Watch Your Wallet Archives - Page 46 of 85 - Friends For Fullerton's Future

January 18, 2013January 19, 2013Chronic Failure

Ramos and Cicinelli Go To Trial: Wolfie Not Far behind

Kelly-Thomas-Police-Beating-500x299

Manny Ramos and Jay Cicinelli, two of the six Fullerton cops who presided over the death of transient Kelly Thomas on July 5th, 2011 were told today by Superior Court judge Froeberg that they would be standing trial in June for the death of the schizophrenic homeless man. Their running buddy, Joe Wolfe the third Fullerton cop charged, has another hearing to dismiss in March.

According to the judge there was sufficient evidence to go to trial. Of course we already knew that; and we also know that newly minted Chief Danny Hughes, the boss of the Fullerton Six told them they did a good job that night. He also claimed there was no Culture of Corruption in the FPD, and other bedtime fairy tales.

Kelly Thomas was killed eighteen months ago.

January 13, 2013Downtown Fullerton

We Get Mail: Not In Their Backyard

by Disillusioned Ex-Hippy172 Comments

Dear Friends, we received the following e-mail from an unhappy resident of the neighborhood around Chapman Park, across the street from the location the County is proposing to buy for $3.15 million to transform into a permanent homeless shelter.

It always interests me to see that those politicians and bureaucrats who support obnoxious land uses of one kind or another always seem suitably removed, geographically, from any undesirable effects of their decisions.

Take the case of the permanent homeless shelter proposed by the County (and possibly our own City Council – nobody really knows what has been agreed to behind closed doors – with zero input from us) on State College. It would be located across the street from the Chapman Park neighborhood where we live. To the north are two story apartments and an elementary school; right next door and to the rear are other commercial properties. But it is a long, long way from any residence of the decision makers. Surprised? Not me.

We will be told that such facilities need to be built where public transportation exists. Okay. But in the next breath we learn that getting the homeless out of downtown Fullerton is required. How come? That is the very heart of the transportation network in north Orange County. La Palma Park in Anaheim is ground zero for the homeless population of north orange County and is located astride not one but THREE bus lines.

Since the County’s only requirements are that their shelter be on a bus route and away from downtown Fullerton, here’s a thought. Let’s build the shelter next to Hillcrest Park, or near the Brea Dam – near two bus lines – on City owned property that won’t cost anybody a dime. Of course it would be pretty near where Jan Flory and Doug Chaffee live. Or maybe it could be built on some open space in Coyote Hills – near the Euclid bus line and not far from Jennifer Fitzgerald and Shawn Nelson’s homes.

January 12, 2013Chronic Failure

Judge Refuses to Drop Charges in Kelly Thomas Case

by The Fullerton Harpoon190 Comments

Ramos

Another effort by the lawyers for the FPD cops charged in the murder of transient Kelly Thomas has failed.

The Voice of OC(EA) has the story succinctly, here. Apparently the issue will be revisited again on the 18th in Judge William R. Froeberg’s court, but from the statements made by the judge it sure looks like this will go forward.

January 10, 2013Behind Closed Doors

County Wants To Build Homeless Shelter On State College

by Disillusioned Ex-Hippy138 Comments

Fullertonstories is reporting here, that the County of Orange wants to build a homeless shelter on south State College in Fullerton. They may be soon buying the Linder Furniture store for $3,000,000.

This may not be good news to the folks who live in the single family neighborhood across the street and who take their kids to the Commonwealth Elementary School which is virtually adjacent to this site. The folks I know over in the Chapman Park area have heard nothing about this venture, which makes me wonder whose big idea this was and why the neighbors have not even been informed.

Amazingly, it would appear from the article that the County’s “search criteria” only included that the shelter be on a bus line and moved away from Downtown Fullerton. Nice.

How much of this “plan” has already been secretly approved by our own City Council goes unmentioned. Has a deal already been work out with the City? It’s hard to believe the County would buy real estate without the approval of the City Council, or at least the City staff.

Apparently the County Board of Supervisors is voting on this purchase Tuesday. I wonder when the government plans on telling anybody about this.

January 8, 2013"Dick" Ackerman

Now, What About Our Water Tax Refund? Part 3: The Big Lie And The Big Dippers

by Joe Sipowicz45 Comments

thief

Of course everybody in City hall knew the dirty little secret. The illegal 10% water tax that was hidden by the confusing name of “in-lieu fee.” Year after rancid year the City Fathers and Mothers – from daffy and angry liberal spendthrifts like Molly McClanahan and Jan Flory, to supposed conservatives Dick Ackerman and Chris Norby blessed the scam and put their imprimatur of approval upon it.

