Author: Joe Sipowicz

Posted onChronic Failure

Ramos and Cicinelli Go To Trial: Wolfie Not Far behind

by 189 Comments on Ramos and Cicinelli Go To Trial: Wolfie Not Far behind

Kelly-Thomas-Police-Beating-500x299

Manny Ramos and Jay Cicinelli, two of the six Fullerton cops who presided over the death of transient Kelly Thomas on July 5th, 2011 were told today by Superior Court judge Froeberg that they would be standing trial in June for the death of the schizophrenic homeless man. Their running buddy, Joe Wolfe the third Fullerton cop charged, has another hearing to dismiss in March.

According to the judge there was sufficient evidence to go to trial. Of course we already knew that; and we also know that newly minted Chief Danny Hughes, the boss of the Fullerton Six told them they did a good job that night. He also claimed there was no Culture of Corruption in the FPD, and other bedtime fairy tales.

Kelly Thomas was killed eighteen months ago.

 

Read More
Posted on"Dick" Ackerman

Now, What About Our Water Tax Refund? Part 3: The Big Lie And The Big Dippers

by 45 Comments on Now, What About Our Water Tax Refund? Part 3: The Big Lie And The Big Dippers

thief

Of course everybody in City hall knew the dirty little secret. The illegal 10% water tax that was hidden by the confusing name of “in-lieu fee.” Year after rancid year the City Fathers and Mothers – from daffy and angry liberal spendthrifts like Molly McClanahan and Jan Flory, to supposed conservatives Dick Ackerman and Chris Norby blessed the scam and put their imprimatur of approval upon it.

Of course they knew, or must have suspected, that the 10% was nothing other than a greasy rake-off that made their jobs easier and rewarded their friends in the bureaucracy. And they knew, or must have suspected, that the various City departments were already charging directly to the Water Fund – in direct contravention to the purpose of the original Resolution that created the”fee.”

This means that because the City departments were already charging to the Water Fund, that cost too jacked up the tax. Double Dip.

And all that free water wasted by the City over the years? You guessed it: the cost jacked up the illegal water tax. Triple Dip.

The fee was set at 10% of gross water revenue, meaning that every time the commodity cost of water went up, or transmission cost went up, so did the absolute amount of the tax itself. Quadruple Dip.

Naturally, the water tax itself was considered to be part of the gross “cost” of the water works, meaning that as the absolute value of the 10% increment rose, so did total of the tax!! The true amount of the tax was 10% of cost plus 10% of the 10%!!! Which is why the tax was actually about 11% of the true cost. Got it? Quintuple Dip.

The defenders of the Old Culture of Corruption and its slimey shakedown want you to believe that everything is pretty okay, that no harm was done, and that refunding any part of this felonious rip-off would just be a big waste of everybody’s time.

Wrong. Accountability and responsibility have their cost. Sooner or later you have to pay the piper.

 

Read More
Posted onChris Norby

Now, What About Our Water Tax Refund? Part 2: The Phony Report

by 14 Comments on Now, What About Our Water Tax Refund? Part 2: The Phony Report

thief

When you are  in charge of the City’s bureaucracy, it’s really easy to get what you want. You simply hire a “professional” opinion to validate your own desire. Good God, it happens so often and yet they continue to get away with it.

For fun, lets’ consider the case of the City of Fullerton’s illegal water tax tax. In 2011 the City was finally caught with its pants down. And what was revealed wasn’t pretty: an illegal 10% tax stuck onto the annual cost of selling water to the ratepayers of Fullerton. In an attempt to stall the inevitable and obfuscate the obvious, the comatose council handed the job of analyzing the tax to an ad hoc water rate committee that had been previously established.

Now we all know that a citizen’s committee is incapable of figuring out things on its own and so staff helpfully hired one of those paid opinion consultants to help out; one of those consultants whose sole mission is to validate whatever the staff wants them to do. In this case the mission was to keep as much of that 10% as possible. After all, that 10% was a much necessary ingredient for for keeping up CalPERS payments and sending Pam Keller and Don Bankhead and Doc HeeHaw to four star hotels in far off Long Beach.

