It could be worse. It could be Speed Metal! Wait. It is!
Last night the Fullerton City Council, at long last, approved a noise-related addition to the Municipal Code. The vote was 3-2: Jung, Dunlap, and Valencia for, Charles and Zahra voting no.
This effort has been going on for over ten years, has been diddled with by more than ten City Councilpersons (Flory twice), and five City Managers, acting and permanent.
The ordinance is pretty tame really, with decibel levels I think are way too high, but at least gauged at the property line where the goofy and distracting issue of “ambient noise” can be better put to rest. Hours of outdoor music have been addressed with common sense and respect for neighboring inhabitants.
Fines for violators are in place, and about time, too.
For the business…
It was amusing to watch Zahra and Charles pretend to be “pro-business.” We know the performance was disingenuous because of their cavalier attitude to non-bar businesses on Wilshire Avenue that suffered when that pair closed the street for their absurd “Walk on Wilshire.” They ignored the fact that downtown Fullerton runs in the red and is subsidized by the rest of us. Really their act was about voting against what they characterized as the wishes of “one businessman” regardless of the need for reform.
In what surely must be the dumbest thing said in recent years at a council meeting, Ahmad Zahra claimed as a fact that the “downtown is dying,” a really weird and irresponsible thing to utter. The Dismal Damascus Doctor offered exactly zero facts to support his stupid utterance.
Transparency, uber alles!
Naturally, our friend sweet young Elijah Manassero popped up to inform the council that most of the bar owners were already non-compliant with the new rules. His logic led him to conclude that therefore the new regulations were ill-advised. It didn’t seem to occur to the tender sprout that the continual bar-owner abuse of existing law was precisely why the new ordinance was needed. I have no idea what they’re teaching the young folk these days, but thinking doesn’t seem to be in the bundle, although I’m sure callow Elijah has loads and loads of self esteem.
Now it will be time to see if the City Code Enforcement operation will employ the willingness and the competence to enforce the law. They have stubbornly refused to do so in the past, partly because councilmembers were running interference for the scofflaws. And part of the reason for staff’s reluctance might be because enforcement implies some sort of fault or failure, and in City Hall the decades long mess they made out of downtown Fullerton, has been characterized as a stunning and inarguable success.
Fullerton City Councilman and immigration fraud, “Dr.” Ahmad Zahra always has an interest in his own self-interest, clothing his own interest in verbiage that makes it seems he loves all mankind, especially the “underserved.”
But Zahra is often motivated by jealousy and vindictiveness, the main target being his nemesis – the Bushala family. Hence his sudden interest in leases of city-owned property. He got it all wrong, of course, but not for lack of trying to hurt the Bushala’s in their lease agreement at the Santa Fe Depot.
Always game day in Fullerton…
At the end of the last council’s discussion on the noise ordinance Zahra was heard to mutter loud enough to be overheard: “Bushala wins again.” What Bushala was supposed to have “won” is unclear, since a decent noise ordinance that would actually be enforced, is in everybody’s interest – except those scofflaw “clubs” orchestrating the decibel free-for-all to the detriment of genuine restaurants and nearby residents.
If the proper draft ordinance decided by the council majority had been prepared, it would have been approved that night.
I sometimes fight for transparency!
Here in the hallowed halls of FFFF HQ, we’ve been wondering aloud how long it would be before Zahra, Ezekiel Manassero and the rest of the Fullerton Observer claque would begin to orchestrate a nuisance opposition when the item comes back to council, with draft ordinance, on October 7th. The over-under is tomorrow at noon.
Oraganizing this may be a tough row to hoe for the ever-delinquent damascene doctor.
Sure, the usual crowd of nincompoops and boobs will rail against the council majority like they always do. Who cares? Will any of the noise pollution makers show up to claim innocence, poverty, government overreach, or some other lamentation? They didn’t appear last time to support the “it’s not broke and we won’t fix it, anyhow” strategy of Community Development Director Sunaya Thomas. I’d love to attach some names and faces to the perpetrators of nuisance blasting noise.
Anyway, the over-under at FFFF about when we will first see the opposition is sometime tomorrow. Any takers?
