Well, it’s two weeks later and our city council still can’t decide on a budget. I’ve been asking around and nobody can remember this ever happening before.
Staff had presented a whole slew of options but the basic premise remained the same for our brave councilors: budget reductions or not?
The fact that the budget still includes numerous unfilled positions seems not to have sunk in to the avowed defenders of Fullerton’s bureaucrats, Ahmad Zahra and Jesus Quirk-Silva who also want to remunerate employees with Federal Biden Bucks. Bruce Whitaker and Nicholas Dunlap keep insisting on cuts to address our permanent structural budget deficit.
I’m not voting yes and you can’t make me…
And then there’s the guy in the middle, Fred Jung, who has staked out a via media and hasn’t moved from his position of a smaller cut.
But what seems to have happened is That Quirk-Silva was willing to go along with Jung at a 1% budget cut, but that Zahra would have none of it. Meantime Whitaker and Dunlap were willing to come down too, but not far enough for Jung.
My bet is we will see Jung, Whitaker, and Dunlap at 2%, or so; Zahra will pout; Quirk-Silva, seeing the handwriting on the wall may want to show unity. But more likely he’ll vote no and at least appear to be supporting his real constituents in City Hall.
What fun! I don’t know how this can keep going, but I love the lack of appeasement and fake collegiality, and the Fitzgeraldine behind-the-scenes monkey business.
Some things in life are perfectly predicable. Things like physics and math. They’re not really that difficult to understand, but some people in our society are a little slower than others.
For example, next week there will be idiots who put a frozen turkey into a vat of hot liquid fat because #Merica. Despite many public service announcements to the contrary, stupidity will have its unavoidable and predicable consequences.
Tonight Fullertonians will miss out on the discussion taking place behind closed doors at City Hall concerning the state of the city’s budget. Voters won’t get to hear about the new contract negotiations designed to help the massive multi-million dollar structural deficit, the $100,000,000 in deferred infrastructure maintenance, or the equally massive unfunded pension debt. Instead, we’ll get a null report from The Other Dick Jones ™, and the facade of all being well will continue into this year’s planned First Night festivities.
Like so many idiots with a tank of propane, recent City Councils had fair warning of the current financial crisis. The math just isn’t that hard to understand. Every year, every single year, since each of their elections, Fullerton has spent more from the general fund than it has taken in. Tens of millions of dollars in reserves have evaporated. *POOF* gone, without a trace.
At the current rate, Fullerton may be bankrupt in two years.
This Thanksgiving, while you’re enjoying your non-idiot prepared bird, I want you to remember tonight’s secret city council meeting. I also want you to remember a meeting held just last year.
Just last year, the council authorized the largest pay raises for staff in a decade.
“The budget is balanced!” — Jennifer Fitzgerald
“Fullerton is in excellent financial shape!’ — Jan Flory
Well, the math simply doesn’t lie. The budget was not balanced and the city was not in excellent financial shape. Jen and Jan dunked their frozen bird and lambasted all the chronic malcontents who protested their fine stewardship.
*POOF*
Like that, Joe Felz hit a tree, and their financial bird exploded, the raging predictable disaster apparent for all to see.
Tonight the Fullerton City Council will likely authorize reducing pay and benefits for city employees, just in time for the holidays. When this is over, some employees will have their salaries reduced or their hours cut. Others will simply lose their jobs. Many of those individuals are good people who do good work. This isn’t their fault, but it will be their house that gets burned down and it will be their life that gets ruined.
Now Jen and Jan, two of those responsible for dunking this turkey? Don’t worry. They’ll be fine. Jen just gave herself a $9000 raise and Jan retired.
The Mayor likes to say that we have a “Balanced Budget” and that we’re making great strides on our roads, parks, et cetera. All of this in spite of closing the Hunt Branch Library, having rundown parks and having to beg, borrow and steal from our City reserves every year to keep the lights on. Why?
Oh, because we send people to Canada. That’s one reason why.
We sent five people to Canada because apparently PowerPoint, Video Conferencing and YouTube don’t cost the taxpayers enough money.
As far as we can tell the City of Fullerton sent Anthony J. Bogart (Police Sergeant), Cesar A. Navarro (Lead Police Dispatcher)m Julie A. Langstaff (Police Technical Services Manager), Christopher J. Overtoom (Information Systems Assistant) & Helen M. Hall (Information Technology Manager) to a conference in Ontario about “Thinking Forward” in policing. But hey, at least according to the agenda they got to attend a Curling Bonspiel on our dime so it wasn’t a total waste of money.
Stay tuned as we show off some more bang that we’re getting for our collective bucks.
