A week or so ago FFFF reported that Jan Flory, the elderly, humorless scold who has been on the Fullerton City Council three times had taken out nominating papers to run this fall in the 2nd District.
FFFF rejoiced.
Too much scotch, not enough water…
We didn’t necessarily think she’d go through with it, what with her pushing 80 years old, her historic constituency dying off, and running against the popular and well-financed Mayor, Nick Dunlap. Still the prospect of having Flory around gave hope for all sorts of blogging fun – once again reciting her horrendous pro-tax, pro-corruption record.
Provide Your Own Caption
And now we learn that Mrs. Flory has indeed returned her nominating papers and is in the process of creating a new campaign committee.
Better check the sell by date…
Well, done, Jan, say I. Your record of “public service” is in a class by itself.
You were the one who approved the budget busting 3@50 retroactive pension bonanza to cops and paramedics.
You were the one who enthusiastically supported the illegal water tax.
You were the one who supported Measure S, the foolish sales tax effort.
You were the one who supported the ill-conceived Utility Tax, and wished it had been double,
You were the one who approved years of red ink budgets and lied about them to the public.
You were the one who cut a slimy deal with Ahmad Zahra to deny the citizens of Fullerton a chance to vote on a replacement for Jesus Quirk Silva.
You were the one who refused to create a citizens commission to reform the Culture of Corruption in the Fullerton Police Department.
You were the one who defended the Three Bald Tires in the wake of the Kelly Thomas murder by the cops. You called them honorable men.
You were the one to sneer and deprecate your own constituents if they dared criticize or complain about the actions of your beloved “staff.”
You were the one to support every Redevelopment boondoggle and every massive, over-built apartment block.
Last Tuesday the Fullerton City Council voted 4-1 to approve the ’24-’25 city budget. Whitaker, as usual voted no. The budget projects big deficits as we’ve already heard.
After that the Council was presented with “revenue enhancement” ideas – the same old nonsense that we’ve already talked about, here. At first these ideas were simply floated to make it look like somebody had given some thought to find other ways, however silly, to address the tsunami of red ink; but in reality the point was to push a general sales tax, a movement that had been subtly going on for many months.
However the proposals agendized last Tuesday did not include a sales tax this fall, a sure indicator that the City Manager has polled the Council and knows he doesn’t have the votes to put it on the ballot. But that didn’t stop Councilmembers Charles and Zahra from pitching and pitching and pitching the idea; and finally supporting each other to get the issue of a sales tax on the an agenda, pronto, in time to schedule it for the November election.
But before that happened the public was treated to some of the most blatant and self serving re-writing of Fullerton history I have ever heard.
If I knew what I was talking about this wouldn’t be Fullerton!
Shana Charles started off with long-winded blabbering that was irrelevant, self-contradictory, confusing, and erroneous. Of course – “decimated” staff, the ill-effects of right-sizing,” reduced response times – the usual liberal litany of problems were simply meant as an introduction to the sales tax proposal. Her complaint was that previous councils had made mistakes, not by exercising fiscal restraint, but by “cutting to the bone.”
Charles then lauded the wonderful benefits that the City of Placentia derived from it’s Measure U sales tax that saved it, having declared bankruptcy – a statement completely false. She failed to mention the fact that Placentia has saved millions by getting their “fire fighters” out of the paramedic business, an idea of which her Fullerton fire fighter union pals are terrified.
While patting herself on the back for very recent staff and service level increases, she failed to see the rich irony of her own incompetence on the edge of a precipice: a situation well-understood when she voted for last year’s budget.
More economic development, better wardrobe…
If Charles blathered nonsense, Zahra just lied about Fullerton’s recent fiscal history, most likely because he has been on the City Council for 6 years, and has his greasy fingerprints all over the budgetary disaster.
According to Zahra, our problem reaches back decades and only now is the Council addressing the problem. Of course our City Councils have made bad decisions over the years, but the current disaster is of very recent vintage and has also occurred while he has been on the City Council.
For several years in the mid and late teens Fullerton was dipping into reserve funds to pay the freight, even as Zahra’s allies Jan Flory and Jennifer Fitzgerald and Jesus Quirk- Silva were lying to the public about the budget being balanced. It wasn’t. In fact the City continued in its cavalier way until Fred Jung and Nick Dunlap joined Bruce Whitaker on the council in 2020.