College Park is an old neighborhood adjacent to Fullerton Junior College. Back in 1979 the City designated it as an historic preservation zone. That was 46 years ago if you’re counting. The area is full of little bungalows and small spanishy looking houses. It’s a nice neighborhood even if you add in the dinky roundabouts on Wilshire – the brainstorm of Wild Ride Joe Felz, who certainly could not have navigated them on election night, 2016.
But I digress.
Cornell Avenue resident
At the last City Council meeting a woman who lives on Cornell Avenue in the district complained about a building on her street under construction that was completely out of character with the neighborhood and the preservation rules, adopted in 1996, that are supposed to protect against such things. She kindly reminded the Council that she lives in D5 – Ahmad Zahra’s district.
So I went over to the 100 North block of Cornell Avenue and snapped some images.
The Thing That Ate Cornell…
Now I’m not an architect, but something is awfully wrong here. Yeah, it’s a big box with cheap, misaligned windows that is completely out of scale with the houses around it. Yikes. Check out the puny little rooflet over the cheapo Home Depot door.
It may be ugly but it sure is big…
How could this happen? It looks like somebody in City Hall dropped the melon with a loud plop. As I understand it, there is a staff process for reviewing these developments. Did it occur? I don’t know. But whether it did or didn’t happen, the problem is obvious. If it didn’t, why not? If they did what sort of knucklehead(s) could have approved this?
Eyesore is right.
At the meeting Development Director Sunaya Thomas preposterously claimed this hulking monster was somehow an ADU development – meaning a mere accessory dwelling unit, a “granny unit,” and that the City had no real control over the design of the beast; and also that it was up to the owner to figure out parking for his tenants! Up to the owner?Since when?
Of course Ms. Thomas is talking out of her backside, as is so often the case. The rules for preservation in the R2P zone are called out in the Municipal Code – Chapter 15.17.60, from which I quote:
All proposed development, including the rehabilitation of existing structures, will be reviewed for compliance with established design criteria and standards, specific to the preservation zones and identified significant properties. These adopted design criteria and standards, entitled “Design Guidelines for Residential Preservation Zones,” are intended to serve as a baseline — a set of elementary guidelines — by which a proposal will be evaluated.
Here are the the guidelines, supposedly unknown to the very person in charge of applying them to new development in preservation zones:
I learned a long time ago that it’s almost impossible to make Fullerton planning bureaucrats do their jobs (see noise ordinance issues). The defensiveness and lack of shame will always prevail. But this is appalling. The rules are there to follow, not to pick and choose.
Thomas failed and failed badly. The Council was lied to on Tuesday night. Does anybody care?
Hopefully the D5 council representative Ahmad Zahra, who champions transparency and accountability, will get to the bottom of this fiasco.
In case you missed the 2022 District 3 election for Fullerton City Council, here’s a recap of the results.
Our current incumbent, the self-righteous and condescending gas bag, Shana Charles, got far less than 50% of the vote; the remaining votes were spilt pretty evenly between a guy named Johnny Ybarra and Arnel Dino who had been supported by Fullerton Mayor Fred Jung. Charles was supported by the fire brigands who got her elected.
It’s obvious that the turnout was anemic. That’s an ongoing challenge to candidates; or an opportunity – depending on one’s perspective.
Dino ponders his future…
The word on the Fullerton grapevine is that Arnel Dino wants to give it another go in 2026. If true, he has been super low-profile about it. I haven’t heard a peep out of this guy.
I’m a doctor. I will figure it out for you dummies…
One opponent would be Charles – who has announced her decision to continue her fascinating journey of discovery.
Charles is vulnerable among conservatives – Republican or Independent. Her spendthrift stance on shelling out $200,000 for illegal immigrants’ rent and legal help will be a huge detriment. A year from now, the failure of the $2.3 million Trail to Nowhere will be obvious; the Waste on Wilshire fiasco, the boutique hotel disaster, and numerous other boondoggles will no doubt shine prominently as campaign issues.
Spinning, spinning…
Then there’s the $4000 she and her husband got from the dope lobby during the 2024 campaign in District 4. The dead weight of these albatross neckties is going to be heavy – even for an advocate for public health.
