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Rumors of increased criminal activity are wafting out of city hall again. A few employees of the Public Works department are in hot water for some sort of embezzlement/kick-back scheme down at the city yard. Criminal charges are in the offing.
It’s not clear to us who was involved or what was stolen. City leaders are keeping quiet right now, but hopefully they will inform the public soon.
If you have any information to contribute, please drop us a line. Discretion is our thing.
Today is the Fullerton Day of Music, where over 150 music acts will play at venues all over town. Here’s the list. Now chill out and go listen to some tunes.
More details at thedayofmusic.com.
Our lobbyist Councilperson Jennifer Fitzgerald has asked her supporters on Facebook to show up at tonight’s Council Meeting to support the purchase of land on Pearl Drive to be used as a park.
Our friend David already went over some of the ridiculousness of this purchase in a previous post but it bears getting a little more attention.
The first point to be made is that this item is on the Consent Calendar tonight. Consent Calendar items are items during a meeting that get no separate discussion and are voted on together unless specifically pulled for comment by a member of the public or council. A typical Consent Calendar item would be the minutes to a previous meeting or perhaps a legislative ordinance change forced upon us by Sacramento.
A typical definition of a consent calendar would be as follows:
Under parliamentary rules governing City Council meetings, Consent Calendar items are reserved for items that are deemed to be non-controversial. They allow a City Council to save the bulk of it’s meeting time for issues in which there is a need for a serious public debate.
Often though the items end up being things that the city doesn’t want to discuss or scrutinize in detail. Tonight’s meeting has 12 consent calendar items with this purchase being the 10th.
The Consent Calendar is hardly the proper place to drop a $1.2Million+ project and it’s more amusing given that councilwoman Fitzgerald is asking for support on an item that is scheduled to take no public comments. It’s somewhat infuriating that the city of Fullerton is so free with money that it doesn’t feel the need to openly discuss an expenditure that is over 18x the median household income of our residents. Worse still when basic details of the deal are lacking from public view.
The parcel in question is slated for purchase with a whopping price tag of $755,500 based on a use assumption that is faulty at best (see David’s post). Then we have $148,000 for an unexplained “administrative settlement”. Then $300,000 for “improvement costs” that will of course be more than $300K owing to the additional paragraph stating that “An updated estimate will be established upon completion of the community meetings.”
What attachments or reference points do we have so we as a city can analyze this project? None. There is no explanation because a properly scanned, searchable PDF is too much work to manage at City Hall despite numerous requests over the years. I’m sure somebody will sound off that there have been “community meetings” that were announced on Nextdoor or some such nonsense so as to suggest the lack of need for the city to do it’s due diligence on transparency. This will likely come from the same people who complain about Public Records Requests from the public in a city known for a culture of corruption and abject secrecy.
Despite being an ongoing project, per the item’s own sparse agenda attachments, since 2002-2003 and we don’t have a breakdown of costs? A thorough estimate? A reason for the administrative settlement? A list of code enforcement violations?
Even the details we do get don’t tell the whole story.
“The amenities required being demolished”? How about we mention that the city paid over $19,000 for part of that very demolition? It seems that just about every pertinent detail has been washed from this item which maybe explains why it was on the consent calendar in the first place. You do have to the give the city credit for their optimism in hoping they could sneak this through the consent calendar knowing full well that we malcontents are always willing to call them on their shenanigans.
I reckon the only thing more infuriating than a bureaucrat putting forth this kind of lazy and shoddy work is a legislative body so uninterested in demanding real data and accountability that those bureaucrats know they can get away with this nonsense.
The old adage “Trust but verify” is absolutely foreign to the Fullerton City Council.
Today Joe Felz’ attorney Bob Hickey entered North Court and had a closed door meeting with the DA and the judge. When they emerged, the pre-trial hearing had been rescheduled once again to August 14. The delays clearly represent the formation of some sort of plea deal for Felz. The whole darn thing got me thinkin’…
Plea deals occur because both the DA and the accused want to avoid the cost of a trial. Normally the DA would have the upper hand, as he has the ability to offer reduced charges and penalties. The defendant comes to the table with nothing except the ability to waste the DA’s time, at a great personal cost. Lawyers are expensive.
In Felz’ case, there was an extra card to play. Felz knew that a trial burdened the DA and the City of Fullerton with the added threat of public exposure. Police Chief Danny Hughes and Sergeant Jeff Corbett had committed obstruction of justice that night when drunk driving Felz was driven home instead of being arrested. The city and its police department needed to keep this quiet and keep themselves free from any courtroom scrutiny. Felz, on the other hand, didn’t have much to lose.
When DA Investigator Abraham Santos’ blew the whistle in May, the odds tilted heavily in Felz’ favor. For the DA, a Felz DUI trial suddenly meant the opportunity for Hickey to dig into the Hughes/DA collusion. The threat of reputational damage to both the institutions and the individual players is suddenly enormous leverage against the DA. Hell, Hickey might even be able to get Santos to testify against the DA and Hughes on the stand. Savage!
So today things aren’t looking to good for the prosecution, who’s already mired in scandal and has little to gain from pushing the Felz case anyway (what’s another DUI conviction? North Court is full of ’em.) While each delay keeps Felz unemployable for a bit longer, it also brings the promise of a dropped case or a neutered plea deal. Keep your eyes out for either one.
