Would you give neighbors access to your bank account?
No? That would probably come as a shock to some at City Hall where (at least) three City of Brea employees have been issued VISA procurement cards belonging to the City of Fullerton.
Fullerton and Brea have a shared Fire Department command staff. The Fire Chief, Deputy Chiefs, Division Chiefs, Battalion Chiefs, and an EMS manager perform services for both cities, even though they remain employees of the City where they came from. Those from Brea have been given the Fullerton VISA cards. Now, I can hear some people uttering phrases like “so what,” and “who cares,” and “what’s the problem?” I can help you with that.
Fullerton Fire Station 3 on Acacia Ave was the recipient of five La-Z-Boy recliners, on the City VISA card. The purchaser? Chris Guerrero, a Brea employee. The supervisor approving the purchase? Kathy Schaefer, another Brea employee. And where did the money come from? Fullerton.
The receipt raises another question because Engine 3, based at this fire station, only has a crew of three. So why purchase five recliners?
I’d bet money the extra recliners are for the CARE Ambulance employees based at Station 3. Nothing in the housing agreement between the City and CARE Ambulance talks about furnishings, so the recliners appear to be a gift.
A gift from Brea employees using Fullerton’s money.
The other evening the Fullerton City Council discussed the issue of letting bar owners cram more of their top-shelf patrons into downtown Fullerton night clubs, a move that the bar owners ludicrously claim will actually help with all that mayhem that occurs on a typical week-end evening. As a tangent, the idea of taxing the generators of all the trouble came up.
Here is our esteemed Mayor, Bruce Whitaker, calmly explaining why some sort of public revenue generating scheme would a bad idea.
This is so disingenuous in several aspects that it’s hard to know where to start. The idea that the private business interests are the best at providing some sort of “management” at the lowest cost is absurd given the fact that the taxpayers are already providing vastly subsidized security and maintenance in the downtown war zone. It is the o-so trustworthy bar owners (that Whitaker claims have the biggest stake in a smoothly operating downtown) who benefit from public services they aren’t paying for.
Whitaker knows very well that the open air saloon known as Downtown Fullerton costs the taxpayers more than $1,500,000 per year. It’s a classic money pit. The irony is rich. The idea that the city government might milk DTF is absolutely absurd. The fact is that Whitaker’s bar-owner campaign contributors are making money on the backs of the rest of us – and Whitaker – despite his rhetoric – knows this damn well.
The real point is that once again Whitaker and his spineless council colleagues are going to bat for their saloon owning pals, people who have stolen public sidewalks, habitually violated the City’s noise ordinances, whose patrons wreak havoc on our streets and on themselves every night. Whitaker and the City Council have not only turned looking the other way into a full-time job, they have gone out of their way to prop up and publicly subsidize the booze peddlers they enabled in the first place.
The City Council was warned earlier this year that (long overdue) changes at CalPERS to tackle pension debts would spell fiscal disaster for Fullerton. This problem is very much real and will be quite painful in the years to come.
What isn’t real was the feigned appearance of City Hall trying to cut expenses. Truth be told, nobody at the City seems to care.
Remember the Hillcrest Park ‘Pine Forest Stairs’ ceremony, which lasted maybe 30 minutes, and was attended by forty or fifty people?
The balloons you see above cost the taxpayers $776.51. Were they necessary? Of course not.
Meanwhile, at other locations across town, the never-ending waste from Parks and Recreation continues unabated. $350 for two hours of face painting and a clown to blow up balloons.
Another $450 down the drain for a game of Human Foosball.
These aren’t unusual expenditures — this stuff goes on all the time.
So this is the cue for [new City Manager] Ken Domer to step up and make this nonsense go away. It’s also a cue for the City Council to hold him accountable in that regard.
Dan Hughes’ career as police chief came to a pretty embarrassing end in November 2016. OCDA investigator Abraham Santos opined that Hughes criminally obstructed justice when he ordered Joe Felz be driven home without an arrest after the now infamous DUI collision. As a result, Santos is now fighting for his career, the result of him blowing the whistle on the OCDA’s refusal to press charges.
Like any politician who lacks integrity, Hughes always tried to portray himself as an upstanding citizen. How ironic because this past July, the Fullerton Police Department learned that a toll was never paid on SR-73 all the way back in December 2015.
You guessed correctly — the vehicle involved was the unmarked City-owned sedan assigned to Dan Hughes.
I haven’t included all of the e-mails back and forth, but suffice it to say, several City employees wasted numerous hours trying to pin down whose car it was, and to ultimately reduce the toll penalties due.
Hughes has a couple of options here:
Own up to his mistake. Reimburse the City for the toll and penalties due. Prove to his old department, his peers, current employees and Disney management that he really is a man of integrity. If this was an error on the part of the toll roads, offer some sort of plausible explanation of what happened that day.
Be a coward. Do and say nothing. Make the residents of Fullerton pay for yet another one of his failures. Hide behind the half a million he rakes in annually between CalPERS and Disneyland.
This will be really interesting because I fully expect him to choose the second option. I hope he proves me wrong.
