Well, sure you do. Sally can help.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YeH14bh6ciULast night’s Fullerton City Council meeting brought out a number of people concerned that their water rates will be going up. I would like to thank each and everyone of them for taking an active interest in our City! A few of them stood and spoke before the council and many approached me after the meeting. They expressed a wide range of emotions and sentiments.
Disgust. Distrust. Anger. Fear.
There was the universal disgust that goes with the realization that Fullerton’s leadership has been absent for decades. There was the feeling of distrust that comes when someone feels they have been lied to about where the money goes. Many were angry that this report was not commissioned decades ago. Then there was fear. Many are fearful that the few businesses in Fullerton who are heavy water users will soon pack up and head out of state to more business-friendly areas. Others are fearful that they will have to leave, unable to afford the higher costs.
Those who sat through the 2-1/2 hour meeting observed many things.
Most notably, at least one councilman had serious trouble staying awake for the meeting. Death by PowerPoint I believe was the cause.
Mayor Jones repeatedly used Hitler as some sort of misplaced analogy to the gross mismanagement of our water system for nearly a century. There were several people who were clearly disgusted with his remarks.
Mayor Pro Tem Bankhead, who is a representative for the City on the Orange County Water District Board, bragged that the board hasn’t raised their tax on the City’s pumping efforts in a year even though a few key executives received raises. OCWD charges Fullerton taxpayers somewhere in the neighborhood of $236 per acre-foot of water that the City pumps.
The franchise tax was mentioned several times. I pointed out that the tax should be eliminated completely which would allow the City to NOT raise water rates AND address the urgency of the neglected system. I did misspeak on one key matter. Specifically, I said that it would be better for the general fund to take the 10% hit rather than the taxpayers. Actually, the water utility franchise tax ($2,474,860 FY2011) accounts for about 1% of the total budget ($180,802,880 FY2011), not 10%. Cutting the franchise tax would increase the water fund from $27,728,430 FY2011 to $30,203,290!
So, the bottom line is that we have the funds to fix the water system but the City Council will need to adjust the City’s priorities.
Those in land development, engineering, construction or anyone else who rides Fullerton’s roads knows that the City’s priorities are out of order. City Hall places too much emphasis on housing and transportation boondoggles while ignoring the skeleton and muscle of the City’s infrastructure. It causes me to question whether or not our City leaders (are there any at City Hall?) have planned for repairing and replacing our roads.
Those interested in protecting the City’s infrastructure from further neglect while protecting the pockets of taxpayers are urged to attend the Water Rate Study workshops in the coming weeks and months.
Let’s hope the city council comes to its senses and votes NO on raising our water rates and associated taxes 91% over the next 10 years. Friends, I’d like to thank Greg Sebourn for bringing this issue to our attention. As many of you may remember, Greg ran for Fullerton city council last year and received 6,375 votes. Here is Greg’s take on the proposed rate increase:
Fullerton Water Rates to Double
This Tuesday night the Fullerton City Council will direct staff on the implementation of a water rate study. Based on the proposal from the City’s consultant, Municipal & Financial Services Group (MFSG), the new rates will be increased by 10% for 5 years then 3.5% for another 5 years amounting to a 191% increase by 2021.
The reason for the tax hike is clear. MSFG says, “It should be noted that the planned spending on mainline replacement over the projection period is significantly more than the City has undertaken in the past. At a cost of approximately $190 per linear foot of line the City plans to replace approximately 6 miles of mainline per year at a cost of over 6 million per year. At this pace it would take the City 400 years to replace the entire system (which consists of approximately 420 miles of pipe).”
MFSG’s proposal spells out how exactly we got into this mess in the first place. Unfortunately, this proposal and the implementation should have been undertaken decades ago. Oddly, the proposal notes that the City could just ignore the problem (like they have been doing for so many years).
Read the rest of “Fullerton Water Rates To Double”
Check out this clip of resident Barry Levinson challenging the city council to tackle our unfunded pension liability problem at the February 2nd council meeting.
