I was perusing old drafts of posts and came across one that needed to be published. The issue itself is bad enough – the virtual surrender of useful public land to build a “boutique” hotel. The fact that the “developer” had no experience and no track record was bad enough; but the idea that any hotel patron would want to spend the night next to the train tracks or in the vicinity of the downtown Fullerton week-end train wreck was laughable. What was even worse was the dumb rationale our council used to keep this metastasizing idiocy alive.
Over several years the dream of our former lobbyist councilperson-for-sale, Jennifer Fitzgerald – a boutique hotel – refused to die, even after Fitzgerald finally bolted from Fullerton. It’s last iteration in December ’22 was approved by our typically befuddled city council.
Which brings me to the point of this post. In her first meeting as the councilperson representing District 3, Shana Charles voted on this embarrassment. She spent that opportunity to display the critical thinking one would expect of a PhD, but demonstrated just the opposite. Listen:
It’s real nice that Ms. Charles felt obliged to share her “thought process” with her constituents. But whatever that process was, the result was comical. The the good doctor believed that such a boutique hotel will support “County functions” and “event and community centers” in DTF, but she didn’t elaborate on what those events and centers are. Why not? Because there aren’t any, unless you think of the Fullerton Community Center across the street from City Hall to be the sort of place out-of-towners will be so keen to visit that they’ll book a room at the Shana Charles Hotel.
