Ths Cash Cow

You lookin’ at me?

There certainly was a lot of boohooing and breast beating at the Fullerton City Council meeting last week in response to the Council majority pulling the plug on a State DUI grant.

The cops mobilized their MADD allies to tell all the horrible stories of drunk driving mayhem. The only problem was that that’s not the point, no matter how much the liberal spendthrifts like Jan Flory would love to throw at her pals in the FPOA for overtime.

Yes, the real issue is the efficacy of DUI checkpoints in the first place, and something even more sinister: the use of DUI checkpoints to seize vehicles belonging to unlicensed drivers, as detailed in this OC Register story from 2010 that cites an actual, honest-to-goodness study at Berkeley. Apparently the impound/towing fees are immense, as are the fines. We already know about the tens of millions of overtime every year in the state, mostly for cops to stand around.

The cop addiction to all this gravy might explain this video of a public forum in Pomona where the topic of DUI/vehicle seizures is being discussed. Naturally a proud member of the police association is there to scream at those who might object.

Hmm. Sergeant O’Malley?

Thin Skin Flory is Horrified

If you are going to get involved in politics developing a thick skin is essential. If you can’t take the heat, well you know. Here is Jan Flory attacking Travis Kiger for having the temerity to be “webmaster” for the award-winning FFFF blog.

It’s interesting to see how Jan Flory thinks this blog  has some issue “strong, older women” (i.e. her). That’s wrong, of course.

It couldn’t possibly be that our antipathy with Mrs. Flory is because she has always been a mean, vindictive harpy with a trail of votes that have cost the taxpayers of Fullerton a fortune, now could it?

Jan Flory Talks About Sex and Water

Correct. We do not want you to discuss sexy issues.

Okay this post is not about Jan Flory discussing anything remotely “sexy” because the thought of that…well, never mind.

The post is about her latest Facebook scribblings in which she opines on a subject near and dear to the hearts of Fullerton reformers: the illegal 10% tax on your water that the City collected for the past 15 years. $27,000,000 worth.

First I’ll start by stating what you could have already guessed. Jan Flory does not want you to get a refund of the theft. In her world-order the taxpayers are meant to be milked, not refunded.

Her assertion that the collection was “illegal” the past three year is a bad lawyer’s half-truth that amounts to a bald-faced lie, of course. It has been illegal for 15 years, six of them on her watch as a council person. The City has a legal opinion that it is only obligated to refund three-year’s worth of the theft. Not the same thing, is it? Of course Mrs. Flory is desperate to disassociate her name with the tax. Too late. She is on record in the 90s as having known it was wrong and doing it anyway.

Mrs. Flory and her ilk love footling committees, especially when they are selected by ozone brains like Jone, Quirk, McKinley and Bankhead. Even better are the “consultants” selected by staff who give them their marching orders. The “report” cooked up by the water rate consultant was so evidently bogus that it hardly needs to be restated. But I will: their goal was to gin up as much phony cost as possible to keep the bureaucrats greedy little fingers on that 10%. Flory may think this gives her cover, and under the old Culture of Corruption it would have. Not any more.

The 10% was expressly collected  to cover specific City staff costs associated with the water utility. However, it turns out that those departments were already charging directly to the Water Fund. Which is why I am happy to refer to the tax as an illegal theft.

And another point: it’s real easy to say that the illegal tax should be refunded to the Water Fund for capital improvements. That’s convenient, but immoral. The tax that was collected had nothing to do with infrastructure. Nothing. True infrastructure costs should be rolled into an effective rate for water transmission, a correction of years of mismanagement by Mrs. Flory and her cohorts that still needs to be done. Confusing these two issues is simply a convenient way for the perpetrators to hide their crime and their dereliction.

Now, let’s address the issue of the reserve funds, a subject that Mrs. Flory wants people to believe she knows something about. There is no need to empty these accounts to pay refunds. No, indeed. I find it remarkably disingenuous for anybody to assert this, especially given just two of City manger Joe Felz’s most recent “cost saving” measures.

First there was the egregious relocation of former Redevelopment personnel into General Fund departments for which they had no apparent expertise. Most recently the City contracted out your graffiti removal services for $120,000. Yay! Big savings, right? Wrong. The city employees were simply reassigned to other  jobs in the Engineering Department that were vacant. Net cost savings? -$120,000.

The City just missed an opportunity to shave a million bucks off its payroll costs. Of course, my point is that the General Fund is far from depleted.

Finally, in closing, I would submit that Mrs. Flory knows more about witching hours than any of us. However, if she doesn’t like staying up that late every other Tuesday night, then she has no business on a city council. And it’s really too bad that the Council is scheduling special meetings to attend to the people’s business.

Mrs. Flory’s little rubber stamp has been put away and locked up.

Jan Flory Update: Says She Likes DUI Checkpoints (!) And Spending Other People’s Money; Admits Water Fraud Was a Tax!

A few facts.

1. The State of California is broke. Why? Mostly because spendthrift incompetent politicians like Jan Flory keep spending more and more.

2. DUI checkpoints and their random stop of law-abiding citizens violates the spirit, if not the letter of the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution.

3. DUI Checkpoints provide lots of overtime for cops, most of whom just stand around doing nothing but socializing.

4. The removal of drunks from the road per man-hours in DUI stops is less than if the cops just pulled over real drunks driving drunk. In Downtown Fullerton that would be like shooting fish in a barrel.

Now let’s observe the vinegary observations of a local Fullerton spendthrift:

Jan Flory thinks somebody needs to consult with the cops to find out if they support overtime for the troops, paid for by somebody else? Hoo Boy, what a great idea. Here’s my idea: arrest people for driving drunk instead of arbitrarily harassing sober motorists.

Mrs. Flory’s education was complete. The designated driver was on the way.

51 bars? Yeah, right. You and your pals, the Three Bald Tires, turned downtown Fullerton into an open air liquor parlor, so thanks for that.

Oh, yeah. And another thing. Thanks, Jan for recognizing that the “in-lieu fee” was really a tax! Now just repeat: illegal tax, and you’ll have it 100% right. You should; you voted for the illegal tax each year for six years!

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.

 

Jan Flory Confirms: Her Dog is Dead! Well, I Knew That!

You heard it directly from the horse’s mouth, although I wish she’d got my moniker right.

My former mistress sure is worked up about that booze thing, and I don’t know why; she never seemed too concerned about it before. That long, painful explanation was almost as bad as a big swig of cheap vodka.

Walking the straight and narrow…

And hey, I am sitting down up here in doggie Heaven and I have to say that the idea of Mr. Kiger getting a nickle, let alone four grand a month “working” for this blog is a preposterous prevarication. Of course such remuneration would have to be reported on the financial interest forms all city council members have to fill out.

Since Ms. Flory cannot produce a shred of evidence to support her story, some folks might think an apology will be forthcoming for libeling a political opponent.

The backswing is a bitch…

But don’t hold your breath. You are much more likely to receive a swat from that damn broomstick! And yes, I do believe I went to my reward right around 1985!

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!

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?