“Dr.” Zahra Wigs Out, Tosses Hissy Fit

I decided to watch the afternoon Fullerton City Council session about hiring a new trash hauler, yesterday. When it came time for questions directed to staff I learned a few things.

First, I realized the extent to which Ahmad Zahra blames one individual – Tony Bushala – for every thing he, Zahra, doesn’t like. And it’s got to the point where anything attributable to Bushala is something he, Zahra, doesn’t like. Even when the attribution is based on his own baseless paranoia and suspicion and egomania. It’s embarrassing.

This accounts for his outbursts yesterday to staff and special council about the origins of the upfront payment to the City by a couple of RFP respondents, EDCO and Republic. As noted here, the idea was mentioned by Mr. Bushala several months ago at a Budget Sustainability Committee meeting and that was it. There is no demonstrable tie between that brief occurrence and any of the trash haulers, except in the febrile brain of the dodgy “doctor” from Damascus. Nada. It was never mention in the first round of RFP submissions.

When Zahra couldn’t get staff or the lawyers to agree with him and condemn the notion of a big initial payment he became agitated and began a completely unprofessional diatribe.

It was good stuff for the handful of his Fullerton Crazy claque in attendance who also faithfully believe any nonsense peddled by Zahra and who remain completely incurious about Zahra’s own string of malfeasances starting with immigration and marriage fraud to get into the country.

Anyway, what was really funny was when Zahra noted that Bushala’s own blog (FFFF) had indicated that the increased CPI differential amounted to a hidden tax.

I am gratified to know that Zahra is a reader of this blog. It’s really too bad he can’t learn anything from it. He is not the least bit opposed to hidden taxes, per se; quite the contrary. However what he and his pals really love is an officially adopted tax, out in the open, when the community proves it is worthy of the higher paid city government that the new revenue buys.

Of course it didn’t seem to occur to Zahra that his admission about the FFFF post undermined his conspiracy theory that Bushala was somehow, somewhere tied to the new proposals by EDCO and Republic.

I observe that a third proposal, by CR&R offered four million bucks, upfront for street repair. This appeared to be seen as some sort of a philanthropic gift. It was seen as such by Councilman Nicholas Dunlap. This is naiveté or dumbness. Nobody works for free, and the cost of that four mil is obviously wrapped up in CR&Rs rate structure that would obviously be lower without their apparent upfront largesse.

The City’s special council mentioned that a lawsuit described as a precedent by opponents of the upfront payment idea was not really precedent since the matter was returned to a lower appeals court where the matter was settled without adjudication. According to this chap an upfront deal repayment would have to be legally justified based on the value of the franchise and that would be his job. I’m confused by this since the proposals by EDCO and Republic do not involve in-lieu franchise fees at all, but rather describe one-time monetary payments, exclusive of the in-lieu fee. This needs clarification.

More on the meeting to be continued…