Friends For Fullerton's Future

Sometimes stuff pops up that you couldn’t possibly make up. The latest Fullerton Observer includes a piece co-authored by Curtis Gamble and Sankia Kennedy and features the headline I used, above.

To start off with I have to say I can’t think of two people less likely to come up with a potential solution for anything.

Poor Curtis Gamble is just a perpetually discombobulated fellow who takes an opportunity a couple times a month to polish his sense of self-importance at city council meetings, generally offering comments on things he knows nothing about. He presumes to advocate for the homeless, bus drivers, seniors, students, etc., etc.; people who would probably just as soon forgo his representation. Co-author Saska Kennedy is thoroughly annoying too, although she, like her older sister, Sharon, is propelled by the ideological dogma of the self-righteous and sanctimonious left.

Their “article” presumes there is a homeless crisis in Fullerton. And it offers that homeless seniors represent 20% of this crisis. Their potential solution? Use the Rancho La Paz senior mobile home park as some sort of permanent housing for the homeless, moving them into trailers as they are vacated.

I can’t conceive of a worse idea: a village of homeless people assigned property, not their own, to live in and presumably maintain. Somehow the pathologies of homelessness – schizophrenia, drug abuse, living in filth would be rectified by mobile home park living. Cooking, cleaning, job hunting, health maintenance all self-performed by the newly housed, one concludes. Of course professional do gooders from Illumination Foundation (as a for instance) will be on hand to dispense “behavioral” admonitions and the necessary modalities.

The biggest unstated obstacle, and one that Curtis and Skansia work really hard to ignore is the fact that the mobile home park has an owner. When last I heard, that fellow is a real estate and numismatist named John Saunders who has been villainized by Fullerton Boohoo for raising rents on his ground leases and who, I believe, is highly unlikely to go along with Homeless Village. Well, maybe he would if the City were to reimburse him for rents and maintenance costs and policing of the village. That would cost a fortune.

The article fails to mention that typically land, not the mobile homes are owned by a guy like Saunders. A trailer wouldn’t be available unless purchased by somebody for the homeless purpose, or just abandoned by the owner.

Then there’s the issue of joint sovereignty. The south half of Rancho La Paz is in Anaheim, not Fullerton, so there’s that.

When I was done reading this nonsense I was left wondering its purpose. Is it just gratuitous virtue signaling? A Big Idea hatched by the disoriented Curtis Gamble and advertised by the Kennedy Sisters? Hard to say. But one thing is certain. The piece projects the typical lack of pragmatism that is the hallmark of the Homeless Industrial Complex, so maybe it has a chance – if politicians can be seen to be throwing money at a problem absent results.

A week or so ago, FFFF posted about the strange case of the missing PRA request, here, requesting communications between Councilperson Shana Charles and the City Manager, Mayor Fred Jung, et al. For some reason this request was omitted from the official log kept on the City website by the City Clerk.

Well, not any longer. The missing request has magically appeared in the log.

On July 30th, Charles let fly with this vulgar and toxic email:

Ms. Charles sure got her dander up. The reason for the outrage that caused the good professor to lose it? Here it is: the August 5th City Council meeting was cancelled.

So the City Manager and Mayor have cancelled the August 5th meeting and the ICE issue can be put off a couple weeks. If you’re an armchair social justice warrior like Charles is, this is outrageous! Shameful!

Shana is transformed into veritable jungle queen! She will explore any and all options! This will not be a quiet cancellation! Aux armes, Fullerton Boohoo!!

Of course no “blatant effort” was being made to silence anything. The council meeting on August 19th addressed the ICE lawsuit to Fullerton Boohoo satisfaction and life in Fullerton went on, somehow, despite the two-week delay.

The personal attack on Fred Jung was pretty objectionable since his health, whatever it may be, had nothing to do with National Night Out, a cop sponsored neighborhood building program which was being promoted by the Fullerton Police Department. And this isn’t the first time Charles has attacked Jung.

I have to wonder how this uncivil outburst might affect Charles’s promotion to Mayor in December, especially given her unlikely appointment as Mayor Pro Tem last year.

Just when you might have felt safe from the re-emergence of the bumbling, incoherent former Fullerton City Councilman, Jesus Quirk-Silva, you might be horrified to learn his political thirst for office hasn’t been quenched. It appears that Quirk-Silva wants to be on the North Orange County Community College Board of Trustees. Observe:

So about a month ago JQS filed the form 501 – the statement filed when you intend to be a candidate.

