Patdown Pat McPension Archives - Page 18 of 33 - Friends For Fullerton's Future

January 19, 2012January 20, 2012Dick Jones

52,254 Recall Signatures Turned In.

Moments ago the Fullerton Recall team turned in well over 50,000 signatures from Fullerton voters to initiate a recall election of councilmembers Don Bankhead, Dick Jones and Pat McKinley. The reason? Their simple failure to provide competent leadership for our city.

The individual totals are:

Don Bankhead: 17,064 signatures
F. Richard “Dick” Jones: 17,587 signatures
Patrick McKinley: 17,603 signatures

Next, the city clerk will turn over the signatures to be verified by the OC Registrar of Voters. Once the requirement of 10,554 valid signatures for each recallee is met, an election must scheduled by the Fullerton city council.

In that election, which will occur sometime before this summer, Fullerton voters will decide both if they want to recall each of the three officials and which candidates will replace them.

I want to give a special thank you to all of our dedicated signature gatherers who worked so hard to bring in 60% more sigs than are required.

The counting begins in the City Clerk's office.

January 19, 2012"Dick" Ackerman

Bulls Eye! Charges of Illegal Lobbying Leveled Against Anti-Recall Team Leader

by Grover Cleveland44 Comments

Well, really, are you surprised? You shouldn’t be.

Political fixer, bag man, phony charity rip-off artist, carpetbagging spouse, lynch-type mob manager, lobbyist and, not coincidentally, head of the Fullerton anti-recall effort, Dick Ackerman, is about to be haunted by the Ghost of Crookedness Past.

Vern Nelson, the editor of the Orange Juice Blog, and staunch defender of the OC Fairgrounds against a swindle set up by Toad-in-Residence (and, not surprisingly, Anti-recall campaign manager) Dave Ellis, will be delivering a challenge to the DA’s whitewash of Dick Ackerman’s role as an illegal lobbyist in the slimy attempt to sell off the Fair to a group of insiders composed of Fair Board members themselves.

The dirty deal took place in the summer of ’09 when Ackerman started making calls to legislators on behalf of enabling legislation (that he only admits he “helped write”) even though he, himself had been out of office for less than a year – in direct violation of State law. Predictably, our honorable DA gave Ackerman a clean bill of health in the fall of 2010; but Lo and Behold!, in early 2011 Norberto Santana of the Voice of OC uncovered Ackerman’s actual billing records! You know, those embarrassing records the DA didn’t bother to look for. These records indicate illegal calls to legislators – which is exactly what Ackerman apparently told DA investigators he didn’t do. Uh, oh! Dick’s in a wringer!

When Santana published his discoveries, DA spoksholetress Susan Kang was quick with the smarmy defense: we reached the conclusion we did based on the evidence we had.

Wow. It’s amazing what you can’t find when you don’t look!

Well, Nelson is now calling Ms. Kang’s bluff and challenging on our do-nothing DA to do his job by re-opening the Ackerman case.

A year has passed, but the Statute of Limitations hasn’t.

January 15, 2012January 16, 2012"Dick" Ackerman

The Shameful Water Triple (Er, Quadruple) Dip

by The Desert Rat78 Comments

UPDATE: Of course the comment from “Do the math” is right on the money. The 10% in-lieu fee is defined as a percentage of gross revenue – including the in-lieu fee itself! This tricky little dodge adds 10% of the 10% – an add-on of yet another 1% to the cost of your water bill! Uh, oh! Quadruple dip!

– The Desert Rat

Way back in 1970 the Fullerton City Council passed Resolution No. 5184 dictating that 10% of the gross revenue collected by the Water Department was a reasonable amount to cover ancillary costs from supporting City departments. Here’s the key language from the Resolution:

That an amount equal to ten percent of the gross annual water sales of the Municipal Utilities Department during the fiscal year ending June 30, 1970 is hereby transferred to the General Fund in payment for the services of the Finance Department of the City and of the City Administrator, the City Attorney and the City Clerk to the Municipal Utilities Department of the City as a part of the operating costs of the waterworks system of the City during the fiscal year ending June 30, 1970.

That at the end of the fiscal year ending on June 30, 1971 and at the end of every fiscal year thereafter, a sum equal to ten percent of the gross annual water sales of the Municipal Utilities Department of the City shall be transferred to the general Fund of the City in payment for the services, during such fiscal year, of the Finance Department of the City and of the City Administrator, the City Attorney and the City Clerk to the Municipal Utilities Department of the City.

What sort of justification proved that 10% of the water revenue in 1970 should have gone to the General Fund is anybody’s guess.

