FFFF supports causes that promote intelligent, responsible and accountable government in Fullerton and Orange County
Category: Redevelopment
Redevelopment is Government removing existing homes, businesses, and other buildings and replacing them with something different. The history of redevelopment in Fullerton has lead to a long string of ugly, deteriorating buildings and outright failure.
Ms. Quirk, are you going to change your vote to spend 6 million in tax $ to move McD's 150'?
Sharon Quirk told me she was going to change her vote on the McD’s. She was disappointed in the way the staff presented no alternatives to leaving the McD’s at it’s current location. She has also told a good friend of ours the same story.
The $6 million McDonald’s move has become a community laughing stock. Even reporter Barbara Giasone, with a long record of fluffy features, ripped into the vote, and followed up with coverage of FHS student opposition.
Any council member voting for this is subject to an easy hit piece which could be the center of an opposition campaign. “Quirk / Keller and/or Bankhead spent $6 million of your tax dollars to move a McDonald’s 150 feet west–across the street from Fullerton High.” This issue will resonate with both fiscal conservatives (wasting $$) and social liberals (big corporate bail-out).
Changing your vote, Council Member Quirk, is the right thing to do. If you want the Fox project to succeed, put the money into the restoration, not to move a fast-food outlet!
The McDonald’s franchisee doesn’t want it. The high school administration doesn’t want it. And you can bet Fullerton voters aren’t going to like it when you get hit with it in the next election (same for Keller and Bankhead).
Item 1. CONFERENCE WITH REAL PROPERTY NEGOTIATOR – Per Government Code
Section 54956.8
Property: North and South Block of 100 West Amerige Avenue,
Fullerton, CA
Agency Negotiator: Rob Zur Schmiede, Director of Redevelopment and
Economic Development
Negotiating Parties: Richard Hamm, Pelican-Laing Fullerton, LLC
Under Negotiations: Price and terms
The Laing of the LLC is John Laing Holmes. Laing is a home builder with a reported debt of $500 million to $1 billion and is in Chapter 11 receivership. And furthermore, the word on the street is the front men of the LLC Hamm & Pellican are also on the verge of financial protection.
Exactly what kind of negotiations could our financially unexperienced City Council be doing with a group of financial wizards who are running amok in debt? When is the Redevelopment Agency going to realize the housing market has collapsed? If this project goes forward it will be a financial wreck for Fullerton.
Dear Friends, how many of you realize Pam Keller, Sharon Quirk, Don Bankhead and Dick Jones have already voted to place the Fullerton tax payers on the hook by guaranteeing the developer who’s in bankruptcy a 15% profit? Who besides us are willing to admit this project was a turkey from day 1?
Today, all eyes—and ears—will be on Fullerton’s representative at the OC Vector Control Board meeting that will take place in Garden Grove. There are three scenarios as to what might happen. Here they are, from best to worst:
Best: The City Council appoints a new Vector Control representative who will take the job seriously.
So-so: No one will show up representing Fullerton, leaving us without a voice.
Worst: Councilman Dick Jones will take his seat on the Vector Board and continue to embarrass the city with his Texas-twanged outbursts.
Stay tuned!
You may have trouble sorting through the man’s mangled syntax so we are providing a transcript of his remarks:
“I would like to compliment you all on the extensive report you gave, however when I get on an airplane I’d like to think that some agency says it’s air worthy, I don’t want to know the percentage of the materials that make up the wing spars, your intentions are laudible and so forth. I think this was over done, when people come to me for an operation I did not give them 4 years of surgical information during my residency, this was excellent. It’s nice to be baffled by brilliance, and it was baffling”.
Do not enter into negotiations with the Fullerton Redevelopment Agency to move your McDonald’s restaurant 150 feet west to the Chapman / Pomona corner. Stay put.
There are many reasons for you to stay where you are. You some of them you know better than we do. But we have some political insights that might be helpful.
To force you to move against your will, the agency must use eminent domain, which requires a 4/5ths vote. With Nelson and Jones already having voted against the move, the votes for eminent domain aren’t there.
Besides, there’s every indication that Sharon Quirk will change her vote. That would make it 3-2 against granting $6 million for the move.
The reconfiguration of your restaurant will hurt business, confusing regular customers who will have to access your drive-in window from Pomona Avenue.
The agency will confine you into a “new-to-look-old” building that will look nothing like a traditional McDonald’s. Many of your patrons will not be able to recognize you.
McDonalds’ trademark signs and golden arches will not be allowed in the new building provided by the agency, confusing and discouraging regular patrons.
You have been, are and will be criticized for accepting $6 million in public money. We know you don’t want to move, but if you accept it, the public will see it as corporate welfare.
The move will likely result in down time, costing you money and customers.
When there are cost overruns (inevitable in public projects) the Agency may be slow to reimburse you for your costs. Those costs may be disputed.
This move is completely unnecessary for you from a business standpoint. You’d said during the hearing that long ago then-Redevelopment employee Terry Galvin told you the city wanted you to move. Galvin didn’t speak for the council then and he certainly doesn’t now.