There is no doubt that Fullerton Tax Payers for Reform will wage a well-funded and efficient campaign against her, as they did with Cannabis Kitty Jaramillo.
Last night the Fullerton City Council was presented with a noise ordinance, the principal target being the bar-owning noise scofflaws in Downtown Fullerton. It was basically the same thing that was sent back to the Planning Commission due to its utter insufficiency. Fullerton. Being. Fullerton.
FFFF has documented ad nauseam the comical efforts of the City to address this issue over the past 15 years. I’m not even going to review the dance of death anymore. You can follow the entire history, here.
Here’s an example of what happens when a scofflaw “club” blasts noise from their establishment.
Now imagine three or four of these establishments doing the same thing at the same time.
But back to a brief synopsis. Basically, there have been two forces working hard in City Hall to continue this embarrassing, bungling misadventure in government activity.
First has been the gymnastic effort to protect the lawbreakers by refusing enforcement of the law because “changes are on the way” a cunning and never ending Dickensian dodge. We know that our former Mayor-for-Hire Jennifer Fitzgerald and her Planning Director Ted White were actively running interference for the scofflaw bar/club owners.
The second active force has been the continual effort to water down the code, making enforcement so difficult as to look impossible, thus relieving Code Enforcement and the cops from having to do their jobs. This is the shrug-it-off position of Community Development Director Sunaya Thomas and her predecessors, one and all.
Last night the a majority of the council chose a second option with changes, but an option that had no draft ordinance to accompany it. The only draft presented to the council and the public was to accept what was given to them as the favored staff recommendation.
Nothin’ up his sleeve…
But then, abracadabra, City Attorney Dick Jones produced an Option 2 draft ordinance from his back pocket almost like a magician summoning a rabbit from a top hat! Mr. Jones declared that the council could approve his newly minted draft, unread, and read up on it and modify it before the obligatory “second reading” in a couple weeks. Unpersuasive.
The council voted 5-0 to bring the damn thing back in two weeks to yak about all over again.
One unintentionally amusing observation during the discussion was made by Shana Charles, who wondered aloud if curtailing the amplified musical free-for-all might not end in the demise of outdoor dining in downtown Fullerton. I can’t really say I’m surprised that something so dumb was uttered by one of Fullerton’s professional know-it-alls.
On June 26th the Fullerton Planning Commission revisited the never-ending saga of a Noise Ordinance Revision, mostly as it applies to illegal noise in Downtown Fullerton, a situation that City Code Enforcement has for years been energetically ignoring. Friends may recall that the City Council bobbed and weaved on this issue at the end of 2023 and again in February, without, seemingly even bothering to read the proposed mess of an ordinance. Taking bold action the Council referred the matter back to the Planning Commission who had already rubber stamped it.
But when the PC did review the matter again, the same thing it had already approved, the Commission seemed to have developed both curiosity and courage. On March 26th they savaged the jumbled and contradictory hodgepodge and decided they had better have an on-site examination of the actual problem and the problem makers; afterward they would reconvene.
And reconvene they did, for a “workshop.” Somehow – and it’s not quite clear how – the meeting had been identified somewhere as a “public hearing,” a meeting where important discretionary decisions are made. Even the staff report contained a recommendation to approve the ordinance changes – a formal action. Some of the Commissioners wanted to shut it down then and there, and reschedule the matter; others were eager share their opinions after on-site field trips. In the end the Planning Commission continued the matter so that staff could get it right next time (they won’t).
The staff report itself contained the usual propaganda and misstatements and handwringing that have become the hallmark of Sunayana Thomas, Fullerton’s Planning Director and Economic Development expert. Here’s one:
This statement is absurd, of course.
Then there was the same old litany of difficulties in legally enforcing anything and winning in court. Jesus H., when they don’t feel like doing something they’re just weak as kittens.
Two things emerged during brief “public comments.”
First, Joshua Ferguson pointed out that the notice error was a Brown Act violation and also that a “serial meeting” had taken place. The unnamed lawyer at the meeting who is employed by “The I can’t Believe It’s A Law Firm,” claimed everything was kosher because a quorum of the Commission never met to discuss anything, which begs the question of whether staff itself can organize a serial meeting, illegal under the Brown Act.
