A few weeks ago the Daily Titan published an article about how, in a few years, Fullerton is going to be running in the red. Deep red. City projections point to being upside down $19 million between 2024 and 2028. Now that’s not very good, is it?
Here’s the grim forecast:
Going the wrong way…
Naturally, the article quickly devolved into a vehicle for advocating the hiring of more people and paying them more, replete with completely fraudulent comparative pay statistics. On hand were Ahmad Zahra and his helper Shana Charles to bleat about unfilled positions and service deficits, always the first opening salvo in a new tax proposal – like the one Zahra pushed hard in 2020.
The head and the hat were a perfect fit.
Doug Chaffee, the senile Fourth District Supervisor of Orange County and a former Fullerton mayor contributed this gem to the conversation: “I think I would have been a little heavier on keeping our staff because they are the lifeblood of the city. They do the work.” Uh, huh. He failed to mention his own inept culpability in mismanaging Fullerton’s budget for years.
Gimme some of that do-re-mi to waste…
Hilariously, Zahra seems to think the phrase “economic development” has some sort of talismanic quality, as if there were anything City Hall could do to produce it. It never worked during the heyday of Redevelopment and it won’t do anything now. It’s just a shiny distraction that can’t even pay for the bumblers who are paid, and paid very well, to pursue it.
What economic development really means is a focus on increasing tax revenue to pay for the salaries and benefits of public employees and their bloated, guaranteed pensions. It would be refreshing if just once elected folks thought about less about raising revenue and more about living within budgetary constraints.
Mayor Fred Jung calmly opined that Fullerton has adequate reserves to handle the tsunami of red ink coming his way, but this is not reassuring. Fullerton went through the same crimson bath during the Fitzgerald/Chaffee/Quirk-Silva/Flory/Zahra regime, and anybody who thinks Fullerton is better off for the deficit spending it is a damn fool.
The trouble with being away so much last summer and fall was that I missed all sorts of Fullerton-related stuff. And one of those things was the separation of Tony Florentine from his Earthly cares.
Addio, Tony!
The Florentine paterfamilias, bar owner and restaurateur passed on to his reward back in July of 2022.
FFFF has been diligently following the activities of Tony and his offspring, Joe, in a series of posts going back well over ten years.
Good luck with that!
We documented how in 2012, Tony loudly inserted himself into the anti-Recall campaign as a staunch supporter of Fullerton’s incompetent Old Guard councilmembers Jones, Bankhead and McKinley, parroting the nonsense peddled by his old Rotary pal, Dick Ackerman. He had lots of good reasons for defending the boobs as they let him run illegal entertainment in his business establishment, and as he and his son did everything they could to dodge the City-ordained -and not enforced – conditions of approval for use permits.
Gone, but not quite forgotten…
But the history went farther back. In 2003 Tony got the City to look the other way as he purloined a public sidewalk and got away with it, creating a legal headache that still hasn’t gone away. The Florentines pulled out in 2020 and left the City as landlords of a building extension that the co-joined building owner didn’t own.
Years before that, if we can believe a former associate, in 1989 Tony took a torch to his business, The Melody Inn, that also destroyed one of the oldest buildings in Fullerton and began an embarrassing Redevelopment boondoggle.
Whether or not Tony once drove a copper spike into a street tree because it was blocking his sign is a matter of conjecture, but that’s the tale told by some old Fullertonions.
So belatedly FFFF says farewell to Mr. Florentine – who brought a little Jersey color to our drab town. In parting it has to be said that neither he or his kid are that important in and of themselves, but they symbolize a governmental culture of incompetence, and a willingness in City Hall to tolerate scofflaws that have become synonymous with Fullerton.
Why crazy? Well it’s not really crazy at all if you’re “Jacob” Poozhikala, the scofflaw proprietor of the notorious downtown gin joint at Harbor and Commonwealth.
JP23 is just the sort of place that the creators of DTF’s nightlife economy didn’t envision and yet have done nothing to stop.
Mr. JP (left) gets a good guy award from some Supervisor Shawn Nelson drone.