Terry Galvin has retired. There is a whole new council majority. Nothing obligates you to go along with this deal.
And, there are not the 4 votes needed for eminent domain. You cannot be forced to move. Stay Put!
In response to County Counsel’s objections to the original blight findings, the staff report asserts that “these parcels if developed will need to be assembled with adjacent properties to create a sufficient development parcel. Because these parcels are in multiple ownerships it becomes more difficult to assemble into a desired development site.”
My brother and I assembled 27 irregular shaped parcels along Truslow & Walnut Ave. without any RDA assistance. No subsidy, no eminent domain. The result is the Soco Walk transit-oriented condo complex.
OC's Premier Transit Oriented Development
Many subsidized in-fill projects made possible by eminent domain are failures, because they respond to government hand-outs rather than market realities. Up and down California there exist many Ghost Malls (Triangle Square / Costa Mesa, Carousel Mall / San Bernardino) built on the backs of dispossessed property owners and fleeced taxpayers.
Let’s not suffer the fate of Santa Ana’s “Renaissance Plan” with numerous agency-owned vacant lots (where home and businesses once stood) have festered for years of bureaucratic inertia. There are many other such examples.
Redevelopment staffs abhor small business districts with multiple ownerships, because they cannot control them.
Remember, staff always knows best!
They tarnish them with the blight label and threaten them with eminent domain to benefit some politically-connected developer who makes a killing before selling out and moving on.
Who thinks that government officials can do a better job of redeveloping areas than private individuals using their own money and taking their own risks? Bottom line: Do you trust the free market or city staff to make crucial development decisions for Fullertons future?
There are 154 small businesses along West Commonwealth in the 2 1/2 miles stretching from Euclid to Dale. Many are run by entrepreneurs who own their own property. This variety of small business owners is why City Staff is declaring it blighted in their attempt to hoodwink the council into including it into a new redevelopment area.
The Atnip Bld.
In response to County Counsel’s objections to the original blight findings, the staff report asserts that “these parcels if developed will need to be assembled with adjacent properties to create a sufficient development parcel. Because these parcels are in multiple ownerships it becomes more difficult the parcels into a desired development site.”
Huh?
These parcels already ARE developed into a variety of small businesses, ranging from coffee shops to body shops, from florists to machinists, from preschools to flight schools. Staff sees this as blight. The new RDA seeks to “assemble” (under threat of eminent domain) these parcels, clear out the small businesses to “create a sufficient development parcel” under one ownership. And that’s not good for Fullerton.
One Commonwealth business owner (Aeromark) has already opted out, fearing consolidation of his small parcel. Other owners, beware!
What idiot would call this "Blight"?
No, West Commonwealth is not Irvine. Some planners may dislike the very variety that makes it interesting. But there is an edgy realism there, of small hardworking people actually producing goods and services for their customers–not because of some government mandate. The report goes on to say “development proposals are not financially feasible because acquisition costs have increased over the years rendering in-fill projects to be infeasible in many cases without redevelopment assistance.”
"Breaker breaker there 1-9...it's unsafe to land here, over"
Lawyers for the Fullerton Redevelopment Agency have a tough job in trying to defend the bogus blight findings that have been so effectively demolished by County Counsel Attorney James Harman and Friends for a Livable Fullerton‘s & FFFF Attorney Robert Ferguson.
They just came out with a weak 14 page response to the blight objections, in preparation for the scheduled hearing this Tuesday, June 16 (Item 14). If the council has any sense, they’d shelve this turkey project now.
but, we need the money
Imagine, Fullerton Council Members, some of whom have been in office since the 90s, spending public money to prove that blight in Fullerton is growing. Blight growing on their watch!
One Page 11 of the Agency’s response, the report reads “Significant improvements are needed at the airport and its vicinity, including safety upgrades. The airport is affected by the lack of safety upgrades…”
Huh?
Admitting that its own airport is unsafe opens the City to serious liability. And if it is true, upgrades should be paid for by internal airport revenues (leases, tie-down fees, etc.) Property tax increment shouldn’t pay for airport upgrades, any more than for municipal golf course improvements. The airport is setup as an enterprise fund—self supporting.
The report clearly asserts that Fullerton Municipal Airport is blighted—and dangerous. If true, who allowed this to happen? If the airport has to be subsidized by redevelopment, than perhaps it should be shut down and sold off.
On Page 12 of the report, the crack Agency legal minds write: “Sam’s Club—This store is completely surrounded by properties with at least one significant condition of physical blight.”
Well, tell that to the Home Depot, which is adjacent to Sam’s Club, and one of the City’s biggest retailers. The City’s biggest home improvement center is now a source of blight!
The report is so full of blanket and sweepingly false statements that is difficult to fathom the legal minds behind it. But, then, if the facts aren’t on your side, you have to make them up!
Just in case any objective person needed more evidence that the basis of the Fullerton Redevelopment Agency’s proposed land-grab is unadulterated hog wash, we share a letter from an individual whose property is currently within the proposed boundaries; and of course we include a copy of the response from the City.
