While We Were Away: the Train Kept On Rolling

Enjoy the one way trip to insolvency

The last substantive article to run on FFFF site before its almost four year hiatus was this little gem about the “College Connector Study”, a $300,000 study designed to convince the Fullerton City Council that a streetcar system in costing (in their estimate) $140 million was exactly what the City of Fullerton needed. Why? Well, because building the streetcar would encourage high density development all along the rail line, turning Fullerton from a two story bedroom community into a six story high density, high traffic eyesore.

And, just to be clear, that was the argument in favor of wasting $140+ million on the streetcar.

What, you thought I was kidding?

Based on that report, three members of the Fullerton City Council (Chaffee, Fitzgerald and Flory) voted to make a streetcar part of the City’s transportation plan.

For the next three years, progress on the streetcar has stalled, and a competing proposal in Anaheim (this one estimated at $325 million) was shot down by the City Council after a coalition of good government activists ousted the Chamber backed majority from power. Unfortunately (to borrow the tagline for the Friday the 13th Part VI poster), nothing this evil ever dies, and the Fullerton Trolley is back. And like all bad horror sequels, it’s even bigger and more elaborate than before, while making even less sense.

I present to you, the Orange County Centerline:

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay. Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare.

The Centerline (something which has been in various stages of development at OCTA for over a decade) incorporates the Fullerton plan, along with a proposed streetcar line through Santa Ana, and several other lines. The plan is to run the line all the way through Harbor Boulevard all the way up to the transportation center. This would probably explain why that streetcar has been popping up on the artist conception for the Fox Block (image above).

OCTA recently provided a presentation to the Fullerton City Council at Tuesday’s meeting, which can be found here . No mention of which government entity will pay for the project, but even if the OCTA picks up the entire tab, we will at a minimum be on the hook for the maintenance cost , just as Anaheim is with the ARTIC Wasteland. Anaheim taxpayers have been forced to dip into the general fund for every year of ARTIC’s operation, as the revenue generated ($1.6 million) is nowhere near enough to pay the operation ($3.9 million). But hey – the City of Anaheim was given a fancy trophy for agreeing to shoulder these expenses, so the tradeoff was totally worth it, in some people’s eyes.

The trophy is huge, gaudy, expensive, tacky, unnecessary and completely impractical. It’s the perfect metaphor.

The Streetcar/ trolley concept is an absolutely terrible idea for too many reasons to count. The cost is astronomical , the benefit miniscule, it will render the streets it is located on un-drivable (seriously, just picture trying to make it through Downtown Fullerton with that thing blocking traffic). Oh, and it will also further undermine bus service in the county, because the cost of running a streetcar line is substantially higher than rapid bus service.

So to sum up, the OCTA wants to take Orange County into the twenty first century by spending hundreds of millions of dollars developing a nineteenth century technology designed to service people who don’t need it, at the expense of the bus riders who do. Sadly, this is about par for the course for state and county government, minus the exceptionally high price tag. Lets give the Center Line project – and every other streetcar project proposed in Orange County – the quick, merciful death it deserves.

T-REX WANT TO PARTY, TOO

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

T-REX NEED HELP TO DRINK BEER. TINY BOTTLE NO REACH MOUTH.

FULLERTON SPEND NEARLY $100,000 THIS WEEKEND FOR POLICE OFFICERS TO HELP PEOPLE DRINK DOWNTOWN.

POLICE WILL HELP TWO BARS CLOSE THEN REOPEN BECAUSE LINE TOO LONG AT BAR.

POLICE WILL HELP THREE PEOPLE OFF STREET BECAUSE BEER MAKE IT HARD TO DRIVE.

POLICE WILL HELP FOUR PEOPLE TO BED BECAUSE BEER MAKE THEM PASS OUT IN BUSHES.

POLICE WILL HELP FIVE PEOPLE TO CALM DOWN AND NOT FIGHT OVER BAR BILL.

POLICE WILL HELP SIX PEOPLE FIND BAR BECAUSE BEER MADE THEM GET LOST AND DRINK IN PARKING LOT.

