Friends For Fullerton's Future
FFFF supports causes that promote intelligent, responsible and accountable government in Fullerton and Orange County
Last night the Fullerton City Council voted 4-1 to settle its lawsuit with Chevron in a deal that essentially man-dates approval of the development plan for West Coyote Hills that includes 760 houses, and that was denied 3-2. Last year Shawn Nelson, Pam Keller, and Sharon Quirk-Silva voted no. With Nelson and Keller having moved on, only Quirk-Silva remained to opposed the settlement.
As always, share your thoughts in the comments thread.
Effervescent Emancipator! Dinosaurs, brick veneer, burning money? Yes, Friends, it’s outta here! Touch ’em all!
Congratulations to the Fullerton Savage for the winning entry in our city seal contest. Fullerton truly has much to be proud of.
Savage, your new Nancy Sanchez CD is on the way.
Matthew J. Cunningham is scurrying around the internet trying to plug the holes in his sinking conservative reputation. Amongst other things, he has accused the Friends of posting portions of his invoices “out of context,” whatever that means. Of course he refuses to explain the details of his activities and continues to do the old “look over there” routine.
You want context? Fine. Here are all of the Pacific Strategies invoices that we scanned. Enjoy.
![[ ]](http://www.fullertonsfuture.org/icons/layout.gif){kind=icon} Invoice-2007-10.pdf 73K
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Invoice-2009-03.pdf 232K
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And if you don’t have time to go through all those invoices, just listen to this ‘ol clip from the John and Ken show:
Molly McClannahan used to call Alan Morton “The Conscience of Fullerton.”
At some point back in the 1990’s, the city retained an expensive consultant to design a sign to be painted on the Union Pacific bridge (my idea) over Harbor Blvd. Alan voluntarily designed the “Welcome to Downtown Fullerton” sign on his home computer, saving the city thousands of dollars.
Alan would constantly question city staff’s wisdom of using legal size paper for staff reports instead of letter size, which is what they use today. Staff’s answer was that they had no choice because the file cabinets were designed for legal size paper.
One of my all time favorite council meetings (I’ll have to YouTube it someday) was when Alan chucked an illegally placed Sa For Council sign during the public comments and the sign almost hit Sa en la cabesa. You go Alan!
I believe it was the great recall that really got Alan energized as an activist. From there, it was off to the races for Alan. He continuously ragged on the council to televise council meetings, and now they are. He would speak on almost every important item on the council’s agenda. His activism helped save Fullerton taxpayers millions of dollars.
Recently, at the ripe age of 86, Alan was having breakfast with three of his buddies. While chatting with one of the servers, Alan took a deep breath and that was it for our feisty old Friend. Alan gave of himself and asked for nothing in return. People like Alan Morton are Fullerton’s Future.
According to Scott Moxley at the OC Weekly 4th District Supervisor Shawn Nelson has applied for a concealed weapon permit from our Sheriff Sandra Hutchens.
Said Nelson: “Most politicians just shoot off their mouths. I’m aiming higher. Literally”
No, he really didn’t say that. But any loony potential perp out there take heed. Nelson’s a good shot. He said so himself.
He’ll be packing a Colt Commander .45 slug hurler. That will leave an impression on just about anybody.
Scott Martindale of the Register has posted this shocking revelation that two-thirds of JC students in OC fail to get any sort of diploma or certification after six years.
That’s a pretty damning indictment of a system that sucks in billions of tax dollars in this State every year and that is opaquely run by local boards of trustees composed of educrats, geriatric featherheads, and assorted big-government apologists.
Apparently, our community colleges are largely acting as baby sitters for late teens and early twenty-somethings who seem to be more interested in putting off a serious confrontation with the working life than with education. Harsh? Yes. Oversimplistic? Maybe. But consider that through the JCs in OC we are subsidizing the educational infrastructure for over a hundred thousand people at any given time who will never graduate.
And then contemplate the vast, breathtakingly compensated hierarchy of admninstrators that administer this Empire of Failure and tell me the system ain’t broken.
At the end of the last City Council meeting on April 5 Councilman Don Bankhead, supported by fellow Councilman Pat McKinely, requested that the agenda of the next council meeting on April 19 include an item to remove the term “acting” from the title of the job currently held by Joe Felz. Joe Felz was appointed Acting City Manager last December following the retirement of Chris Meyer.
Joe Felz certainly has a great deal of experience working for Fullerton. According to the city’s December 2010 press release he began working for Fullerton while still in college. He served as Director of the Parks and Recreation Department in 2007 following a two year stint as assistant to Meyer when he was City Manager.
Is Joe Felz the right person to hire as City Manager, a position that currently pays $166,250.00 per year, plus benefits? Don Bankhead and Pat McKinley seem to think so. McKinley worked for the city for over 15 years himself as Chief of Police, and Don Bankhead has been on the city council for over 22 years and also worked for Fullerton’s Police Dept. for many, many years before that.
Is Felz a good candidate for the job? Maybe, but is he the best person we can get for the money? We may never know, because two city insiders on the council want to hire another one for one of the highest paid and certainly the most powerful position in the city government. Shouldn’t the city conduct a search to find the best candidates for such an important job? They did for the Chief of Police position after McKinley retired from FPD.
Bankhead seems to be in a big hurry to hire Felz permanently because he is “a little tired of using the term acting city manager.” Is it possible that Bankhead is just tired in general and doesn’t want to bother with a job search? Don’t we deserve to know that our City Manager is the best person for the job, and not just the one that has been around for the longest amount of time and knows the most people?
Friends, howzabout about a contest?
We need a prize, of course. Some junk from the FFFF gift shop? We have some T shirts left, I think. Somebody around here stole some Bad Chi signs so I think we may be able give some of those away. Or maybe the real prize is simply contributing to the glory of our city.
Anyway, here’s the first entry. That ought to get your creative juices flowing.
Entries can be emailed to us or uploaded to Tinypic.com and linked in the comments. Good luck!
Update from Admin:
Alright, I found the perfect prize…
It’s a CD from Nancy Sanchez, an awesome jazz singer. My friend Gabriel San Roman told me about Nancy and I saw her play at Steamers in downtown Fullerton. She has a great voice and is pretty cool, too. Check out www.nancysanchezmusic.com.
Every now and then we like to remind our Friends about Fullerton’s recent history. We did it here, in a post on the arrogant mismanagement of Fullerton by former City Manager, James L. Armstrong. We noted that in 2001, after seven years’ worth of failure in Fullerton, he failed all the way to the top job in tony Santa Barbara.
But, alas, Poor Jim has run afoul of the cops up there, and, recently was taken to task by a blog for his efforts to stall the release of information about a city program that subsidized houses for – city employees! Too bad Armstrong mistakenly cc’d his sentiments to the very people who were making the public records request!
Still the same. Incompetent and arrogant.
Here’s an article from Tim Cavanaugh at Reason, having some fun with Rob Reiner’s big government First Five Program.
The best part is the reference to our old friend Matthew J. Cunningham. Follow the links all the way back to a 2006 Flash Report blog post Cunningham did on the program – before he got hooked up with all that Children and Families green!
And here is a tale in The Voice of OC(EA) about how our local branch is suing the State to keep their stash from going to help support MediCal! It seems these people are really, really desperate to keep their gravy train rolling along. After all, the Executive Director of the OC branch makes $327,000 a year in salary and benefits. His job? Handing out cash. Nice work if you can get it.
Right now the First Five superstructure is tottering and about to collapse. Let’s help give it a push.