Pam Keller Archives - Page 9 of 16 - Friends For Fullerton's Future

November 3, 2009January 5, 2010Fullerton School Board

What Does Pam Keller Do All Day?

For most people the idea of being one’s own boss is an alluring if somewhat daunting proposition. With the freedom and self-responsibility come the risks – of freedom and self-responsibility.

So imagine the pleasant prospect of being your own boss, answering to nobody, and at the same time enjoying the safety of a government job with a regular paycheck and pretty good benefits. This is what Fullerton City Council woman Pam Keller gets by being the Executive Director of the Fullerton Collaborative and remaining an employee of the Fullerton School District. The people who print out her paychecks have no idea how she’s spending her time. She doesn’t answer to them. And the Collaborative Board seems to have shown very little interest in her doings, possibly because she’s actually in charge. Pretty sweet gig if you can get it.

Pam-Keller — Pam Keller - Teacher on Special Assignment

The memorandum of understanding between the Collaborative and the school district lists a series of vague directives to be accomplished by the Executive Director through the school year. The two most specific of Pam’s duties are “assist schools to link with community partners for support services” and “increase awareness of schools regarding community services”.

So essentially her job is to communicate with schools. What does that entail? Fire off a couple of emails, make a phone call every once in a while? No, that would only consume a few minutes per day. There must be more to this $51,000-per-year job.

If we give her the benefit of the doubt, it’s likely that the achievement of these goals requires Pam to spend most of her workday meeting with teachers and parents, visiting schools and attending parent/teacher meetings.

Is that what she does? How much time does she spend with teachers and parents? What are her work hours? Since she really is only accountable to herself, does anyone else know?

Regular teachers must answer to parents, principals and ultimately the Superintendent. Who does a “teacher on special assignment”, funded by an outside organization, answer to? Does Superintendent Mitch Hovey appraise her performance? Could he take appropriate action if he didn’t think she was performing well? He certainly has no incentive to question her since the Collaborative pays her salary regardless.

Ultimately, we expect that the Fullerton School District will have to answer this question: Does the perverse nature of FSD’s employee arrangement with the Fullerton Collaborative cause harm to the public by diluting accountability and hiding conflicts of interest?

October 30, 2009October 30, 2009Dick Jones

Fullerton City Council Term Limits – Who’s For and Who’s Against

by admin38 Comments

UPDATE: Here’s a post from last winter, published again to remind the Friends that Fullerton’s decision-makers promised to put the term limits issue on the next available ballot. Of course that opportunity came and went with the 72nd Assembly Special Election primary. It could still be done in January 2010 if the Special Election itself is required. In any case there is a General Election primary election next June. So let’s all remember!

In dramatic fashion our friends on the Fullerton City Council decided on January 6^th that the voters of Fullerton should decide whether a twelve-year term limit for council members is right for Fullerton.

Pam Keller joined campaign promise keepers Shawn Nelson and Sharon Quirk in placing the issue on the first available ballot, which should be in June, 2010. Predictably, antediluvian councilmen Don Bankhead and Dick Jones opposed the motion believing that you can never be around too long, be too hidebound, too boring, and too inert to serve the public.

As usual, the good government types (i.e. we know what’s good for you so sit down and shut up) like Jan Flory were on hand to oppose the idea, knowing as they do that the longer you are in office the more likely you are to identify with public employees instead of constituents. These folks pretend to defend the public’s right to choose who their elected representatives are even though they don’t seem to trust the public to do much of anything else without government intervention.

We strongly support term limits. We believe that public choice will be enhanced by term limits because the well-financed incumbents will be forced to give way to new representation that might actually give people of real talent a chance to participate in governance, people who now largely acquiesce to the inevitability of incumbency. Fortunately, a majority of the council seem to agree.

The outstanding legal issue is whether the limits can be applied to previous years in office. The final wording of the plebiscite will have to address this. Let’s hope it works out so we can end the Age of Dinosaurs in Fullerton.

October 12, 2009Dick Jones

You Want Blight? We Got Blight! Part 2

by admin3 Comments

Dear Friends, a few weeks back we wrote a post about the issue of blight relative to the proposed Redevelopment expansion. So we have decided to collect some more images of blight to help you get the picture. Again, to be fair, and consistent, we have tried to stick to the City’s own standard (or worse) as we collected pictures not in the proposed area, but in the existing Redevelopment Project Area – to let you also see what a bang-up job the city is doing to eradicate blight already!

October 9, 2009February 7, 2012Behind Closed Doors

The Status of the “Amerige Court” Monstrosity; On Life Support – Pull The Plug!

by The Fullerton Shadow9 Comments

Don’t hold your breath waiting for the good folks at City Hall to provide a public update on the drawn-out Amerige Court saga. They would just as soon you don’t know while they work out a deal behind the scenes.

Well, if they won’t we will. To that end we sent out our crack team of investigative reporters and found out a few things.