In 1982 the City Council passed an ordinance permitting itself the authority to collect an “in-lieu” fee from the water utility as a fixed percentage of revenue. Despite the name change, the City continued to add the historic 10% to Fullerton’s water bills, and rake it off directly into the General Fund – without so much as a second thought.

A bit confusing? Not really. The original justification for the fuzzy 10% figure was to reimburse the City for vague incurred costs; calling it an in-lieu fee never changed the inescapable fact that the 10% amount was supposed to pay for actual costs associated with running the waterworks. Either way, as of 1997 and the implementation of Prop. 218, that became illegal.

Flash forward to today, and peruse this year’s budget documents. The Water Fund is Fund 44. Check out the total column on the right.

Summary of Appropriations by Fund.

Notice the amount directly allocated in the 2011-12 budget to the City Manager and Administration: $1.7 million ($29,917 + $1,678,962).

Now let’s see some actual charges. Observe Fiscal year 2009-10, over there, in the left column.

Summary of Expenditures and Appropriations by Fund

Good grief! As you might have guessed (based on this year’s budget), in 2009-10 the City directly charged the Water Fund over $1.5 million for the City Council, City Manager, and Administrative Services; plus fifty grand for Human Resources, and $100,000 for Community Development!

And this means that those services that were originally being used to justify the 10% levy on our water bills are already being charged directly to the General Fund. Double Dip!

Of course it gets worse. We now know the 10% is a double dip; but hold on to your water bill. Because the directly charged costs for “administration” are considered part of the base waterworks cost; the automatic 10% in-lieu fee (which was supposed to pay for “administration” but that pays for nothing), is applied to that! That increase this year is at least $170,000, if you add 10% to that $1.7 million figure we saw in the first table. Triple Dip!

And that, Friends, is a triple gainer off the high board and right into the deep end of the pool.

January 14, 2012January 14, 2012Behind Closed Doors

Mob Mentality?

by Grover Cleveland64 Comments

Apparently FPD PIO Andrew Goodrich misses the irony when describing an outraged public he thinks is suffering from a mob mentality; of course it’s okay for the cops to act like a lynch-type mob, as they did with Kelly Thomas.

Here’s an e-mail in which the propagandist Goodrich shares his observations on an LA Time editorial with his boss, soon to be sick Mike Sellers. Goodrich may have wished for some cooling off but it didn’t happen. And the not so “glowing” tone of the media didn’t get any better, either.

January 13, 2012January 13, 2012Behind Closed Doors

Retirement on the Brain

by Grover Cleveland12 Comments

The bright morning of July 19, 2011.

Kelly Thomas was taken off life support only a few days before, the cops who did him in are patrolling the streets of Fullerton, and the public still believes FPD PIO Andrew Goodrich’s lie that cops suffered broken bones in some titanic struggle with a felonious, homeless superman.

Despite the recent string of FPD bad behavior that had been coming to light, Goodrich is upbeat. Great returns for CalPERS that might take the heat off from critics who deride the defined benefit pension plans for cops who get to retire at age 50! Nasty unfunded liability!

January 11, 2012January 11, 2012Dick Jones

FPD’s Tow Racketeers Keeping You Safe From AAA Roadside Assistance

by Travis110 Comments

Back in September, a AAA tow truck driver made a YouTube video accusing Fullerton police officers of running a coordinated effort to harass and cite any tow truck attempting to help stranded AAA members within city limits.

That video was removed shortly after it was posted. According to the original publisher, it was deleted from YouTube after the truck driver’s boss received threats from city employees.

Four months later, it appears that driver has had enough. Here’s a new video where he accuses the City of Fullerton and its police force of using Fullerton’s new truck route ordinance to cite AAA tow trucks attempting to respond to customer calls for service.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rk5uERx5cs

The assumption is that there are a few tow operators who operate with the FPDs’s blessing (thanks to generous donations towards a few jurassic city council members’ campaign funds and a revenue sharing contract with the FPD) and thus are able to miraculously avoid getting cited for driving their tow trucks on the very same roads.

So next time your wife or daughter is stranded by the side of the road for an hour waiting for one of the few AAA operators left willing to run the FPD gauntlet, make sure you ask the driver what it’s like trying to help motorists in the city of Fullerton.

Mad Max — Welcome to Fullerton! You're on your own.

January 10, 2012Behind Closed Doors

Register Finally Gets on With Board Fullerton Water Rip-off

by Joe Sipowicz32 Comments

File under better late than never. Teri Sforza of the Register has advertised Fullerton city government’s dirty little secret. Well, I guess it was really a big secret. Not any more.

A little MSM attention will help get the word out: F. Richard Jones and Don Bankhead have been ripping us off for 15 year by adding 10% to our water bills to pay for their perks and pensions. A $27,000,000 rip-off. Now that’s not very nice, is it?

