In a typical display of childish petulance, Fullerton City Councilman Ahmad Zahra displayed why he is unfit to be our Mayor last Tuesday.
At the December 10th Special Meeting, Zahra just couldn’t help himself at one point from interrupting Mayor Nick Dunlap who was trying to talk – before letting Zahra speak his piece.
Zahra demanded to be heard on some footling “point of order” or something and refused to shut up, so the Mayor did it for him.
What to do? Zahra got up yammering and sulked into the room behind the dais. Here’s the video:
From everything we’ve heard about Zahra this sort of behavior is typical when the cameras aren’t rolling. In one instance he went so far as to file an hysterical and fraudulent police report on one of his fellow councilmembers. Comically, his devoted claque continually fails to understand why his colleagues refuse to make him Mayor.
For 50 years California has enjoyed/suffered the benefits of CEQA – the California Environmental Quality Act. The intent of the law was to assess the environmental impacts of various projects proposed by private developers and even the government itself – be it dams, roads, civic projects, etc. Some projects, mostly the big ones, required EIRs – Environmental Impact Reports, that cited impacts and measures of mitigation.
If the paper fits, push it!
Now, I don’t pretend to be an expert on CEQA, but I’ve been told that all too often it is just a bungling paper chase that enriches “consultants,” and instead of addressing impacts, coughs up lots of gobbledygook and ginned up “studies” to talk around the problem. And this is just as true for governments’ reports as for those of developers.
Last night I listened to Fullerton’s beloved City Council vote for a new zoning law – the Housing Incentive Overlay Zone (HIOZ), including an explanation of why it was exempt from CEQA even though over 13,000 new units were being incentivized. The excuse was that no specific building was being proposed. You might think that is reasonable enough given that specific location has a lot to do with environmental impacts on thing like roads and street lights and traffic, etc.
And yet the new mandates from Sacramento dictate that because there is some sort of housing “crisis” new developments may be built “by-right” that is to say, without local controls over specific aspects of projects that would normally be comprehensively addressed in Conditions of Approval. Which means that those 13,000 units may not be attached to amelioration of the impacts they create.
And of course 20% of the new units must be reserved for low income tenants, another philanthropic mandate with unknown repercussions on the community.
Here’s the summation: the single-party legislature has serially made such a mess of California over the past 30 years that the fixes for the problems require that they jettison other mandates previously deemed critical, such as CEQA.
Locally, cities have been threatened with legal action by the State’s Governor and Attorney General if they don’t comply; and they are threatened by deprivation of State funding and grants by the Housing and Community Development Department, run by faceless bureaucrats. If cities try to fight back, like Huntington Beach has, the legal results are costly and a foregone conclusion.
And so Fullerton’s City Council went along with the inevitable, acquiescing to the demands of Sacramento in a sad 4-1 vote. Only Bruce Whitaker voted no in what is his last official vote.
I’ve heard it said that government spends half its time trying to fix problems it created during the other half. Sounds about right.
A special meeting of Fullerton’s City Council is taking place tonight. Why? To address the so-called 6th Cycle of the Housing Element of the General Plan and the concomitant Housing Incentive Overlay Zone, or HIOZ, for those who prefer government acronyms.
Where’s the Class 2 Bikeway?
The City Council has already postponed rubber stamping this twice which is odd, because they usually clean their plates like good little boys and girl.
People who need people…
Friends may recall that City staff proposed the opportunity overlay to construct as many as 30,000 new units with almost zero City control. This, even though the Sacramento houseacrats only demanded 13,000. I say “only” even though this lower number would still add twenty to thirty thousand new residents to Fullerton with new, massive apartment blocks on re-zoned commercial and industrial property.
I previously opined that the 30,000 number was just a dodge, to give the City Council the appearance of having fought a tough fight to “save” Fullerton, while quietly acquiescing on the destructive 13,000 mandate. This would be of particular benefit to the 2026 re-election chances of Shana Charles and Ahmad Zahra, both of whom are ardent lefties and both of whom would love to see those 13,000 units without regard for the damage dome to the City’s schools, roads, infrastructure and neighborhood cohesion.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see a roll-out of the usual suspects singing hosannas to the Council for acceding to the 13,000 units.
