Fullerton City Council Archives - Friends For Fullerton's Future

February 19, 2025February 19, 2025Behind Closed Doors

What if It Blows Up?

The wasteful fantasy known as “Walk on Wilshire” may be dead – even though its advocates continue their public weeping – but interesting information about the boondoggle continues to to come to light – information that doesn’t put Fullerton in a good light. WoW is yet another Fullerton cautionary tale.

One issue about WoW never discussed in public, was the Mulberry Street Ristorante parklet’s violation of the standards of Southern California Edison regarding setbacks around their transformer vaults.

Oops.

There’s the culprit, deceptively hiding under car…

It turns out there’s an Edison tranformer vault in the street right in front of the “ristorante,” and right where their “parklet” was built. Here’s the plan for the parklet. The vault is dead center in the middle of it.

The problem popped up in October, 2023 when an Edison inspector discovered a problem: Edison requires a 15ft set back around the outside of their concrete vault, free of construction.

Oops.

Now, we can’t tell what that set back would look like without a sketch. So let’s make one!

The off-limits area inside the black square essentially eradicates the poor parklet. Oops!

Edison sent Mulberry Street a couple warning letters, the second, repeating the issues, in December, 2023.

Mulberry St. Ristorante replied to both these missives, saying more or the same thing each time.

Saying fuck you to Edison isn’t a very smart thing to do if you happen to use electricity, as we will soon see. Be sure to notice how Brandon Bevins, Mulberry’s Manager, also advises Edison to talk to the City of Fullerton!

This correspondence triggered a series of subtly urgent communications between the City Engineer and Edison at the end of 2023. Even our highly paid City Manager, Eric Levitt, was somehow dragged into this low-grade stupidity – all because the City staff who “managed” this project never thought to talk to Edison in the first place.

The tenor of the correspondence and the subsequent meetings was polite, but somewhat stiff since SCE had zero intention of looking the other way. In fact, SCE notified Mulberry Street that they were going turn off the juice to the whole property on January 19, 2024 sans compliance. So Bevins, who must have been panicking, tried to scare the City into desperate action.

Bevins was plenty pissed, and suggested that the we pay the costs for his parklet – just north of $40,000! So now the City had another self-inflicted wound. But wait. Mulberry wasn’t in the clear, either.

In correspondence from December 2022 the City (somebody named Matt Laninovich) erroneously tells Bevins that their parklet can cover the SCE vault so long as there is a hinged door in the parklet platform for access. Of course he pulled that out of his ass; but he also wisely informs Bevins to consult with Edison. Had Bevins done so he could have saved everybody time and trouble, including himself. Nevertheless, the City is now a full partner in a SNAFU that was completely avoidable.

A resolution of sorts was achieved on January 24, 2024 when Edison agreed to let the parklet remain if seating on it were limited to an area outside a 15ft radius from the perimeter of the iron manhole in the middle of the vault. The manhole would have to be reinforced (in case it might blow off in an explosion, presumably) and the vault had to be accessible from the Wilshire Avenue side.

This resolution doesn’t look too promising for Mulberry Street that also had to pay for that additional manhole restraint. Look. There’s hardly any room for seating left.

Was the parklet enlarged to make it actually work? Did Edison finally look the other way? Documents acquired from a Public Act Request don’t inform us: at this point information provided by the City about this issue ends. Was there more? Who knows?

One thing I do know is that images of the operating parklet from last year show tables within the no-go zone.

How much risk were the patrons who used the Mulberry Street parklet exposed to for the past year? How much risk if Edison had not spotted the issue to begin with? I don’t know, but Edison has safety rules for a reason. The explosion of the transformer in Huntington Beach in 2019 gives us some indication of what can go wrong, and the consequences of that episode were actually considered lucky.

Walk on Wilshire. A tail-wagging-the-dog gift that keeps on giving. The thing is a moot issue now, fortunately. But if anybody feels like asking good questions about this or other city-created public hazards, I’ll bet my Nevada ranch they won’t get good answers.

