FFFF supports causes that promote intelligent, responsible and accountable government in Fullerton and Orange County
According to Scott Moxley at the OC Weekly 4th District Supervisor Shawn Nelson has applied for a concealed weapon permit from our Sheriff Sandra Hutchens.
Said Nelson: “Most politicians just shoot off their mouths. I’m aiming higher. Literally”
No, he really didn’t say that. But any loony potential perp out there take heed. Nelson’s a good shot. He said so himself.
He’ll be packing a Colt Commander .45 slug hurler. That will leave an impression on just about anybody.
Scott Martindale of the Register has posted this shocking revelation that two-thirds of JC students in OC fail to get any sort of diploma or certification after six years.
That’s a pretty damning indictment of a system that sucks in billions of tax dollars in this State every year and that is opaquely run by local boards of trustees composed of educrats, geriatric featherheads, and assorted big-government apologists.
Apparently, our community colleges are largely acting as baby sitters for late teens and early twenty-somethings who seem to be more interested in putting off a serious confrontation with the working life than with education. Harsh? Yes. Oversimplistic? Maybe. But consider that through the JCs in OC we are subsidizing the educational infrastructure for over a hundred thousand people at any given time who will never graduate.
And then contemplate the vast, breathtakingly compensated hierarchy of admninstrators that administer this Empire of Failure and tell me the system ain’t broken.
At the end of the last City Council meeting on April 5 Councilman Don Bankhead, supported by fellow Councilman Pat McKinely, requested that the agenda of the next council meeting on April 19 include an item to remove the term “acting” from the title of the job currently held by Joe Felz. Joe Felz was appointed Acting City Manager last December following the retirement of Chris Meyer.
Joe Felz certainly has a great deal of experience working for Fullerton. According to the city’s December 2010 press release he began working for Fullerton while still in college. He served as Director of the Parks and Recreation Department in 2007 following a two year stint as assistant to Meyer when he was City Manager.
Is Joe Felz the right person to hire as City Manager, a position that currently pays $166,250.00 per year, plus benefits? Don Bankhead and Pat McKinley seem to think so. McKinley worked for the city for over 15 years himself as Chief of Police, and Don Bankhead has been on the city council for over 22 years and also worked for Fullerton’s Police Dept. for many, many years before that.
Is Felz a good candidate for the job? Maybe, but is he the best person we can get for the money? We may never know, because two city insiders on the council want to hire another one for one of the highest paid and certainly the most powerful position in the city government. Shouldn’t the city conduct a search to find the best candidates for such an important job? They did for the Chief of Police position after McKinley retired from FPD.
Bankhead seems to be in a big hurry to hire Felz permanently because he is “a little tired of using the term acting city manager.” Is it possible that Bankhead is just tired in general and doesn’t want to bother with a job search? Don’t we deserve to know that our City Manager is the best person for the job, and not just the one that has been around for the longest amount of time and knows the most people?
Friends, howzabout about a contest?
We need a prize, of course. Some junk from the FFFF gift shop? We have some T shirts left, I think. Somebody around here stole some Bad Chi signs so I think we may be able give some of those away. Or maybe the real prize is simply contributing to the glory of our city.
Anyway, here’s the first entry. That ought to get your creative juices flowing.
Entries can be emailed to us or uploaded to Tinypic.com and linked in the comments. Good luck!
Update from Admin:
Alright, I found the perfect prize…
It’s a CD from Nancy Sanchez, an awesome jazz singer. My friend Gabriel San Roman told me about Nancy and I saw her play at Steamers in downtown Fullerton. She has a great voice and is pretty cool, too. Check out www.nancysanchezmusic.com.
Every now and then we like to remind our Friends about Fullerton’s recent history. We did it here, in a post on the arrogant mismanagement of Fullerton by former City Manager, James L. Armstrong. We noted that in 2001, after seven years’ worth of failure in Fullerton, he failed all the way to the top job in tony Santa Barbara.