Somebody’s gotta suck it up…
And that hypothesis seems right on. The Council has already directed staff to remove the Chapman and Commonwealth “corridors” from the HIOZ plan where the application would have been the most damaging and controversial. And paring back the scale of the disingenuous plan gives a victory to the Save Fullerton crowd who may have actually believed the 30,000 units was an authentic proposal. That group includes some our friends at the Fullerton Observer who will happily embrace the 13,000 as a wonderful compromise.
Pantomime…
Why all these meetings? Maybe it’s a necessary part of this Kabuki to give the façade of public review to something that was always a foregone conclusion – satisfying the knuckle headed legislators and the faceless bureaucrats in Sacramento; and their running buddies in the Southern California Association of Governments, and the California League of Cities.
And why a Special Meeting, other than to instill a sense of Heap Big Emergency about bowing to the diktats of an out-of-control legislature?
Friends may remember the tussle on the City Council in the weeks following City Councilmember Ahmad Zahra’s election in 2018. At first he opined that a replacement election to fill Jesus Quirk-Silva’s vacate at-large council seat was right and proper. There was applause.
But then something weird happened. A month later Zahra went back on his word and voted to appoint Council retread Jan Flory for another lap around the track. After Flory was safely installed on the council, she, Jennifer Fitzgerald, and Zahra voted to replace Bruce Whitaker on the OC Water District Board with…Zahra.
“Well, Joe, who cares” I can hear some of you saying. But apart from the role the OCWD plays in the OC water wars, and the huge pile of cash the agency sits on, the appointment pays. And pays damn well. For an unemployed “film producer” what could be better? Suddenly the Flory appointment didn’t look weird at all.
During his two years on the water board Zahra made some damn good money – tens of thousands of dollars in pay and benefits. And while on the board he pimped the awful Poseidon desal scam and got district PR people to write articles he published in the Fullerton Observer under his own name.
Whirlaway
In 2021 Fitzgerald and Flory were mercifully gone; Zahra was removed from the OCWD, replaced with Bruce Whitaker. Zahra’s Mother’s Milk was turned off at the spigot and he has only collected his council stipend since
But I checked all the right boxes!
Fullerton Folk are now speculating about whether the 2024-elected council will appoint Zahra as Mayor, an honorific job he desperately wants. A Vivian Jaramillo victory in District 4 would have got him that. But it also would have gotten the ability to vote himself back onto the OCWD board, and back on that gravy train.
Jamie Valencia, an unknown variable…
Alas ’twas not to be for Zahra. Jaramillo was beaten by newcomer Jamie Valencia who was denigrated by Jaramillo’s precinct walkers and by Jaramillo herself. She owes the Democrat nothing and may not have any inclination to do favors for the man who promoted her opponent, big time.
I have to admit I haven’t been paying much attention to the development of Fullerton’s “6th Cycle” General Plan Housing Element. I figured it to be a fruitless paper chase in which a consultant got paid a bunch of money to produce umpteen pages of incomprehensible gobbledygook. Turns out I was right about that.
If the paper fits, push it!
The other thing that caused indifferent resignation on my part was the housing mandate decreed by the State Housing and Community Development Department, often referred to as “State HCD.” It so happens that their mandate for Fullerton was to create the opportunity for 13,000 new residential units, as determined by yet another faceless bureaucracy, Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG), whose mission is to do whatever the State wants, regardless of what is good for its constituent members. The 13,000 units are part of SCAG’s Regional Housing Needs Assessment (RHNA, pronounced ree-nuh). These people sure love them some acronyms.
Where these 13,000 unit opportunities are supposed to go in a built out city is no mystery. It will require re-zoning commercial, office professional, and industrially zoned property to admit new residential use. Lots of it.
