Grover Cleveland, Author at Friends For Fullerton's Future

March 18, 2010March 18, 2010Dead heads

Total Buzz Fail: The Shoe Fetish

BarbresLittleSecret — Um, too much information?

Everybody knows that traditional print journalism is on the way out. Why? Lazy citizens? Sensory overload? More convenient access? All of the above?

Dying papers like the Orange County Register are fighting a rear-guard action by turning their print edition into a dumbed-down website-looking format with lots of pictures and human interest stories for us idiots. And of course they have gone on-line with stuff like their political gossip column “Total Buzz.” Which might be better termed “Total Schmooze.”

Rather than actually dedicate itself to reporting real, relevant news, the Register has decided to dedicate its employees’ talents toward the inane, and to the political flackery of Martin Wisckol and Frank Mickadeit. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to the worthies than run the Register that Orange County is a market that is starved for local news and, coincidentally, that it is run by a group of political overseers who operate the place like their own private plantation. Seems like an opportunity to do real reporting, right?

But yesterday the Register hit a new low, even for them.

Consider this, um, monument to cutting edge journalism as Jennifer Muir shares the embarrassing shoe fetish of Brett Barbre with her breathlessly waiting readers.

Brett Barbre’s Shoe Fetish

Huh? FFFF has recently disclosed a series of embarrassing expenditures by the County Clerk, Tom Daly, including a $48,000 contract to the very same Brett Barbre to “study” an athletic hall of fame, and who then turned around and kicked back $1000 into Daly’s political campaign.

And what about the $1700 as month retainer that has been paid out by Daly for over five years to a Sacramento “consultant” to do – nothing. And how about the County spending $2,100,000 two years ago at Daly’s behest on a tear-down building that was supposed to house County’s archives? Of any interest to the intrepid journalists at the Register? Naw.

It's not just a girl thing...

Instead we get pictures of what shoes the political hacks are wearing at the Registrar of Voters Office. They think we want to look at pictures of people’s feet. Meanwhile a lowly blog is forced to actually do a newspaper’s job.

Well, we can take a certain perverse pleasure in knowing that the Register’s days are numbered and that soon its employees will be doing (paid) PR work, or will be blogging for food.

Still, it does seem shame that nobody in the business is willing to try to fill the void where local news used to be.

March 11, 2010March 11, 2010Dead heads

The Sad, Shrinking World of Tom Daly

by Grover Cleveland23 Comments

Our Friend Allan Bartlett passed along our post about Tom Daly’s $10,000,000 real estate disaster for the edification of the good government advocates who read the “Red County” blog. Or maybe he did it to annoy the Republican supporters of crazy spendthrift Democrat Tom Daly.

And as I predicted in my original post, a couple of Tom Daly sycophants popped up to defend the indefensible. And here’s what Cynthia Ward, AKA Colony Rabble had to say:

Tom Daly bought a piece of real estate that staff reveiwed (sic) and approved and the Supes voted for? Oh no! Whatever will we do? String up the varmint! The Fullerton boys are real sleuths. I told you in the Barbre post that Tom was expanding the Archives and looking at other space. His real estate may not have been the best deal? Well welcome to the world the rest of us live in!

Browntrout — Tom Daly is a fiscal conservative. Tom Daly is a fiscal conservative.

Apparently the idea of wasting $2,100,000 for a completely worthless piece of property is of no concern to Ms. Ward. Not the best deal? Jesus H., this miscreant flushed 2.1 million tax dollars down the toilet! The world the rest of us live in? Is that supposed to be a joke? Does Cynthia Ward routinely blow millions on worthless real estate? Do her friends? Do her neighbors?

Well now we know what kind of a conservative Ward is. And if we ever needed confirmation that her job at the Mauve County was to do anything other than promote the egregious Daly (and now, it seems, to try to talk away his mammoth incompetency), now we have it.

March 10, 2010March 10, 2010Behind Closed Doors

Tom Daly’s $10,000,000 Headache

by Grover Cleveland34 Comments

daly-and-lewis — Take two aspirins and call me in the morning...

