Rosie addresses the Boys in the Back (of the) Room; Will they hear her?
Is La Habra city councilwoman Rose Espinosa going to run for County Supervisor? Apparently she has made an “intent to run” filing – the first step in the campaign process. At this early junture it may be too soon to tell if she is serious or merely posturing – going for a deal with County Dems and union honchos.
Does Rosie Want To Straighten Up County Government, or Is It All Just Bad Posturing?
Her entry into the 4th District fray in 2010 to replace our Sopoforic Supervisor would certainly have an impact. As a liberal Democrat she would immediately cut into Tom Daly’s base, especially in blue collar La Habra. She might even be able to attract more militant union support (although it didn’t do her any good against Norby in 2006). Daly certainly can’t be happy about any of this, especially if Lori Galloway were to get in as well. We still wonder cyber-aloud whether or not Pam Keller and Sharon Quirk may not have experienced premature endorsolation with Daly – showing up at his coming out party, and all.
All of this seems like excellent news for Fullerton’s own Shawn Nelson. A split Democratic vote means that the Dems will end up going after each other – not him in the primary, and, who knows, a solid Republican candidacy might get 50% +1.
In the year 1992 Fullerton’s City Manager Bill Winter was just about out of gas. He had been running on fumes for quite a while and figured it was time to rest on his threadbare laurels. He could also see the handwriting on the wall. A practical cipher, he had let Hugh Berry run the city and the Redevelopment Agency. A culture of permissiveness obtained at City hall during his tenure. Things were about to change – but not for the better.
The Council hired James L. Armstrong to replace Winter. He had been in Anaheim as an Assistant City Mananger and had also done a term at Hanford located somewhere out in the miasma of the San Joaquin Valley.
James L. Armstrong. Nobody Could have Guessed What Was in Store
Armstrong arrived just as the 90s recession was beginning to sink its teeth into the local government wallet. Revenue was falling and something had to be done to protect city workers. Lack of revenue threatened automatic “step increases,” raises, and City PERS contributions. Perhaps Armstrong felt he had the solid backing of the City Council, but the Fullerton novice certainly had no reading of the mood of the electorate.
Within six months of assuming his new job, Armstrong had persuaded Molly Mc Clanahan, Buck Catlin, and Don Bankhead to go along with the imposition of a new Utility Tax. They deliberately denied a plebescite – knowing as they did that it would be rejected. And so they held the usual dog-and-pony budget hearings, passed a budget based on the Utility Tax, and approved the tax, too. Bankhead and Catlin were allegedly conservative Republicans, but that soon became an apparent farce; even worse, Bankhead had run for re-election in the fall of 1992 promising no new taxes!
The citizenry rose up in fury! Raising taxes during a recession just to protect city employees? The tocsin was sounded and an strange new locution echoed through the corridors of City Hall – Recall! The word had never been uttered in staid, conservative Fullerton before. The statists and the public employee unions, and Fullerton’s good-government liberals were aghast. The newly energized pro-recall crew were seen as outsiders – who are these people, they’ve never served on one our precious committees! Barbarians at the gates! God, almighty! Civilization itself was at stake.
We're From The Steppes, and We're here to Help!
Within a year the Recalls Committee, gained their signatures, placed a recall on the June 1994 ballot, and successfully recalled Catlin, Bankhead and McClanahan. He had only been on the job eighteen months, but our hero Armstrong had instigated a municipal civil war, and had managed to mismanage three of his supporters into ignominious political humiliation.
Watch Out For That first Step...
The way things ultimately worked out, the new Councilmembers were no better than the old. But the Utility Tax was repealed during the interregnum; without it the City got along just fine. But because the Old Guard had managed to hang on to elected office the managers in City Hall never had to confront the consequences of their point-blank refusal to reconsider the way they ran their departments. This was Fullerton after all.
Meantime Jim Armstrong was a busy fellow. He presided over just about every Redevelopment fumble, boondoggle, and cover-up of the 1990s; he made it very clear that when bureaucrats blundered the wagons were to be circled and nobody (in City Hall) would be any the worse for it. The jewels in his tarnished crown were the attempt in 1993 to forestall the Depot corrective work caused by incompetent design (full story coming soon), the complete mismanagement of the new Corporate Yard project, the deployment of attack dog Susan Hunt – whose job was to kick all citizen groups out of city facilities and keep them out, and his mania to turn public facilities into cost centers administered by city employees (see related post on Hillcrest Park).
Lean and mean. Well, mean anyway.
An aura of arrogance clung to City Hall like the ripe aroma surrounding the local Materials Recycling Facility; the City Council was just there to ratify Armstrong’s policy. If they liked that, so much the better. And they sure seemed to.