As many of the friends doubtless know, the original partnership – Pelican/Laing – that was getting all of the Redevelopment gravy: free land, super-high density, etc. etc., is no more. John Laing Homes went into receivership. But we have been informed by our sources that before they declared under Chapter 11 they managed to offload their interest in the Amerige Court project to their erstwhile partners, Pelican. We suspect that they sold out for pennies on the dollar to salvage something before a bankruptcy court judge could lock things up.

The possibility of a kickback to former Laing employees is hard to ignore, and we hope that this thought will occur to the bankruptcy judge, too. The City granted entitlements were and are, worth millions to somebody who can actually seal the deal.

The Redevelopment Agency staff is aware of all this, and rather than start over will no doubt push hard for the Agency to accept this new arrangement, if they haven’t already. It’s hard to see the Pelican boys getting financing to build a birdhouse these days, but many options are open including selling off the whole mess to somebody else. They may also try to repackage the deal in a “softer” format to makes sure they can get the green light.

So the time is ripe to call City Council members who voted for this huge subsidized eyesore. Keller, Quirk-Silva, and Shawn Nelson have an opportunity to correct their previous mistake and do the right thing by the people of Fullerton. Bankhead and Jones are, of course, far beyond hope, but you can try them, too, if you care to.

October 2, 2009January 5, 2010Fullerton BooHoo

Oops! Is it Really All That Difficult?

by The Fullerton Harpoon16 Comments

Hey who is in charge over there at City Hall? Doesn’t anybody have a clue?

At their September 15, 2009 meeting, the Fullerton City Council deliberated over whether or not the Fullerton School District could get a two-year pass making annual payments on a $1,320,000 loan the District had received from the Redevelopment Agency for the renovation of Maple School nine years ago.

Without debating the merits of the proposal, we note that the suspension of payments was approved 5-0 by the City Council.

But wait! Both Sharon Quirk-Silva and Pam Keller are employees of the School District, and have no business voting on issues, especially financial issues, in which their employer is involved. If ever there were a case for recusal, this was it. At the meeting Mitch Hovey the Superintendent of the Fullerton School District was in the audience. Imagine that! You’re voting to defer over $50K in loan payments to the operation you work for and your boss is sitting in the front row! Hmmm. No bueno!

We can’t imagine why it didn’t occur to either Keller or Quirk-Silva that there was an evident conflict of interest involved. Perhaps it never occurred to them because they see the District as some sort of charity, and doing favors for charities can’t possibly undermine the fiduciary responsibility that they have to the City of Fullerton. It’s all about the children, after all. But we merely speculate. Who really knows why they voted?

And even more baffling is why Richard Jones, the City Attorney failed to bring up this problem. Attorney Jones is paid, and paid a lot, to keep these meetings on the up and up, and keep his charges out of trouble, in loco parentis, as it were. Hmmm.

And finally we reserve a separate post for the performance by Mayor Don Bankhead, who really outdid himself on this item

September 30, 2009December 30, 2009Fullerton BooHoo

Fullerton Collaborative Received Contributions from Developers

by The Fullerton Shadow21 Comments

Our own Travis Kiger met with the Chairman and Treasurer of the Fullerton Collaborative yesterday to review donations to that group from people who might have had business before the City of Fullerton where the Collaborative’s Executive Director, Pam Keller, sits on the city council. He also looked into whether or not the Collaborative had received contributions from developers – people from whom Pam Keller had specifically refused to take campaign contributions.

From the records made available to him, Travis discovered two prominent names: Pelican-Ontario, an affiliate of the Amerige Court project developers, and the egregious Steve Sheldon, pitchman for the massive Jefferson Commons project. Pelican and Sheldon gave $300 and $1000 to the Collaborative, respectively. Bushala Brothers, Inc., local property owners and developers in Fullerton gave $1000 as well.

The issue of the St. Jude Medical Center participation in the Collaborative, and Keller’s December 2007 votes in favor of their large project on the west side of Harbor Boulevard was also discussed at length.

The officers of the Collaborative have claimed that the Executive Director is paid from funds separate from those gathered from donations that support Collaborative activities. That may or may not be accurate, but it is true that the typical budget for “Faces of Fullerton,” for instance, includes $5000 for staff salary, and the Collaborative only has one employee – Keller. The larger issue is that contributions made to the Collaborative could, and may have gone to pay for the contract with FSD for Keller’s services. Is it really necessary to parse out different accounts?

The Collaborative leaders also related that in the future they will scrutinize and pre-approve all donations; but that is not any of our business. Our business throughout this affair has been to find out if Pam Keller has been voting on projects applied for by members and contributors to the Collaborative (she has), and whether she has solicited donations from the very developers who she refused to take money from for her campaign (she has).