Well, that’s bad enough, but our crack Community Development Department saw fit to propose a new zoning overlay that could accommodate 30,000 new units. You read that right. 30,000 units, a sum that could increase Fullerton’s population to near the quarter million mark. Their justification? It’s so they won’t have to do anymore bowing and scraping to State HCD. At least not for a while. Or so they say.
The whole thing is ludicrous. First, the rationale for giving the Sacramento boneheads more than they demand is crazy. It’s like paying a million bucks in ransom when the kidnapers only asked for half a mil with no guarantee they won’t do it again. Then there’s the practical side of this. There would be no new roads, no new sewer and water superstructure added, no new schools built, and sixty thousand new auto trips daily. And don’t forget the inadequate parking. It’s a farce piled on top of another farce. But somehow everything will work out, our six-figure experts tell us..
The mechanism to perform this new housing miracle is the called the Housing Incentive Overlay Zone (you guessed it, there’s an acronym – HIOZ). Staff and their consultants have identified hundreds and hundreds of real estate parcels that would receive the new overlay zone, but they don’t seem to be unduly concerned about the effect to the City of Fullerton of losing land for commercial and industrial purposes. It seems that in the grand bureaucratic scheme of things, satisfying other bureaucrats in Sacramento is even more important than losing that sales tax revenue they’re always hunting around for like rabid wolverines.
Pantomime…
Well, fear not, Friends. In reality the 30,000 units was likely just Kabuki theater meant to look like a good faith effort to outdo even the demands of anonymous paper-pushers at SCAG. The City Council discussed this issue last week and there’s no way any of them are going to give the State more than it wants.
Of course, there’s another possibility, too. A political one. The utterly incompetent Ahmad Zahra and Shana Charles, Fullerton City Council’s two ultra-liberals, are up for re-election in 2026, and, cynic that I am, I have to wonder if they both won’t use this silver-platter opportunity to campaign on how they defended Fullerton’s quality of life by fighting hard against 17,000 apartments that were never going to happen anyway. Now that would be cynical, wouldn’t it?
Here’s a fun snippet harvested from Vivian Jaramillo’s facebook page. It seems she is unsettled that neither she nor her acquaintances know “her opponent,” Jamie Valencia.
This is the age-old Fullerton establishment deprecation: “no one knows him/her/them.”
Gee, Kitty, it’s too bad you and your pals don’t know your opponent, especially since she’s getting more votes than you. Maybe many of your would-be constituents don’t know who you are. And, as is likely the case, maybe many of them do know you and decided to vote for someone else, maybe even Scott Markowitz, the phony candidate and confessed perjurer your supporters created to help you win. And you’re “good?” Wow. Talk about delusional.
And that’s Team Jaramillo – the ones we can see and the ones who are trying to remain hidden.
Pray all you want for the Almighty to alter ballots after the fact. But God doesn’t like liars and cheaters and thieves. Or so I’ve heard.
In what is shaping up to be Fullerton’s most expensive Council race ever, newcomer Jamie Valencia has increased her lead from yesterday’s 19 to 41. Here’s the November 19 tally.
At this point 41 votes is a significant lead and the trend for the past three counts is in Valencia’s favor. I don’t know how many ballots are left to count from the so-called provisional ballot pile. And then there’s the possibility that Valencia and Jaramillo are doing ballot “curing” in which ballots (that include a vote for a candidate) that have been disqualified by the Registrar of Voters are validated by the voter himself. Some of these may already be counted and the remaining such ballots, if any, may add to the totals.
And hey! Look there! The confessed perjurer Scott Markowitz, whose phony candidacy was created by the dope lobby and Democrat supporters of Vivian Jaramillo, is only 3 votes away from 1000, proving that the slimy idea to take votes away from Linda Whitaker was a well-calculated one, given the Democrat/Dopers expectation that she would run a real campaign.