Armstrong’s miserable misrule came to an end in 2001 when he took the top job in Santa Barbara – you see in Jim’s line of work nothing succeeds like failure. And he set the bar high for his successor, Chris Myers, who learned from the best: when you find a cushy spot like Fullerton where nobody demands accountability, stick to it like a barnacle – until something better comes along. In the meantime – close ranks, clam-up, and cover up.
The other day, while driving along Chapman, I was struck by the scrawny Bottle brush trees pruned to the point of embarrassment and disgrace. I’ve seen some of the worst examples of improper pruning of both trees and shrubs in Fullerton –both along boulevards and at private homes. Who are these morons with saws? I thought I’d share some of what I look forward to seeing when I go back.
Savannah is a cosmopolitan city with a mix of old and new. It’s an old city, one where history matters and has played a role in the shaping of it. One of the things that grabs the first time visitor are the trees. There are giant oaks draped with Spanish moss. The delicate but strong strands of moss takes over every thing from trees to camellias and azaleas. But the greenery seems to hold the entire city together giving it a level of comfort and sophistication.
These oaks were planted in 1890
There is a stately grandeur about these trees. Nowhere is this seen better than the oak alley planted along the road to Wormsloe Plantation. Wormsloe was built in 1740 by one of the original settlers, Noble Jones. What’s left of Savannah’s first fort are the “Tabby” ruins, a mixture of lime, sand, and oyster shell halves thrown in for good measure. While the ruins are interesting, it’s the alley that everyone remembers and associates with plantation landscapes.
Tranquility in the middle of the city.
One of my favorite finds was the discovery of two secret gardens. Secret meaning they’re private and I peeked through a fence. The two gardens shown here belong to townhouses along busy streets. They provide the owners respite in an area where funeral hearses are resurrected as tour buses, and the usual mix of tourists and business crowd the area.
Dock across bulrushes to the river
Anyway, the grace of the trees and the way the moss takes over everything is part of what makes the city so beautiful. Further out, along the river, there is much scenery to take in as well. I find the natural landscape evocative of where I grew up. The bulrushes are beautiful as well. Here’s the dock over by a house we looked at to buy. This is the stuff of dreams as well.
Because she’s so terribly popular, The Divine MissK gets press releases like this one. Sometimes she has to rewrite them as well:
Eric Berg & Early California Antiques present
Lost California
Photography Exhibit
WHO: Eric Berg & California Antiques present “Lost California” rare Photography Exhibit.
April 29th, 2009, showing through to May 31st
WHAT: “Lost California” is a photography exhibit of rare and never before seen photos depicting the development of California from the orange groves and oil wells to Spanish revival and Monterey homes for which the city is famous. The exhibit includes personal photographers from the Marcel Picard estate. Picard, a noted director of photography of 1930’s films such as Adventures of the Masked Phantom and Get that Venus is best known for working with Will Rogers. All photos are available for purchase and in price from $20.00 to $2,500.00.
WHERE: Early California Antiques –
4032 Melrose Avenue Los Angeles, CA 90029
Cross street South side on Melrose, just east of Heliotrope.
Eric Berg is excited to showcase over 300 black and white, hand tinted and original photographs in a show that chronicles life in California prior to World War Two. “Lost California” captures the majestic pacific coast to the lofty airplane factories. This exhibit will give viewers an up-close and Picard’s personal view of our history.
****************************
Photography by Julius Shulman
And just so you know that we’re not complete snobs who hang out on Melrose and wear black while hobnobbing with reality TV stars, we’re also pleased to tell you about something local.
How many others remember playing in homes decorated with Eames chairs, rice paper lamps and Knoll tables? Oh, please, The Divine MissK is now dating herself. She should stop before she tells you about Tang (the astronauts drank it, you know).
So here’s the release:
“Forever Fullerton: Julius Shulman Open to the public April 4-July 19
Julius Shulman is one of the best known architectural photographers in the world. In the 1950s and 1960s, he did extensive work in Fullerton documenting houses and other buildings in town.” (Such an understatement!! Darlings!!! Why not drop the names A. Quincy Jones, Eichler and Case Study homes into the mix? In fact, does anyone else remember the Case Study Home show at the old “Temporary Contemporary Museum” way back when? If you do, then ten points to Hogwarts).
“A Conversation with Julius Shulman” (You should go to this. Astronauts would, you know.)
“Saturday, May 9 at 2:00 p.m.
$12 general admission/$10 museum members” (Mention this blog, get no discount and two big strong escorts who will throw you out!)
“Julius Shulman will make a rare appearance at the Fullerton Museum Center with Michael Stern and Alan Hess. Learn about the work Julius Shulman did in Fullerton during the 1950s and 1960s.”