In conclusion, we make no accusations of illegal behavior on anyone’s part; but is it ethical of Pam Keller to refuse developer campaign contributions only to turn around and solicit them for the Collaborative – an entity she is paid to run? We don’t think so. When she ran for council in 2006 Keller made a big deal about letting the development process be driven by public participation – rather than by outside developers. Her votes to approve the gigantic Jefferson Commons and Amerige Court projects were baffling to many who no doubt took her campaign promises at face value.

There you have it, Friends. You decide.

September 23, 2009December 30, 2009Pam Keller

Fullerton Collaborative Collaborates on Stall

by The Fullerton Shadow3 Comments

Yesterday our own tenacious Travis followed up, as promised, with Pam Keller, to find out what the Fullerton Collaborative board had decided about our request to divulge their donors.

Here’s what Travis got back:

Dear Travis,

The Board of the Fullerton Collaborative met today. Your request was included on the agenda. The Board suggested if you are interested in knowing about our financial state you are welcome to look for our 990 forms on http://www2.guidestar.org/. If you would like to know more details about how we are funded, where the funding comes from or how our Collaborative functions Zoot Velasco, Chair of the Board; Barry Ross, Treasurer and I would be glad to sit down with you to go over the information.

Thank you for your interest in the Fullerton Collaborative,

Pam Keller

Executive Director

Well, you didn't think it I was going to make it easy, did you?

Hmm. We didn’t get what we wanted, but rather we got a brush off – sort of. While we have nothing against sitting down with these good people, it hardly seems necessary. We don’t need face time with them. They are either going to cooperate or not.

The invitation that we view the Form 990 is really pretty disingenuous: Ms. Keller knows very well that we have already looked at their 2007 version of this document on line – which caused us to start asking our questions in the first place. We posted about it here .

This whole thing is really starting to smell like a stall to us – we’ve been put off for over a month already. Oh well! The truth will out, as they say.

September 22, 2009December 28, 2009Fullerton BooHoo

A Call For Transparency – A Reminder

by The Fullerton Shadow8 Comments

Collab Board — Don't worry...nobody reads the blog

UPDATE: Today’s the big day. Will the Fullerton Collaborative let us know who their donors are? We’ve been patiently waiting to find out for a month. Today we’ll find out if the information is forthcoming.

Last month we asked City Council member Pam Keller for the records of donors to the Fullerton Collaborative since she came onto the City Council. You may recall that the reason we asked was because we were curious whether or not any of the contributors had business before the City, especially business where Keller herself may have participated in the decision-making process. We cited the example of St. Jude’s Medical Center, a listed member of the Collaborative who happened to have a major project before the City a couple of years ago, a project that Keller voted on, and for.

At the time Keller informed us that she would raise the subject at the September Board meeting. After an inquiry the other day, we have learned that there is a board meeting on September 22. Whether the announced meeting of September 8 was held or not we do not know.

We’ll let you know what we find out next week. Promise.

September 21, 2009December 28, 2009About Us

Nobody Reads the Blog

by Travis Kiger18 Comments

ocregister-laptop — OC Register Front Page - Saturday September 19, 2009

Occasionally we hear of local politicos who attempt to downplay the effectiveness of our efforts here at FFFF, claiming “nobody reads the blog” (while feverishly checking it themselves). Despite our hurt feelings, we have continued our daily blogging efforts to bring long-missing accountability and reason to this city.

Last week alone this blog had 8,228 hits. To put that in perspective, Pam Keller spent a year campaigning in 2006 to come up with 10,494 votes, beating out candidate Leland Wilson by a mere 628 votes.

Further evidence of our influence can been seen in our ability to garner coverage from conventional media outlets. Exhibit A is on the front page of Saturday’s OC Register – our continued efforts to expose the dangers of Fullerton’s school laptop program will also be recognized by the LA Times later this week.

Nobody reads the blog?

8,228 hits in a week. That’s a whole lot of nobody.

September 18, 2009December 30, 2009Dick Jones

Our Thanks to Nelson & Quirk-Silva

by The Fullerton Harpoon10 Comments

Quirk2 shawn-nelson

The other day we posted about the shameful payoff deal Fullerton’s Redevelopment lawyer Jeff Oderman cooked up with the County in order to get the latter to call off the legal dogs in regard to the City’s proposed Redevelopment expansion plan here . You may recall that the triumvirate of Usual Suspects – Bankhead, Jones, and Keller went for bribe/hush money scheme even though it required an up front payout of $4,000,000 from the City’s General Fund and involved bogus lease back deals in the out years.

Well, we want to thank council members Shawn Nelson and Sharon Quirk-Silva for sticking to their guns in the face of all sorts of institutional and statist pressure to go along with the scam that required the Council to make findings of blight where none exists. This fragile lie was the foundation of the whole rotten expansion superstructure.

It’s good to know we have two representatives who appreciate a concept much-abused by governments in their mania to raise revenue to pay themselves more and more: the truth.