Posted onDead heads

Matthew Cunningham, Big Government Leech, Lauds “Rising Star” of GOP

by 8 Comments on Matthew Cunningham, Big Government Leech, Lauds “Rising Star” of GOP

I am not an annelid.

I couldn’t help but notice that Red County’s resident hypocrite, Matthew J. Cunningham, who makes his living off of Rob Reiner’s massive income redistribution scheme called Prop 10 did a post today on Florida Senate candidate Marco Rubio who delivered the big speech at last night’s GOP Flag Day party.

Sweet Lord. Did Rubio praise Republicans who make their living sucking at the teat of the Welfare State? Maybe he did. I wasn’t there.

Here’s a Cunningham tribute:

“I think Marco Rubio is a true heir to Reagan conservatism: a rock-ribbed dedication to a smaller, restrained federal government,”

Well that’s great for Rubio, but where does Mr. C. from Suite C. fit into this vision of a smaller, restained government?

It’s amazing that this creep who makes his living from a huge, liberal tax and income redistribution project that defines “whole village child rearing” would have the gall to even go to the diner, let alone opine about it.  I heard his candidate Harry Sidhu was there, too, so maybe they let anyone in.

What a complete and utter disgrace.

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Posted onBehind Closed Doors

Why Public Works Projects Cost So Much

by 9 Comments on Why Public Works Projects Cost So Much

If you build it they will come.

Well, paying legally required “prevailing wage” to union workers, for one thing. This adds from 33-50% to the straight labor costs.

But there’s a more insidious cost to reckon with. And that’s the often overlooked administration costs tacked on to construction projects by the City Engineering Department. By gouging these projects with inflated bureaucratic costs, the Engineering Department can pad its own budget without leaning on the General Fund. The monies for capital projects comes from CDBG funds, Redevelopment tax increment, Gas Tax revenue – a whole crazy Byzantine funding network that fortuitously disconnects the payer from the beneficiary.

Yesterday our blogger Christian noted that a contract to upgrade traffic signals at three intersections was let out to a contractor for about $102,000; but that the City’s Engineering Department tacked on a whopping $39,000 for its own administration and inspections. That’s about a 38% increase, and is anomalously high – even for a typical project in Fullerton. Smaller projects get disproportionately nailed. But the point is that actual infrastructure improvements – the very stuff that everybody says they want to promote – is getting, and has gotten robbed by featherbedding in the Engineering Departments.

Of course this has been going for years and years and years. It’s a standard practice. Probably everywhere. So why haven’t the politicians ever cottoned on to this sleight of hand? Maybe they have. But its just so much easier to go along with the “experts” and not ask any questions; or if you do, don’t demand any cogent answers.

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Posted onOrange County Government

$1.4 MILLION – THE COST OF CLERK-RECORDER TOM DALY’S CRONYISM

by 25 Comments on $1.4 MILLION – THE COST OF CLERK-RECORDER TOM DALY’S CRONYISM

Dear Friends, we have just received this essay from one of our long-time readers. Enjoy.

If the election for Clerk-Recorder had anything to teach us, it is that the best candidate doesn’t always win the election. And we wonder why we have the ineffective government we have. I guess all I can say is that we deserve the government we vote for.

As the County budget approval meeting approach we found even more government waste by election victor Tom Daly.  If you look at the previous three years you’ll become aware of yet another way in which this inept “Manager of the Year” continues to waste the taxpayer’s money. In the past three years, Tom Daly has doled out more that $1.4 million for “temporary help” and “extra-help.” This is easily verifiable by looking at the County’s Proposed Budget Book for 2009-2010.

We have previously reported that Tom Daly likes to give non-competitive “extra-help” jobs to his friends and the relatives of campaign donors. But in a time in which the County is laying off employees and forcing furloughs on other agencies, Tom Daly is getting away with budgetary murder. His budget is at the same levels they were when recording and revenues were at an all time high. Property recordings have declined to almost half of the all time mark in 2005, yet Daly seems to believe he is still entitled to hire his friends and relatives of campaign donors at a whopping cost of $1.4 million. This essentially means the County General Fund is being deprived $1.4 million over the past 3 years.

