The Trail to Nowhere Complaint
As has been predicted, a concerned Fullerton Friend has decided that the dismal Trail to Nowhere was such an insult to California’s taxpayers and to any commonsensical Fullerton resident that he was going to do something about it.
So he wrote a letter to the State of California Natural Resources Agency and addressed it to the Agency’s boss, Mr. Wade Crowfoot. I understand that the letter was sent by registered mail so it may be hard for Mr. Crowfoot to claim he didn’t get it.
Cynics will say that the California bureaucrats at these agencies don’t care how their grants are spent, or in this case, misspent. Their jobs are to dole out the dough without a backward glance. In this case there was no real forward glance either; judging by the initial approval, they swallowed Fullerton’s tale by the proverbial hook, line, and sinker.
Anyway, it’s a good synopsis of the various inaccuracies and falsehoods in Fullerton’s grant application. Here is the text of the letter, forwarded to us by its author:
Mr. Wade Crowfoot
Secretary for Natural Resources
California Natural Resources Agency
715 P. Street, 20th Floor
Sacramento, CA 95814
Dear Mr. Crowfoot,
I am writing to you as a concerned citizen of the City of Fullerton, to inform you of irregularities in a
Grant Application made by the City of Fullerton to your agency which resulted in the award of a Urban
Greening Grant to build a recreational trail on an abandoned section of the Union Pacific Railroad right-of-way.
This is a 2022 grant for $1,777,200.00, under Grant Agreement U29194-0 which itself was authorized by
Senate Bill 859.
The irregularities in the Grant Application falls into two categories: first, omission of pertinent
information required by the application; second, outright falsehoods about the projected positive
aspects of the project.
The application failed to alert the State that one of the adjacent properties to the proposed trail is
contaminated by trichloroethylene (TCE), a known carcinogen. The property (311 South Highland
Avenue) is identified by the EPA and the State of California Department of Toxic Substances Control
(DTSC). Reports have indicated a TCE plume emanating from 311 South Highland in a southerly direction, precisely under the proposed trail site. There are currently 10 Monitoring test wells along the proposed trail site and several others in adjacent properties.
The proposed project budget does not include any cost for additional testing, remediation, and/or
export. There is no inclusion of the need to rework or replace the existing test wells.
Beyond the unmitigated environmental concerns, the City of Fullerton Grant Application asserts
“connectivity” as a positive feature of the proposed trail. These assertions are demonstrably false. The
proposed trail does not connect to any businesses; it does not connect to Downtown Fullerton; it does
not create connections between parks and schools; it does not connect different parts of the City and is
actually contained within the same compact area. In fact, the proposal for Phase II does not even
connect to its predecessor, Phase I, which itself was a selling point in the Grant Application.
In truth, the proposed trail is a disembodied half-mile length of property that starts and stops without
reference to any other transportation corridors.
To the West, Phase II terminates with the Burlington Northern Santa Fe right-of-way at the back corner
of Independence Park, a park so poorly maintained that the playground, courts, and gymnasium have
been closed off to the public for several years. On the East, Phase II abruptly ends at a sidewalk adjacent to Highland Avenue, a North-South thoroughfare serving approximately 11,500 vehicles daily, per the City’s own traffic study in 2019.
Even if Phase II connected to Phase I, which it does not, Phase I itself stops at the back of the abandoned
Union Pacific Park which was closed due to contamination 15 years ago. There is no practical extension
in either direction.
Despite these facts, the City of Fullerton’s Grant Application included a projected 105,000 annual users, a number that is simply preposterous on its face.
The proposed trail does not pass through a residential neighborhood, but rather a blighted industrial
strip situated between two dilapidated, neglected, and run-down parks. In short, it doesn’t go where
anyone with common sense would want to go.
The existing abandoned right-of way has provided plenty of evidence of being unsafe. There is rampant
drug use, homeless encampments and two violent deaths over just the past few years.
The City of Fullerton cannot afford to maintain the proposed facility, as is clearly witnessed in the
condition of the trash strewn, dilapidated, weed-infested Phase I, a condition deliberately omitted from
the grant application. The idea that this area has been so poorly maintained but somehow the City will
be able to be good stewards of the area only AFTER the State grants it nearly $2 million more, is
insulting.
The $1.77 million grant represents resources that could, and should, be used elsewhere.
Fullerton’s Application was disingenuous, at best. At worst it included falsehoods dressed up in words
echoed back from the stated objectives of the Application Form in order to defraud the State.
In writing this I am hoping that your Agency will reevaluate this project, rescind the funding, and find a
better use of this valuable Grant money.
Thank you for consideration of this matter.
Excellent. Let’s see if Mr. Wade Crowfoot really wants to do his job.
