John and Ken Return to Fullerton on Thursday

The KFI radio jocks love stirring things up here in Fullerton. Whether its the 2009 tax revolt, the 2011 teachers’ union protest or the 2012 Fullerton recall, they just can’t seem to avoid our little town and its parade of terrible politicians.

Here’s a clip of KFI’s John and Ken expanding upon The Hourly Struggle’s recent interview with state senator Josh Newman. The radio hosts also took the opportunity to announce that they are coming to Fullerton this week, gathering signatures to recall Newman.

Here are the details:

The effort to recall State Senator Josh Newman is officially on! This Thursday we’re going to broadcast live in Fullerton, and we need you to come by and sign the recall petition.

WHEN: THURSDAY 05/11/17 2pm-6pm PST

LOCATION: Arco AM PM  519 South Harbor Blvd. Fullerton,CA

Carl DeMaio, who hosts on our San Diego sister station KOGO-AM, has worked hard to put all of this together. He’ll be there doing his show along side us from 3-6pm.

We’re also in need of volunteers to collect the signatures, you can click here to sign up for a date that works for you.

We’ll see you this Thursday!

Be sure to come by, sign a petition and say hello to your favorite FFFFers.

Moonbeam’s Money is Coming to Fullerton

That’s right. Governor Brown just announced that he is personally raising money for Fullerton. Not IN Fullerton, mind you.

And well, it’s not for the people of Fullerton either.

Brown is inviting his lobbyist pals to a $4,400 Sacramento dinner in order to raise money to defend Fullerton’s hapless Senator Josh Newman and the car tax Newman helped secure. You know, the one that he recently dumped on Fullerton motorists (along with the rest of California) because the answer is Sacramento to government malfeasance and bad behavior is always MOAR Money.

Bend over
Here’s the story (contains egregious LA Times popups. Do not click).

Brown is headlining a fundraiser on May 23 at de Vere’s Irish Pub in Sacramento, billed as an event to support Newman’s reelection campaign. Donors are asked to give up to $4,400 to Newman’s 2020 Senate campaign committee, although the money can be shifted to fighting a recall measure if one qualifies.

Give to “Newman’s 2020 campaign committee, although…”. Isn’t that cute? It’s almost as if this isn’t specifically FOR the recall. Once he’s out of office maybe Senator Newman can save some of those $4,400 donations to buy himself another posh vacation in Saint Lucia after the recall is over. If he’s lucky maybe he’ll have the bad news before his trip this time around.

It’s always amazing to watch politicians and their lobbyist friends soak up booze while reaching for their wallets for the sole purpose of being able to continue to pick our wallets clean.

For those of you who cannot afford a $4,400 posh dinner and are actually impacted by this new highway robbery masquerading as a transportation tax feel free to sign the petition to recall Senator Newman. You can pick up and sign the petition if you’re a registered voter in District 29 this Thursday between 2-6pm (1400-1800). KFI’s John & Ken as well as KOGO’s Carl DeMaio will be live broadcasting from the ARCO Gas Station at 519 S. Harbor Blvd here in Fullerton.

A Serious Talk With Senator Newman

FFFF firebrand Joshua Ferguson will be interviewing State Senator Josh Newman Friday evening on his podcast “The Hourly Struggle.”

This should be quite an event, as Ferguson has lobbed a series of public critiques at Senator Newman for his involvement as a deciding vote in the $5.2 billion California car tax last month. My guess is that Ferguson will not be throwing any softballs towards Newman.

The podcast will be available on The Hourly Struggle Facebook page at 7:00 PM (1900Hours) on Friday. Replays will be available on iTunes and Google Play.

 

Ready to Recall New Senator Newman?

Carl DeMaio out of San Diego has been pitching the idea of a recall for our new CA State Senator Josh Newman. Why Newman? Because Newman voted to increase our gas taxes for the dubious claim of fixing our roads. He barely won his seat and without him the State wouldn’t have a (D) Super-Majority with which to tax us into oblivion.

While it’s true that Mah Roads need fixing it is not true that the government needs to steal more money in order to accomplish this task. Sadly Newman, like nearly every (D) in Sacramento (I’m looking at your Quirk-Silva) thinks theft is the only way to combat incompetence and prior graft. The cycle will continue unabated until we get mad as hell and don’t take it anymore.

Will the recall succeed? Considering Newman barely won by a razor thin margin this last November it’s definitely possible that he could get the boot. While Newman’s district covers quite a bit of real estate it’s not as if this would be Fullerton’s first recall rodeo.

SD29. Hooked on spending.