The OC Dems will no doubt get behind the guy who knows nothing about college except that he somehow graduated from one despite the obvious intellectual deficit. This will be the same agglomeration of Dems who tried mightily to create a council district for the sole purpose of keeping Mr. Quirk-Silva in a council seat.

If somebody wanted to they could make reference to Quirk-Silva’s votes on the Fullerton City Council – like his embarrassing, comical, and sadly disastrous flip-flop on the boutique hotel disaster, although that isn’t likely.

These community college trustee elections rarely cause much of a dust up because no one really cares who the nodding birds are. The most recent addition to this crew is a guy named Mark Lopez, an unethical bozo who tried to be on the Anaheim School Board at the same time and who got kicked off the latter.

Meantime, I should note there is an incumbent for the job, Jeffrey Brown who has been on the Board for well over twenty years and may be one of those people who love their little sinecure and will fight to keep it.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention a rumor circulating that the seat is now coveted by none other than Paulette Marshal. Yes, the same person whose lawsuit against Tim Shaw caused the Dems to lose their only seat on the OC Board of Education; who tried and failed as a candidate for that job twice, pretending to be a teacher; and who was previously busted for stealing campaign signs from private property during a phony carpetbagging scheme to get on the Fullerton City Council in 2018.

She may look like death warmed over, but her political ambition may not be dead.

It would be safe to say that nobody wants Pilferin’ Paulette around anymore, hovering in the background like the chorus in a Greek tragedy. But this miscreant has shown she’s willing to sink a big chunk of her kid’s inheritance into getting a political office – any political office. Well, nobody except Paulette, and her senile, corrupt husband, County Supervisor Doug “Bud” Chaffee.

Well, it’s really a fundraiser for Shaw’s 4th District County Supervisor campaign.

I’m not sure why Mr. Shaw is running for this seat. `Shaw ran for this job in 2018 against the senile and corrupt Doug “Bud” Chaffee and couldn’t beat him. He didn’t run in the 2022 election which saw two Democrats in the general election.

Shaw is a Republican in a district that is now solidly Democrat. Even if he were to make a run-off in the primary, he won’t win in the general election. He has no evident path to victory.

Shaw may have a name recognition problem. He gave up his job on the La Habra City Council a few years ago thanks to a lawsuit against him by Chaffee’s wife, Pilferin’ Paulette Marshall, the petty thief who wanted to force him off his other job on the OC Board of Education for holding incompatible offices. Shaw crossed her up by keeping his gig at the under-the-radar OCBOE, instead of the La Habra City Council. And therein lies a problem for him.

The OCBOE has been hijacked by a group of ultra-loony Trumpies and Shaw has been part of their team. If he were to get past a primary he would be mercilessly attacked as a fascist loon despite his generally moderate reputation.

Well, all that back story aside, Shaw is inviting folks to his reception out on Carbon Canyon Rd in October. It’s a horsey theme, I guess, so wear your Stetson and bring your credit card.

Way back on July 31, a member of the public made a PRA request. This individual got a receipt for the effort, too, with a reference number and everything. I got ahold of this receipt through a third party but I don’t know anything about the whys or the wherefores.

The trouble is, this request was never included in the City Clerk’s PRA request log. I’ve searched by date and reference number. Nada. So what happened? Is this omission an error, or is it deliberate? Who knows?

The request deals with communications between Shana Charles and the the city manager, the mayor, the police chief and staff. Staff likes to protect councilmembers so maybe that has something to do with the absence of the request on the log. Were there controversial or incriminatory communications?

All we know is that somebody wants to find out what Charles was writing to the people listed in the request. The reason for the request is a mystery as it would be if it were included in the log; but there is something going on here the public not only doesn’t know about: we don’t know what the response is, we wouldn’t even know a request was made without the receipt – defeating the purpose of a log altogether.

When this sort of thing happens people start getting curious.

Last Tuesday the Fullerton City Council voted 4-0 in closed session to file an amicus brief in support of the Vasquez Perdomo v. Noem lawsuit filed by the ACLU, et al. against the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency for their violations of basic civil rights.

Turns out the aye vote was cast by Zahra, Charles, Jung, and Valencia. Dunlap apparently found it impossible to vote one way or the other.

A good chunk of Fullerton’s liberal brigade was on hand to exhort the Council to support the lawsuit and they took the opportunity to do so for an hour and half. When the Council finally “reported out” of closed session the announcement of the decision produced applause.

This was the right decision.

