FFFF supports causes that promote intelligent, responsible and accountable government in Fullerton and Orange County
In a democracy the elected representatives work for the people. When they forget that, and when they come to affiliate themselves with the governing class, the results can be consequential. Sometimes it takes a while, but sooner or later their dereliction catches up to them.
The image above symbolizes freedom from tyranny – the tyranny of incompetent, entrenched, befuddled decrepitude.
Happy 4th of July, Fullerton. Have a cold one and congratulate yourselves!
A guy named Matt Leslie has started a new blog in Fullerton, and it looks like a pretty good read. It’s called the Fullerton Rag and appears thoughtful and well-written. I am informed Mr. Leslie is the lesser half of recent council candidate, Jane Rands.
This blog will likely appeal to the less febrile and more intellectual Fullerton political aesthetic preference; and I say bravo! The more people who dial into what’s happening in Fullerton, the better.
Be sure to read the post about Leslie playing Monopoly with Don Bankhead. It’s pretty good.
It looks like the repuglican phalanx has already started to dredge Laguna Lake for candidates to run in November to hopefully reclaim the Fullerton City Council for themselves, and maybe even rewrite the history of the Recall. Well, good luck with that.
It seems that one of their own kind, Jennifer Cowan-Fitzgerald has been making inquiries to important local elected officials about the possibility of a Cowan-Fitzgerald city council campaign. Who is this person? A lot more about that later. In the meantime, enjoy this snapshot of Ms. Cowan-Fitgerald’s front yard – just to show where this woman’s sympathies lay.
No Recall? Now that’s not very good, is it?
Apparently Ms. Cowan-Fitzgerald is not a fan of mine, or of our humble blog. Well, gosh. Was it something we said?
Suffice to say, I will do anything and everything I can to make sure we have no more of these unaccountable, irresponsible, mealy-mouthed RINOs foisted on us by Ed Royce and the dwindling repuglican crowd.
Yep. Bank on it.
Or to be more precise, Loretta Sanchez has one and is sharing it with Quirk in the latter’s campaign for the 65th State Assembly seat. The location is 1660 West Lincoln Avenue, in Anaheim, and according to a Quirk supporter is part of a master plan – a message to the hard-working families of west Anaheim that legislative help is on the way – Sharon Quirk style.
The liberal OC blogs had announced a grand opening party for Sunday, 1:00 to 3:00 pm and one of our Anaheim Friends, lured by the possibility of free drinks and snacks, took a spin by HQ for the advertised open house. It was scheduled from 1:00 to 3:00.
Unfortunately our Friend says he didn’t get there until a little after 3:00. And guess what?
“I motored by at 3:10 or so. The place was a ghost town. That party was either cancelled or cleared out faster than you-know-what through a goose. I did snap a pic.
For some reason Sanchez and Quirk rented a place next to The Chain Reaction, an Anaheim night spot whose notorious parking problems and near-nightly events will wreak havoc on running a campaign office.
Anyway, we in Anaheim are likely stuck with Sanchez. But you in Fullerton can keep Quirk.”
As a dyed-in-the wool Democrat, Sharon Quirk, the liberal candidate for the 65th State Assembly can be relied upon to do the right thing: the right thing for our Democrat Governor Jerry Brown and the public employee unions that put him in power. And the right thing to do is to pass a budget in June that relies on billions of dollars in new taxes to be voted on by the electorate in November.
Now, Ms. Quirk has a website that is just about the sort of thing you’d expect from a typical say-nothing politician – long on platitudes and lefty endorsements and zero on actual issues. And when I say zero, I mean zero. Scour it. You’ll read vacant nonsense about policies hurting hard-working families, schools and infrastructure, and all about the evils of partisan bickering (code for I am not a total, complete liberal loon), but not a single specific issue or even one useful fact. I have to give her credit for some transparency, though; she doesn’t really even pretend she is saying anything – there isn’t even an issues tab with the fraudulent “coming soon” scam.
Still, it would be nice if she would take a position on perhaps the biggest issue facing the State today. Does she support Governor Brown’s budget and tax proposal? After all, her support of this proposal would certainly be indicative of her own tax and spend propensity on down the road. Most of her endorsers endorse it. If A=B and B=C, then A=C.
So I’d like to know. I’m pretty sure the people of Fullerton would like to know. And all those blue collar, blue dog Dems who live south of the I-5? I bet they would like to know if Quirk is just another one of those incompetent Democrats who long to go to Sacramento where their foolishness and crazy spendthrift ways have buried California under an ossified government and a crushing public employee pension liability.
