Friends may remember the tussle on the City Council in the weeks following City Councilmember Ahmad Zahra’s election in 2018. At first he opined that a replacement election to fill Jesus Quirk-Silva’s vacate at-large council seat was right and proper. There was applause.
But then something weird happened. A month later Zahra went back on his word and voted to appoint Council retread Jan Flory for another lap around the track. After Flory was safely installed on the council, she, Jennifer Fitzgerald, and Zahra voted to replace Bruce Whitaker on the OC Water District Board with…Zahra.
“Well, Joe, who cares” I can hear some of you saying. But apart from the role the OCWD plays in the OC water wars, and the huge pile of cash the agency sits on, the appointment pays. And pays damn well. For an unemployed “film producer” what could be better? Suddenly the Flory appointment didn’t look weird at all.
During his two years on the water board Zahra made some damn good money – tens of thousands of dollars in pay and benefits. And while on the board he pimped the awful Poseidon desal scam and got district PR people to write articles he published in the Fullerton Observer under his own name.
Whirlaway
In 2021 Fitzgerald and Flory were mercifully gone; Zahra was removed from the OCWD, replaced with Bruce Whitaker. Zahra’s Mother’s Milk was turned off at the spigot and he has only collected his council stipend since
But I checked all the right boxes!
Fullerton Folk are now speculating about whether the 2024-elected council will appoint Zahra as Mayor, an honorific job he desperately wants. A Vivian Jaramillo victory in District 4 would have got him that. But it also would have gotten the ability to vote himself back onto the OCWD board, and back on that gravy train.
Jamie Valencia, an unknown variable…
Alas ’twas not to be for Zahra. Jaramillo was beaten by newcomer Jamie Valencia who was denigrated by Jaramillo’s precinct walkers and by Jaramillo herself. She owes the Democrat nothing and may not have any inclination to do favors for the man who promoted her opponent, big time.
I have to admit I haven’t been paying much attention to the development of Fullerton’s “6th Cycle” General Plan Housing Element. I figured it to be a fruitless paper chase in which a consultant got paid a bunch of money to produce umpteen pages of incomprehensible gobbledygook. Turns out I was right about that.
If the paper fits, push it!
The other thing that caused indifferent resignation on my part was the housing mandate decreed by the State Housing and Community Development Department, often referred to as “State HCD.” It so happens that their mandate for Fullerton was to create the opportunity for 13,000 new residential units, as determined by yet another faceless bureaucracy, Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG), whose mission is to do whatever the State wants, regardless of what is good for its constituent members. The 13,000 units are part of SCAG’s Regional Housing Needs Assessment (RHNA, pronounced ree-nuh). These people sure love them some acronyms.
Where these 13,000 unit opportunities are supposed to go in a built out city is no mystery. It will require re-zoning commercial, office professional, and industrially zoned property to admit new residential use. Lots of it.
Well, that’s bad enough, but our crack Community Development Department saw fit to propose a new zoning overlay that could accommodate 30,000 new units. You read that right. 30,000 units, a sum that could increase Fullerton’s population to near the quarter million mark. Their justification? It’s so they won’t have to do anymore bowing and scraping to State HCD. At least not for a while. Or so they say.
The whole thing is ludicrous. First, the rationale for giving the Sacramento boneheads more than they demand is crazy. It’s like paying a million bucks in ransom when the kidnapers only asked for half a mil with no guarantee they won’t do it again. Then there’s the practical side of this. There would be no new roads, no new sewer and water superstructure added, no new schools built, and sixty thousand new auto trips daily. And don’t forget the inadequate parking. It’s a farce piled on top of another farce. But somehow everything will work out, our six-figure experts tell us..
The mechanism to perform this new housing miracle is the called the Housing Incentive Overlay Zone (you guessed it, there’s an acronym – HIOZ). Staff and their consultants have identified hundreds and hundreds of real estate parcels that would receive the new overlay zone, but they don’t seem to be unduly concerned about the effect to the City of Fullerton of losing land for commercial and industrial purposes. It seems that in the grand bureaucratic scheme of things, satisfying other bureaucrats in Sacramento is even more important than losing that sales tax revenue they’re always hunting around for like rabid wolverines.