January 10, 2012January 10, 2012Behind Closed Doors

Sellers Examines His Package

by Grover Cleveland41 Comments

SellersbyEdcarrascoweekly — Suddenly it just wouldn't be worth it anymore...

It is now August 4th, 2011 – about a month since six of now-MIA Chief Mike Sellers’ cops participated in the brutal beating death of a homeless man – and in the middle of a full-bore campaign of obfuscation by his underlings.

Here is Sellers scoping out his contract and his “executive” benefits a few days before his doctor told him he was really, really “sick.” He is looking forward to “wrapping things up.” And how.

And then an inquiry into the IRS to get “squared away.”

January 9, 2012Behind Closed Doors

We Get Mail: Something Is Really Rotten in Fullerton

by Mr. Peabody76 Comments

Here’s an e-mail we just got from a Friendly reader:

I just got done reading how the Fullerton Police Department tried to harass a law-abiding citizen by pursuing a phony prosecution against his brother. This behavior is absolutely despicable. And I noted that the police employees have been trying to use their fraudulent case by posting comments on-line.

The idea that that one of the police employees leaked what they assumed would be harmful information about a political adversary that turned out to be phony is also indicative of a department that is absolutely steeped in corruption. This is not the first time. They tried this with State Assemblyman Chris Norby and they will try it again. No one with an ethical fiber in his body is in charge of the Fullerton Police Department.

Something is really rotten in our City and we need to flush the toilet. Now.

It is time the voters and citizens of Fullerton reclaimed their city from the crooked police and the entrenched special interests in City Hall that are using the senile and incompetent civil authority to promote their own interests. The police have declared war on the citizens of Fullerton. Okay, war it is.

God bless the Recall, and God help Fullerton.

J. Stanley

January 9, 2012January 3, 2017About Us

FPD Harassment Up Close And Personal

by admin122 Comments

fatcops-300x198 — Excessive horning was the least of it…

Friends, over the past couple of months you may have noticed anonymous comments on some of our posts referring to “George” and “Jorge” and some sort of hit-and-run issue. Those comments referred to my brother George and came from inside the FPD. I let them go. Then. But not now.

This is a cautionary tale about a Culture of Corruption in the FPD that encourages the harassment of law abiding citizens. Getting a ticket from Barry Coffman for “excessive horning” is bad enough. Getting prosecuted for a non-existing “crime” is intolerable. Unfortunately this sort of thing has become business as usual with the FPD. It appears to be not only tolerated, but encouraged. And that’s what happens when the civilian authority abdicates its responsibility to oversee the cops.

Here’s the story.

Back on the morning of February 28, 2011 my brother George was driving east down Walnut Avenue, and turned right into the driveway of our office building parking lot. A car had parked quite close to the entry of the driveway, and as he turned in he heard a distinctive sound. After parking he noticed that the front bumper of the car was lying in the street.

He was pretty sure he hadn’t hit the car in any way, and there was no other damage to that car, or to his own vehicle; and he noticed that the bumper had been jerry-rigged at some point to stay on with sheet metal screws. He believed his right front tire just hit the thing as it lay in the roadway.

George kept watch on the car, and later in the afternoon a woman came to pick it up. He explained the situation and told Mrs. Bumper that he didn’t think he was responsible, but that he would help put the bumper back on with secure connections to the chassis the next day. She was grateful and drove off.

The next day her husband showed up and demanded that George buy him a new bumper. George suggested he go away and take his bumper with him.

Mr. Bumper filed a police report and soon George was interrogated by a couple of FPD cops. He told his story for the third time. The next thing he knew he was being charged by the District Attorney with Hit and Run, Unsafe Turn and Illegal Tampering With A Vehicle!

Story recap: No hit. No run. No unsafe turn. No tampering. No evidence. No witness. No nothing. Yet our esteemed DA, following the advice of FPD, had decided to prosecute my brother.

Of course George had to hire a lawyer who made six different court appearances on this idiotic “case.” Finally the DA blinked and offered George the DNA “spit and acquit” deal he makes with campaign-contributing food poisoners. George said no. With a trial date looming the DA’s office just dropped the whole thing on September 20th.

Here’s the case history.

Too bad, in a way. I really looked forward to seeing those FPD clowns on the stand to explain and defend their evidence. Now the public will never see the facts behind what can only be described as a malicious attempt to intimidate and harass me through my brother.

Well, guess what, boys? It didn’t work.

How much police, DA and court time and money was completely wasted in this effort to try to push around a citizen and taxpayer? Who knows? Five different DA employees had their spoons in this soup, as well as judges, bailiffs, court scribes, etc.

But I know one thing. There is an entrenched Culture of Corruption in the Fullerton Police Department that runs pretty deep, and it needs to end soon!