Our geriatric and corrupt County Supervisor is in big trouble. How do I know? Because Doug Chaffee sent out a hit piece mailer against his opponent, Sunny Park of Buena Park. It’s pretty unusual for an incumbent Supervisor to even acknowledge the existence of their opponent so Chaffee’ is scrambling with only 6 weeks until the election.
But that’s not the point of the post. Dig this:
Bud Chaffee goes for ironic humor…
Notice that first bit, the part about Sunny swiping campaign signs? Since when does Chaffee even think that’s a problem? After all, he helped his wife, Pilferin’ Paulette, hide the campaign signs she stole in their garage back in 2018. I don’t recall Chaffe ever reflecting on the “unfairness” to Paulette’s opponents, or the “jeopardy to election integrity.” What a swine.
Crime doesn’t always pay in Fullerton…
Anyway, the big difference between the two cases is that Sunny took her chances in court, and won her case. Doug Chaffee’s old lady pleaded guilty to get her record expunged and then claimed she was never convicted of anything. In fact, during the 2020 OC School Board election she sued Tim Shaw of La Habra for claiming that she had been convicted. She and her husband decided to play the political martyr routine.
The head and the hat were a perfect fit.
Well nobody ever accused the Chaffee Crime Clan of honesty, so there’s that. And nobody ever accused them of ironic humor, so they’re breaking new ground.
Slimy politicians trying to buy votes is nothing new. It should be illegal. Hell, it probably is. Orange County Supervisors do it out of their offices all the time and always have. But this effort from the rodent-like Doug Chaffee, our man in Santa Ana takes the proverbial cake.
Free!
I have no idea how many of his constituents would want to do anything with Chaffee, but I bet there aren’t many. But Chaffee’s unpopularity isn’t the point. The point is people working out of a public facility doing campaign work is illegal. And that’s exactly what this.
The Fullerton Collaborative hosted a candidate forum, which featured some good questions and some not so good. It featured 5 out of 6 City Council candidates running in Districts 3 and 5 this year. Shana Charles received a hall pass and did not stay for the forum.
Ahmad Zahra was his usual full of himself self. The notorious man who never wasted a selfie opportunity was untruthful, effortlessly deceived the audience, remaining true to his duplicitous self.
SERIAL LIAR
Here’s a list of the many, oh, so many lies.
LIE #1: “The district I’ve called home for the last 21 years.”
TRUTH: Zahra’s voter registration record doesn’t agree.
LIE #2: “As a medical doctor.”
TRUTH: Zahra is not a licensed medical doctor or a medical professional of any kind.
LIE #3: “The budget needs to be reflective of the needs of our community.”
TRUTH: Zahra wasted a million dollars of the people’s money frivolously suing a local blog and its authors, and were it not for the new Council, that bill would still be accumulating. A million dollars would have paid for a fire engine and more than a handful of Parks and Recs, Police, or Firefighter, or Maintenance employees.
LIE #4: “We have a shortage of staff and we need to invest in those areas.”
TRUTH: Zahra had an opportunity to pass a budget with a 1% cut and $1 million dollars to the City Manager to fill staffing concerns. He voted no, not once, but on three different City Council meetings.
LIE #5: “I would love to see more drug programs and engaging our school district on drug prevention programs.”
TRUTH: Zahra advocated for publicly and voted for on four separate occasions to have weed sold in Fullerton with only a 100 foot buffer zones to schools or homes or churches or parks.
LIE #6: “Supportive housing is crucial, but we need to make sure we are also outreaching and creating transparency.”
TRUTH: 1600 Commonwealth is an affordable housing development and so little transparency and outreach was done that the neighbors protested en masse and killed the deal with Pathways of Hope because of lack of outreach and transparency.
LIE #7: “We need to make sure our parks are maintained and cleaned.”
TRUTH: Zahra voted to give away Union Pacific Park in the heart of his district to a for-profit event planner for weddings.
LIE #8: “I have been one of the most engaged Council members. Everybody knows I’m out there.”
TRUTH: Woodcrest neighborhood mothers and residents have come to one Council meeting after another in the past 2 years complaining about Zahra’s lack of accessibility and lack of engagement with them. But then again, they are not kissing his ass and stroking his giant ego. He works with the Center for Healthy Neighborhoods. Why? Because their director donates to his campaign and their employee Egleth Nuncci is his permanent tag-a-long. No other non-profit or community group gets any engagement from Zahra.
LIE #9: “We also need to expand our ability to do corporate partnerships.”
TRUTH: Zahra strong armed Republic Services, the City’s trash hauler to give his pet project city in a foreign country a trash truck and then promptly took a selfie and credit for saving democracy. That’s not a corporate partner. That is a quid pro quo.
LIE #10: “I have worked with this Council, despite sometimes the hard times and differences we’ve had.”