Of course they knew, or must have suspected, that the 10% was nothing other than a greasy rake-off that made their jobs easier and rewarded their friends in the bureaucracy. And they knew, or must have suspected, that the various City departments were already charging directly to the Water Fund – in direct contravention to the purpose of the original Resolution that created the”fee.”

This means that because the City departments were already charging to the Water Fund, that cost too jacked up the tax. Double Dip.

And all that free water wasted by the City over the years? You guessed it: the cost jacked up the illegal water tax. Triple Dip.

The fee was set at 10% of gross water revenue, meaning that every time the commodity cost of water went up, or transmission cost went up, so did the absolute amount of the tax itself. Quadruple Dip.

Naturally, the water tax itself was considered to be part of the gross “cost” of the water works, meaning that as the absolute value of the 10% increment rose, so did total of the tax!! The true amount of the tax was 10% of cost plus 10% of the 10%!!! Which is why the tax was actually about 11% of the true cost. Got it? Quintuple Dip.

The defenders of the Old Culture of Corruption and its slimey shakedown want you to believe that everything is pretty okay, that no harm was done, and that refunding any part of this felonious rip-off would just be a big waste of everybody’s time.

Wrong. Accountability and responsibility have their cost. Sooner or later you have to pay the piper.

January 7, 2013Chris Norby

Now, What About Our Water Tax Refund? Part 2: The Phony Report

by Joe Sipowicz14 Comments

thief

When you are in charge of the City’s bureaucracy, it’s really easy to get what you want. You simply hire a “professional” opinion to validate your own desire. Good God, it happens so often and yet they continue to get away with it.

For fun, lets’ consider the case of the City of Fullerton’s illegal water tax tax. In 2011 the City was finally caught with its pants down. And what was revealed wasn’t pretty: an illegal 10% tax stuck onto the annual cost of selling water to the ratepayers of Fullerton. In an attempt to stall the inevitable and obfuscate the obvious, the comatose council handed the job of analyzing the tax to an ad hoc water rate committee that had been previously established.

Now we all know that a citizen’s committee is incapable of figuring out things on its own and so staff helpfully hired one of those paid opinion consultants to help out; one of those consultants whose sole mission is to validate whatever the staff wants them to do. In this case the mission was to keep as much of that 10% as possible. After all, that 10% was a much necessary ingredient for for keeping up CalPERS payments and sending Pam Keller and Don Bankhead and Doc HeeHaw to four star hotels in far off Long Beach.

True to form, the City Council’s “consultant” returned with a helpful finding that the water fund owned the City between six and seven percent annually, principally on the weird fiction that the water utility owed the City rent for land that the water reservoirs and pipes sit on.

Naturally, nobody bothered to explain the embarrassing fact that the land in question had little or no commercial value; or that the water utility could have bought that land for virtually nothing fifty years ago had a true arms-length distance actually existed between the utility and the City that was milking it like a rented cow.

An, worst of all, nobody had explained the self-serving nature of this sudden discovery of a true distinction between the water utility and the City, particularly in light of the fact that the utility had supplied the City with free water for decades.

That’s right. The very mechanism lade upon you and me to “incentivise” conservation, was deemed unnecessary when the City itself was wasting water. How many hundreds of thousands of acre feet of water has been used for free by the City in the past fifty years? Of course nobody knows. But the value is worth millions.

I think the City should pay that back, too.

January 7, 2013January 7, 2013The Cost of Defeat

Now, What About Our Water Tax Refund? Part 1: A Recap

by Joe Sipowicz56 Comments

thief

For 40 years the City of Fullerton has added a 10% tax to your water. The ostensible purpose was to pay for general city costs necessary to deliver water, like the City Manager and the City Attorney. In the beginning the rate was a small 2%. Then in 1970 the City Fathers realized nobody was watching and they bumped it to 10%. But the fee had nothing to do with infrastructure or anything else withing the purview of the Water Utility.

For the first 27 years it was just a scam – the City departments were already charging directly to the Water Fund – the 10% was just pure high-fat content bureaucratic gravy, ripped off from unsuspecting water users by ignorant and lubricious politicians and administrators; then in 1996 Proposition 218 was enacted, requiring that objective studies, approved in public, be the basis of these charges. At this point the annually rubber stamped water tax became illegal; but it was still there, happily rising whenever the cost of the water commodity itself went up – from 1997-2012.

In 2012 the City itself acknowledged the magnitude of the ill-gotten revenue – over $27,000,000 since 1997, a sum that went into the General Fund to pay for salaries and benefits of employees who have absolutely nothing to do with the procurement or transmission of water, as well as other fun stuff – like council junkets to four start hotels.

