The Dan Hughes Sense of Entitlement

Disney Danny.

City Hall did something really helpful this week.  The Clerk’s Office worked with Administrative Services to post very detailed budget documents online in advance of next Tuesday’s City Council budget workshop.  I asked if this could be done and they made it happen 24 hours later.  Thank you!

Budget detail of this depth has never been provided to the public.  This is a big step in the right direction, and likely never would have happened if Joe Felz was still in charge.

The files are posted here:  http://cityoffullerton.com/gov/departments/admin_serv/city_budget/2017_18_proposed_budget_information.asp

From this cache of documents, we are able to see the type of General Fund waste that Dan Hughes justified during his tenure as police chief.  The next time you call the Police Department and are told no officers are available to respond to a call for service, just remember where his priorities were.

Much of this is charitable and/or personal expenses.  Dan Hughes was Fullerton’s highest compensated employee in 2015 with $358,403 in wages and benefits.  He should have paid these expenses out of his own pocket, or simply not at all.

Let us not forget that it was the City Council — led by Fitzgerald, Flory, and Chaffee — that let him get away with shenanigans like this.

One can only hope the current City Council sees fit to finally end this nonsense.

26 Replies to “The Dan Hughes Sense of Entitlement”

  1. Why do the police need to be members of the Chamber of Commerce? Other than it was a way to funnel $ to that dope Theresa Harvey’s lap dog group that does NOTHING for business and verything for Coty hall.

  2. $1700 for an OC Register subscription. At the current subscription rate of $130 a year for 7 day home delivery, that’s 13 full subscriptions. Do they all go to the police department or to Dan and 12 others homes?

    Boys and Girls Club? Since when do you need to pay for the privilege of being on the board of a non profit?

    1. There is no reason for the taxpayers to pick up the bill for his personal expenses. Hughes is a crook, plain and simple.

  3. No city staff person or council member should be allowed to be a member of rotary or the chamber in their capacity as city employee. The chamber supports things regularly that are not what the regular citizen wants and is almost an opponent of the regular citizen. It serves its members..fine enough. But a city hall that is supposed to be a neutral party accommodating due process should not be a member of any group that puts its citizens at odds with others. And for that matter staff should not be making recommendations on agenda items. How does anyone get a fair shake at city hall if staff is taking a position at odds with its own citizens??? There was a time when staff simply came forward and said here’s the proposal details and it meets the code and the laws or it doesn’t. Since Felz came to power they went back to advocacy and the regular joe/jane gets screwed. It becomes their city, not ours. shameful.

    1. “It serves its members.”

      No, actually the Chamber doesn’t even do that. It supports whatever City Hall wants promoted. That’s why they have supported every overbearing housing development that has actually removed Commercial and Office-Professional zoning, properties they should be defending.

      The relationship is symbiotic. The Chamber gets dies and the City gets a compliant puppy dog. Makes me wish for 1993.

    2. Belonging to Rotary and/or similar organizations is common. Brea upper management belonged to those, but I don’t know from where the memberships were paid. I wonder why some of these were paid through Police Admin rather than the Fullerton City account(s). If they duplicated other payments, something is OFF.

      1. Of course something was “off.” This was a way to funnel revenue into a useless Chamber run by a numbskull. In return the City got a competely docile and compliant Chamber that had no interest in promoting the interests of their members and every incentive to cheerlead for City Hall. pathetic. And none of the members seem to get it. I wonder if they still have those Wednesday mixers where the City employees came to get liquored up. Joe Felz wold have been a fixture at those.

  4. How about the $20,000 that was spent to have Michael Gennaco write a glowing report laying out what a great job Danny Hughes was doing? Was that not a total waste. As long as they do not beat anyone FPD can do whatever they want. After all they got cameras….right?
    Office of Independent Review $20,000

        1. No he was there trying to rat fuck The grand Inn on behalf of the drunk driver Joe Felz and Renick Cadillac.

    1. I think you miss the point. While Hughes is indeed gone, we still have, or will have, a chief of police. Any chief of police, Hughes or anyone else, shouldn’t have the city paying thousands of dollars for their Rotary Club dues, cable, and newspaper subscriptions. Remember, this is for the 2017-2018 budget in a city that is well on the way to bankruptcy. I believe this amount is just a carry over from the Hughes days. It needs to be changed, or rather eliminated.

    2. I know I shouldn’t even dignify that comment with a response, but I will. Dan Hughes’s leadership of an unreformed and unrepentant corrupt police department is symbolic of a broader problem: an incompetent city manager who was misleading the City into receivership. And at the highest level, there has been a completely incompetent city council that refuses to do what it was elected to do – govern responsibly and with accountability. And in this I certainly include Whitaker and Sebourn – right along with Fitzgerald, Flory and Chaffee. While the the former generally refrain from obsessive worship at the altar of the bureaucracy, they have done nothing to expose, let alone stop all the mismanagement of the City that has been revealed on these very pages.

      Whitaker just appears to be phoning it in.

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