 

POLICE HELP ALL THESE PEOPLE DRINK BEER FOR $5,000,000 EACH YEAR.

WHY POLICE NO BUY T-REX A STRAW?

T-REX WANT TO PARTY, TOO.

The Quick Brown Fox

Governor Jerry Brown paid a visit to downtown Fullerton on Wednesday, where it looks like he took a tour of the still-unfinished Fullerton Fox Theater with a rabble of current and former local officials in tow. Surely he was impressed.

OK, maybe not.

But why would Jerry Brown fly down to Fullerton to look inside some flopped redevelopment project?

One could guess that battleground Assemblymember Sharon Quirk-Silva invited Brown to pitch some sort of state subsidy to rescue the project; a thinly veiled attempt to buy voters in one district with the rest of the state’s resources. You can tell an opportunity is at hand by the way the local bush league politicos are salivating all over Brown’s loafers. Hopefully someone had a towel handy.

But all of that is just fine. Why shouldn’t residents of Escondido, Bakersfield and Elk Grove pay for decades of Fullerton’s redevelopment screw ups? Mr. Brown, if there’s money to burn on a movie theater, maybe you can fix our decrepit roads and crumbling bridges, too?

Bruce Whitaker’s Cash Cow

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.

And as usual, the rest of us pick up the bar tab.

We Will Find You. Or Not.

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.

Reading 101.1.1

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?

Fish This: Fullerton Bars Need More Drunks

Naw, I done that myself…

You can’t make this stuff up.

At the last Fullerton City Council Meeting, a posse of local bar owners demanded that the city council allow them to stuff more drunken twenty somethings into their bars.  They went so far as to claim their businesses were suffering because Fullerton’s FIRE CODE prevented them from making as much money as their peers in neighboring cities.

The response from our elected city council?

Absolutely.  More drunks.  And it was unanimous.

Now I know what you’re thinking.  You’ve been to downtown Fullerton on a Friday night.  You’ve seen young ladies puking on the sidewalk outside of the Tuscany Club at 9pm.  You’ve seen young men getting into brawls behind Joe’s at 10:30.  And you’ve seen the rivers of piss and vomit trickling into the parking lot behind Matador early in the morning.  It all just glistens in the moonlight.

And of course a grand night out in historic downtown Fullerton wouldn’t be complete without a stabbing outside of the Continental Room, shootings on Santa Fe, and the drunk driving, more drunk driving, inevitably more drunk driving, and . . . did we say the drunk driving?

But hey, we need more drunks!  According to Fullerton Bar owners (and I’m not making this up):

Under the current situation, if coming to historic downtown becomes a negative experience for patrons because they can’t get into restaurants and bars and they are uncomfortable with the crowded streets, sidewalks, and parking lots; they may go to other cities that offer a more positive experience.  As a result, if business owners income’s (sic) decrease to where they are not profitable, some will have to close.

Wait, some of the 50 odd bars in downtown Fullerton will have to close if we keep the FIRE CODE as it is?

GOOD!  And don’t the the door hit you in the ass on the way out.

Because let’s be honest.  More people in bars means one thing: MORE DRUNKS.

Instead of caving into the Bar owners who profit on littering our streets and alleys with vomit and excrement each weekend, perhaps our city council should finally take a small step to restore civility.

Let’s not amend the fire code to allow for more drunks drinking.  Let’s keep it exactly how it is and how about we shut down any bar that exceeds its occupancy limit down for a month.  Fullerton’s current practice allows a bar caught breaking the law to reopen on the same night.

Betcha didn’t know that.

What do you think  Fullerton?  Do you want more drunks?  Let your city council know how you feel about their vote, 5-0, to give you more of this, this, and this.

But hey, we’re just a bunch of malcontents.  Maybe more of this, this, and this is exactly what you want.

Congratulations Fullerton Bar Owners.  You went fishing for a handout and caught the means to finally bring some order to the shit show that is Saturday night.

