A week or so ago the Fullerton City Council reviewed the solicitation for a new garbage hauling contract. Again. FFFF shared the last instalment of the drawn out saga relating how “Dr.” Ahmad Zahra went bonkers because two of the companies offered big upfront payments recouped by a higher CPI multiplier.
The meeting droned on and on and finally the Council went along with yet another temporization – cutting the number of eligible responders to three – CR&R, Republic, and Valley Vista. Republic was told to eliminate its upfront payment plan and revise its fee schedule. The process will now drag on until September, a move that will surely benefit Republic, the current hauler.
Noticeably absent from the final three was EDCO – the original preferred vendor of city staff. Why they were not given the same chance as Republic to delete the big cash offer and rejigger their numbers is unknown. What is known is that Republic, the company that came in dead last in the first round of staff analysis, moves ahead with several nice comments from some of Fullerton’s Left Guard who seem to be terrified of change.
CR&R, you may remember offered what looked like a $4 million gift for the City to pave a few potholes. But companies like this don’t work for free and surely they can lower their fees by getting rid of the Trojan Horse gift. That’s nothing but a hidden tax, right? Just better hidden than EDCO’s or Republic’s.
Valley Vista will surely never get more than three votes since they contributed to the Fullerton Taxpayers for Reform PAC that went after Fullerton Boohoo darling Cannabis Kitty Jaramillo in 2024. Zahra and Charles won’t vote for them because of this political involvement although they certainly wouldn’t mind had Valley Vista given money to the dope lobby’s Working Families for Jaramillo PAC. The Fullerton Observer Sisters like to remind their readers about the bad, bad folks at VV.
But Valley Vista doesn’t need four or five votes, only three.
The Council also decided to let its members talk to vendors directly, something that they had prohibited themselves from doing, apparently. Will the they share who they talked with, and what about? I wonder.
Anyway, let the death march continue. Sure it’s a big deal, but there’s no reason this shouldn’t have been locked up a long time ago.
Right now it looks like Ms. Charles, the sanctimonious and self-important gasbag representing District 3 on the Fullerton City Council has no competition for re-election this November.
I suppose this is a testament to the apathy of the electorate because there should be at least one person willing to challenge the otiose uber-leftist whose constant stream of self-righteous and ignorant bullshit almost demands an opponent.
A visit to the City Clerk’s webpage listing candidate committees shows no one except Charles in the Third District.
This doesn’t mean that a non-committee candidate isn’t running, or that a potential opponent isn’t waiting to file the forms necessary to raise funds like a serious contender. But time is almost up. Candidates will be able to “pull papers” to run in just a few weeks. If they haven’t announced yet, at this late date, it seems unlikely.
Why?
Charles has taken lots positions that would undoubtedly be unpopular among responsible, taxpaying citizens outside the Fullerton Boohoo echo chamber. Let’s put aside her flip-flops on issues like the downtown noise regulations and the issue of private publications on city property. Instead, let’s focus on issues that would be pretty damaging to Charles once voters learn about them. They involve wasting money, or trying to. A lot of it.
First is her steadfast support of handing over $200,000 of public funds to support illegal aliens harassed by ICE. You can feel sympathy for people snagged by the ICE goons without wanting to use public funds to pay for their groceries.
That can’t be good…
Then there is the embarrassing matter of the so-called boutique hotel, where the Council approved massive entitlements on a property and then “sold” it for peanuts to build a massive and harebrained project on Santa Fe Avenue. The worst part was deeding over the property to a couple of inveterate con men who, after many years, haven’t turned a shovel of dirt on the site and never will. Providentially, that approval was Shana Charles’ very first vote.
Green means green. One way or another…
How about the issue of her income from the marijuana lobby – gained via her husband’s effort to get Cannabis Kitty Jaramillo elected in the 2024 D4 election. Her tribe is always blathering about the evils of money in campaigns; Jaramillo got $60,000 of Washington DC lobbyist cash working for her and $4000 went right into the Charles family wallet. Would the residents of D3 like a dispensary on State College?