Fullerton Friend Jerome (Jerry) Mahoney, 21, formerly of Domingo Road, St. Juliana’s and Servite High School, relaxes with the latest FFFF blog post while attending St. Simplicius Seminary in Youngstown, Ohio where his thesis involves translating the Apocrypha from the Vulgate into Esperanto.
Fullerton’s Redevelopment Chairman Don Bankhead, and members Pam Keller and Sharon Quirk led the charge to spend $6 million in tax payer’s money to relocate McDonalds 2oo feet closer to Fullerton High School. As part of the total figure, the Agency previously spent $3 million to buy and demolish four historic California bungalows on the site.
Redevelopment Agency Director Rob Zur Schmiede said “funds for the project had been set aside years ago”. Governments flawed incremental approval process at work again.
The move will pave the way for The Fox Block project– a proposed parking structure type development fronting on Chapman Avenue between Harbor Boulevard and the new McDonald’s which will resemble a McMiniature McSpanish McCastle.
Not everyone favored the deal, longtime Fox critic, Councilman Jones opposed the deal, indicating that he was disappointed a big corporation like McDonald’s was not putting a nickle into the multimillion dollar burger deal.
The City of Fullerton loves fake old McSpanish
“This is a huge cost of the citizens’ money,” Jones said.
Councilman Nelson asked if it were possible to postpone the final decision until the Fox Block developer, Arteco Partners, could come up with a plan and a feasibility study.
With nothing at stake and everything to gain, the out of town Developer’s spokesman Jerry Tessier said the new proposed parking structure and project would not work if McDonald’s stayed in its current location. Yet, he could not provide any guarantees for much.
Councilwoman Quirk agreed it was time to move forward. “We have the funds, and we need to get sales tax in.”
As a school teacher, Quirk must know what causes obesity in children; eating too much of the wrong kinds of food and not getting enough exercise. Now the kids wont have to walk as far to get their subsidized happy meal deals.
McDonald’s franchisee Mr. Frisbie reminded the Redevelopment Agency members that the City staff approached him to relocate his business, which was started by his father, James, in 1969 as a family business. A recent study shows the presence of an fastfood outlet within easy walking distance of a high school — about 530 feet or less — resulted in a 5.2% increase in the incidence of student obesity compared with the average for California youths, a correlation deemed “sizable” according to the findings. Great job Quirk, Bankhead and Keller!
Courtesy of LA Times article (see link above)
“Our business is better suited where we are now,” Frisbie said. Dear Friends but another example that government is part of the problem and not the solution.
Some not so smart landscape planner hired by the Fullerton Redevelopment Agency thought he knew what he was doing when he choose to plant a tree right in front of the Historic Rialto Theater in downtown Fullerton. The Rialto Theater Building is one of the two remaining “Zig Zag Moderne” buildings in Fullerton. What do you think about the landscaping efforts of the Redevelopment Agency in downtown Fullerton?
Just in time for his retirement, our beloved police chief Pat McKinley brought home a $100,000 federal earmark for his new body armor which he designed in a partnership with seasoned police contractor Safariland, a subsidiary of Europe’s largest military contractor. Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez congratulated herself for rooting up the money for the high-priced vests as part of the Omnibus Appropriations Act.
What could be wrong with this earmark? It’s nothing but free money for the City of Fullerton – an unconditional gift from the federal government, right?
But the earmark qualifies as official government pork according to government watchdogs.
Citizens Against Government Waste have identified 10,160 projects at a cost of $19.6 billion in the 12 Appropriations Acts for fiscal 2009 that symbolize the most egregious and blatant examples of pork. All of the items in the Congressional Pig Book Summary meet at least one of these criteria, but most satisfy at least two:
Requested by only one chamber of Congress;
Not specifically authorized;
Not competitively awarded;
Not requested by the President;
Greatly exceeds the President’s budget request or the previous year’s funding;
Not the subject of congressional hearings; or
Serves only a local or special interest.
Officer Rubio shows off his new vest while demonstrating a choke hold for our unsuspecting photographer.
There are two sides to every slab of government pork: on one hand, earmarks return a portion of Fullerton citizens’ federal tax dollars back to the city itself. If Fullerton doesn’t grab it’s share of the pie, the money will merely be assigned to some other bloated project in some other needy town far, far away.
On the flip side, earmarks represent the very worst in fiscal responsibility and big government. Appropriations Committee members arbitrarily pick winners and losers by earmarking funds for specific recipients. Lobbyists and their congressmen bypass authorizing committees directly for pet projects, creating a giant fiscal free-for-all that undermines the Constitution and makes states and localities increasingly beholden to the federal government. Finally, the federal deficit grows unchecked and our taxes increase via the debasement of our currency.
