Last night my compadre the Harpoon penned an angry response to words attributed to outgoing “Acting” Chief Kevin Hamilton that Fullerton was “a town under attack.”
It was a good try, but Harpoon missed the point. Fullerton is under attack!
Fullerton is under attack by a rogue police force that couldn’t control its own uniformed hoodlums, even if it wanted to. And apparently it doesn’t.
Fullerton is under attack by a sclerotic trio of antiquated imbeciles who will never take responsibility for their own failure of leadership.
Fullerton is under attack by a bureaucracy that has fraudulently duped the water rate payers for at least 15 years by tacking on a 10% tax on their water bills without a single effort to inform them about it. Every step of the way in this squalid scam the City Council nodded agreement, and said nothing.
Fullerton is under attack from the Redevelopment Army of jobbers, fixers, bag, men, whores, and other assorted camp followers who want to divert funds from necessary public use into the pockets of favored “developers,” consultants, and lobbyists. And our Three Sclerotic Tree Sloths? Bamboozled? Of course not. These supposedly staunch conservatives are hooked on the smack of Central Government Economic Planning like a street hype is to his junk.Jones even referred to Redevelopment money as candy to be handed out to deserving kids.
Think the threat is false? Even now the Three Dry Wells are pursuing a legal battle to illegally broaden Fullerton’s Redevelopment zone into areas where there is no blight, a basic legal requirement.
Fullerton is under attack by an ignorant, somnolent, rude, self-righteous Turgid Trio that has left the city’s infrastructure a mess, the citizens in fear of their safety, and budget reserves depleted.
Yes Fullerton is under attack. Harpoon got one thing right. We are Fullerton. And we’re fighting back
The old one lasted four months and the one before that hightailed it for the tall grass when the going got tough. Boy did he get going.
Anyway, the new man is 28 year FPD veteran Captain Dan Hughes, who was the boss of all those rogue cops we’ve been telling you about lately, so that’s a real bad sign right there. Was he part of the report write-and-rewrite perpetrated by the killers of Kelly Thomas? Such things are not for the public to know, and you can bet your last nickel City Manager Joe Felz hasn’t got the huevos to find out. Hughes also got kudos from folks for tearing up the “excessive horning” tickets of which he was seen orchestrating the issuance. ¡No bueno, numero dos!
Anyway II, the OC Weekly’s Brandon Ferguson tells about it here. Follow his link to the vapid Fullerton Chamber of Commerce website where its writer manages to scribble twelve paragraphs on Fullerton’s police chief carousel without a single word or even oblique reference to murders, perjury, assaults, sexual battery, theft, fraud, etc., etc.Too bad the Fringies® are over, or else we’d wave a real winner there in the stoogery category.
The wine flowed like water. Or was it the other way around?
In our previous article about Fullerton’s MWD rep-almost-for-life Jim Blake we received an interesting comment from havegunwilltravel, one of our frequent semi-coherent trolls describing Jim Blake as some sort of wealthy philanthropist who has been slaving away for free on the MWD Board of Directors. Here is his/her comment:
Jim Blake, as the City’s MWD representitive gets no pay, and no pension, and no benefits. And doesn’t even ask for mileage reimbursements. He could by and sell Tony Bushala, 100 times over, and still have a pile of gold. So get your facts straight.
But check out this OC Watchdog article by Teri Sforza about the massive amount of expenses racked up by MWD directors. Oh, oh. There’s Mr. Moneybags Blake piling up over $10,000 in “travel” in less than two year’s worth of toiling in the MWD salt mines. I’d love to see those receipts!
Living high on the public hog is par for the course to certain self-entitled folks who seem to think their “service” justifies all kinds of self-indulgence – reflected in behavior like parking in handicapped spaces when you’re not supposed to.
According to our Friend Scott Moxley over at the OC Weekly, the mother of Kelly Thomas, Cathy Thomas has sued our illustrious District Attorney, Tony Rackauckas. It seems she wants to gain access to materials collected by the DA about the murder of her son by officers of the Fullerton Police Department.
Naturally, the DA said no, forcing Ms. Thomas to sue.
It sure would be nice for someone outside of law enforcement to takle a look at just how the DA came up with the dubious theory that only two cops were implicated in criminal activity; that Officer Joe Wolfe had no idea what was going on just 15 feet from where he was standing; or why he exculpated Hampton and Blatney who not only made made no effort to stop Cicinelli’s tasering and beatdown on Kelly, but seemed to have piled on; his take on the role of Sergeant Craig who seems to have coordinated mop-up operations while the dying man was waiting for hospital transportation; his reasoning behind not charging superiors in a blatant criminal conspiracy to cover up the misdeeds of the McKinley Six.