I don’t want to forget the disastrous Trail to Nowhere that cost $2.5 million and has virtually no use. FFFF predicted that over and over again, although it wasn’t hard for anybody to foresee. The last half dozen times I have driven down Richman at various hours, I have yet to see a single user. Charles was stupid enough to fall for all the bullshit peddled by staff; either that or she knew it was nonsense and didn’t care. Does it make a difference?
Spinning, spinning…
If there is a tax on the November ballot Charles will have to take a stand. Spinning won’t help. She won’t get her 13% general sales tax increase, but there could be two 6.5% special sales taxes to vote for, infrastructure and “public safety.” Opposing these would send a signal that she doesn’t care about fixing the budget deficit she helped create: just a couple years ago she bragged about hiring more people.
She has to run on the state of the City and that state isn’t good. She’s been there for four years with nothing to show for it except foolish positions and non-stop, rambling lectures.
Update: a well-informed reader pointed has out that 7/7/26 was removed from the calendar in December 2025 because staff determined it was too close to Independence Day.
I have no idea why it wasn’t so designated on the CC’s schedule found on the City website – until this afternoon.
This does beg the question as to why the meeting wasn’t rescheduled as an official hearing to make determinations regarding the budget and find out the status of the search for a new money-raising consultant. There seems to be almost no sense of urgency about the fact that the City still doesn’t have a budget for this fiscal year.
I decided to watch the afternoon Fullerton City Council session about hiring a new trash hauler, yesterday. When it came time for questions directed to staff I learned a few things.
First, I realized the extent to which Ahmad Zahra blames one individual – Tony Bushala – for every thing he, Zahra, doesn’t like. And it’s got to the point where anything attributable to Bushala is something he, Zahra, doesn’t like. Even when the attribution is based on his own baseless paranoia and suspicion and egomania. It’s embarrassing.
That’s a mighty fine thing you did, Anthony…
This accounts for his outbursts yesterday to staff and special council about the origins of the upfront payment to the City by a couple of RFP respondents, EDCO and Republic. As noted here, the idea was mentioned by Mr. Bushala several months ago at a Budget Sustainability Committee meeting and that was it. There is no demonstrable tie between that brief occurrence and any of the trash haulers, except in the febrile brain of the dodgy “doctor” from Damascus. Nada. It was never mention in the first round of RFP submissions.
When Zahra couldn’t get staff or the lawyers to agree with him and condemn the notion of a big initial payment he became agitated and began a completely unprofessional diatribe.
It was good stuff for the handful of his Fullerton Crazy claque in attendance who also faithfully believe any nonsense peddled by Zahra and who remain completely incurious about Zahra’s own string of malfeasances starting with immigration and marriage fraud to get into the country.
I am gratified to know that Zahra is a reader of this blog. It’s really too bad he can’t learn anything from it. He is not the least bit opposed to hidden taxes, per se; quite the contrary. However what he and his pals really love is an officially adopted tax, out in the open, when the community proves it is worthy of the higher paid city government that the new revenue buys.
Of course it didn’t seem to occur to Zahra that his admission about the FFFF post undermined his conspiracy theory that Bushala was somehow, somewhere tied to the new proposals by EDCO and Republic.
I observe that a third proposal, by CR&R offered four million bucks, upfront for street repair. This appeared to be seen as some sort of a philanthropic gift. It was seen as such by Councilman Nicholas Dunlap. This is naiveté or dumbness. Nobody works for free, and the cost of that four mil is obviously wrapped up in CR&Rs rate structure that would obviously be lower without their apparent upfront largesse.
The City’s special council mentioned that a lawsuit described as a precedent by opponents of the upfront payment idea was not really precedent since the matter was returned to a lower appeals court where the matter was settled without adjudication. According to this chap an upfront deal repayment would have to be legally justified based on the value of the franchise and that would be his job. I’m confused by this since the proposals by EDCO and Republic do not involve in-lieu franchise fees at all, but rather describe one-time monetary payments, exclusive of the in-lieu fee. This needs clarification.
