These misplaced medical supplies were discovered near Hillcrest Park today. If they belong to you, please call (714) 738-6800 to claim them.
Newman has been handed yet another bill to pass off as his own in his race against the recall – SB714. It allows the state to use eminent domain to take Coyote Hills by force, turning it over to something called the “State Coastal Conservancy” at great expense to California taxpayers. Assemblywoman Sharon Quirk-Silva has put up a matching bill that provides taxpayer funding for some of the takings.
Fullerton property rights advocates are warning about the loss of local control and lamenting the potential undoing of 40 years of development compromises (sunk costs, perhaps).
On the other hand, preserve purists like the folks at Save Coyote Hills love the bill, which has the potential to take land from a developer and use it to expand the Robert E. Ward Nature Preserve.
Whatever your take, this warning applies – A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take away everything that you have. Handing this issue over to Sacramento bureaucrats may not get you what you want.
Our lobbyist Councilperson Jennifer Fitzgerald has asked her supporters on Facebook to show up at tonight’s Council Meeting to support the purchase of land on Pearl Drive to be used as a park.
Our friend David already went over some of the ridiculousness of this purchase in a previous post but it bears getting a little more attention.
The first point to be made is that this item is on the Consent Calendar tonight. Consent Calendar items are items during a meeting that get no separate discussion and are voted on together unless specifically pulled for comment by a member of the public or council. A typical Consent Calendar item would be the minutes to a previous meeting or perhaps a legislative ordinance change forced upon us by Sacramento.
A typical definition of a consent calendar would be as follows:
Under parliamentary rules governing City Council meetings, Consent Calendar items are reserved for items that are deemed to be non-controversial. They allow a City Council to save the bulk of it’s meeting time for issues in which there is a need for a serious public debate.
Often though the items end up being things that the city doesn’t want to discuss or scrutinize in detail. Tonight’s meeting has 12 consent calendar items with this purchase being the 10th.
The Consent Calendar is hardly the proper place to drop a $1.2Million+ project and it’s more amusing given that councilwoman Fitzgerald is asking for support on an item that is scheduled to take no public comments. It’s somewhat infuriating that the city of Fullerton is so free with money that it doesn’t feel the need to openly discuss an expenditure that is over 18x the median household income of our residents. Worse still when basic details of the deal are lacking from public view.
The parcel in question is slated for purchase with a whopping price tag of $755,500 based on a use assumption that is faulty at best (see David’s post). Then we have $148,000 for an unexplained “administrative settlement”. Then $300,000 for “improvement costs” that will of course be more than $300K owing to the additional paragraph stating that “An updated estimate will be established upon completion of the community meetings.”
What attachments or reference points do we have so we as a city can analyze this project? None. There is no explanation because a properly scanned, searchable PDF is too much work to manage at City Hall despite numerous requests over the years. I’m sure somebody will sound off that there have been “community meetings” that were announced on Nextdoor or some such nonsense so as to suggest the lack of need for the city to do it’s due diligence on transparency. This will likely come from the same people who complain about Public Records Requests from the public in a city known for a culture of corruption and abject secrecy.
Despite being an ongoing project, per the item’s own sparse agenda attachments, since 2002-2003 and we don’t have a breakdown of costs? A thorough estimate? A reason for the administrative settlement? A list of code enforcement violations?
Even the details we do get don’t tell the whole story.
“The amenities required being demolished”? How about we mention that the city paid over $19,000 for part of that very demolition? It seems that just about every pertinent detail has been washed from this item which maybe explains why it was on the consent calendar in the first place. You do have to the give the city credit for their optimism in hoping they could sneak this through the consent calendar knowing full well that we malcontents are always willing to call them on their shenanigans.
I reckon the only thing more infuriating than a bureaucrat putting forth this kind of lazy and shoddy work is a legislative body so uninterested in demanding real data and accountability that those bureaucrats know they can get away with this nonsense.
The old adage “Trust but verify” is absolutely foreign to the Fullerton City Council.
Just when you thought the Parks and Recreation Department might get their act together comes another gem on next week’s agenda. This time, it’s a $903,500 land purchase for a new park at 3001 Pearl Drive.
The vacant lot used to be home to a swimming pool and clubhouse for the adjacent apartment complexes, which the 33 property owners failed to maintain. Those same property owners now want the City to build a park contingent on the City forking over cash to buy the land.