February 10, 2025February 13, 2025Boohooism

The Problem of Bad Legal Advice

by The Fullerton Harpoon17 Comments

There really shouldn’t be any surprise that bad legal advice always comes with a price tag. Sometimes that cost is monetary. Sometimes it’s misleading and even abusing the public and its trust.

And so it has been over the decades for Fullerton and its egregiously awful lawyer, Dick Jones, of the I Can’t Believe It’s a Law Firm. The latest example is a real boner, even for a guy whose firm specializes in boners in dirty book stores and misbehaving topless bars.

It seems that last fall City Attorney Jones and Mayer may very well have passed advice to newly elected councilwoman Jamie Valencia that some of the donations to her campaign could be problematic, including those from Tony Bushala and the guy who owns the cigar place on Wilshire Avenue. Any official activities effecting these gentlemen might fall under the Section 84308 of the Government Code, the so-called “pay-to-play” statute.

The statute says that politicians can’t vote on licenses, contract awards, entitlements, permits or agreements with entities that give them over $250 in campaign cash. Valencia was supposedly given two options: recuse herself on such issues for at least a year; or, alternatively, give the money back. In November, she chose the latter.

We don’t know our cloaca from a hole in the ground.

Nothing more was said of this until the idiot Walk on Wilshire was up for a vote. At this point The issue of the pay-to-play statute came up again in the bone-headed precincts of Fullerton BooHooville, prompted by who knows who. The reason? Bushala and Mr. Cigar Guy both opposed the continued closure of Wilshire Avenue.

For some reason the City Manager Eric Levitt (according to the Kennedy Sisters of the Fullerton Observer) told them he believed the Valencia contribution return was in process, when it had been accomplished 6-8 weeks before. The fact that he even responded at all gave the boohoos confidence in their brand-new, trumped up “issue.”

And guess what? None of it even mattered!

That’s right. The vote on Walk on Wilshire had nothing to do with the pay-to-play law. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Zip. Zero. A layman could (and FFFF did) see that. No one was getting a license, a permit or a contract award; no one was getting an agreement or an entitlement. Citizens with opinions were simply giving them about a City directed action – not their own. It was so obvious. But not to Dick Jones, for some inexplicable reason. Was it ineptitude, laziness, or was there an ulterior motive? Who knows?

Why write about news when you can try to make your own! (Photo by Julie Leopo/Voice of OC)

Meantime, Fullerton BooHoo and the Fullerton Observer got into high dudgeon over the non-issue, and also whether the money had been given back to the contributors. They tried hard to craft a corruption scandal. “Questions were being asked,” the Kennedy Sisters huffed and puffed, their erectile hairs stiffened. Their nincompoop followers raised the issue at the council meeting in question. But in the end it was irrelevant gums flapping.

Now for the fun part. Guess what? The identical issue had already been raised last fall by City of Palo Alto Councilmember Patrick Burt. About what? The issue was a controversial, City-created street closure vote! What are the odds? Mr. Burt inquired of the FPPC whether such a vote fell under the purview of the pay-to-play law.

Here’s the FPPC decision letter in the Palo Alto case.

If you don’t want to read the whole letter, here’s the conclusion:

CONCLUSION
No, decisions by the Palo Alto City Council to permanently close the specified downtown
areas to car traffic are not entitlement for use proceedings subject to Section 84308. The City
Council initiated the actions to close these areas permanently to car traffic. The facts indicate that
the interests impacted by the closures will be many and diverse. Furthermore, the closures were not
applied for, nor have entitlements for use been formally or informally requested by any party to
date, and the decisions do not involve a contract between the City and any party.

As you can see, the reply was succinct, and the answer was no, just like FFFF had said. Why didn’t Dick Jones know this? Why, indeed. This was a very important finding for those in the political arena – like Jones himself.

Poor Ms. Valencia was caused to publicly explain herself and her return of the campaign cash when she didn’t have to. That alone would cause me to cut loose the useless dumpster fire known as Jones and Mayer for their blatant incompetence.

