Gary Miller is a scumbag

Gary Miller's a scumbag, that's pretty clear. But his newest trick (or, actually, read the article: this is the second time he's pulled this particular ploy) is so magnificently despicable that I simply have a hard time believing that this guy can even stand to look at his thieving face in the mirror:

Residents who live nearby say that Miller is trying to force the city to buy his land by raising the specter of a development that would make the hillside unsafe and unsightly... Miller's game plan, [critics say], is similar to one he successfully used four years ago in Monrovia, about 25 miles west on the 210 Freeway, where a plan for hillside development met with fierce local opposition. Ultimately, Monrovia citizens voted to tax themselves to buy the property from Miller and preserve it as open space.

Miller told [the people from whom he had bought the land] that he would build a $1-million bridge spanning a drainage ditch on the property and name it after their brother, Barnard Carrari, who had just died, if they would lower their price by $1 million. Still grieving... they agreed and sold him the land for about $2 million.

Five months later, Miller reported on his congressional financial disclosure statement that the land was worth at least $5 million.

Miller initially told the Carraris he was only going to make modest adjustments to the land and build about 30 homes, Fernandez said. When the family saw his plans for 110 homes — and no bridge named after Barnard Carrari — they were distraught, she said.

"That farm was a family tradition where people went up there and made a day of it," Fernandez said. "And when he broke his word and didn't do all the things he said he would, it just broke our hearts."

You got that? He conned people to sell the land with various promises, immediately turned around and evaluated the land at 150% more than he paid for it, then betrayed his promises to blackmail the city into buying the land off of him. And he's supposedly a libertarian-leaning conservative. More like a true welfare queen, if you ask me.