Let me count the ways…
Zahra related how he, as a precinct-walking candidate, noted how people wanted better roads and how his predecessors had promised them, too, but that they failed. He didn’t note the fact that Fullerton’s public safety employees were hogging up bigger and bigger shares of the budget – as they still do.
The subject of Zahra’s failed 2020 Measure S sales tax came up, a sore subject, apparently, since his underserved constituents in D5 voted for it. So let us not stop from revisiting it, and right now! Charles chimed in that well she people she spoke to voted against it because there was no sunset provision, and, get this – because there was no oversight committee!
As an aside, I have to share that Zahra made an hilarious little speech about he could not support an infrastructure improvement bond because voting for municipal debt would keep him awake at night!
It’s not rocket science…
Bruce Whitaker made just about the only insightful comment of the discussion, namely: that cities can control costs but they can’t control revenue, an observation that flies in the face of the revenue enhancement propaganda, but that is perfectly true. As has been stated here before: nobody even knows if an Economic Development Manager even pays for himself in terms of incremental tax increase.
I will wrap this up by acknowledging a Zoom caller who actually did make a good revenue enhancing and who identified a huge fiscal problem: downtown Fullerton, the annual sinkhole that makes millions for the scofflaw club owners and that leaves the taxpayers with a $1,500,000 bill. He suggested a special assessment on these eager party entrepreneurs to pay for the havoc their booze and their customers cause. Not surprisingly, none of the council members even mentioned the problem. They never do.
The Fullerton City Council is holding a special meeting tonight – a 2024-25 Budget “workshop.” No work will get done but there will be shopping going on as staff begins its formal press to raise a sales tax.
There is a lot of self-serving verbiage about how well our City staff has performed its tasks up ’til now, but then the hard reality hits because budget numbers can’t pat themselves on the back.
There are some harrowing numbers in the proposed budget – including a $9,400,000 draw-down from strategic reserves. This means of course, that the budget is no where near balanced as City Hall apologists like Jennifer Fitzgerald and Jan Flory claimed when they ran the place into the red almost every year.
M. Eric Levitt. Will he save us from ourselves?
Let’s let our City Manager, Eric Levitt tell the tale:
“Financial Stability. The City has been able to over the last two years (for the first time in recent history of the City) to reach and maintain a 17% contingency reserve level. This budget maintains that reserve level; however due to an operating deficit, we will be utilizing one-time excess reserves this year and coming close to that 17% level in FY 2024-25 and below that in years beyond next year“
Read. Weep.
The overall picture gets even worse as the levels of reserves slowly dwindle away. After this year Fullerton continues to be upside from $7.5 to $8.8 million each year until the end of the dismal decade. We are not favored with the running reserve funds balances.
Infrastructure is supposedly a big deal. Which reminds me of a quotation attributed to Mark Twain: Everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it. But this year we are told, we can push get going on our deteriorating infrastructure along by borrowing! Once again let’s heed the words of Mr. Levitt:
“I have also put together a strategy to increase that funding level to closer to $14 million over the next four years through the use of financing. However, there are both upsides and downsides to this approach which will be discussed with you in more detail at today’s presentation.“
Now this should be a red flag: borrowing to perform maintenance, a basic accounting no-no. And what form will the borrowing take? Not a municipal bond, you can be sure, It would likely be by selling certificates of participation or some other dodge to avoid municipal debt restrictions. Here’s the table that shows our Maintenance of Effort (MOE) shortfall without financing.
Now we all know that interest payments are made by somebody, somewhere, and that somebody is you and me. We get to pay the interest on debt incurred by years of municipal mismanagement by people like Joe Felz and Ken Domer and Jeff Collier who get to sail off to a glorious and massively pensioned retirement at 55 years of age.
And finally, to circle back to the story lead, here’s a distasteful nugget carefully slipped into the City Manager’s report:
“Staff recommends City Council review options over the next year to stabilize the budget and ensure the City remains financially sound.“
Jesus H. There it is. Not quite explicitly stated, but we know very well where this is going. Another general sales tax effort, just like the ill-fated Measure S of four years ago. The seeds for this have already been planted, of course, in a nasty little taxpayer-funded fishing expedition in the guise of a community survey. Last November I regaled the Friends with this slimy maneuver, here.
How did things get so bad?
By the way, this is exactly the same process City Hall rolled out four years ago. And we will be told By Ahmad Zahra, Shana Charles and Vivian Jaramillo that if we don’t pony up we will be morally deficient.
