Not surprising to see a downtown liquor purveyor supporting one of their own. Flory helped turn downtown Fullerton into an open air bar.
It seems that Jan Flory is bringing a little bit of charming Chicago politics to Fullerton, i.e. raiding cemeteries for supporters. Now you know why we have a category called “Deadheads.”
Here is Flory’s 2012 voter guide:
Opps. Bob Root is dead. So is Gwen Ferguson; likewise Majorie Pogue!
Did you spot any others?
Also of high amusement value are the names of me and my ex-wife! How I got on the list is anybody’s guess since I have never given Flory authorization to use my name for anything.
I believe this is just a matter of utter incompetence, but it isn’t surprising. When Flory says she is ten years older and 10 years better she is half right.
An alert Friend snapped this pic at the recent candidates’ night out.
It would seem that poor Don Bankhead is becoming less and less capable of staying awake during public events.
Somebody captured this campaign sign recently. It suggests one of three things.
1) Don Bankhead is a liar who wants people to think he is an incumbent; or,
2) Bankhead belongs in a memory care unit since he can’t remember that he was recalled four months ago and is no longer on the City Council; or,
3) he is too cheap to buy new campaign signs and is using old ones.
Well, which is it?
Just the other day Fullerton City Council candidate Jan Flory was heard to remark about needed reform: protecting the poor, underpaid and overworked city staff that used to bring her all those important projects when she was “on council” right after the last ice age.
Well here’s a staff-driven project that her beloved staff dumped on her and which she happily voted for: The Poisoned Park.
We did a whole series on this fiasco that you can read about here and here. In a nutshell, the City bought contaminated property from the Union Pacific Railroad on West Truslow for a community park. Forget the basic fact that nobody in the neighborhood wanted a park, let alone a gang hang out; the land was there and a private party wanted to buy it.
Fullerton’s stellar bureaucracy led by Susan Hunt (Parks Director), Bob Hodson (City Engineer), Jaim Armstrong (City Manager), Gary Chalupsky (Redevelopment Director), and Paul Dudley (Planning) just couldn’t get in the way of a pending deal fast enough. The City steeped in and bought the land for over a million bucks, then they built their park. More millions spent. All approved by Jan Flory.
And then disaster. It transpires that there was a toxic flume under the site. A fence was set up around the offending park and it remains closed to this day, over ten years after it was purchased, falling into decay. Nobody had ever bothered to to a proper environmental assessment and make the sale contingent upon its results.
The Poisoned Park may well be the exemplar of an incompetent collection of boobs from whom no accountability was ever demanded and from whom none was ever delivered.
But to Jan Flory’s “lights” these are the “heart of the City.” Hmm.
It sure as hell isn’t you. Or any other taxpayer or citizen. Nope. Here she is holding forth on who really matters to her. Her idea of ‘reform” is to place the interests of the City’s workers ahead of yours.
In an era of bloated salaries and, crippling pension burdens on the taxpayer and their great-great grandkids Jan Flory cares first and foremost about the plight of unionized government workers!
Did we put words in this dinosaur’s mouth? Nope. She did it all by herself.
Sometimes you don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Like the case in Philly where a local businessman may be sued by the Redevelopment Agency for cleaning up trash and beautifying a piece of blighted Agency-owned property that they willfully refused to clean up. So ths guy spends 20 big ones of his own dough since the City blatantly ignored its own mess, and is now looking at a potential lawsuit – a lawsuit some asshole city bureaucrat says is based on “principle.” Principle. Now that’s a scream.
What’s really funny is that if the city had done the work it would have cost twenty times as much and taken ten times longer.
Of course apologists of Fullerton’s former Redevelopment Agency (you know who they are) would be quick to point out is that this sort incompetence and arrogance never happened in Fullerton; Fullerton Redevelopment folks were just so darned…well… you know.
But consider this: Fullerton has had a long and inglorious Redevelopment history that includes building, then demolishing concrete trestles along Harbor, giving away a public sidewalk to a politically connected apaign contributor, subsidizing dozens of boondoggles, supporting architectural design Nazi-ism, stealing an old lady’s property to give to a car dealer, and nasty little sales tax kick backs from Redevelopment funds – all done to promote more tax revenue to pay for pensions, League of City junkets, and all those inevitable step pay increases for the gang.
A final thought: even though Redevelopment is supposedly dead in California you can bet the farm (if they don’t steal it for High Speed Rail) that the lobbyists are busy at work in Sacramento trying to revive it, and that local mall fry politicians and local political wannabes are real eager for it to come back.
Why not? It’s fun and it isn’t their money.
Here is a fun image I just harvested from the Orange Juice blog, apparently the creation of local liberal activist Stephan Baxter who has gotten it into his noggin that Fullerton politicians should be held accountable for their actions (or to be more precise, their inaction) in the wake of the Kelly Thomas murder at the hands of members of the FPD. Funny the ideas some folks have.
