Sometimes you don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Like the case in Philly where a local businessman may be sued by the Redevelopment Agency for cleaning up trash and beautifying a piece of blighted Agency-owned property that they willfully refused to clean up. So ths guy spends 20 big ones of his own dough since the City blatantly ignored its own mess, and is now looking at a potential lawsuit – a lawsuit some asshole city bureaucrat says is based on “principle.” Principle. Now that’s a scream.
What’s really funny is that if the city had done the work it would have cost twenty times as much and taken ten times longer.
Of course apologists of Fullerton’s former Redevelopment Agency (you know who they are) would be quick to point out is that this sort incompetence and arrogance never happened in Fullerton; Fullerton Redevelopment folks were just so darned…well… you know.
But consider this: Fullerton has had a long and inglorious Redevelopment history that includes building, then demolishing concrete trestles along Harbor, giving away a public sidewalk to a politically connected apaign contributor, subsidizing dozens of boondoggles, supporting architectural design Nazi-ism, stealing an old lady’s property to give to a car dealer, and nasty little sales tax kick backs from Redevelopment funds – all done to promote more tax revenue to pay for pensions, League of City junkets, and all those inevitable step pay increases for the gang.
A final thought: even though Redevelopment is supposedly dead in California you can bet the farm (if they don’t steal it for High Speed Rail) that the lobbyists are busy at work in Sacramento trying to revive it, and that local mall fry politicians and local political wannabes are real eager for it to come back.
Since I do not want to be accused of being sexist I shall refrain from a literary reference to Macbeth. I would note however that there is not enough brainpower in this picture to light a match.
Two observations. First “Kitty” Jaramillo seems to think it is “time for a change.” She never seemed to think it was time for a change when the FPD was beating people to death, so that tells you all you need to know about her, even if you didn’t know she was a well-pensioned former City employee.
I ain’t a swallerin’ that!
Somebody better tell Mrs. Flory to quit wearing those rayon muu muu things and those cheap plastic beads. They scream out 1973. Which is probably when she bought them. Meeeeow. Hiss!!!!
P.S. Friends, for an added treat enjoy this picture of FPOA boss and serial prevaricator (or hoplessly incompetent) Andrew Goodrich proclaiming the Jaramillo buffet safe for FPOA consumption.
“Several guest sustained broken bones rushing for the cold taquitos.”
As a woman I have to say I found Jan Flory’s observation about Travis Kiger being intimidated by strong, older women pretty comical. The inference of course is that Jan Flory is a strong, older woman; and that as a corollary, Travis is a weak, younger man, possibly, Flory speculated, because his mommy didn’t nurse him long enough.
Are you my mommy?
And now I ask you to dispel the image of Jan Flory nursing anything (warm blooded) herself to gain mommy experience, as I pursue my essay.
The implication that Travis Kiger is weak, and is in any way fearful of Jan Flory, I leave until the end to address. First I will start with Mrs. Flory’s self-description.
Can she run in mud?
I note that Mrs. Flory bolts out of the starting gate with the implication that she is the victim of ageism and sexism. I am no longer offended by limousine liberals whipping out victimhood status, although generally they apply it to which ever class or race they happen to be pandering to.
Jan Flory isn’t “older.” She is old. She is probably in her seventies. That’s a fact and it’s germane, given the total lack of leadership and intellectual perspicacity, delivered by her “esteemed” elderly friends Bankhead, Jones and McKinley who were also in their eighth decade.
Age is a reality. You can try to hide it with lots of cosmetic surgery, but you can’t hide an ossified mindset locked in forty-year time lag. It reveals itself in rigid thought and its addiction to empty clichés, and meaningless abstractions.
But it looked like a strong, older freeway!
Flory is strong, she says. Must we take her word for it? As a structural engineer I know that some materials such as unreinforced concrete or cast iron appear very strong; and so they are – in compression. Yet they lack strength in tension. They are not flexible and their very rigidity makes them comparatively brittle. And brittle is a term I would apply to the speech and demeanor of Jan Flory at the City Council microphone. Perhaps there is an underlying hysteria waiting to erupt. If it ever does, the crack-up will not be pretty, either.
A little Jack Daniels gets you through the morning.
“Strong” people of neither gender advertise their strength. The fact that Mrs. Flory finds it necessary to do so is a pretty clear indication of an underlying insecurity and inherent weakness.
It seems to have escaped Mrs. Flory’s notice that people may dislike her not because she is a strong, older woman, but because she seems to be an inflexible, humorless, mean, self-righteous scold – a veritable literary stereotype, in fact.
