At the December 17th Council Meeting, Sharon Kennedy, “former publisher” of the Fullerton Observer appeared to go bonkers when a public speaker began enumerating the reasons Ahmad Zahra was unfit to be Mayor of Fullerton.
FFFF artist’s fictional interpretation…
She began screaming from the rear of the council chambers, accusing the speaker of being a liar and disseminating “disinformation” while interrupting both the speaker and the meeting.
Kennedy’s violent outburst continued – she kept interrupting the speaker, who calmly continued to recite the damning bill of indictment against Zahra.
Time to come clean…..
Zahra himself interrupted the proceedings, too, as well he might, given that the list of objections to his mayoralty was so persuasive. Still, it’s bad form to engage public speakers – “chilling” is what County Supervisor Doug “Bud” Chaffee called it in 2012, and it treads upon free speech rights of a citizen, for sure.
Eventually, Kennedy removed herself from the chamber before Mayor Nick Dunlap could ask police Chief Radus to kick her out..
Why write about news when you can try to make your own! (Photo by Julie Leopo/Voice of OC)
Zahra’s supporters like Sharon Kennedy and her sister, fellow Observer Skaskia, continue to ignore his plagiarism, his marriage fraud, his false police report against Fred Jung, his assault and battery guilty plea, his ever-shifting coming out/coming to America tale, and his perpetual victimhood narratives.
Their emotional and psychological investment in Zahra is such that they will never see the real story. That’s the persuasion of the conman when his marks would rather buy into the con than face the truth of their own foolish gullibility. Or they are infinitely hypocritical. Either that or they’re really stupid.
It’s a pretty sad thing if your first campaign action is a cheap deception, a deception that is really tantamount to a lie. Or as the Kennedy Sisters would scream: disinformation.
The other day FFFF reported on the 4th District Supervisorial campaign announcement of one Connor Traut, a nebbish-looking guy on the Buena Park City Council whose history is one of self-promotion and carpetbuggery. His mentor was the late creep from Anaheim Jordan Brandman who went nuts and died of acute meth intoxication..
The troutlet’s first announcement as a proclaimed candidate came soon after. In it, he proclaims that his campaign “eclipsed” the $100,000 donation mark in just the first 24 hours! What an unparalleled display of wide and dedicated support!
Little fish, big pond…
CONNOR TRAUT ECLIPSES $100K FUNDRAISING MARK IN RACE FOR OC SUPERVISOR
THANK YOU! I’m so grateful for the outpouring of support following my announcement yesterday that I’m running for Orange County Supervisor. I’m excited to announce that we’ve eclipsed the $100,000 cash-on-hand mark in the campaign’s first 24 hours!
It’s clear that our community shares our vision for the future of Orange County. We’ll continue working hard to raise the resources needed to reach voters in every corner of this district.
Politicians often publicize their bank assets, when they have any, as a way to scare off the competition and to induce potential donors to get on the bandwagon. Of course the confident ones don’t need to. That’s obviously what’s happening here. The problem is in the details.
See, the Troutlet didn’t actually raise any money at all.
That’s a goose egg, kid.
According to facts that came out on the Orange Juice Blog, what the Troutling did was transfer that hundred grand from his Buena Park City Council campaign account, money he has diligently raised over the past 6 years as a councilmember. It’s a shoddy little deception that goes right along with the outdated strategies that didn’t help Vivian Jaramillo, like having a bunch of endorsements from politicians that almost nobody has heard of. Like Jaramillo, he has been endorsed by Josh Newman, Sharon Quirk, Doug “Bud” Chaffee, Shana Charles, Jan Flory, Aruni Thakur and other Fullerton boohoo locals.
Oh, well. At least now we know what to expect from this obnoxious small fry: a marginal sense of ethics, and a lame, expensive, and lumbering campaign.
I don’t know much about someone called Connor Traut, but he’s running to represent Fullerton as our next County Supervisor for the 4th District. This lad, I am told, is on the City Council in Buena Park where he carpetbagged a while back to run for office. I am also informed he was once the political protégé of one-time wunderkind Jordan Brandman, the Anaheim councilman who went nuts and died of severe meth intoxication.
Catch and release?