Well, no that’s not quite right. Headache would imply that County Clerk Tom Daly cares he blew $2,100,000 of public money on a real estate venture and that it could cost another $7,600,000 to fix the problem; or that he is in any way worried about it. And why should he be? When there’s no accountability you never even have to say you’re sorry.

Dark Cloud's looming — 433 W. Civic Center Drive. The jewel in Tom Daly's crown.

Here’s the background. In 2007 Daly urged the purchase of the small office building at 433 West Civic Center Drive, in Santa Ana. The ostensible purpose of this acquisition was the expansion of the County Archives. Negotiations were approved by the Board of Supervisors in September, 2007. After several months of dickering and alleged property inspections, the County CEO and RDMD staff recommended that the Board of Supervisors approve the purchase for $2.1 million. Staff recommended an “as-is purchase” with the caveat that the County Clerk would be paying for “minor repairs” and interior improvements; they noted blithely that the purchase price was below their appraised value for the building. Nothing was mentioned about inadequate space or building deficiencies. In fact the staff report claimed the building had been well-maintained.

An almost comical selling point was an alleged annual savings of $26,000 for parking paid by the County to private parking vendors. No one seemed to calculate the lost opportunity costs or even the interest value of $2,100,000.

The Board voted 3-0 to approve the purchase in January, 2008. Norby, Moorlach and Nguyen put their fingerprints on the deal.

Two years later the building still sits empty across the street from Daly’s office. And the archives still sit where ever it is they sit, presumably more crowded than ever.

What happened? Could it be that the County Clerk is now wrestling with the embarrassment of how to deal with a massive boondoggle?

It turns out that the building in question was not fit for public occupancy. Apart from ADA issues, the structure is deficient, the basement is going to leak, and all of the building systems are all obsolete. It also turns out that the building is too small to do what it was bought to do.

In other words, the building is practically worthless; and plus demolition and paving costs, the County is now the proud owner of a $2,100,000 parking lot for a few dozen cars.

How and when did this painful realization occur? We’re not real sure about the chronology, but sometime in 2008 Daly hired a firm called Kishimoto Architects to look at the building and produce a feasibility report, after the building was purchased, with cost estimates for various alternatives. The report, dated January 12,2009, proposed 3 approaches:

1. 2.8 million to remodel the building to make it usable; ADA, structural, electrical, mechanical, plumbing, roofing, replacement, etc.
2. 5.7 million to remodel as above, and expand the building to accommodate the proposed use.
3. 7.6 million to demolish the building and start over again.

Say what? $2.8 million to remodel a $2.1 million dollar building?! Option two – that included a remodel and expansion – seems highly unlikely given the price tag, the schedule delays and the embarrassing admission that nobody ever bothered to do a space/needs assessment in the first place. And of course #3 was even worse: starting over would jack the price up to nearly $10,000,000, and add years onto any occupancy schedule.

So there the building sits.

Is any of this really Daly’s fault? His few remaining adherents will argue that poor Tom was just the victim of staff incompetence. Blaming the staff that recommended that this turkey proceed is easy because they were obviously derelict in their appraisal and physical assessment of the property. And the two remaining supervisors who voted for this (Moorlach and Nguyen) have a responsibility to the taxpayers to answer for their employees and the waste of over $2,000,000; after all, they are “Supervisors.”

Daly Really2 — I was gonna put the sports hall of fame in the basement.

But ultimately Tom Daly is the chief architect of this fiasco, and to those who know how elected politicians apply pressure to the staff to get the recommendations they want, there can be little doubt that the County Clerk was likely pressing and probably pressing hard for his imperial expansion. The money had been budgeted and needed to be spent. So the staff either intentionally looked the other way or didn’t bother looking at all. In the final analysis Daly is an elected official and answerable to the voters.

It’s hard to say what will happen to this real estate jewel. It’s too expensive to knock down and too deficient to use. The site is too small to do much of anything with. In other words it’s a real headache. And it’s all ours.