Pork projects have haunted this nation since our early years, but they have always been reviled by fiscally responsible citizens. Thomas Jefferson considered earmarks “a source of boundless patronage to the executive, jobbing to members of Congress & their friends, and a bottomless abyss of public money”. If Jefferson knew about the exponential increase in federal earmarks over the last decade, he would likely rise from his grave to scribe a brand new Declaration of Independence.
In the end, the chiefs’ friends at Safariland are $100,000 richer, our police have new vests that cost twice as much as the old, and most importantly, the fruits of our labor have been lost in a sea of unaccountability.
Thank you Forebearing Friends, for following this pathetic revelation to its conclusion. The unwinding of this concatenation of miscreance and misfeasance must be as hard to read as it has been to write. And yet now the conclusion is finally at hand!
By May 1997 the SRO deal was done. The final meeting was a mere formality. Everybody who was paying attention knew that Dick Jones – yes, all hat and no cattle Dick Jones – was going to eat up the tasty morsel that his own staff and collegues had put in front of him.
Hmmm. Maybe some ketchup would help...
Terrified of personal loss, and with apparrently no confidence in City indemnification, he caved in to the ridiculous threats to protect his own pelt. All of his brave words of March were just so much verbal gas.
It's Mostly Just Hot Air
The meeting came and went. The project moved ahead and was ever so slowly built. Two years later the Fullerton City Lights was added to the Downtown scene. The city bureaucrats congratulated themselves on another job well-done: 7 years and several million dollars of public funds in the making – a large stucco box. The erection wasn’t much to write home about.
Well, It Could Have Beeen Worse
Perhaps the sorriest part of this saga was the behavior of Dick Jones – during and after the sad episode. He had eaten his crow – the feathers were still there on his bib for everybody to see. And councilwatchers were wondering if his former fulminations would now be directed at the staff and fellow councilmembers who had placed him in his embarrassing predicament. The answer came quickly. No accountability, no responsibility – nothing. Nothing but loud and consistent praise and support for the bureaucrats who had orchestrated his humiliation; he soon became notorious for his knee-jerk and unquestioning support of almost everything put in front of him by the City staff.
We Have Met The Enemy And He Is Us
All that remained was the peridoc bluster: homespun nonsense, loud, rambling and often incoherent perorations. Deep-fried bloviations, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Loyal and Patient Friends, our long narrative of the City Lights SRO is coming to a sordid climax, and a merciful denouement. We have witnessed incompetence, vindictiveness, cultural vandalism and bureaucratic usurpation of authority, But we’re still not finished. The SRO project appeared dead. The elected representatives had killed it. Democracy at work! But as long-time city-watchers know, the project is only dead when staff says it’s dead, and none of the architects of this disaster – City Manger Jim Armstrong, Planning Director Paul Dudley, or their puppet, Redevelopment Director Gary Chalupsky, wanted it dead. Because that would be an admission of what everybody else already knew – they were largely incompetent.
What The Hell Are Those Guys Smoking?
We left off with Dick Jones at a March, 1997 meeting waxing voluble about drug users and their nefarious ways. Nuh-uh, not in my city! Unfortunately, Jones discovered that getting the foot into the mouth is a whole heckuva lot easier than extracting it.
Need some barbeque sauce with that?
Jones was not acute enough to pick up on clues that the City Manager, Flory and Bankhead were not going to let this die. He should have been clued in during the March meeting by the Agency attorney, who, at the insistence of Flory, Bankhead, and a clueless Julie Sa, gave a legal opinion in public stating that Mithawalla could have a case against the Agency. Here’s where the story gets a bit murky, culpability-wise, and who orchestrated what, so rather than accuse anybody we’ll just let you – the Friends of Fullerton – draw your own conclusions.
A civil rights lawsuit was adventitiously filed against Jones and the City by some guy nobody knew, claiming that the targets of Jones’ tirade were protected under the Americans with Disabilities Act; Mithawalla was waiting in the wings to go after the City for breach of contract – although clearly no contract had been established. With enough proper coaxing from people who wanted this project to live, Dick Jones, the Big Man with The Big Mouth suddenly experienced a case of shrinkage.
It Gets Soft When You Add Water...
A new hearing was held in May 1997. The stage was re-set to take up the SRO project one more time. It didn’t matter that the Council majority had already spoken. The City Staff, the Redevelopment Attorney, Flory and Bankhead were determined to have the last word in order to remind everyone who really runs the City of Fullerton.
As a school teacher, Quirk must know what causes obesity in children; eating too much of the wrong kinds of food and not getting enough exercise. Now the kids wont have to walk as far to get their subsidized happy meal deals.