This appears to be one of those Young (fill in the party name) types who hover around political circles and crave the attention that only elective office can bring. OC politics is full of these people who would rather have an unaccountable job in politics than honest work, even as a lawyer. He says he’s a “consumer protection trial attorney,” on his campaign website but on his business website we discover he’s really a personal injury lawyer, or so he says. Better to stick with consumer protection, which is probably a safe thing to say, in a space where you can sneak into the USA, have everyone call you doctor, and are actually dumb enough to believe you are sincere. But whatever it is Traut does, it’s obvious this youngster would rather be a full-time politician.
I don’t know about you, but it seems unseemly for somebody to start politicking for an office a year and a half before the primary in 2026. Could have at least waited a few weeks, ’til 2025.
Anyhow, it seems the young Trautlet has been super-busy getting endorsements from the usual suspects – the claque of local Democrat small fry. Check out the “partial” endorsement list.
That took real work!
If some of these names look familiar to you, you’d have good reason. Many of these establishment Democrats just endorsed the otiose campaign of Vivian Jaramillo. It appears that there is an effort to produce an inevitability around the callow Connor, the same strategy that failed so spectacularly for Team Jaramillo.
Nothing left but empty bloviation and Bulgarian clothing…
What’s interesting about this list is one name that is not on it – Dr. Ahmad Zahra. I wonder why this is. It’s pretty obvious that Zahra could try for something else in the 2026 Primary – like replacing Sharon Quirk in the State Assembly. So why not endorse The Traut? Is it just an embarrassing omission?
NUFFs enough…
As a fun side note, I see that Senator Josh Newman is euphemistically referred to as “retired,” although he is still in office. I guess this will avoid having to change the website in a few weeks. Some suggested Newman might run for Supervisor. Guess not. Ditto Quirk who is an endorser, or her husband, the limitlessly clownish Jesus Quirk-Silva.
Fred Jung. Rested and ready?
Who else might run for 4th District Supervisor? Well, Fullerton’s Fred Jung, for one. He has name ID and a huge pile o’ cash that will put the Traut Show to shame. He just got over 70% of the vote in his re-election bid without needing any institutional Democrat Party support at all. I wonder if Jung were to run we might not see a Zahra spoiler candidacy as a way to split the vote of Fullerton – the largest city completely within the 4th District. This could explain the non-endorsement by Zahra.
Fullerton’s Mayor, Nick Dunlap could give it a go. He’s just destroyed Jan Flory in his re-election by a huge margin and can raise cash. But he doesn’t seem the type who craves political office or the proverbial limelight. How about Bruce Whitaker? He could try, as the County has a long history of antiquated politicians looking for a nice Supervisorial pasture – incumbent Doug “Bud” Chaffee, for one. He could get Republican votes, but that doesn’t seem enough anymore; and he can’t raise money and will be out of office. Some Repuglican hack from Brea? Steve Vargas ran in 2022 and came in 4th.
I can see no other plausible candidates unless we see the return of Fire Hero, Coto Joe Kerr, who ran for this seat in 2022, or some other as yet unseen phony carpetbagger.
I’ve been watching Fullerton politics and governance for for a long time – since 2008 or 2009, in fact. One thing that has consistently struck me is the way in which Fullerton’s elected officials have completely and almost happily abdicated their responsibility to determine the direction of policy.
It has always been the goal, in principle if not in practice in modern representative democracy, that policy would be established by electeds, and administrated through a protected civil service bureaucracy.
Determining policy – the philosophical direction you want the town to take – isn’t easy in the “City Manager” form of government, a form deliberately created to remove any sort of executive authority from elected representatives. But with that set-up came something else, too: the difficulty of people’s representatives in establishing policy direction, and doing it without violating the Brown Act strictures on open meetings.
Nevertheless, the responsibility is still there, even if it easier to have photo ops, and ribbon cuttings and the like. Sadly our electeds have failed; failed with remarkable banality and complacency. Former Councilman and Fullerton Police Chief Pat McKinley once illustrated the point when challenged for his “failure to lead.” He exclaimed that councilmen weren’t there to lead – that was the City Manager’s job.
Lately the policy role abdication has been seen with the regurgitated, spit out, re-consumed and regurgitated again noise ordinance, an ongoing embarrassment that has plagued honest citizens for over fifteen years. I read the staff report on the recent noise effort, a report that justifies a decision to actually increase acceptable levels, protect offenders by including an ambient noise mask, and locates the noise metering away from the source whence it can be muddled by an equally noisy neighbor.
