Thanks to the City of Bell scandal, local governments are now required to report compensation figures to the state every year. The other day a reader shared that report with us.
This is the first time that we’ve been able to see pension contributions, insurance premiums, overtime, etc. added together for each of the city’s employees, showing us the full value (and cost to the taxpayer) of a job with the city of Fullerton.
Keep in mind that the city’s pension and retiree medical plans are severely underfunded even with these sizable contributions. That means these cost figures are actually understated.
Our new city council members recently received this unsolicited e-mail from former City Manager Chris Meyer:
Council Members, you might want to consider the attached article from Oakland on police commissions/ oversight, before you decide how you want to proceed. It is very instructive on the challenges you may face. Since the procedures for disciplinary action for police officers are embodied in their labor contract (which is subject the collective bargaining process under MMB, PERB; and other State laws, as well as long established city policy), and since the current contract with the optional extension, doesn’t expire until 2014, an oversight commission would be a ineffective, and generally useless until a new contract was mutually agreed upon, or imposed unilaterally on the POA.
Instead, you may want to focus on appointing a permanent Chief of Police for the time being, and see if the problems can be resolved that way. As to the Council appointing a Chief of Police, go ahead and give it a try. It will be interesting to see how the Chief interfaces with the Council, and implements both your individual, and collective agendas. You might want to ask Shawn, Sharon, or Pam what the closed session discussion was like when the most recent Chief was selected. You will note that in the City Manager Ordinance, that the CM is required to consult with the Council on the selection of the Chief. That means that at least three Council Members need to concur with the CM’s recommendation in order for it to happen, unless of course the CM is planning on looking for a new job. For all practical purposes at least four members of the Council need to concur, as no Chief candidate will take a job on a 3/2 vote.The Council also interviews the final three candidates for the job, and can direct the appointment. Generally the CM can work with any of the top three, so the selection is responsive to the Councils direction, and desires. Finally, ask yourself this question? Do you want to be responsible for the Chief’s actions. Remember that will require you to fall on your collective swords, as well as the Chief, if something like Kelly happens again. And, just a reminder, the Chief gets POBAR protection, and presumptive clause protection for medical conditions related to the incident, or the job, so you would be gone long before he, or she would, as you would bear the ultimate responsibility.
Chris Meyer City Manager, Retired
The part I love is the former City Manager trying to scare the new council members into the same craven cowardliness that tanked the last crew. Do you want to be responsible for the Chief’s actions?
Well, hell yes!!
Leaders lead. The poor, brainless bastards that just got recalled failed to lead. They let “the system” take charge; the result was a disaster. Comically, the otiose Meyer derives his entire screed on the premise that “things just happen.” But Meyer fails to grasp one basic truth: things just happen when nobody is in charge.
Typically, Meyer omits to remind the new council that hewas in charge as the Fullerton Police Department slid down the greasy slope of corruption. Typical? Yes, indeed. The old, corrupt regime never took responsibility for its actions. And a bloated pustule like Meyer could make $200,000 a year coaching his three sawdust-brained puppets to dodge the accountability they were elected to assume.
Although FFFF hasn’t been reporting much on County activities it’s pretty hard to overlook the latest management crisis in the County Hall of Administration, in which top managers appear to have hushed up a multitude of sex crimes and workplace harassment perpetrated by a creep named Carlos Bustamante. Bustamante is a Santa Ana city councilman, and until last fall, a high level bureaucrat in the OC Public Works Department. Mr. Peabody touched upon the mess, here.
Bustamante was arrested last week by the DA, fifteen months after an anonymous letter was received by the County. Apparently that complaint was actually given to an underling of Bustamante to investigate! It remains unclear who made that call, but his boss, the Director of Public Works is taking the hit for the team – so far.
Mauk.
Meanwhile a second complaint in August 2011, spurred the CEO, Tom Mauk to hire an outside lawyer to investigate Bustamante’s activities. The consequent detailed report, completed in September 2011, supposedly detailed some pretty greasy stuff. For some reason the Supervisors were not shown the report – except for Chairman Bill Campbell, who now amazingly claims he refused to read it, supervising apparently not being one of the requirements of a Supervisor. The report remained under lock and key as Bustamante was permitted to quit and given 3 month’s salary to (get this) – prevent him from suing the County! Blackmail? Who knows?
Finally, the report came to the surface after the County’s Internal Auditor, pursuing his own investigation (and after months of stonewalling by Mauk and his HR Director, Carl Crown) was permitted the IA to see it. At that point the jig was up and the Board was notified of the damning report. They immediately referred the matter to the DA for an investigation which culminated in a dozen felonies and four misdemeanors.