How come? From what we have heard, most of his cronies are in non-essential jobs so if these useless bodies were to go home tomorrow, the department and the County would be just fine with more money in the General Fund. Tom loves to claim that he has reduced his budget by 26% but really that isn’t true – all he does is cook-up the numbers or overspends and draws from his piggy-bank account known as 12D.  He is not supposed to use this fund for plugging his over-spending, but he does, and the County does nothing. He loves to claim that he has only 102 staff but if you count all the extra-help and temp help he is closer to 110 employees. Maybe someone needs to go to the state agency responsible for investigating this fleecing of the county.

Daly’s needs to give back more to the county General Fund; and he can start by letting go of his friends and crony’s relatives like Bruce Mathias, Jennifer Lowe, Steven Oftelie, Dulce Cuevas and a more; and not the extra-help that are not his buddies.

We will be watching who he lets go and hope that the Board of Supervisors deny his request for these extra-help and temporary help expenses. Hopefully with Shawn Nelson now elected to the Board, Tom Daly will be under more scrutiny. Let’s hope for the right thing to happen soon.

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Posted onFullerton City Council

On the Agenda – June 15th, 2010

by 7 Comments on On the Agenda – June 15th, 2010

With the Primary Election over and candidates licking their wounds we jump into Tuesday’s Council Meeting to see what STAFF has in store for our elected representatives. View the full agenda

In closed session there appears to be some labor negotiations going on. First is a discussion regarding Chris Meyer’s position which I hear will be vacated soon. Second, Fullerton Municipal Employees Federation (FMEF) is meeting with Council to determine what they will meet and discuss in the future regarding lay-offs. At least that is what the agenda says. Actually, it says, “Discuss meet-and-confer topics related to layoffs”. Amazing! A meeting to talk about a future meeting! That’s government bureaucracy and waste for you. Why can’t these be public? I don’t think they are talking about a specific person or maybe they are. Either way, I would like to see just how spineless the council can be when it comes to the public employee unions.

There is a plethora of presentations planned which will probably draw the usual hapless attempts at wit from our mayor and perhaps Texas colloquialism which won’t make sense to anyone but the person saying it.

(more…)

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Posted onMSM Falls on Face

Observer Smacked Down

by 9 Comments on Observer Smacked Down

Nobody told us about the depth charges.

Previously we noted the Fullerton Observer’s legal maneuvering in an attempt to add itself to the city payroll. Last week we found out that Sharon Kennedy’s court filing had been met with objections by both the Orange County Register and the City of Fullerton.

The City’s objection is based on the same points we brought up a few weeks ago – namely, the Observer is not printed within the city, it is not printed weekly and it doesn’t have a bona fide list of paying subscribers as required by law. That’s three strikes for the Observer.

City of Fullerton’s Objection

The city calls into question Sharon Kennedy’s own filing, where we learn that the Observer boasts a whopping 598 paid subscribers and a monthly online distribution that rivals FFFF’s daily hits.

Next we have an objection filed by OC Register attorneys, which finds fault with the notice that Kennedy filed for her own hearing. The Register sums up the problem by saying “It is ironic that the Petitioner [Fullerton Observer] is seeking to publish important legal notices, yet cannot even publish its own Notice correctly.”

OC Register’s Objection

Kennedy pushed out her hearing to the end of July. I suspect she will drop it all together rather than suffer further embarrassment.

Bottom line: Kennedy’s dying cause here is to get the Fullerton Observer onto the city payroll. We’ve already demonstrated the paper’s inability to criticize city staff, engage in any kind of investigative journalism within city hall or participate objective reporting all while claiming that it is a legitimate newspaper. It’s hard to imagine any of these conditions improving should Kennedy’s paper wind up on the taxpayer’s dole.