Pantomime…
Well, fear not, Friends. In reality the 30,000 units was likely just Kabuki theater meant to look like a good faith effort to outdo even the demands of anonymous paper-pushers at SCAG. The City Council discussed this issue last week and there’s no way any of them are going to give the State more than it wants.
Of course, there’s another possibility, too. A political one. The utterly incompetent Ahmad Zahra and Shana Charles, Fullerton City Council’s two ultra-liberals, are up for re-election in 2026, and, cynic that I am, I have to wonder if they both won’t use this silver-platter opportunity to campaign on how they defended Fullerton’s quality of life by fighting hard against 17,000 apartments that were never going to happen anyway. Now that would be cynical, wouldn’t it?
While checking out election disclosure Form 497s yesterday, I noticed that some rich dude named John Phelps had made two significant contributions – maxing out at $5500 apiece for Jan Flory and Vivian Jaramillo.
Obviously that made me wonder who John Phelps is. So I reached out to occasional commenter “Fullerton Old Timer” for a helping hand. Here’s what FOT wrote:
John Phelps is one of the last of the old guard defenders of anything emanating from City Hall bureaucrats. While his clan has been around for a long time he really made his fortune courtesy of the Fullerton Redevelopment Agency that helped develop the massive shopping center on the southwest corner of Harbor and Orangethorpe. He is the epitome of the government-aided developer.
He’s been supporting liberal causes for a long time but has been mostly interested on defending the status quo, Democrat or Republican. It’s no wonder he’s digging deep for Flory and Jaramillo, since they represent Fullerton statism, instead of accountability. His name appears on Jaramillo’s list of endorsers where he is erroneously listed as a former mayor. That will never be fixed.
It’s interesting to note that Phelps also gave the max to the pro sales tax, Measure S a few years ago; in 2022 he gave the maximum amount to the prevaricating Ahmad Zahra’s re-election. He will be likely be supporting the sales tax 2.0 as well.
Well there you have it. The Fullerton Circle of Life.
The subject of trichlorethylene (TCE) contamination along the proposed Trail to Nowhere has been the subject of discussion on this blog. The adjacent factory at 311 South Highland Avenue was the site of TCE spills for years and has been identified as such by the State Department of Toxic Substance Control and the federal EPA. The agencies identified a southerly moving plume off the property and directly under the trail site.
The contamination was included in a lawsuit brought by the Orange County Water District, but has not been remediated.
In previous posts FFFF identified old test wells on property to the west of 311 S. Highland.
It turns out there are new ones, too. Six of them, in fact, that were actually drilled on the trail site strung out along several hundred feet.
There are also new test wells that have been placed very recently even farther south – in the west 100 block of Truslow Avenue.
These test wells have been placed without any notification to the residents of District 5, so they told me when I traversed the area today; but, obviously the City is aware of these installations since encroachment permits are required to do this sort of work on public property.
So the question remains: what is the level of toxicity in the area – and not just on the impact to ground water, but to surface soils that might need to be excavated, treated, and removed. There is no budget to do toxic soils remediation, either in the Trail to Nowhere grant application, or in the City’s budget.
Maybe the soils along the Trail to Nowhere are clean, or at least of a level of toxicity that is not considered hazardous. Maybe not. Maybe it’s time to find out.
The good people at California’s High Speed Rail Authority, who just can’t waste our money fast enough, are moving toward a revised track alignment between Los Angeles and Anaheim. What does this mean? It means a massive boondoggle of course, spending billions to bring a “bullet train” to Orange County that won’t be any faster than the Metrolink line that covers the same distance in the same amount of time.
