Search Results for “redevelopment bankhead” – Page 4

December 14, 2011December 15, 2011Fringie Awards

More 2011 Fringie® Follies: Scariest Ghost of Fullerton Past

When the sun rose on January 1, 2011, who could have foreseen the strange and disturbing circumstance that would produce a veritable cavalcade of scary ghosts from Fullerton’s olden days.

Sweet Baby Jebus!

And who knew that so many vaporous remnants of Fullerton’s horse and buggy days would be putting in appearances to remind us of the bad old days before talking pictures and x-rays.

Damn Recall!

1. First we heard the name A.B. “Buck” Catlin, supporter of the anti-recall crew, and inveterate staff stooge/big government RINO when he was on the City Council in the 1880s. Catlin was a proud supporter of every Redevelopment boondoggle in Fullerton’s history; and some that were so hare-brained even his pals wouldn’t support them. How frightful! Good Old Buck was recalled alongside Don Bankhead and Molly McClanahan for promoting a totally unnecessary utility tax. Wow, things don’t change much around here, do they? Shriek!

2. Another scary ghost reappeared to support the Three Dithering Dinosaurs: the hideous spectral phenomenon known as Linda LeQuire. Linda’s image does not appear in mirrors or photographs so you’ll just have to take our word for it. She also popped up to haunt Fullerton two years ago, so I guess we’re just going to have to get used to these biennial visitations! Brrrr!

FloryBird — It's a bird, it's a plane, it's a noxious vapor.

3. Then there was the horrifying and serial re-appearances of my former, broomstick wielding mistress, Jan Flory. Like her former colleagues she too glady voted to approve an illegal 10% tax on your water bills. Even her offspring are creepy. That’s enough to make you cough up your kibble! EEK!

4. Some purists may quibble that Molly McClanahan can’t possibly be a eerie apparition since she is actually an elected member of the North Orange County Community College District Board of Trustees. But if that isn’t an insubstantial graveyard I don’t know what is. Like Catlin, and Bankhead, McClanahan was recalled in 1994 for backing that shameful utility tax; her eerie manifestation in defense of the indefensible Three Sluggish Sloths says all that need be said about this transparent emanation.

5. And finally, in 2011 we were treated to a horrifying visitation from the Great Beyond in the vacuous form of former city councilwoman Pam Keller. Don’t be fooled by any apparent substance. There’s no there, there.

First she showed up to scream union slogans into a radio show mike; later she appeared at a city council meeting in some sort of cryogenic suit. If that don’t send you shrieking into the night then I don’t know from Milk Bones. Boo!

Feel free to run screaming into the night, yourself.

December 12, 2011December 15, 2011Fringie Awards

The 2011 Fringies® Are Here! Dumbest Thing Said By A Politician

by Jan Florys Dog160 Comments

Sweet, iridescent, radioactive Jebus, how can one choose from such a wealth of material? 2011 may never be surpassed for dumb stuff uttered by our representatives. The Nominating Committe ruminated long and hard to come up with the nominees. And by ruminating long and hard I mean they did major bong rips into the wee hours. And speaking of wee, here are your nominees.

1.You want dumb? How about when Doc HeeHaw exclaimed that he had seen far worse injuries than Kelly Thomas’ in ‘Nam that were survivable?

2. And then there was this pearl from F. Dick, likening the peaceful Kelly Thomas killing protesters to “a lynch-type mob.” Ouch.

bankhead-crown — Would the Reign of Error never come to an end?

3. The Nominating Committee insisted that King Don Bankhead the First be recognized for the idiotic statement that Fullerton would “biterally” be a ghost town without Redevelopment, and then lying about having said it! Oops! Caught on video!

MCKinley3 — Gimme a sec'.The longer I think the dumber it will be...

4. Not to be out done by his superannuated colleagues, the comparatively spry Pat McPension uttered perhaps the stupidest and most odious comment of all, when, after noting he had gotten “bloused” eyes himself, claiming that Kelly’s facial injuries were not life threatening.

5. Then, of course, there was the breathtakingly stupid utterance at the Soroptomist She Bear Pow-wow that left everyone speechless, essentially insinuating that perv-cop Albert Rincon’s victims deserved what they got, and in any case sexual battery by a cop “ain’t a dangerous thing.” Well, actually, hardly anyone was speechless after that.

Sharon_Quirk_190px — Those socks aren't going to knit themselves!