But, alas, Poor Jim has run afoul of the cops up there, and, recently was taken to task by a blog for his efforts to stall the release of information about a city program that subsidized houses for – city employees! Too bad Armstrong mistakenly cc’d his sentiments to the very people who were making the public records request!
Still the same. Incompetent and arrogant.
Here’s an article from Tim Cavanaugh at Reason, having some fun with Rob Reiner’s big government First Five Program.
The best part is the reference to our old friend Matthew J. Cunningham. Follow the links all the way back to a 2006 Flash Report blog post Cunningham did on the program – before he got hooked up with all that Children and Families green!
And here is a tale in The Voice of OC(EA) about how our local branch is suing the State to keep their stash from going to help support MediCal! It seems these people are really, really desperate to keep their gravy train rolling along. After all, the Executive Director of the OC branch makes $327,000 a year in salary and benefits. His job? Handing out cash. Nice work if you can get it.
Right now the First Five superstructure is tottering and about to collapse. Let’s help give it a push.
A while back one of our fans suggested we’d get sued by the City for use of the City seal. (we didn’t). And that go me thinking about the seal itself. So let’s talk about it.
“Designed by artist Tom Van Sant in 1962, the figures shown in the seal are stylized depictions of the qualities important to the City of Fullerton. The orange tree refers to the City’s agricultural beginnings; the man, woman and child represent families; and the open book represents the City’s commitment to providing education and cultural opportunities to its citizens.”
It’s a real, stylized period piece, alright. Just like the building it adorns. Like it? Hate it? Don’t give a damn?
Last week we looked at the number of FSD employees who make over $90k. Now let’s see the salaries of Fullerton Joint Union High School District teachers and administrators for the 2009-10 school year.
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Wow. Four hundred and thirty-two of them earn over $90,000 per year. Some of them teach a little extra summer school while others get stipends for CERT training, coaching badminton or being a leader. There’s also a secretary and a couple of custodian supervisors who earned over $60k in overtime alone.
You can look at this data any way you want, but it’s hard to deny that Fullerton’s educators are very well compensated. The myth of the “poor, underpaid teacher” is crushed.
Which FFFF blogger spent several years molding the young minds of Fullerton’s high schoolers back in the 1980’s?
Here is a simple illustration of what the Fullerton teachers’ union (FETA) is fighting for:
I got an e-mail today from an old Friend who wanted to remind me about something.
A way back in the earliest days of the sordid regime of former OC Sheriff, now disgraced and incarcerated felon Mike Carona, something happened that should never be forgotten.
At the behest of Carona, on December 15, 1998 the OC Board of Supervisors removed the professional requirements for the job of Assistant Sheriff so that he could appoint two of his closest cronies and bag men, Don Haidl and George Jaramillo.
These miscreants proceeded to leave a slime trail in their wake that will always be a disgrace to the OCSD and the County of Orange. They were the henchmen who helped the Crooked Sheriff run his sleazy empire. And who do you suppose made Haidl and Jaramillo’s appointment possible along with the subsequent money laundering, bribing, selling of badges, CCWs, illegal deals with crooked lawyers and bail bondsmen, and interfering in criminal investigations?
That’s right: then Supervisor Todd Spitzer, himself a reserve officer in LA County, and surely somebody who should have known the problem he was creating: because the police are always telling us the importance of their professionalism. And there was Haidl, a shady businessman without a high school diploma and no police experience thrust into the second tier of leadership in one of the largest law enforcement agencies in the nation. Jaramillo was a cop from Garden Grove with none of the requisite command experience previously required.
Carona, Haidl and Jaramillo have now been convicted of crimes and their debauchery has been exposed in one embarrassing media reveation after another. That the scurvy Haidl and Jaramillo toppled over themselves in a rush to rat out Carona is the only redeeming part of the lurid story.
And who helped make all this possible? That’s right, the same guy who approved a retroactive pension spike for public safety employees, and who assures us he has the experience we need in a County Supervisor. Guess Spitzer figures nobody’s been paying attention. He is wrong.