Welcome to the No-tell Hotel

One thing you can always count on in Fullerton elections is that concrete, real issues will never be discussed. You’ll hear mostly generalities about this or that topic. Even roads and taxes melt away in general promises and vague hand-wringing. But, when it comes to specific projects with all sorts of facts and figures involved, you can forget it. A charming characteristic of all local elections, and especially in Fullerton, is that people aren’t elected on their knowledge of anything, but, rather on their acceptability as wise people who will do the right thing given the opportunity.

This is all nonsense, of course. The electeds, knowing nothing are in no intellectual position to push back on the lamest of lame ideas that percolate through the “experts” in the bureaucracy. Not knowing and not learning and not working are the natural siblings of the councilmember’s natural tendency to acquiesce to City Hall staff anyhow. It’s easier just to attend ribbon cuttings and golden shovel ceremonies, I suppose.

Enhanced with genuine brick veneer!

And so it is that zero attention has been given by anybody (except FFFF) to various nonsense projects, the worst of which is the so-called boutique hotel project that started out as an idiotic scheme and naturally morphed into the worst kind of Redevelopment boondoggle. It even has a stupid name: It’s called The Tracks at Fullerton Station.

I’m not telling the truth and you can’t make me…

You may recall that the hare-brained idea was hatched by your former Mayor-for-Hire, Jennifer Fitzgerald who pushed a non-competitive agreement with some local dude who couldn’t build a birdhouse. Because the City had to declare the land on which the thing was supposed to sit as “surplus property” a deadline had to met to dodge a State law requiring first right of refusal to low-income housing “developers.”

Rather than shit-canning the whole thing, boobs Bruce Whitaker, Ahmad Zahra and Shana Charles approved of the project and the City actually deeded over the land before any agreements were in place. Pretty amazing, huh? Their convoluted reasoning was so dumb it doesn’t even deserve a description. That was December 2022.

They had me at boutique…

The even bigger problem was that by then the original guy (now deceased) had been pushed out and a whole new partnership had taken over. The new players were a pair of bums – Johnny Lu and Larry Liu who had a record of fraud, embezzlement, and bankruptcies in their wake, and creditors foreclosing on them. Why Fullerton’s crack economic development team and City Attorney failed to pursue even the slightest investigation of Lu/Liu’s record like FFFF did, has never been discussed. And it never will be, Fullerton being Fullerton.

I don’t know the current situation with this project. Two years have passed. Johnny Lu and Larry Liu had many milestones to accomplish certain actions per the agreement they finally signed. Did they? Who knows? Not the public, that’s for sure. Obviously, no one in City Hall wants to talk about this vast embarrassment, and an insecure council isn’t making them. And naturally, the Fullerton electoral process doesn’t discuss such things – bad form to discuss City failures, you see.

But the public has a right to know the whole story, because in the end, the entitlements granted to Lu and Liu are worth a fortune; even worse, the sales price of 1.4 million, less site clearance, is a tenth of the market value the City created with those entitlements. And the new density with hotel and with the new apartments Liu suckered the City into approving, just to keep the mess alive, is two and a half times the density the Transportation Center Specific Plan allows for housing. Go figure.

The mileage is terrible and the wheels are bald…

It’s also critical to remember that in Fullerton projects take on a life of their own through institutional inertia and the human instinct to dodge responsibility whenever possible. The Fullerton Clown Car has never had a rear-view mirror.

Water, Water Everywhere Nor Any Drop to Drink

I will get what I want, one way or another…

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.

So check this out, Transparent California’s report for our hero, Zahra.

The hours are great. So is the pay!

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.

She’s In! The Return Of Jan Flory

The closer you look, the worse it gets.

A week or so ago FFFF reported that Jan Flory, the elderly, humorless scold who has been on the Fullerton City Council three times had taken out nominating papers to run this fall in the 2nd District.

FFFF rejoiced.