True to form, the City Council’s “consultant” returned with a helpful finding that the water fund owned the City between six and seven percent annually, principally on the weird fiction that the water utility owed the City rent for land that the water reservoirs and pipes sit on.

Naturally, nobody bothered to explain the embarrassing fact that the land in question had little or no commercial value; or that the water utility could have bought that land for virtually nothing fifty years ago had a true arms-length distance actually existed between the utility and the City that was milking it like a rented cow.

An, worst of all, nobody had explained the self-serving nature of this sudden discovery of a true distinction between the water utility and the City, particularly in light of the fact that the utility had supplied the City with free water for decades.

That’s right. The very mechanism lade upon you and me to “incentivise” conservation, was deemed unnecessary when the City itself was wasting water. How many hundreds of thousands of acre feet of water has been used for free by the City in the past fifty years? Of course nobody knows. But the value is worth millions.

I think the City should pay that back, too.

 

Read More
Posted onThe Cost of Defeat

Now, What About Our Water Tax Refund? Part 1: A Recap

by 56 Comments on Now, What About Our Water Tax Refund? Part 1: A Recap

thief

For 40 years the City of Fullerton has added a 10% tax to your water. The ostensible purpose was to pay for general city costs necessary to deliver water, like the City Manager and the City Attorney. In the beginning the rate was a small 2%. Then in 1970 the City Fathers realized nobody was watching and they bumped it to 10%. But the fee had nothing to do with infrastructure or anything else withing the purview of the Water Utility.

For the first 27 years it was just a scam – the City departments were already charging directly to the Water Fund – the 10% was just pure high-fat content bureaucratic gravy, ripped off from unsuspecting water users by ignorant and lubricious politicians and administrators; then in 1996 Proposition 218 was enacted, requiring that objective studies, approved in public, be the basis of these charges. At this point the annually rubber stamped water tax became illegal; but it was still there, happily rising whenever the cost of the water commodity itself went up – from 1997-2012.

In 2012 the City itself acknowledged the magnitude of the ill-gotten revenue – over $27,000,000 since 1997, a sum that went into the General Fund to pay for salaries and benefits of employees who have absolutely nothing to do with the procurement or transmission of water, as well as other fun stuff – like council junkets to four start hotels.

Last year, the previous council majority made a commitment to return as much of the graft as possible. The new council? Don’t hold your breath. Mrs. Flory, one of architects of the ripoff, and someone who, arrogantly, has never even bothered to proffer an apology for her heist, has claimed that the City can’t afford refunds of even the minimum amount prescribed by law.

Well, we’ll see how this plays out. In the meantime, stay tuned for Part II: How to Phony Up A Report.

 

 

Read More
Posted onChronic Failure

Excuses, Excuses

by 172 Comments on Excuses, Excuses

Ponsi2

OC Register excuse for a journalist, and notorious bad-cop-story-misser, Lou Ponsi, really outdid himself today with a ridiculous “story” about all the excuses his pals on the force heard from folks who wanted to dodge a traffic citation. Real tough, hard-hitting piece there, Lou.

I wonder if Ponzi will ever tire of writing stupid fluff pieces for one of the most notorious police forces in California. I also wonder if writing salacious cop-accounts of wanton females is the best story line, given the well-documented behavior of FPD serial sex batterer Albert Rincon, whose activities were essentially known, and condoned by the department.