Another thing that popped up is that staff, on its own initiative has actually now raised the allowable decibel level that they are recommending in Fullerton’s Commercial Zones to 80dBs – based, presumably, on their field adventures.
Two things remain crystal clear: City staff doesn’t want to do their jobs, and the coddling of nightclub operators abusing their 47 Licenses is going to keep happening until some City Council caves in and gives the bar owners legal license to keep doing what they’ve been doing for 20 years. The long-running effort to protect lawbreakers in Downtown Fullerton will continue for at least a while longer. And every delay makes more money flow into the pockets of the scofflaw bar owners.
It’s pretty rare when one of our commissions really does its job, so when they do I’m happy to advertise the fact. Last week the Fullerton Planning Commission re-reviewed the noise ordinance that was kicked back to them by the City Council for further consideration, and they excelled themselves.
Their performance was so rewarding it almost makes me want to overlook the first time this group unanimously passed virtually the same proposed ordinance in November, 2023. This time they really took their jobs seriously.
The staff report for the item, given by some guy named Edgardo, was the same nonsense they pitched before, and they essentially asked the Commission to rubber stamp it yet again.
But this time there is a problem. It seems that no matter how many words they throw at the issue, staff can’t talk around their own complete lack of effort at code enforcement in Downtown Fullerton. They admit it now, claiming (without a shred of evidence) that the existing noise level is unsupportable in court, and begging the question of why amplified music is then allowed outdoors at all – it wasn’t for decades. We were informed that a “vibrant” downtown (pictures of happy people) requires more noise, not less. The underlying theme was the usual tripe: DTF is an economic asset whose saloon proprietors must be coddled at all cost. Look the other way, fast!
Incredibly, our new friend Edgardo informed the Commission that current levels of noise are acceptable to the citizenry based on the fact that so few complaints are lodged. Complete balderdash, of course. Naturally the bald declaration of “acceptability” was unsupported by any complaint data, suggesting that if there is a record, it is an embarrassing one. And the Commission learned from public speaker Joshua Ferguson that the City doesn’t bother with code enforcement and almost never has, leading Commissioner Patricia Tutor to wonder if this lack of responsiveness might have caused citizens to give up complaining.
One poor lady, the owner of Les Amis was there to push for the proposal. Unfortunately, as she admitted, she does live music in her establishment without the benefit of the required entertainment permit. Oops. Code enforcement to the rescue!
Local hero…
Tony Bushala got up to speak, sharing his story of being driven out of his downtown home due the noise. He also produced a lengthy list of errors and omissions in the proposed ordinance and stuff that was just contradictory. It turns out that the public and the Commission were not presented with a complete underline/strike-out version, showing pretty clearly that counsel Baron Bettenhauser of the I Can’t Believe It’s a Law Firm, had not, as he claimed, looking up from his cell phone, read the damn thing.
Edgardo and Baron work their magic…
One zoom caller named Maureen said the smartest thing of the night. She actually suggested that without actually hearing the sound on site, she (and presumably everybody else) was at a loss to really fathom the mystery of decibel levels.
Tutor tutors staff.
Commissioner Tutor was particularly effective in asking pertinent questions, one of which, was how come, after 10pm when music is supposed to move indoors, isn’t the decibel level lowered. A really commonsensical question. She didn’t get a commonsensical answer. The acoustical consultant from some operation called Dudek explained that during their noise collection procedure, that seemed to be the general noise level.
What’s going on here?
Oops again. Commissioner Cox pounced on the fact that the collected data was based on a noise level that was one, currently illegal; and two, based on a situation where there is no code enforcement, thus kicking up the noise level that staff was claiming was acceptable! He didn’t say so, but it was pretty clear that Mr. Dudek Guy had been receiving coaching from staff on the noise levels they found acceptable.
Mansuri ain’t buying it.
The other main sticking point was where to measure noise from – a certain distance from the noise source or a certain distance from the property line; two choices were offered with the greater distance being recommended. Commissioner Mansuri was unpersuaded by staff. That issue tied everybody up in knots off and on for the better part of an hour. Finally it was concluded that the noise sampling site needed a rethink.