The new configuration would share existing tracks along the current three-track mainline, and would a add a fourth, dedicated line. And where would the fourth track alignment go? In Fullerton it would have to go on the south side of the main line tracks because there isn’t any room on the northside where the BNSF Railroad currently has two sidings right up to the edge of their right-of-way. The south side of the tracks, however do have room from the Commonwealth underpass as far as Harbor Boulevard.
Of course this would mean using the property that the Parks Department and the Friends of the Trail to Nowhere say is feasible (later on) to take their amenity to the Hunt Branch Library, and beyond. The question of how the trail could get past the BNSF mainline tracks would become moot. The trail would require a prohibitively expensive bridge with elevators; either that or a bridge a quarter mile long, or more. And there goes the alleged connectivity that the Trail to Nowhere boosters keep talking about, even if the BNSF were willing on some distant day to sell to the City.
The trail folks can pick their poison. Useless transit or useless bike trail. Of course they would have to educamate themselves first, and that’s just not going to happen in the Education Community.
As you might expect, the application form is boilerplate and gives the applicant the opportunity to pick questions that put its proposal in the best light. Reading it gives one the impression that the State doesn’t do a lot of particular investigation; takes applications at face value, assuming applicant to be honest; and doesn’t condescend to concern itself with real field investigations.
The application is replete with traffic and demographic data of the most useless sort. This tripe can be dismissed as bureaucratic string tying and gobbledegooking. The literary answers in it sounds like somebody describing the Yellow Brick Road leading to the fabulous Emerald City.
But there are specific questions on the application that are germane to effective spending of public money, and the answers elicited shed light into the mindset of our Parks Department personnel.
Let’s look at Lie Collection #1. The City is asked to describe boonful economic impacts of the Trail to Nowhere:
Visit local businesses? What the Hell? Like the back of industrial buildings and junk yards? Countless opportunities for economic renewal and growth? Name just one along this dismal “trail.” We now know the proposed “trail” doesn’t even line up with Phase I, a fact omitted in the project budget and description. We also know it doesn’t go east past the abandoned park and doesn’t reach the Transportation Center. An affordable way to travel? For whom, for God’s sake? And how much does it cost to walk to Independence Park, using safe streets? That’s right, nothing. The “trail” links no disadvantaged community with schools (there aren’t any), or local businesses, and of course the “trail” doesn’t get to the Transportation Center. It stops at Harbor Boulevard.
Here’s another packet of misinformation, Lie Collection #2. Get a load of this.
Somehow the author of this application “anticipates” 105,000users annually,an astonishing 288 users each and every day – 24 every daytime hour. In order to get where? Why to the back parking lot in the northeast corner of Independence Park, that’s where. The statistics thrown into the mush to support this nonsense are of the most generic kind, and .prove nothing. Of course we already know that there is no physical linkage to the half-circle north of the tracks. Calling this strip an “active transportation corridor” is hysterically funny to anyone who has walked the abandoned right-of-way.
I included the paragraph above the c.2 in the snippet just to show the repetition of the lies and the nonsense that this “trail” would be used, miraculously, by bus and train riders. There are no points of connection from the “trail” to either service. And notice that the application includes the names of all sorts of disembodied parks that are nowhere near the “trail” and that are not remotely accessible to it.
Is it safe? Is it clean? Who cares? It’s a transportation corridor!
Now we arrive at Lie Collection #3. This is more of the same rubbish.
This block of lies is nothing but a bureaucratic word salad of nonsense and misinformation. It’s comical that the described location of Independence Park is actually where the large DMV facility is located. You’d think the Parks Department would know where their parks are, but this geographical illiteracy may explain how the “trail” proposal was cooked up in the first place. And we know the “trail” provides no access to Richman Park, and of course the Big Lie about connectivity to Downtown Fullerton, the High School and Fullerton College must be repeated, and repeated and repeated – ad nauseam.
A trail runs through it…
Lie Collection #4 is crucial to understanding how this grant was approved, rather than booted out the door with guffaws of laughter.
