The Desert Rat, Author at Friends For Fullerton's Future

February 16, 2025February 17, 2025About Us

Baron Bettenhausen Belches Bilge Water

The other day The Fullerton Harpoon published a post on how new Councilwoman Jamie Valencia got bad advice regarding receiving and then giving back campaign contributors who had expressed definite opinions about the ridiculous Walk on Wilshire – and another vote was coming up! He opined that the bad advice about Section 84308 in the Government Code (“the Levine Act”) may have come from the City Attorney Jones and Mayer – through one channel or another – a suggestion supported by later events.

As Mr. Harpoon ably showed by commonsense and State legal findings, the law in question does not even apply to the people opposed to Walk on Wilshire who gave Valencia campaign contributions over $250 in the past year.

It turns out that some dope is still pursuing that angle – to create a scandal out of nothing, and find a smoking gun where no gunshot was even fired. My money would be on one of the Kennedy Sisters of Fullerton Observer fame. Here’s a Public Record Act request dated 2/3/25:

Now, we now this request should have been responded to with a brisk “there are no relevant records” like a city does when it’s trying to hide something. In this case it would be true since the law doesn’t apply. Even the dodo who submitted the request cites the scope of issues involved in the law: permits, entitlements and licenses that clearly don’t apply to Walk on Wilshire opponents.

Enter Baron Bettenhausen, Esq.

Mr. Bettenhausen, is graduate of the Regent School of Law, Now he’s a partner in the I Can’t Believe It’s A Law Firm of Jones and Mayer. His response to reporter Gabriel San Roman about the Valencia matter, was trawled in the Public Records Act request, above. The response is incompetent, immaterial and irrelevant.

Let’s see what Bettenhausen had to say to San Ramon:

Notice how Bettenhasen throws the rat on Valencia, claiming it was her decision to return the money because of her determination of a conflict with the law. Well, we already know what she did it, but not being a lawyer herself, we have to assume someone who is, or who had access to one, gave Valencia her options.

Bettenhausen admits it’s his firm’s responsibility to hand out legal advice regarding the “Levine Act” to the City Council, but notes that it’s the councilmember’s responsibility not to run afoul of it – another bit of obvious information meant to deflect from the real problem.

What’s the real problem? Valencia, Bettenhausen intones to the reporter, has “cured” the Levine Act problem, but he doesn’t acknowledge the truth: that there was nothing to cure. This is like your doctor telling your friends that you’ve been cured of a nasty disease when you never had it in the first place.

If no one at Jones and Mayer was responsible for guiding the action provoking Valencia’s return of campaign contributions last fall, they are certainly responsible for knowing the contents and the applicability of the damn Government Code, including the Levine Act, to Fullerton decision makers in various circumstances. The lawyers at Jones and Mayer either didn’t know the law or they don’t care. Maybe both.

Ignorance and apathy? Throw in some occasional malice to FFFF and other Fullerton troublemakers. What a team.

January 30, 2025January 30, 2025About Us

Who is Tychoon Tony Bushala and what does he want?

by The Desert Rat26 Comments

Fullerton’s left wing joined with its Old Timey Republican enemies back in the 1990s in a rather unsavory but comical embrace. The sight of Dick Ackerman and Molly McClanahan on stage, debating as pals was a joy for some to to see since it corroborated evidence that the two groups were really no longer that different, and the Main Goal was to defend the walls of City Hall from the obnoxious prying eyes of “unknown” outsiders.

18 years later the two groups found themselves again in desperate solidarity as another recall offered a new and unsettling future with unkempt barbarians at the gate.

At the center of both tumults? My old friend Tony Bushala was at the center of the vortex of evil. A fun, self-deprecating video made by a Friend in 2012 was actually stolen by sad sacks Dick Ackerman and Larry Bennett and published on the anti-recall website. You can’t make up this level of Grade A stupidity. Anyhow, here’s the video.

Nowadays, Tony seems once again to be the target of his haters – dipshits that have done an awful lot less for Fullerton than Bushala. These are the remnants of Fullerton Boohooo and a scraggle of uninformed nitwits who actually respond to the delusional Kennedy sisters, Sharon and Saskatoon.

I guarantee he will be smiling when he sees this.

January 14, 2025January 15, 2025A Step in the Right Direction

Fullerton’s Committees and Commissions. What Are They Good For?

by The Desert Rat27 Comments

Well, the answer to that question depends on who you are and what you want.