Why write about news when you can try to make your own! (Photo by Julie Leopo/Voice of OC)
Yes, indeed. In an editorial masquerading as some sort of news, Fullerton Observer sister Sikita Kennedy explained the failure of government and the ways in which that failure is dressed up to look like victory. This article appears to be an AI generated creation since the estimable Satskia has never shown this sort of perspicuity in the past, but, whatever. After you weed out the jargon some fundamental management truths emerge.
The topic of course is something almost nobody gives a rat’s ass about: getting rid of bike lockers at the train station, the reason given that they are underused. The awkward title shouts out “Fullerton’s Bicycle Lockers Spark Controversy Among Cyclists” as if an inanimate object has such puissance. Naturally, it’s the removal of said lockers that is causing Siska herself grief; not a solitary cyclist is interviewed or quoted in her essay.
But I digress. The topic is inconsequential, but the analysis of failure is quite remarkable and completely uncharacteristic. Kennedy seems to have finally discovered the cultural behavior of government bureaucracies that we have known all along. Let’s enjoy some of the fruits of her editorial labors:
Organizations in crisis rarely announce themselves as such.More often, they produce charts, reports, and performance metrics that tell a reassuring story — one that, on closer inspection, was shaped by the same decisions it purports to evaluate. This is one of the quieter dangers of institutional mismanagement: it doesn’t just damage an organization, it can generate the evidence that justifies its own continuation.
How perfectly true, and so descriptive of almost every staff and study report ever produced in Fullerton. The classic dodge is to answer a question that nobody asked.
“…a dispute over bicycle lockers is offering a textbook example of how low performance, manufactured by neglect, gets cited as the reason to eliminate the very thing being neglected.
Yes, indeed. Sort of sounds like the death-march noise ordinance fiasco, doesn’t it, wherein City failure to enforce codes results in the push to abandon the process of code enforcement altogether.
When managers make poor decisions, they typically face two options: change course or defend the course they’re on. Defense, in institutional settings, almost always involves data. The problem is that those same managers often control what data gets collected, how it gets measured, and how it gets reported.
Good Lord, Satkia, has had her come to Jesus revelation! The truth may yet set her free! How often have we seen a circling of the wagons, the manipulation of information to reinforce the error? Mostly data collection, crooked or otherwise, isn’t even necessary. Convoluted rhetoric often does the trick. Option number one never takes place.
A leader who has misallocated resources will tend to measure success in ways that don’t reveal the misallocation. A department head who has pursued the wrong strategy will frame performance indicators around the metrics where progress is easiest to show. Over time, the organization’s entire information infrastructure bends toward confirming decisions already made.
This is something we’ve seen time and time again. Throw out the jargon and it means this: “look over there.” The misdirection is so common as to be commonplace. This is what will happen when the City’s disastrous “fire fighter” ambulance driver chickens come home to the proverbial roost.
This is the classic mismanagement data trap: measuring outputs rather than outcomes, and then using those outputs to validate the decisions that produced them.
Amen, Sister, testify!
The “data trap” of measuring outputs was nowhere better seen than on the horrendously useless Trail to Nowhere, where the efforts were all about building something expensive and then patting yourself on the back for…building something expensive. But that wasn’t about a few piddling bike lockers, no, but the waste of $2,500,000, an irony lost on the Fullerton Observer editorial staff of two. The Observer Sisters will never expend a moment’s time worrying about actual users (or complete lack of same) on the “trail.”
One of the most common tools in this playbook is selective periodization — choosing a start date for measurement that makes current numbers look favorable by comparison. Applied to civic infrastructure, this often means measuring usage after a program has already been allowed to deteriorate, rather than tracking the arc from functional to neglected.
How funny. Siskia has had her epiphany, alright, but it sure is a selective enlightenment. Remember when staff tried to keep the ridiculous Waste on Wilshire going by citing low traffic on Wilshire after the street had been closed!