Admit it. You weren’t using the that block of Whiting, anyway.
And then there is the Flory Record to consider, amply described on the pages of FFFF. Her previous years on the Fullerton City Council are informed by failure. Flory voted to approve an illegal tax on our water for six years; which also means she never balanced a legitimate budget. She gave away City property and streets worth millions to her developer friends. She voted to retroactively spike the pensions of “public safety” employees, burying the taxpayers and citizens under a multi-hundred million dollar mountain of unfunded pension liability.
Move on. Nothing to see here.
And then there is the Flory Inaction: totally MIA about the murder of the mentally ill homeless man at the hands of Fullerton cops. Is that the behavior of a “strong, older woman” or the pitiful cowardice of an entropic, conscienceless fossil? What does Jan Flory think about the crime wave perpetrated by members of the Fullerton Police Department, including the sexual assaults by Albert Rincon that even elicited disgust from a federal judge? Well we do know that she actually gave her pal ex-Chief Pat McKinley an award of some kind afterall the bad FPD news and after a multi-hundred thousand dollar settlement was reached in the Rincon matter.
Those ladies weren’t like you. They were weak, younger women!
As with many of Fullerton’s “strong, older women (and men)” it has been more important for Flory to back the sclerotic Fullerton establishment to the hilt, rathert than uncover the stinky morass in the FPD. Flory actually wants to hire more cops without reforming the department. Flory seems to think somebody in Fullerton really wants this retrograde attitude. Of course the voters will decide, but I doubt anybody wants to backtrack to the days of complete unaccountability in City Hall that marked the Flory years.
Now as far as Travis Kiger is concerned I will say this. He is one of the most courageous people I know. He has endured the threats and vulgar vituperation of the FPOA trolls on this site with equanimity. They have attacked him and his family, posting his home address long before he was a public figure. He has never backed down. That’s because he believes in principles, one of which is taking responsibility for his decisions. That’s pretty refreshing. And that’s strength.
Travis is thirty-three years old. I sincerely doubt if Jan Flory has embraced a new idea in over forty.
I have always been fascinated by the urge for government employees and their die-hard supporters to cling to the notion of collective bargaining as some sort of birthright. The ability for public employees to unionize is actually not even that old, but is a comparatively recent and curious chapter in the history of organized labor.
Classical Marxist doctrine holds that in the capitalist phase of history there are two elements contributing to economic activity. There are capital and labor; the first representing the bourgeois investment class (and their managerial overseers); the second is the workforce that sells its labor to the former. Naturally, the cost of labor , the investment of the capitalists, and the return the latter is willing to accept determine the supply side cost of goods.
The Marxists believed that capital habitually exploited an oversupply of labor through poor working conditions and long hours of employment. There was certainly evidence to support this contention and the capitalists did their best to outlaw labor “combination” through their control of legislatures.
(For the sake of argument I will happily stipulate the socialist fact in evidence.)
Of course labor did combine.
But the idea of government workers unionizing did not enter the into the equation. Why? For several reasons, one of which is succinctly stated by the most effective liberal in American history, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Roosevelt realized that people who work for the government cannot hold the same employer/employee relationship since their employer is the people as a sovereign whole. Clearly the idea of collective bargaining, and particularly militant union tactics used against the citizenry was abhorrent to old FDR himself.
Another related problem is that government employees do not fit into the labor-capital equation, since the “capitalist” investor in their operation is none other than the taxpayers and citizens – and not a natural adversary in an economic system. And public employees were granted civil service protection and security to make up for comparatively modest wages.
Cornering the market…
And then there is the problem of the complete public sector labor monopoly. Producers of goods compete with each other in marketplaces that, among other things, sets a value on product that helps determine the cost of labor. No such balance exists in the public sector where nothing is for sale and there is no competition in the labor market at all.
The ability to unionize and the concomitant ability to engage in collective political action has enabled the public sector labor monopoly to elect its favored candidates at all levels, and subsequently to exact greater and greater salaries and benefits for themselves; and always using the argument that all they seek is parity with the private sector. Yet never have they jettisoned the civil service protections that makes in almost impossible to fire an incompetent public worker.
Most comical are the “management” unions that represent the upper tier employees who oversee the lower, and whose own interests in running the “company” are inexplicably linked with the benefits conferred upon the latter!
We didn’t do it!
