FFFF supports causes that promote intelligent, responsible and accountable government in Fullerton and Orange County
A bit of a debate as to whether the Downtown Fullerton Artwalk is really worth a damn popped up on another thread so it seems appropriate to advertise the fact that tonight is the monthly attempt to brighten our cultural horizon with some artsy-fartsy stuff.
So go downtown tonight and check it our for yourselves.
Yesterday the State Attorney General handed out an opinion that, yes, outgoing Anaheim Mayor-for-Hire, Kurt Pringle did indeed hold incompatible offices as the Chairman of the California High Speed Rail Authority. For three long years. And that raises all sorts of questions about the ethics of Der Pringle’s votes on both HSR prioritization issues that benefited him and his clients, and City of Anaheim land use issues that benefited – him and his clients. You can read all about it in an LA Times article, here.
Well, we told you so. What will his mom say?
Interestingly the other day the Voice of OCEA did a story on an e-mail exchange between Herr Burgermeister Pringle and his former Director of the HSR, in which he attacks the “core competence”of the Authority’s engineers. The author misses the point, somewhat, in noting Pringle’s critique of the “experts” like so many others in California have done; but the real point is that his anger was based on their unwillingness to defy engineering realities to deliver the HSR line to his already designated ARTIC boondoggle. It certainly wasn’t lost on the recipient of his e-mail who noted dryly that he wasn’t sure if he was communicating with the HSR Chair or the Mayor of Anaheim.
Well, our boy Pringle is days away from being off the OCTA and out of City Hall (except as a lobbyist to his hand selected replacements, of course). But what about his Chairmanship of the CHSRA? Can the new guv keep him? Hard to imagine why Jerry Brown would keep on the HSR a repuglican who has soiled himself and the Authority so badly, if he had a choice.
Well, not the law, exactly. More like City Council Administrative Policy #37, approved last February. Check it out:
Administrative Policy #37
Here’s the deal: the guy with most seniority since last being Mayor shall be appointed, plain and simple. And that means our Crazy Ol’ Doc Heehaw is line to shoulder the burden of the mayoralty, like it or not. Well, he can shirk his duty again, like he did before, and go to the second spot.
That means the next in line to be Mayor is Sharon Quirk-Silva, with Dr. Phogbound as Mayor Pro Tem; and if he declines the second spot, too, that would fall to the highest vote getter in the last election. And that’s our old Friend, Bruce Whitaker.
Now it could very well be that Sharon Quirk-Silva would defer her place until next year to run for re-election in 2012 with the title “Mayor of Fullerton,” in which case our next mayor would be Whitaker.
Of course Administrative Policy #37 isn’t worth the TP it was written on or the Sharpie it was written with – despite the fact that it’s the wet-dream of all Fullerton liberals, and ironically could produce the first truly conservative mayor since…well, since anybody could possibly remember.
How will it play out? Who knows? One thing is certain. This is Fullerton and it’s bound to be a confused mess. But the entertainment value should be high.
Even before they were elected, the superintendent let the Fullerton School Board candidates know that tickets had been reserved for them at the 2010 CSBA conference in in the Bay Area, which starts today.
Presumably the California School Boards Association will introduce the new adherents to the ways of the educational bureaucracy. Topics will include unconditional respect, union coddling, collaborating, achievement gapping, revenue generation, tax enumeration and the proper operation of trite awards ceremonies.
Check out the program:
CSBA 2010 Annual Education Conference and Trade Show Guide
It’s loaded with ads for lobbyists and political consultants eager to help young board members navigate the challenges of passing new school bonds and local property taxes.
So will our new school board members drink in the delicious Kool Aid of California’s educational establishment? Or will they withstand the temptation of vacuous adoration from their new group of friends, holding their promises of independence above the cheap thrill of being “liked” by their peers.
I suppose we’ll find out soon enough.
According to the OC Registrar of Voters, Doug Chaffee has requested a recount in the election for Fullerton City Council in which he finished 90 votes behind former Po-lice Chief Pat McKinley.
90 votes. A seemingly insurmountable lead, really. After all, any errors in counting are just as likely to go against Chaffee as for him. It sure seems like a fool’s errand, but what the hell, gotta give it that last shot, right?