Too much scotch, not enough water…

We didn’t necessarily think she’d go through with it, what with her pushing 80 years old, her historic constituency dying off, and running against the popular and well-financed Mayor, Nick Dunlap. Still the prospect of having Flory around gave hope for all sorts of blogging fun – once again reciting her horrendous pro-tax, pro-corruption record.

Provide Your Own Caption

And now we learn that Mrs. Flory has indeed returned her nominating papers and is in the process of creating a new campaign committee.

Better check the sell by date…

Well, done, Jan, say I. Your record of “public service” is in a class by itself.

You were the one who approved the budget busting 3@50 retroactive pension bonanza to cops and paramedics.

You were the one who enthusiastically supported the illegal water tax.

You were the one who supported Measure S, the foolish sales tax effort.

You were the one who supported the ill-conceived Utility Tax, and wished it had been double,

You were the one who approved years of red ink budgets and lied about them to the public.

You were the one who cut a slimy deal with Ahmad Zahra to deny the citizens of Fullerton a chance to vote on a replacement for Jesus Quirk Silva.

You were the one who refused to create a citizens commission to reform the Culture of Corruption in the Fullerton Police Department.

You were the one who defended the Three Bald Tires in the wake of the Kelly Thomas murder by the cops. You called them honorable men.

You were the one to sneer and deprecate your own constituents if they dared criticize or complain about the actions of your beloved “staff.”

You were the one to support every Redevelopment boondoggle and every massive, over-built apartment block.

And of course the list goes on and on and on.

And so once again, FFFF says thank you, God!

Thank You God!

What appeared to be a pretty tame fall City Council election may have just become a lot more fun.

The closer you look, the worse it gets.

Word on the street is that Jan Flory pulled nomination papers yesterday to run against Mayor Nick Dunlap in the 2nd District election in November.

Too much scotch, not enough water…

Who is Jan Flory? If you don’t know, take a spin through our files, here. You’ll find all sorts of entertaining stories about Ms. Flory and even about her creepy/pervy son Mike, who used to be a Deputy District Attorney and even tried to be a judge once.

Mike Flory Photo
How far did the apple fall from the tree?
Flory Call Log 01
Maybe not breast fed long enough…

Jan Flory was elected to the City Council in 1994 and voted off in 2002. In those eight years she happily allowed an illegal water tax, voted for the disastrous retroactive public safety pension spike and supported the culture of unaccountability that has helped us get where we are today.

In 2012 she hauled herself out of the stable to try another lap around the track.

See if you can find the old nag.

Her mission was to restore municipal authority to the Old Guard she represented, and to protect the Culture of Corruption at the Fullerton Police Department from any sort of reform. She informed us that the City Department heads were the “heart of the City.”

She put in her four years, patting her Chief of Police Danny Hughes on the fanny as they both walked out the door in 2016, a few days after the drunken City Manager, Joe Felz drove over a tree and tried to drive away. The ensuing cover up turned out to be expensive. Oops.

Poor Sappy.
Poor Sappy. So young, so vibrant…

But Jan wasn’t done with us. Not by a long shot.

When an opening on the City Council occurred in 2019 guess who was there to snap up the job? After her appointment she rewarded the unemployed Ahmad Zahra for his vote with a paying gig at the Orange County Water District.

In this last stint Flory was happy to continue her love affair with unbalanced budgets and was one of the members of the Council, along with Jesus Quirk Silva, Ahmad Zahra, and Jennifer Fitzgerald who waged a legal vendetta against this blog and specifically against Joshua Ferguson and David Curlee. Of course that harpy-like mission cost the taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars, but didn’t cost the perpetrators anything.

Ferguson and Curlee. The easy winners…

Well, I sure hope Ms. Flory really does want to run. The entertainment value alone is worth it. Who her constituency might be is unclear. There aren’t that many elderly liberals left in Fullerton. She might get the support of the yellowing, and thinning Fullerton Observer crowd, but a humorless, stick-up-the-backside septuagenarian is not likely to appeal to anyone under seventy.

