City Hall, Fresno, California

California Politics Today #238, "Twenty-year-old article in The Fresno Bee reveals the secrets of stem cell entrepreneur Robert Klein's success," featured a hard-to-read copy of a May 13, 1984 article in The Fresno Bee entitled "County bond consultant's role questioned," which reported on some financial dealings involving the sale of government bonds by Fresno County in the early 1980s.

These bond sales were made possible by the involvement of the present-day Chair of the Independent Citizens' Oversight Committee/Interim President of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, Robert Klein II, known at that time as Robert N. Klein Jr.

Access to a more readable version of that article may allow careful observers to note some parallels and similarities between what went on over twenty years ago in that Central Valley county as it issued less than $30 million in government bonds to finance low-cost housing in 1981 under the direction of Mr. Klein and the present instance in which the State of California has been authorized by the passage of Proposition 71 to issue ten times that amount in bonds every year for ten years under the direction of Mr. Klein, particularly in terms of openness, conflicts of interest, accountability, and the appearance and reality of integrity—in short, what we now call "transparency," or the lack thereof.

A newly-reformatted version of that article can now be accessed by clicking here.

This article has been reformatted and posted on the contemporary California Politics Today web site with the permission of the current management of The Fresno Bee, which is hereby acknowledged and thanked by California Politics Today for doing so.