6. And finally, to round out our nominees, the committee just couldn’t overlook the predictably irrelevant observation from councilwoman Sharon Quirk-Silva that homeless people really need socks. Yes, Sharon, they probably do, and many other things, besides. But they would also appreciate not being beaten to death for no reason by your police force, if it’s not too much trouble.

Well Friends, them’s yer nominees in this all-important Fringie® category. Feel free to opine in the comments thread, as always!

December 4, 2011December 4, 2011Behind Closed Doors

You Said What You Said

by Mr. Peabody147 Comments

Politicians are forever saying asinine things and then denying they said them. Small time politicians like our own mutton head Don Bankhead have been getting away with this sort of thing for years. Televised council meetings have helped expose the intra-noggin confusion that exists in minds like Bankhead’s, but youtube has really been invaluable.

A while back we ran a post that highlighted Bruce Whitaker rightfully taking Bankhead to task for sharing his opinion that Fullerton would be ghost town without Redevelopment. No, no said Bankhead, testy-like. He really said “downtown Fullerton.” Forget that neither would be a ghost town without Redevelopment – that’s just Big Gummint Bankhead passing along all the lies he’s swallowed over the years, and of course his own campaign literature year after dreary year – taking credit for “revitalizing” DTF over and over and over and over and over again.

Here’s what Bankhead really said, verbatim, an insult to the hundreds of businesses in DTF and in the rest of the city that never took a nickel of Bankhead’s largess:

Or, to put it another way:

November 16, 2011November 16, 2011"Dick" Ackerman

“Dick” Ackerman Moral Weathervane of the Anti-recall Team. Part 3.

by Joe Sipowicz128 Comments

tricky dick — Heh, heh. When nobody was looking the collection plate went missing.

When you are a moral vacuum like Dick Ackerman, you really don’t stand for much of anything except your own well-being. Public service? Hell, no! It’s all about personal service. Everything else is just platitudes and bull shit.

An indication of Mr. Ackerman’s future career path was clearly established with the creation of a fake charity by his wife that was simply a mechanism to get state legislators (one of whom was Mr. Ackerman) alone on Maui with lobbyists for big corporate interests who actually paid for the whole junket. Ackerman is hilariously quoted as saying how beneficial these get togethers were, as if being lobbied in Sacramento (instead of Hawaii by the same cast of characters) was somehow just so much more darned inefficient. FFFF posted all about the utterly phony Pacific Policy Research Foundation, here.

AcknFlack4-430x500 — I don't even know how I got into the room...

That was just the start of Mr. Ackerman exploiting Mrs. Ackerman for family gain. And it wasn’t enough that The Dickster got the missus on the Metropolitan Water Board where she naturally supported huge water rate increases (true, that bar was already set really, really low).

In the summer of 2009, while The Dick was illegally lobbying the State Legislature in the sordid the OC Fair Swindle, his protege, 72nd District Assemblyman Mike Duvall was caught bragging of nasty sexual accomplishments with a lobbyist; maybe the idea of nasty accomplishments with lobbyists ignited a fire in Dick’s political loins. By the end of September his wife, Linda Ackerwoman was running to replace the disgraced Duvall!

Now people endowed with a normal dose of shame would have simply receded into the background after the man they promoted was busted for moral turpitude. But the Ackermans are not so endowed. Dick’s immediate impulse was to promote the candidacy of the wife, a woman who had, apparently, never even held a job except as a “consultant” raiding her husband’s campaign accounts.

Well, okay. Lot’s of unqualified dimwits run for the Legislature. The real problem was that the Ackermans didn’t even live in the district. The Ackermans live in a top-secret gated community in Irvine! The State Constitution says you have to live in a district a year, but what the Hell, the State Constitution is for losers!

So Dick and Linda cooked up a fake address in the rumpus room of a Fullerton stooge. Well, technically they were carpetbaggers; but since nobody really believed they spent a night living in Fullerton a better word applies: fraud.

Bankhead2 — You mean they never really lived here. I guess I slept through that. Again.

As expected, Mrs. Ackerwoman got the endorsements of the Three Deteriorating Dinosaurs, all the statewide Redevelopment money, and the big corporate interest lobbyists. They ran one of the slimiest campaign anybody could remember. It hardly mattered. The Ackermans still lost to Chris Norby by a whopping 20 points in the Republican Primary. Within a few weeks they had reregistered to vote in the leafy precincts where their Irvine mini-McMansion is located. How’s that for a big F-you, Fullerton?

