The Marovic Sidewalk

A new year, and for Fullerton, lingering problems remain a municipal embarrassment, except that the people in charge don’t seemed particularly inclined to terminate them.

The seven year-old boutique hotel has lots of current actors’ fingerprints on it. And then there’s the decades old case of the hijacked sidewalk on Commonwealth and Harbor, heisted by the Florentine Crime Family in 2002, who put a permanent structure on it, attached to a building they didn’t even own. It has never been returned.

The current owner of the adjacent structure and the business in it, Mario Marovic, made a deal with the City in 2022 to remove the offending structure.

Marovic reneged on the agreement, and boy he reneged hard. The demotion was to start in March 2023 and be done by that July. Nothing started except that Marovic filed some sort of claim and lawsuit against the City for some made up reason, and the the whole mess disappeared into the usual mists of Closed Session.

In the meantime, Marovic has continued to benefit from the add-on as an integral part of his bar – Mickey’s Irish Pub for three years, and counting.

Although I can’t verify the rumor, Marovic finally got sick of paying legal bills last fall and decided to perform the scope of his original agreement. A status (secret) of the lawsuit popped up on the October 7th, 2025 City Council Closed Session agenda. This might have led to some new deal.

According to the deal rumor, Marovic was supposed to start removing the addition this month, January 2026. If there was a behind the scenes agreement, it should have been made public, although the City lawyers would proclaim the lawsuits pending until the removal is complete, and therefore not subject to public airing in public. Of course that would make no practical difference, but that’s the way it is – secrecy for secrecy’s sake.

I can’t see Marovic settling anything, stalling has been so fun; but maybe his legal bills are costing him more than revenue from the dozen chairs within the “bump out.” It would be nice to see Fullerton play hardball with this scofflaw, but it probably won’t happen. If the add-on actually does go away, I bet the taxpayers get stuck with the legal bill.

In the meantime the small contingent of “transparency” whiners at City Council meeting, the Fullerton Observer and their tender young investigative reporter Sweet Elijah Manassero don’t seem at all curious about this twenty four year-old scandal. I wonder why.