Friends For Fullerton's Future

April 5, 2010Fullerton City Council

On The Agenda – April 6th, 2010

Here we are in April with no real change in the City’s business practices. View the agenda for April 6th.

In the Redevelopment Agency’s Closed Session we find three properties being negotiated for. Everyone’s favorite land Czar, Rob Zur Schmiede, wants to spend your money to buy 345 E. Commonwealth, 147 W. Santa Fe, and 324 W. Valencia. What could our Czar want with these fruited lots? Certainly the transaction will bring tremendous revenue to the City’s general fund, will it not? NO. Once again, we get the short end of this stick, too. Hopefully, one of our Friends can enlighten us with details as to what the Czar has planned.

In the Open Session, the Council will consider an appointment to the Parks and Recreation Commission.

There are 7 items on the consent calendar. Aside from the minutes there are a few items worth commenting on.

Item 2 seeks to raise the speed limits on a few streets. I noted on my March 16^th comments:

“Now you get to punch that gas pedal and really feel the wind in your hair! Item #15 seeks to change the speed limits on Sunny Ridge and Pioneer Avenue. The PD asked Traffic Engineering to conduct a traffic study. The results: RAISE, that is correct, the speed limit! Here is the breakdown:

Pioneer Ave (Sunny Ridge to Gilbert) Increase from 25mph to 30mph.

Pioneer Ave (Gilbert to Parks) Establish a speed limit of 40mph

Sunny Ridge Dr (Malvern to Pioneer) Increase from 25mph to 35mph

Sunny Ridge Dr (Pioneer to Roscrans) Increase from 25mph to 30mph

All other speed limits remain unchanged”

Why do you suppose the PD would want to raise the speed limit? Surely they aren’t concerned with traffic congestion. The text of the ordinance states that these speeds are “…for the safe operation of vehicles…” Perhaps it is because the PD cannot enforce the speed limit with radar at their currently posted speeds. Raising the speed limits to as much as 40mph would likely result in more citations which equal more revenue. So, maybe don’t punch that gas pedal too hard.

Item 3 could change the way the City does noticing for public hearings. It seems the newspapers are just too expensive. Staff will have four places to post notices of public hearings: City Hall, Maintenance Services Yard, Museum, and the Main Library. It’s odd that they would use the main library (all of about 150 feet from City Hall) and the museum (about two blocks over from City Hall) for the notices. It seems a broad approach including certain parks or perhaps schools would have been considered.

Council wants Fullerton designated as a “Recovery Zone”! Read item 4. The Redevelopment Agency, lead by everyone’s favorite land Czar, wants to go after some financing opportunity available if only council adopts this resolution. This looks to be a 30-year bond worth initially $2,705,000. I’m not much of an accountant so someone needs to do the math and find out what it will really cost. It sounds like another way to waste our money. After passing this resolution, we will all need to get checked into recovery… We can start with a few council members!

Item 5 states that the PD wants the City to accept some federal and state grant funding worth $93,782. The individual grants vary and all have strings attached. Some include $44,652 for DUI checkpoint-related costs, body armor costs that have doubled and approved of at an August 5, 2008 council meeting, and an FBI reimbursement of up to $12,680 in 2009-2010 and $16,903 in 2010-2011 for overtime, training, and equipment for an officer to be assigned to the Orange County Regional Computer Forensics Laboratory.

Item 6 is a maintenance declaration between Engineering, the Land Czar (a.k.a. Redevelopment Agency), and the Walter N. Johnson Family Trust. The idea is to get the alley to be maintained by someone other than the Engineering Department which is broke as is the alley.

Pay more for your water! Item 7 says that Engineering wants you to pay more for your water so they can fund the city’s League of Cities slush fund? WTF? Approval of this item gives staff the go-ahead to mail out notices of a PROPOSED rate hike. According to the staff summary, the proposal is for a $2 per month per customer increase in the service charge. So, if we take every residential water meter and add $2 each for each month, staff thinks it will add up to $700,000 in to the Water Fund for the 2010-2011FY. If my math is correct, which it rarely is, that means we will have 29,167 water customers paying an additional $2 per month for a 12-month period. Good luck Bankhead and Keller when the voters find out about this little scam!