There’s a couple things we know about the Kennedy Sisters, Sharon and Skaskia, the people who bring to Fullerton their confused mix of opinion, “news,” innuendo and spite known as The Fullerton Observer.
It has long been a purveyor of hard left perspective, in 1994 joining the establishment in a hearty defense of anything cooked up in the bowels of City Hall. There has been no crackpot idea, no new tax, no illegal venture that they were not willing to defend, ignore, obfuscate as they thought the situation demanded.
Why write about news when you can try to make your own! (Photo by Julie Leopo/Voice of OC)
The Kennedys have also believed in the completely unethical practice of joining in making the news. Why simply report on something honestly when one could involve oneself in actually drumming up support for some harebrained idea if it checked the right box? And the right box was about virtue signaling, to wit: it didn’t matter if something made sense, or was even legal, so long as it sent the message you believed in. Efficacy matters not; it’s the gesture that counts, see?
And so things like the Trail to Nowhere and the Wank on Wilshire were the Observer subjects not just of editorial approbation, but active organization and dissemination of misinformation.
These two characteristics lead, in course, to sanctimony and self-righteousness; and the belief that one’s political piety must be accompanied by active participation. These traits are to be expected in political parties and their minions, but are forbidden in the precincts of ethical journalism.
Okay, Joe, I hear you saying. But the Observer is not a professional journal or an ethical one, and we always knew it. Well, you’re right, of course. However this issue could be bigger than an illegal water tax here, a cop cover up there, or a look-the-other-way when a few million are wasted once in a while. This is about an honest election.
Yes, I was a phony from Day 1. And it was obvious…
FFFF knew almost immediately that the candidacy of Scott Markowitz was a scam. The facts were so clear and so pernicious that only one intelligent conclusion could be drawn. The man was a plant to interfere in an election by diverting Republican votes away from Linda Whitaker to Markowitz. The beneficiary of the scam was Vivian Jaramillo, the favored candidate of the Democrat Party and the Observer crowd. And the Kennedy Sisters never made any attempt to even explore the possibility that the obvious conclusion was correct.
Instead, the Kennedys, Soeur et Soeur, ignored the story in the Observer, and in internet conversations actually pretended that Markowitz was a legitimate candidate – until the news broke that he had been arrested for perjury. After Markowitz pleaded guilty to perjury they talked about how he “dropped out” of the race, even though his name was still on the ballot. Even then their emphasis turned to “unrelated” conspiracy theories” submitted to the DA by Tony Bushala.
See my badge? I’m a real reporter!!
In the meantime Sharon Kennedy had been active on social media trying extremely hard divert attention to the irrelevant. She posited the ridiculous idea that maybe Markowitz was afraid to leave his house for candidate forums because he feared for his safety – after a mean threat on a blog that somebody should go to his house and talk to him. She volunteered unsolicited information that her pal and fellow “Observer,” Diane Vena, was a “kind” person and that she simply signed the nomination papers of a MAGA-sounding Republican candidate “at the request of a friend.”
Sharon Kennedy’s conversation with Vena is where ethical debasement and self-righteous political ideology climbed onto the same small raft with honesty. What was said between them, precisely, we’ll never know. But we do know that the conversation had nothing about it that looked like honest journalism, and may well, in fact, have included both coaching, and a plan to respond to criticism from FFFF. If this is what happened then the Kennedys went from negligent reporting to participating in an effort to hide the activities of the conspirators in this slimy episode.
An honest person, let alone an “incubator of journalism,” would have gotten the name of the “friend” who convinced the evidently doltish Vena to sign Markowitz’s papers, even though she had already endorsed Vivian Jaramillo and actually appeared on the latter’s website. An honest journalist would also have gotten the name of the person who circulated the nomination papers. Maybe Sharon Kennedy did get the name, or names. But if she did, neither she nor her sister ever shared it with Observer readers.
