Aren’t ya just sick and tired of watching our city council continue vote on things because they say it’s “mandated.” I can think of dozens of times hearing O’l Doc Hee Haw holler “we don’t have a choice cause it’s man-dated” or “it’s the law.” Now, when was the last time you ever heard of any city councilman going to jail because he voted his conscience against something really stupid?
The reality is that our allegedly conservative Republican political representatives are indulging their own high price, big-government sentiments, and hiding behind policies established by one of the most liberal legislatures in the nation – and of course continually giving away the store to public employee unions.
Friends, the next time you hear someone say “it’s mandated” or, “it’s the law” tell ’em to prove it. And proving it doesn’t mean saying it’s true because you heard it from the City Attorney who is shilling for some staff make-work project or other.
With a little digging I have discovered that our old small government pal Matthew J. Cunningham, who raked in hundreds of thousands of bucks doing $200 an hour make-work for Rob Reiner’s tax-and-redistribute Children and Families Commission has found a new gig. Or, as is more likely the case, has had a gig given to him by his repuglican overlords.
A year ago FFFF exposed the hypocrisy of this guy making a small fortune off of the nanny statists and social engineers at the Children & Family scam. After that sweet run was terminated due to uncomfortable exposure, Cunningham landed a contract with the social engineers at the Orange County Transportation Authority to do…well, I’m not real sure.
It might be instructive to remember that two targets of Cunningham’s tiresome tongue treacle, Bill Campbell and Kurt Pringle, were OCTA Board members when he got this new arrangement last November. I wonder if this contract was result of an honest RFP or if was just laddled out to Mr. C. behind closed doors.
Here’s the agreement, noting Mrs. Cunningham as the “Principal” of the operation and the Mr. as “Project Manager.”
Hmmm. $30K a year with a scope of work that seems ridiculously inconsequential. Basically it entails reading city agendas for transportation issues and telling the OCTA who’s on city councils and going to some meetings. Tellingly, there is no listed OCTA project manager named to ride heard on the egregious wordsmith suggesting that OCTA contract quality control may well be no better than that exercised by the C & F Commissariat.
Well, I guess this means we’ll be doing a public records request for work product and billing records.
P.S. Please note that Pacific Strategies is still using the phony “Suite C” address – hilarious given that the Cunninghams operate their business, whatever it does, out of their house.
Every government agency displays a tendency to circle its wagons, defend incompetent behavior and keep outside scrutiny….well, outside. A notable exception appears to be the County of Orange’s Performance Auditor, whose office just completed a scathing report on County executives gettting unjustified pay raises with the assent of the CEO, and just as bad, giving away the farm when it came to negotiating sweetheart deals with the other County “family,” er, union members.
And juxtaposed to this is the typical behavior County CEO Tom Mauk, who has presided over the disaster and who, rather than letting his HR director quit in disgrace, and fixing the catastrophe he helped create, has apparently talked the incompetent Carl Crown into staying on another year so he can “negotiate” another disastrous deal with Nick “Bullhorn” Berardino’s union. He’s circling the wagons, hard.
Here’s a good recap by the Register’s Kimberly Edds.
The real question is what are the County Supervisors going to do about this mess? In a Voice of OC(EA) post our Supervisor, Shawn Nelson seemed outraged. He should be. Let’s hope the Gang of Five will finally shoot straight – and get rid of their CEO, Tom Mauk.
I couldn't have done it without a real dedicated Board of Supervisors...
We found out today that Wayne Quint, the head boss of the Deputy Sheriff’s union is quitting – supposedly to take a job at the State. Well the State is so effed-up it’s hard to imagine anybody making it any worse, even somebody with no identifiable job skills.
Or judgment. Consider Quint’s ill-conceived plan to spent hundreds of thousands of bucks to support the carpetbagging assclown, Harry Sidhu. Apparently Quint was so scared of Shawn Nelson that he was willing to squander a fortune of his member’s dues on the boob Sidhu.
Supervisor material? Wayne Quint thought so.
Come to think of it, maybe his members will be glad to see him go, too.
Among nearly unknown local governmental agencies, the Fullerton Arboretum Authority must rank pretty high on the list. Its 26 acres are tucked away between the CSUF baseball fields and the 57 Freeway. And according The OC Register, here, the Authority failed to reveal salary data of its employees as required by John Chiang, the State Controller. They faced a $5000 fine.
Arboretum staff claim they have no record of ever receiving the notice from Chiang. Which is either an indictment of Chiang, the USPS or of Arboretum Director Greg Dyment’s front office. But apparently they have contacted the Controller’s office and are off the naughty list.
The topic caused me to visit the Arboretum website. Although I couldn’t find a list of the Authority Commissioners on the website, I discovered that there is something called the OC Agricultural and Nikkei Heritage Museum on the grounds and that there is actually a “civil rights in California” exhibit at this facility. Civil rights? That seems like a pretty long stretch for a botanical garden, although the connection with Japanese WWII internment is clear enough. Still, I’m wondering what the connection is between a botanical garden and Nikkei history in the first place, other than that Japanese-Americans were farmers and nurserymen – as were lots of non-Japanese.
Anyway, as a joint venture between the City, the Redevelopment Agency, and CSUF it might behoove us to learn more about the operation of this government agency.
At the end of the last City Council meeting on April 5 Councilman Don Bankhead, supported by fellow Councilman Pat McKinely, requested that the agenda of the next council meeting on April 19 include an item to remove the term “acting” from the title of the job currently held by Joe Felz. Joe Felz was appointed Acting City Manager last December following the retirement of Chris Meyer.
Joe Felz certainly has a great deal of experience working for Fullerton. According to the city’s December 2010 press release he began working for Fullerton while still in college. He served as Director of the Parks and Recreation Department in 2007 following a two year stint as assistant to Meyer when he was City Manager.