March 8, 2010March 8, 2010Behind Closed Doors

Register Picks Up On Daly’s $50K Hall of Shame

by Grover Cleveland22 Comments

UPDATE: ALTHOUGH THIS STORY BY MS. MUIR APPEARED ON-LINE, APPARENTLY IT DID NOT APPEAR IN ANY PRINT EDITION – CAUSING SOME OF OUR FRIENDS TO WONDER WHAT SORT OF THRESHOLD OF PUBLIC MISFEASANCE/MALFEASANCE NEEDS TO BE SURMOUNTED IN ORDER TO ACTUALLY BE PRINTED BY THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER.

THE ANSWER: WE DON’T KNOW. BUT MUST IT MUST BE PRETTY HIGH.

WELL, I’VE GOT MORE GOOD STUFF ON DALY AND WE’LL SEE IF THAT’S OF ANY INTEREST TO THEM.

– Grover Cleveland

Jennifer Muir of the OC Register picked up on the Brett Barbre hall of fame brainstormin’ fiasco that cost the taxpayers $48,000 – courtesy of County Clerk Tom Daly’s reckless largess with our money. Interestingly, Muir cites a County rule that any expenditure more than $50,000 has to be approved by the Board of Supervisors. Hmm.

The funniest quote in Muir’s piece was Daly claiming that the whole deal was within his purview and that he paid Barbre for ideas, not “long reports.” Of course he got neither.

Hilariously, Barbre claims to have worked 40 hours a month on the project. That would be an average of 2 hours a day. Every working day. For 18 months. That’s 720 hours – with nothing to show for it. Is there a single person in OC stupid enough to believe any of that?

He seemed to be soliciting sympathy with the big revelation to Muir that a trip he made to Boston was paid for out of his own pocket! What self sacrifice!

Barbre also seemed indignant that somebody (us) might imply a nexus between his windfall and the $1000 he gave to Daly’s supervisorial campaign. His self-exoneration? He didn’t even give Daly the maximum amount of $1700! What a guy.

Additionally, we have received an e-mail that really sheds light onto just how feeble Barbre’s and Daly’s “research” efforts really were. Here it is:

Subject: Orange County Sports Hall of Fame

I am a founder of the Orange County Sports Hall of Fame. We began in 1980 with a huge banquet at the Anaheim Convention Center. Over the years, we inducted more than 70 athletes, coaches and contributors from Walter Johnson and Mickey Flynn to Jack Youngblood and Jim Fregosi. We eventually had a museum at Anaheim Stadium that has since been replaced by Angel offices (our artifacts are in storage). Nobody contacted me or other founders (including Cal State Fullerton Sports Information Director Mel Franks and long-time OC business and political leader Buck Johns) regarding research into a Hall of Fame — that existed 30 years ago. If someone was paid nearly $50,000 to do research they did an amazingly poor job. Sincerely, Pete Donovan

Thanks for the e-mail, Mr. Donovan. Just as we expected.

March 8, 2010March 8, 2010About Us

He Went to Boston But Couldn’t Make a Local Phone Call; Original Hall of Fame Founder Calls BS on Daly/Barbre

by Grover Cleveland8 Comments

It’s looking like County Clerk Tom Daly figures he can peddle any old bullshit to a Register reporter and get away with it. And he probably figures on an easy re-election this spring. That’s the arrogance of a career politician for you.

When questioned by the Reg’s Jennifer Muir about his sports hall of fame fiasco in which he paid “consultant” and campaign contributor Brett Barbre $48,000 to “study” the notion, Daly said he paid Barbre for “ideas, not long reports.” Not quite right, Mr. Daly. See, we read your contract with Barbre even if you didn’t. He was supposed to be doing research on the feasiblity of the scheme – a scheme, by the way, that falls way outside the County Clerk’s job description. That specifically included contacting similar entities.

