This is Marklesburg, Pennsylvania, population 205.
This is The Plains, Virginia.
Population 217.
This is Blackwater, Missouri.
Population 128.
And this is Vernon, California.
Population 222.
Notice anything different about Vernon?
That’s right: it’s in California, and those other ones were in other states.
Also, it’s home to 1,800 businesses that employ about 55,000 people.
Here’s a number: the property that houses these businesses is worth about $4.1 billion
dollars—which, coincidentally, gives Vernon California a $4.1 billion property base on
which to collect property taxes.
There’s another number: Vernon also takes in about a quarter billion annually just in
the power and other city-owned utilities they provide to businesses.
Put those numbers together and you’re probably realizing that a city with a population less
than a semi-crowded Cheesecake Factory is bringing a few hundred million dollars a year
in taxes.
Which likely leads you to the question: where does all that money go?
To answer that question, let me introduce you to a man named John B. Leonis.
John is dead right now, and has been being dead for about seventy years, but before he
was dead, he turned Vernon, California into what it is today.
You see, what’s now Vernon, California was once a beautiful, bucolic farmland community
inhabited by a modest number of families living the kind of simple, bucolic lives where you
don’t need to know what the word bucolic means.
That is, until John B. Leonis showed up in the late 19th century, realized that three
major railroads ran through the area, then rubbed his hands together like a cartoon villain
and said “how can I ruin all of this while making a preposterous sum of money?”
So, he bought up as much land as he could, and with a few partners, incorporated the
area into the town of Vernon, where he promptly installed himself and his cronies as the board
of trustees for the city, and essentially ran it as his own personal fiefdom for the
next fifty years.
Leonis started by transforming Vernon into what he called a “sporting town,” opening
attractions like a baseball stadium, a 7,000 seat boxing arena, and a 100-foot long “world’s
longest bar.”
And if you’re thinking, those sound like things that would attract the worst kind of
people in the world: that was exactly the point.
All the big business boys who traveled to Vernon to watch events like the world boxing
championships would end up getting sweet-talked by Leonis into building their West Coast factories
in Vernon—and many companies, including Studebaker, Alcoa, and Owens-Illinois, did
just that, bringing their tax dollars with them.
All the while, the board of trustees, which Leonis ran, straight-up refused to hold the
elections they were supposed to hold, and when lawsuits eventually forced them to, let’s
just say they found ways of influencing the few dozen people who technically had voting
rights in the town.
You see, Vernon has, for over a century, operated by a simple mathematical formula: limit population
to maximize corruption.
For most of its existence, the government has owned almost all of the city’s extremely
limited housing supply, which means they’re essentially able to control who lives in the
town, and thus who votes in the town, which they ensure is pretty much exclusively city
employees—as in, people who are paid by the people looking for their votes.
And if you’re thinking that this is just another story of old-timey corruption, think
again.
It’s actually a story of very new-timey corruption as well.
Because you see, when John B. Leonis died, he left his estate to his grandson, Leonis
Malburg, who would go on to become mayor of Vernon for 35 years, continuing his family’s
proud legacy of being the worst.
In 2006, a group of people tried moving to Vernon to contest local elections—which
hadn’t been competitive in over two decades—and when the city found out what they were doing,
they shut off their power and tried to have them evicted: an electoral tactic so brilliant
and innovative it makes you wonder if it’s legal.
It isn’t, but we have to move on because none of this answers the question you wanted
answered: what about the money?
Well, it’s basically just handed out to anyone who’s in the good graces of the city
government, which includes, most of all, the people in the city government.
Take Bruce V Malkenhorst for example.
At one point he was, simultaneously, Vernon’s city manager, finance director, city clerk,
redevelopment director, treasurer, and chief of light and power.
He once had the highest salary of any public official in California, and to this day, he
receives the biggest pension of any California government retiree.
And he’s just one example: a lawyer named Eric Freisch was paid $7.5 million by the
city in salary and fees over a five-year period for doing work that nobody seems to be able
to account for.
I could go on listing the names of old white dudes who get stupidly huge payouts, but come
on, this isn’t Shark Tank.
Much like the US Men’s National Soccer team, though, things in Vernon are very slowly,
painstakingly, getting a little better.
In 2009 the 26-year mayor, Leonis Malberg, was arrested on corruption charges that also,
hilariously, involved the revelation that he didn’t even live in Vernon, and in 2011,
the state of California attempted to disincorporate Vernon and have it absorbed into Los Angeles.
Unfortunately, it turns out that the city government whose whole thing is that it has
too much money is able to hire some pretty high-powered lawyers, who were able to kill
the attempt, but Vernon was forced to nearly double its population by building apartment
complexes, which has reduced the city government’s ability to manipulate its voting pool.
Now Vernon is actually only the second-smallest town in California by population, getting
beaten out by Amador City—which means that, much like Vernon, the title of this video
was actually just a fraudulent scheme designed to line my own corrupt pockets.
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