City Hall Disasters Archives - Friends For Fullerton's Future

December 11, 2024December 11, 2024Ahmad Zahra

The Hypocrisy of California’s Government

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.

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.

December 10, 2024December 10, 2024Ahmad Zahra

HIOZ It Going, Fullerton?

by Mr. Peabody16 Comments

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

November 26, 2024November 26, 2024Ahmad Zahra

They Did What?

by Mr. Peabody14 Comments

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.

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.

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?

November 14, 2024November 14, 2024Ahmad Zahra

Jaramillo Goes Ahead

by Grover Cleveland33 Comments

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.

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.

November 11, 2024Ahmad Zahra

Got Headache?

by Mr. Peabody12 Comments

If not, and if for some perverse reason you want one, I recommend watching the final hour of the September 25th Planning Commission meeting.

The Commission’s job was to make recommendations to the City Council about the City’s plan to placate the State of California’s Department of Housing and Community Development’s demand to plan for the inclusion of 13,000 new housing units in a city that is effectively built out. The housing numbers are ejaculated by the Southern California Association of Governments – an unelected body run by bureaucrats – and adopted by the State. And cities can just sit down up and shut the fuck up. The numbers are appalling and would mean another 25,000 residents with the attendant traffic, parking and burden on schools and infrastructure.

Amazingly, California being California, the environmental impacts are brushed aside with a bureaucratic flick.

The specific agenda of the evening was to review the new Housing Element of the General Plan, and the pertinent Zone Code Amendment that adds a “Housing Incentive Overlay Zone” or (HIOZ) to hundreds of commercial and industrially zoned parcels of land.

I have never seen five people so confused and so fundamentally incapable of dealing with the business in front of them in my life. Motions were made; substitute motions were moved; secondary substitute motions were made. Some were opaque; some were vague; some disappeared altogether; some were retracted. Some blossomed into nonsense. Some issues were bifurcated. Confused discussion was interlarded into motions without seconds. Staff was dragged into the motion process.

The Chairman, poor Peter Gambino lost control of the meeting, try as he might.

One Planning Commissioner, Arnell Dino, seemed particularly adept at muddling everything up; another, Doug Cox, seemed to want to run the meeting, and kept interjecting and interrupting out of order, and kept asking for repetition after repetition of proposed motions; Commissioner Patricia Tutor seemed just as befuddled as the rest, trying to connect motions to the three resolutions proposed by staff. Commissioner Arif Mansouri, who unfortunately oversimplifies his pronouns and drops definite articles at least stuck to his motions, all most to the end; his goal was to removed the Chapman and Commonwealth corridors from the proposed housing overlay incentive zone that could put high density housing up against low density, single family neighborhoods.

An hour of everybody’s time was completely wasted as the sinking Commissioners struggled mightily to grasp a hold of any plausible object that appeared to float.

Ironically, at the end of the meeting a self-exhausted Planning Commission just rubber stamped everything that was put in front of it and passed it along to the City Council for approval.

In the end some of the participants actually seemed to be laughing in a mirthless sort of way. What the audience thought of this clownish death march is best left to the imagination.

Some zoning details were kicked to a Special PC Meeting that was be held last Wednesday. I declined to watch fearing for my sanity.

The issue is coming to the City Council on November 19th and we can be sure of two things. Ahmad Zahra and Shana Charles will push hard for the maximum urbanization of Fullerton, and clarity will be the first casualty of the hearing.

October 23, 2024October 24, 2024Ahmad Zahra

Waste on Wilshire Wilts & Ahmad Zahra Has a “Day Job”

by The Fullerton Harpoon15 Comments

Last week the wretched waste known as “Walk-on-Wilshire” was extended another three months – to the end of January, 2025.

At the City Council meeting a cavalcade of comedy ended with a fun twist. More on that in a bit.

Right out of the gate we learned from Ahmad Zahra that he had to jet away that very evening for parts unknown because of his “day job” as a “producer.” He didn’t elaborate on what he produces; or where or how or what. But he also says he’s a doctor and the faithful believe. Cynical people think that his plagiarizing gig at the OC Water District was his first paying job.

Any how he admonished the crowd he helped manipulated to be there, to exercise brevity. They didn’t.

Of course Fullerton BooHoo was fully mobilized to defend the idiotic and continue spilling disinformation all over downtown. Listening to these uninformed nitwits you’d get the idea that a botanical garden had sprung up in the 100 block of West Wilshire, a veritable garden spot in an endless plain of burning sulphur.

It was brutal to listen to the whole damn thing. Jesus H. Christ, what utter nonsense.

It was fun the hear our old pal Diane Vena pontificate; I would have been hard pressed not to ask her about her role in the Scott Markowitz perjury conviction, but that’s another story.

In the end Shana Charles, the boobish mastermind behind this boondoggle made a motion – the usual temporizing – more study needed to make the Wilt of Wilshire permanent; and also to apply the same study to the rest of the block – all the way to Malden Avenue.

Then the fun started. The Mayor-pro-tem, Fred Jung intervened with a “friendly” amendment to the motion. Half-measures were wrong if Fullerton was going to do this thing, said Jung, and he proposed dumping the existing couple hundred feet as part of future study and go for the whole enchilada – the other 400 feet to Malden.

Doctor Charles got giddy. And greedy. In her haste to promote her hobby horse, the PhD of Public Health agreed and the motion passed 3-1, Whitaker voting no and Dunlap abstaining. Some Fullerton boohoos rejoiced, but they rejoiced too soon. Why?

