Jan Flory Living in Wrong Century

Too bad it’s not 1971. Too bad for Jan Flory, that is.

See, her vision of a know-it-all government, whose “expertise” the citizenry is obliged to (shut up and) obey was much more prevalent then. But a decade of suffocating inflation, ever-escalating taxes and ballooning interest rates got people thinking about things.

By the time Mrs. Flory was first elected to the Fullerton City Council in 1994, the world had changed a lot, although she hardly knew it. And by the time she was fired by the voters, in 2002, she was as obsolete as the horse and buggy.

You need only observe her behavior during the past year to witness a mind soaked in a nasty vindictiveness as her “esteemed” idols, the Three Bald Tires, were driven from office themselves for incompetence and dereliction.

Where was Flory when an innocent man was murdered by the cops? Where was Flory when the City paid out $350,00 to two victims of Albert Rincon’s sexual batteries? Where was Flory when FPD employees were looting the evidence room and ripping off Explorers; or beating up, arresting and prosecuting innocent bystanders?

I’ll tell you where Flory was. She was snuggling up to the Three Hollow Logs in their secret sound-proof bunker.

If Mrs. Flory thinks posting her mindless musings on a Facebook page means that she is in any way more useful than a lost shoe, she has another think coming.

And we’re not going to give Fullerton back to the decrepit mind-set of Flory, Jones, Bankhead and McPension and their incompetent, arrogant ilk.

As Doc HeeHaw would say: Nuh uh!

Jan Flory and the “3@50” Sinkhole

Jan Flory is running for Fullerton City Council. Jan Flory used to be on Fullerton City Council. Jan Flory is hoping that nobody remembers her disastrous decisions on Fullerton City Council.

Oops!  Too late.

In one of the costliest misjudgments in Fullerton history, Mrs. Flory joined her fellow council members in approving the horrible, retroactive 3@50 pension formula for the City’s “public safety” employees that was a massive gift of public funds and created a huge unfunded pension liability that eats up a bigger percentage of Fullerton’s budget every year.

Bankhead, Flory, Clesceri, Jones and Norby.  At least Norby apologized for his blunder. Flory never has. She even made the motion to approve the gargantuan giveaway!

View the agreement

Post meeting party at the police station!

Of course the excuse Don Bankhead and Patdown Pat McPension used was that without the benefit Fullerton couldn’t recruit the best and brightest. You know, cops like Ramos and Wolfe and Cicinelli, and Rincon, and Mater and Mejia and Major, and well, you get the idea.

Of course Mrs. Flory never got around to explaining how giving away a retroactive benefit to current employees would improve future recruitment.

Being on a city council for eight long years can create an embarrassing trail of disastrous decision. Our job will be to remind the public of Mrs. Flory’s string of expensive votes.

 

OC GOP Endorses Whitaker, Kiger

Last night the OC GOP Central Committee endorsed incumbent Fullerton City Councilmembers Bruce Whitaker and Travis Kiger for re-election in November.

From a practical standpoint that’s good news for Whitaker and Kiger. The party still carries a lot of weight in Fullerton elections as demonstrated by leland Wilson’s blow-out of Jan Flory in 2002, and even Pat McKinley’s razor-thin victory over Doug Chaffee in 2010.

A Day at the Races

Here is a snapshot of a gaggle of Jan Flory supporters proudly wearing their T-shirts at Los Alamitos Racetrack! How they got a T shirt on the that old nag is anybody’s guess.

See if you can find the old nag.

I don’t know who the [dopey looking] guy is on the far right, but the bald, beady-eyed gent in the back is F. “Paul” Dudley, Jan Flory’s old drinking buddy. He’s the creep who gave away the public sidewalk to the Florentine mob, and who played a pivotal role in every single Jan Flory approved boondoggle from 1994 through 2002.

Whirlaway. Win, place or show?

It’s hard to imagine these people getting their greasy mitts on any sort of authority in Fullerton again. But what to I know? I’m just a dead dog. And Don Bankead is running again!