TRUTH: Zahra only works for and with Zahra. He has no contact with his Council colleagues. So how are you working with this Council, Ahmad?
LIE #11: “Be faithful with my votes.”
TRUTH: Zahra made an impassioned speech about how important voting was in his country of Syria and that the at large Council seat vacated by Jesus Quirk-Silva should be determined in a special election to betray the people and his faith in democracy the very next meeting and appoint the elderly disaster Jan Flory, who in turn voted to appoint him to the Orange County Water District and its healthy stipend, one he took without objection and then donated to his campaign.
LIE #12: “We see so many Councilmembers come and then they make backroom deals.”
TRUTH: See TRUTH #11.
The truth is Ahmad Zahra is nothing more than a serial liar. Things come apart so easily when they are held together by lies. It’s always the ones with dirty hands doing all the finger pointing isn’t it?
When council districts were finally created in Fullerton – in response to a lawsuit, one district was designed to support Fullerton’s large Latino community – District 5. In 2018 D5 elected a non-Latino which of course was surprising but perfectly legal. But what would Latinos think about a concerted effort by the OC Democratic party to make sure the Latino vote was divided to protect Ahmad Zahra, the non-Latino incumbent?
Enter Tony Castro, the dead-beat nobody who popped up out of nowhere and pulled election papers the day after Oscar Valadez, who has lived in D5 for over 20 years.
Recently FFFF has been bombarded with spam comments all of which came from Tony Castro himself. I took out the trash, but not before salvaging this little gobbet of that is quite revealing: a statement that Castro was approached by one Ajay Mohan:
This snippet has the ring of truth. There is an Ajay Mohan and he is the director of the OC Democrat Party. Here he is:
Now that’s not very good, is it?
Now why would Mr. Mohan recruit an unknown, broke, Tony Castro to run against the incumbent who has the endorsement of Party Central? The answer is, unfortunately, crystal clear: to take votes away from Oscar Valadez. This dirty little trick is as old as elections themselves, of course, but to see the Dems do it to working class Latinos betrays a special sort of cynical mindset.
Get off my grass…
Which brings us to the OC Dem Party Chairperson, Ada Briceno, a Latina unionista who apparently has decided to bamboozle La Raza in support of the egregious Zahra – who has supported dope stores near schools, who battered a Latina woman, and who voted to give away a public park in the barrio to a private events center/caterer.
Apparently, Ahmad Zahra held some sort of meet and greet (I’ll talk to anyone, but I won’t tell them the truth) Sunday morn, behind a donut store.
There to greet him were some protesters who seem to be angry that he voted several times to allow marijuana dispensaries within 100 feet of homes and schools – at the behest of emissaries from the Long Beach weed store cartel.
FFFF has squirted some cyber-ink on the missus, so I thought we ought to start spending a bit of time with Pilferin’ Paulette’s hubby, the egregious Doug “Bud” Chaffee.”
If the snout fits, wear it…
This piece was recently sent out by Chaffee’s OC Board of Supervisor challenger, Sunny Park of Buena Park.
The swine were offended by the comparison…
The reference here is to an early foray of the Chaffee Crime Family into “affordable” housing, the subsidized sort that always costs so much more than the regular kind. Of course this was thirty years ago and Chaffee has a much longer list of grifts large and small, including selling out the advocates of preserving the West Coyote Hills, creating phony districts in Fullerton, supporting overbuilt prison, I mean apartment blocks with inadequate parking, and of course spending all his time failing to reform the Fullerton Police Department.
On the Board of Supervisors Chaffee has distinguished himself by hiding COVID information from the public, overseeing the public humiliation and politicization of the Health Care Agency, and being a lackey for the misfeasance of his fellow board member, Andrew Do. And the funniest thing of all is that he, as Chairman of the Commission to End Homelessness, had to confess to reporters that he didn’t know what the Commission does.
Putting politician’s faces on animals has always struck me as desperate and sort of silly, persuasion-wise. But Sunny is running against an incumbent (and recumbent) Democrat and needs to syphon enough votes to 1) at least come in second; and, 2) keep Bud from reaching the magic 50%+1 number thereby forcing a runoff in November. Will this help?
It’s sort of fun to watch this mob enjoy a brief bout of fisticuffs between two of their own, especially when one of the pugilists gets cold-cocked and further beaten while lying helpless on the ground. What simian fun!!
Look familiar? This crap has been going on for almost 20 years thanks to our craven politicians who were bought and paid for by bar owners.
Speaking of bar owners the fight scene above (not apes) takes place in the fight ring/parking lot behind the Matador bar, whose owner, Mario Marovic is opening two new saloons on the corner of Harbor and Commonwealth, and who still hasn’t give back the sidewalk fraudulently acquired by the Florentines way back in 2002.
