Search Results for “trail to nowhere” – Page 10

September 19, 2023September 19, 2023Boohooism

If You Build It…

The other night I watched an old movie from the 80s called Field of Dreams. Somehow I managed to get through an hour and a half of the worst Hollywood schmaltz imaginable. Some guy hears voices and builds a baseball field in the middle of an Iowa cornfield. And guess what? Magic happens! Long dead baseball players show up to knock the old horsehide around.

Today I realized that 90 minutes of my life hadn’t been wasted after all.

“If you build it, he will come…” He did, and he did. I noticed the same blind faith in principalities of the air in those who kept, and keep yammering about the Trail to Nowhere.

These folk believe that simply building something will cause users to show up on their field of dreams. Somehow. Sometime. Even though they never bother to identify who those users are going to be. And I suspect that this one practical effort is dutifully avoided because at some visceral level they don’t even care if the trail is used by anybody.

Field of Dreams is all about the suspension of reality if you really, really, really just wish it hard enough.

As has been pointed out by several FFFF commenters, there is a mindset that cherishes gesture, not effectiveness, good intention over good outcome. And when this is compounded with the old liberal attitude of happily patronizing minorities (ahem, underserved populations) by granting them government largesse, the recipe is complete.

Anybody who has been along this strip of real estate knows a few things. They can’t figure out who on earth would want to use this as a trail and that the so-called Phase I has been at utter failure in use and design as a recreation facility – even when its terminus, Union Pacific Park, was open. The proposed Phase II runs through desolate industrial buildings, used tire stores, plating and asphalt business; it traverses junk yards parking lots with junk cars. Somehow this bleak, linear experience offers a golden shower of dreams to government employees with too much money and their do-gooding camp followers who seem to think that spending money is more important than spending it well. See, it’s the thought that counts. Just build it. You’ll feel good about yourself.

September 18, 2023September 19, 2023Bike Nation

Fullerton’s Observers Still Up In Arms

by Joe Sipowicz14 Comments

The trail didn’t go anywhere, but it sure was short…

The intelligent decision by Fullerton City Councilmembers Whitaker, Dunlap and Jung not to waste public money on the abysmal “Trail to Nowhere” has resulted in high dudgeon and angst among Fullerton’s unthinking Observers. They have stirred up uniformed kids (interns they call ’em) to include it in a video about Fullerton’s crumbling infrastructure – missing the rich irony of a city unable to take care of the infrastructure it already has. They have instigated other kids to create a group calling itself “People Above Things” who will bring protest to the City Council meeting because somehow a useless trail is people and not a useless thing.

Here’s a fun anonymous essay that appeared in the latest paper version of the Fullerton Observer full of sturm und drang, confusion and all het up emotion:

What a silly mish-mash of unintelligible nonsense. I notice the reference to “Jane” by which I believe the author refers to a Jane Rands, who stood up and gave a very commonsensical address to the Council, but commonsense is not a highly respected commodity among Observers. What is “Hart?” Who is “Tony?” What on earth is the connection with Associated Road on the other side of town?

I can’t blame the author of this illiterate screed for wanting to remain anonymous, but she didn’t remain anonymous for long. On the Observer blog the author revealed herself: Sharon Kennedy, the long-time proprietess for the Observer whose “news” efforts never failed to read as confused editorial gobbledygook.

It’s clear that the Observers, Yellowing and Pink, will cling to this issue and try to nurture it despite the fact that it’s over and done with and the public at large, if properly informed of all the facts, would overwhelmingly applaud the wise decision of the Council. Facts are the perpetual bogeyman of the Fullerton Observers who peddle emotion, not reason, and promote waste, just so long as the goal satisfies their drive to support patronizing the lower classes, whom they believe depend upon their philanthropic gestures with everybody else’s money.

September 1, 2023Ahmad Zahra

The Curse of Other People’s Money

by Disillusioned Ex-Hippy39 Comments

It’s a sad fact that local politicians usually have no qualms about spending money from off-budget sources – like State and Federal grants to do this or that uber-important thing. And these things don’t really undergo much scrutiny at all because the money the locality gets, if it finds itself awarded such a grant, isn’t competing with other municipal needs. And, better still, the awarding agency very often has no interest in seeing how successful the grant actually was. See, this requires a rear-view mirror, which the government go-carts just don’t have.

This topic came to light during discussion of the ill-fated “Trail to Nowhere” that was going to built with almost $2,000,000 bucks raised from some State of California bond rip-off or other. We heard from the drummed up “community” that the money had been awarded, so better take it; these people being not at all concerned that just maybe the money could be better spent on a project elsewhere. And let’s not worry about the fact that nobody will be responsible for the failure of the scheme.

