Friends For Fullerton's Future
FFFF supports causes that promote intelligent, responsible and accountable government in Fullerton and Orange County
Fullerton is in the state of California, which has many problems of its own.
Our Friends over at the Orange Juice blog are reporting that Fullerton’s Sharon Quirk has pulled papers to run against Chris Norby in the new 65th State Assembly District.
Good luck Sharon! And wake up Chris! You may have an opponent!
The real interest for FFF is that this will free up Quirk’s seat on Fullerton’s City Council, and will give Fullerton residents a chance to elect a pro-accountability candidate in November.
With a little hard work we can clean up Fullerton for a long, long time.
UPDATE: As noted in the comment from Chris Thompson below, he did not learn about the Beechwood situation (whatever it is) from FFFF. This was my error. I misread the following comment made by Thompson in yesterday’s post:
For clarity’s sake, I have NOT been briefed on any aspect of this story beyond the information which has been made publicly available in the meeting posted here.
I read this to mean that he had not been briefed at all. I do not know if he had an independent briefing from Hovey, but he was actually at the meeting in question. My mistake. I have edited the text below.
In the past few days in Fullerton we have witnessed the usurpation of public sovereignty by government employees and contractors who seem to believe it is their right, not our representative’s, to determine what sorts of information the duly elected representatives are, or are not permitted to see.
First, was the protracted saga of Fullerton City councilman Bruce Whitaker, who for seven moths has been trying to get access to the video of FPD cops beating Kelly Thomas to death. This is a pretty reasonable request, you would think, given the fact that the cops have watched and re-watched the video (Acting Chief Dan Hughes says he’s seen it 400 times); it’s been viewed by the DA; it’s been watched by Cicinelli and Ramos’s lawyers; apparently it’s even been watched by Ron Thomas, father of the dead man. But for some reason the City Manager and City Attorney believe they have the authority to deny access of this public document to Bruce Whitaker, and have used the majority vote of the Three Dim Bulbs to continue to deny Whitaker access.
This is just an outrageous usurpation of the authority that accrues to elected officials by virtue of their popular election. Despite what the bureaucrats and their die-hard elected supporters believe, the sovereignty invested in the elected is indivisible and should never be confused with the practical exigency of majority rule that determines policy and decides the quotidian issues of managing a city.
And then, we have the very recent sad spectacle of a Fullerton School District trustee, Chris Thompson, not being adequately briefed on a matter involving a teacher at Beechwood Elementary School – a matter so serious that the Fullerton police were called in to investigate it, and an emergency parent meeting held. Whatever is going on, the Superintendant, Mitch Hovey decided that the trustees didn’t need to know about it.
The question of whether other trustees besides Thompson were briefed remains to be ascertained, and if so that would make matters even worse.
But here’s the really bad part. According to Thompson: Dr. Hovey informed me that he had been advised by the district’s law firm as to what information he could and could not give to the board members. He did confirm that he knows more than we do.
Say what? That law firm doesn’t work for Hovey; it works for the Board of Trustees who hired them. It has no business collaborating with the Superintendent to decide what information can and can’t be parceled out to the Board. And anybody who doesn’t grasp this basic tenet shouldn’t be on the Board or work for it, either.
As Assemblyman Norby pointed out in his newsletter, it is both the right and the responsibility of elected officials to have reasonable access to public property and documents in order to do their jobs. The Legislative Counsel for the State of California said so. This precept is all about accountability and responsibility in our representative democracy.
So why is this basic concept being flagrantly flouted by Fullerton’s bureaucrats? Who is in charge here, indeed?
Here is an interesting bit from Assemblyman Chris Norby’s latest newsletter documenting his effort to promote legislation to guarantee elected officials – like Fullerton’s Bruce Whitaker – access to public documents and records.
Well, Lo and Behold: it’s not necessary according to Legislative Counsel who determined that such a right already exists. Looks like somebody forgot to tell our esteemed City Attorney Dick Jones, who has publicly defended denying Whitaker access to city-owned records.
And it looks like we have another Recall issue.
So who the Hell is really in charge in Fullerton? The cops? The bureaucrats? The unelected City Attorney? The Three Triassic Fossils who have no authority to deny a duly elected official access to official records? Who?
In the words of the Bard, Bob Dylan in “Oxford Town”: somebody better investigate soon.
Can elected officials be denied information obtained at public expense on public property? Can unelected attorneys and administrators keep such information hidden from those who appointed them?