Mr. JP has been in violation of conditions placed on his permits seemingly forever, and the City government just can’t seem to screw up the courage to tell Mr. JP to go screw himself once and for all. The list of violations over the years reminds me of a lurid passage in a Dickens novel – occupancy violations crowding, cover charges, illegal occupation of substandard spaces, illegal site use (shipping containers!), etc. Even the minor requirements laid upon Mr. JP, such as exterior lighting have just been ignored.
Without delving into the details of that awful story I will only say that the patrons of the place probably don’t exercise the greatest judgment in the first place.
Ima hit that…
Student nite at At JP23…
So what’s the latest?
Last week the City Council received an update on the status of this enterprise. Apparently, Mr. JP says he has been planning to sell his business to an eager young nephew, a gambit that has gained even more time for Poozhikala to evade making the remedial requirements demanded by the City. The alleged nephew-sale was supposed to happen last November, but still hasn’t been consummated. There are still the outstanding deficiencies to be rectified, and then there is the looming problem of the all-important new entertainment permit that has to be approved.
“You have remedies”
Our old pal, handjob lawyer Gregory Palmer stood up to bring the Council a status update on the whole affair. It was like watching an old jalopy lumber down the street. It was painful to watch this cut-rate pettifogger trying not to say things that were spelled out in the staff report, the funniest of which was:
It was very clear to all of us in the room with Mr. Pathiyil that he was nothing more than a “straw man” put up by Jacob Poozhikala to avoid his responsibility, and that Mr.Pathiyil was not a bona fide purchaser.”
In their communications, Mr. JP has declared to the City that apart from “training” his young protégé on the intricacies and mysteries of saloon owning, he will have no interest in the ongoing business. The City staff report laconically informs us that:
The purchase price for all of the business equipment, inventory and packaging; books, records and files, trademarks and trade names, as well as goodwill, was zero dollars ($0.00).
However, for some unstated reason, Mr. JP intends to remain the principle tenant of the building and supposedly collect rent from his nephew.
I’m not voting yes and you can’t make me…
Mayor Jung correctly observed the unlikelihood of Poozhikala letting go of the reins. It does seem pretty likely, as the staff report warned, that The Pooz is using his nephew to act as a decoy so a new business can be established with a new entertainment permit, unsullied by the business’s long history of bad behavior.
Finally, the report was received and filed, the issue of the permits still in the works.
And so the saga of JP23 sags along. And aren’t law-abiding citizens, taxpayers, and the owners of legitimate businesses indeed justified in calling this never-ending pas-de-deux with Mr. JP what it is? It’s crazy.
Yes, apparently, former Fullerton City Councilman, Dr. F. Richard “Dick” Jones has gone to his reward. He was 90, or thereabouts.
I am ambivalent about his passing. His record as a public representative was appallingly bad. And yet, doggone it, I miss him. Every other Tuesday we could look forward to some crazy and limitlessly entertaining outburst.
Indeed, it would be remiss of this blog not to acknowledge Mr. Jones and his place in Fullerton lore. This is especially true since it was Jones whose re-election campaign in 2008 was the impetus that created this very blog. Many people in Fullerton believed that 12 years of Jones was more than enough, and FFFF was created as a response to his record on the City Council dais.
Jones was re-elected, of course, and a good thing, too – for over the subsequent years and months the blog was able to treat Fullertonions to wonderful examples his special wit and wisdom. It’s true that the first 12 years of Dick’s political career went largely underappreciated, and included a lot of bad stuff – his support of retroactive pensions spikes, the illegal water tax and the constant shilling for dumbass Redevelopment were largely forgotten – but the FFFF spotlight of the next 4 made up for it.
Between 2008 and 2012 – when Jones was finally and justly recalled from office – he gave us a wealth of comedic material that displayed the various facets of the man: vindictive bully, philistine, loudmouth, hypocrite, bloviator supreme and ignoramus – all delivered with an especially thick, southern-fried coating. Jeez, we traversed the years together sharing fun Jonesian vignettes.
Who can forget him lamenting the monster he created in Downtown Fullerton, the “New West” even as he continued to feed it? His fixation on babies in bathwater became the stuff of legends. He introduced new names for the patrons of DTF – Drunken Others and Last Week’s Felons, even as he saddled the taxpayers of Fullerton with the bill to clean up the mess he admitted creating.
