(Los Cerritos Newspaper Group) Community News has obtained an audiotape that details how the Office of California State Assembly Speaker John Perez collaborated with former Assemblyman Tom Calderon and officials with the Central Basin Municipal Water District in an attempt to coerce three Maywood Mutual Water Districts (MMWD) into taking on unwanted projects that if they did not accept, the districts, as Calderon said, would be "dissolved with a stroke of a pen."
The "stroke of a pen" meaning legislation that would be championed by Speaker Perez and passed in Sacramento to "dissolve the water companies." The entities would then be taken over by CBMWD.
Even more disturbing, the projects would have landed Calderon, and his allies, as well as the CBMWD a lucrative $25 million dollar consulting contract to "fix problems" that one MMWC General Manager insisted twice in the audio recording "we don't have, or we were already working with the WRD to fix."
Further, HMG-CN has determined that several figures currently under probe by the FBI in a complex political "pay to play scheme" at the CBMWD also played active roles in pushing for the legislation that targeted the tiny MMWD.
HMG-CN has also been told by sources that investigators with the FBI have been given a copy of the audio tape.