Bungling Boutique Boondoggle Blunders

Some folks have been asking about the fate of the idiotic “boutique” hotel project that had morphed into a hideously overbuilt hotel/apartment hippogriff that is twice the allowable density permitted per the City’s own Transportation Center Specific Plan. Of course the project was never contemplated at all in the Specific Plan, so who cares, right? Fullerton being Fullerton.

In an act of utter incompetence the City actually rushed the approval to transfer of title to the land, before the deal had received final approval. Then they gave it away the land for pennies on the dollar.

Friends may recall our last October post in which we discovered that the new “developer,” one Johnny Lu of TA Westpark LLC, was way upside down on loans he had somehow leveraged on apartment blocks in Irvine and was in default.

You may also recall that Lu started shifting the property to different corporations, the first of which, a Delaware corporation, was non-existent. And just for grins, Mr. Lu changed the property description, too, when he later deeded it back to his California Corporation.

Anyhow, it looks like Johnny has finally created and recorded the appropriately named Delaware corporation in March – only two years too late, but, hey, not bad for Fullerton, right?

There has been nothing but radio silence from City Hall as to the status of Mr. Lu and whether he has met any of the stipulated deadlines in the Development and Disposition Agreement, but as we have learned in the case of the Florentine/Marovich sidewalk heist, contractual obligations mean nothing when the “I Can’t Believe It’s a Law Firm” of Jones & Mayer is your City Attorney. Recently, cluelessly verbose Shana Charles indicated that the project was still alive and well. She didn’t mention Mr. Lu’s financial embarrassment, but then nobody else has, either.

And now for some sadly interesting news. It turns out the original Founding Father of the boutique hotel concept, Craig Hostert of West Park Development – the guy who sold the idea to Jennifer Fitzgerald, Jan Flory, Jesus Quirk Silva, Ahmad Zahra, Bruce Whitaker, et. al. – died in late May.

Hostert

Poor guy. He went to his Reward after getting pushed out of his own scheme, and sticking us with the appalling, metastasized mess the concept has predictably morphed into; showing that once again, no bad idea goes unappreciated in downtown Fullerton. Being Fullerton, of course.

Revenue Enhancement Time. Plus Lies and More Lies

Last Tuesday the Fullerton City Council voted 4-1 to approve the ’24-’25 city budget. Whitaker, as usual voted no. The budget projects big deficits as we’ve already heard.

After that the Council was presented with “revenue enhancement” ideas – the same old nonsense that we’ve already talked about, here. At first these ideas were simply floated to make it look like somebody had given some thought to find other ways, however silly, to address the tsunami of red ink; but in reality the point was to push a general sales tax, a movement that had been subtly going on for many months.

However the proposals agendized last Tuesday did not include a sales tax this fall, a sure indicator that the City Manager has polled the Council and knows he doesn’t have the votes to put it on the ballot. But that didn’t stop Councilmembers Charles and Zahra from pitching and pitching and pitching the idea; and finally supporting each other to get the issue of a sales tax on the an agenda, pronto, in time to schedule it for the November election.

But before that happened the public was treated to some of the most blatant and self serving re-writing of Fullerton history I have ever heard.

If I knew what I was talking about this wouldn’t be Fullerton!

Shana Charles started off with long-winded blabbering that was irrelevant, self-contradictory, confusing, and erroneous. Of course – “decimated” staff, the ill-effects of right-sizing,” reduced response times – the usual liberal litany of problems were simply meant as an introduction to the sales tax proposal. Her complaint was that previous councils had made mistakes, not by exercising fiscal restraint, but by “cutting to the bone.”

Charles then lauded the wonderful benefits that the City of Placentia derived from it’s Measure U sales tax that saved it, having declared bankruptcy – a statement completely false. She failed to mention the fact that Placentia has saved millions by getting their “fire fighters” out of the paramedic business, an idea of which her Fullerton fire fighter union pals are terrified.