January 28, 2025January 28, 2025A Step in the Right Direction

Park Dwelling Fee-asco?

by The Fullerton Harpoon19 Comments

*The story no one wanted to talk about.*

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want the abandoned Union Pacific Park reopened. It was a crime-ridden attractive nuisance from the day it opened even without considering the toxic substances that had to be remediated after the damn thing was built.

But there seems to be an interesting reason the park hasn’t been reopened 18 months after the City Council ordered the fence around the vacant land be taken down. And the reason could be that there isn’t enough money in the Park Dwelling Fee Fund to pay for it. These funds are collected from developers to pay for new park facilities, presumably to reflect the new projected increase in population.

This situation emerged at a Fiscal Sustainability Committee meeting a while back. The Fund has about $800,000 to $900,000, according to Assistant City Manager Daisy Perez, and at least $300,000 of that is already earmarked for the delusional “Trail to Nowhere” plan. It also emerged that the massive eyesore project called “The Hub,” on Commonwealth at the 57 Freeway, has not paid it’s Park Dwelling Fees, a number amounting to $5,000,000, staff said.

It seems that for some reason the City gave the developer of the project a waiver on the required upfront fees, until the project has a certificate of occupancy. That $5 million is burning a hole in somebody’s pocket, and it sure ain’t our pocket. How this happened is another story, and a good one, too, I’ll bet.

In the meantime, we seem to have some sort of Mexican Standoff – UP Park vs. Trail to Nowhere. The Park is assumed to have been given priority, but there’s no money for it. Meantime the Trail to Nowhere waits in the wings, embarrassingly, having missed several entrance cues demanded by the State, the most important of which were submission of plans by 6/24; start of construction by 8/24; and viable plant life by 10/25.

*The idea may have been bad, but it sure was old.*

One of the selling points of the Trail to Nowhere is that it connected to the UP Park (of course that was another lie, too – it ends at Highland Avenue). But what if there is no UP Park at all?

January 26, 2025January 26, 2025About Us

We Get Mail. Walk on Wilshire Cult Fail

by The Fullerton Harpoon36 Comments

FFFF has received the following communication from a Wilshire Avenue resident who has asked for anonymity to avoid persecution from the Walk on Wilshire pressure group, stirred up by the Fullerton Observer:

The mob looked a lot bigger than it was…

This past Tuesday, Fullerton City Council permitted the reopening of Wilshire Avenue to auto traffic, removing the annoying impediment known locally as “Waste on Wilshire.” Starting January 31, the street will reopen to through vehicular traffic, marking the end of the Wilshire Avenue experiment in frustration, deception, and stupidity.

Yesterday, at the invitation of the Fullerton Observer, a handful of self righteous dopes gathered at the Waste. The Observer had encouraged them to show up and “join the peaceful gathering and protest the decision,” bringing “Save WoW” signs to show solidarity.

Their cult followers were asked to mislead passersby into believing this is an overwhelmingly unpopular decision driven by selfish or ego-centric motives. They framed the post as a “fight” against two corrupt of council members and a couple selfish businesses – implying that the WoWers represent a vast and unified community sentiment when, in reality, it was never more than a core handful of ideologues with nothing to lose.

While the Observer statement expresses appreciation for the supporters of the initiative and “incredible” individuals met throughout this process, it purposely suggests that only those who supported Walk on Wilshire are the only the ones truly connected to the community—ignoring those with valid concerns that didn’t align with the narrative of “saving” the space.

Thank God Vivian Jaramillo was not elected to the City Council, otherwise the City would be looking at a lawsuit that would only end with a big payday to the City Attorney defending another losing lawsuit, leading to yet again, a big loss for the taxpayers of Fullerton.

January 22, 2025January 22, 2025Ahmad Zahra

Walk on Wilshire Dead. For Now.

by Mr. Peabody74 Comments

I say for now because in Fullerton nothing truly goes away if staff wants something. And boy did they want the wasteful, little-used, annoying road blockage.