Well, good luck Friends. This is going to be a long year and you can bet the farm that we will be asked to pick up the check – again.
What do you do when your City Manager is spectacularly unspectacular? If it’s Fullerton you give him a raise.
I’ll drink to that!
See, in Fullerton if you’re a City Manager who avoids getting drunk and driving over a tree before trying to evade the law, you’re doing pretty darn good.
Don’t let the amorphous shape fool you. Oh, wait…
And so Mr. Eric Levitt, who has been City Manager for less than 2 years is getting an 8% raise from $250,000 to $270,000. This gentleman is hardly any different than the two temps who preceded him and gives precisely the same deference to an incompetent collection of underlings. In the past 20 months he hasn’t shown any interests in establishing a corps of excellence – just the opposite in fact, and this must be cause for comfort for a City Council that thrives in a culture of not bad is outstanding – just try not to let us make ourselves look too bad.
Last year, the City Manager predicted dire economic issues ahead for Fullerton, massive deficits, of course; and by the end of 2023 Levitt had already started paving his own path of least resistance by hiring a public opinion pollster to drum up support for a general sales tax. This year’s mission will be to revive the ill-fated Measure S, give it a new letter from the alphabet, and let the cops and emergency medics pitch it to the public.
A few weeks ago I published a post on the extremely dubious efforts of a paid consultant to begin a renewed effort to raise a new sales tax in Fullerton. The consultant is an operation called FM3.
We’ve seen this movie before. Many times.
In an effort to build momentum toward justifying a new tax a consultant is tasked with cooking up a poll, a survey that is worded in such a way as to make the question of a new tax sound not only plausible but even desirable.
The information that is collected is meant to probe the electorate’s weak spots, just like an army might send out reconnaissance to figure out where to attack.
Another benefit is to begin the process of developing ballot statement language that will push and persuade voters to the correct decision – a decision that will always be to vote for the tax. The reasons will be a short recital of the usual, low-hanging fruit, public safety being at the top of the list, but with no explanation that our public safety corps – emergency medical personnel (formerly known as :firefighters) and cops already suck up the majority of Fullerton’s General Fund. Mention of parks, quality of life, libraries and now “homeless” will be thrown in to the pot; and infrastructure maintenance will be included, disingenuously, to get support of the more hard-headed voter, just like last time.
Let me count the ways…
And of course this language will be also be used by the inevitable political action committee formed to wage the propaganda war.
Make no mistake about it. The consultant hired to undertake this effort will know at the outset what his mission is. He knows who hired him and he knows what his employer wants.
Here’s a fun little Aussie video that spells out the process succinctly:
And so it goes. The start of a charade in which the taxpayers foot the bill to be “educated” into supporting a pre-determined outcome. The line between education (legal) and propaganda (illegal) is not bright, as asserted by Councilmember Bruce Whitaker. The fuzzy demarcation is exploited all the time by government agencies – always based on information collected in the original poll.
Don’t Reward the City’s Stupidity
The hopeful part of this is that the electorate is not always as easily persuaded as is supposed by the would be taxers. This was demonstrated in Fullerton in 2020 when voters rejected the ill-considered Measure S, and property tax-based bond floats by Fullerton’s two school districts.
In the end the Council (Jung, Zahra and Charles) voted, vaguely, to keep the “education” process going, a process that we know is nothing other than political propaganda aimed at persuading a majority of voters and coordinating with a special political action committee set up to scare, cajole, and bamboozle the voters.
A few years ago during the depths of the COVID pandemic, the Fullerton City Council voted to put a sales tax measure on the ballot. Since things were looking grim and with revenue falling off, the best course of action in City Hall seemed to be to lay it on to taxpayers. It was necessary to protect Fullerton’s quality of life, you see; or, to be more precise, to protect the pay and pensions of City employees, particularly the cops and “fire fighters” who suck up the majority of the municipal budget.
Well, the names have mostly changed, except for Ahmad Zahra, but the playbook remains the same.
At their November 7th meeting the City Council heard a report from a company called FM3 that had been tasked with producing a survey of resident concerns, and, significantly, to poll them about how to raise revenue. And lots of it.
Who actually hired FM3 in the first place is a mystery, but it must have been our illustrious City Manager, Eric Levitt, since no record of the Council approving a contract is found in the City Clerk’s database. So far they have been paid $49,000 – most likely sneaking under their City Manager’s spending authorization.