Anyhoo, that’s all introductory to my own version of a real human interest piece, something of which we are all too familiar, by now. And that’s the excuses doled out by the cops themselves to try to explain away their own malfeasance – crap subsequently sucked up by drones like Ponsi. Enjoy.

fatcops-300x198

1. He was running.

2. He was fighting.

3. He disobeyed a legal command.

4. He was reaching for his “waistband” (whatever that is).

5. That donut was supposed to be jelly-filled.

6. We put our lives on the line every day.

7. Our belts weigh 80 pounds.

8. We die at average 53 years old.

9. We try to arrest the right guy.

10. He thought he was beating up the right guy.

11. That’s POBR covered. Can’t talk about it.

12. It was not just honking. It was excessive horning.

13. No, it’s not tax deductible, but give us your money anyway, you’ll get a decal.

14. The job stress hooked me on those pills.

15. I just set my bag of chicken on that iPad. After that I don’t know what happened.

16. I got mad at my DAR and smashed it against the wall.

17. We slammed his head against the bars as we removed the dead body.

18. Those ladies weren’t like you.

19. Just wait to see the video. You’ll change your minds. I’ve seen it 400 times.

20. There were broken bones.

21. There was only one, maybe two deeply involved.

22. He was breaking into cars.

23. He was high on PCP.

24. He was a gang banger.

25. I feared for my safety.

26. The 90 pound girl with the jack knife entered the 22 foot radius so we had to shoot her 18 times.

27. Ron Thomas was never a deputy sheriff.

28. He was just a smelly bum.

29. The free sandwiches and beers are just a small perk for an otherwise unrewarding job.

30. My second wife doesn’t understand me and my girlfriend just wants a chunk of that pension.

31. It was suicide by cop.

32. He was a terrorist.

33. It was just a bong from the evidence room. It’s not like i was going to use it or anything.

34. Once you take a guided tour of the station you’ll feel differently about everything.

35. it was really all just a misunderstanding.

36. They are either misinformed or lying.

And now, feel free to add your own.

 

 

 

Read More
Posted onChronic Failure

Hail to the Creep

by 61 Comments on Hail to the Creep
The Best and Brightest?

Back after a month in eastern Nevada, I picked up some information about Fullerton’s cop union president.

We first met Barry Coffman on these pages as the carb-packing ticket writer for “excessive horning,” a charge made up by the FPD as tickets were being handed out to honest citizens honking their horns in support of Kelly Thomas murder protesters outside the Fullerton Police Station. That strategy was organized by then Captain “Danny” Hughes who got to act as both bad cop and good cop all by himself by thoughtfully tearing up the tickets he himself had ordered handed out. Hughes and Coffman. What a team.

But back to the egregious Coffman, himself.

I have it on good authority that Coffman was re-elected  as head man of the Fullerton Police Officer’s Association, proving that being an otiose fathead who won’t even stick up for one of his own members is no obstacle to leadership in the FPOA.

Coffman had no opponent; apparently another cop challenged Coffman and was told he couldn’t run without naming a Vice President candidate. Whether or not such nonsense is actually memorialized in the FPOA by-laws in anybody’s guess, but I would bet not. Yes, the FPOA resembles nothing so much as a small, corrupt banana republic.

 

Read More
Posted onAbout Us

Sharon Quirk, Poor Little Rich Girl and The Myth of the Union/Corporation Dichotomy

by 269 Comments on Sharon Quirk, Poor Little Rich Girl and The Myth of the Union/Corporation Dichotomy

I was struck the other day by a post on the Voice of OC(EA) about Sharon Quirk that started out with Q complaining that there is now a target on her back by the GOP who want their Republican seat back. The rest of the post is the typical mush-drivel we’ve come to expect of the local media so I’ll let that pass.

What intrigued me was the absurdity of making yourself out to be a target by the very sorts of people who got you elected. What am I talking about? Check out this post from OC Political. Quirk got almost $300,000 funneled into her campaign account over the course of 18 days – laundered through various county Democrat Central Committees, including obscure Del Norte County – 800 miles away.

As expected, a lot of it came from public employee unions. But a lot of it also came from giant corporations like AECOM, Blue Shield, AEG, and of course, our good friends at Disney. So it would appear that Quirk was obviously looked favorably upon by these corporate behemoths, despite their subsequent attempts to distance themselves from their odd gifts to distant Democratic County Central Committees.

Which brings me to the point of this post.