For those that support the recall I’d recommend checking our DeMaio’s page HERE. While I’m inclined to give the boot to anybody who saddles the working class with such ridiculous taxes – I remember who our last recall gifted us in this fair town and substituting Newman for a Fitzgerald type would be no win for taxpayers. I’m also of the opinion that if we’re going to boot Newman for being a party stooge reaching for our wallets we should probably aim for a twofer and do the same to his colleague in the Assembly at the same time.

Budget Proposals Call for Elimination of City Positions

FFFF was just sent a few pages from the latest budget proposals, which the Fullerton City Council will soon vote on. The true costs of Fullerton’s pension debt are coming to bear, as the proposals call for the elimination for firefighters, police corporals, maintenance workers and security guard services.

These reductions will be necessary in order to offset significant increases in CalPERS pension payments for existing employees. Most of the budget is allocated to staffing, so city staff claims there are very few non-staffing cuts to be made.


From here, it will only get worse. CalPERS will continue to lower its discount rate, triggering higher bills for cities across the state. We are looking at many more reductions in services and increases in taxes and fees over the next few years.

I’d like to get out now.

Will our council have the guts to pull the trigger and start making severe cuts now? Or will they postpone action until insolvency becomes inevitable?

Newman Recall?

That didn’t take long. Radio host and former San Diego City Councilman Carl Demaio is starting a recall effort against Fullerton’s own state Senator Josh Newman. Here is Carl on the John and Ken show yesterday discussing Newman’s participation in the massive $5.2 billion California tax hike.

John and Ken reckon that Fullerton is a great place to kick off a rage-fueled recall effort. History says they’re right. It will be fun to see if Newman can be held accountable for his massive error.

The Rip Off

We have been asked by one of our Friends to publish the following post:

Now that our Legislature has passed the obscene Gas Tax, the usual liberal Democrat suspects have popped up to add their voices in high hosanna to the deed. Their script, as usual, is the old, tired mantra of affiliating more taxes with good government, as if the two things had more than a distant correlation. Generalities are the stock-in-trade of this crew. It’s too bad the opponents also tend to speak in generalities about the existing waste in government transportation planning and execution.

I’m going to talk about waste in government, too. But I am going to do it with specifics in near-future posts that will closely examine a “transportation” project that was planned entirely with earmarked transportation funds to demonstrate the crazy, almost obscene ways in which these funds were budgeted, and are being spent.

Does a single project represent a current state of affairs? Given the fact that the State and County governments are always “educating” us about their strict compliance with rules and regulations, and given the fact that the County Measure M extension, for instance, was sold with the idea of a rigorous auditing process complete with Oversight Committee, I am going to posit an affirmative answer to my question and challenge someone to prove me wrong. This should be easy if indeed I am wrong.

Held up by wishful thinking…

So what’s the project? Is it some distant, unknown pork boondoggle in some liberal, urban bastion? Ah, no. It is the ridiculously conceived, horrendously over budgeted and overstaffed, and seemingly bungled-out-of-the-gate elevator addition project at Fullerton’s own train station.

Fullerton Engineer

Newman & Quirk-Silva Help Families Prioritize Spending

By Making Sure They Have Less Money to Spend

There are few things harder than trying to prioritize your spending. This is easily evidenced by the new law which is slated to bring in “much needed” transportation funds to fix our ailing infrastructure and yet amazingly has close to the same price-tag as Jerry Brown’s Bullet Train to Nowhere. The train is currently slated to cost $68Billion while the new tax will bring in $52Billion over 10 years. If we stopped the Brown’s Folly we would be able to pay for our infrastructure but alas those whacked priorities in Sacramento.

Enter Josh Newman (D. 29th State Senate District) & Sharon Quirk-Silva (D. Assembly District 65) to save us from the grief of budgets and the balancing acts that follow. They both surely read the study that claims that poverty taxes the brain and are thus worried about the poorest amongst us. What better way to make sure the poor can make fewer bad decisions than by pricing them out of those very decisions?

Please Sir, may I have my State back?

This is an act of benevolence on the part of our elected betters. Nay! An act of sheer mercy. We tried shaming you out of going to McDonald’s so now we’ll just increase prices so you can no longer afford it.

Of course this new tax increase has led to a flurry of interest and even the call for recalls. However we would all be remiss if we didn’t give credit where credit is due. We should acknowledge that Newman & Quirk-Silva, along with their (D) allies such as Senator Anthony Canella, have finally found a way to try to balance the budget on the backs of everybody as opposed to simply taxing “The Rich™” or “The 1%™”.

