New Water Tax: 6.7%? Not a Freakin’ Chance!

Apparently the much-anticipated Joe Felz Water Study is in, and it says that the illegal 10% water tax is…drum roll, please…illegal. But get this: rather than an honest study, the consultants were clearly told to gin up as much plausible reason to keep as much of the 10% as they could. The result? It’s only 6.7%. Yay!

The only problem is that to reach 6.7%, the consultant cooked up the idea that the Water Fund owed the City rent on land where water reservoirs are located! According to Ad Hoc Water Committee member Greg Sebourn, the total annual rent was figured at $1,374,000 – well-over half of the existing tax.

Of course this scam raises all sorts of new issues, as scams generally do. Such as: the reservoir in Hillcrest Park supports a play field on its deck. Does the City rent this back from the Water Fund? Bet not! The reservoir up at the top of Euclid is situated in a cactus patch patrolled by goats. What’s the rental or development value of a nature park? I dunno, but it’s not much. Has the Water Fund been paying for maintenance on these properties that should have been the responsibility of the General Fund? Bet so.

Then of course there’s the issue of whether the waterworks itself paid for fee title to any of these properties in the first place, a way back when. I wonder if the consultant even bothered to check. Bet not.

And there’s the embarrassing fact that there is no arm’s length relationship between the people that impose the rent and the people that pay it. The City Council can demand any amount of rent they want – then agree to pay it. Why not? The proceeds go to pay their own pensions! Now, that’s not very good, is it?

In any case, the public may find it a bit confusing and unseemly that at the eleventh hour the bureaucrats and their hand-picked consultant are burning the near-midnight oil to drum up ways to charge as much for water as they can that they can keep siphoning money into the General Fund.

Will you please shut up.

Will the city Council buy into this load? Well, of course they will. The vote will be 4-1, and it will be up to the citizens and voters to rectify the scam at the ballot box.

Our job is to continue to expose the fraud for what it is.

 

City Council Candidate Jane Rands Identifies Corruption

Kudos to Recall candidate Jane Rands for correctly identifying repuglican bagman and fixer Dick Ackerman as the motive force behind the St. Anton Partners project’s meteoric rise from number six to number one. The Three Bald Tires clearly intend to reward the leader of the anti-recall team with a juicy multi-million dollar subsidy for his client.

Is this a quid pro quo? Of course it is. The Three Dithering Dinosaurs have been handing out freebies to their supporters and campaign contributors for years.

You see, in Fullerton the Culture of Corruption extends beyond the walls of police headquarters.

The Cover-Up Club

Yesterday, the OC Register did a story about the Fullerton jail house death of Dean Francis Gochenour, and the role played by Vincent Mater, who smashed his DAR against a steel door in order to destroy the evidence it contained.

Well, it happened like this...

Our Acting Chief, Dan Hughes, was unusually chatty.

For instance, he shares with trusted police scribe Lou Ponsi the fact that an internal investigation was concluded by June 20, 2011, that discipline was recommended by Hughes, himself, and then Mater quit on August 2: I made recommendations for discipline and in that process, he resigned,” Hughes said.

So let us ponder a few things. Mater destroys his DAR in mid April, and disciplinary action is started over two months later? And what is this disciplinary “process?” Hard to say; it may have included firing the creep, but if so the process is designed to permit the perp to quit first. And that’s a shame because in the case of Mater we already know he was considered by the DA to be a Brady Cop, (i.e. unfit for court testimony due to unfamiliarity with the truth). We also know that he was complicit in some way in the wrongful incarceration of Emanuel Martinez.

Whatever this so-called discipline process entailed (including, no doubt, union exacted rights for appeal hearings, ad nauseam), Mater decided his best option was to walk away, perhaps to try his luck as a cop somewhere else. So Mater quietly went his merry way on August 2, 2011 – curiously, just as the Kelly Thomas murder protests were starting in earnest.

And now, for the $64,000 question: what was going on between the FPD and the DAs office between August 2 2011 and March 13, 2012? Seven and a half months had passed since Mater’s departure; eleven months had passed since the original crime. It would appear to the outsider that nothing was going to happen at all.

And then somebody changed their mind. I wonder why.

 

“Dick” Jones: We’re All Socialists Now!

Listen to Ol’ Country Doc Jones babble on last Tuesday about how evahbody’s sub-sa-dized nowadays, so con’sarn it, why not go ahead and give his buddy Dick Ackerman a big ol’ Texas-sized hunk a’ public funds. At about the three minute mark HeeHaw goes on a rant about how “everything in this country has got subsidies.”

Is it really possible that this yokel doesn’t know the difference between the words “transit” and “transient?” Apparently not. And also note the idiocy that Ackerman’s project is good ’cause it’s “mixed use” – it might contain “market rate” apartments. I”ll let that assertion go since it’s not even worth challenging.

We now know beyond the shadow of a doubt that this knucklehead really and truly believes in crony capitalism; that he believes in top down master plans that result in coercion and taxpayer subsidy; and that he believes American life necessarily revolves around gummint subsidy checks – including the millions he’s handing over to the mastermind of the anti-recall campaign – his good ol’ buddy “Dick” Ackerman.

Dick Jones is a socialist!

Where Is Albert Rincon?

The police unions in California have become so powerful that they have paid for legislation that makes it virtually impossible to find out anything about individual cops, including the ones that shame their badges and violate their oaths.