That’s what’s happening to Fullerton City Councilman Bruce Whitaker. His request to view the city’s video of the fatal beating of Kelly Thomas has been denied by the City Manager and City Attorney. That video was made by a city-owned camera at the city-owned Fullerton Transportation Center. Three of Bruce’s colleagues have chosen not to watch the tape, but have never voted to deny it to him.
Bruce doesn’t seek to release the tape to the public, or even have his own copy. He just wants to see it, to be in better position to understand what happened on that fateful July night. So I drafted a bill clarifying an elected official’s right to the same information as those they hire. “Bruce’s Law” would assure those we elect have access to information they need.
My bill was rejected by Legislative Counsel, however, as unnecessary. I was told that elected officials already have this right. I was told that unelected government employees cannot deny public officials information they need to represent their constituents. I was told that video camera footage taken by a public agency can be viewed by an official elected to govern that agency.
A new bill cannot be introduced which simply duplicates existing laws. But Bruce is still being denied the tape.
FFFF’s own Travis Kiger, a member of the City’s Planning Commission hit a home run last week in his comments about the proposed high-density government subsidized housing project on W. Santa Fe Avenue in downtown Fullerton.
State court judge LLoyd Connolly said no to supplicants trying a last ditch effort to save their sacred cash cow known as Redevelopment.
Please note the attorney for the aggrieved cities – including Cerritos, the biggest pirate in the Redevelopment waters – Jeffrey Oderman. Oderman is the City of Fullerton’s Redevelopment lawyer, and, as we have documented on these pages, has legal apologist for all the Redevelopment boondoggles in Fullerton for 20 years.
Okay, there seems to be confusion about the term “repuglican” as often used here on FFFF. The term does not refer to a political party, but rather a personality type within the GOP. The Dems have their own version, no doubt, but since we are a red county we are stuck with the ‘pugs. Please read the following post from October 2009.
Repuglicanism has always been a target of our blog because it seeks to empower, and enrich the grifters who put imbeciles like Bankhead, Jones and McKinley in charge of doling out government welfare to the high rollers. It also seeks to defend the all-important status quo above all else.
– Joe Sipowicz
This morning we received the following e-mail from a Friend:
Dear FFFF, some of your posters keep using the term “Repuglican.” I am not sure if this is simply a typo or if you mean to use this unusual term. Can you please clarify? Thanks.
Sure. Be happy to. This locution is no accident. It is a fusion of the words Republican and repugnant, from which you may draw the obvious conclusions.
Here is a definition from the Urban Dictionary:
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=repuglican
We apply the term to describe local Republicans of the same ilk, although the issue of “neo-conservativism” is largely irrelevant here. These individuals are people who pursue the politics of partisan affiliation for its own sake, but also for what they can get out of it. The main thing, the only thing, really, is to stand for the Party (as a convenient vehicle for self-promotion, of course!), and of course to oppose the Other Party. Issues themselves mean almost nothing except as way to promote themselves in the wider context of promoting the Party. Inner conviction means little; philosophical beliefs mean little – except for getting and hanging on to the strings of political power in order to pull and persuade them in your direction.
Repuglicans love big business interests because those are the guys with the money; the high-rollers who will enable your “conference” in Maui.
A red bastion in a blue state, OC is chock-full of Repuglicans – who use the local municipal and County governments for their own advancement and enrichment. The Legislature is hopelessly Democrat, but this does not mean that the doors to fun and profit are completely closed to Repuglicans. Especially if they hang around long enough.
This is a Repuglican:
And so is this:
Here’s another one:
And here’s one of the best examples:
Additional examples of the species are welcome!
Thanks to Friend Tony Serra for providing a link to a Sac Bee story about Anaheim’s former Mayor-for-Hire Kurt Pringle quitting the California High Speed Rail Board.
Could it be true? Sure looks like it. According to the story he wants Governor Brown to be able to appoint someone who represents his point of view. I wonder what that point of view might be. Ethics? Brown, who as Attorney General took note of Pringle’s conflicts of interest over many years may have asked him to go.
So Der Rat is jumping off Das Sinkingboot; timely, too, now that all the revelations of incompetence, waste, misinformation, and decreased funding are dragging the HSR to a well-deserved grave.
The funniest thing in the piece is the glowing valediction to Pringle from fellow HSR barnacle, Tom Umberg, who in the past has proved there is no moral morass too low for a politician to sink into, and who recently penned a pro-HSR op-ed piece in the Register that was so incompetent I’m not going to link to it to save Umberg any more embarrassment.
On tonight’s Planning Commission agenda there’s an item titled “Planning Commission Position on Green Building”. This should be fun to watch. I’ll make anyone a bet that the Planning Commission decides to send a letter to the city council recommending to NOT mandate Green Building standards. Stay tuned!