20. AMERICAN RESCUE PLAN ACT UPDATE On March 11, 2021, President Biden signed the American Rescue Plan Act which programs over $1.9 trillion in relief funding related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Councilmember Jung requested, with concurrence from Mayor Whitaker, to hold an initial discussion of local funding opportunities. Recommendation: Provide direction as appropriate
On tomorrow night’s council agenda we see that Item #20 is a discussion about what to do with the Democrat’s Federal relief dough, estimated to be in the neighborhood of $35,000,000. That’s a nice neighborhood, especially if you’re a stumblebum city manager like Ken Domer who is hanging on to quarter mil per year job by the skin of his teeth.
Hitching to Blythe…
This pile o’ cash is undoubtedly already attracted the attention of the Hero unions who will be clamoring for equity, parity, and any other ity they can think up. And of course Domer has been complaining about his poor, overworked skeleton staff crew, too, so there’s that.
I know that the bureaucrats will be applying pressure to use the money for payroll and pensions. How do we know this? Because that’s what they were pushing hard with the late and not lamented Measure S tax. We can be sure that staff will be doing the usual song and dance about what the Biden Bucks can and cannot be spent on.
Well, here’s what I say: $35,000,000 will pay for a whole lot of paving and a whole lot of sidewalk.
Can these two help bring some accountability to Fullerton?
It’s painfully obvious that Councilpersons Zahra and Silva will do whatever they’re told by the City Manager. Fortunately, Councilmen Dunlap and Jung know who they work for. And it isn’t the public employee unions. That leaves Mayor Bruce Whitaker who actually helped Jung get this item on the agenda for public discussion.
Okay. What have we learned so far about Fullerton’s long and corrupt attempt to avoid addressing the problem of amplified outdoor music?
I’m not going to do my job and you can’t make me…
First we have learned that Fullerton’s “experts” in the Planning and Code Enforcement divisions have been serially uninterested in enforcing their own laws in an effort to appease and placate scofflaw bars in the financial sinkhole known as downtown Fullerton.
Second we have learned that you can’t make government bureaucrats do their jobs if they don’t want to do them.
Stop the noise, consarn it!
Way back in 2009 City Hall knew it had a problem on its hands as the metastasizing and illegal clubs began sharing their good times with everybody else. A “consultant” called Bon Terra was engaged to to a noise study and the City Council, at the time, voted to maintain the existing code that prohibited outdoor music.
But saying something and doing something about it reflects a mammoth void in Fullerton, and the bureaucrats in City Hall don’t give up on an issue until one way or another, they get what they want.
Yes, that is the answer!
And in 2012 they got a friend, Jennifer Fitzgerald, who was more than happy to run interference for people who had no qualms about violating the noise and land-use law.
You can take the douche out of the bag…
And so, over the next seven years, the Noise Nuisance continued, most notably at The Slidebar, a club that was illegally operating without a CUP. And even as the nuisance continued, the City embarked on a campaign to eliminate any restrictions at all. Complaints were invariably batted away by Planning Directors Karen Haluza, Ted White, and Matt Foulkes who, along with our egregious City Attorney, Dick Jones kept citing studies and new plans, and whatever else they could use as a pretext for doing nothing.
Matt Foulkes. The downward spiral is complete.
Finally by 2019, it became apparent that the goal was to permit an acoustic free-for-all in downtown Fullerton.
In the past 10 years or so, Fullerton has had four different planning directors: Al Zelinka, Karen Haluza, Ted White, and most recently an individual named Matt Foulkes. Pop quiz: what else do these folks have in common?
Haluza. The closer you looked, the worse it got.
Time’s up. Answer: none of them enforced the city’s noise ordinances, and each seemed to be dedicated to ignoring zoning and land use regulations in downtown Fullerton. We’ll get to the “why” of it in a later post. For now I want to point out the trajectory of this mess. As scofflaws like Jeremy Popoff’s odious Slidebar and the Florentine Mob’s various enterprises refused to comply with our laws, the Planning Directors noted above began an ongoing project to lower and lower the legal bar until even the lowest nematode could wriggle over it.