The City of Fullerton unveiled the proposed budget for fiscal year 2011-2012 and 2012-2013.
The budget appears to be largely a rearrangement of the deck chairs with no real cuts proposed. There are proposed cuts in certain projected spending to help make up for significant increases in employee benefits.
There were no explanations about the benefits increasing which Councilmember Whitaker took issue with.
Councilmember Quirk-Silva reminded staff that last year there were several ideas proposed for generating revenue and increasing fees such as the tow franchise which will be heard by the Council later this year. Quirk-Silva expressed appreciation that the tow franchise was moving forward but would like to know about the other measure proposed last year.
One of my major concerns continues to be the infrastructure. As Public Works Director Hoppe pointed out, we still have a nearly $150 million dollar paving deficit to deal with. The current paving plan does not adequately address this nor does this proposed budget. I hope the council members and City Manager Joe Felz will give serious consideration and address our infrastructure with this budget.
Below are the summaries for the proposed budget. (click on image to read) The big question remaining in my mind is how does $274.9 million in taxpayer expenditures next year benefit my family, my neighborhood, and the quality of life in my community?
A Friend just forwarded an article in the Yellowing Fullerton Observer about the City’s latest foray into something called economic development – an effort to create more tax revenue, somewhere, somehow, sometime. The good folk in City Hall are alarmed at the looming budget deficit they forecast in the next few years. And they know full well that another attempt at a sales tax like the ill-fated Measure S promoted by Ahmad Zahra and Jesus Quirk-Silva would be a shaky proposition.
According to the Observer the City hired an entity called Kosmont Companies to assay Fullerton’s future and determine where tax generating opportunities may lay. At the June 20th meeting of the City Council a report by Kosmont was submitted for general perusal.
Exhausting all options…
I note that Kosmont Companies is an operation whose sole raison d’etre these days is to work for Redevelopment Successor agencies and municipalities trying to gin up revenue to support the bureaucratic establishment. According to the staff report Kosmont was employed by “the City” in February 2023; since no agenda report exists for this contract, it must have been executed out of the public eye by our esteemed City Manager, Eric Levitt. I’ll address the report itself and the Council’s reaction in another post.
I often wonder why anybody thinks local government have any business promoting these types of endeavors. Government employees know little about business operations, nothing about the concept enterprise; they know defined benefit pensions, their union agreements and petty, make-work bureaucratic stuff. These same chuckleheads just up-zoned and entitled a massive apartment project on land they sold to the developer for 10% of its new value. As far as the unknown amount paid to the “consultant” I wonder if even that expense will be recouped by their own work product.
Just as bad, the economic development concept is created and run, for and by, the same people who stand to benefit from it – it it were to even work at all. And of course there is never any accountability for public resources expended in the pursuit of this talisman.
Fullerton has a long and sordid history of City Council making stupid moves and putting personal animus and self-interest above what’s best for the City and it’s residents but this week they’re just insulting us taxpayers.
You see, at the last council meeting a majority of the Council voted to approve a budget with a glaring $10 Million hole in it. That’s right – the budget is in the red and terribly so. We’re broke largely because we’ve been systematically defunded by the Police and Fire Unions over the years abetted by an indebted City Council Majority who can never make hard decisions, do real math or plan ahead for the future.
The current Council has no idea how they’re going to make up this budget deficit or where the money is going to come from to pay the ever increasing union pay and benefits packages they can never deny.
So this week what’s on the agenda? What are the brass tacks they’re going to get down to? What are the hard choices they’re prepared to make in light of our financial woes? Where oh where must the cutting begin?
Somewhere else at some later date. Instead of cutting, the council is instead going to vote on spending – specifically spending for themselves.
That’s right. Self-interest is the item of the day. They’re going to vote on wether or not they should spend $75,000 to give themselves offices on the third floor of City Hall.
You heard that correctly. Just one meeting after admitting they have no idea how to balance our budget they want to reward themselves with new offices for all of their hard work.
This is a level of self-entitlement and tone-deafness that should be unimaginable from true “public servants”. This is nothing less than arrogance of the highest order.
Over the next few years you’re going to be asked to give up more in services, to pay more in fees and taxes and to take it on the chin because of our financial dire straights. Dire straights we were put in BY our bought and paid for City Councils.
Over those next few years Council and their allies will likely be trying to sell you on all of the financial hardships we face as a city – of course right after taking meetings with developers and lobbyists from their swanky new offices they prioritized over balancing the budget because, well, screw you.
I hope they at least have the decency to play the fiddle from up there on the third floor while they watch Fullerton burn but I doubt they’d even give us that much respect.