And here’s the kicker: we already had a hall of fame in the County – which apparently was located in Angel’s Stadium in the 80s and subsequently mothballed. And we got an e-mail from a gent who says he was one of the founders: Pete Donovan. Mr. Donovan asserts that nobody ever contacted him or fellow founders about this idea. Here’s Donovan’s e-mail:

Subject: Orange County Sports Hall of Fame

Gee. Barbre had time to go to Boston to “study” the issue at Fenway Park, but not not enough time to make a couple of local calls to people who had already given it a go. Come to think of it, maybe those were exactly the people Barbre and Daly didn’t want to talk to!

Well, that pretty well sums up the incompetence and/or corruption of the whole stinking pile.

Want your $48,000 back?

March 2, 2010March 2, 2010Behind Closed Doors

Tom Daly’s $50K Hall of Shame

by Grover Cleveland16 Comments

As we reported last week, here, County Clerk/Recorder Tom Daly paid almost $50,00 in 2008 and 2009 to a campaign contributor to “study” the feasibility of developing an Orange County athletic “hall of fame.” We opined upon the irresponsible expenditure and questioned why the County Clerk would even embark on such a lame idea in the first place.

At the time of the post, our request for public records had resulted in scant documentation that this “consultant” Brett Barbre, had actually done anything at all to justify his $3000 per month bill. We were informed by the County that we didn’t have all their “work product” documents.

Now we do.

tom_daly — I don't remember and you can't make me.

The sum and substance of Mr. Barbre’s efforts for Daly is reflected in brief periodic memorandums sent to Daly’s office informing them of what he had been up to in the previous month. Even these cursory, written updates ceased after September 1, 2008, although Barbre continued to be paid by Daly through June, 2009.

Curiously, in the summer of 2008 Barbre and Daly had gotten it into their noggins to create something called a prep sports honor roll dinner, some sort of tie-in to the original concept, presumably. They had even picked a date for the inaugural event. Amazingly no one seems to have even questioned why the County Clerk would be organizing such a blatanly non-public function that had absolutely nothing to do with his job responsibilities.

The other scant fruits of Barbre’s labor were a photo montage of the New England Hall of Fame and a facsimile of a brochure from the Newport Sports Museum. Material collected and scanned and submitted as somehow substantive.

We will probably never know what was actually discussed verbally between the parties involved – including why they thought this hare-brained idea was in any way justified; or how they could ever defend the $50,000 paid to Barbre to do almost nothing. One thing is evident from the documents: by the summer of 2009 Barbre was no longer at the public trough, although by then he had already collected regular monthly payments of $3000, totaling $48,000 with nothing to show for it.

Almost fifty thousand dollars. Squandered. Wasted. Flushed down a rathole and into the pocket of a Daly campaign contributor.

Does anyone in the County government even care about this total dereliction of responsibility and breach of the public trust? Do the folks at the Orange County Register care? Do you?

March 2, 2010March 2, 2010Behind Closed Doors

Monkey Business at the Clerk/Recorder’s Office? Why Did Tom Daly Pay His Campaign Supporter $50K?

by Grover Cleveland48 Comments

UPDATE: Allan Bartlett has helped close the circle on the Daly-Barbre financial connection. Here is the link that shows a $1000 campaign contribution from Barbre back to Daly. Even if there is no overt kickback here it sure stinks like Hell.

– GC

Has there been fiscal misfeasance by Tom Daly at the County Clerk/Recorder’s office? As we previously indicated, here, OC Clerk Recorder paid self-styled public relations “consultant” and Municipal Water Board member Brett Barbre tens of thousands of dollars in 2008 and 2009 to assist in the creation of some sort of OC sports “hall of fame.” A public records search has turned up invoices from Barbre to Tom Daly’s department for almost $50,000, with almost nothing to show for it. Interestingly, as early as March, 2009 Barbre, who is a Republican, made himself conspicuous as an endorser of Daly in his now defunct campaign for 4th District County Supervisor.

What the records show is that in February 2008 the County Clerk’s office engaged the services of Barbre in a contract for $15,000 and later in a $3000 per month extension, to delve into the subject of creating a sports hall of fame museum.