Ted White didn’t leave his fingerprints…he thinks…
Now if we contemplate this downward spiral of our “experts” in the Planning Department and Code Enforcement we notice that it hit a virtual rock bottom in January 2019 when Matt Foulkes pretended that he didn’t know what a property owner was and approved the submission of an official document forged by Joe Florentine pretending that he, Florentine, was an “owner.”
Matt Foulkes. The downward spiral is complete.
Of course all of this malfeasance was amply documented here on the FFFF blog. And guess what? Nobody in City Hall cared; or to be more precise, nobody cares, still. See, in Fullerton incompetency and blatant corruption are so common on the part of our City Attorney, Dick Jones and the cadre of drunk, venal and just plain dumb City Managers and staff that our threshold for outrage is as low is almost worn away.
But not quite. Stay tuned for noise. And by noise I mean the noise generated by city staff to ignore, dilute, obfuscate and dodge the Noise Ordinances.
FFFF has published lots of posts about the way in which our highly paid “experts” in City Hall have made it their business to run interference for the numerous scofflaw bar and “club” owners downtown when it comes to ignoring annoyances like Conditions of Approval and the municipal code’s Noise Ordinance.
In City Hall, doing the right thing just wasn’t gonna happen…
Both topics have been addressed in the same way: if they can, they simply ignore the situation. The blind eye approach has worked most of time. When it hasn’t, Step 2 is invoked. Step 2 is to diligently pursue making the laws laxer, so lax in fact, that the lawbreaking is no longer lawbreaking. This bureaucratic gambit is really nice because the Planning Department Staff can always claim that something is in the works that will address the situation. Of course that’s a lie. What’s really happening is that the department is trying really hard to come up with a legal absolution so low even the lowest douchebag can slither over it.
You can take the douche out of the bag…
At every step of the way, the scofflaws – Jeremy Popoff of Slidebar fame and the Florentine Mob spring most readily to mind – lubricate the gears of Fullerton’s small town political machine who have seemed ever-ready to support the law breaking.
While we here at FFFF have extensively covered the abuse of CUPs and other land use issues, the history of the ongoing issue of nuisance noise traces a perfect trajectory of incompetence or casual corruption, or most likely, of both.
The story spans three city managers, four planning directors and a whole slew of elected ciphers who would rather defend purveyors of nuisance over the right of their constituents to quiet enjoyment of their property.
This Tuesday, at the request of the Fire Heroes Union, the Fullerton City Council will vote (likely 3-2) to light $68,000 dollars on fire to get a bid from the Orange County Fire Authority (OCFA).
What’s $68k between friends?
This is a scam and just a waste of your tax dollars.
Don’t believe the fiscal lies being told here, none of the disingenuous liars who will vote for this care about your tax dollars and they’re certainly not going to get rid of Fullerton’s Fire Department to jump to OCFA.
The entire point of this bullshit bid is leverage to justify a raise for the Fire Department. Nothing more, nothing less.
I’ll prove it by using Council’s own agenda from the exact same meeting this coming Tuesday:
When you join OCFA you typically lease all of your equipment to them at no cost and all of your fire facilities for $1/year (as Garden Grove did a few years ago).
To take this bid seriously, you would have to believe that council is SERIOUSLY considering a bid to change to OCFA and is simultaneously spending $1,546,683.30 to buy Fullerton Fire a new ladder truck that they’ll just gift to OCFA to use as they see fit.
If we went to OCFA, it is them and not us who would decide where trucks (apparatus) would be stationed in order to best serve the cities under their jurisdiction. Thus it makes zero sense for Fullerton to buy a new truck when it might not even stay in Fullerton.
These conflicting agenda items would make no logical sense if this bullshit OCFA bid was serious. But it’s not serious.
This is just the council Dems lighting your tax dollars on fire, well, because screw you, they need to help a union argue for more of your money later during negotiations. Silva, Jung and Zahra refuse to take their role as representatives of the residents seriously any time a union rears it’s ugly head and this is just another gross example.
If the Fire Heroes Union wants this bid so bad they can pay for it their damn selves considering they have no issues spending their own money to try and raise your taxes (Measure S campaigning) or to pick your City Council (campaign contributions).
Your roads suck, your services are getting more expensive and you’re constantly being asked to do more with less by City Hall and City Council. Hell, the City asked you to donate Christmas decorations this last season because they’re so broke.