Last Tuesday the Fullerton City Council majority finally got sick and tired enough with their hapless City Manager to tell him to take a hike. The votes to oust Ken Domer came from Bruce Whitaker, Nick Dunlap and Fred Jung.
Cop coverup artist, drug warrior, IT wizard, this talented cat can do it all…
Insiders are suggesting that his temporary replacement will be none other than Police Chief Robert Dunn.
The Council is meeting Tuesday to discuss a replacement appointment.
The handwriting is on the wall…
And when you think about it, the only real question is why it took so long.
Domer. There’s a lot less there than meets the eye.
By any measurable standards, Ken Domer was not very good at his job. He took too long to address the City’s structural budget deficits, and when he did, his solution was to raise sales taxes – taxes not even aimed at our horrible infrastructure.
Under Domer we saw the deliberate ignoring of noise code violation enforcement and the effort to dilute the relevant codes. We saw the the aiding and abetting of a permit applicant who forged official planning documents. We saw idiotic and unsupervised vanity construction projects. We saw stupid things like the recently killed “aquaponics farm” and the connivance required to begin a Specific Plan without any input from the community or even the City Council.
We saw a string of “consultants” hired out of the blue to perform tasks that Domer and his highly paid staff should have been able to do in their sleep.
Why the underqualified Domer was ever hired in the first place will probably always remain a mystery, except that it makes perfect sense that Jennifer Fitzgerald, our former Mayor-for-hire, wanted someone who would reliably do what she wanted without asking any embarrassing questions.
Along with walking legal catastrophe, Dick Jones, Domer was certainly complicit in the vindictive lawsuit waged by the City against FFFF bloggers, a disastrous strategy that will cost the tax-payers plenty.
But it was the ill-fated and duplicitous Measure S sales tax scam that really iced the cake. It was designed as a rescue for the pay and pensions of Fullerton’s full-time public employees, who, during the pandemic, have continued to enjoy pay and benefits while many of Fullerton’s residents and business were suffering the cruelty of a real world unprotected by the largesse dispensed by government union-friendly politicians.
Well, Domer is gone, but it would be a waste of time and tears to mourn his departure. He is getting a month’s pay and benefits up front worth $25,000. And then he will begetting 9 months’ pay and benefits courtesy of a contract extension granted just two month before last November’s election by Fitzgerald and her council cronies Ahmad Zahra, Jan Flory, and Jesus Silva. That’s another $25,000. Per month. And the bonanza of Domer’s pension spike in Fullerton will be a cost borne by all of us for a long, long time.
The people of Fullerton have been awful good to the Domer family.
While we suspect there’s at least one candidate on the ballot on November who will not be responding to our candidate questionnaire under any circumstances, we did receive our second response, from Libertarian Nickolas Wildstar. Wildstar is running in the Third Council district where I live and the only non-incumbent in the race.
To reiterate: all City Council candidates for the 2018 election are strongly encouraged to respond to the questionnaire and their responses will be reprinted in full at our earliest opportunity. All candidates have received the questionnaires already and we hope to hear what the other candidates have to say soon.
Our original questions, and Mr. Wildstar’s responses, are as follows: (more…)
Taking a brief break from the non-stop coverage of (mostly) bad news from the Fullerton Police Department, we have received our first candidate response to the FFFF Candidate questionnaire, and it is realtor Johnny Ybarra, who is running in District Five.
To reiterate: all City Council candidates for the 2018 election are strongly encouraged to respond to the questionnaire and their responses will be reprinted in full at our earliest opportunity. All candidates have received the questionnaires already and we hope to hear what the other candidates have to say soon.
Our original questions, and Mr. Ybarra’s responses, are as follows:
With the filing period now closed, the election season is in full swing for the first district election on Fullerton City Council history (the full list of candidates who have qualified and their candidate statements can be found here).
The transition to District elections is proceeding smoothly.
As someone who has run for office before, I know that the single biggest challenge for any candidate is raising enough money to get your message out so that voters even know who you are. Nobody likes the direct mail pieces that inundate our mail box during election season but the candidates who pay for mail are the ones most likely to win, like it or not. And as a voter who has cast a ballot in every election since his 18th birthday, my biggest challenge for every election cycle is sorting through all that BS to find out which candidates have an actual plan, and are sincere about and committed to that plan.
So as a service to both candidates and the electorate, we have prepared the official Friends for Fullerton’s Future City Council candidate questionnaire, which we will email it to all candidates who qualify for the ballot. Unlike most questionnaires, ours has no word limit. Brevity is always recommended, but if you think your position takes three or more paragraphs to explain, then that’s what it takes. Whatever you write, we will publish it, in full, and let other residents know where you stand and why. The first one to turn in their questionnaire will be the first article we will publish.