Thanking God it’s over…
Finally, mercifully, Commissioner Arnel Dino moved that the whole thing come back in May with the entire code changes organized and clarified and that in the interim the Planning Commissioners would go out themselves with decibel monitors and experience for themselves the problems of sound accumulation, reverberation, etc. So that’s what is going to happen. Imagine that – first hand experience without the muddled abstraction of decibel levels on a piece of paper.
As usual it was obvious that our hand-wringing staff was pursuing their path of least residence by raising sound thresholds, making it harder to enforce even that, and refusing to enforce the requirements of the bar-owners’ entertainment permits – things like closing doors and windows. How many times have we seen staff guide the consultant they chose to get what they want? Happens all the time. And how many times must the public be subjected to uninformed or misinformed opinion passed along as Gospel truth by our public employees? Happens all the time. And when will the City Council demand honesty and competence from its bureaucrats? I’m afraid we all know the answer to that.
I’ve been watching Fullerton politics and governance for for a long time – since 2008 or 2009, in fact. One thing that has consistently struck me is the way in which Fullerton’s elected officials have completely and almost happily abdicated their responsibility to determine the direction of policy.
It has always been the goal, in principle if not in practice in modern representative democracy, that policy would be established by electeds, and administrated through a protected civil service bureaucracy.
Determining policy – the philosophical direction you want the town to take – isn’t easy in the “City Manager” form of government, a form deliberately created to remove any sort of executive authority from elected representatives. But with that set-up came something else, too: the difficulty of people’s representatives in establishing policy direction, and doing it without violating the Brown Act strictures on open meetings.
Nevertheless, the responsibility is still there, even if it easier to have photo ops, and ribbon cuttings and the like. Sadly our electeds have failed; failed with remarkable banality and complacency. Former Councilman and Fullerton Police Chief Pat McKinley once illustrated the point when challenged for his “failure to lead.” He exclaimed that councilmen weren’t there to lead – that was the City Manager’s job.
Lately the policy role abdication has been seen with the regurgitated, spit out, re-consumed and regurgitated again noise ordinance, an ongoing embarrassment that has plagued honest citizens for over fifteen years. I read the staff report on the recent noise effort, a report that justifies a decision to actually increase acceptable levels, protect offenders by including an ambient noise mask, and locates the noise metering away from the source whence it can be muddled by an equally noisy neighbor.
The staff report is nothing but a list of events that have occurred since 2009 when the City Council last expressed a coherent position. Nowhere in the staff report is there any discussion on the policy decisions behind any of the activities. Why not? Because there weren’t any. In the same way that the incredibly costly, drunken binge known as Downtown Fullerton has escaped any intelligent policy conversation, the noise nuisance issue, a subset of the former, has evaded policy discussion as City staff – behind the scenes – has diligently avoided doing anything to enforce existing code, and worked very hard to reduce the requirements.
So what has happened is a vacuum in which each new action seems disembodied from policy conversation; that’s because it is. And our council steadfastly refused to have an open and honest conversation of what it wants, abdicating its responsibilities.
One size fits all…
There is a long list of issues that our elected representatives should be addressing from an overarching policy level and aren’t. This sort of thing takes thought; and some hard work in ascertaining whether your city employees are really doing the thing you want; or not, as in the case of the Trail to Nowhere. It’s easier just to ram through the Consent Calendar on the nod, rubberstamp the ridiculous, clean your plate like good kids, and move on to the photo ops and the trophy ceremonies.
Over the past two decades FFFF has documented the mess our City government has made of the financial sinkhole know as Downtown Fullerton; how laws and rules have been ignored to help the myriad bar owners, and how what is undoubtedly a fiscal municipal liability continues to be characterized as some sort of wonderful accomplishment.
Matt Foulkes. The spin out left casualties…
Planning Directors and Redevelopment Drones came and went: Dudley, Zur Schmied, Zelenka, Haluza, White, Foulkes, each one as useless as the one that came before, and each willing to put the scofflaws’ interest ahead of the citizens.’ To be fair, the political interference was there, too, nowhere better exemplified than in the case of our now-departed Mayor-for-Hire, Jennifer Fitzgerald, who had a for sale sign on her back. And of course City Attorney Dick Jones was there every step of the way to add obfuscating smoke into the downtown atmosphere.