Not too sure how this effects next Tuesday’s swearing in of McKinley since the recount will not have happened.
The last remaining Observers awoke this morning only to discover that the website of Fullerton’s favorite liberal rag had been digitally violated by rogue Internet vandals.
Several years’ worth of error-ridden editorials and retyped city press releases have been replaced with a single web page containing an indecipherable message and some horrible trance music.
The number of readers who will be affected by this outage is unknown, but private documents released by the Observer in a court last summer revealed that the Observer’s online readership is insignificant in comparison to that of its digital neighbors.
It is also unknown how much of the Fullerton Observer’s priceless archives were lost in the attack. Let’s hope SK keeps a backup.
What’s going on tonight in Fullerton? I have no idea. But these guys do:
Inside Fullerton is a new website that posts the latest happenings in Fullerton’s restaurants, bars, shops, theaters and everywhere else you can think of.
The site seems to update once or twice a day. That’s quite a lot of work. In fact, there’s only one other Fullerton site that can pull that off, and it’s us!
Welcome to the world wide web, Inside Fullerton.
Yesterday I put up a post on a recent Register article about…well, I still don’t know what it was really about, but it had to do with graffiti in Fullerton. I noted somewhat acerbically that the authors, Townsend & Terrell, cited some cop from LA who worried about Fullerton’s “Art Scene” as somehow being a catalyst for graffiti!
Now let’s consider the rest of the piece. The title asks a question that is meant to be provocative, and it succeeds; but the article only dances around the topic from there on out. Hmm. Asking provocative questions then letting them dangle. Almost sounds like irresponsible bloggery to me.
First we note that only some buildings in the 600 block of Williamson are cited as typical of the sort of graffiti train riders see all the way to LA. And Deputy Thibodeaux is only concerned that Fullerton could become a “mecca” for taggery, thus echoing the tentative nature of the headline.
A city employee is invited to comment on the situation:
Fullerton Maintenance Services Manager Bob Savage said he’s seen the square footage of graffiti the city paints over increase sevenfold in the last 15 years. (A link. To a 2006 article that includes a very interesting Anaheim quotation: Community Preservation Manager Bill Sell said there’s no indication that graffiti is increasing, but the city is tracking it more closely.)
“When I first started 15 or 16 years ago, I was doing about 100,000 square feet (per year),” Savage said. “Now, I’m up to about 700,000.”
That sure sounds impressive. But could it be that Mr. Savage’s four man crew has grown and is now just doing a more thorough job, or is responding to faster response times? It’s possible. Hard to tell.
As to the actual statistics we still don’t really know much since the article only cites County-wide convictions for vandalism, not just graffiti: 85 in 2000, 321, in 2009. In 2010 the numbers seem to be going down. No data for Fullerton, no useful statistics at all to support some existing or impending apocalyptic wave; just a story from a property manager along the train tracks where tagging is likely always high.
Back to Mr. Thibodeaux, who starts talking tough about resolving a problem that has still not been established. Mr. T. breaks out this scary screamer:
“Technically, these crews fall under the Street Terrorism Protection Act,” Thibodeaux said.
Oh boy! Now we have another “War” on our hands!
Of course this is an age-old ploy as the authors try to fool us into thinking some sort of case has been made and now opinions for a solution must be solicited. But then they foul up their own strategy by inviting comment from an old pal of ours, as the story takes an abrupt turn:
Fullerton Police Sgt. Andrew Goodrich said that Fullerton isn’t known to have a big problem with graffiti, and most of the tags that maintenance services covers up are black scrawls, often connected with street gangs. The vandal’s purpose is the message, not any artistry in the tag itself, he said.
Now we have one cop talking about tagging crews and another who says the real problem is gang markings and suggests that maybe Fullerton isn’t in any way unique. What a cluster. And Mr. Savage, it turns out, agrees that most of the graffiti is “nuisance stuff,” not “art” although the distinction is probably lost on the property owner who has to pay to get it removed. Parenthetically we note that Savage actually admires “street art”:
“Some of it is just beautiful artistry, that’s all there is to it,” he said.