Item 8 of the Regular Business is the Land Czar’s recommendation to Council that they re-agendize (it’s a made up word on the agenda, likely means “to place on the agenda again”) the proposal from the Business Improvement District’s consultant Urban Place. The proposal is for $3,100 for “initial Business Improvement District explorative community outreach.” Give me the $3,100 and I’ll give you a shiny report with glossy photos and a little exploration of reaching out to the community…

You have to love the way Item 9 is stated: “AFFORDABLE HOUSING RFP SELECTION CRITERIA DISCUSSION”. It’s quite laughable if you consider that the Council and Land Czar always say we need more affordable housing. Doc HeeHaw likes to proclaim that by golly it’s the law. In the unlikely event you believed old Doc, he likes to lie. Affordable housing quotas aren’t law, they are the strings attached to some of the silly grants our city staff chases after. Remember, Doc’s best years, if he had any, were gone long before he set foot in the council chambers. Anyway, if you think council needs to have certain selection criteria for their affordable housing RFP’s, then chime in.

And lastly, old Doc made news when he Hee-Hawed is way off of the Vector Control Board’s meeting last month. Item 10 states: “Recommendation by City Clerk’s Office: Appoint a representative to the Orange County Vector Control .”

The key word is REPRESENTATIVE. I’m sure the OCVC Board will be happy to have anyone but Doc around. I would really like to know what set him off. Maybe we could do it at the next council meeting and get him to quit…

In summary, if tax dollars were turds, this agenda might represent more waste than even the Orange County Sanitation District could handle.

As always, if you have any information to contribute or if you feel I missed something important, please give us your comments.

April 5, 2010Dick Jones

Bad Time to Raise Taxes; Especially to Save the League of Cities Baloney

by admin7 Comments

Taxes takin’ my whole damn check, junkies makin’ me a nervous wreck, the price of food is goin’ up, an’ as if all that shit wasn’t enough, this Tuesday evening the city’s considerin’ a water rate increase.

Furthermore, the city is going to use the rate increase to pay for the League of Cities baloney. The two spendthrift promoters of this idea are Don Bankhead and Pam Keller who in 2008 attended the League of Cities conference in Long Beach here and here, a mere 25 miles from their front doors and racked up $400 per night waterfront hotel bills.

The League of Cities is a do nothing operation run by bureaucrats for the purpose of promoting their own policies. Fullerton’s annual membership budget is $75,000 – not an inconsiderable sum, exactly why the City of Orange quit the League.

NO new taxes, NO bogus water rate increase. We all know Bankhead and Keller are going to vote for this tax increase and I suspect Dick “RINO” Jones will, too.

We’ll find out tomorrow night.

April 5, 2010April 5, 2010OC's Fourth District

A Little Common Sense Could Go a Long Way

by admin10 Comments

The other day one of our Friends asked Shawn Nelson for his impressions on the much-discussed High Speed Rail project. Our Friend has helpfully forwarded Nelson’s reply:

I have been struck lately by the supporters of the high speed rail and their seeming lack of common sense when it comes to problem solving; my observations have led me to believe that the current leadership of the program has become more focused on getting a pot of government gold to spend (the more the merrier) and enriching the myriad players involved in the process. By ignoring existing opportunities to run the rail project on the already existing lines of the Metrolink and Amtrak the current design for the high speed rail (HSR) to run from Anaheim to Los Angeles provides a windfall to those in the consulting industry by requiring countless hours of public outreach and environmental impact study.

Why aren’t the leaders of the program asking the basic questions and looking for basic answers? Case in point: I went to a presentation in Anaheim two weeks ago given by the project team of HSR. They explained that the HSR will be able to connect Anaheim and LA in 23 minutes. Of course to accomplish this the tracks would need to be able to cross existing streets that are not presently separated from the rail line (think at grade rail crossings with the drop arms and flashing lights) and some improvements to a curve in the tracks in the Buena Park area. They admitted that the first leg could be a stand alone service in case the rest of the project were never built!

After a few follow up questions we learned the existing system only takes 30 minutes as is and with a few of the improvements that are necessary for the HSR the Metrolink will be able to achieve the same speed as the HSR from Anaheim to LA. With a few of the upgrades being made to the existing system we could all make it to downtown LA in about 26 minutes.