And so dear Friends, next time you see a “retired” 50 year old cop who was granted almost 100% of his salary as a pension, and who was given two decades of retroactive benefits, ask him whom he has to thank. I guarantee it won’t be you, or even the other public employees who negotiated his benefits on your behalf; nor even the lackeys on the city council like Don Bankhead, Dick Jones, and Jan Flory whom his union got elected. Nuh, uh. He will thank an anonymous “system” that has created this mess and that has virtually bankrupt California and threatens almost every municipality in the state.
Our State Assemblyman and former County Supervisor has made some really lame endorsements in the past, including the unspeakable corn pone donkey, Dick Jones.
But this time he has really surpassed himself, bestowing his political benediction on an Anaheim city council candidate named Steve Lodge. Except that his name isn’t Steve Lodge at all. It’s Steven Chavez Lodge, a name he recently adopted in an attempt to curry favor with Anaheim Latino voters and, not insignificantly, get his name to the top of the ballot.
If you set aside the fake name and carpetbagging there’s really a lot less there than meets the eye!
Let’s set aside the fake name gambit for a moment and consider a few other unsavory facts about Lodge. First he is an ex-cop with a dirty record, “retired” with a disability at 52, set up in a make-work schmooze job by who knows who, and of course, worst of all, this cypher is a creation of the Kurt Pringle government for sale machine that has a hold of the City of Anaheim by the balls.
“Chavez’s” list of endorsers includes a who’s who of OC repuglicans including “Everything Must Go” Bill Campbell, carpetbagging spouse Dick Ackerman, carpetbagger Harry Hairball Sidhu and the other Pringle puppets on the Anaheim City council. Disney and the Anaheim Chamber of Commerce have joined the band, endorsing this miscreant as some sort of businessman who didn’t just move into Anaheim in the past year. Naturally, Ed Royce is a supporter.
And then there is Chris Norby. An endorser. Why? Why on Earth? You’ll have to ask him since the answer isn’t readily apparent. Maybe his political handler John Lewis dictated that it must be so. Maybe Norby was simply flattered to be asked for an endorsement that is now completely devalued.
This guy is an up and comer, Norby. Get on board!
But this Lodge creep stands for everything that is abhorrent to those who want intelligent and responsible leadership. So what could Norby be thinking? Who knows.
Here are Jan Flory’s recent musings on the topic of selecting a Fullerton representative for the Metropolitan Water District. Mrs. Flory has herself torqued up into a faux outrage that a council majority may appoint whomever it chooses. It seems she believes that Doug Chaffee should be the Met rep, simply because he wants the job – instead of a “crony.”
WATERBOARDED And the victim would be,—-Doug Chaffee! Last Tuesday night, the council took up the appointment to the Metropolitan Water District Board. No small thing as the MWD is the largest municipal water district in the world. That bears repeating,—the WORLD! Doug had asked for the appointment. He stated that he had a degree in economics, he had extensive experience running his own business, and he had dealt with natural resources in his law practice “from way back.” He seemed to know what he was talking about. Bruce Whitaker, on the other hand, wanted to appoint Tom Babcock. My recollection of Tom was that he was a ringleader of the 1994 Recall that successfully removed Molly McClanahan, Don Bankhead and Buck Catlin from office. For months after the recall (and my subsequent election), Babcock would harangue the council for one thing or another. To my lights, it was all so much sour grapes because when it was all said and done, the 1994 Recall was a bust. The Recallers didn’t get anyone elected to the council with the exception of Conrad DeWitte who lasted 6 weeks before he was booted out of office. Ahead of his time, Mr. Babcock was a Tea Bagger before we had Tea Baggers. Whitaker’s sole premise for wanting Mr. Babcock was that Babcock would be a “rate payer advocate”. No other credentials were cited. The agenda letter was “skinny” with the details in the extreme, and merely mentioned that the “Council is being asked to consider whether to make an appointment from the two persons previously nominated.” If I hadn’t attended the August 7th council meeting, I would have had no idea who the contenders were. So much for “transparency”. I will have to say that I have never seen a city councilmember denied an appointment by his colleagues. There have been times when two council members wanted the same appointment, but this was always worked out amicably between the two of them. Here, Travis Kiger, ever ready to skewer someone (anyone!), actually moved to reject Doug Chaffee for the position. The motion failed for lack of a second. Kiger did pout out that he could not support Chaffee because Kiger had left a message for Chaffee two months before, and Chaffee had still not returned his call. Oh my! In the end, our intrepid Tea Baggers (Kiger, Sebourn and Whitaker) appointed Tom Babcock to serve as a representative to the MWD Board until the first meeting in December 2012. Presumably if all goes well for Tony Bushala, Mr. Babcock will keep his appointment. If not, c’set la vie.
Hang in there, Doug!
