T-REX ALREADY HAVE HARD ENOUGH TIME DRIVING. WHY YOU MAKE IT HARDER AND RAISE GAS PRICE? TAXES MAKE T-REX SO ANGRY!
RAWRRRRRR!
Three long months ago FFFF updated the story of FJCs rogue “Campus Safety Officer”, Dino Skokos. You remember Dino, right? He’s the former LA Deputy Sheriff, who, while enjoying a $48K annual disability pension courtesy of LA County taxpayers, and while costing us $75,000 per year us as a guard at FJC, was caught on video assaulting some skinny kid for refusing to identify himself. Be sure to watch the video if you need to remind yourself.
That was over a year ago. Yes, the Earth has made an entire revolution of the Sun, and then some.
Skokos was placed on administrative leave way back on October 14, 2016. And what has been going on in the twelve month interim?
FFFF has serially reported that the North Orange County Community College District orchestrated some sort of “investigation,” conducted by their own special government defense lawyer. But FJC President, Greg Schulz ain’t saying anything after all this time except for spouting some embarrassingly contradictory double talk.
So what’s the status of Dino Skokos? And has there been any legal action by the kid who he choke slammed up against a wall and then threw to the ground? Who knows? Not the public, that’s for sure.
Remember when Schulz promised the college’s full dedication in reaching a conclusion regarding the incident? I guess that never included letting the public know what was going on.
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…
Another day, and another reason to question the fiscal insanity at the City of Fullerton. The Police Department paid over $3900 for this freezer which is a mere 3.9 cubic feet in size. The typical residential refrigerator-freezer holds anywhere from 18 to 25 cubic feet, so this unit is far smaller than it appears.
The police will be quick to say how essential this is to preserve forensic evidence like DNA. I can’t fault them for buying a unit with temperature alarms, but you know what’s funny? Medical grade freezers used by pharmacies, similar in size and features, cost anywhere from 1/4 to 1/2 the price, maybe even less.
Wasteful spending is nothing new around here, but this serves as a great opportunity to look at the City’s flawed procurement policies.
The freezer was not purchased by the City’s Purchasing Agent. The Police Department doesn’t think the City’s procurement rules apply to them, so they bypass City Hall in most cases, and order whatever they want themselves.
“Reasonable effort shall be made to obtain three or more competitive bids for procurement of goods or services.” This sounds like a good policy except that it allows a City employee to solicit bids for their preferred piece of equipment, and preferred manufacturer, no matter how unnecessary or overpriced.
They didn’t get bids for a small freezer sufficient to store forensic evidence. They got bids for this specific Follett FZR4P-00-00 freezer, which was already leaps and bounds more expensive than comparable options from other manufacturers. Basically, we acquired the Mercedes-Benz of freezers, but that’s all fine and dandy because the Police Department got three bids as specified in the procurement policy.
There’s no excuse to overpay because somebody is too lazy to research alternatives perfectly acceptable in a similar work environment, and yet, the City of Fullerton does this over and over and over again.
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?
Axon, formerly known as Taser International, is the manufacturer of tasers and body cameras worn by officers of the Fullerton Police Department.
In 2014, Felz and Hughes went before the City Council to beg for $650,534 over a five-year period to pay for body cameras from Taser International. The actual cost will far exceed that amount, but that’s unfortunately typical of the false assurances made by those two. You can read the agenda letter here where Dan Hughes did his best impression of a salesman for Taser International. There was never any competitive bidding process for those body cameras, which is obscene given the large price tag.
Fast forward to this past June. Gary Sirin of the Fullerton Police Department was sent to the Axon Accelerate Conference Fleece-A-Thon in Scottsdale, AZ. We paid $899 for him to attend the conference, $580.87 for lodging at the Westin, and it appears another $363.19 for travel expenses. I presume he was also on the clock and being paid for his time.
So what actually took place at this conference? Axon did a write up themselves that talks about demonstrating new products and strategies to prevent disclosure of body camera footage to the public. Once again, an insulting waste of City funds.
The Police Department apparently never got the memo about Fullerton having a fiscal crisis, or else they just don’t care.
I think it’s the latter, but in any event, these ridiculous conferences all over the United States and Canada on the City dime need to stop.
Wouldn’t it be nice if every City employee consistently set the bar for professionalism?
Michael Lemmon, of the Fullerton Fire Department, thought it was perfectly okay to purchase these inappropriate mugs using taxpayer money on his City-issued VISA card.
A couple months later, Michael Lemmon decided the Fire Department needed more coffee mugs, so he purchased these — again on the taxpayer’s dime:
Would you give neighbors access to your bank account?
No? That would probably come as a shock to some at City Hall where (at least) three City of Brea employees have been issued VISA procurement cards belonging to the City of Fullerton.
Fullerton and Brea have a shared Fire Department command staff. The Fire Chief, Deputy Chiefs, Division Chiefs, Battalion Chiefs, and an EMS manager perform services for both cities, even though they remain employees of the City where they came from. Those from Brea have been given the Fullerton VISA cards. Now, I can hear some people uttering phrases like “so what,” and “who cares,” and “what’s the problem?” I can help you with that.
Fullerton Fire Station 3 on Acacia Ave was the recipient of five La-Z-Boy recliners, on the City VISA card. The purchaser? Chris Guerrero, a Brea employee. The supervisor approving the purchase? Kathy Schaefer, another Brea employee. And where did the money come from? Fullerton.
The receipt raises another question because Engine 3, based at this fire station, only has a crew of three. So why purchase five recliners?
I’d bet money the extra recliners are for the CARE Ambulance employees based at Station 3. Nothing in the housing agreement between the City and CARE Ambulance talks about furnishings, so the recliners appear to be a gift.
A gift from Brea employees using Fullerton’s money.
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 City Council was warned earlier this year that (long overdue) changes at CalPERS to tackle pension debts would spell fiscal disaster for Fullerton. This problem is very much real and will be quite painful in the years to come.
What isn’t real was the feigned appearance of City Hall trying to cut expenses. Truth be told, nobody at the City seems to care.
Remember the Hillcrest Park ‘Pine Forest Stairs’ ceremony, which lasted maybe 30 minutes, and was attended by forty or fifty people?
The balloons you see above cost the taxpayers $776.51. Were they necessary? Of course not.
Meanwhile, at other locations across town, the never-ending waste from Parks and Recreation continues unabated. $350 for two hours of face painting and a clown to blow up balloons.
Another $450 down the drain for a game of Human Foosball.
These aren’t unusual expenditures — this stuff goes on all the time.
So this is the cue for [new City Manager] Ken Domer to step up and make this nonsense go away. It’s also a cue for the City Council to hold him accountable in that regard.