Last year, the previous council majority made a commitment to return as much of the graft as possible. The new council? Don’t hold your breath. Mrs. Flory, one of architects of the ripoff, and someone who, arrogantly, has never even bothered to proffer an apology for her heist, has claimed that the City can’t afford refunds of even the minimum amount prescribed by law.

Well, we’ll see how this plays out. In the meantime, stay tuned for Part II: How to Phony Up A Report.

January 3, 2013January 3, 2013I Aint a Swallerin That

Out of Control Government. No Sex in the Cornfields

by The Fullerton Harpoon30 Comments

Unhappy

I just couldn’t resist posting about this. It’s about some Kansan dude who coughed up his jism to a lesbian couple so they could give birth to a daughter.

Everything was going pretty okay, from conception (let’s be courtly and not inquire about the details) through birth, and early First Five nurturing. But, alas, the lesbians fell upon hard financial times and apparently have put in for taxpayer subsidy for their toddler.

And now Kansas wants DNA Dad to cough up even more – child support!!

Apparently those damn patriarchal Kansas laws require that in the case of welfare there be a daddy. Even the lesbian lobby is mad.

Honestly you couldn’t make this stuff up.

December 28, 2012December 16, 2016Chronic Failure

Excuses, Excuses

by Joe Sipowicz172 Comments

Ponsi2

OC Register excuse for a journalist, and notorious bad-cop-story-misser, Lou Ponsi, really outdid himself today with a ridiculous “story” about all the excuses his pals on the force heard from folks who wanted to dodge a traffic citation. Real tough, hard-hitting piece there, Lou.

I wonder if Ponzi will ever tire of writing stupid fluff pieces for one of the most notorious police forces in California. I also wonder if writing salacious cop-accounts of wanton females is the best story line, given the well-documented behavior of FPD serial sex batterer Albert Rincon, whose activities were essentially known, and condoned by the department.

Anyhoo, that’s all introductory to my own version of a real human interest piece, something of which we are all too familiar, by now. And that’s the excuses doled out by the cops themselves to try to explain away their own malfeasance – crap subsequently sucked up by drones like Ponsi. Enjoy.

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1. He was running.

2. He was fighting.

3. He disobeyed a legal command.

4. He was reaching for his “waistband” (whatever that is).

5. That donut was supposed to be jelly-filled.

6. We put our lives on the line every day.

7. Our belts weigh 80 pounds.

8. We die at average 53 years old.

9. We try to arrest the right guy.

10. He thought he was beating up the right guy.

11. That’s POBR covered. Can’t talk about it.

12. It was not just honking. It was excessive horning.

13. No, it’s not tax deductible, but give us your money anyway, you’ll get a decal.

14. The job stress hooked me on those pills.

15. I just set my bag of chicken on that iPad. After that I don’t know what happened.

16. I got mad at my DAR and smashed it against the wall.

17. We slammed his head against the bars as we removed the dead body.

18. Those ladies weren’t like you.

19. Just wait to see the video. You’ll change your minds. I’ve seen it 400 times.

20. There were broken bones.

21. There was only one, maybe two deeply involved.

22. He was breaking into cars.

23. He was high on PCP.

24. He was a gang banger.

25. I feared for my safety.

26. The 90 pound girl with the jack knife entered the 22 foot radius so we had to shoot her 18 times.

27. Ron Thomas was never a deputy sheriff.

28. He was just a smelly bum.

29. The free sandwiches and beers are just a small perk for an otherwise unrewarding job.

30. My second wife doesn’t understand me and my girlfriend just wants a chunk of that pension.

31. It was suicide by cop.

32. He was a terrorist.

33. It was just a bong from the evidence room. It’s not like i was going to use it or anything.

34. Once you take a guided tour of the station you’ll feel differently about everything.

35. it was really all just a misunderstanding.

36. They are either misinformed or lying.

And now, feel free to add your own.

December 19, 2012Something Wicked This Way Comes

Have At It

by Mr. Peabody245 Comments

As expected, the new council voted 3-2 to begin “negotiations” with Dan Hughes to become Fullerton’s police chief.

Flory, Chaffee and Fitzgerald took their vote even as questions remain unanswered about Hughes’ role in the aftermath of Kelly Thomas murder, and accusations that Hughes himself was involved in an incident which is now the subject of a lawsuit against the City; and of course ongoing suspicion that Hughes has been an active part of the Culture of Corruption every step of the way.

Now watch ’em give away the store.

Oh, and yeah: you will not be getting a police oversight committee.