Organizations under poor leadership often commission external reviews that appear to provide independent accountability but are structured to confirm decisions already made. The questions given to reviewers shape the findings, and the questions come from the people who need favorable findings. The result carries the authority of objectivity while functioning as a mirror.
Let’s consider the very recent Grant Thornton report whose results were meant to cauterize a huge embarrassment without naming a single culprit or a single systemic failure. No outcries from the Observers, of course.
Cities do this too — with traffic studies, usage audits, and infrastructure assessments that are framed around the conclusion leadership has already reached. Whether that’s what’s happening with Fullerton’s active transportation data is a question advocates would do well to press publicly.
They sure do, Sitka. Who are you supposed to believe, your commonsense or the experts we have hired to back us up? Ahem, remember the “experts” hired to produce pro tax findings, pro development findings, pro this or pro that findings? In fact data supporting everything that the City Manager who hired them wants. The latest examples is that “traffic study” for the overbuilt Harbor/Hermosa project that will never in a million years stop the project as designed, from being built.
The antidote to data shaped by mismanagement is not more data — it’s differently sourced data, with different incentive structures attached to it. Independent audits are conducted by parties with no relationship to the decisions being evaluated. Performance metrics set before interventions begin, not after. Usage data is examined in the context of program accessibility, not in isolation.
Great Caesar’s Ghost! What a splendid statement of objective accountability and something that should be happening, at least occasionally, and not on some silly bike lockers, but on real issues where millions are spent, from hiring ambulance drivers to deciding if anybody is now going to use a new but previously failed park; on weather there is a chance in hell that anybody would patronize a “boutique” hotel at the Transportation Center.
There is a vast irony in the Observer’s new-found demand for objective standards to promote accountability – exactly the thing government employees dread. See, it’s the squalid world of professional management, and such accountability is not to be applied to government bureaucrats who are made of a finer material. They are working for us, see, and have a noble calling not to be subjected to accountability.
And it’s deliciously ironic that the new Observer spirit has been discovered due to some footling bike lockers, and not the decades long history of Fullerton disasters that nobody but FFFF has chronicled.
Might Sciatica Kennedy’s observations and suggestions be applied to future Fullerton mishaps? Bet not. But let’s enjoy them while we can.
Why did this go away? I don’t know, but I suspect that three councilmembers who voted for it lost interest or maybe decided it wasn’t worth the trouble, political or otherwise.
“Dr.” Ahmad Zahra and Shana Charles stirred up his usual claque to clamor against it, citing Fred Jung’s vaulting ambition, but failing to explain how, exactly, a charter would deliver an evil outcome.
I think it’s time to resurrect this idea, even though no one seems to want to chat about it. A lot of good could come from it. Despite the cries of horror from the Kennedy Sisters and their ilk, a new municipal organization could be created, with a strong, city-wide elected Mayor holding executive power and the accountability for it.
The “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” argument now seems absurd. The City is a breaking mess. The infrastructure is a disgrace and the finances seem to have been handed over to cluster of chimps. Things are not working. One only has to look at the budget disaster and the basic accounting errors to know it. Who knows what the proverbial “deep dive” into Fullerton’s personnel, purchasing, asset management and risk management might reveal?
When things don’t work, and haven’t worked for a long, time it sure looks a lot like an invitation to change.
But change is hard for everyone, especially when lots of people are involved in the making of it.
A couple months ago the City of Fullerton hired Grant Thornton to investigate a handful of financial transactions that resulted in an vast overstatement of the city’s General Fund.
Last night they reported on Task 1: investigating the awkward General Fund balance fuck up.
As expected was the conclusion that no nefarious intent was involved. Just some good old fashioned negligence and/or incompetence (these were not used by Grant Thornton who was completely diplomatic).
But all you had to do was read between the lines and the conclusions were, and are, damning.