Too bad Mrs. Flory’s own history turns her indignation into a laughable lie. In 2003 Mrs. Flory, having been kicked off the City Council by the voters tried to represent Fullerton on the Orange County Water District! Back then Flory didn’t care that a duly elected councilman wanted the job. Oh, no. In her delusional state of self-aggrandizement, only she could do it!
I’m not self-aggrandized. Just a little happy.
But of course it gets worse. Much worse. Flory now attacks Thom Babcock as a “rate payer advocate” (Oh! The horror!). What Flory isn’t telling her 113 friends is that when she was on the City Council, from 1994-2002 she rubber stamped the re-appointment of a useless local hack named James Blake with zero professional credentials, to the MWD. Of course Blake was also a Flory campaign contributor, by why worry about details, right? FFFF has written all about Blake on numerous occasions, including here and here when we tuned him up for unnecessary travel and wining/dining on the water rate payers’ dime.
Sure I gave her some money. So what?
Looks like the rate payers could use an advocate, and it looks like Jan Flory has once again waterboarded the truth.
For paranoia, sheer cynicism and demonstration of unbridled self-interest there’s nothing that can beat this “playbook” created by the law firm of Lackie, Dammeier & McGill for use by their clients: cop unions.
See how many of these tactics strike you as familiar in Fullerton. Paranoia, cynicism and self-interest. Check, check, check.
Lackie, Dammeier & McGill
Former Cops Defending Current Ones
Negotiations After Impasse – Association Options
In gearing up for negotiations, hopefully your association has developed some political ties with members of your governing body. Now is the time those political endorsements, favors, and friendships come into play. When negotiations reach an impasse, the association will have options which may be utilized simultaneously, or one before the other.
Political Option
As most association leaders already know, associations should be selective in their battles. However, this does not mean that the association should roll over for everything either. Association respect (by the employer) is gained over years of actions or inactions. Associations who rarely, if ever, take things to the mat or challenge the employer gain little respect at the bargaining table or elsewhere. The flip side is also true. Those associations that battle over every minor issue may be seen as an association that simply cannot be pleased, so why bother. While it is a fine line, somewhere in the middle is where you want to be. The association should be like a quiet giant in the position of, “do as I ask and don’t piss me off.” Depending on the circumstances surrounding the negotiations impasse, there are various tools available to an association to put political pressure on the decision makers. A few things to keep in mind when utilizing these tools are the following:
Public Message
Always keep this in mind. The public could care less about your pay, medical coverage and pension plan. All they want to know is “what is in it for them.” Any public positions or statements by the association should always keep that focus. The message should always be public safety first. You do not want wage increases for yourselves, but simply to attract better qualified candidates and to keep more experienced officers from leaving.
The Future
Also keep in mind that once the fight is over, you and your members will still be working there. Avoid activities where one or just a few members are involved who can be singled out for retaliation. Always keep in mind your department policies and the law. You should be in very close contact with your association’s attorney during these times to ensure you are not going to get yourself or any of your members in trouble. For associations in the Legal Defense Fund, please keep in mind that concerted labor activity should always be discussed with the LDF Trustees prior to the activity to ensure coverage.
Let the Debate Begin
Again, the ideas listed below are not in any particular order. Just as in your use-of-force guidelines, you can start with simple verbal commands or jump to a higher level, based on the circumstances.
Keep in mind that most of these tools are not to deliver your message to the public but are designed to simply get the decision makers into giving in to your position.
Storm City Council – While an association is at impasse, no city council or governing board meeting should take place where members of your association and the public aren’t present publicly chastising them for their lack of concern for public safety.
Picketing – Plan a few well organized picketing events. Keep these events spread out to avoid burning out your membership.
Public Appearances – During impasse, the association should make known at every significant public event, such as parades, Christmas tree lightings, the Mayor’s Gala and any other event of interest to the decision makers, that the association is upset about the lack of concern for public safety.
Newspaper Ads – Again, keep the message focused on “public safety.”
Billboards – Nothing seems to get more attention than a billboard entering the city limits which reads that crime is up and the City could care less about your safety.
Job Fair – Getting your members to apply at a large local agency, which causes an influx of personnel file checks by background investigators always sends a strong signal. Keep this for last, as some of your members may ultimately leave anyway.
Work Slowdown – This involves informing your members to comply closely with Department policy and obey all speed limits. It also involves having members do thorough investigations, such as canvassing the entire neighborhood when taking a 459 report and asking for a back-up unit on most calls. Of course, exercising officer discretion in not issuing citations and making arrests is also encouraged.