So what is the land worth? $740,000 according to the appraiser, who notes that an “extraordinary assumption” to build high-density housing was used. Translation: The $740,000 estimate could be totally worthless and the appraiser admits it. Nothing more is divulged about the appraised value because Hugo Curiel only included two pages from the appraisal report. Page One and Page Two
And it gets worse. Hugo wants an additional 20 percent of the appraised value ($148,000) for an administrative settlement to be paid out to the property owners. Once again, Hugo fails to provide any sort of written justification for this:
The parcel is 0.398 acres in size. At that price, it is equivalent to $2.27 million per acre which is more than double the price Chevron is asking for Coyote Hills land. This would be the most expensive land ever purchased for a Fullerton park.
I have a question. Why should we pay the property owners a premium price when it was their own negligence that created this situation? In fact, why pay them anything at all, provided the City agrees to build a park?
Makes you wonder if the property owners are more interested in a cash payout for themselves, or a park for the neighborhood’s benefit.
Parks and Recreation has been spending a considerable amount of energy lately, between their big PR push to justify their last costly mistake (Hillcrest Park’s poorly constructed and unneeded stairs) and obtaining approval for the next one (Hillcrest Park’s unneeded bridge across the creek).
Do you know what Parks & Recreation have been paying less attention to? Their parks.
Residents have been complaining for several months about the condition of Rolling Hills Park’s playground and equipment. The issues run from routine maintenance like unpainted benches to hazards like this:
And this:
Phone calls and letters to Parks & Recreation were ignored for months until residents went over Hugo Curiel’s head and appealed to the Commissioners directly, at which time they finally saw results.
Well, sort of. The benches have been repainted, but that rickety play truck is unchanged. Meanwhile, the broken spinner was simply been removed, along with an unsafe climber that had split in two. Before removing the climber outright, however, this was Parks & Recreation’s solution:
Which worked out about as well as anyone who’s ever had a five year old could have told them it would.
This right here is the hidden cost of our wasteful policies at City Hall: we get stairs and bridges we didn’t ask for or want, but we do not get well maintained parks or working playground equipment (aka recreation) for our children that we expect. Our government in a nutshell.
Readers of this blog know good and well the many failures of the Pine Forest Stairs at Hillcrest Park, not to mention the $724,000 bridge to nowhere that will soon become reality.
What you probably don’t know about are the shenanigans used by City Hall to influence the City Council vote.
Funding for the bridge, fountain, and “Great Lawn” improvements was approved on a 3-2 vote (Whitaker and Sebourn: No) at the May 16 City Council meeting. A couple weeks earlier, I made a records request for documentation on Hillcrest Park.
Jennifer Fitzgerald’s appointee to the Parks and Recreation Commission, Gretchen Cox, made public comments in support of the project. Having skimmed through the e-mails provided by City Hall the day before, I thought to myself, wait a minute, portions of her comments sounded awfully familiar.
As it turns out, my suspicions were correct. A week prior, Parks & Recreation Director Hugo Curiel had one of his employees, Doug Pickard, e-mail Gretchen Cox a list of “talking points” to assist her in making attacks on Councilmembers Sebourn and Silva:
Portions of the e-mail were in fact used by Gretchen Cox during public comments. Let’s go back and compare the e-mail to what she actually said. This ought to be fun! (more…)
Readers here will be familiar with the Pine Wood… excuse me, the Exercise Stairs, that were thrown up at Hillcrest Park recently for the low-low price of over $1.6Million.
Let us take a tour of these stairs:
After walking the stairs here’s the first thing that came to mind: (more…)
The grand opening of the “Pine Forest Stairs” connecting Lions Field to Hillcrest Park was this morning. I didn’t count but I’m guessing 30 people in attendance, about a third of which were City staff or elected/appointed folks.
A short 10-minute ceremony marked the grand opening:
Those of you strapped for time should watch this excerpt featuring Jennifer Fitzgerald. Listen very carefully as she avoids using the word “bridge” when referring to the Great Lawn. She’s so excited!
No other councilmembers besides Chaffee and Fitzgerald were in attendance, though former councilwoman Jan Flory joined them.
The event was somewhat unusual in that a number of people who probably see me as a City Hall adversary took it upon themselves to strike up a conversation, which was nice for a change. Doug Chaffee and his wife Paulette Marshall were very friendly, as was Gretchen Cox, Parks and Recreation Commissioner. From the City staff, John Clements and Don Hoppe were nice as well.
After everyone took a trip up the stairs, can you guess which councilmember found a reason to be nasty to me? This isn’t a difficult question.
This Saturday, 06 May 2017 at 10:00 the city of Fullerton is having a Grand Opening for the new “Pine Wood Stairs” at Hillcrest Park. To which the natural response should be something along the lines of “They’re stairs. Why do you need a ‘Grand Opening’ for a set of stairs?”.