The rich will certainly be hurt by Newman and Quirk-Silva’s $100/year tax on zero emission cars that doesn’t go into affect until 2020 (with the gas taxes going into effect this coming November and the increase in the vehicle license fees next year). However even if the zero emission fees were immediate the $100/year isn’t so bad owing to the heavily subsidized nature of Teslas & other zero emission car sales in the first place. It could take up to 70 years before the rich will have paid back that subsidy $100 at a time.

No, this new tax is first and foremost a tax on the poor. After all of these years of saying that people need to pay their “fair share” of taxes the (D)s finally approved a bill that further socks it to the poor in a way they can’t escape. While quite a bit of ink has and will be spilled on both inflation-adjusted taxes which include the increase of $0.12/gallon on fuel and $38/year in registration fees less ink has been spilled on the $0.20/gallon diesel excise tax increase or the $0.04 increase in the sales tax on diesel fuel.

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The Bearer of New Taxes Adds Insult to Injury

The Tax Bear Cometh

The same day that Senator Josh Newman (D. 29th State Senate District) voted to further rob us at both the gas pump and DMV he claimed support for CA Assembly Bill 5. This bill would let California Voters decide, in June of 2018, if the legislature can use our stolen money to do anything but fix our failing infrastructure. Our failing infrastructure that should already be funded and fixed by our current gas taxes.

To his credit he wants to put a toothless California Constitutional Amendment on the ballot to make sure that our new CalPERS transportation taxes aren’t misspent. It’s too bad he didn’t care if we voters got a say on the issue of these taxes in the first place.

This bill was introduced in March of 2015 and has sat in committee as a non-urgent matter since that time. This means that it was proper urgent that Newman, Quirk-Silva and the rest of the Democrat-Controlled legislature to tax us into oblivion NOW NOW NOW but not so important that the money they steal from us via ever higher taxes actually gets used for their intended purposes.

Inactive and Unimportant.

Assembly Bill 5 is a perfect example of how everybody in Sacramento does things in entirely the wrong order. It would have been smart and prudent for the Assembly/Senate to put a bill on Gray Davis’ Jerry Brown’s desk to limit how money is spent for the intended purposes and then put the NEW TAXES on the ballot and not the other way around. Sadly we don’t get a choice in how much they rob you, just a choice in how they pretend to spend the ill-gotten goods.

That this sort of measure is even needed and yet ignored until politically convenient shows you all you need to know about the priorities of our electeds such as Josh Newman & Sharon Quirk-Silva.

Fullerton Parking – State ADU Edition

You! I need your gas taxes & vehicle license fees… so stop driving.

Tomorrow the planning commission is going to be dealing with more parking issues. Or shall I say they’re going to be talking about something they have no control over because the State already stepped on them.

Back on 27 September 2016 Governor Moonbean signed SB 1069 into law. SB 1069 deals with “Additional Dwelling Units” or in the common vernacular “back houses”. You know the units as they’re the ones that get added behind a house so a homeowner can rent their second/third/fifth property to two groups of people as opposed to one. Charitably they’re known as “Granny Units” and uncharitably as “‘Mommy why is the creepy man staring at me all the time’ Units”.

The merits or pitfalls of these units notwithstanding, as we now legally have to allow for them all over town, this particular piece of legislation includes the following nugget:

Cities must waive parking requirements for ADUs that are entirely contained within existing structures, or that are within one-half mile of public transit, one block of a car-share vehicle, or in a historic district.

Within one-half mile of public transit. Okay, so let’s put that into context. Here’s a map of Fullerton to which I’ve added the major bus lines of OCTA in blue.

At least OCTA doesn’t go near the nicer houses.

Using the Google Maps Distance Tool I can say that 1/2 mile would mean that Fullerton cannot require additional parking for ADUs anywhere approximately South of North Court. Likewise no new parking requirements would be allowed 1/2 mile East or West of Euclid or State College for ADUs. I’d worry about the neighborhood by CSUF but with CollegeTown coming back (courtesy of Japanese Chat Girls) that’s the least of their worries.

I loathe writing about roads and parking, truly I do yet unfortunately our elected betters seem to not understand human nature and thus the issues constantly come up.

This no required parking if within a half-mile of public transit is because allegedly the low-income take public transit unlike those who write these stupid laws. The poor take so much public transit that we subsidize the snot out of buses, streetcars, trolleys and hubs such as ARTIC. The poor love their public transit so much that we keep having to exempt streets from overnight parking in the lower-income apartments thanks to their under-parked nature. Why if only the folks in those low-income apartments could find parking for all of the public transit that they love to take we wouldn’t need to exempt so many streets.

Add this newest parking issue to the quiver of arrows that will be used to kill the overnight parking ban. As an aside I wonder how many new AirBnB rentals will be built here in Fullerton thanks to this “affordable housing” bill.