Some creatures in Nature’s realm need to mass produce their potential offspring. It’s a numbers game. Sea turtles lay thousands upon thousands of eggs in desperate hope that at least a few will return to the sea and grow up to be happy sea turtles.
In politics, the act of desperation is reflected in blind mailings to all voters in the vain hope that a few voters will respond. Yes, it sure is desperate. In the reptilian campaign to save the scaly hides of the Three Dithering Dinosaurs desperation has set in, all right. You might call it a last gasp.
Here’s a very expensive mailer they just sent out to everybody, anybody, trying to get folks to rescind their signature on the pro-recall petition. But they have zero idea who has signed the petitions. Talk about desperation! Just to show how inept the Three Sluggish Sloths’ handlers are, they even sent one to – Tony Bushala!
If you happen to get one of these in the mail you can do the Recall a favor. Write in: Go Screw Yourself, Ackerman, and mail it in. See, Pat McPension, the kook who hired all those crooked Fullerton cops, and who makes almost $20,000 a month in retirement, has to pay for the postage!
Recall Reply Mail Contest!
Show the anti-recall committee your creative writing skills by scratching something fun onto their reply cards. Take a picture, upload it to www.tinypic.com and post it in the comments before you mail it away!
For years and years the City of Fullerton has been adding ten percent to the cost you and I pay for our water and re-directing this money to Fullerton’s General Fund; the fund that pays for City Councilmen Jones’ and Bankhead’s pay and perks, and that also pays for Fullerton’s pensions, including the mammoth pension pulled in by Councilmember and former Police Chief Pat McKinley.
Forget for a moment the fact that California’s Constitution prohibits governments from charging more for services than they really cost, and consider Proposition 218, passed by the voters in 1996. It says that the government can’t dress up taxes and call them fees. It requires justification of such charges and public transparency. Justification and transparency, two commodities in real short supply in Fullerton.
The 10% “in-lieu fee” that the City has been adding (and hiding) in your water bill total is, and always was a fraud, and illegal.
Who wants to put lipstick on the pig?
Coincidentally, our asinine councilmember, F “Dick” Jones was first elected in 1996. And that means for every year of his rude, loud-mouthed tenure on the Fullerton City Council he has been approving this rip-off. Of course his sleepy pal Don Bankhead was trudging right along side him every crooked mile of the way.
They ain't very smart, but they sure is slow...
Since the gross rater revenue runs into the tens of millions every year, the 10% rip off has sure piled up. I estimate the total to be somewhere between $25,000,000 and $30,000,000 since 1997 alone. That’s a lot of dough, and I really have to wonder, will Jones, Bankhead and now McKinley offer the water ratepayers of Fullerton a refund of this misdirected money?
Politicians are forever saying asinine things and then denying they said them. Small time politicians like our own mutton head Don Bankhead have been getting away with this sort of thing for years. Televised council meetings have helped expose the intra-noggin confusion that exists in minds like Bankhead’s, but youtube has really been invaluable.
A while back we ran a post that highlighted Bruce Whitaker rightfully taking Bankhead to task for sharing his opinion that Fullerton would be ghost town without Redevelopment. No, no said Bankhead, testy-like. He really said “downtown Fullerton.” Forget that neither would be a ghost town without Redevelopment – that’s just Big Gummint Bankhead passing along all the lies he’s swallowed over the years, and of course his own campaign literature year after dreary year – taking credit for “revitalizing” DTF over and over and over and over and over again.
Here’s what Bankhead really said, verbatim, an insult to the hundreds of businesses in DTF and in the rest of the city that never took a nickel of Bankhead’s largess:
It looks like our city may be in for another lawsuit. Check out this letter that was sent from the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association just before Turkey Day (emphasis mine):
Mr. Joe Felz, City Manager
City of Fullerton
303 W Commonwealth Avenue
Fullerton,CA 92832
Re: Water Department “In Lieu Fees”
Jack Dean, a friend of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, has brought to our attention that the City of Fullerton pads the rates charged to water customers in order to transfer funds from the Water Fund to the General Fund. These transfers appear in the City’s Budget under Water Fund expenses and General Fund revenue as a 10% in-lieu franchise fee. We believe the fee and revenue transfers are illegal.
If a private company provided water service to the residents of Fullerton, the City could charge the private company a negotiated franchise fee for occupying public rights of way with its pipelines. That is not the case in Fullerton, however, as the City operates its own municipal water utility. The rates the City may charge are governed by the California Constitution, which limits rates to just the amount required to provide service, and prohibits transferring rate revenue for use elsewhere.