Phase 1 was a complete failure so Phase 2 is bound to work!

Which brings me to Fullerton’s history of grant money, utterly wasted, and with absolutely no accountability. Specifically I am referring to the long-lost Core and Corridors Specific Plan. I wrote about it seven years ago, here.

Back in 2013 or so, the City of Fullerton received a million dollars from Jerry Brown’s half-baked Strategic Growth Council to develop a specific plan that would sprawl over a lot of Fullerton, offering by-right development for high-density housing along Fullerton’s main streets – a social engineering plan that would have drastically changed the character of the city. The reasons for the entire project’s eventual disappearance off the face of the Earth are not really important anymore. What is important is that the grant money – coming from Proposition 84 (a water-related referendum!) was completely and utterly wasted.

A page on the City’s website dedicated to the Core and Corridors Specific Plan had quietly vanished by 2017, never to be heard of again.

It doesn’t matter how it turns out. It’s the gesture that counts.

The lesson, of course is that Other People’s Money causes public officials – the elected and the bureaucratic – to take a whole other attitude toward spending on stuff than it does if the proposed projects were competing with General Fund-related costs – like the all-important salaries and benefits; or competing for Capital Improvement Fund projects that people actually expect a city to pursue. And it’s very rare indeed for a city council, like ours, to realize that grant money can be misused and actually wasted.

And so I salute Messrs. Dunlap, Whitaker and Jung for voting to return the Trail to Nowhere grant money – an act of true fiscal and moral responsibility.

August 29, 2023Ahmad Zahra

Weeds, Weeds and More Weeds

by Fred L. Olmsted26 Comments

A Friend sent in a copy of a letter from Daniel S. Franco of the City of Fullerton, requesting/demanding weed abatement per the Municipal Code. Supposedly the letter was instigated by a complaint. That may be a true story; or not. Here’s the letter:

Now, this isn’t all that unusual except that the irony of the City making a private citizen do what it will not is pretty rich. What am I referring to? Why, the Trail to Nowhere, of course, the City-owned former UP right-of-way where lately a handful of people, offensively masquerading as “the community” demanded a recreation trial. A quick look at the current situation along the abandoned strip reveals the City in severe breach of the rules it feels compelled to apply to the populace.

Oops.

Oops, again.

It’s pretty apparent that the City of Fullerton can’t take care of its own property. Or maybe by neglecting this property the City is offering up a big FU to the “community” it pretends to care so much about.

In any case the question of our town’s ability to maintain its property brings into focus the question of maintenance costs for new facilities – like the sad proposal of the Trail to Nowhere.

August 12, 2023August 12, 2023Ahmad Zahra

Say, Who’s In Charge Over There?

by The Fullerton Harpoon8 Comments

I know, lets get some running exercise. Before they catch us!

The other day I learned that Fullerton’s nonsensical trail to nowhere has been magically resurrected, again, it seems, the beneficiary of some wasteful State grant meant to make people feel good about themselves. How do I know it’s wasteful and all about virtue signaling? Easy. Just consider the “Trail To Nowhere.”

City staff is no longer even pretending that the the proposed “trail” goes to the Transportation Center, or that it could ever make its way to the Hunt Branch and points northwest. At least those lies have been dispensed with. Now it’s all about connecting a refurbished UP Park and Independence Park, a connection that means nothing to anybody outside the hallowed halls of City Hall. The proponents of this absurdity still can’t identify a single likely user, nor can they spit out the cost of maintaining this trail. They don’t know and don’t care. Build something and someone’s bound to use it, despite the fact that it runs through a dangerous, dilapidated, and dismal industrial zone of junkyards, used tire shops, asphalt plants and metal plating operations. The gesture is what counts, not the aftermath!

But I have already digressed.

The real point of this post is to ask how this miserable idea sprang back to life after the City Council expressed their displeasure with the bureaucratic piecemeal planning of this area, questioned the wisdom of the proposal and said they wanted to see alternatives that might actually help innovative development in the area. They got none of that.

Don’t let the amorphous shape fool you. Oh, wait…

It’s true that Fullerton has had four City Managers in the past three years or so; it’s pretty easy to spot the vacuum here. Plus the new guy, Eric Levitt, seems to have the backbone of a jelly donut when it comes to saying no to his staff. He appears to be cruising for a pension spike and an imminent decampment.

The idea may have been bad, but it sure was old.

