Last fall anti-recallers wanted folks to believe that everything in Fullerton’s great and it was just a wholesome family town. Of course the facts are that City Councilmembers Bankhead, Jones and McKinley have turned downtown Fullerton into an all night free for all of drugged-up, boozing, fighting, defecating thugs from who knows where. And of course an out-of-control gang of badged thugs was deployed to try to keep the other thugs in line.
All of this is just a long preamble to advertise the fact that another shooting took place in Downtown Fullerton early this morning, in the parking structure in the 100 block of east Wilshire Avenue.
Who benefits from this mayhem besides the liquor peddlers? Ask Bankhead or Jones or McKinley next time you see them.
Makes ya feel good. Oops, watchit there, just step over the bodies and the civil rights!
Thus spaketh Lou Ponsi who seems to be doing his level best to avoid real news and even to parrot the nonsense peddled by the anti-recall crowd.
Ponsi seems really impressed with banners stating how much folks love Fullerton. Ponsi doesn’t seem interested that the operation is the brainchild of downtown businesses who have profited off of the City Council’s crazy wild west show; nor in the irony that these essentially anti-recall messages are hung on public property. No, that would take independence and intelligence, traits that Ponsi simply doesn’t possess.
Of course Ponsi echoes the notion that the one and only problem is the minor altercation last summer that left Kelly Thomas’ brains in a Transportation Center gutter, and of course he ignores the reality a phone call made by – a downtown business, that may very well have an I Love Fullerton banner in front of it.
Really? I don't know anything about that stuff. Wow!
Lou must have a short or self-serving memory if he can’t remember:
FPD cop Todd Major – convicted of fraud, 2011.
FPD cop Kelly Mejia – plead guilty to grand larceny, 2011
FPD cop Albert Rincon – accused of a dozen sexual batteries while in uniform causing a rebuke from a federal judge and a $350,000 settlement (so far), but actually “separated” for something else (jeez how bad could that have been), 2006-2011.
FPD cop Vincent Mater – “separated” after destroying evidence in a Fullerton jail suicide, identified as an untrustworthy “Brady cop” and suspected of a roll in the false identification in the Emanuel Martinez case. Charged by the District Attorney,2011.
FPD cop “Sonny” Saliceo who through laziness or malice, permitted or encouraged the mis-identification of Emanuel Martinez who subsequently spent five months in jail.
FPD employee April Baughman who was recently arrested on charges of theft from the FPD property room over a period of two years. 2012.
A lawsuit by Veth Mam against the police department and FPD cop Kenton Hampton for a laundry list of civil rights violations and false prosecution. 2011.
A lawsuit by Andrew Trevor Clarke against FPD cop Cary Tong and half the FPD for a laundry list of civil rights violations. 2012.
A lawsuit by Edward Miguel Quinonez against the FPD and Kenton Hampton for even more civil rights violations. 2011
And let’s not forget the eventual civil and civil rights suits against the balance of the FPD Six (including our old friends Kenton Hampton and Joe Wolfe). 2011.
Then in non-police matters there’s the little problem of the City Council giving away land worth millions for free to campaign contributors; and giving away huge subsidies to the bag man who runs the anti-recall campaign. 1996-2012.
And finally let us recall the biggest scam of all – the perpetuation of the illegal water tax for fifteen long years that went, in part, to pay the salaries and pensions of the very city council that looked the other way year after year. 1996-2012.
I know I said that. But that was way back yesterday!
Tuesday was a big day for Fullerton Mayor Sharon Quirk Silva. Only the day before Quirk-Silva had issued a bold press release to her pals in the liberal blogosphere stating that she was going to request that her colleagues on the city council suspend the illegal 10% water tax. She even helpfully explained why the new 6.7% number was a load of manure.
Here’s what she said, quoted verbatim from a press release sent to an admiring Liberal OC: “I will also call upon members of the city council to join me in a motion to stop any further diversions of water revenues to the general fund until these questions are answered,” Mayor Quirk-Silva asserted.
Naturally, when the chips were down, SQS chickened out. Don’t believe me? Here she is, right after Councilman Bruce Whitaker made the motion she herself had said she was going to make, that is, agendize the suspension of the illegal 10% tax on our water.