Once he gets past the dreary numbers, Barry suggests that the city manager obtain outsourcing bids to create a dollar baseline as a heavy bargaining chip during the next set of negotiations with the unions.
The lumbering Mayor Pro Tem, both a recipient and perpetrator of the ridiculous pension scheme, became agitated and cut Barry off several times, but Barry got his point across in the end.
With much hullabaloo, the OC District Attorney’s PR machine announced the first mobile application “ever launched by a prosecutorial agency.” A dubious use of taxpayer dollars, sure. But there’s more to this app than just Rackauckas’ duplicitous grin.
An FFFF staffer who installed the T-Rack app immediately discovered an alert indicating that the DA was seeking out his current location via GPS and cell triangulation. Hey, that’s pretty creepy!
Of course, the irony of the DA’s mobile intrusion is not lost on FFFF. Remember when his bumbling prosecutors couldn’t manage to track down Supervisorial hopeful Harry Sidhu after he lied about his residence at the lovely Calabria apartments in Anaheim? We even got real Private Eye to gather the evidence and draw him a map. It was a slam dunk.
But even with the goods sitting right under the prosecutor’s nose, Anaheim’s craftiest carpetbagger still managed to elude justice… at least until the voters finally caught up with him.
Back to the app: I’m not sure what the DA really had in mind with this little gimmick, but experts generally agree that it’s best to keep The Man as far away from your cell phone as you can.
An urgent meeting is scheduled for this Tuesday afternoon at City Hall. While most meetings are scheduled for 6PM or later, this one is set for 4PM, forcing many to leave work early in order to speak at the meeting.
The urgency of the council/Redevelopment Agency meeting comes after Governor Brown announced his intentions of squashing Redevelopment Agencies as component of saving money and redistributing funds to their normally allocated destinations.
This afternoon’s Agenda has only one item:
In a nut shell, City Hall sees their glass house shattering and is looking to pull out as much money as possible from the Redevelopment Agency in order to install street lights in the Lemon/Truslow area, stabilize the slopes along Harbor Boulevard just below the YMCA, work on Hillcrest Park, and build a parking garage at the Fullerton Transportation Center.
In all, the City/Redevelopment Agency is looking to move $14,100,000 from the Redevelopment agency coffers to the City of Fullerton coffers to help cover some of the upfront costs associated with these projects.
If any of those mentioned sound familiar it’s because just last Tuesday the City Council decided to ask Congress for some money to address them.
This sounds like the scheme of someone who desperately pulls out every bit of equity from their house ($14.1M from RDA’s tax increment), maxes out all of their credit cards ($29M in tax bonds) for that new sports car (town homes and condos and garages) knowing they are about to get slapped by a court-ordered judgment (governor’s proposed budget) that will surely leave them penniless.
Once again, the lack of leadership has manifested itself by the procrastination of City Hall to tackle our crumbling infrastructure. Water-mains continue to erupt forth from our streets like Old Faithful while the ever-expanding potholes begin to resemble the Grand Canyon. At this rate, residents will be able to sell tickets to the spectacle as our city sinks into the abyss of municipal doom.
Several years ago this blog documented the shameful saga of Fullerton’s red light cameras, which were shut down after a judge declared that the city had been operating them illegally. That was an embarrassing moment for the mystified members of city council; even more so for the city attorney who lost in court and then stuck us with the bill.
The cameras were removed, but the poles and strobes still hang over Harbor Blvd today.
Should the city take them down?
Nope. Please leave them up forever as permanent monuments to magnificent and expensive failure, driven by a desperate quest for new revenue. Ah, wonderful new revenue streams… usually that means some gimmick conjured up to extract more money from the beleaguered public, promoted by tireless staff (and in this case, an eager red light camera salesman) and then executed by council with little regard for external consequences, all to avoid dealing with the real problem: excessive spending.
Any way, I see no sense in tearing down those poles. None at all.
The following commentary was sent in by Fullerton’s own Barry Levinson.