In Fullerton we have seen how this curtain of secrecy immediately descended when Kelly Thomas, a homeless man, was bludgeoned to death by several members of the police department. Well, okay, some of these goons were eventually brought to the bar of justice, and they get the same rights as the rest of us, even if it takes a veritable act of Congress to get crooked cops charged with a crime.

Of course the difference between them and us is that if they arrest us for something, our pictures can be plastered all over the evening news, and forensic evidence be damned.

So let us now consider the case of Albert Rincon, poster boy for the FPD Culture of Corruption, and the creep you will nevermore hear McKinley, Jones or Bankhead or Lou Ponsi talk about. Over several years, Rincon serially violated department policy by turning off his DAR and then, according to numerous complaints, sexually assaulted women in his patrol car. Rincon was given “pat-down” training as a corrective measure and sent back out on the streets of Fullerton to molest more females.

The City was upbraided by Federal Judge Andrew Guilford, for its years’ long tolerance of Rincon’s behavior as he denied a summary judgment in a civil suit brought by two of Rincon’s victims. The City immediately settled with the two women for a massive $350,000. And here’s where it gets even sicker, if that’s even possible.

Sometime in October, Rincon left the department. But we are not permitted to know the details. And for that matter we know nothing of the separations of the iPad thief, Kelly Mejia, or the Brady Cop, Vincent Mater.

Were these people fired? Were they permitted to quit? Are they still, or can they become cops someplace else? These things we shall never know – unless they continue the behavior cultivated under the corrupt chiefship of Pat McKinley, and get caught again.

But the case of Albert Rincon deserves special attention. We cannot see what this perverted sociapath looks like, nor know where he went, although such behavior by a civilian would certainly have resulted in a conviction and a life-long sex offender tag. That civilian’s name would be in an index the rest of his life; but not Rincon’s.

For all we know Rincon may already be a police officer in some other jurisdiction, fulfilling his life-long dream of being a cop.

Such is the ridiculous shroud of secrecy and special protections the cops’ politicians have erected for their patrons; the shroud protects all cops, good and bad. And that’s the way they want it.

Here’s Your Line Up

At 5:00 PM today the filing period to run in the Fullerton Recall Election came to a close. These are your candidates:

F “Dick” Jones:

  • Travis Kiger
  • Glenn Georgieff
  • Roberta Reid
  • Dorothy Birsic
  • Matthew Hakim

Don Bankhead:

  • Greg Sebourn
  • Paula Williams
  • Jane Rands
  • Rick Alvarez

Pat McKinley:

  • Barry Levinson
  • Doug Chaffee
  • Matthew Rowe
  • Sean Paden

As a public service, FFFF will be providing detailed, insightful, and colorful descriptions of these candidates to help you Friends reach an informed decision on June 5th.

Joe Felz Sighs

Why can't they leave me alone?

Poor, put upon Fullerton City Manger Joe Felz is getting frustrated. And so he sighs to a reporter.

He’s frustrated that people are holding him accountable for his promises. Last year he stalled the Howard Jarvis Tax folks by clamming that the illegal 10% water tax would be addressed by March; well, March is here and it ain’t. In the meantime the City has collected $200,000 per month and continues to hide the tax from the water rate payers.

Here is an article in the Register all about how gosh darn tough it is for Felz to : 1) tell the truth; 2) do the right thing; 3) obey the law.

It'll cost you...

The truth is that the illegal tax has nothing to do with with the water rate study; it is a stand alone issue that should have been fixed at least 15 years ago. And the fix is easy. The Water Fund already pays the General Fund for work done other city departments for work done on its behalf. The 10% tax is an outright scam that needs to be killed.

Ackerman Trying to Sell His Lemons, But No One Wants Lemonade.

I have it on good authority that anti-recall team captain Dick Ackerman has been diligently hounding OC Register personnel to start flogging the wonderful deeds accomplished by the Three Rotten Eggs, Dick Jones, Don Bankhead, and Pat McPension.

Will it work? It’s hard to see how. Two of the three are career public employees with massive inflation-linked pensions; Jones was the drum-beater for the abortive pension spike of 2008 only stopped by Shawn Nelson; Jones and Bankhead have approved of an illegal 10% water tax every year for 15 years; and all three have been reliable water bearers for whatever idiocy was put in front of them by the city bureaucracy.

Ackerman has millions of reasons to fight the recall of the gents who are in the process of handing his client a deal worth millions in government subsidies, but the editorialists at the Register have no reason to promote these clowns.

True, Ackerman is drinking buddies with a couple of the Register social columnists – the same ones that went out of their way to pass on the smears of Ackerman against Chris Norby, and to promote the useless, carpetbagging Ackerwoman.

I guess we’ll have to wait and see if Ackerman’s efforts to promote the unpromotable, gains traction.

A New Generation of Leadership for Fullerton

With the deadline for filing papers to run in the Recall election approaching – it’s at the end of the week – it seems like an opportune moment to invite our Friends to suggest names of people they would like to see run for the seats held by the Tyrannic Triad, Jones, Bankhead and McKinley.

During the past eight months we’ve seen lots of people step up and take leadership roles, challenging the Old Regime for its incompetence, corruption and detachment from the very people they were elected to serve.

The issues have centered around the serial criminal behavior by members of the Fullerton police department that culminated in the beating death of Kelly Thomas; the illegal grifting of a 10% water tax; and the land development giveaways handed out to campaign contributors.

There is no doubt in my mind that there are dozens of folks in these protests that would do an immeasurably better job governing our City than the The Three Fissured Fossils up there on the dais now.

So share your ideas. Maybe we can talk some of these good people into running.