While patting herself on the back for very recent staff and service level increases, she failed to see the rich irony of her own incompetence on the edge of a precipice: a situation well-understood when she voted for last year’s budget.

More economic development, better wardrobe…

If Charles blathered nonsense, Zahra just lied about Fullerton’s recent fiscal history, most likely because he has been on the City Council for 6 years, and has his greasy fingerprints all over the budgetary disaster.

According to Zahra, our problem reaches back decades and only now is the Council addressing the problem. Of course our City Councils have made bad decisions over the years, but the current disaster is of very recent vintage and has also occurred while he has been on the City Council.

For several years in the mid and late teens Fullerton was dipping into reserve funds to pay the freight, even as Zahra’s allies Jan Flory and Jennifer Fitzgerald and Jesus Quirk- Silva were lying to the public about the budget being balanced. It wasn’t. In fact the City continued in its cavalier way until Fred Jung and Nick Dunlap joined Bruce Whitaker on the council in 2020.

Measure S Covid Lie
Let me count the ways…

Zahra related how he, as a precinct-walking candidate, noted how people wanted better roads and how his predecessors had promised them, too, but that they failed. He didn’t note the fact that Fullerton’s public safety employees were hogging up bigger and bigger shares of the budget – as they still do.

The subject of Zahra’s failed 2020 Measure S sales tax came up, a sore subject, apparently, since his underserved constituents in D5 voted for it. So let us not stop from revisiting it, and right now! Charles chimed in that well she people she spoke to voted against it because there was no sunset provision, and, get this – because there was no oversight committee!

As an aside, I have to share that Zahra made an hilarious little speech about he could not support an infrastructure improvement bond because voting for municipal debt would keep him awake at night!

It’s not rocket science…

Bruce Whitaker made just about the only insightful comment of the discussion, namely: that cities can control costs but they can’t control revenue, an observation that flies in the face of the revenue enhancement propaganda, but that is perfectly true. As has been stated here before: nobody even knows if an Economic Development Manager even pays for himself in terms of incremental tax increase.

I will wrap this up by acknowledging a Zoom caller who actually did make a good revenue enhancing and who identified a huge fiscal problem: downtown Fullerton, the annual sinkhole that makes millions for the scofflaw club owners and that leaves the taxpayers with a $1,500,000 bill. He suggested a special assessment on these eager party entrepreneurs to pay for the havoc their booze and their customers cause. Not surprisingly, none of the council members even mentioned the problem. They never do.

The Fiscal Cliff

The Fullerton City Council is holding a special meeting tonight – a 2024-25 Budget “workshop.” No work will get done but there will be shopping going on as staff begins its formal press to raise a sales tax.

There is a lot of self-serving verbiage about how well our City staff has performed its tasks up ’til now, but then the hard reality hits because budget numbers can’t pat themselves on the back.

There are some harrowing numbers in the proposed budget – including a $9,400,000 draw-down from strategic reserves. This means of course, that the budget is no where near balanced as City Hall apologists like Jennifer Fitzgerald and Jan Flory claimed when they ran the place into the red almost every year.

M. Eric Levitt. Will he save us from ourselves?

Let’s let our City Manager, Eric Levitt tell the tale:

Financial Stability. The City has been able to over the last two years (for the first time in recent history of the City) to reach and maintain a 17% contingency reserve level. This budget maintains that reserve level; however due to an operating deficit, we will be utilizing one-time excess reserves this year and coming close to that 17% level in FY 2024-25 and below that in years beyond next year

Read. Weep.

The overall picture gets even worse as the levels of reserves slowly dwindle away. After this year Fullerton continues to be upside from $7.5 to $8.8 million each year until the end of the dismal decade. We are not favored with the running reserve funds balances.

