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.