According to the consultants these few transactions were the only thing they looked into; they were not hired to perform a full forensic audit. Well, okay. But the conclusions that they drew, and that informed their recommendations should have been perceived as a serious indictment of how the City’s finances operate, were accepted by a clueless city council without a whimper.
One transaction alone, the $2.9 million from redevelopment, should have sufficed to alarm all involved. The funds were moved without a concomitant debit to at least a temporary holding account – a basic principle of accounting called double entry book keeping, a fundamental concept of Accounting 101. It’s only been around for 600 years.
The big recommendation was to hire a competent Chief Financial Officer – a CPA knowledgeable in government accounting. There’s another $300,000 per annum. It seems like the budget and reporting reforms recommended by our consultant may not be able to be applied to the upcoming budget due to lack of time, which just seems so typical of Fullerton Futility.
The little that Grant Thornton did delve into suggests a fundamental failure of practices and procedures that is the result of years, if not decades of organization entropy because of lack of managerial leadership. When we consider the completely unqualified City Managers like Chris Myers, Joe Felz, Ken Domer, and Eric Levitt – appointed for reasons of political maneuvering or convenience – things start to make more sense. Combine that with the fiscal and budget responsibilities being rolled up to Administration Directors whose professional accounting abilities were (and are) dubious, you get a process running on inertia.
Naturally, nobody at the meeting had the courage to say any of that, although the Grant Thornton folks sure must have spent a lot of time trying to figure out how not to say it.
Grant Thornton has decided that someone else should perform Task 2 – the generation of revenue to bail the City out of its fiscal embarrassment. They say it will save the City money to hire somebody else with a better “wheelhouse” to perform this task, a generosity foolishly lauded by one councilmember, but that begs the question of why Grant Thornton was hired to perform the task in the first place, a question whose answer will not be forthcoming.
My guess is that GT doesn’t want to have anything to do with talking about new taxes and there’s an end to it.
Fullerton Boohoo comes in all shapes and sizes, but its members share one thing in common: a desperate drive to support Democrat Party candidates. Fullerton Forward, the brain child of someone called Steven Sherry is no exception. “Building a Better Future for All Fullertonians” is Sherry’s slogan #1. Slogan #2 is about “values”:
We met Fullerton Forward a few weeks ago as Sherry orchestrated a comical People’s Council meeting with limited pizza. The Fullerton Observer wouldn’t say who was behind the get together that attracted the cream of Fullerton Crazy’s crop, and that appointed immigration fraud “Dr.” Ahmad Zahra as the People’s Mayor.
According to the Fullerton Forward website, an individual named Linda Gardner is on the group’s 3 person “advisory council” whatever that title may mean. Here’s her bio:
Linda “…has been active in local and state politics for many years, serving as President of Democrats of North Orange County for six years and continuing to be an active member. Linda has actively worked on campaigns for California Governor, Senate and Assembly as well as Fullerton City Council and major propositions and recalls.
Linda is currently a Delegate for the California Democratic Party. She is passionate about positive change for the future of Fullerton.”
Sherry a former Democrat lobbyist, boasts about himself:
For over a decade, he has also worked in political campaigns, founding his own consulting firm, NewWave Strategies, in 2020. Through his firm, Steven has raised millions for clients nationwide and built highly effective, resourceful advertising campaigns.
Most of this is undoubtedly made up, and after you finish this post you may think the same thing.
Andre, all smiles for cannabis…
This guy looks an awful lot like the under-employed Andre Charles, husband of the insufferable hot air bag Shana whose employment history is sketchy, at best.
Anyhow, Fullerton Forward has finally submitted the necessary Form 460 required of political action committees after the June primary. This document is instructive for lots of reasons.
Cannabis Kitty Jaramillo
First, we can see several of Fullerton’s cyphers who contributed – like the failed Cannabis Kitty Jaramillo, who sued the City so she could get elected; and our old friend, the pathetic election fraud participant,Diane Vena,who endorsed Jaramillo then signed the nominating papers of the phony candidate/confessed perjurer Scott Markowitz.We see you angry liitle eye doctor Anjali Tapadia; and you too, developer shake down artist Elizabeth Hansberg; Aha, over there, indignant front parlor antique, Karen Lloreda, recalled from the Dana Point City Council, and come to Fullerton to roost in the municipal rafters.
