay more than $44,000 in restitution and violating probation in two cases charged at around the time LaForge was shot to death.
Linda Ann Mafrice, 55, a massage therapist from Kelseyville, was transported to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation this week after Judge Andrew Blum sentenced her to four years and eight months in state prison earlier this month.
“She is a person of interest in the murder of Barbara LaForge,” Lakeport Police Det. Lou Riccardi, who was in court for Mafrice's sentencing, told Lake County News.
Riccardi's statement accounts for the first time the Lakeport Police Department has publicly identified a person of interest in the case since LaForge was found fatally shot in her downtown Lakeport frame shop on Oct. 8, 2002.
The 43-year-old LaForge was shot multiple times at close range with a .22 caliber weapon that has never been found.
LaForge's murder is the city's only unsolved homicide.
On Dec. 3, Judge Blum sentenced Mafrice to prison for theft from an elder, grand theft and forgery, charges which arose from two separate criminal filings.
On Aug. 3, 2002, the District Attorney's Office filed three counts against Mafrice – theft from an elder, theft by a forged or invalid access card and forgery.
Then on Oct. 9, 2002, the day after LaForge's murder, the District Attorney's Office filed a case against Mafrice alleging 90 counts, most of them forgery, along with grand theft, which were alleged to have taken place between February 2000 and Aug. 28, 2002, against the Royale Shores Homeowners Association. She was arrested two days later, court records show.
Most of the charges in that second case were dismissed via a Harvey waiver, meaning they could be considered in sentencing but would not be prosecuted.
Mafrice would eventually be sentenced to five years probation and 300 days in jail on the three remaining charges, which she was convicted of in July 2004. She also was sentenced to 200 hours of community service, which court records appear to indicate were never served.
Her sentencing then – as more recently – was delayed by reports of mental and physical health issues. At one point early in the case, she brought a forged doctor's note to court asking for her probation to be modified, according to District Attorney Jon Hopkins in a 2007 interview. A document in Mafrice's file showed her admitting the forgery to the court.
The terms of her probation specified that she was to pay back restitution totaling $113,116.07 to Royale Shores, with credit for $65,000 that she had already paid back. She also was to pay back the elderly woman she had defrauded $1,723.
But time went by, and the restitution to Royale Shores was not fully repaid, court documents showed.
Then, on Oct. 27, 2009, just weeks before her probation was set to expire, Judge Richard Martin issued a $50,000 bench warrant for her arrest for violation of probation because of the unpaid restitution.
Riccardi – a homicide detective from San Mateo County who moved to Lake County after his retirement – was brought in on a special assignment in 2009 to work on the LaForge case.
He said Mafrice is a person of interest because of her relationship with Dan Hamblin, LaForge's husband.
Mafrice and Hamblin were reportedly romantically involved before LaForge's October 2002 murder.
In a 2007 interview, retired Lakeport Police Chief Tom Engstrom told Lake County News that Mafrice was seen packing LaForge's possessions into garbage bags at LaForge's Piner Court home on the day of her 2002 funeral.
In the wake of the recent election, the LaForge investigation appears to have gained a new and important ally.
District Attorney-elect Don Anderson told Lake County News that he is very interested in the case, and plans to meet with Riccardi and Det. Destry Henderson, who also has been assigned to the investigation, to go over the case's details.
Riccardi said a $50,000 reward offered by the Governor's Office remains in place for anyone who provides information that leads to an arrest and conviction in the case.
The Lakeport Police Department, which is hosting a series of town halls, will devote a February gathering to giving the community an update on the LaForge homicide investigation.
Neighbor speaks about case
A former neighbor of Mafrice's at Royale Shores helped bring the embezzlement cases to the attention of police.
The woman, who asked not to be named due to concerns for her safety, said Mafrice lived in a unit at Royale Shores owned by a family member, and was the association's onsite property manager at the time when the forgeries and thefts took place.
The neighbor said her name and the name of another person had been forged on checks by Mafrice, who was alleged to have been taking large sums of money from the association for about a year before it was discovered.
Although Mafrice was not supposed to be handling money, “She found a way to get to it,” the neighbor said.
“She knew how to play everybody,” said the woman. “She was very good at what she did.”
The issue with the elderly victim in the other criminal case was happening at the same time, and the neighbor warned the woman's family about Mafrice, who had been caregiving for the woman. That led to the first filing in August 2002, with the larger case involving Royale Shores filed two months later.
The neighbor alleged that members of Mafrice's family were harassing the elderly woman at the center of the first case.
The neighbor said the homeowners association had money in the bank from a lawsuit it had won relating to building defects, and was preparing to use the money for repairs.
“We were in the throes of determining what we needed to do and what needed to be done first,” she said.
The money that Mafrice took was to have been used for a new roof, new decks and other repairs. The woman said the association has since managed to move forward with the repair work.
Mafrice moved from Royale Shores and in with Hamblin within about a week of the LaForge murder, the neighbor estimated.
“There were no secrets there,” the woman noted, explaining that Hamblin had been at the condominium a lot, and Mafrice had purchased him a motorcycle.
A lengthy court process
During the year following Mafrice's October 2009 arrest for violation of probation, she would be scheduled for five different hearings – including pleas and continuations.
In a hearing before Blum on Aug. 27, Mafrice admitted to a violation of her probation by not paying her restitution to Royale Shores in a timely manner. Blum told her she could face a maximum prison sentence of five years, four months for the violations.
At that time, Blum ordered Mafrice to pay the remainder of the restitution by Dec. 3.
Just a few months before, Hamblin – with whom Mafrice has lived since late 2002 – had been awarded $24,931.85 from Stonebridge Life Insurance Co. for a life insurance policy on LaForge, according to court documents.