So very popular…
It’s abundantly clear that the Fullerton Observer had no intention reporting on the Markowitz story. The aim was to distance the candidacy of their favored Vivian Jaramillo from what had really happened
I also note that in the same vein, the Kennedy Sisters have been completely mute about the massive influx of marijuana lobbyist cash into a pro-Jaramillo Independent Expenditure PAC, with the loot laundered through the national office of the grocery workers union. There’s another story we’ll never read about in the pages or website of the Fullerton Observer, although they have never shied away from reporting this sort of thing with the attendant innuendo when it came to people they didn’t like.
But very soon, I predict, we’ll hear all about the money contributed by Tony Bushala.
Otiose Fullerton 4th District candidate Vivian Jaramillo pulled ahead of her rival, newcomer Jamie Valenzuela yesterday – by 13 votes. Jaramillo has steadily gained since election night in what seems to be a non-statistical anomaly. It’s pretty clear that the late Jaramillo GOTV mail-in effort is paying off now.
We now know who paid for that effort – the Marijuana Dispensary Cartel – who dumped in an astounding $60,000 into a pro-Jaramillo PAC, the green laundered through the grocery store union.
We can also surmise with a lot of confidence that it was the Dope Cartel that had a hand in the creation of the fake candidate, confessed perjurer, Scott Markowitz.
The shoe fit…
If Jaramillo wins, Fullerton will have a pro-dope majority, and Jaramillo, the candidate who made it her platform to bitch about incumbents “not listening to the people,” will, ironically, jam the dispensaries into Fullerton, despite overwhelming opposition from her common folk – real working families.
I will get what I want, one way or another…
Just as importantly Ahmad Zahra, the immigration fraud, “doctor” and “film maker” would finally get to play gay Arab Muslim Mayor. One wonders how the often hysterical Zahra would handle a steady stream of abuse like the kind he orchestrated against his colleagues over the past four years.
As far as municipal finance goes, a new majority could exercise its wisdom without being able to blame Mssrs, Whitaker, Dunlap, and Jung. There still would not be a 4/5ths majority to put a general tax on the ballot, but Zahra, Charles and Jaramillo could certainly put a specific tax on a 2026 ballot. And all that new brainpower ought to be able to come up with something to address Fullerton’s economic cliff.
If you check the Independent Expenditure forms on the City Clerk’s website you’ll notice the comically named “Working Families For Kitty Jaramillo, Yadda, Yadda.” This committee was “sponsored” by the United Food and Commercial Workers, Local 324, in beautiful Buena Park. At first glance you might think this was an odd sponsorship given the name of the union and the nature of Jaramillo’s would-be job. A second glance at the committee’s inaugural Form 497 filing is even more astonishing – $60,000, paid through the national HQ in Washington DC.
Hmm. That’s a lot of cabbage from the grocery store and food service workers for this council seat.
The day before the election the OCEA, the union of government paper pushers, chipped in $25,000 more.
At least this OCEA contribution to the PAC makes some sort of sense, since Jaramillo proclaimed to the OC Register that she wanted to represent City Employees in their battle against oppressive management (the taxpayers). The amount is unprecedented for the OCEA, however.
But what about the United Food and Commercial Workers, Local 324? Why the involvement, and why the massive donation and the expenditure for campaign workers? Well, let’s go to their website and see.
It turns out that Local 324 represents employees in the cannabis business. Well I’m shocked! Shocked, I tell ya.
Suddenly all sorts of things fall into place. The connection between the Long Beach marijuana cartel and Cannabis Kitty Jaramillo, whose previous support of the most liberal dispensary plan was rewarded by the cartel.
I find it really difficult to believe that the workers themselves ponied up this cash, but I don’t find it difficult at all to believe that their employers and their employers’ lobbyists did. As OC saw in the case of Ahmad Zahra’s pal, the now convicted Melahat Rafiei, 60 grand is chump change. So who really kicked in that dark money, laundered through the home office, into the campaign to elect Jaramillo, and what did she promise them?
And did all those paid precinct walkers tell their targets a word about marijuana dispensaries 101 feet from their homes? Bet not.