Sherry raised almost $17K, which looks okay. But wait. There are only two main contributors:
As we will see, one is frequent Council irritant Helen Higgins, and the other is some dude named Joel Maus, which means “mouse” in English. I have no idea what his motivation is. Maybe he’ll drop by to tell us. He’s the $5K “small business” moneybags.
Like Andre Charles, Mr. Sherry seems to believe that personally doing well by doing good is his life’s path. How’s that? you ask.
Because according to the Form 460 Schedule E, Sherry paid himself almost $6000 for the campaign he ran against Fred Jung in the primary, a campaign that only lasted a couple months. I won’t even share the percentages of Sherry’s cost versus the totals he spent and raised, because the Form 460 Schedule E totals don’t add up to the total expenditures listed on the Form 460 top summary.
The best part of Sherry’s activities, with his name almost obscured, was this remarkable payment he made to himself: $4560.80 for “fundraising.” WTF?
I love the amount this honest and transparent political action committee paid to scofflaw Mario Marovic for holding their fundraiser at “Madero 1899,” even as his fake Irish pub across the street still illegally squats on the Commonwealth sidewalk. Did the dummy Sherry list the cost of the Big Fundraising Party twice, somehow? If so, the numbers still wouldn’t add up to the summary page, so it hardly matters.
Naturally, Sherry paid his tribute to the Democrat Party of OC – $500 on April 27th – confirming the purely partisan nature of his new plaything.
By the way, I’m informed that Sherry’s self-serve creation is also now the object of an FPPC complaint, dealing with illegal campaign sign disclosure rules.
Finally, we are we really to believe somebody who spent a lot to raise a little, and who, as treasurer and “Executive Director” of a PAC can’t seem to add, has “raised millions for nationwide clients?” Yeah, sure, Steve, whatever you say.
Almost half the money raised came from only two donors. If I were on that “Advisory Council” I’d be asking some serious questions of Mr. Sherry. Of course that won’t happen.
A week ago the Fullerton Observer Kennedy Sisters passed along a confused post about the City Council reviewing an appeal of a Planning Commission denial of the 32 unit project at Hermosa and Harbor, such appeal occurring on June 16th.
It’s not unlike the Fullerton Observer “amateurs” to post stupid, befuddled, or erroneous stuff, but this is perplexing even to Observer observers.
It looks like an old post has been carelessly updated, but why? My first thought was did somebody like Ahmad Zahra or Shana Charles want this to come back – maybe because it wasn’t officially “tabled” as an issue? This has happened before. The agenda for the June 16th meeting hasn’t been published yet, so it seems possible that somebody alerted the Kennedy Sisters that this was returning for some reason. Our first sharp-eyed commenter below point out that the issue was forecast in the 6/2/26 agenda for the next meeting to pass a resolution defending the appeal. Why? I don’t know other than this is a due diligence exercise. Maybe this is where the Sisters got the idea of a rolling issue.
It looks like mostly just another Observer gagglefuck – a garbled post carelessly published by the Sisters. Sadly, Fullerton Boohoo/Fullerton Self-righteous will no doubt exercise another “we need housing” circus to embarrass the Council majority and to take a shot at the hated NIMBYies in north Fullerton.
Back in the 1950s there was a TV show called “Queen for a Day.” Typical American women got to compete for the stupid title and probably won some housewife-drudgery prize like a washing machine or a vacuum cleaner.
The booby prize…
“Dr.” Ahmad Zahra got a similarly useless tile the other day, when a dozen Council irritants selected him as “The People’s Mayor.” Except that Zahra didn’t even get a useful home appliance. Instead he got a Fullerton Crazy diploma in a plastic frame.
