Leary claims to have grown 10,000 Elk Grove jobs during his tenure

Might as well claim he also invented the question mark!

Over an adult beverage, who hasn’t made an exaggerated claim that is such a whopper as to be immediately known to be a joke? Dr. Evil claimed he invented the question mark, while many others claim to have been written the lyrics to the song “Tequila” over a shot of the said.

Faced with questionable special interest donations from real estate developers, questionable use of campaign funds for what could be interpreted as personal use and an opponent who is effectively hammering you, a law enforcement professional, with a perception of increased violent crime, what would you do to save your political butt?

Well if your name is your name is Mike Leary and your political future hangs in the balance, do what any entrenched special-interest political hack or drunken lounge lizard would do – tell a whopper of a story. Make an exaggerated claim and hope no one questions it.

This is what Mike Leary appears to be doing with his 10,000 job creation claim.

To cover his butt, Leary, who has been the subject of ethics investigations by the Sacramento County Grand Jury, has not laid claim to any significant verifiable initiative he took to improve life in Elk Grove. When in doubt, grab on to something that is hard to verify and take credit for it.

We took a look at the Elk Grove Chamber of Commerce's site to see what they had to say. If any organization would lay claim to such job growth, it would your local chamber.

We did find a posting by chamber president Janet Toppenberg, who talked about creating jobs in the future and vaguely talks about past job creation:

In February, the Elk Grove Economic Development Corporation (EGEDC) became a reality and will immediately begin implementation of the Community First Initiative. The Initiative lays out a five-year strategy to strengthen the local economy by adding 1500 commercial, professional and industrial jobs. The EGEDC will be funded through investments in the program by private industry and public agencies, with the majority coming from the private sector.

Toppenberg talked about creating 1,500 jobs in five years.

The irony of Leary’s claim is the old cliche that success has many mothers, failure none. It is interesting that if Elk Grove did in fact grow 10,000 permanent jobs in the last eight years, why aren’t the other council members staking a claim to this truly great development?

Our research has not been able to pinpoint any source showing Elk Grove has grown 10,000 jobs since July 1, 2000, the day Leary took office.

We have done the usual Google searches, searches on chamber of commerce web sites, state, regional and local government web site. Perhaps Leary is getting his number from his largest group of donors - real estate developers.

Granted, we could be overlooking something and we invite anyone who has access to this claim to please forward it to us and we will gladly post it. Until then, we have to take the position that Leary is simply exaggerating job growth in Elk Grove for his own political gain - what else can he do!