When the EDD and DMV are the “best practice” examples of California government services, don’t hold your breath waiting for Mr. Crowfoot’s action.
It is a good summation, hopefully helped along by FFFF.
Whoever wrote this did his/her own investigation. I didn’t realize there were that many test wells on the actual trail. They’re all in the way of earthwork and grading. No bueno!
“It is a good summation, hopefully helped along by FFFF.”
The question is why wasn’t it sent on FFFF letterhead signed by FFFF activists.
Bad rep?
Because FFFF isn’t an organization it’s an informal group of Friends seeking intelligent, accountable government. Ideas completely foreign to you.
Excellent. Let the State know. They won’t do anything, most likely, but it’ll give ’em plenty to think about.
I think they just hand out money willy-nilly and don’t give a flying fuck what happens to it. Remember the $1,000,000 grant that paid for the idiot Core and Corridors Specific Plan? The money was wasted and there never was a Specific Plan produced. The State didn’t give a damn and neither will Wade Crowfoot. In fact, he’ll be pissed off about the burden. Ignorance is bureaucratic bliss. Knowledge confers responsibility.
Haha. Give the dude a chance!
The City Council knew all this and approved it anyway. Pathetic. A lot of people have a lot of explaining to do.
why is a private citizen doing more research than the people paid and elected? this person clearly has a willingness to be involved in city politics so why aren’t they involved?
Too smart.
You’re right about the official negligence. A lot of people have been spending a lot of time looking the other way from the obvious problems and falsehoods.
This being Fullerton nobody is accountable if finger pointing actually starts – which it almost never does.
Rental assistance for seniors. Closing my streets for restaurants. Giving me away to hoteliers. Fred may be the most conservative. Heaven help us all.
Private citizens often must do the work that bureaucrats are incapable of or cannot perform. Government jobs are where the intellectually disabled and physically lazy go to pretend they work.
Signed by?
I assume it wasn’t Zahra who you called a traitor for talking directly to California officials.
And who is going to send a letter about the main falsehood like claiming it doesn’t connect anything? I guess there’s no need because that is simply a deliberately ignorant opinion. The trail connects IP and the DMV to homes near the trailhead.
It’s a network, morons! As you’ve been told. That network includes city streets and sidewalks. You can get from anywhere to anywhere. The trail is just one leg of an extremely large set of route permutations.
Sincerely,
John R. Hogerhuis, Angry Elf and Insufferable Twat
No, I keep telling you. He’s an angry manatee. And now somebody just hit him with a big speed boat.
Speed boat? If anything I’d say it’s more of a potential speed bump.
We won, you lost. Rather than accept your loss, you’re angrily working the ref, your neighbors be damned… you’d rather Fullerton’s tax dollars not come back to us and go somewhere else than see some new useful infrastructure for walkers and cyclists.
Talk about sour grapes.
But I do understand the political science concept of disproportionate negative power. It’s much easier to kill a bill/project/etc. than to get anything done, and that creates a natural bias towards conservative positions and public ineptitude and impotence. We used to be able to get big things done in this country, but NIMBYism is gradually killing that.
Which is why people like me feel the necessity to push back against your corrosive cynicism including this new effort to directly fuck over your neighbors.
“Friends” lol.
We’ll see if you’ve won and what you’ve won.
Fuck over our neighbors? What twaddle. The thing’s an expensive loser meant to look like somebody gives a shit about the “underserved” Mexicans in D5 – a useless gift the the fake doctor Zahra to his untermenschen.
I wonder what would happen if the media got hold of this.
You’ve been supporting the city council creatures and staff who have relentlessly and repeatedly offered up “new effort to directly fuck over your neighbors”. You’re fine with fucking over your neighbors as long as it’s you and your friends doing the fucking!
Shut your pie hole Hoogie! You are part of the perpetual problem in Fullerton. Go fuck yourself…again!
“You’ve been supporting the city council creatures and staff who have relentlessly and repeatedly offered up “new effort to directly fuck over your neighbors”.
Huh? You all have your knickers in a twist about the trail. But it’s hard to see how a new class 1 bike and walking trail with some greenery is fucking anyone over. Exactly the opposite. The city is taking a dead zone and turning it into more park space which marginally improves the safety active transportation network, offers space for recreation, cleans pollution from the air.
“Shut your pie hole Hoogie!”
No.
So you would stand up take personal responsibility for its failure?
Not in a million years. No one else will either so you’ll have a lot of company.
Hoogie doesn’t believe in personal accountability or responsibility. He places his faith and believes in the omnipotence of the bureaucratic collective, where being wrong is sound doctrine, wasting other people’s money is an act worship, and holding anyone accountable is blasphemy.