So how about it Sharon? How about a statement on your website about where you stand on increasing State revenue to feed the unions that have endorsed you?
You know, Larry Bennett really could have just left it alone. After dodging a final, humiliating meeting to certify the recall election that drove them out of office, at least one of the Three Bald Tires finally deigned to show up at Fullerton City Hall tomorrow morning to do the deed. It could have been done quietly with as little fanfare as possible. Actually only one of them even needed to show up.
But no.
Bennett seems to think the Three Dead Batteries need a sendoff appropriate to all the wonderful things these men have done for Fullerton. Friday he notified supporters of the Three Tree Stumps that there was to be a special council meeting, and that he hoped everybody would show up to let them know what terrific public servants they have been.
Bennett has likely spent the week-end making phone calls to drum up some folks willing to say kind thing about the Three Pea-less Pods. No doubt some will show up. And others are likely to show up now, too. People who recognize the disastrous misrule of these three characters:
Don Bankhead: dumb-bell, and self-annointed king of Fullerton, whose somnolent councilmanic career was punctuated with one Redevelopment boondoggle and union give away after another.
Dick Jones, the southern fried lunatic and loud-mouthed bully who never came to understand that the authority to give orders doesn’t confer wisdom – or even relevance.
Pat McKinley: protector and apologist for the undeniable Culture of Corruption in the Fullerton Police Department that he himself had created. Those ladies weren’t like you. Aliens. Don’t rush to judgement.
Well, good bye and good riddance.
And please take Larry Bennett with you. The tide is rising.
Apparently this invitation is making the rounds. Please do attend.
There’s been speculation about some of the new city council members and if they have a “hidden agenda.” While I don’t speak for any other council members, it did occur to me that I do actually have a personal agenda that I’ve been keeping since early June.
In the interest of transparency, why not publish it?
Here you go: my raw and unredacted personal agenda, online and up-to-date for everyone to see:
[iframe_loader width=’100%’ height=’600′ frameborder=’1′ scrolling=’auto’ src=’https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1l2nvBpJCJwSBM8vDUlvoi92Akl-bT14DqhtbZZiu0xg&embedded=true’]
Anybody who reads this blog knows that I have had a running battle with the Fullerton Redevelopments Agency, even going so far as suing the Agency to block its bogus expansion attempt into areas of west and east Fullerton that had no blight. That was just a fraudulent attempt to divert property tax revenue from legitimate recipients.
Now that Redevelopment has been killed off by the Legislature and the Governor, I really have to wonder what has and will become of that small army of government economic planners, boondoggle promoters, bribers, bagmen, design guideline perpetrators, and the rest, whose job it was to gin up sales tax revenue and property tax increment (usually at the expense of somebody else) while dictating land use development in Redevelopment project areas across California.
Lest anybody think I’m just grousing about an abstract problem, consider an article here in the OC Register that points out the exorbitant amount that Fullerton Redevelopment Agency wasted on administration.
Anyway, these folks were in the business of playing developer without taking any of the risks, and with a compliant city council there was never any fear of them being held accountable for their manifest failures.
Some of the former Redevelopment employees will be kept around to close things out. The rest? Who knows? In Fullerton, some of them have already been absorbed into the regular bureaucracy, to be supported by the General Fund – as if these people were simply interchangeable and indispensable parts. The message that move sent to the citizens of Fullerton is a really bad one – that the government has no appetite to shrink, even though a specific purpose has been ended.
The current city councilmembers (or at least a majority of them) have finally agreed to meet quickly on Monday morning for the sole purpose of certifying the results of the recall election. Once that’s out of the way, the three new councilmembers will be sworn in unceremoniously by the city clerk during the day on Monday.
Why skip the usual pomp and circumstance? Because there’s urgent business to take care of.
The new council has called a second special meeting for Tuesday evening to immediately deal with the collection of the 10% in-lieu franchise fee on water bills: a tax which was called illegal by the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association over a year ago, yet still persists today.
And so at their first meeting, a fresh city council will finally have a chance to eliminate the water tax entirely – a fee that was never properly authorized by taxpayers under Proposition 218 and was illegally diverted to the general fund to pay for non water-related costs (primarily salaries and pensions) for the last 15 years.
There are probably a lot of residents who wouldn’t be sad to see it go.