Before delving into the presentation, it’s important to note that FM3 is a consulting operation deeply involved in promoting government tax and bond efforts, and has been supporting liberal Democrat politicians for decades. One of the clients listed on their website is Carter/Mondale! On their splash page we find the slogan: Synthesizing Public Opinion To Help Achieve Your Goals, which is code for push polling that promotes your client’s goal of raising taxes.
The company conducted its polling of likely voters last spring, The “results” were presented to the Council on the 7th.
The concerns of the citizenry polled emphasized Fullerton’s rotten roads and included a bunch of stuff that the City has no control over and is merely being used as data filler. The options were presented by the pollsters.
Notice the inclusion of budget shortfalls on the list. According to FM3, 45% of those surveyed believe budget shortfalls are a extremely/very serious problem. Really? Then the other shoe begins to drop.
First, it’s curious that somehow data relating to 2019 and 2020 are shared. Where did that data come from? And what happened to 2021 and 2022? This presentation is just nonsense.
The bland term “additional funding” to the initiated means more taxes, but probably not to those polled. Not yet anyway, for the respondents are being artfully massaged by people whose job it is to push and pass tax proposals for their governmental “clients.” The bit about providing “the level of services Fullerton residents need and want” is telling, and so is the language. How does one’s “personal opinion” qualify one to opine on all Fullerton residents? The purpose is to loosen the respondents mind into the miasma of the common good, as defined by the principle beneficiaries – City employees. Then the other shoe hit the ground.
It didn’t take very long for FM3 to roll out a couple of “hypothetical” sales tax raising ballot measures, one a general purpose tax and the other more narrowly directed to infrastructure, although including the ambiguous phrase “to maintain rapid police, fire and 911 response.” The general purpose tax only requires 50%+1 ballot majority; the special purpose tax requires a 67% majority. The latter is an almost impossible threshold to get over.
Then FM3 rolls out some interesting language in their push for a general sales tax. Notice how these alleged concerns of the surveyed mimic the language of the typical “push poll.” FM3 is using language that will elicit super-high positive responses and suggestthat others are already on board. The tiny text at the bottom of the slide tells all. But is all this dire language persuasive when it actually comes to voting?
Finally, FM3 sums it up by saying that a general sales tax is winnable. But is it? Somebody said the same thing about the City’s Measure S back in 2020 and it failed.
In the end the Council (Jung, Zahra and Charles) voted to keep the “education” process going, a process that we know is nothing other than political propaganda aimed at persuading a majority of voters and coordinating with a special political action committee set up to scare, cajole, and bamboozle the voters.
As Bruce Whitaker pointed out on the 7th, there is supposed to be a “bright line” that separates government information from government propaganda. But this line only in the abstract law. In practice the line dissolves almost completely.
A Friend just forwarded an article in the Yellowing Fullerton Observer about the City’s latest foray into something called economic development – an effort to create more tax revenue, somewhere, somehow, sometime. The good folk in City Hall are alarmed at the looming budget deficit they forecast in the next few years. And they know full well that another attempt at a sales tax like the ill-fated Measure S promoted by Ahmad Zahra and Jesus Quirk-Silva would be a shaky proposition.
According to the Observer the City hired an entity called Kosmont Companies to assay Fullerton’s future and determine where tax generating opportunities may lay. At the June 20th meeting of the City Council a report by Kosmont was submitted for general perusal.
Exhausting all options…
I note that Kosmont Companies is an operation whose sole raison d’etre these days is to work for Redevelopment Successor agencies and municipalities trying to gin up revenue to support the bureaucratic establishment. According to the staff report Kosmont was employed by “the City” in February 2023; since no agenda report exists for this contract, it must have been executed out of the public eye by our esteemed City Manager, Eric Levitt. I’ll address the report itself and the Council’s reaction in another post.
I often wonder why anybody thinks local government have any business promoting these types of endeavors. Government employees know little about business operations, nothing about the concept enterprise; they know defined benefit pensions, their union agreements and petty, make-work bureaucratic stuff. These same chuckleheads just up-zoned and entitled a massive apartment project on land they sold to the developer for 10% of its new value. As far as the unknown amount paid to the “consultant” I wonder if even that expense will be recouped by their own work product.
Just as bad, the economic development concept is created and run, for and by, the same people who stand to benefit from it – it it were to even work at all. And of course there is never any accountability for public resources expended in the pursuit of this talisman.