Sit down and grab some sidewalk, brother…
His sideways reference to the sidewalk stealing Florentine Mob came out as an encomium to the Italian “roots” mafia that ran his hometown of Galveston “very well,” to the chagrin of the Feds who couldn’t figure out how to traverse that consarned two-mile long bridge.
Let’s not forget the night Jones took umbrage that an award-winning architect had come to town to propose good, modern residential architecture. Nuh uh! Mr. Arkyteck? He might like Salvador Dali, but none of that fizzjickle would be in Jonesy’s living room and none of these pointy-headed modern buildings would be in “his” city, brayed the Good Doctor.
When it came to legalized marijuana – as approved by the people of California, Dr. Jones would have none of it. He was out to “right a wrong,” goldarnit! And somebody gotta stop little kids from eatin’ manure, too! And he introduced us to the wonders of heroin products and oxytoxin!
When the sore subject of Fullerton’s illegal water tax rates again floated to the surface, Jones was right there to draw baffling comparison with Hitler’s reoccupying the the Rhineland in 1936. Nobody knew what in tarnation he was going on about, but all the toadies in City Hall nodded, sagely.
But finally, in 2011, the mismanagement of Fullerton began to catch up to those who were responsible. When a mentally sick homeless man was horrifically murdered by Fullerton cops, Jones had no way of wrapping his personality around the realities. His lack of accountability was matched only by his lack of empathy in the aftermath of the Kelly Thomas killing. His natural instinct to defend Authority and join the clown show inside the circled wagons came to the fore as he nailed his colors to the Fullerton Police Department mast.
Well, why belabor this? In June 2012 Dr. F. Richard “Dick” Jones was recalled from office, along with his pals Don Bankhead and Pat McKinley. The recall election wasn’t even close.
I don’t know what Mr. Jones has been doing with himself the past 11 years, but I doubt if it included a lot of self-reflection. Dick just wasn’t built that way.
Although the thought of discovering Paulette Marshall in your mailbox might seem a little unsettling, worry not. For it is only her campaign propaganda. A vigilant Friend forwarded the piece in question.
Would the grimace pass for a smile?
This is so funny because everybody in Fullerton knows that Ms. Paulette has never “led” anything. She is the consummate joiner, padding her service resume with memberships in this or that group started and carried on by others. She tried to be a leader in Fullerton by faking an address in a district that she didn’t live in. She insinuated herself into all sorts of photo-ops where she didn’t belong, courtesy of her equally creepy spouse Doug “Bud” Chaffee.
Paulette attacks the guy who beat her like a drum the last time around, Tim Shaw, who was made to resign from the OC Board of Education to avoid a costly lawsuit brought by a Chaffee surrogate and undoubtedly paid for by the Chaffee Crime family. Shaw didn’t resign in shame and no doubt feels none. Sort of like how Paulette doesn’t feel any shame as a caught and convicted criminal.
Oh, no. The purple Joker pantsuit again!
We see that Paulette is “endorsed by OC teachers” although she doesn’t care to inform us which ones those might be. Another posed picture shows Paulette engaging exited youngsters, but I really have to wonder if this picture wasn’t staged during her mandatory community service following her guilty plea bargain.
And finally, Paulette shares more staged images that only a fool would mistake for genuine support or personal experience.
Paulette uses a freakin’ adding machine? How 20th Century.
As my uncle Cas always said, no matter how you slice it it’s still baloney. So here’s the image by which we will always remember Paulette – caught in the act of committing a crime.
The 2022 effort to create new districts stumbles along. Last week, the Commission set-up to make a recommendation to the City Council met to discuss the several maps that had been submitted. The complete lack of public participation was evident – only a handful of maps were submitted.
At the end of the meeting a 5-2 majority favored Map 114 – the demographers tweak of Commissioner John Seminara’s Map 106. Then they added Maps 111 and 112 as worthy of Council consideration. Take a look at Map 114. The dark lines show current district boundaries:
Map 114 making pre-eminent good sense.
Map 114 isn’t perfect, but it is informed by Fullerton’s clear major street boundaries and respects both ethnic and physical communities of interest. It cleans up the idiotic Tentacles of Interest foisted on the voters in 2016 by our former Mayor-for-Hire, Jennifer Fitzgerald. There would no longer be district contortions so that council members could each have an interest in the public money vortex knows as Downtown Fullerton.