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Posted onBoohooism

Downtown Fullerton Redevelopment Failure

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In 1974 the various Redevelopment project areas were created in Fullerton, including the area that includes the downtown.

This was at the very tail end of the urban renewal era of social engineering that gutted old neighborhoods and districts across the land only to see the creation of bureaucrat-planned ghost towns and vast housing projects that nobody wanted to live in.

Although the downtown area was pretty much left to its own devices in the 70s, the 80s saw a new and noxious interest in re-inventing the area according to the whims of the Redevelopment manager and whatever cookie-cutter standardization idiocy was emanating from central planning workshops. Anybody remember the embarrassing concrete trestles?

True, the old businesses were leaving, put out of business by a new Mall culture. But what was the cure? Specialty retail, standardized street furniture, stamped concrete paving, design guidelines, and a plethora of silliness whose only aim seemed to be to create a roofless mall (an obviously pointless goal) – and provide employment for the Redevelopment manager. Hideous trees were planted that destroyed the sidewalks and on-street parking was removed, spelling final doom for what was left of the downtown businesses, but it was all part of the Master Plan, see? And new Master Plans kept being spit out every five years or so.

And while the City professed an interest in historic preservation, and even took credit for it, historic buildings kept disappearing – either completely or under a wall of brick veneer.

Things weren’t working. A ban on churches and pawn shops and junk yards couldn’t alter the fact that the low rents were pulling in businesses that weren’t “specialty retail.” They were mom and pop second hand stores masquerading as “antique” this and “vintage” that.

Ah! Much had been accomplished, but more work needed to be done. Job security for life!

The FFFF pages are strewn with the ugly history of the late eighties and the nineties when an unaccountable city staff engaged in boondoggle after boondoggle with a complaisant council going along every step of the way, and always taking credit for “revitalizing” downtown Fullerton.

Much had been accomplished, but clearly more work needed to be done.

Huge apartment blocks were approved, giving away millions in profits to favored developers through entitlements and grants. City streets were handed out like Monopoly deeds. The hope was that a captive residential audience would have to patronize downtown business. Synergy was the watchword of the day!

Much had been accomplished, but clearly more work needed to be done.

A new phenomenon was beginning to emerge in the late 90s. The subsidized restaurant. And a  new booze culture was coalescing. Was it policy or accident? Who can say now. But what is inescapable is that for more than a decade the City’s actions and lack of actions had demonstrable effects. And the effects weren’t salutory. The restaurants morphed into bars and the bars morphed into bootleg night clubs and dance halls. The latter weren’t shut down; they were permitted. And then they were subsidized by the taxpayers with free fire water lines.

Every night the downtown area was filling up with drunken out of towners; fights, rapes, a murder. The City Manager wrung his hands. The downtown area was costing over a million dollars a year more to manage than it was bringing in in revenue.

Much had been accomplished, but clearly more work needed to be done.

In the 2000s the merry chase for revitalization continued apace with lustful Redevelopment eyes alighting on a vast Fox Theater project, cynically calculated to leverage popular interest in the Fox Theater. Aha! The anchor project that would make all the other pieces fall into place: success was at hand! Sure, we could move the McDonald’s a couple hundred feet. Six million? No problem! Environmental impacts? No big deal.

Then there is the Amerige Court monster. Aha! The anchor project that would make all the other pieces fall into place: success was at hand! Environmental impacts? No big deal.

And now Redevelopment in downtown Fullerton is 36 years old. Let’s put this in perspective: Fullerton was founded in 1886. And that means for 30% of its life span downtown Fullerton has had Redevelopment. And in 2010 the very sort of business that redevelopment bureaucrats find abhorrent starts up in the very heart of Redevelopment territory. See the irony yet? I do. It’s not about sex, it’s about failure. Oh, well.

Much has been accomplished, but clearly more work needs to be done.