Still, for the present, staff has been directed to open the street.

At last night’s City Council meeting, no majority was present to keep the embarrassing WoW on life support, let alone expand it to Malden. On a 2-2 vote no positive action could be taken. Now businesses and residents who used to use Wilshire to get to and from Harbor Boulevard will be able to do it again.

But oh Sweet Baby Jebus, how the crowd gave it a go. Dozens of speakers cheered for the dumb idea, almost none of whom had any skin in the game, as they say. The nonsense went way over the top, including some who actually said businesses were going to be hurt if the street was opened! The only businesses supporting this were not even located on Wilshire.

My God, their descriptions of this 200ft kiddie chalk surface were rhapsodic. The Garden of Eden. Central Park. Golden Gate Park, doncha know. Cars are frightening. So fun to get off the sidewalk. Peaceful and serene. Back to nature, even!

Naturally a few of the speakers were vitriolic. One, a ill-tempered shrew named Karen Lloreda questioned the integrity of Jamie Valencia for taking campaign money from bad people. Lloreda didn’t bother share with the public that she was an endorser of Kitty Jaramillo, the woman Valencia defeated to become a councilmember, so I’ll do it here.

Diane Vena, proud Scott Markowitz supporter…

Diane Vena, another Jaramillo supporter (and supporter of the felonious Republican candidate Scott Markowitz) showed up to take the usual moral high ground, too, adding some unintended irony to the goings on.

Then there was this acolyte of Ahmad Zahra, a perpetually angry little person spilling her overflow of venom at council meetings in a rapid-fire succession of aspersions. She claimed to be a business owner (of course no details forthcoming) and asserted that opening Wilshire would be detrimental to business! It seems that if your heart is in the right place you can make any claim you want.

The train of thought short, but it sure was slow…

Of course the younger Kennedy sister, Skasia showed up to support the stupid, and yammer about something so far above her head she might as well have been discoursing on astrophysics.

Dancing on the grave of Walk on Wilshire…

We learned three things last night. Jamie Valencia and Fred Jung can demonstrate commonsense in the face of angry, histrionic boohoodom. We also learned that Councilmember Shana Charles appears to be the mastermind behind keeping Wilshire blocked off. Her closing statement was a litany of her special academic qualifications as an urban planner and a public heath expert of some sort. And in retrospect one gets the idea that it was she who rounded up speakers to attend the meetings last year, too. Her completely callous attitude toward Wilshire businesses may come back to haunt her. If Charles thinks she gets to tell businesses whether they are doing well enough to satisfy her, and expects them to buy it, she’s got another think coming.

We also learned that Sunaya Thomas, Fullerton’s was willing to let the Council believe that $50,000 to $250,000 was a price range for closing the block, when in reality it was just the possible cost of the design side of stuff. Zahra jumped at the chance to waste $50K up front and let staff come back for more, a typical, incompetent attitude.

And finally let’s give another nod to Fred Jung, whose suggestion to close down the whole block gummed up the works, but good.

And let’s celebrate for ourselves. At least for now the taxpayers of Fullerton dodged another losing lawsuit that was surely headed our way.

January 20, 2025January 20, 2025Ahmad Zahra

Jamie Valencia wants to Reduce Public Comment Time

by The Fullerton Harpoon29 Comments

At the last Fullerton City Council meeting, newly elected 4th District representative Jamie Valencia proposed reducing the time allotted to each general public commenter from three to two minutes. Her reasoning was to produce more efficient meetings. The motion failed 3-2 with Nick Dunlap, in what seems to be a trend, voting with Ahmad Zahra and Shana Charles – the Council’s two obnoxious moralistic pontificators.

The speakers present at the meeting objected, as well they might. That’s because many of them are constantly haranguing the Council majority about this or that, enjoying three minutes to blather away.