When Mafrice appeared Dec. 3, her attorney, Stephen Carter, asked for a continuation until Jan. 24, saying that the funds would not be available until later in December.
In turn, Blum read from a Lake County Probation Department report, in which the probation officer stated that he didn't have any confidence that Mafrice intended to pay the remainder of the restitution, and that her request for another continuation was “just another ploy” to delay the proceedings.
Senior Deputy District Attorney Rachel Abelson opposed the continuation based on the Probation Department report, asking for Mafrice to be remanded into custody.
Carter said he didn't think remanding her was necessary as she was trying to make arrangements to pay the funds.
But Blum, pointing out that Mafrice had six years to make payment, said of her request for a continuance, “I'm disinclined to grant it.”
Mafrice's case was put on hold for several hours that day and finally recalled just after 2 p.m.
Blum read both the original probation report from September 2004 and the most recent report from this past November.
“My inclination is to follow the recommendation” of the probation department, which Blum said was for state prison.
Carter said Mafrice still maintained that the money would be available later in December. If probation was to be denied, then he asked for less prison sentences.
Abelson argued in turn, “She has done nothing but play games with the restitution.”
“Basically, her interest is herself,” Abelson added.
Abelson said she didn't think Mafrice's promise of paying more money in the future was realistic, and she asked for the original probation proposal of prison to be imposed.
Blum, finding Mafrice in violation of her probation, ruled, “Probation is permanently revoked,” noting that she has had ample time to comply and hasn't.
Pointing out that there were two separate cases with two separate victims, Blum went on to sentence Mafrice to four years for the first count of theft from an elder, as it was a crime committed in a way that suggested professionalism and planning.
The two other counts were to run consecutively, at two years each, with all but eight months of each term stayed.
The total time given was four years, eight months. By the time credits for previous time served and good behavior are calculated, it's estimated that Mafrice will spend about two years in state prison.
She must also repay $44,681.07 to Royale Shores, plus additional administrative fines, based on Blum's ruling.
After Blum passed sentence, Mafrice was handcuffed and transported to the Lake County Jail.
It's not yet clear where Mafrice will serve her time. There are three women's prison facilities in the state, two in Chowchilla and one in Corona, according to the California Department of Corrections.
E-mail Elizabeth Larson at
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- Written by: Elizabeth Larson
California Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner's office said Glenn Neasham, 50, was arrested Tuesday based on an investigation conducted by his agency.
“Insurance agents or brokers who steal from vulnerable seniors will not get away with their shameful tricks,” said Commissioner Poizner. “CDI investigators will continue working to track down any unscrupulous agent who preys on California's seniors.”
Neasham is charged with felony theft from an elder with two special allegations, the first for taking or damaging more than $50,000 in property and the second for a theft that is alleged to have totaled more than $100,000.
Lakeport attorney Mitchell Hauptman, who is representing Neasham, called the case “another one of the DA's famous flights of fantasy.”
Senior Deputy District Attorney said Neasham could face five years in prison if convicted, with four years for the first count, an additional year for the first special allegation and a limitation on probation if he were found guilty of the second special allegation.
The Lake County District Attorney's Office filed the case based on the state investigation, which began in 2008 after the California Department of Insurance received a report from the Savings Bank of Mendocino County.
Neasham, doing business as Glenn Neasham Insurance Agency, is alleged to have sold a $175,000 annuity to a then-83-year-old client on Feb. 6, 2008.
The Savings Bank of Mendocino County alerted local officials after the alleged victim and her elderly boyfriend came in to withdraw $175,000 from a certificate of deposit to purchase the annuity in February 2008, court records showed.
Abelson said banks are mandatory reporters in such cases, with the reports often going to Adult Protective Services, local law enforcement or other agencies.
Hauptman said that the court documents actually allege no wrongdoing, and the alleged victim neither suffered a loss nor filed a complaint.
The California Department of Insurance said the investigation determined that the alleged victim lacked the mental capacity to enter into this contract, and that the terms and conditions of the annuity contract were not in her best financial interest.
In the investigative reports the state investigator found that the woman who purchased the annuity appeared confused at times. The woman also was said to be under the control of her boyfriend, who was named as the beneficiary on the annuity rather than the woman's son, with whom she reportedly had a strained relationship.
The son of the alleged victim told the state investigator that his mother had Alzheimer's, but Neasham told the investigator he was not aware that the woman had any such condition.
“It is insulting to assume that just because she is old she lacks the capacity to manage her affairs,” Hauptman said.
No charges have been filed against the woman's boyfriend. Abelson said the investigation did not yield any findings of wrongdoing against the man, who had been a client of Neasham's for about 10 years at the time of the annuity's purchase, based on investigation documents.
Lake County News could not reach a California Department of Insurance spokesman by the end of Thursday to ask additional questions about the case.
Hauptman said in the nearly three years since the annuity was written, there has been no request for any change in its status, and it has actually shown a greater rate of return than the CD that was the previous financial arrangement.
In that time the woman has never requested any changes be made to the annuity, and she's making money, he said.
He said there is no evidence that Neasham received any particular benefit from the annuity sale, other than his normal commission on such a transaction.
Hauptman said that the state licenses agents to sell annuities, which have stringent requirements attached to them. He said the only thing that's suggested is that the woman purchasing the product didn't completely understand the product, which Hauptman said isn't a crime. “They're confusing products.”
The confusion the state investigator attributed to the woman who purchased the annuity “does not rise to justification for this frivolous criminal charge,” Hauptman said.
Hauptman said Neasham is set to make his first court appearance in the case in February.
The California Department of Insurance invites anyone who believes they may have been a victim of Neasham to call the agency at 707-751-2005.
E-mail Elizabeth Larson at