Two of the commission members – former City employee Kitty Jaramillo, and Jody Vallejo preferred Map 110 a bizarre amalgamation for District 3 – a long, thin district that stretches from Placentia Avenue to Euclid Avenue connecting neighborhoods that are physically remote and that don’t share any obvious connection. The adherents of this map apparently banded together into a committee of some kind to concoct this hot, wet mess, proving that more heads are not necessarily better than fewer. Check out this acid burp:
The people who defended this map claimed that it is the “College map,” joining CSUF and FJC with their surrounding neighborhoods as a dubious “community of interest.” The further rationale for its support was that “many people” had participated in its creation. This map violates several basic tenets of district-making, to wit: creating a district (3) that is not compact; splitting the trans-57 community of interest into two separate tribes; and throwing together neighborhoods almost 4 miles apart in a weird, horizontal embrace.
How anybody could justify this District 3 is still beyond me. The demographer tried to make it less ridiculous by whacking it back by a mile (Map 112), but it still looks unsupportable by reason or logic. Here is Map 112.
So what gives? Commission member Tony Bushala dialed in to proclaim that Map110 (and by extension, Map 112 was motivated by purely political consideration, not the Voting Rights Act and the Fair Map Act that govern this process, and would have none of it. He didn’t elaborate.
The train of thought was weak but it sure was short…
And then it hit me.
Map 110 (and by extension Map 112) was submitted by a group of people committed to keeping Jesus Quirk-Silva, the current liberal, dim-witted D3 councilman in office. The other recommended maps – that removed the gerrymander that put him in the office – would leave him with no place to run in 2022 and out office!
Hence the desperation by this “committee” that wasted a lot of verbal gas doing what it not permitted by the FPA – protecting a party or a politician.
Oh, well, the maps go to the City Council on Tuesday the 8th, where outrage theater, liberally sprinkled with liberal handwriting will be featured on the playbill. Expect long lines the usual weepers, new and old, show up to promote Map 112. Will it work? That depends on Mayor Fred Jung who by now must be getting a shitload of unwanted importunity coming at him.
Of course there is nothing stopping a council majority from devising its own map, drawing on others, or cooking up a whole new one. But as it stands now, Map 114 is the one supported by the Redistricting Advisory Commission.
Last Wednesday, Elizabeth Hansburg quit the Fullerton Planning Commission.
FFFF has already introduced Ms. Hansburg to the Friends, noting her involvement in the drive to cover Fullerton in penitentiary-like apartment blocks. Her “non-profit” is used to provide Astroturf support for developers of huge housing projects and of course donations from said developers are always welcome.
Ms. Hansburg was also part of the shadowing clan that developed a new housing plan that almost nobody knew anything about until it was conceptually presented the the City Council. The idea was (and is) to achieve the preposterous new housing unit needs count – 13,000 -proffered by SCAG, the Southern California Association of Government – an unelected agency run by and for bureaucrats and their Big Ideas.
Well, anyhow, Hansburg has had enough. Here’s her petulant good-bye speech at the end of the meeting in which she attacks the City Council, bemoans the loss of her beloved fellow 5th Columnists in City Hall, and of course praises the contemptible camera hog and credit thief, Ahmad Zahra.
Consistently awful…
Self-righteous, indignant, know-it-all. Hansburg went out of her way to promote God-awful projects that were intrusive, obnoxious, and promised a tsunami of negative impacts on our neighborhoods including more parking disasters.
Good riddance. This is exactly the sort of person that causes regular folks to be wary of self-proclaimed “experts” and the bureaucracies they love so dearly. Now she can peddle her services to developers free from legitimate charges of conflict of interest.
When he’s not lecturing us on ethics, Fullerton City Councilman Ahmad Zahra climbs down from his high horse to participate in all sorts of activities that don’t seem very ethical at all.
We have also seen how Zahra claimed authorship of Water District-related articles actually ghost-written by a district bureaucrat; and how he tried to leverage this pseudo-expertise to keep his well-compensated seat on that board.