And of course the semi-literate Skaskia Kennedy at the Fullerton Observer couldn’t resist angry editorializing:

“In an apparent disregard for public engagement, newly elected District 4 councilmember Jamie Valencia made a motion to reduce the time allotted for each public commentor (sic) to speak at the start of city council meetings from three to two minutes.“

The general thrust of the opposition to the motion was that this proposal was an affront to public engagement, public participation, etc., etc.

Now, these are the same people who, if given three minutes will use it up, in pointless repetition, non sequitur, and in one recent case, a minute of silence just to annoy everybody.

On the face of it, Ms. Valencia’s proposal seemed like bad politics, and maybe it was.

What seems to be missing here on the part of Dunlap, Zahra and Charles is the understanding that these speakers are members of the public, but are not “the public.” They have been chosen by nobody but themselves, and represent nobody but themselves. Some of them are driven by some inner impulse to share their mental gyrations about something or other and, if given 180 seconds, will use them all.

But, hey, wait just a second. Why must all the other members of the public in attendance, or watching online be subjected to 180 seconds of the same nonsense over and over again? Why can’t everybody else enjoy shorter, better run meetings?

No one is claiming that the right to speak at a meeting be eliminated, or that “engagement” be ended. But why not make these folk distill their comments into something more concise, more relevant and more intelligent? My own attitude is that if you can’t express a general observation, complaint, or even irrelevant philosophizing into two minutes, then there’s something wrong with you.

January 19, 2025January 19, 2025Boohooism

Observer Pushes False Story

by The Fullerton Harpoon17 Comments

By now FFFF readers know that the truth and the Fullerton Observer, run by Kennedy Sisters Skaskia and Sharon, are often at odds. These two dimwits seem to think their editorializing and narrative peddling go hand in hand with reporting news.

Well, they’ve done it again.

While alerting their readers of the upcoming “Walk on Wilshire” vote on Tuesday, they lead off with this gem:

The city council is set to determine the fate of Walk On Wilshire on Tuesday, January 21, with a session at 5:30pm at Fullerton City Hall, 303 W. Commonwealth Ave. The recommendation is to accept a proposed motion to permanently close W. Wilshire from Harbor to Malden to vehicular traffic, thereby expanding Walk on Wilshire or to open the entire street to traffic by February 2025.

This is not only completely backwards, but it omits the most important part of the agenda staff report, to wit: closing the whole block is not recommended; rather opening the street back up in February 2025 is the proposed action. There is a back up option to close the street, among several others should the Council decide not to follow the recommended action.

This statement is tantamount to a lie, and at best can be considered intentional disinformation, the scrofulitic handmaiden that closely follows the Kennedy Sisters where ever they go. It’s clear they want to drum up support for the stupid boondoggle they have come to cherish, and are willing to mislead their fellow travelers into thinking that staff has actually recommended the street closure for the whole block. No, now that I think about it, this isn’t “tantamount” to a lie. It is a lie.

But the standard of objective honesty among Fullerton Observer readers seems to be so consistently low and the casual acceptance of subjective ideology so high, that this sort of bullshit passes as journalism among them.

January 17, 2025January 17, 2025A Step in the Right Direction

Watch Waste on Wilshire Wither

by Mr. Peabody18 Comments

Yes, Friends, the so-called Walk on Wilshire is coming back to the City Council this Tuesday. For the fourth or fifth time this annoying street closure is being reconsidered. I really don’t know how often this mess has been rehashed. But I do know that City staff has turned this temporary remedy for COVID relief into a stupid, near permanent boondoggle. The bureaucrats in City Hall love them some Walk on Wilshire. It offers an opportunity for them to program things there, to collect what little rent comes in, and hide it all under the nonsensical concept of “business development.”

Of course it has nothing to do with business development. No one in City Hall has ever presented a comprehensive cost or budget analysis on this nonsense, and its adherents in the community who want to claim the street and block off cars don’t care. It’s another liberal gesture in which misplaced feelings are ever so more important than cost/benefit study.