The whining lefties are forever complaining that the lavish benefits, pay and massive pensions showered upon public employee unions are somehow a necessary counterbalance to all the misfeasance and excessive compensation of those greedy private business exec bastards. Of course it was always a false choice, but that falsity has never been made clearer by the fact of big corporations bellying up to Quirk’s bar.

The fact of the matter is that big corporations like big government. They are comfortable with it; they profit from it. Whether Republicans or Democrats are at the helm matters not a whit. Think big corporate subsidies, tax loopholes, and onerous regulations that chase small businesses out of business and you will start to get the picture. Big business likes balanced government budgets, and if that takes raising taxes on the rest of us, so be it. The very last thing they want is a small government advocate like Chris Norby. Think OC Business Council and you will understand that these people have no interest in anything other than a smoothly run plantation. You and I are the coolies that make the thing run for the benefit of our overseers.

Or to put it another way, the public employee unions and the big corporations both regard the taxpayer the same way: we are just pigeons to be plucked.

It’s actually rather amusing that Sharon Quirk is trying to gin up sympathy for her re-election against the big, mean Republicans, even before she is sworn in. Her dim-witted supporter may fall for that. She really doesn’t have anything to worry about.

Just ask Mickey Mouse.

 

 

 

 

Read More
Posted onChronic Failure

Barry Coffman: FPD Has A Cancer

by 173 Comments on Barry Coffman: FPD Has A Cancer

Yep, he said it. In reference to his own union member, Benjamin Lira.

Listen to the Barry Coffman interview on KFI, here. Scroll to the 23:40 mark and enjoy the Fullerton cop union boss try as hard as he can to bad-mouth a dues paying member of the FPOA!

First he says Lira is on the way out, a POBAR violation if uttered by anybody in authority; and of course after the embarrassing question about how come he isn’t defending his union member, and an awkward pause, we learn from Barry that Lira is a real malcontent, a cancer in the presumably healthy body tissue of the FPD. Which is pretty hard to swallow given the evident  Culture of Corruption in the department.

Comically, Coffman asks us who are we to believe, his own man, or the upstanding Michael Gennaco Report – a bucket full of pabulum coughed up by a paid hack in order to whitewash the felonious FPD and its command structure.

Say, what’s going on here? A union boss siding with management? Huh?

In response to the tricky question about how come his union didn’t bail out Ramos, Coffman (after another painful pause) exclaims that he and his boys just wanted the justice system to play out, a non-answer if ever there was one. He does admit that when the Thomas murder hit he and his fellow FPOA leaders were completely useless. We do know that they came onto this blog to post vulgar obscenities.

It’s hard not to relish the delicious double standard of the oh-so-ethical Barry C who never said a single word in public about Todd Major, Kelly Mejia, Albert Rincon, Vincent Mater, Kenton Hampton, Frank Nguyen, Cary Tong or any of the other FPOA miscreants whose behavior has been so amply demonstrated on these pages.

 

Read More
Posted onChronic Failure

Whatever Happened to April Leanne Baughman?

by 102 Comments on Whatever Happened to April Leanne Baughman?
To swerve and deflect

Haven’t heard that name lately? How about her alias, April Leanne Wilson?

She’s the FPD employee who (miraculously, considering the caliber of the detectives who work there) got caught last March stealing from the the evidence room at FPD Central. Here is Ms. Baughman’s court record.

Right now she’s free on bail after having ripped off more than $50K from the till.

To a certain extent you have to cut April some slack. After all, when you look around and see a culture of chaos, corruption, incompetence it must be hard for a person of marginal integrity not to give in to temptation.

According to police spokesholes, Baughman had been at it for quite some time. Which begs the inevitable question, who the Hell was in charge? Either nobody was doing inventories and audits, or the egregious Baughman had one or more accomplices helping her out. Will there be any accountability? Want odds?

Either way it’s another black eye for the department and its “leadership” who would have us believe everything is hunky dory at Commonwealth and Highland.

And before you feel obliged to credit the FPD for nabbing one of their own, consider what would have happened if Baughman were not a civilian employee. Would we ever have heard anything from the Culture of Cover up?

 

Read More