Grab it and consume it as fast as you can…
Then there’s the about-face Zahra played on the suckers of Fullerton when he announced that the open seat on the Council should be decided by a vote, and then promptly voted to appoint Jan Flory to the vacancy at the behest of Jennifer Fitzgerald.
The closer you look, the worse it gets.
And that last bit is what this story is about. The deal that Zahra cut with Fitzgerald to appoint Flory and get himself appointed to the lucrative Orange County Water District Board, a board that pays stipends for all sorts of meetings and sub-committee meetings.
Check this out:
Just before Zahra was replaced on the Water Board in 2021 by Bruce Whitaker, the District paid $10,000 to “CL7” for something called a “OC Water Special Water Insert.” I don’t know what that means, but I do know that CL7 is the name of Jennifer Fitzgerald’s side biz – when she wasn’t using the City to make bank for lobbyist Curt Pringle. So what’s going on here? A little gravy slopping out of the boat, or a legitimate job for a real public service? Knowing Fitzgerald’s complete lack of ethical compass and her influence peddling, I would bet on the former. Easy enough to find out: a PRA on the work order and a sample of the work product, and maybe any correspondence regarding this contract ought to do it.
And did Zahra have a role in this little handout? Was this a little payback for getting appointed in the first place? These sorts of little deals happen in OC political/government circles all the time. It’s all just easy government cheese. Maybe Zahra will be forthcoming about what this was all about. Maybe, but don’t count on it.
Some folks might think that continuing conversation about Jesus Quirk-Silva’s and Ahmad Zahra’s aquaponic farm/event center scheme would be like smacking a dead mackerel.
The train of thought was weak but it sure was short…
Well, here at FFFF we believe it’s never a bad idea to remind the public of hare-brained proposals made by bureaucrats and supported by bobble-headed politicians.
So to recap: last spring the Fullerton City Council deliberated on a scheme to create an aquaponic farm on the site of the abandoned Union Pacific Park site. The problem was that the exclusive negotiating deal was with a guy who had no financial wherewithal and proposed an event center on the site – just like he had done in Anaheim and Aliso Viejo. Staff even dredged up a last minute “partner” to sell the deal. The idea was rejected, but not for lack of trying.
And we have just received word from down south in Aliso Viejo about the negative impacts of an identical operation there, Renewable Farms, run by the same people.
Let’s hear from a MV resident to a concerned Fullerton resident:
My name is Dena LeCave and I am a resident of Aliso Viejo. While looking into information and press on Renewable Farms I came across a story from the Fullerton Observer regarding the aforementioned. I wish to congratulate you on terminating your contract with Renewable Farms. As a long time resident of the city of Aliso Viejo, 20+ years, I am astonished and horrified by what our city council has allowed to happen to my community, neighborhood and particularly our quality of life since Renewable Farms started hosting wedding receptions on the vacant land behind our home. We live less than 50 yards from the event center for Renewable Farms and they host weddings every single Saturday night and have been doing so since May. The noise, lights, music and constant yelling goes on for 7+ hours. The city has done little to alleviate the problem and has instead hamstringed us by making these events private by the City, meaning we have almost no recourse in getting them to quiet down. I do not wish to take up your time, I’m sure you’re quite busy, but if you would like to further discuss our situation you may email me back or call me. Thank you, and have a good day.
Sincerely,
Dena LeCave
Ms. Le Cave’s words have the ring of truth, all right, and they certainly would have applied to the proposal in Fullerton – problems that show the complete lack of concern, disdain even, that our staff shows for this neighborhood. And then of course there was the attitude shown by Quirk-Silva and Zahra about the residents who would have suffered the negative impacts of this proposal, without so much as a by-your-leave. Their current concern over public input on the park site is extremely recent and undisputedly hypocritical.
The purveyors of bad ideas were holding their own. For a while, anyway.
And of course the deal would have illegally converted a public park into a private, fenced and gated place to hold events, and incidentally an aquaponic facility, effectively giving away parkland – something our City Attorney Dick Jones just got caught approving in Westminster. Of course there was no parking, no business plan and nothing but a site plan to recommend it to the Council, so naturally Quirk-Silva and Zahra latched on to it like a couple of lamprey eels.