Last week California was showered with editorials criticizing state Democrats for their underhanded retroactive gimping of the recall process to protect state senator Josh Newman.
Here are a few of them:
The Democrats’ cynical move to protect one of their own – Los Angeles Times
Democrats push a phony election ‘fix’ – San Francisco Chronicle
Reject legislation to stymie recall elections – Los Angeles Daily News
Democrats Embrace Banana-Republic Tactics – American Spectator
Democrats playing dirty to save Newman from recall – OC Register
In at least one interview Newman himself has supported the effort to delay his own recall, although he avoided directly voting for it. Newman’s abutment of this electoral abuse of power illustrates his rapid degeneration from virginal statesman to shrugging beneficiary of political treachery. If any of the public’s trust in Newman remained after his vote for the regressive gas tax, it’s all but gone now.
On the bright side, recall organizers have vowed to mount constitutional challenges that will attempt to restore California voters’ right to recall government officials.
Just when you thought the Parks and Recreation Department might get their act together comes another gem on next week’s agenda. This time, it’s a $903,500 land purchase for a new park at 3001 Pearl Drive.
The vacant lot used to be home to a swimming pool and clubhouse for the adjacent apartment complexes, which the 33 property owners failed to maintain. Those same property owners now want the City to build a park contingent on the City forking over cash to buy the land.
So what is the land worth? $740,000 according to the appraiser, who notes that an “extraordinary assumption” to build high-density housing was used. Translation: The $740,000 estimate could be totally worthless and the appraiser admits it. Nothing more is divulged about the appraised value because Hugo Curiel only included two pages from the appraisal report. Page One and Page Two
And it gets worse. Hugo wants an additional 20 percent of the appraised value ($148,000) for an administrative settlement to be paid out to the property owners. Once again, Hugo fails to provide any sort of written justification for this:
The parcel is 0.398 acres in size. At that price, it is equivalent to $2.27 million per acre which is more than double the price Chevron is asking for Coyote Hills land. This would be the most expensive land ever purchased for a Fullerton park.
I have a question. Why should we pay the property owners a premium price when it was their own negligence that created this situation? In fact, why pay them anything at all, provided the City agrees to build a park?
Makes you wonder if the property owners are more interested in a cash payout for themselves, or a park for the neighborhood’s benefit.
The highly-desired position of Fullerton City Manager has been awarded to one “Kenneth Domer,” currently assistant city manager down in Huntington Beach. Domer has also served in management roles in Placentia and Villa Park.
Mr. Domer’s total compensation will be on par with that of the former disgraced city manager, Joe Felz.
Managing the peaceful and serene hamlet of Fullerton is not for the weak-minded, as previous occupants of this lofty position ended up seeking answers in the bottom of a bottle. If former Council member Pat “I hired them all” McKinley labeled Joe Felz the “Albert Pujols of City Managers,” how can this new Flounder hope to succeed? Hopefully this flat fish of a City Manager will take full advantage of the soothing presence of Nicole “can do” Bernard.
Last weekend OC Democratic Party official Jeff LeTourneau approached a Newman recall table at the Fullerton Walmart and began shouting profanities. “Which one of you assholes is the gay?” he screams, along with “You are a fucking disgrace to any gay person I know, you piece of shit.”
Video was captured by one of the recall signature gatherers and has just been posted to Fox News.
State Senator Josh Newman and the rest of the CA Democratic party are apparently not returning any calls regarding the incident.
Remember last year when Jan Flory claimed she was ‘retiring’ from City politics? Much to our chagrin, that never happened. Instead, she’s taken up a new calling with close pal Gretchen Cox.
A Friend was gracious enough to share a letter they plastered all over the neighborhood last month:
This isn’t some altruistic idea in the name of public safety. Gretchen and Jan simply have an aversion to the aesthetics of said land, with Gretchen living two houses away and Jan living further up the hill.
Leave it to these numbskulls to use traffic hazard as a ploy for the City to dole out money for appearances. The intersection already has a traffic signal and the frequency of traffic accidents is no worse than other major intersections across the city. Don’t like the appearance of the land? Fine. Focus on that. Don’t try to lump traffic concerns in at the same time.
What’s more, the timing of the letter is particularly obnoxious given that the property was listed for sale in February. Were they hoping to derail a potential sale so the City could swoop in and acquire the parcel?
Since the letter was written, the property has gone into escrow. What an awful way to welcome someone to the neighborhood.
In FFFF’s early days, this blog noted how the Fullerton Observer and its “editor” Sharon Kennedy would bend over backwards to avoid printing anything that might embarrass City officialdom. In the years after that blog post, the Observer remained true to form. It continually went to bat for the bureaucrats in increasingly shameful ways, even when it violated the tenets of the Yellowing Observer’s own professed liberalism. The culmination, perhaps, was the Observer’s series of misdirections and avoidances in the wake of the Kelly Thomas murder in 2011.
But wait. One of our Friends just noticed that the front page of the latest Observer includes an unexpected headline. The article seems to acknowledge the recent claims of corruption in city hall as asserted by the OC DA investigator Abraham Santos.
The piece discusses the facts of the claims against Dan Hughes and Joe Felz without the insertion of Kennedy’s usual dismissive editorial remarks. How could this happen? Is Kennedy turning over a new leaf?
No. This is the work of the Observer’s new co-editor, Jesse La Tour. How he managed to slip this honest piece of work past Kennedy, we may never know.