In his letter to the Agency, longtime Fullerton resident and businessman Mr. Paul O’Neil of AEROMARK, provides a rather comprehensive indictment of the entire expansion process and its ultimate conclusion of “blight.” He concludes his letter with a request to have his property deleted from the project area. In response Agency Director Rob Zur Schmiede agrees that the property can be excluded because it is near the boundary, because it not necessary to further the goals of the project, and because Mr O’Neil wrote a letter!
Well, Mr. Zur Schmiede’s missive begs several pertinent questions that go to the very heart of the Agency’s competency and honesty in this whole matter. First, if the property in question is on the edge and not necessary, why was it included by the City’s “expert” consultant in the first place? Second, why does the fact that Mr. O’Neil wrote a letter asking to be removed have any bearing on the supposed “findings” necessary to include it? This response gives every indication of being nothing but a way to shut up potentially vocal opposition to the expansion by an obviously informed, and unhappy property owner. If the mere fact of “writing a letter” is a germane to exclusion of a property, then it seems like every single property owner ought to have the same right.
Edge, what edge?
We also note that exclusion of Mr. O’Neil’s “edge” property from the project would simply create a new “edge” property right next door. At the very least that property’s owner should have the same opportunity as Mr. O’Neil to have his property deleted from the expansion – thus creating another edge property!
This whole process of Redevelopment expansion, including both analysis and notification, seems to have been undertaken in an incredibly haphazard way. Who can say whether this was intentional. Not us. But we have our suspicions – as do a growing number of affected businesses and property owners.
Just what exactly does “temporary” mean? “Roscoe’s Famous” Deli,” and famous noise polluter in downtown Fullerton is back to the Planning Commission Wednesday night to try to get a “special event permit” for outdoor amplified music.
Oh yeah! Mixed-use, baby!
The Planning Commission and City Council already agreed that outdoor amplified music is not a good thing for our community. Allowing loud music to be permitted on a permanent basis will stump Fullerton’s bright future of continuing to become a center of mixed-use commerce and residences as defined by the current downtown zoning (C3.) If we want our downtown to unfold in a positive direction it’s imperative that we as a community find a balance between business, entertainment and living in the downtown. Its real simple: if you want loud noise you need to put it inside. In fact the city required Tuscany Club to keep it’s door shut during the hours it has its loud entertainment- that sounds like a reasonable idea doesn’t it ?
As usual the City staff has gotten everything ass-backward.
From where we're standing it looks reasonable...
Instead of establishing an objective code and requiring that businesses abide by it, they are actually justifying a likely nuisance as way to experiment with amplified music outdoors, and thus circumvent the existing Code. The taxpayers have just paid for an acoustical study. What are the results? Those results should be used to amend the Code or leave it as is. Then it should be used as a mechanism to approve or deny permits – “special event” or otherwise, and if necessary, code enforcement. The special event permit also strangely omits hours of operation. That’s pretty negligent, and we wonder why.
Roscoe’s didn’t get approved for a permanent permit to play amplified music outdoors; now they are trying to get a temporary permit to do that very same thing…. Hey that’s very creative, but we don’t think a special event permit should evade that original denial, and we don’t think a temporary permit was ever intended for eight events spanning an entire summer! Can you imagine having a neighbor that continues to have a backyard party with a loud electric band every weekend ? That’s how a lot of Roscoe’s neighbors feel…
It could be worse. It could be Speed Metal!
This is the Municipal Code that deals with temporary event permits in the City of Fullerton:
The Fullerton Municipal Code defines a special event as “an event that will be conducted outdoors to which the general public is admitted or invited. Such an event includes a carnival festival tent or car show, circus parade, auction rally or similar kind of temporary outdoor exhibit or performance” (Accents added).
As follows is the roster of Roscoe’s “special event” application-
Roscoe’s Special Events Request List:
Sunday June 14th Bootlegger Bike Fund Raiser. 4-9 pm
Saturday June 20th Silvia’s Engagement party. 7-12 pm
Sunday June 21st Fathers Day Celebration. 4-9pm
Sunday June 28th SOCO Guest Bartender Fund Raiser. 4-9 pm
Sunday July 12th Bootlegger Bike Fund Raiser. 4-9 pm
Sunday July 26th SOCO Guest Bartender Fund Raiser. 4-9pm
Sunday August 9th Bootlegger Bike Fund Raiser. 4-9pm
Sunday August 30th SOCO Guest Bartender Fund Raiser. 4-9 pm
Friends, you decide if this is just a way to get around the rules that all the rest of us are supposed to abide by. Let’s not forget that in the original permanent use hearing the City ignored its own environmental review obligations. Why is Famous Roscoes and its owner, Jack Franklyn, receiving all this special consideration and hand holding from the City? The law is the law. We all live by it everyday, and so should he.
Any council member voting for this is subject to an easy hit piece which could be the center of an opposition campaign. “Quirk / Keller and/or Bankhead spent $6 million of your tax dollars to move a McDonald’s 150 feet west–across the street from Fullerton High.” This issue will resonate with both fiscal conservatives (wasting $$) and social liberals (big corporate bail-out).