The staff report is nothing but a list of events that have occurred since 2009 when the City Council last expressed a coherent position. Nowhere in the staff report is there any discussion on the policy decisions behind any of the activities. Why not? Because there weren’t any. In the same way that the incredibly costly, drunken binge known as Downtown Fullerton has escaped any intelligent policy conversation, the noise nuisance issue, a subset of the former, has evaded policy discussion as City staff – behind the scenes – has diligently avoided doing anything to enforce existing code, and worked very hard to reduce the requirements.
So what has happened is a vacuum in which each new action seems disembodied from policy conversation; that’s because it is. And our council steadfastly refused to have an open and honest conversation of what it wants, abdicating its responsibilities.
One size fits all…
There is a long list of issues that our elected representatives should be addressing from an overarching policy level and aren’t. This sort of thing takes thought; and some hard work in ascertaining whether your city employees are really doing the thing you want; or not, as in the case of the Trail to Nowhere. It’s easier just to ram through the Consent Calendar on the nod, rubberstamp the ridiculous, clean your plate like good kids, and move on to the photo ops and the trophy ceremonies.
When thinking about the Trail to Nowhere it seemed to me that I had seen this same sort of thing before. Then it struck me. Of course.
An expensive and unnecessary project that dragged out for years, and that was supposed to be paid for with other people’s money, “free money” as it is known in City Hall, I recalled.
It may have been expensive, but it sure was unnecessary…
I remembered because I wrote about it, here. The second elevator towers at the Fullerton train station, a project so ridiculously over-engineered, so expensive, so reliant on phony ridership projections and so expensive and mismanaged that it ended up raiding Fullerton’s own Capital Budget to the tune of $600,000. In the end no one knows how much was actually spent on that boondoggle when everything was said and done. But one good thing that came out of it was teaching me to appreciate how things are done in Fullerton, and how there isn’t one cent’s worth of accountability on the part of anybody.
If the Trail to Nowhere actually ever gets built but is way over budget, unused, unmaintained and falls into decrepitude, who will stand up to take responsibility? Not the City Council who approved it without question. Not City staff – the chief architects of this disaster in-waiting are already gone– nor will the City Manager, who will be gone as soon as his pension formula tops him out. None of the people stirred up to insult and harangue the City Council will be in evidence and the proprietors of the Fullerton Observer, if they are still around annoying people, will not be searching for those accountable. No one else will be, either.
Maybe the less said, the better…
Remember the multi-million dollar Poison Park intergenerational fiasco? Has anybody ever taken responsibility for that poster child of bureaucratic incompetence and political indifference? Of course not. That would be a horrible precedent. Fullerton.
Friends probably remember that FFFF has been relentlessly critical of the dubious scheme approved by our City Council to underwrite a downtown boutique hotel and uber-dense apartment project on a parking lot owned by the City and used by Metrolink commuters.
Here’s a reminder: three councilmembers Bruce Whitaker, Shana Charles and Ahmad Zahra voted to sell this property to a developer for a mere $1.4 million (less site material removal) while simultaneously time jacking up the value of the land by approving density 2.5 times the limit specified in the Transportation Center Specific Plan. It was a gift of public funds at least ten million dollars.
Here’s the fun part. The original and completely unqualified baby daddy of the project, Craig Hostert, didn’t have the wherewithal to make the deal. After years of failing to perform on his Exclusive Negotiating Agreement and numerous extensions, Hostert’s West Park Investments, LLC joined its non-existent forces with TA Partners Development of Irvine, Johnny Lu, proprietor.
Mr. Lu, the new face of the project, appeared at council meetings to seal the deal with a ration of gobbledygook bullshit.
Now it appears that Mr. Lu may not have been the best choice of partner according to the Real Deal Real Estate News.
Why is Johnny smiling?
It seems that Johnny has gotten himself in over his head on two projects in Irvine, including second bridge loans that he has now defaulted on. And of course Sunayana Thomas, Fullerton’s crack “business development” director seemingly failed to inform the City Council of Mr. Lu’s impending financial embarrassment, something that should have been revealed in even a cursory perusal of TA Partners’ asset to debt ratio and its balance sheet.