Last fall Mayor Fred Jung added a caveat to a Shana Charles proposal for another three month extension to do even more studying. Jung proposed to take the street closure all the way from Harbor to Malden – the whole damn block. To anybody with any sort of brains this was a non-starter idea meant to spike the 200ft closure one and for all. Naturally, the dopes Charles and Ahmad Zahra greedily went for it, the love the anti-auto gesture so much.

Tuesday’s staff report includes traffic crap bought from consultants by staff (our money, of course) to make the closure seem plausible, one conclusion being that impacts to traffic would be minimal. This is pure bullshit, of course. The comparison numbers between the 100 W. blocks of Amerige and Wilshire are based on the current Wilshire closure, the analogy being that botched surgery has already so weakened the patient that a little more cutting won’t make much difference anyhow.

Fortunately, the City Manager seems to have brought some commonsense to the project. Citing staff’s inability to guarantee there won’t be a traffic impact, and noting the problem of access to businesses and residences on Wilshire, the recommendation is to drop the whole thing. There is also the potential of legal action lurking in the future, so there’s that, too. Staff recommends reopening the whole street to auto traffic and letting businesses on Wilshire pursue the “parklet” option of outdoor dining, a fairly reasonable approach.

Well, Fullerton BooHoo will be out in force on Tuesday to moan and wail about the absolute criticality of the Walk on Wilshire, despite the fact that except for a few silly events planned in desperation, the place is empty most of the time; and the Downtown Plaza, perfectly suitable for this sort of thing, is only a few hundred feet away.

But appreciation of facts and deployment of common sense can’t be listed among the skillset of people like the Kennedy Sisters and their ilk. But things aren’t looking good for The Walk. Nick Dunlap will recuse himself again, leaving four councilmembers to provide the three votes necessary to keep the boondoggle on life support.

January 5, 2025January 5, 2025About Us

What Does Fullerton’s Future Hold In Store For Dick Jones?

by Joe Sipowicz17 Comments

I don’t have the answer. Not yet anyway. But I know that the “I Can’t Believe It’s a Law Firm” of Jones and Mayer has been making bank on Fullerton for over 25 years as City Attorney. And I know that that the dismal legal counsel has impoverished the taxpayers of Fullerton plenty over the two and a half decades. I’m not going to recite the litany of legal failures we can lay at Jones’s doorstep – not yet anyway; we’ve already been doing that for years.

For reasons that escape Council watchers, Dick Jones somehow managed to escape getting the boot between 2020 and 2024, and I can’t think of anybody outside the Council who knows exactly why. Generally we can conclude that at least one member of the Whitaker, Dunlap, Jung triumvirate was protecting Jones and his minions, since it is incomprehensible that either Ahmad Zahra or Shana Charles would dump this chump.

Dick Jones is nothing if not a politician, playing the angles to keep at least three council persons happy at any one time, even alongside legal debacle after legal debacle. It’s worked through 4 different decades thanks to Fullerton being Fullerton. The Old Guard didn’t care and didn’t want to cause trouble; they were easy to push and persuade without too much trouble. The lamebrains like Leland Wilson and Mike Clesceri were afraid of their own shadows. Norby, I’m told, was just happy that the job was outsourced. The other dopes like Pam Keller, Sharon Quirk and Jesus Quirk-Silva could not have conceived of anybody holding Jones responsible for the legal advice he dispensed. For a fixer like Jennifer Fitzgerald he was the perfect running buddy, trying to accommodate anything she wanted.

Well, now Whitaker is gone, and if he was the fly in the ointment for the past 4 years, we may soon find out. Will Council newcomer Jamie Valencia take an independent stand and actually review Jones and Mayer’s record of failure? I sure hope so. It’s time that the City Attorney started giving out advice that avoids lawsuits instead of getting into them, with the result that he gets paid even more for failure.

I don’t know if Ms. Valencia reads this blog, but if so I sure hope she follows that link, above. She would find stories of Jones & Mayer’s incompetence, self-service, and ghastly legal decisions that have harassed Fullerton citizens, given away public resources and cost the taxpayers millions going back 25 years.

