So far the Orange County public employee unions have spend over a million dollars in this year’s 4th District Supervisor’s election.
Doing what? Calling Shawn Nelson a pedophile supporter; claiming what a virtuous and honorable man Harry Sidhu is. A million bucks.
Lest anybody thinks these goons are going to give up their death grip on the taxpayers without a struggle had better think again. A million times.
Forget issues. They only care about their own selfish interests and Heaven forfend anybody suggests that a County paper shuffler shouldn’t be able to retire at 55 and enjoy most of his pay for rest of his life. Naturally these people are going to do everything they can to distract attention from the main issue of this campaign: unfunded liabilities on the taxpayers caused by public employee union greed and spineless politicians.
And so Hide and Seek Sidhu, carpetbagger and perjurer, the man who doesn’t even know what a defined benefit is suddenly a paragon of virtue; Nelson is an unspeakable monster.
There you have it. Fear and Loathing, and enough to go around.
That is the question of the day. We have previously reported here that Tom Daly likes to give jobs to relatives or friends of campaign donors. But this hiring takes the “Manager of the Year” to a whole different level. According to department insiders, Tom Daly hired the wife of a City of Anaheim employee who also happens to be a personal friend of Tom’s.
Even during these tough times at the County, Daly has been budgeting at least $200,000 per year for extra-help hires. Despite revenues and workloads being at their lowest levels ever, Daly feels it is more important to keep his friends employed than to protect the interests of the public. Extra-help employees are basically at-will employees and can be let go at anytime.
Not surprisingly, Daly hired his friend’s wife under this category which means no competitive recruitment was held to bring her on board.
Clerk-Recorder employees tell me they are upset because this person speaks very little English. Due to her lack of English skills, this person is given very menial work but is getting paid the same as others who do much more. Word has it this person doesn’t seem to posses any qualifications or skills or even a verifiable high school diploma, the minimum educational threshold for the county, but was even given a raise over all the other extra-help employees in the department. How does this happen? Loophole-finding Tommy boy allows the assignment to expire and then re-hires the person at a higher position thus earning higher wages.
Other extra-help employees have been told by department HR that per County policy they were not entitled to raises.
Even more disturbing is that Assistant Clerk-Recorder Renee Ramirez approached several staff when this person was being hired and asked them “do you know how to hire an illegal alien?”
Is this a liability for the County? Is Tom Daly opening himself to a lawsuit where the taxpayers will have to foot the bill?
This clearly demonstrates that Tom Daly feels he can do no wrong and that no one will hold him accountable. Let’s show this CAREER POLITICIAN that we are watching him and that we will vote him out of office sooner than he thinks.
We were looking through Clerk-Recorder Tom Daly’s campaign expenditures and stumbled upon a very interesting expenditure or shall we say “more monkey business”. In his statements, Tom listed a $275.37 payment to current Clerk-Recorder employee Rosa Chavez for “refreshments for 80 staff” since he knows they hate both him and his minion Assistant Clerk-Recorder Rene Ramirez.
This payment is very suspicious and it appears that Daly is working his staff for votes. Why would he pay an employee out of his campaign funds for something that was done at his work place? As we all know, campaign activity is to be kept out of your county work place especially if you are the elected official. Someone call Shirley!
The more interesting thing is that since this payment was made to Rosa Chavez, she has been promoted to a supervisory position. Is Tom Daly rewarding Rosa Chavez so she can rally the troops to vote for him? This is a total conflict and disregard for all the rules.
Or perhaps this is a desperate attempt by “Manager of the Year” Tom Daly to win over his staff who is praying that he gets voted out due to his lack of leadership and commitment to the department. After seven years of neglecting his staff and hiring his friends, Tom Daly is now realizing that he has dropped the ball. Like your typical career politician on election year, he is now trying hard to win over a staff that has little respect for him and his assistant Renee Ramirez. Has he acted late? I guess he will know the answer this June 8th.
Steven Greenhut just put out an impressive piece on the why the public employee unions are throwing everything they can behind Harry Sidhu.
While explaining Sidhu’s appeal to the union bosses, Greenhut writes:
Sidhu has no obvious principles that I can detect. He has agreed to drop OC’s lawsuit against the 2001 retroactive pension hike for deputy sheriffs, which has earned him the unending loyalty of the Association of Orange County Deputy Sheriffs. He supports the high-speed rail boondoggle. He would not support the Prop. 90 eminent-domain reform. He talks like a conservative at times, but that’s typical in OC — talk like a conservative, then vote like a liberal on the really important stuff.