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Posted onBoohooism

Sex and The Liberal OC

by 9 Comments on Sex and The Liberal OC

Claudio is a little fuzzy on the facts of life.

A few months ago at the NUFF blogger’s forum I was confronted by a near-hysterical guy babbling about anchor babies and who knows what else. I didn’t know who he was or what he was talking about. He was almost in tears.

Turns out he is a slightly unstable fellow called Claudio Gallegos – a Liberal OC blogger who was making stuff up about what he thought he saw on our blog.

Yesterday this odd fellow did a post on the same Adam Townsend article about “The Naughty Teddy” that we posted about.

Of course this Gallegos loon tried to blame Shawn Nelson for being behind the City’s effort to investigate this business even though the Townsend article said nothing about Nelson. He used Townsend’s article to claim that FFFF was collectively harassing the enterprising ladies who operate this store. Another casual lie of the sort that drives the Liberal OC engine.

Did poor Claudio bother to read the original post? If he had he would have seen that it was one person’s opinion and that many of our bloggers and regular commenters were okay with the use. And he would have realized that the gist of the post was an ironic condemnation of 40 years of Redevelopment failure in downtown Fullerton – as conceived by Redevelopment standards themselves! Of course all this presupposes a basic intellectual honesty from this guy, which of course would be a contradiction in terms. He linked to the Desert Rat’s post from yesterday, but not the original post. How dreary.

OC Liberal readers were offered a 20% discount on store merchandise, and I think that’s just great. Now Dan and Chris and Claudio know where they can do their early Christmas shopping.

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Posted onFullerton City Council

The Register Finds Time for Sex

by 6 Comments on The Register Finds Time for Sex

It’s been a couple of months since The Fullerton Savage’s debut on this blog drew over sixty responses to the story of a new sex oriented shop in downtown Fullerton.  Now the Register has gotten into the act with a story about the same subject.  Adam Townsend, the author, and many commenters on this blog seem to think I had something inherently against the business in question.  This is what Mr. Townsend wrote:

‘The author called the shop’s merchandise “trash.” ‘The blog said that seeing the underwear-clad mannequins and other sexually-oriented merchandise would harm children and said allowing the business to operate was “engendering blight.’

To be fair, I did use the word “trash”, but trashy isn’t the worst thing to associate with lingerie.  I never wrote that the sight of the busty mannequins etc. would “harm children.”  I did write that they would get “quite an education” from looking into the shop’s windows.  Remember, we are The Education City!

So maybe Adam Townsend got the wrong idea about my attitude toward a sex-themed business.  No big deal, but where he really blew it in his article was when he wrote that I ‘said allowing the business to operate was “engendering blight.”‘

No, Mr. Townsend, what I asked was “Is there any better evidence of redevelopment engendering blight?”  This is no small distinction.  Shops like The Naughty Teddy are sometimes cited as examples of blight when cities are trying to establish redevelopment zones.  Downtown Fullerton has been a redevelopment zone since 1973.  My point, Mr. Townsend, was that despite nearly forty years and millions of dollars spent to push out pawn shops, lure in restaurants, add trees, build signs, commission murals, rehab storefronts, brick street medians, redesign traffic signals, build mixed use developments, and whatever else The Redevelopment Agency unilaterally decides is good for the area, in the end a 5,000 square foot shop that sells lubricants, videos and sex toys to the 21-and-over only crowd is open for business near a major intersection downtown.

Well, just for the record, I don’t really care what consenting adults do for sex and I don’t care what a business sells, as long as both are safe.  But if a city spends millions of taxpayer dollars trying to turn a downtown into restaurant Disneyland or whatever it is they are trying to do with it, I would really like to know how The Naughty Teddy fits into their vision for the whole place.

Did the business lie on their application to the city, as has been claimed, or are they the victims of a prudish municipal mindset?  I don’t know.  Several tattoo parlors have already opened downtown, and the city is right behind that curve.  Look for an agenda item concerning the classification of tattoo parlors on the next council meeting agenda.

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