Remarkably, in the intervening months between March 2012 and now, Mauk has been permitted to keep his job despite the inescapable facts of incompetence, cronyism, withholding information from the Board, and of course, paying Bustamante $45,000 to go away without a ruckus. Sure sounds like a cover up, doesn’t it?
Boss Tweed, OC style.
Evidently the Board, or a majority of it at least, likes this kind of thing and thinks it’s just fine. Bill Campbell has publicly said so, claiming the Mauk was just trying to protect the County by covering up Bustamante’s behavior. Of course that begs another question: why did anybody put the County at risk by employing this scum-sack in the first place? For that you may direct your question right back to Bill Campbell, who has been Carlos Bustamante’s political patron over the years, and who, no doubt, presided, along with Mauk, over Bustamante’s weird and inexplicable assent to the top of County government.
A “closed session” was held by the Board on Friday to discuss what to do. Apparently doing nothing remains the Board’s path of least resistance as they have postponed taking about the matter ’til July 24th. They had better hurry up. The DA has said that he’s not done investigating and will now focus his attention on personnel with the Hall of Administration itself.
Anybody who reads this blog knows that I have had a running battle with the Fullerton Redevelopments Agency, even going so far as suing the Agency to block its bogus expansion attempt into areas of west and east Fullerton that had no blight. That was just a fraudulent attempt to divert property tax revenue from legitimate recipients.
Now that Redevelopment has been killed off by the Legislature and the Governor, I really have to wonder what has and will become of that small army of government economic planners, boondoggle promoters, bribers, bagmen, design guideline perpetrators, and the rest, whose job it was to gin up sales tax revenue and property tax increment (usually at the expense of somebody else) while dictating land use development in Redevelopment project areas across California.
Lest anybody think I’m just grousing about an abstract problem, consider an article here in the OC Register that points out the exorbitant amount that Fullerton Redevelopment Agency wasted on administration.
Anyway, these folks were in the business of playing developer without taking any of the risks, and with a compliant city council there was never any fear of them being held accountable for their manifest failures.
Some of the former Redevelopment employees will be kept around to close things out. The rest? Who knows? In Fullerton, some of them have already been absorbed into the regular bureaucracy, to be supported by the General Fund – as if these people were simply interchangeable and indispensable parts. The message that move sent to the citizens of Fullerton is a really bad one – that the government has no appetite to shrink, even though a specific purpose has been ended.
I keep hearing on the Fullerton grapevine that Fullerton City Manager Joe Felz, doggone it, just can’t get one of the recalled Three Bald Tires to show up to validate the June 5th Recall election. Without at least one of these clowns there is no quorum and a meeting can’t be held. Apparently they have been individually agreeing to show up then later, suddenly have other plans.
This could go on for quite awhile, and if left to their own devices, these miscreants may actually file to run for election in November before they’ve officially been run out of office.
Well, this might explain why it’s been three weeks since the election and the new councilmen Kiger, Sebourn and Chaffee have not been sworn it yet. That’s pretty reprehensible, if you ask me, and it begs the question – how much longer is this farce going to go on before somebody goes to a judge and gets a court order validating the election?
I remember well in 1994 that the three recalled councilmembers simply refused to schedule a replacement election (different laws then) until ordered to do so by a judge. Then as now, the incompetent, arrogant Old Guard refused to go quietly into that good night. And Don Bankhead, recalled the first time, got himself elected again.
And here’s a final thought for you Fullerton water rate payers. Every single day that passes costs you all another $7000 in an illegal tax that is still being collected.
Heh heh. The hardest part of the game is gonna be keeping the score down. Heh heh.
If you think about it, anti-recall managers Bennett, Ackerman and Ellis really screwed the pooch (and I don’t use that phrase lightly).
The Three Bald Ties put their reputations in the hands of Amateur Hour.
The metamorphosis into an oxygen breathing creature was slow and painful…
Remember the stupid rescission cards fiasco? The embarrassing website that just reproduced damning posts from FFFF and nonsense from Fullerton’s delusional gerontocracy?
Rock on!
And the of course there was the idiotic Stop Bushala campaign, ultimately doomed to fail since the name Bushala did not appear on the ballot.
Larry had sacrificed speed for size.
Stupid door hangers, stupid mail piece, stupid signs. Remember that awful video they touted as “hard hitting”?
These assclowns found the Recall team waiting for them with knives drawn around every corner as they kept pitching thousands of dollars into old school repuglican moneypits like Jim Bieber and Adam Probolsky.
And they lost by thirty points.
Need a jump?
True, the Three Dead Batteries put almost none of their own money into this disaster, perhaps showing the greatest wisdom of which they were capable. But even so, somebody should be asking for his money back.