Whatever one thinks about illegal immigrants and their place in American society and our economy, there’s no escaping two basic facts. Everyone has the rights of due process in the United States per the 5th Amendment. We are all protected against unfounded search and seizure by the 4th Amendment. Case closed.

What we have been seeing in California is the wanton disregard for the Constitution by a lawless administration that has zero respect for it, and is more interested in exercising a race-based reign of terror by a collection of masked and heavily armed goons. The State of California and the municipalities therein have a moral obligation to say something and do something, at least.

I guess your position on this issue depends on what you really believe about yourself. If you’re willing to support the war being waged on our streets by anonymous, unaccountable, and violent agents of the federal government – a veritable Geheime Staatspolizei; if you are willing to see the federal government send its troops to patrol the streets of America in peacetime, you are living in the wrong country.

Yesterday U.S. District Judge Fernando Aelle-Rocha hit cannabis lobbyist Melahat Rafiei with a six month jail sentence and a $10,000 fine for fraud. In reality she had already pleaded guilty to trying to bribe two Irvine councilmembers to help her client – somebody in the local marijuana cartel. This seems like a light penalty for what she admitted.

Her adherents (she has some thanks to her years of disingenuous self-promotion in Democrat politics) claim that her ratting out some of Anaheim’s crooks should have meant no jail time at all.

What will this mean for the dope lobby in Fullerton? Hard to say. We know that the business has insinuated itself into Fullerton. Ahmad Zahra appointed one of its political spokesholes, Derek Smith to the Fiscal Sustainability Ad Hoc Committee. And the Dutiful Doctor from Damascus has been an active and open drum-beater for the marijuana dispensary cause for years. He actually recommended Rafiei as a lobbyist to at least one commercial property owner that I know. How many others have there been?

We also know that Zahra and the dope lobby worked real hard to elect Cannabis Kitty Jaramillo (above) last fall. Had Jaramillo won we would have MJ stores in Fullerton, possibly 100 feet from your house.

People have been speculating about Zahra’s ties to the local Marijuana Trust. How beholden is he? Ditto Sheena Charles, whose husband, Andre, got a tidy $4,000 from the marijuana worker union’s PAC, “Working Families for Jaramillo.”

The Fullerton Observer and their followers have been vocal about the political influence of Tony Bushala, but have been completely silent about the long reach of the MJ cartel into Fullerton politics. I don’t wonder why.

As the saying goes about the sooner or later discovery by the blind pig.

In this instance the issue was the lack of the actual solid waste RFP document in Tuesday’s presentation to the Fullerton City Council. Tender Elijah popped up during public comments to note this omission, and he was right to do so.

Maybe innocent Elijah came across this on his own – it’s pretty blatant. Or maybe he got it from my FFFF colleague Disillusioned Ex-hippy, who wrote this on Monday:

“Item 21 is the start of something big. Fullerton’s trash service contract is coming up in June, 2027 and staff wants to issue a Request for Proposal (RFP). The RFP solicitation document itself remains a mystery to the public because it isn’t attached to the agenda. Sorry.“

This sort of thing makes everybody look bad. The City staffer who got up to explain how come the actual document was not attached to the staff report gave the lamest of lame explanations: the ad hoc committee looked at it.

The bare fact that this actually happened bespeaks a culture in which the bureaucracy assumes the council won’t read anything more complicated than a Denny’s menu and will rely on staff to tell them what to do. This doesn’t happen in a vacuum. The sad fact is that most electeds are more interested in photo ops than in doing any real work. And reading documents you are voting on takes effort.

Then there’s the FU to the public, deliberate opacity through design or indifference. I think it’s the culture issue, again; a culture that is created by inertia, where sort of okay is good enough. Hopefully we will get a new City Manager who understands this. But don’t hold your breath.

The August 19th Fullerton City Council meeting has a few sort of interesting items.

First, we have the Closed Session topic of Fullerton joining the class action lawsuit against ICE behavior on our streets.

This is interesting because it aligns with the “transparency” protest cooked up by the Kennedy Sisters long before the agenda was even published. Obviously Zahra and Charles leaked confidential attorney-client information from the City Attorney as to why this should be discussed first behind a closed door, as Harpoon insinuated in the linked post, above.

Anyhow, whatever happens behind this closed door will soon be leaked by Zahra and Charles to Fullerton Boohoo, some of whom will show up to blow three minutes (each) of everybody’s time with the usual rhetoric. But now the rhetoric will be about the lack of transparency of Jung, Valencia, and Dunlap.