The article stumbles toward a blurry finish line by stubbornly clinging to the still unsubstantiated fact that graffiti is on the rise in Fullerton. Evidence that it is seemingly on the decline in Placentia, as well as in cash laid out for graffiti removal by the OCTA is posited as if to somehow indirectly support the thesis that there is a peculiar graffiti problem in Fullerton:
Although graffiti is still a significant problem in nearby Placentia, incidents have dropped over the last five years, with graffiti reports in the city shrinking by more than 40 percent between 2006 and 2010, according to police department records.
Most Orange County cities have started using the Orange County Sheriff Department’s online tracking system to share and track graffiti incidents, helping law enforcement officials in OC and neighboring counties identify and prosecute tagging crews. The collaboration, which includes Fullerton, is helping to reduce graffiti in the county, said Ramin Aminloo, senior developer for the sheriff’s department.
Since the Tracking Automated and Graffiti Reporting System’s implementation three years ago, the amount of cash shelled out by the Orange County Transportation Authority to clean up graffiti has dropped from $283,000 in 2007 to less than $170,000 in 2009, according to the sheriff’s department.
Hmm. If we accept the premise of our authors, we are now inevitably forced to ask: is the anti-graffiti collaboration really failing in Fullerton? But of course local reporters are not taught to mention embarrassing things like failure, and so the possibility is not even addressed in the article – which should really be the most significant part of the story if graffiti actually is on a precipitous rise here.
The piece mercifully ends with the obligatory interview with a vandal and a former vandal to get their perspective, and a posting of the city’s hotline.
At least by the end of this hodge-podge of logic and confusion nobody is blaming Fullerton students and artists for urban social pathology.
A recent article on Fullerton graffiti by professional reporters Adam Townsend and Jessica Terrell of the Orange County Register, Junior Grade, sets all sorts of standards for general slackery; yet the worst part of it was taking some lame-brain LA County Deputy Sheriff as an authority – on anything.
The Deputy Sheriff, Mike Thibodeaux, knows all about graffiti from his day job in LA. And at night he comes home to Orange County, and to Townsend and Terrell, seemingly, that makes him an authority on graffiti in Fullerton. Here’s the egregious Deputy Thibodeaux worrying out loud about the fate of Fullerton, and his analysis of the situation:
He said that he worries Fullerton may become a mecca for graffiti artists. He cited the youth culture around Cal State Fullerton, the proliferation of tattoo shops to which graffiti artists often gravitate as a career move and the thriving legitimate arts scene in the town.
Mecca. Well, you can’t have a Mecca without a jihad.
And of course the idiotic statement goes unchallenged by our intrepid reporters by at least asking for a single shred of evidence tying graffiti to “youth culture” at CSUF, tattoo parlors, or even legitimate artists.
Say, what is “youth culture,” anyway?
More on the graffiti story to follow.
On Tuesday, four OC Supervisors voted to ban medical marijuana dispensaries in unincorporated County areas. Only one voted in support – and that someone was Fullerton’s Shawn Nelson, who emphasized that medical MJ was the will of the people and also explained to me that it would encourage a black market for medically helpful marijuana. As Supervisor Nelson pointed out, government spends way too much time trying to figure out how to thwart what people want instead of facilitating it. According to Nelson, the main issue is “zoning.” Medical marijuana is legal in California and the County of Orange should not use proscriptive use zoning within the County’s jurisdiction that would ban any dispensaries from distributing medical marijuana, or prohibit activity that is already illegal.
The proposed ordinance lumped “sales” and “dispensing” into the same category of banned activity. And therein lies the problem.
Just a few years back my friend’s dad died of cancer, he did, however, enjoy a heightened quality of life in his final year once he got access to medical marijuana. It not only gave him an appetite but it also made him feel better and actually laugh.
Supervisor Nelson showed a lot courage on this vote as the other Supes caved into pressure of the County staff and the Sheriff. Nelson will no doubt draw fire from the army of dead-heads and fake drug warrior ‘pugs who either love the annual billions wasted on the disastrous War on Drugs, or even worse, those who are too chicken to stand up to them.
And I thought Supervisor John Moorlach had more courage than he showed, but boy, I sure got that wrong. Scratch a “conservative,” hit an authoritarian.