Tuesday’s City Council Meeting

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.