FFFF supports causes that promote intelligent, responsible and accountable government in Fullerton and Orange County
Our Friends over at the Orange Juice blog are reporting that Fullerton’s Sharon Quirk has pulled papers to run against Chris Norby in the new 65th State Assembly District.
Good luck Sharon! And wake up Chris! You may have an opponent!
The real interest for FFF is that this will free up Quirk’s seat on Fullerton’s City Council, and will give Fullerton residents a chance to elect a pro-accountability candidate in November.
With a little hard work we can clean up Fullerton for a long, long time.
Well, somebody has to do Bankhead’s job since he has adamantly refused to do it himself – for almost 25 years.
Today, Jane Rands, former State Assembly candidate under the Green Party banner, has filed papers to replace council Precambrian holdover, Don Bankhead.
Jane appears to be somebody who is smart and believes in accountability, and would make an immeasurably better city council person than Bankhead – who has been targeted for Recall because of his dismal leadership failure.
FFFF looks forward to sharing more information about Jane and her platform in the coming days.
Here’s an irate e-mail we received from a Golden Hills Little League parent explaining that despite his political troubles, Fullerton FPD Culture of Corruption architect Pat McPension just couldn’t be denied his place as a speaker at opening day ceremonies. Strings were pulled, leverage was exerted.
But what’s this?
Subject: McKinley – Little League Opening Day
I contacted you last week informing you that McKinley had strong armed Golden Hill Little League via Parks & rec’s John Clements to speak at GHLL’s Opening Day this past weekend. Despite the league’s concerns given recent news re: Mr. McKinley and the fact that this is a children’s event, they were informed in no uncertain terms that as Mr. McKinley sat on committe responsible for assigning fields to youth programs, not letting him speak would be a bad idea. With their backs against the wall GHLL, a non-profit youth baseball league, decided to allow McKinley a few words.
And the dude NO-SHOWED…
So after strongarming GHLL and indirectly threatening to look unfavorably on their requests for city fields in the future, McKinley didn’t even show…or have the courtesy to have his people call GHLL to let them know. He was a no call/no show.
Lovely.
Message to Golden Hills Little League organizers: no good deed goes unpunished.
Poor, put upon Fullerton City Manger Joe Felz is getting frustrated. And so he sighs to a reporter.
He’s frustrated that people are holding him accountable for his promises. Last year he stalled the Howard Jarvis Tax folks by clamming that the illegal 10% water tax would be addressed by March; well, March is here and it ain’t. In the meantime the City has collected $200,000 per month and continues to hide the tax from the water rate payers.
Here is an article in the Register all about how gosh darn tough it is for Felz to : 1) tell the truth; 2) do the right thing; 3) obey the law.
The truth is that the illegal tax has nothing to do with with the water rate study; it is a stand alone issue that should have been fixed at least 15 years ago. And the fix is easy. The Water Fund already pays the General Fund for work done other city departments for work done on its behalf. The 10% tax is an outright scam that needs to be killed.
I have it on good authority that anti-recall team captain Dick Ackerman has been diligently hounding OC Register personnel to start flogging the wonderful deeds accomplished by the Three Rotten Eggs, Dick Jones, Don Bankhead, and Pat McPension.
Will it work? It’s hard to see how. Two of the three are career public employees with massive inflation-linked pensions; Jones was the drum-beater for the abortive pension spike of 2008 only stopped by Shawn Nelson; Jones and Bankhead have approved of an illegal 10% water tax every year for 15 years; and all three have been reliable water bearers for whatever idiocy was put in front of them by the city bureaucracy.
Ackerman has millions of reasons to fight the recall of the gents who are in the process of handing his client a deal worth millions in government subsidies, but the editorialists at the Register have no reason to promote these clowns.
True, Ackerman is drinking buddies with a couple of the Register social columnists – the same ones that went out of their way to pass on the smears of Ackerman against Chris Norby, and to promote the useless, carpetbagging Ackerwoman.
I guess we’ll have to wait and see if Ackerman’s efforts to promote the unpromotable, gains traction.
With the deadline for filing papers to run in the Recall election approaching – it’s at the end of the week – it seems like an opportune moment to invite our Friends to suggest names of people they would like to see run for the seats held by the Tyrannic Triad, Jones, Bankhead and McKinley.
During the past eight months we’ve seen lots of people step up and take leadership roles, challenging the Old Regime for its incompetence, corruption and detachment from the very people they were elected to serve.
The issues have centered around the serial criminal behavior by members of the Fullerton police department that culminated in the beating death of Kelly Thomas; the illegal grifting of a 10% water tax; and the land development giveaways handed out to campaign contributors.
There is no doubt in my mind that there are dozens of folks in these protests that would do an immeasurably better job governing our City than the The Three Fissured Fossils up there on the dais now.
So share your ideas. Maybe we can talk some of these good people into running.
Here’s an article by the pathetic Lou Ponsi in the OC Register about a guy named John Huelsman, an ex-cop, who unluckily happens to be the step-father of Jay Cicinelli, the Fullerton policeman charged with the beating death of schizophrenic homeless man Kelly Thomas, last July.
This man popped up at the last council meeting nattering the same nonsense about what an angel his step-boy is, so this isn’t really news. What is news is this guy’s claim that he has been able to review the City-owned video that captured the Thomas killing.