What the consultant selection process was, why Mr. Barbre was chosen, what his qualifications were, and why the taxpayers were put on the hook for this dubious concept project may never be known. But what is known is that from May 2008 through June 2009 the County paid Barbre $48,000 with virtually no evidence of any accomplishment at all.

Our request for “all activity status reports” and “lists of work completed” turned up three short memorandums and an incomplete spreadsheet listing Orange County High Schools and their mascots.

We have been provided with no evidence to suggest that any of the activities outlined in Barbre’s contract were ever achieved. Added to the evident lack of accomplishment seems to be a reluctance to publicize the hall of fame brainstorm at all. Very telling is a sentence from a January 15, 2009 memorandum from Barbre to Tom Daly, in which Barbre says about the whole idea: I would suggest keeping it fairly low key until the budget mess at the state and the county are behind us.

Right. No sense in letting the public know that the Clerk/Recorder Tom Daly is squandering public money on such a hare-brained scheme during a recession, including giving Barbre $3,000 a month to ponder the sports hall of fame concept, while county employees are about to be laid off.

We have been informed by the County Public Information office that we are not in possession of all the work product documents, and that something else is forthcoming. This strikes us as particularly odd since Barbre’s questionable “services” were concluded nine months ago and our records request was made several weeks ago. We can’t help but consider the possibility that something is being fabricated up after the fact to make it appear as if the $48,000 slipped to Barbre by Daly produced more than a few short memos and an incomplete list of Orange County’s High Schools and their mascots. Well, we’ll soon find out.

The final disturbing piece to this puzzle is the fact that Brett Barbre’s name appears on Tom Daly’s March, 2009 fundraiser host committee list – the event in which he launched his abortive campaign for County supervisor; and that later, in the summer of 2009, Barbre assumed the office of ambassador to the OC GOP Central Committee for newly-minted Republican Renee Ramirez, Daly’s employee and hand-picked successor for the County Clerk’s job.

DalyFundraiser — First column, six down.

Ironically, we note that Daly pulled the plug on his supervisorial campaign last Friday – the very same day we presented ourselves at the County to pick up the Barbre documents.

That’s the story so far. It doesn’t paint a pretty picture of either competence or probity within Tom Daly’s bureaucratic regime. The self-styled fiscal conservative seems to have been anything but conservative with public funds, and, as will become painfully evident in subsequent posts, this episode is not a lone example.

Hall of fame? Really? Maybe what we need in OC is a hall of shame – for politicians who abuse the public trust. We’ve got a recommendation for the first inductee.

February 28, 2010February 28, 2010Behind Closed Doors

High Speed Rail Boondoggle Splashed With Cold Water

by Grover Cleveland15 Comments

According to a Sunday Los Angeles Times story, here, the high speed rail (HSR) project, every big-government lover’s answer to all our problems, is starting to receive more unwelcome scrutiny lately. Skyrocketing projected costs and ticket prices, federal subsidy guarantee requirements, incomprehensible ridership projections, and property takings that include, apparently, some part of Buena Park’s Metrolink Station or the adjacent residential development are causing folks to take a harder look at this fiasco in the making.

Things have gotten so bad that even lefty Long Beach State Senator Alan Lowenthal is upset.

HSR should be a source of great alarm to everyone in north Orange County, both in terms of its cost to the taxpayers, the damage that it will do to established communities, and also because so many clueless but ambitious politicians like Harry Sidhu and Lorri Galloway are using it as a mantra to solve unemployment woes in California, and in particular Orange County.

When and if this monstrosity is ever built, the jobs will go to giant out of town engineering firms. Most of the construction workers will be imported from the Inland Empire and Los Angeles County – just like they are on every public works project. The only local recipients of reliable employment benefit will be the lobbyists like Anaheim’s outgoing mayor, Curt Pringle and his ilk who are promoting this giant money sucking vortex in their own interest.

And just watch as the onerous environmental laws that the rest of us have to live by are waived for the politicos pet project.