Say, Whatever Happened to Fullerton’s Downtown Core and Corridors Specific Plan and the $1,000,000 in State Money that Paid for It?

Most government projects have three things in common: they are bad ideas promoted by bureaucrats, they are obscenely expensive, and there is no accountability attached to them.

In Fullerton we have lots of examples over the years that touch all three bases. But if ever one needed a veritable poster child for government fiascoes, the ill-conceived “Downtown Core and Corridors” Specific Plan would be it.

 

Back in 2010, the City of Fullerton put in an application for a “project” to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s  “Strategic Growth Council” an assemblage of bureaucrats and political appointees selected by the governor to promote sustainability and responsibility in urban (and suburban planning). On the face of it, the idea was to promote development that would be eco-friendly – somehow, someway. Lo and Behold! Fullerton received a $1,000,000 grant to create the Downtown Core and Corridors Specific Plan, a massive overlay zone. In 2013  a committee was appointed to make this look like a community driven enterprise, but as so often happens the committee was led along by the consultants and staff who were being paid, and paid well, out of the grant money. Some members of this committee only went to one meeting, the last one, in May 2014, a meeting consumed by passing out certificates of participation to committee members for all their hard work.

In the meantime, the intent of the creators of the specific plan became crystal clear: opportunity for massive new housing projects along Fullerton’s busiest streets, development that would not even have to undergo the scrutiny facing normal projects so long as the permissive guidelines of the specific plan were met. Naturally, lots of people objected to the continued over-development of Fullerton, and the utter disconnect with what the Strategic Growth Council was ostensibly promoting. Perhaps the most obnoxious thing about the specific plan proposal was the way it was being used, unapproved by any policy maker, to promote other massive apartment projects already in the entitlement process.

And then a funny thing happened. The Downtown Core and Corridors Specific Plan vanished into thin air. Although recommended by the Planning Commission in August of 2014, the plan and its Environmental Impact Report never went to the city council for approval. 2015 passed; and so did 2016 without the plan being approved. Even modifications rumored to have been proposed by the now-departed Planning Director Karen Haluza never materialized for council review or approval.

I’ll drink to that!

Some cynical people believe the plan was postponed in 2014 because of the council election, an election that returned development uber alles councilmembers Greg Sebourn and Bud Chaffee. And they believe that the subsequent attempt to erase the plan from the municipal memory was perpetrated by none other than the hapless city manager, Joe Felz and lobbyist councilperson Jennifer Fitzgerald, (so the story goes) two individuals who had every incentive to shake down potential developers one by one, rather than granting a broad entitlement for new and gargantuan development. Felz had a massive budget deficit to fill, and Fitzgerald had massive lobbying opportunities from potential Pringle and Associate clients.

A chemical bond

What is undeniable is that three long years have passed and no action has been taken to either approve or deny the specific plan. The grant money approved by the State has been a complete waste – a travesty so embarrassing to everybody concerned that no one seems to want to demand an explanation for this fiasco. Neither the city bureaucrats or council, nor the State has any incentive to advertise this disaster, and you can bet there never will be an accounting.

 

 

And There It Sits

It may have been expensive, but it sure was unnecessary…

Ten weeks ago I took a break documenting the disastrous “elevators to nowhere” story, a history of confusion and ineptitude that had its genesis in Jones, Bankhead and McKinley era. This completely unnecessary $4,000,000 boondoggle was five-and-a-half years old and it was dead in the water.

As of May 10, 2017 work on this project had already been halted for quite some time. Now, two-and-a-half months later, work has still not resumed. It is probably useless to inquire to the City about the facts of this latest delay, given the total lack of transparency surrounding this project throughout its death march. The Public Works Department appears to be incapable of presenting an honest staff report about it, and our elected officials could pretty obviously not care less about the waste or the management problems connected to it.

One thing we may safely assume: the delay – if it is the responsibility of the City, as is highly likely – is going to cost us a lot in extended overhead for the contractor, Woodcliff Corporation; and the cost will be accompanied by the usual complete lack of accountability to the taxpayers of Fullerton.