Because now staff has direction to address only the entire block as relevant.

Closing the entire 100 block of West Wilshire block is a much different animal than the keeping the existing 200 feet that the City has nursed along with temporary extensions and the comical phrase “pilot program.” Much different indeed. Closing the street would entail cutting off a dozen commercial businesses on the south side of the street from direct auto access; another half dozen offices on the north side would be cut off, too.

The Villa del Sol parking lot, and the east end of the Promenade parking structure could only be reached via a narrow alley off of Whiting, itself a traffic restricted street at Harbor Booulevard.

At least 35 parking spaces would be lost or made useless.

Some businesses would actually no longer have useful street addresses if the street were to disappear.

In short, the Jung Amendment was a non-starter, a rather creative effort to stall the issue, and force a new council majority, if there is one, to start over again in February.

It was entertaining to see Charles go for this. Perhaps she could see the Jungian end run and decided that she needed the three votes to keep it alive, so she went along with it. If so she must be counting on Vivian Jaramillo to win in District 4.

September 30, 2024September 30, 2024Ahmad Zahra

Funny Truxaw

by Mr. Peabody7 Comments

Spencer Custudio of the Voice of OC has a dutiful write up of last week’s League of Women Voters’ Fullerton candidate forum. One of the statements caught my eye, attributed to the strange individual Matt Truxaw, who is being offered up as a sacrificial offering by Ahmad Zahra and Fullerton Boohoo.

Here’s what Truxaw had to say on the topic of municipal finance:

When asked how to reverse the city’s finances and generate more tax revenue, Truxaw said city officials should consider expanding things like Walk on Wilshire – a closed section of Wilshire Avenue in downtown where people can dine and shop in the street that started during the pandemic.

Well, Matt, you can’t “shop” in the street, so there’s that. But seriously, no one seems to have informed this poor, uninformed boob, that the Wake on Wilshire doesn’t generate revenue for the City of Fullerton. It never has. The taxpayer’s “investment” on this boondoggle is so far in the red that it will never make a positive contribution to the City’s bank account. But let’s not let cooler heads consider this idiocy with any sort of objectivity.

No on bothered to tell Truxaw that you can’t lose your way back to fiscal heath.

No, the Wake on Wilshire is no longer an object that a few Fullertonions can consider dispassionately. The idea of closing a public road to cars has so bewitched the credulous that they will make up any sort of nonsensical lie to defend it. And lie #1 is that the thing is, or magically can become, a money maker – instead of what it is, another Fullerton financial sinkhole.

Like the Trail to Nowhere, the Wake on Wilshire has now assumed talismanic value to its adherents; and once again, it is symbolic of two City Councilmembers “not listening to the people.” In this case “the people” is a new set of half a dozen goobers dredged up by public health doctor, Shana Charles and few other Fullerton Observer nitwits.

City councilmember are supposed to be leaders. And you don’t lead by indulging the stupid make-work projects of your bureaucrats. You’re supposed to be able to ask honest questions and demand honest answers. But this is Fullerton, where no bad idea ever dies…so long as the public employees and their enablers want it.

September 29, 2024September 29, 2024Ahmad Zahra

Zahra’s Small Business Forum Draws Small Crowd

by Mr. Peabody15 Comments

I guess, if you wanted to call it a crowd at all.

Suppose they gave a forum and nobody came…

Last Friday’s Small Business “Forum,” brought to Fullerton by the North Orange County Chamber of Commerce and featuring Councilperson Ahmad Zahra as “Master-of-Ceremonies,” didn’t attract a whole lot of turnout. Could it be that the NOCCC is seen for what it is – a useless toady for Fullerton City Hall, rather than an incubator for small business? Or maybe folks realize that the unemployed and unemployable “film director” Ahmad Zahra, is hardly the person to talk authoritatively on the subject of business, large or small.

In any case attendance was sparse.

There seem to be about 20 people here, and half of them are wandering around, holding private conversations, or just walking away, even as Zahra, at the podium, is burnishing his credentials as an agent of economic development.

Maybe next time they’ll hold their “brilliant” and “dynamic” conference in a broom closet to enhance Zahra’s profile, and keep the City from further humiliation.

This forum is another wonderful metaphor for the City of Fullerton’s hapless “economic development” department, a function that can present no evidence that it actually pays for itself in new tax increment. In fact, if another metaphor, the ridiculous, money losing “Wake on Wilshire” is any indication, they never will.

And I still want to know: who approved the use of the City seal, and who paid for the hall.

September 4, 2024September 4, 2024Chronic Failure

Now We Are Six

by The Desert Rat7 Comments

Just yesterday I posted a story about how a Fullertonion friend had received five copies of the Parks Department’s glossy activities brochure. That seemed pretty funny for a town dancing along the edge of a fiscal cliff.

But I wrote that before the afternoon mail arrived. Sure enough. Yet another copy.

I guess we’ll call this a provisional total.

September 3, 2024September 4, 2024Chronic Failure

Five of a Kind

by The Desert Rat4 Comments

A friend of mine in Fullerton just received a brochure from the City Parks and Recreation Department that showed all the super-fun activities our city government provides for them.

What’s really funny is that this guy then received another. And another. And another. And another.

Small stuff adds up they say, and I have to wonder how many people got five (or maybe more) copies of this thing.

One thing is pretty clear. This sort of sloppiness reflects really poorly for an organization responsible for a massive budget deficit.