Walk on Wilshire Limps Along
Last Tuesday the Fullerton City Council considered extending the so-called Walk on Wilshire project, a staff-driven closure of Wilshire Avenue just west of Harbor to auto traffic and leasing the street to adjacent businesses to operate for outdoor dining. The “pilot” program term ended in June but “economic development” bureaucrats sure wanted to keep it going even though it’s over fifty grand in the hole so far, with little but wishful thinking promising success in the future.
Right off the bat, Mayor Nick Dunlap recused himself. Apparently his father is part owner of the adjacent the Villa del Sol building that has tenants who may or may not want the street closure ended. That left four councilmembers to deal with the item.
It turns out that the folks in City Hall commissioned another one of those surveys designed to arrive at a pre-determined conclusion that City Hall wants. We’ve seen that over and over and over again. Guess what? Everyone just loves them some Walk on Wilshire.
Public speakers included about five or six people nobody had ever heard of before, suggesting that they were planted by staff or a councilmember like Shana Charles to be there. Oh, they just oozed enthusiasm for the closure, rhapsodizing on the exclusion of cars, the walking and the bicycling and the ambiance, etc., all the touchy-feely stuff you would expect.
Saskia Kennedy, editor of the yellowing Fullerton Observer got up to extol the virtues of the plan, proving that making the news is a lot more fun than responsibly reporting it.
Several adjacent business owners spoke, complaining about the unfairness of the closure that only benefitted three adjacent restaurants and that hurts their business. They included the owners of Pour Company, Les Amis, and The Back Alley Bar and Grill, and Tony Bushala who owns the historic building at 124 W. Wilshire.
Two other speakers, Joshua Ferguson and Jack Dean made excellent arguments against continuing the closure. Ferguson pointed out that the council was being asked to make a decision based on insufficient information, while Mr. Dean reminded the council that the business and property owners on Wilshire, many of whom were not even notified of the meeting, have a paramount interest in this endeavor.
When the chit-chat was all over it became clear that there was not a majority in favor of continuing the program until December. Zahra and Charles naturally wanted to prolong the boondoggle, Fred Jung and Bruce Whitaker didn’t. In a rambling discourse Whitaker went to great but unpersuasive lengths to explain his switcheroo, but did hit upon one truth. The Walk on Wilshire is completely driven by bureaucrats in City Hall, and nobody else. A motion for continuing the Walk on Wilshire until the end of the year failed on a 2-2 vote.
But a waffling Whitaker was in favor of giving the participants three months to plan for the end of the program which wasn’t all that bad of an idea. However, Shana Charles thought she espied the eye of the needle and threaded herself though it, using all the arguments against the Walk on Wilshire to propose that staff review the mess, again, and come back, again.
Waffling Whitaker agreed to a return of the item in three months to study up on the issue, as if there hadn’t been plenty of time to do that already. And so a council majority voted 3-1 to keep the patient on life support, and as usual nothing was decided and there was no specific direction. Staff is supposed to review something, anything, who knows what.
There never seems to be closure until it is approved by the bureaucrats who are the real profiteers on money losing schemes. It’s job security.
It’s never over ’til staff says it’s over.
Another sterling performance.
I’d like a dollar for every time Whitaker mentioned “al fresco” dining.
It doesn’t seem to have occurred to him that you can use the sidewalk for that.
Zahra and Charles were getting all wet about public spaces. They seem to forget the downtown plaza that is empty most of the time.
The answer is to shut down the whole 100 block of Wilshire once in a while and just let people use the street free, and no planners and gobbledegook speakers like that idiot Sunyaya involved.
Fortunately the idea of assessments to find other locations to fail seems dead – for now.
“Everyone” loves it but only one of the three restaurants who use it has bothered to install a “parklet” that comes close to what the city required of them by this time. If they aren’t interested enough to invest in the Walk on Wilshire why should we be subsidizing this closure of a public street?
This ill considered boondoggle, a remnant of COVID restrictions on dining (although two of the three participating restaurants already had outdoor dining before the pandemic) had actually expired already on June 30. A council vote to extend the program failed on a 2-2 vote, as noted above. That should have marked the end of the topic that night, but then an alternate proposal was considered, completely out of order, and, effectively, a vote was taken on an item not appearing on the agenda that night, since all business on the Walk on Wilshire item had been concluded with the first vote.
Is there now a five second rule on council votes? If there is, this item wouldn’t have qualified, since it was not a changed vote, but an alternate proposal that should have been considered before a vote on the original one. I don’t understand how this was a legal decision.
Good point. Of course we saw the same thing over a longer period of time with the Trail to Nowhere when a council decision was worn down by repeated harassment of the council majority.
And then it happened again on the sales tax issue: Zahra and Charles, the latter claiming “new information” is somehow possible and “staff” should have more time to figure it out.
Whitaker went for it out of senility or weakness.
The City Manager is complicit in this bullshit.
“I’ve got information, man! New shit has come to light!”
Loved your comments, Matt. They were right on.
Won’t make you any friends with the predictable Observers.
Skasia Kennedy can’t put a coherent sentence together.
What waste of our tax dollars! Guess money doesn’t mean anything to Zahra. Except when it fits his narrative. Then the city is broke! He must have no pants in his lackluster wardrobe since he lies so regularly, they must all have burn marks. Or skid marks?
Ferguson was the only person out of the whole lot that mentioned a budget deficit. Whitaker couldn’t even manage that.
Actually a person in Zoom also spoke about how spending money on WOW is a a revenue killer for the other businesses on the street that don’t see a benefit for their customers.
Endless meetings drone,
papers shuffle, no resolve
stagnant minds delay.
Here’s one:
Back and forth chatter
Turning into insect drone
A moss bound tree falls
It seems sort of ridiculous to block off about 30 feet of street for dining at 2 places, to the detriment of all the places that are not right there and all the people who have to drive around and figure out new routes to get home or to a store.
And the worse is the bike lane. I have never seen a biker on that lane, and only 2-3 on Wilshire, which ws supposed to be this new bike path. Why are bike people so passionate about something nobody wants or uses??
“Why are bike people so passionate about something nobody wants or uses??”
Because all ideologues are committed to abstractions and addicted to fuzzy thinking. Come to think of it, so are the weak-minded, which means most of our city councils over the years.
You have just described Hoogerbooger to a T.
just because you dont use the bike lanes in fullerton doesnt mean nobody does you cunt
Had dinner at Mulberry Street last night. Dined inside. Not a soul dining outside at either establishment. Weather was perfect. Time to tear it down.
Don’t spoil the beautiful origin narrative.