Why? Because politicians and bureaucrats love to celebrate anything that can result in a photo-op, self-congratulatory award or chance to pretend to care about their jobs or city. In this case that celebratory nature has taken on the smell of desperation only slightly masked by Pine.
David has already posted a great piece explaining some of the many problems with Fullerton’s new Stairs to Nowhere, or in city parlance “The Pine Wood Stairs”. I decided to check them out myself and see what was what and I was, shall we say, less than thrilled with the experience.
All of my hilarious ranting aside there is one major thing that needs to be pointed out. Does THIS:
And before some bureaucratic bootlickers come on here to try and justify this misdirection and waste of funds, I’m looking at your Mrs. “We Held Oh So Many Meetings”, let me point out THIS:
I like that there is a “FREE Intro Stairs Exercise Class” because nobody knows how to use stairs. At least they found a selling point for the stairs to nowhere – exercise! You too can get in shape after fighting for parking in order to use our stairs to nowhere. It’s a good thing we’ve cornered the market on poorly built stairs in a park we don’t maintain (and won’t maintain), otherwise people might want to exercise somewhere convenient and then how would we justify these stairs? I mean we had to spend the Park Dwelling money on something other than buying land in Coyote Hills or just maintaining our current parks. So Exercise Stairs. Pine Wood Exercise Stairs. To Nowhere.
Oy.
Yesterday, I wrote about the hideous stairs at Hillcrest Park and alluded to the City Council being asked to spend another $5.7 million on Hillcrest Park improvements. This is Park Dwelling Fund money — an important distinction I will get to in a minute. You can read the full Agenda Letter here.
A portion of that $5.7 million is slated for the construction of what would become Fullerton’s most useless bridge, if funding is approved next Tuesday night. No, it won’t be painted orange, and I don’t know the exact type of bridge.
This is just a crude rendering of where the bridge would sit, scaled as best as possible using the City’s drawings.
Here’s the official drawing from the City. The bridge across the creek is clearly visible below:
I keep scratching my head as to who would ever use this bridge. It doesn’t align with any current or proposed trail, nor does it connect the park to crowds of people just dying to enter the “Great Lawn” as they want to call it. The nearest City parking is FOUR spaces at Harbor and Valley View, 425 feet away.
Why would someone opt to walk another 425 feet, over the bridge, to access the “Great Lawn” when it’s right in front of their parking space?
When these parking spaces fill up, the few people desiring to use the bridge will probably just leave their cars at Ralph’s or Chase Bank — or just not bother using the bridge at all. The next closest City parking lot at Hillcrest Park is 900 feet away on Valley View. Either way, taking the bridge is the least convenient route to the lawn.
Second closest is the combined Hillcrest/Lions Field parking lot along Brea Blvd. That measures out to 950 feet away on Google Earth, if, and that’s a big if, you can find parking there at all. On the weekends, that lot is jammed full of cars with youth sports in session at Lions Field. During the week, Parks and Recreation has the bright idea to lease parking spaces to St. Jude Hospital for employee use. They also want to lease Lions Field to Hope International University, presumably during the week as well. While your chances of finding parking there are questionable at this point, let’s just say you succeed. From that parking lot, there is direct access to the “Great Lawn” without needing to use a bridge, cross the creek, or walk alongside Harbor Blvd. A park road already exists.
As an aside, do you think it’s fair for park users to siphon parking spaces away from Ralph’s or Chase Bank and the other businesses there? I sure don’t.
Park Dwelling Money
All of the proposed Hillcrest Park improvements are scheduled to use cash from the Park Dwelling Fund. This is the fee charged to developers for every dwelling unit they build.
But wait a minute? Can’t the Park Dwelling money be used for other, more reasonable purposes, besides a useless bridge?
YES.
Chapter 21.12 of the Fullerton Municipal Code covers this.
21.12.040 Use of funds.
All money collected as fees imposed by this chapter shall be deposited in the park dwelling fund and shall be used solely for the acquisition, development, improvement, and maintenance of public parks and recreational facilities in the City, as proposed by the City’s Five Year Capital Improvement Program.
Translation: The $5.7 million could be used on things people actually want, such as acquiring land within Coyote Hills.
Really, people. If you think this is a stupid use of funds, this is the LAST chance to do something about it. The project itself has already been approved, but not the funding. That’s what they’re seeking approval for Tuesday night.
Send the City Council an email: council@cityoffullerton.com or attend the meeting on Tuesday, May 2, 2017 at 6:30pm and plan to speak during public comments.