Hitching to Needles…
But not broke enough to avoid spending $65k of your money to help a union at the negotiating table.
If this bid was serious then the council would be getting bids from LA Fire and Placentia as well as OCFA. That’s how you find out the best services with the most benefits fort he residents at the best price – by shopping around. So of course they don’t want to do any of that.
Later this year when the City is selling everything not nailed down, and a few things that are, remember this moment when these disingenuous liars spent your money on political theater to help out the unions who will always put their interests above your safety.
The two default positions of government are corruption and stupidity but this coming week the Fullerton Planning Commission is about to engage in the latter to try and hide the former.
This week’s Planning Commission meeting, as chaired by Elizabeth Hansburg, will be spent pretending to not know what “is” is in order to try and obfuscate the fact that City Hall is acting like corrupt jackasses picking winners and losers.
Ok, so in this case the “is” in question is the phrase “property owner” but the sentiment of obfuscation by semantically playing games is the same.
Here’s the verbatim “background and analysis” from next week’s meeting:
“The City’s land use applications require completion by or authorization from the corresponding property owner”. The Fullerton Municipal Code (FMC) defines “fee owner”. Throughout the FMC, various forms of “owner” are identified as the party to file a land use application. While these terms are commonly understood to all identify the legal owner of a real property, these amendments will clarify what constitutes a property owner.”
This is just blustering bullshit because PC and City Hall got caught with their pants down while trying to violate the law in favor of a preferred business.
Never once in the history of Fullerton has the phrase “property owner” been in contention until City Hall tried to pass off a fabricated Conditional Use Permit in violation of the City’s municipal code. You can read about that particular scam [HERE] & [HERE]. Pretending to not know what words mean after the fact is what liars do to avoid accountability.
If the Planning Commission really didn’t know what “Property Owner” meant it would call into question years of decisions spanning PC and City Council. It would call into question tons of zoning, permitting and a lot of the work being done in the planning department.
None of that is being brought up in this agenda item because Planning Commission isn’t worried about any of that – precisely because they know they’re full of shit and this is a distraction.
But how do I know this isn’t honest stupidity as opposed to corrupt pretend stupidity to cover-up an attempted fraud? Because CA law supersedes the Municipal Code and CA law already clarifies who a “property owner” is and that’s the person who holds the title and pays the property taxes.
I’ll point your attention to the California Department of Real Estate’s website which gives you a nice little history [HERE] of why property has an owner in CA. But let’s just jump to page 55 to get to the meat (bold emphasis added):
OWNERSHIP OF REAL PROPERTY All property has an owner, the government – federal, state, or local— or some private party or entity (typically referred to as persons). Very broadly, an estate in real property may be owned in the following ways: 1. Sole or several ownership; 2. Joint, common, or community ownership; a. Tenancy in common; b. Joint tenancy; c. Community property; or, d. Partnership interests. 3. Ownership by other lawfully created entities. SOLE OR SEVERAL OWNERSHIP Sole or several ownership is defined to mean ownership by one person. Being the sole owner, one person enjoys the benefits of the property and is subject to the accompanying burdens, such as the payment of taxes. Subject to applicable federal and state law, a sole owner is free to dispose of property at will. Typically, only the sole owner’s signature is required on the instrument of transfer/deed of conveyance. See Civil Code Section 681.
When The Other Dick Jones™️ sided with Florentine’s asinine “legal opinion” that Florentine was entitled to bypass the law, all he did was perpetuate a fraud on behalf of City Hall.
It was never in question that Joe Florentine wasn’t the required owner needed for his Conditional Use Permit and the City knew it from day one. Why they chose to pick sides is anybody’s guess but that’s government here in Fullerton.
However – if that isn’t clear enough for the nitwits on Planning Commission let’s look at the requirements for noticing zoning and land use decisions in the Fullerton Municipal Code:
Ah. So we have to refer back to State law again. Here’s the highlighted CA Gov Code:
So the Fullerton Municipal Code says that before a public hearing, of which Chair Hansburg has participated in who knows how many in her years on Planning Commission, the city must notify people based on a State Law that defines a property owner by looking at the “equalized assessment roll” or in laymen’s terms – tax rolls.