Is Joe Felz the right person to hire as City Manager, a position that currently pays $166,250.00 per year, plus benefits? Don Bankhead and Pat McKinley seem to think so. McKinley worked for the city for over 15 years himself as Chief of Police, and Don Bankhead has been on the city council for over 22 years and also worked for Fullerton’s Police Dept. for many, many years before that.
Is Felz a good candidate for the job? Maybe, but is he the best person we can get for the money? We may never know, because two city insiders on the council want to hire another one for one of the highest paid and certainly the most powerful position in the city government. Shouldn’t the city conduct a search to find the best candidates for such an important job? They did for the Chief of Police position after McKinley retired from FPD.
Bankhead seems to be in a big hurry to hire Felz permanently because he is “a little tired of using the term acting city manager.” Is it possible that Bankhead is just tired in general and doesn’t want to bother with a job search? Don’t we deserve to know that our City Manager is the best person for the job, and not just the one that has been around for the longest amount of time and knows the most people?
Every now and then we like to remind our Friends about Fullerton’s recent history. We did it here, in a post on the arrogant mismanagement of Fullerton by former City Manager, James L. Armstrong. We noted that in 2001, after seven years’ worth of failure in Fullerton, he failed all the way to the top job in tony Santa Barbara.
But, alas, Poor Jim has run afoul of the cops up there, and, recently was taken to task by a blog for his efforts to stall the release of information about a city program that subsidized houses for – city employees! Too bad Armstrong mistakenly cc’d his sentiments to the very people who were making the public records request!
Jim Armstrong hard at work shoveling...well, you know what he's shovelling.
Here’s an article from Tim Cavanaugh at Reason, having some fun with Rob Reiner’s big government First Five Program.
The best part is the reference to our old friend Matthew J. Cunningham. Follow the links all the way back to a 2006 Flash Report blog post Cunningham did on the program – before he got hooked up with all that Children and Families green!
And here is a tale in The Voice of OC(EA) about how our local branch is suing the State to keep their stash from going to help support MediCal! It seems these people are really, really desperate to keep their gravy train rolling along. After all, the Executive Director of the OC branch makes $327,000 a year in salary and benefits. His job? Handing out cash. Nice work if you can get it.
Right now the First Five superstructure is tottering and about to collapse. Let’s help give it a push.
The other day we re-ran a post from last year questioning how repuglican yakmouth Hugh Hewitt was qualified to be on OC’s version of Rob Reiner’s tax and redistribute Children and Families Commission. See, we didn’t believe he could possibly meet the requirements for membership defined in the County ordinance.
Watching yesterday’s Board meeting provided some enlightenment and showed how much Supervisor BillCampbell, who chairs this ultra-liberal commission, wants Hewitt on there. Badly.
Yes. It's a Do Tank.
As Campbell explained, Hewitt does indeed qualify in the education category. How? Because he is a director of the local branch of something called Young Life. I googled the name and found this. Not much to go on. No list of directors, so we’ll just have to take Hugh’s word for it. But check it out. It’s a Christian-based program for adolescents. This has zero to do with 0-5 child development and nothing to do with any professional qualifications for anything, so at least now we can be completely satisfied that Hewitt’s appointment was always bogus.
But as they say on TV infomercials: wait, there’s more!
According to Supervisor Shawn Nelson, who objected to Hewitt’s appointment, the latter missed seven meetings in a twelve moth period, and, per the code, was automatically removed from the Commission. Of course the Commission staff never notified the Board of Supervisors as the law requires. Hewitt was simply permitted to keep participating in the few meetings he was able to make, and was casually “re-appointed” along with the rest of the incumbents. And on that subject Nelson demonstrated that no solicitation for new members had ever been made – also required by the law.
So there you have it. A packed, opaque Commission doing whatever the hell it damn well pleases, and answerable to nobody, except presumably, its grossly overpaid Executive Director and his protector Bill Campbell.
Here’s a post we ran last summer. Why is it timely? Beacuse I noticed on Tuesday’s Board of Supervisor’s agenda an item to reappoint all of Supervisor Bill Campbell’s minions on the OC Children and Families Commission – including Hugh Hewitt – who is not legally qualified to be on the Commission in the first place.
Empires of Hypocrisy World Tour
P.S. Apparently you can join Hewitt on a cruise! If you decide to go be sure to ask him to explain the complicity of a “conservative” on a big, liberal tax-redistributionist scheme. Let us know if you get a coherent answer!
– admin
And what useful purpose does he serve there?
According to the State Health and Safety Code, and the County Code that created the “First Five Commissions” (pursuant to liberal activist Rob Reiner’s successful tax and redistribute Prop 10), the commissions are made up of people in the kiddie welfare biz.
Which brings us to Hugh Hewitt, whom Gustavo Arellano has described as a “conservative yakmouth.” We’ll leave aside the conservative tag for a bit and reflect upon the fact that Hewitt is a lawyer, talking head, writer (when not being ghost written for by Matthew J. Cunningham), etc.
Here are the minimum qualifications, per the Code, for the membership category in which Hewitt is enrolled:
A representative of a local child care resource or referral agency, or a local child care coordination group, or a local organization for prevention or early intervention for families at risk, etc…
Say what?
Since Hewitt is clearly not recognizable by the Code’s definition, we are entitled to inquire and speculate about the real reason this ‘pug is on the Commission. Could it be simply to help ratify contracts to his pals and buddies at the behest of Commission Chairman Bill Campbell, the avuncular cipher who represents the 3rd District on the County Board of Supervisors? Campbell appointed him.
That's not a road apple. That's equine feces!
And maybe he is there to help his old friend Cunningham put some sort of conservative polish on this big, liberal road apple.
