Well, it’s two weeks later and our city council still can’t decide on a budget. I’ve been asking around and nobody can remember this ever happening before.
Staff had presented a whole slew of options but the basic premise remained the same for our brave councilors: budget reductions or not?
The fact that the budget still includes numerous unfilled positions seems not to have sunk in to the avowed defenders of Fullerton’s bureaucrats, Ahmad Zahra and Jesus Quirk-Silva who also want to remunerate employees with Federal Biden Bucks. Bruce Whitaker and Nicholas Dunlap keep insisting on cuts to address our permanent structural budget deficit.
![](https://www.fullertonsfuture.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Jung.jpg)
And then there’s the guy in the middle, Fred Jung, who has staked out a via media and hasn’t moved from his position of a smaller cut.
But what seems to have happened is That Quirk-Silva was willing to go along with Jung at a 1% budget cut, but that Zahra would have none of it. Meantime Whitaker and Dunlap were willing to come down too, but not far enough for Jung.
My bet is we will see Jung, Whitaker, and Dunlap at 2%, or so; Zahra will pout; Quirk-Silva, seeing the handwriting on the wall may want to show unity. But more likely he’ll vote no and at least appear to be supporting his real constituents in City Hall.
What fun! I don’t know how this can keep going, but I love the lack of appeasement and fake collegiality, and the Fitzgeraldine behind-the-scenes monkey business.