Last Tuesday’s Fullerton City Council agenda featured an item to modify some of the current roster of committees and commissions. The idea was to schedule fewer meetings for some, get rid of “at-large” members in others and in one case, the Active Transportation Committee, roll it into the Transportation and Circulation Committee. The Planning Commission was to be expanded to seven members by adding two at-large members.

Naturally, the true nature of these committees and what they actually accomplish was not part of the discussion.

Almost no city committees are legally necessary according to State law – except, I believe, Library Boards and Planning Commissions. The rest are there, presumably, to give the public a chance to contribute to the charming swindle known as participatory government. This is almost always a fiction, as anybody who has spent any time watching these shows, knows. The committees are little better than rubber stamps.

City staff likes committees because it gives them a chance to build momentum behind one of their pet projects – to create an aura of inevitability about this or that. It’s an opportunity to go to the City Council and explain the unanimous support for their item. And if, perchance, a committee shows a little independence then their ideas and their votes are mere suggestions with no legal standing.

Some of the bureaucratic enthusiasm for committees must have waned a bit when Fullerton went to direct Council appointments a few years back. Previously choices were made by review panels made up of council and committee members who could be relied on to pick “sound” people, that is, folks who could be trusted not to rock the proverbial boat.

In the olden days staff liked larger committees. The reasoning seemed to be that the more members you had the more impotent the commission really was.

City Council members like to put friends and allies on committees, and, in the case of the Planning Commission, maybe even someone moving up in Fullerton’s political arena. This is how you build a political machine: you help people, they help you.

It is not uncommon that if there is an annoying member of the public, an irritant at Council meetings, he or she might just be shut up by being put on a committee, becoming part of the team, so to speak. It worked shockingly often. John Henry Habermeyer, Estelle Geddy Professor of Political Science and Economics at RPI for many years, describes the scenario eloquently:

“The answer is to asphyxiate the irritant in a smothering embrace; to draw said miscreant into the circle of government itself by appointing this him to some footling committee or other, thereby causing him to voluntarily silence himself in deference to the grand fraternity to which he has been officially welcomed. He has a name plate; perhaps even a coveted parking space! Many an underdeveloped and agitated ego has been assuaged by such a maneuver and its proprietor thereby silenced.“

Committee members who are not impatient with bureaucratic doubletalk like to be on committees, especially if they can sit up on the dais in the City Council chamber. It makes them feel good about things, an ego boost.

Of course the public is completely unaware or even interested in committee meetings which are almost always held in empty rooms.

Since almost everybody seems to like the current set-up, why the proposed alterations? The staff report referred to economies, efficiencies, and such-like. The verbiage didn’t sound very heart-felt or persuasive and the reader gets the impression of a top down diktat from Mayor Fred Jung to clean things up.

In the end most of the proposed reductions to five directly appointed members of certain commissions was approved, which is basically a smart move. The inconsistent proposal to increase the Planning Commission membership to seven (actually the way it used to be) failed. The motion to keep it the way it is passed 3-2 with Fred Jung and Jamie Valencia voting no.

On a side note, Fullerton Boohoo was at the meeting to display their unhappiness. Why not? The altar of probity, the Fullerton Observer had tried to stir up opposition earlier with one of their editorial/news mishmashes. The funniest part of this effort was to explain that these committees help keep staff “accountable,” an obvious misdirection from the Kennedy Sisters who have never cared about staff accountability before.

Whether or not the changes would have saved anybody time or money is debatable. What is not debatable is that these footling committees are there to look like public participation is going on, when it hardly ever is.

December 30, 2024January 1, 2025Ahmad Zahra

Welcome to the No-tell Hotel

by The Desert Rat21 Comments

One thing you can always count on in Fullerton elections is that concrete, real issues will never be discussed. You’ll hear mostly generalities about this or that topic. Even roads and taxes melt away in general promises and vague hand-wringing. But, when it comes to specific projects with all sorts of facts and figures involved, you can forget it. A charming characteristic of all local elections, and especially in Fullerton, is that people aren’t elected on their knowledge of anything, but, rather on their acceptability as wise people who will do the right thing given the opportunity.

This is all nonsense, of course. The electeds, knowing nothing are in no intellectual position to push back on the lamest of lame ideas that percolate through the “experts” in the bureaucracy. Not knowing and not learning and not working are the natural siblings of the councilmember’s natural tendency to acquiesce to City Hall staff anyhow. It’s easier just to attend ribbon cuttings and golden shovel ceremonies, I suppose.