Blue Flu – This one is very rarely used and only in dire circumstances. As with all of these, please consult your association’s attorney before even discussing this issue with your members.
Public Ridicule – Blunders by the City Manager, Mayor, or City Council members or wasteful spending should be highlighted and pointed out to the public at every opportunity.
Referendum / Ballot Initiatives – Getting the public to vote for a wage increase is seldom going to fly, however, as a pressure tactic, seeking petition to file a referendum on eliminating the City Manager’s position for a full time elected mayor may cause the City Manager to rethink his or her position.
Mailers – Again, the message should be for “public safety” in getting the public to attend city council meetings and to call the City Council members (preferably at home) to chastize them for their inaction.
Campaigning – If any members of the governing body are up for election, the association should begin actively campaigning against them, again for their lack of concern over public safety. If you are in a non-election year, make political flyers which you can explain will be mailed out the following year during the election season.
Focus on an Individual – Avoid spreading your energy. Focus on a city manager, councilperson, mayor or police chief and keep the pressure up until that person assures you his loyalty and then move on to the next victim.
Press Conferences – Every high profile crime that takes place should result in the association’s uproar at the governing body for not having enough officers on the street, which could have avoided the incident.
Of course, other ideas that cops come up with are very imaginative. Just keep in mind, the idea is to show the decision makers that the public favors public safety and it will only harm their public support by not prioritizing you and almost equally as important, to let them know that next time they should agree with you much sooner.
Correct. We do not want you to discuss sexy issues.
Okay this post is not about Jan Flory discussing anything remotely “sexy” because the thought of that…well, never mind.
The post is about her latest Facebook scribblings in which she opines on a subject near and dear to the hearts of Fullerton reformers: the illegal 10% tax on your water that the City collected for the past 15 years. $27,000,000 worth.
First I’ll start by stating what you could have already guessed. Jan Flory does not want you to get a refund of the theft. In her world-order the taxpayers are meant to be milked, not refunded.
Her assertion that the collection was “illegal” the past three year is a bad lawyer’s half-truth that amounts to a bald-faced lie, of course. It has been illegal for 15 years, six of them on her watch as a council person. The City has a legal opinion that it is only obligated to refund three-year’s worth of the theft. Not the same thing, is it? Of course Mrs. Flory is desperate to disassociate her name with the tax. Too late. She is on record in the 90s as having known it was wrong and doing it anyway.
Mrs. Flory and her ilk love footling committees, especially when they are selected by ozone brains like Jone, Quirk, McKinley and Bankhead. Even better are the “consultants” selected by staff who give them their marching orders. The “report” cooked up by the water rate consultant was so evidently bogus that it hardly needs to be restated. But I will: their goal was to gin up as much phony cost as possible to keep the bureaucrats greedy little fingers on that 10%. Flory may think this gives her cover, and under the old Culture of Corruption it would have. Not any more.
The 10% was expressly collected to cover specific City staff costs associated with the water utility. However, it turns out that those departments were alreadycharging directly to the Water Fund. Which is why I am happy to refer to the tax as an illegal theft.
And another point: it’s real easy to say that the illegal tax should be refunded to the Water Fund for capital improvements. That’s convenient, but immoral. The tax that was collected had nothing to do with infrastructure. Nothing. True infrastructure costs should be rolled into an effective rate for water transmission, a correction of years of mismanagement by Mrs. Flory and her cohorts that still needs to be done. Confusing these two issues is simply a convenient way for the perpetrators to hide their crime and their dereliction.
Now, let’s address the issue of the reserve funds, a subject that Mrs. Flory wants people to believe she knows something about. There is no need to empty these accounts to pay refunds. No, indeed. I find it remarkably disingenuous for anybody to assert this, especially given just two of City manger Joe Felz’s most recent “cost saving” measures.
First there was the egregious relocation of former Redevelopment personnel into General Fund departments for which they had no apparent expertise. Most recently the City contracted out your graffiti removal services for $120,000. Yay! Big savings, right? Wrong. The city employees were simply reassigned to other jobs in the Engineering Department that were vacant. Net cost savings? -$120,000.
The City just missed an opportunity to shave a million bucks off its payroll costs. Of course, my point is that the General Fund is far from depleted.
Finally, in closing, I would submit that Mrs. Flory knows more about witching hours than any of us. However, if she doesn’t like staying up that late every other Tuesday night, then she has no business on a city council. And it’s really too bad that the Council is scheduling special meetings to attend to the people’s business.
Mrs. Flory’s little rubber stamp has been put away and locked up.