Staying awake long enough to break the law…
Nowhere is the Fullerton downtown dysfunction better seen than in the complete hash the bureaucrats in City Hall have made of the noise situation. At first, the noise ordinance was simply ignored by the cops and by code enforcement. And for the past 15 years the City has made a concerted effort to allow amplified outdoor music downtown, to delay action (we’re still studying it), and to water down whatever official rules were on the books.
For the past four years nothing has happened and of course the nightclub operators have continued to take advantage of Fullerton’s de facto unwillingness to enforce anything.
And now the issue has finally resurfaced yet again, and once again the effort is likely not to work for us, but essentially, to admit defeat and allow the raucous free-for all to become official.
In December a new stab at a noise ordinance addressing outdoor music was placed on the table in front of the City Council.
Evidently the proposed ordinance was so bad that the our otherwise malleable City Council turned it back for rework. I don’t know what was in it because the City Clerk’s webpage doesn’t work. But supposedly the thing will be coming back on Tuesday the 29th and hopefully we will be able to see what sort of surrender our staff is coming up with.
Sometimes it’s hard to tell if government bureaucracies do the things they do because of incompetence, venality, or favoritism. In the never-ending story of Fullerton’s noise regulation all three seem to be uniquely intertwined.
What is inescapable is that the City of Fullerton has striven mightily to separate the issue of nuisance noise emanating from downtown outdoor areas from both enforcement and illegality.
A few thou here and there worked wonders…
In 2011 the ridiculous Transportation Center Specific Plan finally made it legal to propagate amplified outdoor music, thus making Jeremey Popoff’s Slidebar appear honest, although he still didn’t have a legal Conditional Use Permit. But the new regulations for noise had no more effect than Popoff’s missing CUP because the City – cops and code enforcement – refused to enforce the regulations.
A standup guy walking tall. .
What to do? Hmm. What about throwing the issue into a miasma of bureaucratic paper shuffling so that nobody would notice what you were doing, and downtown scofflaws could actually be absolved, de jure as well as de facto?
In August, 2014 the City tried this pitch with the idea that the Noise ordinance would be updated along with great swaths of the existing land use law to make thing, you know, easier to figure out. But downtown noise played a prominent part in the discussion, if not really in the staff report. The council approved noise studies as a mechanism, a cynic might say, to avoid cracking down on Popoff, Jack Franklin’s Roscoe’s, and their ilk, because that is exactly what happened.
I’m not going to do my job and you can’t make me…
2015 rolled around and the Community Development “professionals,” led by newly minted Director Karen Haluza, were again yakking it up about revising the Code. Well, these things take time, you know, and in the late summer of 2016 the City Council finally got around to passing Ordinance 3232, a revised Code, still, with intent of instilling commonsense and clarity. The definition of amplified music was scratched out pending future action.
But whatever the motivation, the ever-shifting sands of sound gave the bureaucrats, aided and abetted by the perpetual dishonesty of City Attorney Dick Jones, the pretext they needed to bat away complaints about the illegal noise – because the issues was under study and consideration!
New in town, but he caught on quickly…
The vicious circle took yet another revolution in June of 2018 when the Council was persuaded by yet another new planning director, Ted White, to pass a Resolution of Intent to once again revise the land use codes in the interests of commonsense and clarity. Of course the Noise Ordinance and downtown noise was actually a key driver in this conversation, too. Mr. White took it upon himself to introduce a new downtown noise map where any outdoor sound would be permitted; but, the standards – 70 decibels outside and 65 decibels inside – were not to be applied to the source, but to the sensitive receptor, and the burden of proof was clearly laid at the feet of the victim, not the perpetrator of the nuisance. The bureaucracy seemed oblivious to the Armageddon of Noise they were trying to create or the sensibilities of residents adjacent to the riot zone.
The Planning Commission was finally scheduled to review the latest iteration of musical chairs in November, 2018; but the discussion was mysteriously continued for three months until February, 2019 by which time two opponents of amplified music, Nick Dunlap and Ryan Cantor had been removed from the Commission. A coincidence? Who knows? Stay tuned…