Oops.
Well, there you have it. Quirk decided to side with the blowhard who attended (and fell asleep at) the Water Rate Ad Hoc Committee meeting, and put off the decision to do the right thing for some other day.
The courage of Monday morning evaporated by the next afternoon.
Teri Sforza of the OC Register has done another piece on Fullerton’s fraudulent 10% water tax and the equally fraudulent study commissioned by the City Council to justify keeping as much of the tax as they can. Naturally the consultant ginned up some phony rent value for City owned property that water reservoirs sit on! In fact the bogus rent topped $1.3 million, a figure so absurd that even Mayor Sharon Quirk took offense. It’s a good thing Ms. Quirk is running for the State Assembly or she might not be so concerned about the wear ratepayers getting ripped off in an illegal scam. Whatever. At least she finally seems to have somebody who knows what’s going on advising her.
Apparently the much-anticipated Joe Felz Water Study is in, and it says that the illegal 10% water tax is…drum roll, please…illegal. But get this: rather than an honest study, the consultants were clearly told to gin up as much plausible reason to keep as much of the 10% as they could. The result? It’s only 6.7%. Yay!
The only problem is that to reach 6.7%, the consultant cooked up the idea that the Water Fund owed the City rent on land where water reservoirs are located! According to Ad Hoc Water Committee member Greg Sebourn, the total annual rent was figured at $1,374,000 – well-over half of the existing tax.
Of course this scam raises all sorts of new issues, as scams generally do. Such as: the reservoir in Hillcrest Park supports a play field on its deck. Does the City rent this back from the Water Fund? Bet not! The reservoir up at the top of Euclid is situated in a cactus patch patrolled by goats. What’s the rental or development value of a nature park? I dunno, but it’s not much. Has the Water Fund been paying for maintenance on these properties that should have been the responsibility of the General Fund? Bet so.
Then of course there’s the issue of whether the waterworks itself paid for fee title to any of these properties in the first place, a way back when. I wonder if the consultant even bothered to check. Bet not.
And there’s the embarrassing fact that there is no arm’s length relationship between the people that impose the rent and the people that pay it. The City Council can demand any amount of rent they want – then agree to pay it. Why not? The proceeds go to pay their own pensions! Now, that’s not very good, is it?
In any case, the public may find it a bit confusing and unseemly that at the eleventh hour the bureaucrats and their hand-picked consultant are burning the near-midnight oil to drum up ways to charge as much for water as they can that they can keep siphoning money into the General Fund.
Will you please shut up.
Will the city Council buy into this load? Well, of course they will. The vote will be 4-1, and it will be up to the citizens and voters to rectify the scam at the ballot box.
Our job is to continue to expose the fraud for what it is.
In an ideal city our elected officials would know what the hell they were voting on. Alas, in Fullerton, such is not the case. Here is the egregious Pat McKinley last Tuesday demonstrating that he hasn’t got a clue what he is talking about. First he emphatically says there is no Ackerman project. Then, when corrected, he emphatically says he supports the Ackerman project.
McPension is totally clueless, except for one thing: He knows that his pal Dick Ackerman needs an approval of a lousy project with a massive subsidy to keep his oily hide employed. And that’s enough for McKinley.
Our Friends over at the Orange Juice blog are reporting that Fullerton’s Sharon Quirk has pulled papers to run against Chris Norby in the new 65th State Assembly District.
Good luck Sharon! And wake up Chris! You may have an opponent!
The real interest for FFF is that this will free up Quirk’s seat on Fullerton’s City Council, and will give Fullerton residents a chance to elect a pro-accountability candidate in November.
With a little hard work we can clean up Fullerton for a long, long time.
The Voice of OC(EA) is reporting here that Fullerton mayor Sharon Quirk-Silva intends to issue an apology to the Thomas family on behalf of the people of Fullerton; and apparently she also wants name a small part of Fullerton after Kelly Thomas, the homeless, schizophrenic man beaten to death by members of the Fullerton police department last July.
What’s the apology for? According to the article, it’s not entirely clear if it’s for the deliberate smear campaign against Thomas to help make the cops look justified in their actions, or for the actual killing itself.