The Field is Set

Here are your 2012 candidates for Fullerton City Council. Seats will go to the the top three vote-getters.

Rick Alvarez
Businessowner/Planning Commissioner

Bruce Whitaker
Member of the City Council, City of Fullerton

Matthew Hakim
Musician/Artist

Travis Kiger
City Council Member, City of Fullerton

Jennifer Fitzgerald
Fullerton Business Owner

Jan Flory
Family Law Attorney

Jane Rands
Systems Engineer

Roberta Reid
Retired

Vivian “Kitty” Jaramillo
Retired Preservation Inspector

Barry Levinson
Auditor/Parks Commissioner

Brian Bartholomew
Small Business Owner

Don Bankhead
Retired Police Captain

The Blank is Back!

Pudding cups!

Tanned rested and ready, after a 9 week hiatus, Don Bankhead, retired police captain, stumblebum, incompetent, tired, phraser of spoonerisms, and the only man in the 162 year-old history of California to be recalled from the same office twice, is back.

Yes, indeedy, recently ousted Fullerton councilman Don Bankhead filed papers yesterday to run for city council this fall – marking his tenth election to get or hold that esteemed position.

Even after the meteorite hit him in the noggin, Blank jumped right back into the game. After all his legacy was at stake. Damn mammals.

You really have to wonder what motivates Bankhead at this point, if anything beyond senile stubbornness. Who he thinks his supporters are is hard to fathom. Perhaps he was encouraged by a room full of cops and cop apologists wearing blue shirts. Blue is Don’s favorite color. Does he believe the FPOA and the fire union will back a clueless octogenarian exhibiting signs of evident cognitive dissonance? Well of course they will!

Still, it will be interesting to see which cruel, thoughtless persons signed his nominating papers.

In a way it’s sort of sad to see a man whom time has so evidently passed by deny the reality: two thirds of the voters in the recent Recall voted to get rid of him.

 

What To Do About The Illegal Water Tax

On Tuesday the City Council is scheduled to discuss what they want to do about the embarrassing fact that the City charged an illegal 10% tax on our water bill for fifteen years, amassing a total rip-off that easily topped $25,000,000. The funds were deposited in General Fund and mostly went to pay for salaries and pensions of City employees that had absolutely nothing to do with the acquisition and transmission of water – the ostensible purpose of the levy. It even went to pay for four-star hotels for Councilmembers’ League of City junkets.

Some folks think reparations are due, in some fashion, to the rate payers that got ripped off. But how? A check in the mail? Lowered rates in the future? Repayment from the General Fund to the Water Fund?

The City doesn’t have $25 mil laying around, and rebates in the future for past indiscretions would certainly create inequities. Going back just a few years for reparations may be a logical and practical step. Repayment from the General Fund over time may be the only recourse and would certainly address the original purpose of the “in-lieu fee” which was the cost of delivering water to the people and businesses of Fullerton. However it should be pointed out that the the 10% that was raked off was never connected to the true cost of the water in the first place.

Another question to be dealt with is what is an applicable rate for miscellaneous City costs that are currently unrecompensed by the Water Fund? There isn’t much unaccounted for, and the “consultant” for the Water rate Ad Hoc Committee tried to cook up some phony percentage between 6 and 7 based largely on the cost of the City charging the Water Fund rent!

This raises all sorts of embarrassing questions about why the Water Utility was not permitted to acquire all this valuable real estate in the first place, dirt cheap, if now it is to be treated as a separate entity; and how a landlord can negotiate rent with his tenant when they are both one and the same person. In any case there is a new council that is a lot less likely to cave in to this sort of nonsense than the old stumblebums.