He closes with this excellent summation of consequences from an (unlikely) Sidhu victory:
If Sidhu wins in Orange County, then the unions will have won an enormous victory in arguably the most union-unfriendly area in the state. They will have made their point loud and clear: If you stand up to us, we will defeat you and will elect our own hand-picked candidate. Forget about pension reform and other union reform issues if they hold sway.
It looks like the Sheriff’s union has been watching the same video clips that we have. You know… the ones where Sidhu stammers incoherently and fails to answer simple questions about union pensions.
That must be why they sent out this mailer with a photo of Harry sifting through a dictionary, as if to tell voters “Harry knows pensions. See, he looked it up!”
What a bumbling buffoon! It’s no wonder county unions can’t wait to sit at table with Harry Sidhu and negotiate their next pension spike.
One of the things we here at FFFF stand for is the idea of government accountability.
So naturally we were pretty sore when we saw the memo from County CEO Tom Mauk to the Board of Supervisors downplaying the disastrous purchase of the money pit at 433 W. Civic Center Dr. here.
Those clouds seem to be getting darker
Mauk finally produced the smoking gun—three years too late—an RDMD analysis estimating the needed cost to make the building functional. The amounts reached into the millions but for some reason this critical information, which was known to staff in June 2007, was withheld from the Board. Any guesses as to why?
Evidently Mr. Mauk is not interested in accountability. But we are, so please take note of the names of the people in the County Clerks office and the RDMD who were copied on this June 2007 memo. They are:
Phil Brigandi, Paul Lanning, Jean Pasco, Bob Wilson, Clark Shen, Mark Browning, Tony Ferrulli, Tony Mason, Michael Stein.
See any familiar names ? Jean Pasco in particular stands out since she was the clerk employee who acted as liaison with the Board in the matter of the building at 433 W. Civic.
This is not the story of an inadvertent error; no this was a deliberate attempt to mislead the Board of Supervisors and the evidence lies in the statements contained in the staff reports that deliberately mischaracterized the condition of the building and that were in fact untrue.
Hopefully the Board of Supervisors will be more interested in finding out what really happened and why crucial information that staff had been aware of for many months was intentionally withheld from them.
In a May 12thmemo sent to the Board of Supervisors by County CEO Tom Mauk, it was confirmed by Mauk that Clerk-Recorder Tom Daly was less than truthful with regards to the acquisition of the $2.1 million money-sucking building that he decided splurge on with tax payers’ money.
Mauk says that “…it has become apparent to me that the Board was not provided with all the information known to staff at the time given the June 29th RDMD A&E memo among RDMD and Clerk-Recorder staff.”
In that sentence, Mauk confirmed what we have known for a very long time… that Tom Daly is deceitful and that he believes it’s OK to lie to the public and the Board of Supervisors.
Tom Daly lies so much that he can’t keep his lies straight. For example, in the same memo Mauk was told that “Since the acquisition of the property, the thirty-four spaces have been utilized and saved the County approximately $26, 100 a year due the ability to reduce the number of parking spaces the County leases from the private sector.”
We received several calls from Clerk-Recorder employees indicating that only one Clerk-Recorder employee parks at that parking lot. Guess who it is? Low and behold, it’s the wife of Disneyland’s Manager of Government Relations Chris Lowe. As reported in a previous blog post here, Disney has contributed to Tom Daly’s campaigns since 2002. Apparently the scampaign contribution not only led to a job for Lowe’s wife but also prime parking space. This has several long-time Clerk-Recorder employees fuming.
The truth about the parking lot is that it is being leased by Daly to a private company. The parking management company leases the parking lot and pays the Clerk-Recorder Department about $1,500 a month to manage the lot for profit. Any revenue above the $1,500 mark is kept by the company.
Does this sound like a fair trade off? Daly spent $2.1 million of tax payers’ money for a return of about $18,000 annually and 34 parking spaces. The math doesn’t add up! Daly is really putting his English major from Harvard to work here.
Look at the photos. The lot is clearly marked for public parking for $5 a day. This is a blatant lie to the Board and to CEO Tom Mauk.
The other baldfaced lie is that according to the memo, the department has reduced the number of spaces leased from privately owned parking lots for its’ employees. Since 2008, Tom Daly has been leasing about 17 spaces from Mike Harrah’s parking company Sycamore Parking Concepts to the tune of about $1,200 a month or $14,400 a year. This lot is located behind the run-down YMCA building on Civic Center Dr.