California Constitution article XIII D § 6(b) states in relevant part: “(1) Revenues derived from the fee or charge shall not exceed the funds required to provide the property related service. (2) Revenues derived from the fee or charge shall not be used for any purpose other than that for which the fee or charge was imposed.”
We successfully litigated this issue several years ago in lawsuits against the cities of Roseville and Fresno. The courts in those two cases ruled that a city’s utility enterprise can reimburse the General Fund for actual, documented expenditures incurred on behalf of the utility, such as the utility’s use of the City Attorney’s services, or the utility’s share of a common insurance fund. However, the utility cannot serve as a supplemental source of revenue for the General Fund. As the court in the Roseville case said:
“[T]he in-lieu fee violates section 6(b) of Proposition 218 in a more direct way. Roseville concedes that ‘[r]evenue from the in [-]lieu franchise fee is placed in [Roseville’s] general fund to pay for general governmental services. It has not been pledged, formally or informally[,] for any specific purpose.’ This concession runs afoul of section 6(b)(2) that ‘[r]evenues derived from the fee or charge shall not be used for any purpose other than that for which the fee or charge was imposed.’ It also contravenes section 6(b)(5) that ‘[n]o fee or charge may be imposed for general governmental services.’”Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn. v. City of Roseville (2002) 97 Cal.App.4th 637, 650.
By this letter we are formally requesting the City of Fullerton to stop charging the 10% in-lieu franchise fee, and to adjust its customers’ water rates accordingly.
If the City believes its 10% in-lieu franchise fee is legally defensible, then please consider this letter a request under the California Public Records Act for copies of the study(s) and/or accounting(s) that itemize General Fund costs on behalf of the Water Fund totaling exactly 10% each year.
Your response by December 10, 2011, would be appreciated.
Sincerely,
Timothy A. Bittle
Director of Legal Affairs
The tax became a big issue back in July, when a guy named Jack Dean from the Fullerton Association of Concerned Taxpayers pointed out the illegality of this water tax to the council (during an attempt to double water rates.)
Well, it’s been four months now, and Fullerton residents are STILL PAYING that illegal tax on every water bill.
Of course Bankhead, Jones and McKinley are waiting for the city attorney to find a way to squeeze that tax through a legal loophole, instead of rescinding it and refunding the money they’ve been helping the city steal from taxpayers since Prop 218 passed fifteen years ago.
The OC Weekly’s Marisa Gerber has just written a detailed and painful catalog of offenses perpetrated by the Fullerton Police Department over a period of many years. It’s on the cover of this week’s edition.
No reasonable person can read this litany of arrogant terror and error, without concluding that the FPD sank deep into a Culture of Corruption under former chief and current councilmember, Pat McKinley; and that McKinley’s diseased poultry is still coming home to roost – two and a half years after his retirement.
But, as they say, where there is a will, there is way, and the anti-recall clowns will never acknowledge any of this scandal. They have far too much at stake – financially and emotionally.
Well, they can bury their heads in the sands, but the denial isn’t going to help. Their “esteemed” councilmen have dozed away, and looked the other way when all this was happening. It seems they thought their job was to attend ribbon cuttings, enjoy free drinks at Chamber of Commerce mixers, and give away millions of dollars worth of property to their campaign contributors.
And having everyone kiss your pale, withered butt means never having to say you’re sorry.
For Bankhead, Jones, and now McKinley, there has never been a thin dime’s worth of accountability.
Last spring Dean Francis Gochenour, 52, was arrested in Fullerton for suspicion of drunk driving and was taken to the Fullerton jail. He never left. Not alive, anyway.
In the early morning hours of April 15, 2011 Gochenour was discovered in a holding cell, dead. Death by apparent “hanging” was passed out by the cops to the media, although what he was hanging from and by what means wasn’t elaborated. Here’s the brief news clip.
Almost immediately, however, stories began to emanate from the basement of the police HQ to the effect that Gochenour had been demeaned and taunted by the arresting officer; that he had been admonished by the cop to kill himself; that the cop’s behavior had been witnessed and or overheard by a jail employee and reported to his bosses; that a superior had confronted the officer in question, whereupon the latter tried to smash his DAR to destroy evidence; but that said evidence was retrieved.
He was not like you Rotarians. I mean he was not a credible witness. And now he's dead. I guess we could do another one of those "in-house" investigations we excel at.
It would not be entirely out of character for a Fullerton cop to urge an arrestee to commit suicide, given what we’ve seen of the thuggish behavior of our police lately. Is that what happened? Exactly how Gochenour died is not clear. In April it seemed a lot less suspicious than it does now, especially since FPD spokesmen have been shown to play fast and loose with the truth.
All of which begs the questions: who was the cop involved and what is his current employment status? In Fullerton, such things are shrouded behind a nearly impenetrable curtain.