If it’s the former, I guess the apology would focus on the FPD/City totally mischaracterizing as a “fight” the horrible beat down that took place on Thomas; for telling the public that cops had suffered broken bones; for insinuating that Kelly was amped up on drugs and had stolen property on his person.
Of course all that nonsense was pitched by FPD spokesdonut Andrew Goodrich who never thought it necessary to correct any misinformation he had peddled in those first days after the crime, which makes it deliberate, obviously. If this will be the gist of it, then the apology will be nothing more than a repudiation of Goodriches’ sad performance trying to defend the indefensible actions of his union brethren.
Personally, I would be happier with an apology for the murder itself, along with a personal apology from Quirk-Silva to the citizens of Fullerton for helping permit a Culture of Corruption in the FPD during her seven-plus years in office. I guess this ins’t too likely.
An apology may make Q-S feel better, but sincere or not, I think it falls under the heading of too little, too late; still, better late than never, I suppose.
Oh, by the way, Ms. Quirk-Silva is letting the City Attorney edit the “apology” and that’s not good sign.
As to the issue of placing and naming a bench after KT, I think that’s not helpful. But I relish the idea of watching Pat McPension vote to recognize the homeless man who was beaten to death by thugs he personally hired and vouched for.
In Fullerton the mayor succession is just about the only political intrigue we usually have, with the upper tier repuglicans like Ed Royce Jr. and Richard “Dick” Ackerman calling in markers for their previous endorsements, in order to keep some hapless lady Democrat from getting the largely ceremonial job.
Her luck was about to change...
In 2010 the deal went down right on schedule as the Three Tired Retreads voted in install Dozing Don Bankhead as “Mayor Pro Tem” instead of Sharon Quirk-Silva whose turn it was. Well, since the Mayor Pro Tem is traditionally next in line to be Mayor, the proverbial handwriting was on the wall.
And then in 2011 the damnedest thing happened in sleepy Fullerton. All Hell broke loose.
With the murder of Kelly Thomas by members of the FPD, with an entire Culture of Corruption finally exposed, with Redevelopment subsidies to campaign supporters uncovered, with an illegal, hidden 10% tax on water laid bare, with the subsequent Recall of the Three Stripped Gears, things took a turn for the weird.
In November, with the Recall signature campaign gathering steam, it suddenly became a matter of conjecture whether it could be business as usual for the Fullerton Old Guard. We said as much, here. And what we asked about is exactly what happened as we reported here.
Heh, heh. I've got these three beauties, here. Sure the mileage is a little high, and the tires are bald, but they'll get you where you want to go!
But never let it be said that Tricky Dick Ackerman missed a trick. I’ve got it on excellent authority that the Three Blind Brontosauruses didn’t elect Q-S without first proposing The Deal: in exchange for making her mayor for 2012, she would have to promise to oppose the Recall of The Three Dim Dealmakers!
To her credit Sharon Quirk-Silva saw what we saw: that her outbound colleagues had no choice but to make her mayor and were in no position to try to cut deals with anyone. When you’re out of chips the poker game is over.
And now the recall is qualified, an election will be scheduled for June, and the ‘pugs get to watch Quirk-Silva run for re-election with the title Mayor of Fullerton. Best of all they got nothing out of it.
It has been said that the only two certainties are death and taxes.
That sure seems to be the case when you consider Fullerton’s illegal 10% tax on water that you are forced to pay with each bill. The cowards haven’t even got the guts to add it as a line item on the bill. Wouldn’t want nosy citizens asking embarrassing questions, now would we?
Nine months ago the City was challenged on the legality of the notorious “in-lieu fee” that adds over $2,500,000 to the City General Fund coffers every year. What did they do? They decided to study. And study. And study some more.
The Three Dead Batteries.
Well, the study isn’t done yet. But guess what? You still pay that tax. An honest government would have gotten a definitive legal opinion from a competent attorney (ahem) and immediately reported to the public. Not in Fullerton, where the idea seems to be to keep soaking the public until some judge, or a recall election makes them fix the problem. In the meantime they’ve collected two million bucks to pay for things like councilmen Don Bankhead and Pat McKinley’s six-figure pensions.
But everything’s just fine. Go back to sleep again.