And then, of course there is the problem with the completely incompetent concept of rushing the approval to transfer of title to the land, before the deal had received final approval.
By now the Council has possibly, though not necessarily been informed by the Fullerton City Manager, Eric Leavitt, of the problem, but where does the deal stand? Title to the property has been transferred from the City to and through Lu’s companies*, presumably for the original sale amount. But if TA Partners can’t perform, will the City get its now very valuable property back, or will it be encumbered by bankruptcy receivers? Will the City, in order to save face as it always has, permit Mr. Lu to assign his rights and interests to another party as a face-saving strategy? If that happens, will the original bad idea still go forward, or will the Council approve something even worse as a sop to a new developer so to avoid admitting their horrible mistake in the first place?
You can try asking Whitaker, Charles, or Zahra, the architects of this inexcusable and completely avoidable mess, but don’t hold your breath waiting for a response.
There are two kinds of lame-duck, termed out politicians. There are those who no longer care to appease the rubes who elected them and let their real character come out. Then there are those who maintain the same fat-headed, dissimulating personas that they always carried about with them.
An especially small hat was located…
It is rare indeed to find the sort of swine we have in County Supervisor Doug Chaffee – an individual who has left a remarkable slime trail in his wake. Chaffee seems intent on combining the two elements described above, and that ain’t easy.
But no pot of gold…
A week or so ago Chaffee voted with his colleagues Don Wagner and Andrew Do to oppose hoisting the Rainbow Flag at the County, the flag a symbol for all non-hetero folks to feel some sort of pride in whatever sexual orientation they have discovered for themselves. This has been a sticking point for the new right for a long time as they fight a rear-guard action in the culture war they have already lost.
Apparently, Supervisor Wagner got his political start as a Bible-thumping school district member. And Supervisor Do is just another sleazy mid-County scumbag trying to hang on to what’s left of the Viet-Republican coalition. So why did Chaffee side with this pair of trogs against the two Democrats on the Board of Supervisors? Same old garbage peddled by his intellectual forbearers: if we let them do it we’ll have to let the Neo-Nazis raise the swastika over public buildings.
I’m sort of sick and tired of this sort of disingenuousness on the part of our “honorable” politicians. But I got sick of the Chaffee crime family a long time ago and like many other obnoxious problems, we’re just stuck with this on for another two and a half years.
A few weeks ago the Daily Titan published an article about how, in a few years, Fullerton is going to be running in the red. Deep red. City projections point to being upside down $19 million between 2024 and 2028. Now that’s not very good, is it?
Here’s the grim forecast:
Going the wrong way…
Naturally, the article quickly devolved into a vehicle for advocating the hiring of more people and paying them more, replete with completely fraudulent comparative pay statistics. On hand were Ahmad Zahra and his helper Shana Charles to bleat about unfilled positions and service deficits, always the first opening salvo in a new tax proposal – like the one Zahra pushed hard in 2020.
The head and the hat were a perfect fit.
Doug Chaffee, the senile Fourth District Supervisor of Orange County and a former Fullerton mayor contributed this gem to the conversation: “I think I would have been a little heavier on keeping our staff because they are the lifeblood of the city. They do the work.” Uh, huh. He failed to mention his own inept culpability in mismanaging Fullerton’s budget for years.
Gimme some of that do-re-mi to waste…
Hilariously, Zahra seems to think the phrase “economic development” has some sort of talismanic quality, as if there were anything City Hall could do to produce it. It never worked during the heyday of Redevelopment and it won’t do anything now. It’s just a shiny distraction that can’t even pay for the bumblers who are paid, and paid very well, to pursue it.
What economic development really means is a focus on increasing tax revenue to pay for the salaries and benefits of public employees and their bloated, guaranteed pensions. It would be refreshing if just once elected folks thought about less about raising revenue and more about living within budgetary constraints.
Mayor Fred Jung calmly opined that Fullerton has adequate reserves to handle the tsunami of red ink coming his way, but this is not reassuring. Fullerton went through the same crimson bath during the Fitzgerald/Chaffee/Quirk-Silva/Flory/Zahra regime, and anybody who thinks Fullerton is better off for the deficit spending it is a damn fool.
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.