Whether this hot mess was really “shovel ready” as confidently asserted here is a matter of conjecture, based on the presence of carcinogenic toxins adjacent and below a significant part of the “trail.” But observe in the red box how the application writer avers that some sort of “Environmental Review process” was completed in 1998, and how no elements of the “trail” were found to require mitigation. There’s a body buried here and it’s toxic, too. We know this claim is a lie because the UP Park was acquired at the same time as the linear right-of-way, and was found to be contaminated much later – in the 2000s, demanding that we accept the idiocy that the “trail” was tested in 1998, but the park site was not. It’s an inescapable conclusion that no environmental “process” was undertaken by the City in 1998 at all. Furthermore, we know that two recent Public Records Act requests for specific information about testing on the “trail” returned no relevant documents. This means that if any documents for Environmental Phase I and Phase II research and testing were performed in 1998, the City is withholding that documentation. Or, alternatively, no documentation exists, meaning that the claim in the application couldn’t have been verified.
Finally, the application conveniently omits any mention of TCE contamination along part of it, and under it, a fact well-known in City Hall and by the State of California for decades.
Wow, this makes my lies about myself look like amateur stuff.
And that leads to a significant question: would the State ever have approved a grant based on this dodge about environmental assessment? I seriously doubt it.
Fortunately the question is moot so far as the future of the infamous Trail to Nowhere is concerned. That proverbial train pulled out of the station with the wise vote by Dunlap, Jung and Whitaker. That’s not what these series of posts have been about. They are about what goes on in City Hall, how decisions are made, or, as the case may be, not made; how there seems to be be little or no accountability for things that are done poorly, illegally, illogically, and untruthfully.
The other night I was watching our esteemed councilcreatures meet so I could check out the Associated Road conversation and I stuck around for the discussion on whether to hire a “consultant” to figure out the cost for Fullerton to ditch the Orange County Power Agency.
Green and electric…
The OCPA was conceived as a way to provide “green energy” alternative electricity to people in orange County who wanted it. The idea was the brainchild of the City of Irvine who paid for the start up costs. Eventually Fullerton, Buena Park, Huntington Beach and the County signed on.
Don’t Ask Don’t Tell!
From the get go critics attacked the new agency for secrecy and incompetence and failure to deliver a competitive price. It was up to individuals who wanted out, to opt out, a backhanded way to get, and keep customers. Not a good start.
Flash forward to today.
The County has pulled out of the OCPA, Irvine has been talking about it, too. Last Tuesday the Huntington Beach council voted to do the same; on the very same night the Fullerton City, debated the merits of hiring a consultant to figure out what the financial ramifications might be for us get out, too, before Fullerton is left holding the proverbial bag.
I have no idea why City Hall doesn’t already know the consequences of leaving the agency and why the exact formula wasn’t know before we got into it. Anyhow, the discussion wasn’t all that clear.
Show me the money…
Ahmad Zahra, one of the people who voted for Fullerton to join this agency wasn’t there to opine on it. Bruce Whitaker and Nick Dunlap both expressed reservations about the whole deal, but went along with Mayor Jung’s suggestion of having the City Manager ask the agency to tell them what it would cost to bolt, instead of hiring a consultant to do it. That makes sense of course, but begs the question of why this wasn’t done a long, long time ago. Like on Day One.
Cost analysis is hard…
Shana Charles who comically described herself as a “cost analyst” was pushing hard to waste money hiring somebody to pry the information, somehow, out of the OCPA – no doubt a way to embarrass Jung who is now happens to be the Chair of the OCPA. Her motion died a very slow death.
So where will this all lead? The OCPA claims to have reformed itself, but has provided zero evidence to show it has. The board got rid of the first problematic CEO even as they showered him with praise. As far as I can see this shows that nobody there is serious about anything.
Getting out of OCPA may be expensive and may get more so as members drop out; nobody seems to know, and if they do, they ain’t a-talkin.’ And that’s not only embarrassing, it’s a dereliction of duty on the part of the people who got Fullerton into this mess.