And so it is that zero attention has been given by anybody (except FFFF) to various nonsense projects, the worst of which is the so-called boutique hotel project that started out as an idiotic scheme and naturally morphed into the worst kind of Redevelopment boondoggle. It even has a stupid name: It’s called The Tracks at Fullerton Station.

I’m not telling the truth and you can’t make me…

You may recall that the hare-brained idea was hatched by your former Mayor-for-Hire, Jennifer Fitzgerald who pushed a non-competitive agreement with some local dude who couldn’t build a birdhouse. Because the City had to declare the land on which the thing was supposed to sit as “surplus property” a deadline had to met to dodge a State law requiring first right of refusal to low-income housing “developers.”

Rather than shit-canning the whole thing, boobs Bruce Whitaker, Ahmad Zahra and Shana Charles approved of the project and the City actually deeded over the land before any agreements were in place. Pretty amazing, huh? Their convoluted reasoning was so dumb it doesn’t even deserve a description. That was December 2022.

The even bigger problem was that by then the original guy (now deceased) had been pushed out and a whole new partnership had taken over. The new players were a pair of bums – Johnny Lu and Larry Liu who had a record of fraud, embezzlement, and bankruptcies in their wake, and creditors foreclosing on them. Why Fullerton’s crack economic development team and City Attorney failed to pursue even the slightest investigation of Lu/Liu’s record like FFFF did, has never been discussed. And it never will be, Fullerton being Fullerton.

I don’t know the current situation with this project. Two years have passed. Johnny Lu and Larry Liu had many milestones to accomplish certain actions per the agreement they finally signed. Did they? Who knows? Not the public, that’s for sure. Obviously, no one in City Hall wants to talk about this vast embarrassment, and an insecure council isn’t making them. And naturally, the Fullerton electoral process doesn’t discuss such things – bad form to discuss City failures, you see.

But the public has a right to know the whole story, because in the end, the entitlements granted to Lu and Liu are worth a fortune; even worse, the sales price of 1.4 million, less site clearance, is a tenth of the market value the City created with those entitlements. And the new density with hotel and with the new apartments Liu suckered the City into approving, just to keep the mess alive, is two and a half times the density the Transportation Center Specific Plan allows for housing. Go figure.

The mileage is terrible and the wheels are bald…

It’s also critical to remember that in Fullerton projects take on a life of their own through institutional inertia and the human instinct to dodge responsibility whenever possible. The Fullerton Clown Car has never had a rear-view mirror.

September 4, 2024September 4, 2024Chronic Failure

Now We Are Six

by The Desert Rat7 Comments

Just yesterday I posted a story about how a Fullertonion friend had received five copies of the Parks Department’s glossy activities brochure. That seemed pretty funny for a town dancing along the edge of a fiscal cliff.

But I wrote that before the afternoon mail arrived. Sure enough. Yet another copy.

I guess we’ll call this a provisional total.

September 3, 2024September 4, 2024Chronic Failure

Five of a Kind

by The Desert Rat4 Comments

A friend of mine in Fullerton just received a brochure from the City Parks and Recreation Department that showed all the super-fun activities our city government provides for them.

What’s really funny is that this guy then received another. And another. And another. And another.

Small stuff adds up they say, and I have to wonder how many people got five (or maybe more) copies of this thing.

One thing is pretty clear. This sort of sloppiness reflects really poorly for an organization responsible for a massive budget deficit.

August 29, 2024Bad Cops

Grab Her!

by The Desert Rat16 Comments

Here’s a fun video harvested from youtube.

Aren’t you a good citizen?

October 31, 2019October 31, 2019Behind Closed Doors

The Seven Walls of Local Government: Wall #6 – The Long Arm of the Law

by The Desert Rat16 Comments

Carc1 — We’re from the government and we’re here to help. Ourselves.

(Ed. note: this post was first made on July 5th 2011 – a date that should resonate with Fullertonions; FFFF republished it in 2016; and now, given the City Council’s decision to employ legal harassment against FFFF bloggers, we repost, the themes in the essay being more apropos than ever )

And now Friends, here is installment #6 of Professor J.H. Habermeyer’s engaging essay on the relationship of local government agencies with their constituents.