In layman’s terms the first leg of the project is a likely multi-billion dollar effort to shave a few minutes off the average commute from Anaheim to LA. It would save ZERO time if we just made the grade separation improvements and ran an express line (i.e. no stops in between) once per hour! Is there anyone on the HSR board that is thinking this through? Clearly we do not need to spend billions of dollars to avoid running an express train once an hour to LA do we?

The concept of HSR in California could be a useful project tying the central parts of the state with the major metropolitan areas of the San Francisco Bay area and greater Los Angeles. Why isn’t the current effort focused on getting the communities in between tied in to the anchors on each end? Couldn’t Amtrak funding be tied in if the train went to the exact same locations on the route? As things stand now both ends of the line have currently operating rail systems that could be used and result in tens of billions in savings. Can’t the HSR start out by connecting the southern most terminus of BART with the northern most terminus of Metrolink?

Art Leahy, former OCTA president and now the current head of the MTA in Los Angeles, has gone on record acknowledging the problems with the existing approach. I applaud Art for standing up. He has a working knowledge of these systems and we should listen to him. I hope he takes a prominent role in the discussion going forward. Another public figure to recently demand some common sense be included in this process is Assemblywoman Diane Harkey of south Orange County who recognized the disaster we are walking into if we sell bonds to cover the costs for the current proposals.

There are a number of other problems such as why would our Measure M dollars be used to fund the vast majority of the HSR train storage facility/transit link planned in Anaheim? Isn’t measure M money generated here for the purpose of helping all commuters get around Orange County? This is a state and federal project not a local project. Getting people from San Francisco to Anaheim was never the purpose of Measure M. To make matters worse, the $140 million or so in Measure M funds being proposed for the train parking facility are desperately needed by cities like Placentia and Fullerton to finance underpasses at railroad grade crossings – grade separations that will make life better for everybody in North Orange County.

The road we are on now is going to exhaust all the funding available at the state and federal levels, enrich a few well-connected consultants, ruin many neighborhoods that don’t need disturbing and accomplish virtually nothing but duplication of service already provided. Why can’t common sense have a place at the table? Government doesn’t have to be the home of poor execution, but in order to get results that are good for the citizens we need to demand accountability before it is too late.

April 5, 2010April 5, 2010Behind Closed Doors

Milking the Welfare State; Repuglicanism for Fun and Profit

by Grover Cleveland14 Comments

PringlePud — First wrap yourself in the flag. The rest is easy.

Away back in 1998, the people of California in their infinite wisdom passed Proposition 10, a tax on cigarettes and tobacco products the revenue of which was to go to the creation of a vast new state and local early child development bureaucracy. At the time, and even subsequently Republicans have assailed the tax and its main advocate, Rob “Meathead” Reiner for this statist approach to whole village child-rearing.

What many people don’t realize is how many supposedly conservative Republicans have made small fortunes participating in skimming lucrative contracts of questionable value off of the tax proceeds.

Let’s take a look at how this works in Orange County.

Proposition 10 created Children and Family Commissions in California’s counties, including Orange County. The very name suggests typical liberal social engineering. Replete with staff, lawyers and appointed commissioners the thing is virtually opaque public-wise, and yet it starts the process of allocating millions of dollars of Prop 10 monies as it adopts programs, and more problematically, hires a plethora of consulting services. And what consulting services they are!

Let’s take a look at the OC Child and Family Commission agenda for the June 4, 2008 meeting. One item really jumps out.

$150,000 to Curt Pringle (up from $100,000 the year before) to be a lobbyist! And another $150,00 to “The White House Writers Group,” a collection of former Reagan script writers, to promote the County’s ever-so special programs and projects nationwide!

Say what? Why is a government agency that is supposed to be helping unhealthy poor kids making healthy, rich Republican adults even richer? Why do they need a lobbyist? They say it’s to protect their bureaucracy from budget raids. Really? $150,000 to lobby the legislature for a mere twelve months? Yep, that’s $12,500 per month; or, over $600 per working day! And, say, how did that Pringle deal work out for them?

And why do they need to promote themselves and their programs anywhere except inside the County? Good questions. Anyhow, $300,000 per annum could feed a lot of hungry kids; or a mere handful of grownup Repuglicans.

If anybody was wondering what Pringle’s “expertise” is, and how it will be applied to his Main Chance Choo Choo, now you know – lobbying for ever greater tax revenue in Sacramento! What a racket!

billcampbell-240x300 — I like to help spread the wealth around...