Consent Calendar Item 12 is so poorly written it’s impossible to understand. Are “Downtown Parking Program Funds” just dumped into the General Fund (10) and then doled out to the appropriate downtown projects? The agenda report gives no separate accounting. If those funds are buried in the General Fund, why? Why aren’t they just placed in their own enterprise fund to begin with? Are downtown parking revenues being used to pay General Fund responsibilities? Typical opacity. Don’t expect anybody on the City Council to inquire, and don’t expect Young Elijah Manassero to demand transparency with his special brand of tender earnestness

Consent Calendar Item #14 deals with the usual pea-under-the-walnut shell budgeting for “Phase 2” work on the dismal disaster formally known as the UP Park – The Poison Park in FFFF jargon. The slow and incredibly expensive death march has begun with no mention of why the park was fenced off decades ago. The staff report just says “the park closed approximately 20 years ago” as if the park just decided to close itself. The City closed the park with zero fanfare because it was a complete fiasco from the beginning, a multi-million dollar monument to six-figure bureaucratic failure; a thing something nobody outside City Hall asked for or wanted.

The really bad part about this item is how the Council is being asked to transfer another $300,000 to the project. Why? More mission cost creep, of course.

Item 21 is the start of something big. Fullerton’s trash service contract is coming up in June, 2027 and staff wants to issue a Request for Proposal (RFP). The RFP solicitation document itself remains a mystery to the public because it isn’t attached to the agenda. Sorry.

These contracts with trash haulers involve huge amounts of money over the term of agreements. Hundreds of millions. Republic Services is our current “vendor,” grandfathered in from the old MG Disposal operation, if you go back far enough. Republic’s foot in the door may not help in obtaining future contract. It recently underwent a work stoppage by Teamsters workers in solidarity with Republic employees in…Boston. We were the ones affected.

Another Republic problem, apparently, has been their continued unwillingness to come to terms with the City about stuff required by a state mandate, as described in the staff report.

Oops. Making the City look bad to the pointy heads in Sacramento is no way to endear yourself to city staff. The inclusion of this episode in the staff report can’t be good news for the good folks at Republic.

Republic has, no doubt, been busy greasing the Fullerton council axle recently, and no doubt others will soon follow.

FFFF has been notified that a complaint against serial prevaricator and immigration fraud Ahmad Zahra has been lodged with the California Fair Political Practices Commission (FPPC).

Although I don’t have a copy of the complaint yet, the gist of it is that for years Zahra has been identifying the Capital One Bank in the City of Industry as a “payee” for all sorts of non-related campaign expenses. These include travel(?), web service and office expenses.

I decided to check out Mr. Zahra’s campaign expenses just for the first half of 2025. He listed only two payees:

Sure enough, there’s Capital One Bank. $2329, under the heading of OFC – Office Expenses. Office expenses? So where, exactly is Zahra’s campaign office? In his little apartment by the freeway? Someplace else? That’s a lot of paper clips and staples.

Comically, Zahra’s campaign “office expenses” brought him in exactly $0 in the first two quarters of this year, a fairly damning indictment of his business acumen, at best. Zero.

So I went back a few years for fun. Here’s an entry from 2020:

Sure enough, here’s Zahra using Capital One, City of Industry as a payee for IT expenses. Here are some more:

The Bank is listed as payee for IT expenses, and meeting attendance? Huh?

When he was running for re-election in 2022 Zahra was really casting his campaign bread on the waters. But a lot of the water was murky. One example listed the bank as payee for civic donations! To whom? What for? Who Knows? Big secret.

All of Zahra’s other Capital One “expenses” in 2022 were split among various FPPC codes, including more expensive travel, hiding the true nature of these expenses, and who he really paid.

A cynical person might conclude that Zahra has been deliberately hiding his real campaign financial activity for almost seven years. But why? Have any of these payments gone to personally support Zahra himself? Maybe the FPPC can find out.

And maybe Young Elijah Manassero, the young ethics crusader will dig deep into this mess.

And by the way, who is “Tammi McIntyre” who is signing off on this as Zahra’s treasurer and why on earth is she submitting this junk to the City Clerk? Is Tammi McIntyre in on something, um, untoward? Could be.

By the way AI coughed up this when I inquired about Capital One Bank, City of Industry:

AI says: Capital One has a presence in the City of Industry, California, specifically for auto loan payments. The address for mailing auto loan payments is: Capital One Auto Finance, P.O. Box 60511, City of Industry, CA 91716.