Fail to Nowhere

Congratulations, Fullerton. The infamous Trail to Nowhere, or as it is called in City Hall circles, the “UP Trail Phase II,” is now six months old.

None of its adherents inside of City Hall or in the hallowed and self-righteous pages of the Fullerton Observer will ever follow up to actually see if has been a successful expenditure of 2.5 million bucks. The bureaucrats who will be hard at work looking for their next boondoggle will never give it another thought; nor will the cowardly City Council that approved the waste, caving into a gaggle of local fools. It was all for la communidad and when top-down patronizing government is hard at work, money is no object.

But I will keep reminding FFFF.

Because I happen to drive down Highland Avenue and often Richman Avenue I get periodic glimpses into what all that money bought. And what I have seen is precisely what this blog predicted all along. It’s almost always empty. And that makes a lot of sense because it starts in the back of Independence Park and dies at Highland. It doesn’t even connect to Phase I – a deficiency so obvious that you would have thought someone on the City Council might have noticed. If they did they didn’t say a word in objection.

Obviously the community, the supposed beneficiary of this largesse doesn’t use it. Why would they?

In her grant application to the State of California, now retired Park employee Alice Loya bragged about connectivity. There isn’t any. She dreamed up 105,000 anticipated users annually. The users so far could probably be counted in the hundreds. The trail was going to be a miraculous incubator for redevelopment of the surrounding area. All lies. And a plankton colony could have seen it. But not the geniuses in City Hall. Or they didn’t care.

Even as we are being asked to make sacrifices because of their inability to run the City, we have yet another facility without the means to maintain it. Other parks were already suffering from neglect, and of course Hillcrest Park, what should be the crown jewel of Fullerton parks continues to be intentionally neglected through institutional apathy. Its bare hillsides are a testament to that neglect.

And the case of Hillcrest is ironic because many of the casual users are Latinos – just the sort of folks the Trail to Nowhere was meant to patronize. However, a sense of irony is not one of the qualities one associates with government agencies who talk a good talk, but in the end always opt for the park project that will give them something to do.