I notice that in 2008 Commission members include the John Lewis-sawdust-brained-marionette Bill Campbell, and ‘Pug talking pin-head Hugh Hewitt – both chums of our old acquaintance, Matthew J. Cunningham – another supposed big government hater.

News flash! Repuglican “consultants” like Curt Pringle not only make their livings helping us regular citizens “navigate” the treacherous waters of the big government they helped create, they also make big incomes for themselves and their underlings by reaping government windfalls – like Prop 10 revenue redistribution.

Well, the original critics of Proposition 10 were right on the money. But now it looks like some of them are in it – but good.

I’m going to be giving the branches of the Children and Families Commission tree a real good shake, and it will be interesting to see what other strange fruits fall out of it.

April 4, 2010Dead heads

Too Good To Pass Up

by Joe Sipowicz4 Comments

I recently visited the Craig Hunter for Sheriff website and found this picture.

Yeah, a picture of Hunter with Il Duce himself. The guy who became an American hero and terrorism expert by accomplishing – absolutely nothing. That’s right kids. Apparently this noble nation is so starved for real heroes that you can become one by being a mayor in a town where terrorists fly airplanes into your biggest buildings.

But this post isn’t about Rudy Giuliani – not directly, anyway. It’s about authoritarianism masked as conservatism; about using the police power of the government to keep us safe from – ourselves. And that’s the vibe I’ve gotten from this Hunter guy, from his statements about marijuana and the hapless “drug war” and about the rights “that have been given to us” – presumably he believes by the government. It doesn’t help that most of his pictures seem to reveal a guy with a really bad case of constipation.

I really can’t wait for the day that wannabe politicians quit sharing their photos ops with Bush-era police staters.

When this campaign started I really was planning on just boycotting the whole thing. But the more I see of Hunter the less I like him.

April 4, 2010April 28, 2010Behind Closed Doors

Another Day Another Dump on Pringle’s Main Chance Choo Choo

by Mr. Peabody5 Comments

PringlePower — You are growing very sleepy...

This time it’s a story by the LA Times featuring former OCTA boss Art Leahy and others questioning the dedicated tracks, the impacts, and of course some of the basic operating assumptions of the California HSR.

Meantime we’re not holding our collective breath for the release of Curt Pringle’s “business plan” that seems to be at least 5 years late.

April 3, 2010April 3, 2010Orange County Government

Carona Gang Still Gunnin’ for Hunt: The Elusive Attorney General Report

by Travis11 Comments

As Bill Hunt’s candidacy for sheriff is building momentum, the previously unreleased Attorney General report on the Greg Haidl incident has begun to surface. FFFF has obtained the report now we pass it along, although it has been slightly redacted to protect the identity of a minor (view the report).

The report was allegedly leaked to the press by Carona’s pal Michael Schroeder back in 2005 but was never completely released to the public. Why not?

Perhaps because the 21 page document is primarily an indictment against a department culture created under Carona himself, along with Jaramillo and Haidl back before Carona became a convicted felon and was forced to resign. The report also reprimands several subordinates, including Lieutenants Downing and Hunt for showing “poor judgment”. Somehow even blogger Jon Fleischman managed to receive a slap for his complete lack of accountability as PIO for the department.

carona-speaks — Well that's bittersweet.

So how will the report affect candidate Bill Hunt?

It’s not quite the indictment on Hunt that his detractors claim it to be. Hunt’s involvement in the controversy centers around whether Hunt ordered his deputy to remove opinions and facts from an incident report on the night that Greg Haidl, son of Assistant Sheriff Don Haidl, was stopped with some friends who were found in possession of marijuana back in 2003.

The report does accuse Hunt of ordering the police report to be edited in a “questionable fashion,” but what does that mean? Were facts removed, or just opinions?

In our interview last month, Hunt indicated that he asked his deputy to remove only an opinion that contradicted both the evidence and a confession.

Additionally, a sworn statement made after the report that was issued by Hunt’s sargent asserted that the involved deputy’s report was “too opinionated” and so Hunt asked Deputy Roche to remove the opinions. Hunt reportedly said “you need to put the facts – the elements of the crime” into the report.

Five years later, Hunt is still standing behind his actions. In our interview, he told us that he violated no law, no policy and he still maintains that he did the right thing.