The point of the story is simple: there is no basement so low that Dick Ackerman & Co. won’t crawl into it in order to pull a string or make a buck. And if you don’t recognize Dick as the moral barometer of the anti-recall campaign, you don’t know Dick.

November 14, 2011November 15, 2011"Dick" Ackerman

“Dick” Ackerman, Moral Weathervane of the Anti-recall Team. Part 1

by Joe Sipowicz199 Comments

Some of our loyal readers have asked us who Dick Ackerman is, and why is he the leader of the opposition to the recall of the Three Shop Worn Stooges on the Fullerton City Council: Jones, Bankhead, and McKinley.

Good question. After all, Ackerman is a resident of Irvine, and although he used to live in Fullerton a long, long time ago, it’s not immediately apparent why he should care about defending the Three Burned Out Bulbs on the council.

Well, these three did support Ackerman’s utterly unqualified wife when the Dickster tried to get her into the Legislature by cooking up a fake address in Fullerton.

But there’s more, and as you may have guessed, it’s the cash nexus. You see, ever since Ackerman termed out of the Legislature he’s been looking to grease his skids peddling the influence he accrued on the taxpayer’s dime. He is employed for lobbying purposes by a law firm called Nossaman; but rather than bring in business he’s actually become embroiled in embarrassing ethical and illegal incidents (more on that in Part 2). The word on Easy Street is that he’s got to bring in some do-re-mi to Nossaman and PDQ, or he’s out.

Which circuitously brings us to the latest round of “affordable” housing projects in Fullerton, the kind of housing that costs two or three times as much to build as the regular kind, and the sort that Dick Ackerman vociferously opposed on principal when he was on the Fullerton City Council. Well that was then, before Ackerman discovered he could profit handsomely from them. Now he is a lobbyist for one of the so-called developers, St. Anton’s Partners, who, not surprisingly, received the promise of millions of dollars in City Redevelopment subsidies from Jones, Bankhead and McKinley on a project just a few weeks ago. Jones, Bankhead and McKinley were so eager to pay off Ackerman that they actually tried to rush through their vote before the public hearing was even held!

And that’s why Ackerman needs to keep Fullerton’s Three Blind Bobbleheads in office, no matter what. There is no noble purpose, no moral justification, no principle at stake. There’s just a big potential payday for Ackerman and his employer, Nossaman. And if you don’t understand that, you don’t know Dick.

Stay tuned for Part 2, in which we share a little Dick Ackerman retrospective.

November 1, 2011November 1, 2011Dead heads

The Union Pacific Park Sink Hole. What’s Next For The Park From Hell?

by The Fullerton Shadow27 Comments

upparkpoison1-500x375 — The Park That Never Was...

The history of Redevelopment failures should weigh heavily in the upcoming recall campaign. The disasters and boondoggles are many, but none so painful, perhaps, than the Poisoned Park. This is a saga of utter incompetence with zero accountability; in other words, business as usual for our illustrious City Councilmen Bankhead and Jones. McPension gets off this hook because he wasn’t part of this calamity, although you could bet your bottom dollar he would have gone along with it, too.

This post was originally published 27 months ago. The public is still fenced off from the contamination.

– Joe Sipowicz

It was supposed to be a park. That’s how they pitched it over at City Hall. The only problem was that nobody asked for a park. And nobody outside City Hall wanted a park. Commonsense could have predicted the future of a park.

We are referring, of course, to the Union Pacific Park on West Truslow Avenue, the sad history of which has been well documented on these pages; and one of many in a conga line of Redevelopment disasters perpetrated by Terry Galvin and Gary Chalupsky of the Fullerton Redevelopment Agency- in this case aided and abetted by Susan Hunt the lady dragon of the Community Services Department, and former City Manager Jim Armstrong, mastermind of a million Fullerton failures. We have also stressed the fact that so far nobody has been held accountable for this miserable failure and waste of millions of tax dollars. No one.

Last Tuesday, during the public comments portion of the City Council Show, a longtime resident who lives on Truslow Avenue, across from The Great Disaster spoke about the problems the City had created when they decided to bestow a park upon unwilling residents. Below we share the video of the residents statement, as well as the response by City Manager Chris Myers. The video is a bit long, but well worth the watch. Borrachos, meth-heads, gang members. Who else did the City think was going to frequent this park?