Who was it that organized the happy field trip to explore the potential wonders of the trail? How come nobody knew about it except select invitees? How did the Parks Commission come to be presented with a choice that was no choice and how on Earth did this get on the City Council agenda? Obviously there has been a conspiracy to revive this idea and Mr. Levitt is all on board. Why? And why has the City Council permitted the same proposal it rejected last time, to reappear in the same form? These are rhetorical questions only.

The fact that D5 Councilmember Ahmad Zahra and his minions wanted this so badly last time – a gesture, (no matter how expensive and hollow) to the communidad – leads me to suspect this thing has been orchestrated by him and Parks staff to embarrass his colleagues into going along with the scheme this time.

December 16, 2009July 9, 2010About Us

The Fringies on A Roll: Worst Bureaucratic SNAFU

by Jan Florys Dog3 Comments

trophy

What’s that you say? The pickings are just too plentiful to settle on a mere handful of nominees? True. But let’s not let that hinder our purpose. And remember. We are not just scoping out the most expensive screw-up by highly paid public servants. No. We are also going after the comical and the perplexing, too. So here goes, in the category of Worst Bureaucratic SNAFU. And by SNAFU we really mean embarrassing bungle. And by embarrassing bungle we mean FUBAR.

1. The hilarious Magical Football Stadium that materialized out of nowhere at FJC when NOCCCD bond revenue squanderers revealed their complete contempt of, or ignorance of, (or both) the California Environmental Quality Act; a law that you or I would violate only at the risk of incarceration.

2. The Poisoned Park. True most of the horrific damage was done years ago in the whole Union Pacific Park fiasco, but City Manager Chris Meyer has put his own special stamp of futility on the mess by unilaterally closing the non-toxic part and ordering – you guessed it – more Redevelopment! The perfect bureaucratic antidote for what ails you! Waste millions? Don’t worry, there’s more where that came from!

3.The Great Hillcrest Park Massacre. So what do you do when you own an historic resource? That’s easy. First you neglect it terribly for years and years; then you let pervs hang out there; then you waste money building unnecessary and unwanted facilities that you can run and charge the public for; finally you just start ripping it up so you can rebuild it. Bravo! Well done!

4. The incredibly stupid affair of the Red Light Cameras documented here, here, and here. Policy disaster; financial embarrassment; dismal legal entanglements. You want ’em? We got ’em. The sad tale of Fullerton’s relationship with Nestor Traffic Systems and the eventual legal bills for lost law suits paints an ugly picture of bureaucratic bungling.

5. The Trail of Tears. Rather than abandoning the idea of continuing the foolish “Trail to Nowhere” along the contaminated Union Pacific ROW (see nominee #2), the City is forging ahead, trying to get other people’s money to extend the horse trail without horses; the bike trail without bikes; the paseo without paseo-promenaders. As in most of these cases the City Council is complicit in the thing, but as we all know…

Good God who’s in charge over there?

May 14, 2009January 4, 2010Fullerton City Council

The “Paseo Park” Chronicles – The Park That Never Was. Or is. Part 1

by The Fullerton Shadow9 Comments

This is a story that relates a chain of events that goes back many years, Gentle Readers, so please be patient. For those who don’t think Redevelopment spends half its time fixing mistakes it created with the other half, we promise that you will learn a lot about the way your city has been run – in three bite-size installments.

Way, way back in the 1980s Terry Galvin of the Redevelopment Agency cooked up a deal with the Union Pacific Railroad to acquire their Mission Revival depot on Truslow and Harbor. It was properly seen as a valuable historic resource, but damn the luck! It was on the wrong side of the tracks! Galvin’s plan was to relocate it to its current location on Harbor and Santa Fe, attach a weird-looking wood box addition to it, and present it to his pals at The Spaghetti Factory for $1 a year. The first of Fullerton’s subsidized restaurants offered cheap carbs to the masses, and why not? They weren’t paying any rent!

But how does this narration tie into something called “Paseo Park” you ask? Patience, Friends, patience.

As usual the Redevelopment “experts” created more problems than they solved, for the empty lot created by the relocation was soon to become a permanent dumping ground for trash and junk – right next to Harbor Boulevard in the veritable gateway to Downtown Fullerton! And the painful irony: blight as a by-product of Redevelopment! But it was in the barrio so nobody cared.

Blight in the foreground, blight in the background, Redevelopment style... — The UP site with the Allen Hotel in the distance: blight in the foreground, blight in the background, courtesy of Redevelopment.