It’s never been a question of who owns what property in Fullerton or what the Conditional Use Permit meant by “Property Owner”.
This is bullshitery and bluster to bury bureaucratic bungling. If you don’t believe me – just look at the City of Fullerton’s own Development Portal:
You can’t make up this level of disingenuous asshattery.
This is Fullerton efficiency for you. Staff’s time and several meetings will be wasted to get to the bottom of the meaning of a phrase in common usage – meanwhile nobody is being held to account for how we got to this level of stupid in the first place. If this is what we can expect from the current planning commission we’re in for a long, rough ride on the Idiot Express.
If you don’t look like him, he can’t represent you.
It didn’t take racist grifter Adan Ortega long to find a new city to help him keep him aboard his little crony gravy train.
You’ll recall that Mr. Ortega was removed from the Metropolitan Water Board of Directors by Fullerton back on 02 February. Now, according to their agenda for 01 March, Ortega is going to be appointed back to that very board by San Fernando.
He took his little grift to a town known for getting pounded…
Not even a month went by before he managed to get back on the board that allows him to so easily peddle his municipal lobbying firm “Ortega Solutions” to unsuspecting entities. And just like that the grift keeps on grifting.
That he also peddles in racism & the San Fernando City Council is a-ok with that is further evidence that porn is still the moral and ethical bright spot in the San Fernando Valley.
This just goes to show that Fullerton was right to remove him because representing Fullerton’s interests was never his agenda – the same as representing San Fernando won’t be going forward. I guess the taxpayers of San Fernando better hope those evil “white people” in Pasadena look out for their best interests because Ortega will be too busy looking out for his own.
The Joe Felz Cover-up is nearly complete. Yesterday the officer, Jeff Corbett, who falsified his report, was slapped on the wrist for his felonious actions.
While we don’t know what happened in his Jury Trial, the bench trial ended yesterday with the judge giving him less time for lying in his official capacity as a police officer than you can get for contempt of court.
His attorney said this case, where an officer lied on a report, was more of a “political football than a felony”. Let that sink in. Lying under the color of authority isn’t that big of a deal in this system.
His attorney also claimed that Corbett was being prosecuted for his “opinion” that Joe Felz wasn’t intoxicated. What this defense attorney and judge ignored is that it took Corbett over an hour to conduct his “limited investigation” because, according to Corbett himself, the “back and forth phone calls” took too long. Those are the phone calls between Corbett, Danny Hughes, Jennifer Fitzgerald and lord knows who else.
So the powers that be were pulling strings for Felz to not get treated like any other DUI in Fullerton (hi MADD!) and Corbett went along with it by stating that an obviously intoxicated Felz (who plead guilty to that fact) didn’t seem intoxicated. The other officers reported that Felz “smelled of alcohol” but something something Corbett is hero and deserve.
The judge admitted she had no idea there was an independent investigation by RCS and she clearly didn’t know the facts of the case or she wouldn’t call this just a “sloppy investigation”.
The judge claimed there are a lot of politics involved and then claimed she was going to avoid the politics to “follow the law” but you cannot untangle the two in this case. Let us not forget that the Mayor and Chief of Police directed the actions of a police officer in relation to the drinking and driving by the City Manager. That the officer was on the up-and-up when he claimed to not think the City Manager was drunk under the law (after not doing a breathalyzer and waiting over an hour to conduct any sobriety tests) is laughable at best.
It only took 51 months, 14 days (or 1,567 days) for the illusion of justice to be handed down in the Joe Felz Sappy McTree Caper.
All in all he got 80 hours of community service, is required to pay restitution (that may not even exist), is required to pay $500 to the “victim witness” and Corbett can’t work in law enforcement anymore. Once this “diversion” is completed in a year the record will be sealed.
All that remains is for the body worn camera footage to be “lost” by FPD now that there is no reason to legally withhold it from the public.
Former FPD Officer Jeff Corbett, made famous for giving former City Manager Joe Felz a pass on his drunken driving, is back in court over his falsifying a report in that very incident.
He had a previous jury trial where… something happened? Now he’s back with a bench trial.
Watch live here:
Never say the wheels of justice move slowly in America – we’re only 4 years and 3.5 months away from the incident in question.