February 27, 2010February 27, 2010Behind Closed Doors

The Tom Daly Experience. The Longer You Look, The Worse It Gets

by Grover Cleveland34 Comments

UPDATE: FYI, our document request only extended back to 2005. Any retainer payments to GFR in 2004 are not included in the spreadsheet, below.

– GC

Yesterday we reported on the dubious contract between Tom Daly’s County Clerk office and a Republican PR man and campaign agent, Brett Barbre, that put a cool $48,000 in Barbre’s pocket, and produced no evident accomplishment. We also learned that Mr. B was not only a political supporter of Daly, but a big contributor, too – to the tune of one thousand bucks.

Today’s revelation is just as startling. Starting in the summer 2004 Daly made an agreement with an operation called Government Finance Research from Rocklin, CA, and it’s principle consultant, Peter A. Lauwerys, for a retainer deal that would cost the County $1695 per month, each and every month with special projects billed separately. Consider the implications: over twenty grand a year to some sort of research firm in order to do….well, nothing.

In the documents provided to us through our request for “all activity status reports” and “lists of work completed,” we have identified two principal GRS project proposals: one was to do a “push” survey to support Daly’s desire to expand his empire by opening satellite offices. The survey project as outlined in a September 2004 proposal would cost $16,200. Apparently that project was not finished per the original contract because in January 2005 Mr. Lauwerys proposed a nine-week extension that would cost the County another $14,000 – a whopping 86% increase. The survey was finally produced in April 2005 – a meager twenty-two page double-spaced report, including tables, plus photos and appendices.

One year and twelve more retainer payments later, in June, 2006 Lauwerys submitted a second proposal: $15,800 to “prepare and complete” the California County Recorder Association’s Statistical Report for 2006, a job that Daly apparently decided to take over from the County of Riverside. Why the County of Orange and not the Association paid for this “report” is unknown.

Finally in November, 2007 and another year and a half of retainer payments later, GFR did some sort of analysis of the benefits of “outsourcing” data entry clerks and found a savings. We do not know if Daly implemented the recommendation contained therein.

Since then two more years of monthly retainer payments have been made by the taxpayers of Orange County to the lucky boys at GFR.

The County’s invoice and billing records pertaining to GFR appear to be incomplete and somewhat confused. But one thing is perfectly clear: GFR has been receiving a monthly retainer of $1700 a month for over five years, and counting. The latest check was cut on January 15, 2010, so presumably the GFR spigot has not been turned off. Not yet, anyway.

The total payout to this operation to date has been $113,810, including the 2006 California Recorders Association project. But the billing for the original satellite office survey contract and its extension in 2004 and early 2005 seems not to have been included in the material that we received; that total was $30,200, as proposed.

Of course we question the utility of these projects as even necessary; Daly’s die-hard devotees would probably disagree. However what appears to be incontrovertible is the evidence of a complete and frivolous waste of public funds in the retainer payout to a Sacramento area firm to essentially do nothing – for over five years.

As with the Barbre contract we ask: what was the consultant selection process? Was this a no-bid arrangement? What are GFR’s unique qualifications that justify a retainer agreement, and for that matter, what are the Clerk/Recorder’s needs that justify it?

Maybe one of Daly’s supporters who have been pitching his fiscal conservatism can help us out here.

February 26, 2010February 26, 2010About Us

Chris Norby Supports Profanity!

by Grover Cleveland8 Comments

At least that’s what Ackerman, Inc, would no doubt be saying about our recently elected State Assemblyman Chris Norby if their opinion mattered anymore. We just said it in a cheap attempt to grab your attention to read this post.

Chris-Norby1 — Will they wash his mouth out with soap?

What happened was that yesterday one of our typical idiot Assemblymen proposed a resolution declaring next week “anti-cursing week” (or something of the like).

To his credit, Norby stood up and denounced the measure as a complete waste of time in a state that is fiscally and managerially bereft. Apparently fellow legislator Sam Blakeslee from SLO joined Chris in making a statement about the state of the State; and a statement about the state of the State Assembly and all those stupid “_____ Week” resolutions they just love to pass.