The Sixth Wall

As we have already seen, the local government has formidable resources at its disposal to protect itself in its undertakings, no matter how inimical those doings may be to the very taxpayers who are footing the bill to defend them. And nowhere is this better illustrated than in the utilization by the bureaucracy of the legal system to thwart, frustrate, outlast, and outspend any civic opposition.

First I will note that judges are habitually riding calvary-like to the aid of fellow government authority. This is seen in the way that government action, often of dubious legal or constitutional foundation is tolerated with the tacit understanding that we need government and thus we need the people who run it; thus the individuals symbolize the institution and both must be protected for the common good of having government itself. It is a very egregious offense indeed that will cause a judge to act in a way that could undermine confidence in the very government of which he is a part.

And so judges themselves can be counted upon to defer to the bureaucrats and their experts and dispose of all sorts of embarrassing obstacles that separate a government from its desired object. Constitutional Amendments 4, 5 and 14 in particular seem to be the most annoying impediments, and are thus brushed aside with the most regularity. Anyone who doubts this need only look at the way our country’s police collect evidence and the way that urban renewal fiascoes have wreaked havoc on the very cities they were meant to revitalize; both with the disconcerting approbation of the nation’s jurists.

But to even advance to a courtroom takes time and money, again, two resources that the government agency has in abundance and which opponents can usually be counted upon to have very little. A city has its own attorney; if needed outside counsel may be employed at the taxpayer’s expense, which is to say at the expense of the very people who have shown the temerity to seek legal redress!

If, once before a judge, the nearly impossible occurs, and the opponents win a courtroom victory, the agency can be relied upon to seek appeal to a higher court, running up more cost and draining its antagonists even farther.

The spectacle of free citizens in a democracy suing their own government is not a pretty one and while public agencies will avoid it, once joined, it is a battle that they will never voluntarily quit: for defeat means professional humiliation and a chink in the armor of their alleged expertise and professionalism. There is no cheap lawyer’s trick they will not deploy to win, including technicalities in the law that work to their advantage and to the disadvantage of their supposed employers.

It is a desperate man who engages his own government in a legal dispute.

The Seven Walls of Local Government

<< Wall #5: Time Is Not On Your Side | Wall # 7 – Playing With The Houses Money>>

January 24, 2017January 24, 2017Bruce Whitaker

4th District County Supervisor 2018 Edition

by The Desert Rat27 Comments

Out here on Screech Owl Road we stay informed, distantly, of the doings in humble Fullerton, a place of constant interest and amusement value. When the dust storms and tortoise races grow tedious we often turn our attention to your town.

And one genre that never bores, are the stories of political ambition and the small-time politicians with big dreams – for themselves, mostly.

Peel off a layer and you’ll find the same thing…

Is it really too early for you Fullertonions to start thinking about who represents you as County Supervisor in 2018? The campaign process normally starts at the end summer before the election and that is about six months away. On the other hand two Fullerton characters may play a part in that campaign so why not indulge in some early speculation?

The current incumbent is former Fullerton Councilman Shawn Nelson, who is ending a second completely lackluster term, in which County watchers could hardly distinguish a difference from his sleepy predecessor, Chris Norby, except that the casual corruption at the County and the downright wackiness have gotten even worse. He’s termed-out in 2018.

The talk is that both Bruce Whitaker and Jennifer Fitzgerald both have their eye on the job even though they’ve just been re-elected to their current positions in Fullerton. Oh well, political ambition trumps loyalty to the electorate every time, right?

A candidacy that splits the Fullerton electorate could leave the door open for a an Anaheim candidate with a decent reputation to join the fray. Who that might be remains to be seen.

Speaking of reputations, as to their records, Whitaker and Fitzgerald are quite similar, except that Whitaker has promoted accountability from the Fullerton Police Department, and stood on the right side of the Kelly Thomas murder, where of course Fitzgerald and her ilk were no-shows. The cop union supported Fitzgerald, and she has done her best to cover-up and protect the Culture of Corruption – while actually having the nerve to credit former Chief Danny “Galahad” Hughes for “reforming” something or other. Whitaker has also been on the right side of the ongoing red-ink budgets that Fitzgerald brazenly lied about to the voters. And he tried to establish an audit committee to keep the bureaucrats on the up and up.