But cleaning up junk on railroad property is not nearly so fun as playing Monopoly with other people’s money, and the problem festered for years and years – almost twenty to be exact; until the Union Pacific decided to unburden itself of this section of track and the adjacent depot site. Despite the fact that that the railroad was in negotiations with private citizens to buy the old depot site, the Redevelopment Agency led by Gary Chalupsky intervened, and acquired the property itself – with the ludicrous intention of building a trail and an adjacent park. The “trail” itself was utterly useless since it effectively ended at the Highland Avenue grade separation on one end, and the SoCo Walk project at the other. The park occupied the former depot space between Truslow and the trail. Check out the aerial.

And all the property was removed from the property-tax rolls forever.

How about a Utility Tax Fix? — How about Another Utility Tax Fix?

Apart from the trail to nowhere, the park project itself was a dubious venture from the start. The location was not auspicious, and nobody from the community really wanted it. Sparsely attended “community” meetings showed that people on Truslow were concerned about on-street parking and getting rid of blight – not creating more. And they weren’t interested in a hang-out for the local gangs and borrachos by creating a “pocket park.” Well the City never let that sort of thing stand in the way of progress.

Skeptical observers noted that vast Richman Park was only a few blocks away, but this did not dampen enthusiasm in City Hall for a land grab: Susan Hunt, the Director of Community Services, was in a facility building mood – and that’s all that counted. Redevelopment money was there to grease the skids.

cashspigot

Read the rest of the Paseo Park Chronicles – Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3

November 28, 2024November 29, 2024A Step in the Right Direction

Happy Thanksgiving, Friends

by Mr. Peabody16 Comments

Here is a re-print of as FFFF Thanksgiving message from way back in 2011. There is no mention of downtown noise bungles, Trails to Nowhere, Walks on Wilshire or boutique hotels. Bankhead and Jones are long dead. The Recall a distant memory. However, the message is still very pertinent, and it’s way easier to reproduce an old one than come up with a new one.

As we pause today to give thanks for whatever we have to be thankful for, please consider how fortunate we are to live in a nation where freedom of speech actually means something.

This blog has never abused that basic right. We are abusive, rude, enlightening, abrasive, endearing, funny, not funny; we are free with our opinions, but never make things up. And we always remember what Dick Jones, Don Bankhead and Pat McKinley do not: that we derive the right from ourselves, and not from the government that would make us fill out a little blue card to speak to them.

We have been accused of being angry. Hell, yes we’re angry: as our elected representatives cut ribbons and hobnobbed at Chamber of Commerce mixers and rubber stamped every idiocy put in front of them, our city (ours, not theirs) was turned over to a gang of grifters, liars, thugs, pickpockets, perverts and killers.

These same buffoons have turned downtown Fullerton into a urine-soaked, booze addled free-for-all upon which our city council unleashed a band of uniformed goons hardly better than the low-lifes they invited into our city.

They have given their campaign contributors free land and even public streets upon which to erect the overbuilt stucco’d monstrosities that have swallowed up the historic downtown. Are they even ashamed? Hell, no, they are proud of what they have done and apologize for nothing.

Yes, there is anger; yet, anger tempered by hope. Hope that with a clear, sharp message Fullerton can be relieved of the dead hand of an ancient and corrupt regime. That message of hope is being delivered by the Fullerton Recall campaign.

You are all welcome to share that hope. And be assured: the winter of discontent will give way to a new year and spring of accountability and responsibility on the part of Fullerton’s elected representatives.

November 9, 2024November 11, 2024Boohooism

The Morning After Pill, 4th District Version Part 2

by Grover Cleveland15 Comments

Those celebrating the impending defeat of Fullerton 4th District candidate, Vivian Jaramillo, may have been celebrating too soon.

Jaramillo, staunch defender of Fullerton’s underpaid and under-pensioned employees made a big gap closure yesterday, narrowing Jamie Valencia’s lead by more than half, down to a mere 55. She trails 2653 to 2708.

What accounts for the big blob of Jaramillo votes coming through the hose? I don’t know but those ballots were nowhere near the overall percentages, which suggests a ballot collection supposedly harvested by Fullerton School District food service union workers deployed OC Dem Central, and submitted as a batch.

Whether this huge disparity will continue to erase Valencia’s election night lead remains to be seen. It doesn’t look good for Valencia, still it’s better to be ahead than behind, right?

Meantime, the total for candidate Linda Whitaker is 1442 and remains about the same – 1200 votes behind Valencia, more or less.

