Welcome to the No-tell Hotel
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.
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.
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.
I wonder if status briefings are given to the council in closed session under the generic heading “potential litigation.” This would hide it from the public and get the councilmembers who didn’t go for this nonsense – Dunlap and Jung to keep quiet while staff looks for a white knight to assign the project to.
Right now Johnny and Larry are sitting on a damn gold mine and can make a fortune doing nada.
Good question. Lots of things are hidden behind the veil of “anticipated” or “potential” litigation.
Dunlap could have killed this by voting to deny the super majority motion brought by a hotel workers union. He caved. He only voted with Jung to deny the project after that vote sticking Fullerton with this mess. Sound familiar?
I do remember that. These people are so useless.
I don’t understand/don’t remember. How can a union “bring a motion?”
Not sure of the terminology Fullerton Harpoon. So I maybe using the words wrong.
fullerton observer.com/2021/09/03/city-extends-agreement-with-downtown-hotel-developer-2/
This is why Dr. Ahmad Zahra and Dr. Shana Charles will win. You guys can never get your shit together and he’s always one-step ahead.
Yeah, that’s a real brain trust. Two fake doctors.
If “Dr” Zahra was one step ahead he’d already served a term as Mayor. Instead, he’ll never ever get that opportunity. Not in this life or the next.
Jesse Latour didn’t understand what was happening. The agreement was extended to keep the mess alive. The union showed up to pitch “affordable housing” on the site.
But the reality was (and is) that this site is not surplus and never was. There was no reason to do ANYTHING. But doing nothing is not in staff’s bag of tricks. There’s no job security in doing nothing and for the politicians no photo ops, either.
That was over three years ago. It took another year for the hand-over to the new “partnership.”
The City did create sudden, immense wealth for which the City was getting virtually nothing but another uber dense cliff dwelling. I may have to go back to Screech Owl Road.
Clown car, indeed. This mess was aided and abetted by the numbskull Domer who was only hired because he would do whatever FitzFlory wanted.
The path of this project was so typical. The most ironic, but really predictable thing was that Whitaker was fooled into backing it.
According to Whitaker he backed it because he had seen in a history of stagnation in city development and figured something moving forward is better than nothing
How many time over the years and months has the City got into bed with deadbeats, fly-by-nighters and other scammers?
There was the Bank of Italy fiasco where the developer ruined the building then went belly up and the City held the empty bag.
The Knowlwood corner boondoggle where Sanderson J Ray couldn’t perform and ended up putting a fake second story after the lot sat vacant for years.
Then there was the “City Lights” AKA the Bum Box where the “developer” Caleb Nelson looked like he was living out out of his 15 year old pick-up truck; he went away and was replaced (illegally, of course by Gary Chapulski) by the scammer Ajit Mithawala who later fled to India to escape American justice.
Let’s not forget the Amerige Court monstrosity that may still be alive for all I know – the brainchild of Paul Dudley working hard for Pelican Lang.
And no one was ever held accountable. As Molly McClanahan liked to cluck: hindsight is 20/20.
So the Johnny/Larry shit show is par for the course.
What about the $2,000,000 that the City invested and lost in the Wilshire Promenade (Howard/Platz) project?
Holy crap!
Warn a guy before you blast that Fitz pic!
Imagine waking up to that every morning!
BTW, wonder if she has slithered into a seat somewhere in Texas yet?
Request denied. Everyone needs strong tonic now and then to remind him of the casual corruption of the FitzFlory regime.
There’s an excellent point in the post. The project was essentially reassigned to a new partnership. How could $180K per year Suraya (sp?) Thomas NOT perform due diligence in investigating the background of Lu and Liu? That negligence suggest supreme incompetence or criminally indifference.
Grover said it. Proverbs 24:6. Wage war. Fire the employees who are not doing their jobs!
Let’s see from Nicole the BeTard, to Kelly what’s her name, and now Sunyna, we have not seen a real push for meaningful economic development for at least 10 years. Nobody is held accountable as they simply leave for other jobs or retire.
Though it’s not fair just to blame staff, recently the Planning Commission tried to push for a Vietnamese market to take over the Stater Bros spot at Euclid and Chapman. Good job Arnel Dino, who couldn’t string together an actual sentence with help from AI.
While there is a large Korean population in Amerige Heights and Sunny Hills, can anyone identify a large Vietnamese pocket that would indicate a Vietnamese supermarket would be beneficial or somehow generate tax revenue?
Aside from crappy highrise housing projects there is no real development in the city.