When things get tough, real leaders make difficult choices. And then there are those like Ahmad Zahra.
When Covid 19 rolled around in the spring of 2020 Fullerton was already looking at financial disaster. Years of unbalanced budgets were backfilled by reserve funds by the partnership Fitzgerald, Flory, Silva and Zahra. With the Covid lockdown things looked bleak.
What to do?
“I know” said Ahmad Zahra, “lets have a sales tax.”
And so the ill-fated Measure S was placed on the ballot by the same herd: Fitzgerald, Flory, Silva and Zahra. The proponents didn’t seem to care that sales taxes are inherently regressive, and Zahra seemed uninterested in the fact that his D5 constituents would be disproportionately hurt. Ironically, at the time, Zahra was hauling in $4,000 a month for a few hours time as an appointed member of the Orange County Water District Board.
Later, in 2021, when federal relief money rolled in to Fullerton, Zahra tried to direct funds away from infrastructure and into salaries and pension obligations.
Well, those chickens have come to roost. This mail piece landed in D5 mailboxes today:
Back in 2020 our Lords and Masters at City Hall cooked up a plan to impose a sales tax increase upon people buying stuff in Fullerton. It was staff-driven natch, and lazy liberals Zahra, Quirk-Silva, Flory and Fitzgerald were on board. It was called Measure S. See, they figured the path of least resistance was deploying a new tax rather than finally exercising fiscal restraint.
The Big Lie
Measure S soon found itself in the crosshairs of Fullerton anti-tax advocates and some well-placed signs describing the true nature of the beast doomed it to failure come election time.
Well guess what? They’re at it again. This time the idea is something called a Pension Obligation Bond, a mechanism for paying off part of Fullerton’s massive unfunded pension actuarial liability at CalPERS, the State’s giant pension administrator.
An introductory briefing was on the Council’s agenda last Tuesday to start the cheerleading process – a process that will entail the employment of an “expert” who will certainly benefit from a positive result; and of course “bond counsel” the legal camp-followers who push bonds on lazy elected officials after a hot meal and a few glasses of wine.
As everybody knows, the interest on the bonds are ultimately backed up by the collateral of new property taxes. This revenue would go to pay down the pension debt and free up money owed to CalPERS for staff salaries and benefits that will ultimately, and ironically, increase pension debt.
Here’s the second kicker: because a pension obligation bond is not deemed new debt, per se, but a sort of pea-under-the-walnut shell maneuver, no vote of the people is required – as it is in the case of general obligation bonds. It just gets “validated” by a judge and goes through on the nod unless challenged. Ouch. Of course the Council, if it wanted to could put the issue on a ballot anyhow, if they chose to move ahead with this scheme.
Of course the strategy for this type of thing is to reprimand opponents by citing the fact that the daily cost is little more than a Big Mac, or some other trifle and in return we get…what do we get again? Our loyal and devoted “public safety” club will almost certainly gobble up the lion’s share of this taxpayer largesse, just like they already do, and we’ll be even worse off than we already are, and no desperately needed cultural changes will have been made.
I looked over the agenda material on line and found nary a clue as to how this was even agendized. Another smoke screen protecting somebody.
Last week the Voice of OC published an opinion piece by a gentleman named Ed Bargas. Mr. Bargas is head of the civilian employee union in Fullerton, and if he wrote this drivel, then I’m the Pope.
You can read about how Bargas believes Fullerton is at a crossroads – meaning that the City leaders must choose between the welfare of his union members and the citizenry at large. Of course he doesn’t put it like that. He complains that the City Council is embracing the conservatism of the ’80s in which government is viewed with suspicion, even hostility. To this all I can suggest to Mr. Bargas is to read the pages of this blog, and after reviewing the litany of incompetence, corruption and cover-ups, reconsider whether or not suspicion, even hostility is justified.
Bargas makes the mistake of starting of his long list of threatened city functions with public safety, forgetting to remind his readers that it is the very public safety pensions laid out by supine politicians like Ahmad Zahra and Jesus Silva & Co. that have brought financial crisis to Fullerton.
Of course the Big Problem is lack of revenue, and Mr. Bargas was no doubt a cheerleader for the ill-fated Measure S on last November’s ballot that went down in flames, falling victim to honesty and common sense. Maybe he thinks that somehow the new majority of responsible councilmembers can be persuaded to try that scam again. Well good luck with that.