In any case, I want to mention a couple of things. First, the perpetrators of the scam need to be identified and chastised for their complicity in the tax: they would be all of the former councilmen of the last 15 years who let this happen; the city managers Jim Armstrong, Chris Meyer, and Joe Felz, who participated in the scheme and who either knew or should have known it was illegal; and let’s not forget Richard Jones, Esq., the City Attorney, who was there every single step of the way and damn well knew it was illegal. Second, Joe Felz’ obvious strategy of stalling and temporizing on this issue, aided and abetted by the Three Hollow Logs and Sharon Quirk, protracted the rip-off by another full year and compounded the problem even more, even as they knew the jig was up.

It should be interesting to see if any of our aspiring council candidates show up to share their wisdom on this subject.

What do you think?

 

Unity Versus Justice

I spent a long time listening to the comments at our City Council meeting on August 7 on getting an RFP from OCSD.  There were some good remarks pro and con.  But I also heard a lot of the following:

“Support your Community!”  “Strength in Unity!” “Unite, don’t Divide!” “We need to Come Together!”

Listening to this I was struck that the people offering these platitudes didn’t seem to understand one of the most fundamental characteristics of  a real democracy.  While I hate to quote from former Defense Secretary and accomplished pathological liar Donald Rumsfeld, he did once blurt out the truth at a press conference when he said “democracy is messy.”

The irony of course was that Rumsfeld said this in defense of the chaos he had just created in starting a very undemocratic invasion of another country.  But, democracy is messy, and this messiness is necessary.  Disagreement and debate are also necessary.  Seeking information, such as an RFP, is necessary.  And yes, prospective city council people and Fullerton middle-of-the-roaders,  anger is necessary.  It can be misdirected and incoherent, but in the presence of great injustice anger is a sign of compassion, not of hate. Anger is also one of the few options the powerless have to express their need for justice.  So questioning the Fullerton Police Department’s entire existence may create division between the public and the police (though randomly beating and killing members of the public arguably creates a lot more division).  But so what?  In a democracy, healing divisions between law enforcement (or one law enforcement organization to be precise) and the public is not even close to the highest goal of government.

The penultimate goal of the justice system and those who administer it should always and invariably be justice.   It would be easy to have a community which thought of themselves as unified, but tolerated injustice. Think of a country which experiences unity as it unjustly attacks and wages war against another country; or enslaves a race; or discriminates against certain classes of individuals.  Think of unity as the rallying cry for totalitarian regimes past and present.  Unity and community without justice is nothing more than the acceptance of injustice and oppression.

This is why the appropriate sentiment for Fullerton, or Anaheim, or Downey, or any community where law enforcement has been manifestly unjust is not “let’s all unite together” but “no justice no peace.”  This simple slogan reminds those in power that  justice is the primary goal, and there can be no peace until justice is achieved. If peace comes before justice, the likely result is that there will be no motivation to right past wrongs and to ensure future justice. “Peace” is desirable only once the conditions for peace have been established, and the primary condition is justice.

Another phrase thrown around a lot is “compromise.”  Compromise is essential in any form of human relationships, including politics. But there are a few things which cannot be compromised, and the main one of these is justice.  Remember, we were not too long ago faced with a situation in which police drove around Fullerton, randomly pulled people over, beat them savagely and sadistically, and then falsely arrested them. What sort of compromise could there be in cases like this?  That police officers are given a mild talking-to instead of being terminated and prosecuted?  What kind of compromise can we forge with those who would bludgeon an unarmed and innocent man like Kelly Thomas to death, or those who would shield the men who did?

It is apparent that the coded language of injustice in Fullerton is now built around the following words or phrases: “Unity.” “Coming Together.” “Compromise.” “Support.” “Community.”When you hear these words used in the context of our city be forewarned – someone or some group is conspiring to make sure that justice is not served, so that your rights will continue to be violated with impunity while those in positions of power and privilege are able to keep them.  I don’t want to hear these words used by our elected officials or candidates for public office.  I don’t want the “healing to begin.” I want to hear the following words:

Accountability. Responsibility. And most importantly – JUSTICE.

Or else?  No peace.