In the end Myers admits that the park is being shut down – toilets closed, tables removed, fences going up, etc. You can decide for yourselves if can detect any contrition in his voice for the complete and unarguable waste of the millions spent on acquiring, designing, and building this park THAT IS ONLY FIVE YEARS OLD.

Now the city wants to create a “reuse committee,” ostensibly to figure out how to clean up the mess they created.

Here’s a free bit of advice from FFFF: SELL THE PROPERTY ASAP! And let’s not forget a complete investigation into this entire disaster with accountability for the people who created this mess. Perhaps the three councilperson who don’t have their fingerprints all over this debacle, Quirk, Keller, and Nelson, will be willing to demand accountability.

October 31, 2011October 31, 2011Chris Norby

State Assemblyman Norby Settles Santa Fe Lease Issue

by Joe Sipowicz71 Comments

Here’s a copy of a letter to The Fullerton Observer by our State Assemblyman, Chris Norby, who puts the lie to the notion that Tony Bushala got some oct of subsidy in his lease deal with the Fullerton Redevelopment Agency. It’s funny how those who have routinely handed out millions in corporate welfare to their pals and cronies have chosen to attack Tony for actually paying to renovate the City-owned building!

Well, such are politics. The anti-recall crew are incapable of defending the Three Dessicated Dinosaurs so they have to attack the messenger of the Recall. Anyway, here’s Norby’s letter:

Santa Fe Depot Redevelopment Deal the Best We Could Get

I hesitate to get in the middle of your lively give-and-take with Tony Bushala (Mid-Sept Observer page 9 “Redevelopment Foe Also a Recipient,” and the Early October page 2 Rebuttal ).

However, since I was one of five Fullerton City Councilmembers (including Don Bankhead, Molly McClanahan, Buck Catlin, and Richard Ackerman) voting to approve the old Santa Fe Depot lease, allow me to defend our action.

That lease was the only way to save the historic structure from demolition and make an outdated building commercially viable.

In 1987, the Santa Fe Railroad sold the depot to a private developer who then sought a demolition permit. To avert its razing, the Fullerton Redevelopment Agency acquired the depot and sought bids for those who could preserve, restore and operate it. Agency staff recommended that the Bushala Brothers, Inc. (BBI) be awarded the project.

BBI was the only firm not requesting public subsidies. It offered a $41,000 up front payment to the agency plus $340,000 to restore the building to its original condition. As BBI had just completed an award-winning restoration of the old Ice House (just across the tracks from the depot) it was well qualified. When the depot restoration actually cost $540,000, the overruns were covered by BBI.

BBI also applied for and received the depot’s recognition on the National Registration of Historic Buildings and Places.

The monthly lease payment to the agency is $1,326, which is adjusted annually for inflation. While the Observer contends this is below market rate, it was the best offer we had at the time to restore this historic building. In addition, BBI pays $12,000 annually in building maintenance and for all property taxes and insurance.

The agency retained all rental income from Amtrak for the waiting room and ticketing areas. The rest of the depot was largely baggage storage rooms and an abandoned loading dock – areas difficult to lease out.

I have been critical of redevelopment agencies’ abuse of eminent domain, handouts to developers and diversion of property taxes from public schools. However, I have voted for agency-funded public projects (roads, parks, libraries) and for the preservation of historic buildings, such as the Santa Fe Depot.

One could argue that an old depot was not worth the public investment. However, given the council’s commitment to save the structure, I believe this was the best deal we had.

Chris Norby Fullerton Current California Assemblymember and former Fullerton City Council & Redevelopment Agency Member, 1984-2002

October 25, 2011October 25, 2011Behind Closed Doors

They’re Having A Party!

by The Desert Rat132 Comments

Looks like the anti-recall sponges and parasites have decided to hold a party to raise money for the Three Blind Mice.

Well, good for them, say I. After all, we really need to see what kind of creeps will support the incompetents who created and tolerated the Culture of Corruption in the Fullerton Police Department.

Here’s the flier:

View the flyer

Of course they were going to trot out the Jurassic McClanahan and Catlin – who were both recalled alongside Bankhead in 1994 for imposing a tally unnecessary utility tax on Fullerton. Oh! And here’s Jan Flory who not only supported the utility tax, but even wished it were doubled. And all of them voted year after year to stick us with a 10% tax on our water bills for no damn good reason other than that they could get away with it. Oh, yeah, they also supported every single Redevelopment boondoggle, giveaway, disaster, and money pit.