Infrastructure is supposedly a big deal. Which reminds me of a quotation attributed to Mark Twain: Everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it. But this year we are told, we can push get going on our deteriorating infrastructure along by borrowing! Once again let’s heed the words of Mr. Levitt:

I have also put together a strategy to increase that funding level to closer to $14 million over the next four years through the use of financing. However, there are both upsides and downsides to this approach which will be discussed with you in more detail at today’s presentation.

Now this should be a red flag: borrowing to perform maintenance, a basic accounting no-no. And what form will the borrowing take? Not a municipal bond, you can be sure, It would likely be by selling certificates of participation or some other dodge to avoid municipal debt restrictions. Here’s the table that shows our Maintenance of Effort (MOE) shortfall without financing.

Now we all know that interest payments are made by somebody, somewhere, and that somebody is you and me. We get to pay the interest on debt incurred by years of municipal mismanagement by people like Joe Felz and Ken Domer and Jeff Collier who get to sail off to a glorious and massively pensioned retirement at 55 years of age.

And finally, to circle back to the story lead, here’s a distasteful nugget carefully slipped into the City Manager’s report:

“Staff recommends City Council review options over the next year to stabilize the budget and ensure the City remains financially sound.

Jesus H. There it is. Not quite explicitly stated, but we know very well where this is going. Another general sales tax effort, just like the ill-fated Measure S of four years ago. The seeds for this have already been planted, of course, in a nasty little taxpayer-funded fishing expedition in the guise of a community survey. Last November I regaled the Friends with this slimy maneuver, here.

How did things get so bad?

By the way, this is exactly the same process City Hall rolled out four years ago. And we will be told By Ahmad Zahra, Shana Charles and Vivian Jaramillo that if we don’t pony up we will be morally deficient.

Well, good luck Friends. This is going to be a long year and you can bet the farm that we will be asked to pick up the check – again.

The Abdication

Lots of Indians, but no chiefs…

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.

I Think I’ve Seen This Movie

It’s real expensive, but it sure is short…

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.

The Sound of Music

Business is booming…

Over the past two decades FFFF has documented the mess our City government has made of the financial sinkhole know as Downtown Fullerton; how laws and rules have been ignored to help the myriad bar owners, and how what is undoubtedly a fiscal municipal liability continues to be characterized as some sort of wonderful accomplishment.

Matt Foulkes. The spin out left casualties…

Planning Directors and Redevelopment Drones came and went: Dudley, Zur Schmied, Zelenka, Haluza, White, Foulkes, each one as useless as the one that came before, and each willing to put the scofflaws’ interest ahead of the citizens.’ To be fair, the political interference was there, too, nowhere better exemplified than in the case of our now-departed Mayor-for-Hire, Jennifer Fitzgerald, who had a for sale sign on her back. And of course City Attorney Dick Jones was there every step of the way to add obfuscating smoke into the downtown atmosphere.

dick-jones
Staying awake long enough to break the law…

Nowhere is the Fullerton downtown dysfunction better seen than in the complete hash the bureaucrats in City Hall have made of the noise situation. At first, the noise ordinance was simply ignored by the cops and by code enforcement. And for the past 15 years the City has made a concerted effort to allow amplified outdoor music downtown, to delay action (we’re still studying it), and to water down whatever official rules were on the books.

For the past four years nothing has happened and of course the nightclub operators have continued to take advantage of Fullerton’s de facto unwillingness to enforce anything.

And now the issue has finally resurfaced yet again, and once again the effort is likely not to work for us, but essentially, to admit defeat and allow the raucous free-for all to become official.

In December a new stab at a noise ordinance addressing outdoor music was placed on the table in front of the City Council.

Evidently the proposed ordinance was so bad that the our otherwise malleable City Council turned it back for rework. I don’t know what was in it because the City Clerk’s webpage doesn’t work. But supposedly the thing will be coming back on Tuesday the 29th and hopefully we will be able to see what sort of surrender our staff is coming up with.