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Since the November 2010 elections, I have read two articles on the Friends for Fullerton’s Future site that require further discussion. The first one stated that the rescinding of the utility tax increases of 1994 has saved the taxpayers approximately 150 million dollars since 1994 to the present time. Hats off to Council member Bruce Whitaker and all the people who helped make that rescission a reality. The fact that we were able to elect him to the council indicates that we are making some progress. But this is not a time to sit back and savor our victory locally as well as nationally.
We cannot afford any complacency since another even larger albatross is now facing the fine citizens of Fullerton, namely the unfunded liabilities for public pensions and retiree medical costs.
The second article deals with the reporting by CALPERS that the Fullerton police and fire pension obligations are now facing a 127 million dollar unfunded liability as of June 30, 2009. In other words, we the taxpayers of Fullerton are currently on the hook for this astronomical amount.
If you add the unfunded liability of the miscelleous employees as well as the City’s unfunded retiree health care benefits, it skyrockets up to and probably well over the 200 million dollar mark! Twice the amount saved from the utility tax rescission.
I suggest that the citizens of Fullerton have to be just as irate now as when we were facing the massive utility tax increase in 1994. The one common thread between these two instances is our city council. We must make it clear that we the people are watching very closely the actions taken by our council as they prepare to negotiate with all of the city’s unions! We must speak out loud and clear and demand that the council vote for significant cuts in these benefits coupled with significant employee contribution increases.
I suggest that all fellow readers of this blog attend the February 1st Council Meeting to speak to the council during its Open Agenda Segment to insist that major employee cost savings must be implemented across the board this year. We must demand no less and be ready to take further action if a majority of the council defies the people one more time.
As part of its project mitigation planning, the Orange County Transportation Authority’s Measure M program has sequestered a huge pile ‘o cash, something in the neighborhood of $200,000,000. The purpose of this dough is to procure sensitive habitat from private property owners who might have development plans.
Naturally, the West Coyote Hills property was on the initial list, until removed by its owners last year. Chevron likely thought their plans for development were in the bag in 2010.
It wasn’t, and now it’s 2011. And apparently the OCTA is re-opening consideration of applications for the first funding from the mitigation fund. Chevron has until Jan 13, to file an application to the OCTA if they want to participate in the program.
Chevron may believe they now have 3 secure votes to approve what the Council denied last June. And they may still prefer to face long years of entitlement, inevitable lawsuits, and two or three embarrassing economic cycles in order to make a big profit. Or perhaps upon further reflection, they might come to realize that selling part or all of their property for a big payday up front without mitigation cost and without dragged out development issues, is preferable.
The Fullerton City Council might want to consider this too, and help persuade Chevron to take this alternate path. Bruce Whitaker, for one, has an excellent opportunity to make this overture.
Yesterday the State Attorney General handed out an opinion that, yes, outgoing Anaheim Mayor-for-Hire, Kurt Pringle did indeed hold incompatible offices as the Chairman of the California High Speed Rail Authority. For three long years. And that raises all sorts of questions about the ethics of Der Pringle’s votes on both HSR prioritization issues that benefited him and his clients, and City of Anaheim land use issues that benefited – him and his clients. You can read all about it in an LA Times article, here.
Well, we told you so. What will his mom say?
Interestingly the other day the Voice of OCEA did a story on an e-mail exchange between Herr Burgermeister Pringle and his former Director of the HSR, in which he attacks the “core competence”of the Authority’s engineers. The author misses the point, somewhat, in noting Pringle’s critique of the “experts” like so many others in California have done; but the real point is that his anger was based on their unwillingness to defy engineering realities to deliver the HSR line to his already designated ARTIC boondoggle. It certainly wasn’t lost on the recipient of his e-mail who noted dryly that he wasn’t sure if he was communicating with the HSR Chair or the Mayor of Anaheim.
Well, our boy Pringle is days away from being off the OCTA and out of City Hall (except as a lobbyist to his hand selected replacements, of course). But what about his Chairmanship of the CHSRA? Can the new guv keep him? Hard to imagine why Jerry Brown would keep on the HSR a repuglican who has soiled himself and the Authority so badly, if he had a choice.