Even more disturbing to some, Baxter doesn’t seem to care that the object of his scorn happens to be an old Democrat war horse named Jan Flory. who really loves the FPD.
Since I do not want to be accused of being sexist I shall refrain from a literary reference to Macbeth. I would note however that there is not enough brainpower in this picture to light a match.
Two observations. First “Kitty” Jaramillo seems to think it is “time for a change.” She never seemed to think it was time for a change when the FPD was beating people to death, so that tells you all you need to know about her, even if you didn’t know she was a well-pensioned former City employee.
Somebody better tell Mrs. Flory to quit wearing those rayon muu muu things and those cheap plastic beads. They scream out 1973. Which is probably when she bought them. Meeeeow. Hiss!!!!
P.S. Friends, for an added treat enjoy this picture of FPOA boss and serial prevaricator (or hoplessly incompetent) Andrew Goodrich proclaiming the Jaramillo buffet safe for FPOA consumption.
As a woman I have to say I found Jan Flory’s observation about Travis Kiger being intimidated by strong, older women pretty comical. The inference of course is that Jan Flory is a strong, older woman; and that as a corollary, Travis is a weak, younger man, possibly, Flory speculated, because his mommy didn’t nurse him long enough.
And now I ask you to dispel the image of Jan Flory nursing anything (warm blooded) herself to gain mommy experience, as I pursue my essay.
The implication that Travis Kiger is weak, and is in any way fearful of Jan Flory, I leave until the end to address. First I will start with Mrs. Flory’s self-description.
I note that Mrs. Flory bolts out of the starting gate with the implication that she is the victim of ageism and sexism. I am no longer offended by limousine liberals whipping out victimhood status, although generally they apply it to which ever class or race they happen to be pandering to.
Jan Flory isn’t “older.” She is old. She is probably in her seventies. That’s a fact and it’s germane, given the total lack of leadership and intellectual perspicacity, delivered by her “esteemed” elderly friends Bankhead, Jones and McKinley who were also in their eighth decade.
Age is a reality. You can try to hide it with lots of cosmetic surgery, but you can’t hide an ossified mindset locked in forty-year time lag. It reveals itself in rigid thought and its addiction to empty clichés, and meaningless abstractions.
Flory is strong, she says. Must we take her word for it? As a structural engineer I know that some materials such as unreinforced concrete or cast iron appear very strong; and so they are – in compression. Yet they lack strength in tension. They are not flexible and their very rigidity makes them comparatively brittle. And brittle is a term I would apply to the speech and demeanor of Jan Flory at the City Council microphone. Perhaps there is an underlying hysteria waiting to erupt. If it ever does, the crack-up will not be pretty, either.
“Strong” people of neither gender advertise their strength. The fact that Mrs. Flory finds it necessary to do so is a pretty clear indication of an underlying insecurity and inherent weakness.
It seems to have escaped Mrs. Flory’s notice that people may dislike her not because she is a strong, older woman, but because she seems to be an inflexible, humorless, mean, self-righteous scold – a veritable literary stereotype, in fact.
And then there is the Flory Record to consider, amply described on the pages of FFFF. Her previous years on the Fullerton City Council are informed by failure. Flory voted to approve an illegal tax on our water for six years; which also means she never balanced a legitimate budget. She gave away City property and streets worth millions to her developer friends. She voted to retroactively spike the pensions of “public safety” employees, burying the taxpayers and citizens under a multi-hundred million dollar mountain of unfunded pension liability.
And then there is the Flory Inaction: totally MIA about the murder of the mentally ill homeless man at the hands of Fullerton cops. Is that the behavior of a “strong, older woman” or the pitiful cowardice of an entropic, conscienceless fossil? What does Jan Flory think about the crime wave perpetrated by members of the Fullerton Police Department, including the sexual assaults by Albert Rincon that even elicited disgust from a federal judge? Well we do know that she actually gave her pal ex-Chief Pat McKinley an award of some kind after all the bad FPD news and after a multi-hundred thousand dollar settlement was reached in the Rincon matter.
As with many of Fullerton’s “strong, older women (and men)” it has been more important for Flory to back the sclerotic Fullerton establishment to the hilt, rathert than uncover the stinky morass in the FPD. Flory actually wants to hire more cops without reforming the department. Flory seems to think somebody in Fullerton really wants this retrograde attitude. Of course the voters will decide, but I doubt anybody wants to backtrack to the days of complete unaccountability in City Hall that marked the Flory years.
Now as far as Travis Kiger is concerned I will say this. He is one of the most courageous people I know. He has endured the threats and vulgar vituperation of the FPOA trolls on this site with equanimity. They have attacked him and his family, posting his home address long before he was a public figure. He has never backed down. That’s because he believes in principles, one of which is taking responsibility for his decisions. That’s pretty refreshing. And that’s strength.
Travis is thirty-three years old. I sincerely doubt if Jan Flory has embraced a new idea in over forty.