The Fullerton PD just publicized these photos of a patrol car that was tagged with graffiti by a downtown reveler over the weekend. The vandalism allegedly occurred while the officers were away on “proactive” foot patrol.
The social media pronouncement was accompanied by some humorous posturing, including the hashtag #WeWillFindYou.
Now anyone who’s filed a graffiti or vandalism report in the city of Fullerton knows that these types of crime reports usually get stuffed in a drawer, dismissed as non-priorities. You’d be lucky if you can get a cop to come out and take a report, let alone collect evidence and track down the perp.
In this case, some egos have been offended and so we might expect to see some sort of minimal effort expended. But I wouldn’t count on it.
Let’s say you are in the market for a realtor – one who may be willing to bring a certain, um, shall we say, pugnacious flavor to your real estate negotiations. FFFF may be able to help!
Here’s the real estate promo for one Bryan Bybee, a Fullerton cop who’s looking to make a little extra cash moonlighting in the real estate business:
We’ll close this deal. Or else.
So who is Mr. Bybee, you may ask? We originally introduced the Friends to this gentleman, after he rammed his police vehicle into a guy on a bike. Bybee’s name also figured prominently in a very expensive lawsuit brought by the Ortiz brothers, Luiz and Antonio, against the City. They alleged (and alleged successfully, it seems) that Bybee and a few of his FPD cohorts beat them up for no apparent reason, threw them in the Fullerton lock-up, and charged them with fictitious crimes – charges that were eventually rejected by a jury and dropped by the DA. That fun-filled episode cost us Fullerton taxpayers a tidy $280,000.
Anyhow, like I said, Bryan’s just looking to make some extra dough on the side, so let’s give a brotha’ a break, right? If you’re looking for “boutique” real estate services and someone to bring a special brand of negotiating talent to the table, Bryan may be just be the fella to meet your needs.
It looks like I might be a “hater”. As one of only a handful of people to come out against the “Pine Forest Staircase” I’m going to make the leap that Fitzgerald is talking about me and therefore will respond accordingly.
Let us take the points in reverse order.
This is not a “New” community amenity as this is one of Fullerton’s oldest parks. All of those people who remember the Duck Pond aren’t having a massive shared delusion as it really did exist. The city let this park fall apart and is now trying to sell it as a win that they’re finally fixing what they themselves broke.
Duck Pond In Hillcrest Park Fullerton
Fixing something you broke isn’t an act of respect. The city let this park fall into complete disrepair owing to budget constraints and poor management as folks like Fitzgerald prioritized six-figure pensions for her friends (Danny Hughes, Joe Felz, et al). To make matters worse the city council has yet to budget for more staff to maintain this park once it is completed. Add to that the likely budget cuts coming thanks to her (and her cohort’s) over spending on FPD/FFD Overtime/Pensions.
The Pine Forest Stairs are shoddily constructed and were significantly overpriced. “People like them and use them” Fitzgerald and her friends claim. Do you know what else they’d like and use? Better made stairs that cost less.
Something didn’t line up…
This type of fiscal deflection is ludicrous from an elected official who should be demanding the best bang for our buck and not running interference for developers. To be fair this is a common refrain from elected officials. One needs only listen to Bruce Whitaker justifying overpaying for a park because it’s in the “Gem District“. The council literally rewarded owners for their negligence at a premium price in the instance of Pearl Park.
This project isn’t restoring the park to it’s “original grandeur” as you do not restore something by completely altering it. This is a renovation and not a restoration. A bridge nobody will have cause to use is further destroying what was the duck pond and the pine stairs are totally new. Words matters and the idea that this is a “restoration” is an outright lie. Is the city putting the trees back into the park? No. They were too busy pumping water into Laguna Lake to bother putting any of it on the trees they let die and then had to remove.
And finally let us talk about Fitzgerald’s economic illiteracy here.
“A fantastic use of park fees”.
Park Fees are fees the city takes for new development. When the city allows a new mega-apartment complex to go up they collect a bucket load of money for the purpose of adding or improving parks. I’ve addressed this issue before here.
If this is a legal use of fees is debatable but is it a good use let alone a “fantastic” use of fees?
No.
This is nothing more than Jennifer Fitzgerald perpetuating the ‘Broken Window Fallacy’ as explained by Frédéric Bastiat.
I’ll sum it up simply.
The city council and city management broke Hillcrest park and are now using millions of dollars that could have been used to buy land in Coyote Hills or to fix our long neglected “Poisoned Park” or even to purchase Fullerton’s now most expensive park which Whitaker was all too happy to overspend taxpayer’s money upon.
This money is being used in the least efficient way possible because it is fixing that which never should have been broken. It wasn’t an accidental breakage either. Hillcrest Park has suffered decades of neglect as council after council ignores any semblance of accountability while generation after generation of overpaid bureaucrats toil away on grand schemes to fix what they should have been protecting in the first place.
Fitzgerald’s reasoning logically follows that we should neglect and destroy all of our parks in order to spend money fixing them. Wouldn’t that just be “fantastic”?