Sad, but true. Of course with some of the dyed-in-the-wool boohoos you have to wonder if they really believe the nonsense or just believe they have to defend it – no matter the cost or the boondogglery.
Guess it doesn’t really matter.
Poor, sad, lonely Hoogerbooger. Zahra went to the state behind his colleagues’ backs.
This upstanding citizen has every right to call bullshit on the whole sordid scam and seek redress directly from the State.
The Trail to Nowhere doesn’t connect to the DMV, please stop spouting that nonsense – it’s stoopid even for you.
Of course YOU are welcome to write your own letter to Mr. Wade Crowfoot and explain why someone might want to ride a bike to register a car or take a driving test. That ought to be worth a couple mil, right?
“The Trail to Nowhere doesn’t connect to the DMV, please stop spouting that nonsense – it’s stoopid even for you.”
It goes to IP which is right fucking next door to the DMV. By all appearances the DMV is one of the most popular destinations in Fullerton. People are regularly lined up out the door, willing to spend hours waiting for their opportunity to interact with the State of California braving crashed computer systems, tuberculosis, COVID, colds, the flu to get a California ID, to take a written test to get a permit, etc.
Maybe you’re confused as to cyclists needing to use the DMV. Drivers and cyclists are not disjoint sets. Most drivers own bicycles (53%) and most cyclists own cars (83%).
“Of course YOU are welcome to write your own letter to Mr. Wade Crowfoot and explain why someone might want to ride a bike to register a car or take a driving test.”
It doesn’t really need explaining. My point is your concerned citizen is a lying hypocrite. Lies of omission are still lies, right? I mean that’s your whole case here. That Fullerton didn’t make extraordinary efforts to kill their own grant application by spending money trying to find reasons that it MIGHT not work.
And if this person is really concerned and really a upstanding citizen why so coy? If this person is proud of their choice to try to fuck over their neighbors, they should stand behind their choice, with their name.
And still the Trail to Nowhere doesn’t get you to the DMV!
“My point is your concerned citizen is a lying hypocrite. Lies of omission are still lies, right?”
You mean like “forgetting” to tell the State about the TCR contamination? Like that?
Yes, exactly the point I was making.
(There is no actual evidence that anyone forgot. No contamination of the actual trail site is documented.)
The writer is claiming that it could be contaminated because nearby property is contaminated while simultaneously leaving out relevant facts.
Hypocritical, lie of omission
Oof. Hoagie strikes out again.
Hoogerboogerpicker…
How many humans do you see commuting or getting groceries daily using your vaunted “integrated network of streets, sidewalks and trails”? You won’t answer the question honestly because you know your entire argument is a farse!
It seems like you are dead set on not getting it.
You’re asking the wrong question. I’m not making the case the network is great now. I’m very clear that it isn’t. It isn’t safe. It is worse today than it once was because the streets themselves suck (for everyone). But it is a network and it is workable. If your commute has to pass through Fullerton you will be better off with a mountain bike or fat tire electric and constant vigilance to watch out for potholes.
These things are fixable by expanding and improving the network for safe cycling.
With your attitude it will certainly never improve and that’s the way you want it. You don’t care about the active transportation use cases, the users, the potential for growing that pool of users, their safety or quality of life as far as I can tell.
Wah wah.
Better off with a pint of Fat Tire Ale and a few ounces of chronic — both can be found in abundance in DTF!
You probably see yourself as some sort of hero, but your support of this dumbass idea costs you NOTHING.
IF it ever gets built and then fails, where will you be?
Probably squawking that the problem was the taxpayers just didn’t spend enough on it, and blame somebody else. And Zahra and his little claque of barrio abuelitas and septuagenarians won’t be around, either.
“You probably see yourself as some sort of hero”
No, I see myself as correct.
John R. Hogerhuis is dyslexic. That is why he sees himself as “correct”.
Most Dunning-Kruger victims do. Dumb is as dumb does. Off to the DMV with you. Good luck crossing Independence Park on your tricycle.
Using Dunning-Kruger in an internet argument is almost always an example of Dunning-Kruger.
Keep losing.
“Good luck crossing Independence Park on your tricycle.”
Trail to IP park, DMV: clearly a trail to somewhere. It blows up your narrative. That’s why you’re working so hard tuning the parameters of your reality distortion field to make the trek from IP to the DMV sound ludicrous.
If nowhere is somewhere then sure knock yourself out, professor. But it doesn’t go to the DMV – that’s another lie even if it made sense. In other words lying to be dumb. More Dunning-Kruger.
“That’s why you’re working so hard tuning the parameters of your reality distortion field to make the trek from IP to the DMV sound ludicrous.”
And you’re trying awfully hard to make that ludicrous notion plausible.
Poor Hoogie, got his panties in a twist.