I’m sure Jonesy has already tried hard to wheedle himself into Valencia’s good graces, because that’s what he has always done. Will she go for it?

Hanging on to Fullerton should be a big deal to Jones and Mayer in terms of the future legal partnership. And I’m sure Jones figures that the loss of Fullerton could jeopardize his jobs in other cities like Westminster, La Habra, and Costa Mesa. True, Jones is 75 years old and may not even care anymore. Still, the firm must go on, and the junior partners such as the terrier-like Kim Barlow and the obnoxious hand-job lawyer, Gregory Palmer may still have a few years of legal bungling ahead of them.

December 30, 2024January 1, 2025Ahmad Zahra

Welcome to the No-tell Hotel

by The Desert Rat21 Comments

One thing you can always count on in Fullerton elections is that concrete, real issues will never be discussed. You’ll hear mostly generalities about this or that topic. Even roads and taxes melt away in general promises and vague hand-wringing. But, when it comes to specific projects with all sorts of facts and figures involved, you can forget it. A charming characteristic of all local elections, and especially in Fullerton, is that people aren’t elected on their knowledge of anything, but, rather on their acceptability as wise people who will do the right thing given the opportunity.

This is all nonsense, of course. The electeds, knowing nothing are in no intellectual position to push back on the lamest of lame ideas that percolate through the “experts” in the bureaucracy. Not knowing and not learning and not working are the natural siblings of the councilmember’s natural tendency to acquiesce to City Hall staff anyhow. It’s easier just to attend ribbon cuttings and golden shovel ceremonies, I suppose.

And so it is that zero attention has been given by anybody (except FFFF) to various nonsense projects, the worst of which is the so-called boutique hotel project that started out as an idiotic scheme and naturally morphed into the worst kind of Redevelopment boondoggle. It even has a stupid name: It’s called The Tracks at Fullerton Station.

I’m not telling the truth and you can’t make me…

You may recall that the hare-brained idea was hatched by your former Mayor-for-Hire, Jennifer Fitzgerald who pushed a non-competitive agreement with some local dude who couldn’t build a birdhouse. Because the City had to declare the land on which the thing was supposed to sit as “surplus property” a deadline had to met to dodge a State law requiring first right of refusal to low-income housing “developers.”

Rather than shit-canning the whole thing, boobs Bruce Whitaker, Ahmad Zahra and Shana Charles approved of the project and the City actually deeded over the land before any agreements were in place. Pretty amazing, huh? Their convoluted reasoning was so dumb it doesn’t even deserve a description. That was December 2022.

The even bigger problem was that by then the original guy (now deceased) had been pushed out and a whole new partnership had taken over. The new players were a pair of bums – Johnny Lu and Larry Liu who had a record of fraud, embezzlement, and bankruptcies in their wake, and creditors foreclosing on them. Why Fullerton’s crack economic development team and City Attorney failed to pursue even the slightest investigation of Lu/Liu’s record like FFFF did, has never been discussed. And it never will be, Fullerton being Fullerton.

I don’t know the current situation with this project. Two years have passed. Johnny Lu and Larry Liu had many milestones to accomplish certain actions per the agreement they finally signed. Did they? Who knows? Not the public, that’s for sure. Obviously, no one in City Hall wants to talk about this vast embarrassment, and an insecure council isn’t making them. And naturally, the Fullerton electoral process doesn’t discuss such things – bad form to discuss City failures, you see.

But the public has a right to know the whole story, because in the end, the entitlements granted to Lu and Liu are worth a fortune; even worse, the sales price of 1.4 million, less site clearance, is a tenth of the market value the City created with those entitlements. And the new density with hotel and with the new apartments Liu suckered the City into approving, just to keep the mess alive, is two and a half times the density the Transportation Center Specific Plan allows for housing. Go figure.

The mileage is terrible and the wheels are bald…

It’s also critical to remember that in Fullerton projects take on a life of their own through institutional inertia and the human instinct to dodge responsibility whenever possible. The Fullerton Clown Car has never had a rear-view mirror.