After years of unbalanced budgets we can’t really expect much more from Fitzgerald or the Fullerton City Council but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be outraged at their cavalier attitudes or sheer incompetence.
I still naively expect elected officials to work for what is in our best interest and to be able to explain away criticisms without resorting to childish colloquialisms.
Fitzgerald might be correct in that “haters will always hate” but it is also true that economic illiterates will never math.
File this one under “Jeezus We’re getting Desperate.” Trotting out a stock photo of an old lady and comparing ripping off “Grandma” with the recall of Josh “Gas Tax” Newman? Man that’s lame.
Opponents of the recall, i.e. the building trades who work on public boondoggle projects like high speed rail, seem to think this sort of nonsense sells. Well, the consultants will burn though a lot of that union cash, but there’s really no way to defend the indefensible: Newman voted for a highly regressive gas tax that will hammer the poor and people on a fixed income while his pals in the trades make bank building stuff like Jerry Brown’s $60 billion bullet train – whether it’s needed or not.
The Democrats in the Legislature have climbed all the way up onto their high horses claiming that recall petition signers were lied to and that recalling Newman won’t get rid of the gas tax, an objection that is really just based on a desperate semantic ploy. The fact is that getting rid of Newman is simply the first step in yanking the chain of the politicians in Sacramento who would rather tax us then curtail their own addiction to wasting the gas tax money we have already been sending them every time we fill up. The end game is a repeal of the tax, and of course, prevention of any more gas or car taxes.
The Democrats have pulled out all of the ethical stops in attempting to derail the recall. They tried to pass midnight legislation changing the recall rules after the recall signatures had been submitted. Then they put pressure on the California Fair Political Practices Commission to re-interpret their standing rules so that Dem politicians can help bail out Newman financially, proving that when it comes to maintaining their super-majority, no trick or hustle is too low to put into action.
Let us talk about priorities. Why has Sharon Quirk-Silva not re-introduced a bill for the Veteran’s Cemetery in Irvine?
Sharon Quirk-Silva introduced a bill into the Assembly for the Veteran’s Cemetery in Irvine (AB409) which never even got a vote in committee.
The (D) Super-Majority outright ignored it. Her bill was later rolled into SB96. SB96 was a budget “trailer bill” which is basically an empty bill that is passed by the Senate with one line to be “Gutted” and a new bill full of legislation to be “Amended” into it by the Assembly before coming back for a vote before both houses. It’s a procedural trick which violates the spirit of the law and the very premise of good and open government.
To complicate matters because the Cemetery was rolled into SB96 with 95 other provisions, one of which is also an appropriations item, it is unconstitutional not once but twice and once specifically owing to the provision for the Veteran’s Cemetery itself. (more…)
How well can you read? Good enough? Somebody at City Hall desperately needs your help.
These obnoxious signs were installed at the train station last week. Not only are they ugly and obtrusive, parts of the text are a lie. Apparently City staff expects nobody to double-check their work.
“NO Loitering” — Hello? This is a train station where people are encouraged to loiter while waiting for their train. What’s worse is the code citation, FMC 17.105.020, is completely bogus because Title 17 doesn’t exist in the municipal code. The City doesn’t even have a “no loitering” ordinance that would apply here. Somebody made this up!
“NO Handbills” — They cite FMC 7.30.030. Funny, the title of Chapter 7.30 clearly says this part applies to “Private Residential Property” (see below) which the train station obviously is not.
“NO Soliciting” — Here’s what the code says:
7.106.030 Solicitation.
No person shall accost any other person in, or on, any public place, or in, or on, any place open to the public for the purpose of begging or soliciting alms or soliciting donations in exchange for a token service that has been provided or promised.
This section shall only apply to areas within fifty feet of a business establishment, unless such area is located in a shopping mall or center, in which case this section shall also apply to the parking and common areas of that shopping mall or center…
I took the liberty of drawing circles with a radius of 50 feet from the Amtrak office, Spaghetti Factory, and Santa Fe Express Cafe. Good news for solicitors, despite the new signs posted all over the place, about 75 percent of the train station is still fair game!
Last, but not least, don’t feed the birds!
A real shocker, I know, but FMC 9.12.208 on the sign only applies to Parks and is worded for the protection of waterfowl. This isn’t enforceable at the train station.
9.12.208
1. “Waterfowl” means and refers to any ducks, geese, or other birds which can be found in a restricted area, which have used a restricted area as a habitat, or are reasonably capable of using a restricted area as a habitat. 2. “Restricted area” means and refers to any publicly owned lake, pond, stream, creek, fountain, or body of water in the City of Fullerton, including, but not limited to, Laguna Lake.
What’s the point of this exercise? To prove just because the City makes a sign, or assures us something is true and correct — that more often than not — they are wrong.
I know you’re reading this [new City Manager] Ken Domer. Now would be a great time to take a stand against the perpetual incompetence that emanates from all levels of City government. Your predecessor, Joe Felz, had no problem doing things poorly. Will your tenure be marked by more of the same?