It’s a “network” in the same sense city employees “work” — appearance only, no utility or effective, positive outcomes.
Yeah, it’s a network in Hoogerhouse’s tiny brain. There are no users so it needs to be expanded.
You nailed it.
It becomes part of the transportation network. That’s how roads and trails work.
If you drive, you use small segments of roads every day to get to/from your final destination. That’s no different than including a segment of a short trail in your route like the UP 2 will be.
It will get used. It will get used for riding, for walking, and the additional trees will help clean pollution from the air.
If hypothetical TCE is on the ROW it would have to be cleaned up, not because it creates a risk to trail users… short of a drinking fountain tapped directly into groundwater, I don’t see how it would. It would have to be cleaned up because it creates a risk to groundwater generally.
I don’t understand why anyone here thinks that a possible cleanup becomes part of the budget of the trail project. The trail doesn’t cause the pollution so any cost of cleanup should not be allocated to it. Likewise, if the trail doesn’t get developed it wouldn’t mean any TCE would disappear or somehow become irrelevant.
It MIGHT delay the project, if it was there. But I’m not sure why it would have to delay the project, unless it interferes with the cleanup. Which again, I think would have to happen trail or not.
Who will walk on it? Who will ride a bike on it? None of Zahra’s chubby grannies and their portly grand-ninos, that’s for sure. And you wouldn’t, either, because what for?
Idiot. Keep throwing nonsense words around if it makes you feel smart.
Why would the city council do the job? All of them are too busy giving the finger to private property owners and getting in bed with career politician Sharon Quirk giving handouts to “seniors”. Someone check on the mayor. He might be a commie.
Dunlap voted with the dems for this dumb trail. He’s another RINO traitor.
I predict absolutely nothing will come of this letter.
It’s very easy to come to that conclusion, given the history of Fullerton and the likely indifference of the State and its reluctance to be embarrassed publicly by rescinding a grant.
Still, the language in the grant says fraud is a reason to cancel it, which is exactly what happened, so the effort is a necessary gesture in calling their bluff.
Embarrassed? The unfeeling bureaucracy and bureaucrats have feelings, OK /s
More likely nothing will happen because nothing has happened except some sour grapes loser sent someone their thoughts.
I’m sure a conversation will happen about this. But it will be a short one.
“Still, the language in the grant says fraud is a reason to cancel it, which is exactly what happened”
Fraud? Not shown. Wishful thinking on your part. Sad really that is what you wish for.
Not shown? 105,000 users, no connectivity to businesses, no connection to Phase 1, no mention of the pollution everyone in City Hall knew about?
Sounds like fraud to me.
Astoundingly obvious. People lied.
Rosy scenarios on # of users isn’t fraud. I imagine it is typical for a grant application. Connectivity to businesses… roads and trails connect different points in our town. It is simply a fact that having a new space between point A and point B improves access to point within reach of A and B.
Period! How can you fail to understand how a transportation network works? Really astounding how ridiculous you all are willing to be.
As no one has shown contamination of the trail, it’s hard to see how not speculating about it in a grant application is fraud. Further, if there were contamination it would likely have to be cleaned up trail or not, so it’s hard to see the relevance. There’s no documentation of contamination on the trail, and I don’t see why it would kill the project or even make it more expensive beyond the cost of delays. And all development faces unexpected delays.
105,000 is a goddamn lie. And that makes you a liar too.
J.R. Hogerhuis is dyslexic regarding proof, facts, friends, and just about everything else. It’s safe to assume that the opposite of whatever he says or claims is real and true.
It’s his fantasy world…the rest of us are just living in it.
“It’s his fantasy world…the rest of us are just living in it.”
Don’t let me keep you
You aren’t keeping anybody.
Ever notice how Hogerhuis loves himself so much he won’t stop blathering even when nobody listens or cares what he has to say? It must be a living hell to have to interact with him on the daily. I pity his family and co-workers. Their major depression and suicide rates must be triple the average.
You read every word. You can’t help yourself.
Rainy day? Can’t ride your trike?
Inside doing projects and making sufferable posts.
Yes, you did. You read every word of the post above which screams the truth about your sad, dreary, insular life.
I wish the Fullerton PD hadn’t murdered me so that I could bicycle the Trail to Nowhere.
Mr. Crowfoot has been a sycophantic parasite feeding on Gavin Newsom since his days as San Francisco mayor. Mr. Crowfoot isn’t going to do ANYTHING with your letter because he is too busy orally copulating Dear Leader Newsom.
https://resources.ca.gov/About-Us/Who-We-Are/Secretary-for-Natural-Resources
I accidentally dropped Johnny on his head when he was a baby. That is why he is the angry, insufferable twat he is today. It’s my fault. He can’t change the damage.