Friends For Fullerton's Future
FFFF supports causes that promote intelligent, responsible and accountable government in Fullerton and Orange County
Need a pen or pencil? How about a coloring book, a fire badge sticker, or a hat to keep your head dry from the rain this weekend?
I guess it’s a good thing Fullerton is swimming in surplus cash. Oh, wait…
Nearly $1,700 for this stuff despite it being known all year long that we’re in a budget crisis. The entire amount was charged to General Fund accounts.
Good question. She is the spouse of Fullerton Councilman Doug “Bud” Chaffee, and has often been considered the brains of the operation.
She is also rumored to be a future council candidate from the 2nd District once that district comes up for election – now slated for 2020. Here is Ms. Marshall attending an underpass opening ceremony. She’s the one over on the left wearing the purple jacket.
Here’s a close up.
But wait. Why is she even there? She doesn’t hold any official position in the city. And even more importantly, why is she wearing a City of Fullerton badge bearing the official city seal? How did she get that badge and why is she wearing it?
A cynical person might suspect that Ms. Marshall is posing in a photo op like this for future campaign material, projecting the subliminal message of “incumbent.” But that would be extremely unethical and really hard to credit.
It’s been almost one year since former Fullerton City manager, Joe Felz, embarked on his infamous Wild Ride after an evening of drinking at election night parties in the Downtown Fullerton gin mills he worked so tirelessly to protect.
We all know how the drive home went wrong: Felz lost control of his vehicle on Glenwood Drive, drove over a tree, and tried to get away – in violation of the law. We also know that the Fullerton cops gave Joe a free pass and a ride home, many believe on the instructions of outgoing Cop-in-Charge, Danny “Gallahad” Hughes. That would be a crime, too – obstruction of justice, which is exactly what is asserted by District Attorney investigator, Abraham Santos.
Anyway, Felz has been charged with drunk driving by the DA, but the collusion to protect the City Manager has not been addressed and it never will be. That would set a very bad precedent, wouldn’t it?
On January 16, 2018 it looks like Wild Ride Felz is going to get his day in court as he has pleaded innocent to the charges. And since there is no evidence of his inebriation we all reckon the deal will be “dry reckless” driving, and case closed.
Rest assured, FFFF will be present to record and report the court proceedings.
New procurement card policies are being implemented at City Hall this week. That’s a good start and something to be cautiously optimistic about.
Until such changes extend to the merits of things like conferences and travel, any such reform will be of limited value because it’s all interrelated. Employees from all departments have had a reputation of being sent to conferences, staying for a couple hours, then skipping out on the rest to play tourist, play golf, or be entertained. Some have joked about these trips being “paycations” — as in the City pays them to go on vacation.
CalNENA is the California chapter of the National Emergency Number Association, a trade organization for 911 dispatchers. Without any consideration for the City’s bleak financial outlook, or the value of such a trip, the Police Department sent two dispatchers to the annual conference in San Diego. That shouldn’t be too expensive, right?
$1,467 for hotel rooms and parking, $1,200 for conference registration, $93.84 for mileage reimbursement, and probably $4,000 to 6,000 in wages, benefits, and potential overtime paid out to other employees to cover their absences. Their union agreement has a provision that considers it a full workweek if they attend training for 3+ consecutive days. I assume that provision applies here.
Ballpark cost of attending = $6,500 to 8,500. So what did the City of Fullerton gain from this trip? You tell me…
Is it just me, or have things been getting a little tense lately?
The CSUF Republicans have invited controversial conservative pundit Milo Yiannopoulos to speak on campus Halloween evening, creating quite a bit of anxiety for CSU educrats, liberal activists and local police.
Why? Here’s what happened when Yiannopoulos tried to speak at UC Berkley earlier this year:
That’s a lot of potential chaos for Fullerton, and local agencies seem to be planning for the worst case scenario. Nearby Acacia Elementary School has announced that it will be sending kids home early that day. Some CSUF students have said they are afraid to go to school. The Fullerton Police Department is working with “local, state and federal law-enforcement agencies” to plan security for the event.