So what do you do as a candidate when you’re a liar, a self-admitted thief, a phony carpetbagger, and quite possibly the worst human being in north Orange County; and because of these sad truths you can’t raise any campaign dough?
Night time is the right time!
If you’re Paulette Marshall, the Constant Candidate, you write yourself a check. A big check
Making an investment in good government…
Ms. Marshall did it last time, too, when she previously ran for the OC Board of Education in 2020, and blew through hundreds of thousands of dollars to come in 3rd, 5,000 votes behind Vicki Calhoun who spent almost nothing.
Apparently Marshall and her hubby, the odious rodent Doug “Bud” Chaffee, who serves as our County Supervisor believe any amount is worth it to promote the missus into some elected office – any office probably.
Meantime, she and her pals are trying backdoor legal means to get rid of the incumbent Tim Shaw, and if that works maybe she can save some of that money.
Last Wednesday, Elizabeth Hansburg quit the Fullerton Planning Commission.
FFFF has already introduced Ms. Hansburg to the Friends, noting her involvement in the drive to cover Fullerton in penitentiary-like apartment blocks. Her “non-profit” is used to provide Astroturf support for developers of huge housing projects and of course donations from said developers are always welcome.
Ms. Hansburg was also part of the shadowing clan that developed a new housing plan that almost nobody knew anything about until it was conceptually presented the the City Council. The idea was (and is) to achieve the preposterous new housing unit needs count – 13,000 -proffered by SCAG, the Southern California Association of Government – an unelected agency run by and for bureaucrats and their Big Ideas.
Well, anyhow, Hansburg has had enough. Here’s her petulant good-bye speech at the end of the meeting in which she attacks the City Council, bemoans the loss of her beloved fellow 5th Columnists in City Hall, and of course praises the contemptible camera hog and credit thief, Ahmad Zahra.
Consistently awful…
Self-righteous, indignant, know-it-all. Hansburg went out of her way to promote God-awful projects that were intrusive, obnoxious, and promised a tsunami of negative impacts on our neighborhoods including more parking disasters.
Good riddance. This is exactly the sort of person that causes regular folks to be wary of self-proclaimed “experts” and the bureaucracies they love so dearly. Now she can peddle her services to developers free from legitimate charges of conflict of interest.
When he’s not lecturing us on ethics, Fullerton City Councilman Ahmad Zahra climbs down from his high horse to participate in all sorts of activities that don’t seem very ethical at all.
We have also seen how Zahra claimed authorship of Water District-related articles actually ghost-written by a district bureaucrat; and how he tried to leverage this pseudo-expertise to keep his well-compensated seat on that board.
Grab it and consume it as fast as you can…
Then there’s the about-face Zahra played on the suckers of Fullerton when he announced that the open seat on the Council should be decided by a vote, and then promptly voted to appoint Jan Flory to the vacancy at the behest of Jennifer Fitzgerald.
The closer you look, the worse it gets.
And that last bit is what this story is about. The deal that Zahra cut with Fitzgerald to appoint Flory and get himself appointed to the lucrative Orange County Water District Board, a board that pays stipends for all sorts of meetings and sub-committee meetings.
Check this out:
Just before Zahra was replaced on the Water Board in 2021 by Bruce Whitaker, the District paid $10,000 to “CL7” for something called a “OC Water Special Water Insert.” I don’t know what that means, but I do know that CL7 is the name of Jennifer Fitzgerald’s side biz – when she wasn’t using the City to make bank for lobbyist Curt Pringle. So what’s going on here? A little gravy slopping out of the boat, or a legitimate job for a real public service? Knowing Fitzgerald’s complete lack of ethical compass and her influence peddling, I would bet on the former. Easy enough to find out: a PRA on the work order and a sample of the work product, and maybe any correspondence regarding this contract ought to do it.
And did Zahra have a role in this little handout? Was this a little payback for getting appointed in the first place? These sorts of little deals happen in OC political/government circles all the time. It’s all just easy government cheese. Maybe Zahra will be forthcoming about what this was all about. Maybe, but don’t count on it.