The best outcome for the money sucking building is that it be sold. If the tax payers are lucky they will recover the cost of the property and break even. However, the condition of the building is horrendous, per the memo. So I find it odd that Tom Mauk would say that “…having the property in our inventory is a positive outcome.” Is Tom Mauk covering for Tom Daly? Or did good-old friend of Tom Daly, Rob Richardson, write this memo without clearing it with Mauk or even verifying the information given. All Mauk or Richardson had to do was take a little stroll to the parking lot across the street and see that it is public parking.
Tom Daly is a red-faced liar and deserves to be voted out of office. Daly and company are running a misinformation campaign not only to voters but to the public, the Board of Supervisors and CEO Tom Mauk. Supervisor John Moorlach needs to call for audits of the Clerk-Recorder Department to see what other lies are uncovered.
By now we have all seen the campaign mailers produced by Hide-n-Seek Sidhu and his union pals asking what Shawn Nelson is hiding and that got me thinking about Harry Sidhu and what he might be hiding from the people of the 4th district.
So to be helpful I made a list:
1. Sidhu doesn’t live in this district and he doesn’t want you to know it.
2. Sidhu committed perjury twice when he claimed to have live at the Calabria apartments.
3. Sidhu is the public employee union candidate and his pals in the union are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to put their puppet in office.
4. Sidhu is barely intelligible and has no grasp of the basic functions of county government.
5. Sidhu is a perpetual office seeker who is constantly running for higher office.
6. Despite his claims to the contrary as an Anaheim city council member Sidhu has voted for dozens of fee and utility rate increases.
So there’s the Sidhu record. No wonder his handlers want to keep it a secret and I’ve only just scratched the surface.
On Tuesday Fullerton held a groundbreaking ceremony on the $10 million Main Library Expansion and approved the first round of construction contracts.
Fullerton resident Helen Logan sent us her thoughts on the expansion. They are printed below.
Before the library drains more precious tax dollars into its “Meet the Jetsons” architecture, Fullerton’s city council should be made aware of other futuristic stuff like the Kindle, the iPad and the Nook that can download hundreds of books right into our hands. With the advent of internet technology, libraries and their staff are nothing more than appendages to our society.
Our tax dollars would best be spent helping Fullerton’s residents afford the future by defraying the costs of laptops, internet services, and other digital reading devices.
The city of Fullerton should partner with local businesses to reduce the cost of internet technology to its residents. This move would directly benefit our residents and stimulate Fullerton’s business sector.
Fullerton’s city council members’ approval of this library expansion exposes their ignorance that books and knowledge may only be found in an actual building. Expansion of the Fullerton library is a growing monument to the dinosaurs who rule our city from their seats on our town’s city council.
Last week Nick Berardino and his goons at OCEA sent out mailers alleging that 4th District Supervisor candidate Shawn Nelson voted in his own business interest to and that he did something for the campaign contributor who owned the Fox Theatre in Fullerton. All nonsense, of course.
These were really lame pieces and probably got Nelson a lot more votes than they cost him. But this effort was quite revealing in that it demonstrates the utter hypocrisy and self-interest of “Bullhorn” Bernardino and his crew.
What? I can't hear you, Bullhorn.
While this guy is making up stories about Nelson, he has turned a blind eye to a real government miscreant, County Clerk, Tom Daly whom we have busted giving jobs and no-bid contracts to friends and relatives of contributors, as well as pitching over two million bucks into the worthless property at 433 West Civic Center Drive. Oh yeah, and then there was that $48,000 contract given to another campaign contributor to “study” a sports hall of fame.
The OCEA has watered Tom Daly campaigns with more than $4000 over the years, no doubt hoping the investment would some day flower into something that looked like a county supervisor. Instead it helped create an incompetent little emperor that has no accountability, no oversight, and whose fiefdom is rife with cronyism and kickbackery and wasted millions.
I guess he's talking about me.
I would love to believe that Berardino meant to put Tom Daly’s name on those mailers because I would love to believe that Berardino was venting his righteous anger at the wrong candidate. Yeah, right! The County’s public employee unions are going after Nelson because they are terrified of a real Board majority that will institute permanent and meaningful pension reform and conduct responsible contract negotiations.
But who knows? Someday maybe the OCEA will stand up to real corruption – even on the part of a Democrat. If they ever do they know where to come to get all the info they need. But I’m not holding my breath.
View the memo