And Dick Ackerman? Ho ho! We’re onto that slime ball’s influence peddling schemes. Just a few weeks ago the Three Desiccated Dinosaurs awarded the lobbyist Ackerman’s clint a multi-million dollar subsidy for an unnecessary housing project. Awarded for services rendered, no doubt.

Well, there’s your sad crew of anti-recall characters. Here’s a thought: let’s sweep the whole rotten Phalanx of Failure into the garbage can of Fullerton history – once and for all!

Can anybody say protest at the Villa del Sol?

October 21, 2011October 21, 2011About Us

Wow! There’s No Bottom to This Well of Stoogery. Well, We Know Better!

by Joe Sipowicz91 Comments

A couple of months a go we related a pathetic pro-cop piece written by the OC Register’s David Whiting, who is used to writing about wild flowers and bike trails and who, if the Register weren’t sinking, would probably be forced to stick to those bucolic endeavors.

Here is this toady’s latest effort. He has coughed up just about the lamest propaganda for the Three Desiccated Dinosaurs imaginable. It’s all about their quiet, dignified “leadership.” He helpfully supplies thumbnail biographies of his new heroes: Jones Bankhead and McKinley.

For Whiting everything has to do with how these three handled the murder of Kelly Thomas. But he conveniently omits some shocking truths; thruths like the abandonment of civilian oversight of the FPD as it descended into criminal chaos under McKinley’s reign of error; of a conga line of law suits, criminal and civil rights accusations, arrests and convictions of cops for one crime after another, about false police reports and perjury. Theft. Sexual battery. Fraud. Assault. False arrest. You name it.

Shallow observers like Whiting want to think the recall is about Kelly Thomas as an isolated, unavoidable incident; it isn’t. It’s about a Culture of Corruption created and fostered by Jones, Bankhead, and McKinley and they essentially turned over the police department to their union supporters – going so far as to permit one of the union bosses to act as an official city spokesman, a position this individual has used, and grossly abused in trying to help his union brethren escape responsibility for their criminal behavior.

Then there are the other troubling issues that Whiting knows and cares nothing about: the use of Redevelopment by The Three Myopic Miscreants to reward their political supporters and campaign contributors; the serial boondoggles and wasted millions in pursuit of one cockeyed master plan after another. It’s about the cesspool these individuals have created in downtown Fullerton; it’s about creating a criminal praetorian guard to patrol the downtown sidewalks – those that haven’t yet been given away to campaign contributors.

And then there is the disgraceful 10% tax on the water users of Fullerton, a $2.5 million annual ripoff that goes to pay the massive pensions and perks enjoyed by Jones, Bankhead and McKinley. It’s been illegal to impose such a tax for years, but Bankhead and Jones have been cheerfully ripping us off for decades.

Enough is enough. Time to break out the municipal broom and sweep these malefactors out of City Hall. Lackeys like Whiting will never permit themselves to comprehend the truth we know, and that thanks to Kelly Thomas many more people now realize: Bankhead, Jones, and McKinley are not leaders, dignified or otherwise. Real leaders take responsibility for their actions and their inactions. They are accountable. These three are detached, self-serving, arrogant clowns pretending to be something thy are not. If they won’t leave voluntarily we will help them to the door.

September 20, 2011September 20, 2011Fullerton City Council

On The Agenda: September 20, 2011

by Christian72 Comments

As FFFF’s Grover Cleveland has pointed out, the City of Fullerton has no fewer than 7 pending or likely law suits pending – and that’s just what’s on the Agenda!

After the shock wears off, let’s look at the rest of tonight’s Agenda.

There are the usual meeting minutes and funding transfers. There’s an agreement between the Fullerton Redevelopment Agency and the City of Fullerton so that the City/RDA can pay the State so that the City can keep the RDA.

The price tag is staggering: $54,701,015!!! And this is in addition to paying off tens of millions in bond debt incurred thanks to Bankhead, Jones, and even McKinley. And this is “under the radar” in the Consent Calendar where we usually see minor routine action items. More often then not, however, this is where staff places big ticket items (like the City Manager’s FAT raise or this RDA agreement to pay blood money to the State.)

Oh but wait! It gets better. In the same agreement there is a schedule of payments to the tune of $58,383,657 to cover RDA administrative costs!

And almost as an after thought, the agreement schedules “housing administration annual costs” which will total $16,234,607!

(more…)