Perhaps stoking the flames, student and faculty groups have denounced the event and called for the school to prevent Yiannopoulos from speaking. These efforts seem to embolden Yiannopoulos’ followers, driving media attention leading up to the event and reinforcing his assertion that conservatives’ right to free speech on campus is being threatened.
Anyway, here’s hoping that Fullerton residents won’t have to rely on the FPD’s finesse in tactfully de-escalating a Halloween riot.
Apartments at Grace Ministry. White glove advice to politicians: keep your hands clean.
Governor Jerry Brown paid a visit to downtown Fullerton on Wednesday, where it looks like he took a tour of the still-unfinished Fullerton Fox Theater with a rabble of current and former local officials in tow. Surely he was impressed.
OK, maybe not.
But why would Jerry Brown fly down to Fullerton to look inside some flopped redevelopment project?
One could guess that battleground Assemblymember Sharon Quirk-Silva invited Brown to pitch some sort of state subsidy to rescue the project; a thinly veiled attempt to buy voters in one district with the rest of the state’s resources. You can tell an opportunity is at hand by the way the local bush league politicos are salivating all over Brown’s loafers. Hopefully someone had a towel handy.
But all of that is just fine. Why shouldn’t residents of Escondido, Bakersfield and Elk Grove pay for decades of Fullerton’s redevelopment screw ups? Mr. Brown, if there’s money to burn on a movie theater, maybe you can fix our decrepit roads and crumbling bridges, too?
The other evening the Fullerton City Council discussed the issue of letting bar owners cram more of their top-shelf patrons into downtown Fullerton night clubs, a move that the bar owners ludicrously claim will actually help with all that mayhem that occurs on a typical week-end evening. As a tangent, the idea of taxing the generators of all the trouble came up.
Here is our esteemed Mayor, Bruce Whitaker, calmly explaining why some sort of public revenue generating scheme would a bad idea.
This is so disingenuous in several aspects that it’s hard to know where to start. The idea that the private business interests are the best at providing some sort of “management” at the lowest cost is absurd given the fact that the taxpayers are already providing vastly subsidized security and maintenance in the downtown war zone. It is the o-so trustworthy bar owners (that Whitaker claims have the biggest stake in a smoothly operating downtown) who benefit from public services they aren’t paying for.
Whitaker knows very well that the open air saloon known as Downtown Fullerton costs the taxpayers more than $1,500,000 per year. It’s a classic money pit. The irony is rich. The idea that the city government might milk DTF is absolutely absurd. The fact is that Whitaker’s bar-owner campaign contributors are making money on the backs of the rest of us – and Whitaker – despite his rhetoric – knows this damn well.
The real point is that once again Whitaker and his spineless council colleagues are going to bat for their saloon owning pals, people who have stolen public sidewalks, habitually violated the City’s noise ordinances, whose patrons wreak havoc on our streets and on themselves every night. Whitaker and the City Council have not only turned looking the other way into a full-time job, they have gone out of their way to prop up and publicly subsidize the booze peddlers they enabled in the first place.
And as usual, the rest of us pick up the bar tab.
The Fullerton PD just publicized these photos of a patrol car that was tagged with graffiti by a downtown reveler over the weekend. The vandalism allegedly occurred while the officers were away on “proactive” foot patrol.
The social media pronouncement was accompanied by some humorous posturing, including the hashtag #WeWillFindYou.
Now anyone who’s filed a graffiti or vandalism report in the city of Fullerton knows that these types of crime reports usually get stuffed in a drawer, dismissed as non-priorities. You’d be lucky if you can get a cop to come out and take a report, let alone collect evidence and track down the perp.
In this case, some egos have been offended and so we might expect to see some sort of minimal effort expended. But I wouldn’t count on it.