Sort of like toenail fungus, Paulette Marshall (Chaffee) is an unwelcome parasite that won’t go away. She has recently announced yet another run for public office – this time another try for the Orange County Board of Education.
Crime doesn’t always pay in Fullerton…
Friends may remember Paulette from such hits as faking an address to run for Fullerton’s 5th District back in 2018. Too bad she was caught stealing campaigns on video. That ethical lapse caused her to quit the race (not in shame, for she has none). The DA wasn’t impressed and charged her. She was forced to plead guilty, pay a fine and do community service; her record was expunged, but the two videos that document her criminal activity are alive and well on the internet.
And that’s where I put the sign in the back of the car…
In 2020 Ms. Marshall (Chaffee) returned to electoral politics – a first run at the OC BoE. Her campaign was marked by a phony “news” website and phony interviews which were so lame it was almost more pathetic than angrifying.
Trying to run on her County Supervisor husband’s coat tails yet again, she poured a ton of cash into her campaign, yet finished a distant third place – way behind Vicki Calhoun – who spent virtually nothing.
Why Paulette thinks her chances are any better than they were two years ago is unknown. Her past is hanging around her neck like the proverbial albatross and it seems unlikely that her by just using her husband’s name will work.
In 2021 she got a crony to sue Tim Shaw, the guy who beat her in 2020, to quit the Board. His reappointment to a 2-year term must have come as a shock to Paulette who unsuccessfully interviewed for the job, and is suing Shaw yet again.
I suppose FFFF will just have to dust off and crank up the old campaign machine and get ready to go to work.
In Fullerton City Hall, nothing is forgotten quite so quickly as the past, particularly if that past includes malfeasance, misfeasance, incompetence or prevarication.
That’s why FFFF has made it our mission to remind folks about such egregious rip-offs as the Saga of the Florentine Sidewalk, in which a sleazy restaurant put a room addition on a public sidewalk and got away with it.
Here’s the now relevant part: The disgraced Florentine & Co. quit Fullerton last year, and the building’s owner, Mario Marovic is in the process of remodeling the exterior and interior of the building even though he doesn’t yet have the proposed CUP – so he must be pretty confident he’s going to get it. The matter comes to the Planning Commission tonight.
The staff report, as usual, is full of irrelevant crap, and completely ignores the the theft of the sidewalk, a land grab that was eventually made legal by a revised lease – with Florentine. The report also shares Marovic’s plan for the corner space at Harbor and Commonwealth, keeping the permanent structure built by Florentine!
The theft continues…
Now that’s not very good, is it.
I doubt if anybody on the Planning Commission remembers the sordid history of this building, and you can be sure that no one on staff remembers or cares to remind them. But now is the time to get this sidewalk back!
Back in 2020 our Lords and Masters at City Hall cooked up a plan to impose a sales tax increase upon people buying stuff in Fullerton. It was staff-driven natch, and lazy liberals Zahra, Quirk-Silva, Flory and Fitzgerald were on board. It was called Measure S. See, they figured the path of least resistance was deploying a new tax rather than finally exercising fiscal restraint.
The Big Lie
Measure S soon found itself in the crosshairs of Fullerton anti-tax advocates and some well-placed signs describing the true nature of the beast doomed it to failure come election time.
Well guess what? They’re at it again. This time the idea is something called a Pension Obligation Bond, a mechanism for paying off part of Fullerton’s massive unfunded pension actuarial liability at CalPERS, the State’s giant pension administrator.
An introductory briefing was on the Council’s agenda last Tuesday to start the cheerleading process – a process that will entail the employment of an “expert” who will certainly benefit from a positive result; and of course “bond counsel” the legal camp-followers who push bonds on lazy elected officials after a hot meal and a few glasses of wine.
As everybody knows, the interest on the bonds are ultimately backed up by the collateral of new property taxes. This revenue would go to pay down the pension debt and free up money owed to CalPERS for staff salaries and benefits that will ultimately, and ironically, increase pension debt.
Here’s the second kicker: because a pension obligation bond is not deemed new debt, per se, but a sort of pea-under-the-walnut shell maneuver, no vote of the people is required – as it is in the case of general obligation bonds. It just gets “validated” by a judge and goes through on the nod unless challenged. Ouch. Of course the Council, if it wanted to could put the issue on a ballot anyhow, if they chose to move ahead with this scheme.
Of course the strategy for this type of thing is to reprimand opponents by citing the fact that the daily cost is little more than a Big Mac, or some other trifle and in return we get…what do we get again? Our loyal and devoted “public safety” club will almost certainly gobble up the lion’s share of this taxpayer largesse, just like they already do, and we’ll be even worse off than we already are, and no desperately needed cultural changes will have been made.
I looked over the agenda material on line and found nary a clue as to how this was even agendized. Another smoke screen protecting somebody.