Let’s assume for the sake of argument that Huelsman is actually telling the truth. This begs the question – who hasn’t seen the video? We know that our elected representative, Bruce Whitaker is being illegally denied the opportunity to see it. But, really: the freakin’ step-father of the accused gets to watch it? Really? And a Fullerton council member may not?
So who let this guy watch the video? Was it the FPD? Was it the District Attorney? Such questions seem not to have occurred to the incurious idiot Lou Ponsi whom we can all count upon to miss the real story while peddling pro-cop bullshit.
Somebody better explain soon why some clown from who knows where can watch the video, when the people’s elected representative can’t.
The Fullerton FPD Culture of Corruption just got a new inductee into its Hall of Shame today, as reported by the OC Register’s Sean Emery, here.
It seems that FPD employee April Baughman, 52, is cooling her heels in the County jail, alleged to have swiped cash from the FPD property room for – get this – two freakin’ years!
The money quote comes from our friend “Acting” Chief Dan Hughes who is quoted as saying:
“When there are violations of public trust or actions which result in the reduction of confidence in the police department, disciplinary action will be taken swiftly and decisively.”
Uh, yeah, Dan, sure. Whatever you say. At least we didn’t have to read such inane bullshit as spoken by the otiose Sgt. Goodrich, although he probably wrote it.
Too bad swift and decisive disciplinary action wasn’t taken against the thugs who killed Kelley Thomas until ten weeks after he was murdered.
This latest humiliation begs two questions. One, how could there have been no accounting of property room inventory over this period without the collusion of at least one other miscreant; and two, how much will the Culture of Corruption created by Pat McKinley and tolerated by sleepwalking councilmembers Don Bankhead and Dick Jones end up costing us?
And naturally we are left to ponder the previous assertion of Acting Chief Hughes: anyone who believes there is a Culture of corruption in the FPD is either lying or misinformed.
Newsflash, Chief: we are not lying and we are not misinformed.
The Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association fired off another pithy letter to city manager Joe Felz last week, accusing him of intentionally delaying the termination of the illegal 10% in-lieu water franchise tax while continuing to collect over $100,000 per month from Fullerton residents in violation of the state constitution.
The letter states that Joe Felz verbally admitted to the illegality of the fee and promised action within a certain timeframe. But honesty is not a virtue within city hall, and nine months later Felz and his trusted council majority of Bankhead, Jones and McKinley still allow the city to continue its theft without comment or remorse.
Mr. Bittle closed out his letter with a threat of a class action lawsuit that would seek a refund on behalf of all Fullerton water users. As one of the 135,000 ripped-off residents, I’d say that’s a great idea.
UPDATE: As noted in the comment from Chris Thompson below, he did not learn about the Beechwood situation (whatever it is) from FFFF. This was my error. I misread the following comment made by Thompson in yesterday’s post:
For clarity’s sake, I have NOT been briefed on any aspect of this story beyond the information which has been made publicly available in the meeting posted here.
I read this to mean that he had not been briefed at all. I do not know if he had an independent briefing from Hovey, but he was actually at the meeting in question. My mistake. I have edited the text below.
In the past few days in Fullerton we have witnessed the usurpation of public sovereignty by government employees and contractors who seem to believe it is their right, not our representative’s, to determine what sorts of information the duly elected representatives are, or are not permitted to see.
First, was the protracted saga of Fullerton City councilman Bruce Whitaker, who for seven moths has been trying to get access to the video of FPD cops beating Kelly Thomas to death. This is a pretty reasonable request, you would think, given the fact that the cops have watched and re-watched the video (Acting Chief Dan Hughes says he’s seen it 400 times); it’s been viewed by the DA; it’s been watched by Cicinelli and Ramos’s lawyers; apparently it’s even been watched by Ron Thomas, father of the dead man. But for some reason the City Manager and City Attorney believe they have the authority to deny access of this public document to Bruce Whitaker, and have used the majority vote of the Three Dim Bulbs to continue to deny Whitaker access.
This is just an outrageous usurpation of the authority that accrues to elected officials by virtue of their popular election. Despite what the bureaucrats and their die-hard elected supporters believe, the sovereignty invested in the elected is indivisible and should never be confused with the practical exigency of majority rule that determines policy and decides the quotidian issues of managing a city.
And then, we have the very recent sad spectacle of a Fullerton School District trustee, Chris Thompson, not being adequately briefed on a matter involving a teacher at Beechwood Elementary School – a matter so serious that the Fullerton police were called in to investigate it, and an emergency parent meeting held. Whatever is going on, the Superintendant, Mitch Hovey decided that the trustees didn’t need to know about it.
The question of whether other trustees besides Thompson were briefed remains to be ascertained, and if so that would make matters even worse.
But here’s the really bad part. According to Thompson: Dr. Hovey informed me that he had been advised by the district’s law firm as to what information he could and could not give to the board members. He did confirm that he knows more than we do.
Say what? That law firm doesn’t work for Hovey; it works for the Board of Trustees who hired them. It has no business collaborating with the Superintendent to decide what information can and can’t be parceled out to the Board. And anybody who doesn’t grasp this basic tenet shouldn’t be on the Board or work for it, either.
As Assemblyman Norby pointed out in his newsletter, it is both the right and the responsibility of elected officials to have reasonable access to public property and documents in order to do their jobs. The Legislative Counsel for the State of California said so. This precept is all about accountability and responsibility in our representative democracy.
So why is this basic concept being flagrantly flouted by Fullerton’s bureaucrats? Who is in charge here, indeed?