I am told that forthcoming federal court testimony will be revealing. But will it conflict with what Bill Hunt told us?

It’s also important to note that the AG report was not part of an independent investigation – for some reason Carona specifically requested that an investigation not be performed (see page 2). Rather, the Attorney General based the report primarily on Carona’s own internal investigation as conducted by Assistant Sheriff Jo Ann Galisky.

April 3, 2010April 3, 2010Arts & Architecture

Downtown Art Walk. A Work In Progress

by The Fullerton Shadow12 Comments

Back in town for a few days from wrangling wild horses outside Pioche, Nevada, I decided to traipse around downtown Fullerton last night to check out the new Fullerton “Art Walk.” I dragged along my husband Joe who has never gone to an art gallery without the kicking and the screaming.

The idea seems like a good one: walk around and see what local artists are doing, and by doing so help inspire and cultivate art. I didn’t take any notes so my comments are just impressions – and you can feel free to take them for what they’re worth.

While we didn’t get to all the places on the map, I think we stopped at enough places to get a sense of what was happening. The Fullerton “art scene,” if such a term can be used, (and I devoutly hope it can’t) seems to be dominated by the usual avant-garde collage/mixed-media, assemblage creep art that is supposed to be either thought provoking, or unsettling, but that almost always seems to be humorless, self-important and always makes me wonder if the perpetrators can even draw. The target for such stuff is invariably younger people, which is good, but there remains the now-hackneyed Tim Burton-esque mindset behind this stuff that really makes me wonder if 20-somethings even appreciate traditional artitistic expression. The Hibbleton Gallery on Wilshire seems to have staked out this territory, especially.

The Violet Hour on Santa Fe is a pretty interesting place – an old industrial space converted into a performance art studio/gallery – and while going for a hard-core non-traditional ambiance included some interesting photography of a place called Zyzzx.

I have to note one exception to this avant-garde trend is evident at the Village Art Center (we didn’t make it that far north last night) where the gallery is full of simply stunning pastels by Brad Faerge and oils by John Hunzicker; plus paintings and even sculpture from some other really exquisitely talented artists. Philistines like me know it’s good when we couldn’t possibly conceive of doing it ourselves.

We also stopped by a place called the Graves Gallery on Amerige, of which I had some hope; alas, much of it was dedicated to some truly awful acrylic paintings. This is really too bad since this place was by far the best space for exhibiting art.

And I have to mention another stop: the Fullerton Museum Center where a woman named Lora Lingl had a couple of “kinetic” sculpture pieces made out of wood on display. One was an interactive hammer/metal plate device operated by a crank and gears; the other was a motor driven contraption that manipulated leaves on tree branches via monofilament fishing line. This piece had a strange, mesmerizing effect as it juxtaposed the mechanical and the natural. Watching this piece was really engaging.

The highlight of the evening may have been a stop at an office suite over on Malden where they had put up a bunch of paintings some guy had collected over the years from garage sales. It actually made a pretty ironic and persuasive statement about the world of local art galleries.

Next time I hope to stop in at some of the other venues to see what direction they are going in. Overall, the idea is good one and I congratulate and encourage the organizers.

My two-cents worth is that a lot more attention needs to be dedicated to finding and presenting the work of first-rate artists. They are out there, all over the place, in fact – professionals and amateurs alike.

April 1, 2010April 28, 2010Dead heads

Another Gut Punch to Pringle’s HSR Boondoggle

by Mr. Peabody21 Comments

Just checked out this article at the new Voice of OC.

Read Pringle’s quotes and try not to barf. Of course he’s pimping this monster hard, after all, he plans to reap big dividends personally when his Mayorship in Anaheim comes to a slimy conclusion.

Here’s the money quote:

But Pringle said “when the whole system’s up and operating, we’ll have a tremendous operating income” to keep it going. He said specifics will be spelled out in future business plans.

In other words, he has no idea what the operating income is and he doesn’t want anybody to know that. If he can’t give us the facts now he’s just gambling with our money. But the House always wins. And Pringle is the House. Sweet. For him.

April 1, 2010April 1, 2010Boohooism

REGISTERED SEX OFFENDER BUSTED FOR KIDDIE PORN STASH IN FULLERTON!

by Jan Florys Dog17 Comments

According to a post by Liberal OC blogger Chris Prevatt (image above), yesterday.