Yesterday the world was treated to the moving words of love and respect that Slidebar Rock ‘N Roll Kitchen proprietor Jeremy Popoff had for Kelly Thomas, the homeless man who was beat to death by members of the Fullerton Police Department last July.
Poor Jeremy! It must indeed have been heartbreaking for him to lose somebody he had known for years. Especially since he now acknowledges that the call that summoned police to the scene was instigated by a call from his establishment.
(Horrible screeching sound as needle is dragged across the LP)
Here are a few choice quotations from a Fullerton Stories article dated July 23rd 2011 about the Kelly Thomas affair featuring some trenchant observations by Mr. Popoff himself:
“I feel guilty having ever had any contempt for this guy, but if you had asked me about him a month ago, I’d have nothing good to say about him,” Popoff said. “I don’t want to say that it was justified, what happened. But man, Kelly scared people. We …. were always having to kick him out of our bathrooms or tell him to leave customers alone. Then he would yell at us.”
“He had long matted hair and a matted beard that stuck to his body,” Popoff said. “I wish there was something I could do or could have done a long time ago. My manager was in tears when she called me that night. She was really shaken up by it. “
Popoff said that the police have been good to the homeless in the area near his bar. “The cops have been really lenient with him and other homeless. He was allowed to get away with a lot more because he was homeless. The cops gave him a lot of breaks.”
“We’ve given him lots of stuff,” Popoff added. “[He was] not allowed to be here anymore because Kelly did not respect our customers.”
Back to Popoff: “The last thing I want is to be anti-PD or anti-Kelly. We live here, I’m a father. We support the PD and the residents and the community. Literally, most of my staff was very scared and intimidated by him. They were reluctant to ask him to move along,” says Popoff. “Two or three days before [the arrest] he was bumming cigarettes and the manager said to him ‘Kelly you can’t’ do that here, you gotta move on.’ And Kelly screamed back at him ‘don’t call me by my first name!’”
For almost a year now rumors have been swirling around the role of Fullerton’s Slidebar in the death of the mentally ill homeless man, Kelly Thomas, last July. Specifically, did a Slidebar employee at the behest of his or her boss, owner Jeremy Popoff, make a phony call to the cops to give them a pretext to roust Thomas.
Staring into an uncertain future...
Despite all of his protestations of innocence and donations of canned food to the homeless, Popoff’s story never quite rang true.
A couple days ago the other shoe finally dropped: a lawsuit for wrongful termination by a former employee named Michael Reeves that goes into elaborate detail about what happened on the night of July 5, 2011, and the cover up that followed.
The guy claims the fateful and false call to the FPD that triggered the events leading to the murder of Thomas was made by Slidebar manager Jeanette DiMarco at the behest of owner Jeremy Popoff.
Later, when he wouldn’t play ball, Reeves claims he was demoted, then fired. The guy is suing for $4,000,000, a tidy sum, to be sure.
Well, there you have it. Is any part of this tale true? I don’t know. But I do know that the other, even more sinister part of the story is still looming on the horizon like a nasty weather front; and that’s the disturbing possibility that the bar was in cahoots with one or more of the police before hand, complicit in a criminal conspiracy to deprive Kelly Thomas of his Constitutional rights and even his physical well-being.
We now know that the DA has decided to look the other way in his haste to kiss and make up with the Fullerton cops, but the possibility that the attack on Thomas was per-arranged does indeed explain the antagonistic behavior of Wolfe and Ramos, and perhaps even the seemingly inexplicable violence of Cicinelli.
All this is now bound to come out in the civil proceedings against the City by Ron Thomas and Garo Mardirossian. The latter may be pressured to cut a deal to avoid embarrassing the City too much in a public trial, but the new council needs a vehicle to get all the facts on the table once and for all. A trial is just the thing.
Chris Nguyen, who runs a blog called OC Political, says recently recalled Fullerton City Councilman Don Bankhead has just been initiated into a very exclusive club. According to Nguyen’s research (and I can’t vouch for that) only two men in American history have ever been recalled twice from the same job.
The first is some guy named James W. Holley who was mayor of Portsmouth, Virginia from 1984-1987 and again from 2008-2010. Each stint was punctuated by a recall. And now, with trumpets blaring and drums rolling, enters the august personage of Donald T. Bankhead, Fullerton City Council 1988-1994 and 1994-2012.
The asteroid was getting ominously close to Earth...
And of course I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that if Nguyen is accurate, then Bankhead is the only office holder in the 162 year history of California to be recalled twice from the same office. And that’s a damn impressive accomplishment.