Patsy Markowitz. Left holding the empty bag, but he got his 15 minutes of fame…

And Scott Markowitz, the dummy surrogate for the Jaramillo campaign who pleaded guilty to perjury and “dropped out” is on his way to 900 votes, proving that his illegal presence on the ballot does indeed have an effect.

In the close Fullerton Elementary School Board race in D5, Sharon Quirk’s empire-building fortunes have taken a turn for the better as her hand-picked candidate Vanesa Estrella, has taken a 57 vote lead over incumbent and union-supported Leonel Talavares; a result, if it holds, that would mean zero practical difference to actual governance that will remain 90 minutes of gold star distribution and a rubber stamp on real district business.

The OC Registrar of Voters won’t report again until Monday at 5 pm.

September 12, 2024September 12, 2024"Dick" Ackerman

Defender of the Faith, Part 2

by The Fullerton Harpoon7 Comments

The other day our Friend, Fullerton Old Timer introduced us to man named John Phelps, a big donor to Vivian Jaramillo, Jan Flory, and in 2022 to Ahmad Zahra. He also was a big contributor to the failed City Hall sales tax proposal in 2020.

Fullerton Old Timer checked in with me:

You shouldn’t think Mr. Phelps is only a recent player in propping up Fullerton’s unaccountable Democrat councilcreatures, Be sure to check out his financial political activity to keep three useless Republicans in office in 2012; namely Bankhead, Jones, and McKinley. The Form 460s will tell you a lot about his dedication to protecting the people in City Hall.

Well, okay. I guess I can do that. FOT is referring to the Fullerton Recall in 2012 in the aftermath of the Kelly Thomas Murder by the FPD, an event that went global after FFFF published a photo of the “after FPD Intervention” picture.

The recall began in the summer of 2011 and finally occurred in June, 2012. The anti-recall campaign created by the loathsome Dick Ackerman, now a Fullerton lobbyist, was called “Protect Fullerton – Recall No”. Let’s see what Phelps was up to.

Hardly out of the gate, Protect Fullerton got a 1000 bucks from Phelps. And he was far from done.

In October, 2011 he kicked in a measly hundred dollars. Then he really got going.

In April 2012 he gave another $1000 to help protect the Three Tree Fungi and their Praetorian Guard.

Finally, he gave the anti-recall committee a whopping $5,000 in mid May, 2012. Overall, that’s $7100 to fight the recall that succeeded in June, despite Phelpses largesse.

But, wait. Phelps didn’t only cast his bread upon anti-recall waters – at least not directly.

He also contributed to the individual campaign accounts of the recalled. While the recall campaign was in full swing he gave Don Bankhead’s 2012 campaign committee, not Protect Fullerton, another $1000.

A few days earlier he gave $1000 to Pat McKinley’s campaign committee. Of course both Bankhead and McKinley kicked in those exact amounts to Protect Fullerton. I don’t know what he may given Dr. Dick Jones, because those records don’t seem to be available in the City Clerk’s webpages.

When the recall was won, Mr. Phelps directed his well-funded attention to the upcoming November 2012 election. Guess what?

In September, in a move full of pathos, he gave poor Bankhead another $1000 as the latter was trying, and failing, to get re-elected again. Another candidate, Jan Flory, who going for another lap around the race track hit the Phelpsian jackpot.

You read that right. 10 Big Ones to Jan Flory, who once proclaimed that “in her lights” the department heads were “the heart of the City.”

Flory, was almost through. In the summer of 2013 she started hitting up contributors again. Why? To pay off the $8,000 she loaned to herself in 2012. And Phelps was there to help relieve Ms. Flory of her burden.

Now, if you’re not counting, the total anti-recall and pro statist candidate contributions by Phelps in 2011-2013 is a staggering $18,350. Whether he was really investing in his warped concept of good government, or rather because he still had, or hoped to have business before the council, we shall never know.

What we do know is that the election of Jan Flory, after the promising months after the recall, has been a disaster for Fullerton. What happened in the subsequent years of mismanagement are with us still: no reform of an incompetent and corrupt police department and more cop killings; increased employee pension liability, more neglect of infrastructure, continuation of the Water in Lieu Fee theft, cover-up of City Manager drunken wild ride, more nonsense like Trails to Nowhere, Fish Farm Wedding Venues, Walks on Wilshire, more cop killings. And of course a massive deficit cliff threatening our solvency.

Mr. Phelps is a friend of the establishment, the bureaucracy, and whatever liberal causes he adores. He’s probably a member of the right clubs and contributes handsomely to charity.

But he’s no friend to the taxpayers of Fullerton.