Unfortunately for Whitaker, there are many points of convergence, voting and performance-wise, with Fitzgerald. There is the massive and rampant overdevelopment of Fullerton; the creation of the phony language of the Coyote Hills plebescite and then the fighting of the successful referendum; there is the the absolutely horrible dereliction of duty by supporting voting districts Map8A, cooked up by the bar owners in the riot zone known as downtown Fullerton to dilute the voters in that vomit and urine-soaked district. They both voted to waste $100,000 on a completely unnecessary “interim” City Manager. They both sat by doing nothing as hundreds of millions of gallons of prime MWD water leaked out of Laguna Lake.

The 4th District election will really gear up in the summer, but there’s no doubt that Fitzgerald, if she is running, is already lining up her bankrollers: Anaheim’s deep pockets with ties to her “employer” the slimy, pink lobbyist Curt Pringle. Whitaker can’t compete with that money machine. But as Anaheim’s recent elections proved, money isn’t everything. Still, if Whitaker is going to run, he had better start showing voters why there’s a real reason to support him.

December 10, 2016December 11, 2016Behind Closed Doors

The Seven Walls of Local Government: Wall #7 – Playing With The House’s Money

by The Desert Rat6 Comments

Friends, for the past couple weeks I’ve been out in the lonely salt flats and rocky wastes of the great Mojave searching for new zinc veins; so now I belatedly bring you the final installment of Professor J.H Habermeyer’s entertaining essay on the means and methods local government deploys to do what it wants, to get what it desires, and to abuse those who oppose it. Here is the Seventh and final wall.

The Seventh Wall

We have reviewed the myriad ways that local governments obfuscate what they do and then defend their actions against the very citizenry that has placed its faith in the charming swindle known as participatory democracy. The process is one of systematically winnowing out ever smaller numbers of remaining opposition through all sorts of clever tactics that include preying upon citizen apathy, bamboozling the public with unfathomable pseudo-technical jargon, delaying, temporizing, and even legal hair splitting that would make any Philadelphia lawyer proud.

Finally we come to the seventh and final wall that the bureaucracies of local government have erected about themselves and that provides the ultimate protection of the citadel, the sanctum sanctorum, the Holy of Holies. This final palisade is constituted of the legal and practical insulation in which the government functionaries have enveloped themselves.

It is well-known that government employees are cocooned in the protections afforded the “civil service.” This insulation provides great protection and engenders great arrogance. While politicians are theoretically answerable to the public, public employees, practically, answer to nobody. Practice and law provides effective shields to these denizens of the citadel.

The police structure can be counted upon to cover up, obscure, and ultimately exonerate instances of corruption and physical brutalization of perpetrators and innocent, alike. How? Because sham investigations are performed by other police like “Internal Affairs” and the local District Attorney – fellow members of the law enforcement fraternity who use each other symbiotically.

Likewise the urban renewal bureaucrats and land planners who devise titanic fiascoes affecting the lives and livelihoods of hundreds if not thousands of people are protected from public wrath and disapprobation. Their mantra is to look forward not backward; that hindsight is eagle-eyed; that lessons learned will provide a guide for the future; and most comically, that their projects would have worked but for lack of adequate funding. The vehicle known as local government has no rear view mirror, and no matter how rickety the contraption is, its operators will never cast a backwards glance. Thus the great open air civic center mausoleums and dysfunctional ghetto-creating human warehouse projects that should have worked in theory but that failed in practice dot the urban landscape while the perpetrators thereof suffer no rebuke for their manifest failures. In fact they are apt to give each other self-congratulatory awards and accolades!

Layer upon layer of onerous regulations will be promulgated by compliant politicians and then used, and abused, by the bureaucracy with an autocratic arrogance against which the citizenry has little effective recourse; for the guardians of the citadel cannot be held accountable.

In the last analysis, the agents of local authority take their decisions with impunity. They have invested nothing in the expensive mistakes that will cost the taxpayers plenty. There being no practical difference for the bureaucracy between success and failure, we may be sure that strategies based on arbitrary whims, and not sound financial or economic judgment will be propounded. The consequent failures and municipal catastrophes will result in no opprobrium, let alone fiscal detriment, falling upon the decision makers.

Inside the seventh wall the air is rarefied, indeed. Those securely ensconced within its sacred precincts look down upon those outside the citadel with the resigned noblesse and disdain of the mandarin. They are from the government and they are here to help.

And no, you may not come in.

<< Wall #6 – The Long Arm of the Law