Just in case there were any doubt about the state of Mr. Don Bankhead’s mental faculties, I am pleased to report that the recently recalled councilman has pulled papers to run again for the city council, just like he did in 1994 after being recalled. Bankhead is only one of two office holders in the history of the United States to be recalled from the same office twice, and the only man in the 152 year history of California.
This dunderhead snoozed while the FPD sank into a Culture of Corruption, while the water rate payers were ripped off, and as he handed out millions to his campaign contributors; and yet he seems to think himself still worthy of somebody’s trust.
Still, running for the office you were recalled from a mere six weeks ago takes a lot of gall, or disconnect from reality, or both; especially when you got your sorry old ass whipped 2-1.
Hope the tux is rented…
I have no idea if this doorknob actually plans on running; but I doubt if he has a single friend of family member with the sense or decency to tell him no. But if he does, you can certainly look forward to some fun.
Hey y’all, we gotta do it. Its dun been man-dated!!!
Last night our new council majority voted to end a monstrously dense “affordable” housing project on Commonwealth Avenue.
I put the word affordable in quotation marks because these 100% subsidized projects somehow end up costing two or three times the amount to build the regular kind of multi-family housing that is built without government subsidy.
This project, targeted for the 300 block of East Commonwealth, was planned for about 361 stories and was approved on the nod by the old recalled council – Bankhead, Jones, McPension plus, of course Sharon Quirk.
But the times they are a changin.’
New councilmen Kiger and Sebourn, along with Bruce Whitaker said no to a continuance, and then, despite the attempts of Doug Chaffee and Sharon Quirk to keep the monster alive, killed it outright.
And to this I say God bless! No more nonsense from cretins like Dr. Dick and his coterie of self-interested hacks about how we are “mandated” to litter our city with this crap.
Although FFFF hasn’t been reporting much on County activities it’s pretty hard to overlook the latest management crisis in the County Hall of Administration, in which top managers appear to have hushed up a multitude of sex crimes and workplace harassment perpetrated by a creep named Carlos Bustamante. Bustamante is a Santa Ana city councilman, and until last fall, a high level bureaucrat in the OC Public Works Department. Mr. Peabody touched upon the mess, here.
Bustamante was arrested last week by the DA, fifteen months after an anonymous letter was received by the County. Apparently that complaint was actually given to an underling of Bustamante to investigate! It remains unclear who made that call, but his boss, the Director of Public Works is taking the hit for the team – so far.
Mauk.
Meanwhile a second complaint in August 2011, spurred the CEO, Tom Mauk to hire an outside lawyer to investigate Bustamante’s activities. The consequent detailed report, completed in September 2011, supposedly detailed some pretty greasy stuff. For some reason the Supervisors were not shown the report – except for Chairman Bill Campbell, who now amazingly claims he refused to read it, supervising apparently not being one of the requirements of a Supervisor. The report remained under lock and key as Bustamante was permitted to quit and given 3 month’s salary to (get this) – prevent him from suing the County! Blackmail? Who knows?
Finally, the report came to the surface after the County’s Internal Auditor, pursuing his own investigation (and after months of stonewalling by Mauk and his HR Director, Carl Crown) was permitted the IA to see it. At that point the jig was up and the Board was notified of the damning report. They immediately referred the matter to the DA for an investigation which culminated in a dozen felonies and four misdemeanors.
Remarkably, in the intervening months between March 2012 and now, Mauk has been permitted to keep his job despite the inescapable facts of incompetence, cronyism, withholding information from the Board, and of course, paying Bustamante $45,000 to go away without a ruckus. Sure sounds like a cover up, doesn’t it?
Boss Tweed, OC style.
Evidently the Board, or a majority of it at least, likes this kind of thing and thinks it’s just fine. Bill Campbell has publicly said so, claiming the Mauk was just trying to protect the County by covering up Bustamante’s behavior. Of course that begs another question: why did anybody put the County at risk by employing this scum-sack in the first place? For that you may direct your question right back to Bill Campbell, who has been Carlos Bustamante’s political patron over the years, and who, no doubt, presided, along with Mauk, over Bustamante’s weird and inexplicable assent to the top of County government.
A “closed session” was held by the Board on Friday to discuss what to do. Apparently doing nothing remains the Board’s path of least resistance as they have postponed taking about the matter ’til July 24th. They had better hurry up. The DA has said that he’s not done investigating and will now focus his attention on personnel with the Hall of Administration itself.
It looks like the repuglican phalanx has already started to dredge Laguna Lake for candidates to run in November to hopefully reclaim the Fullerton City Council for themselves, and maybe even rewrite the history of the Recall. Well, good luck with that.
It seems that one of their own kind, Jennifer Cowan-Fitzgerald has been making inquiries to important local elected officials about the possibility of a Cowan-Fitzgerald city council campaign. Who is this person? A lot more about that later. In the meantime, enjoy this snapshot of Ms. Cowan-Fitgerald’s front yard – just to show where this woman’s sympathies lay.
No Recall? Now that’s not very good, is it?
Apparently Ms. Cowan-Fitzgerald is not a fan of mine, or of our humble blog. Well, gosh. Was it something we said?
Suffice to say, I will do anything and everything I can to make sure we have no more of these unaccountable, irresponsible, mealy-mouthed RINOs foisted on us by Ed Royce and the dwindling repuglican crowd.
You know, Larry Bennett really could have just left it alone. After dodging a final, humiliating meeting to certify the recall election that drove them out of office, at least one of the Three Bald Tires finally deigned to show up at Fullerton City Hall tomorrow morning to do the deed. It could have been done quietly with as little fanfare as possible. Actually only one of them even needed to show up.
But no.
Bennett seems to think the Three Dead Batteries need a sendoff appropriate to all the wonderful things these men have done for Fullerton. Friday he notified supporters of the Three Tree Stumps that there was to be a special council meeting, and that he hoped everybody would show up to let them know what terrific public servants they have been.
Bennett has likely spent the week-end making phone calls to drum up some folks willing to say kind thing about the Three Pea-less Pods. No doubt some will show up. And others are likely to show up now, too. People who recognize the disastrous misrule of these three characters:
Yes, I was the king.
Don Bankhead: dumb-bell, and self-annointed king of Fullerton, whose somnolent councilmanic career was punctuated with one Redevelopment boondoggle and union give away after another.
Crazy? Check. Rude? Check. Gone? Check.
Dick Jones, the southern fried lunatic and loud-mouthed bully who never came to understand that the authority to give orders doesn’t confer wisdom – or even relevance.
To all appearances it looked a lot like a street gang.
Pat McKinley: protector and apologist for the undeniable Culture of Corruption in the Fullerton Police Department that he himself had created. Those ladies weren’t like you. Aliens. Don’t rush to judgement.
Well, good bye and good riddance.
The sun had been warm and life was good. But all that changed.
And please take Larry Bennett with you. The tide is rising.
Anybody who reads this blog knows that I have had a running battle with the Fullerton Redevelopments Agency, even going so far as suing the Agency to block its bogus expansion attempt into areas of west and east Fullerton that had no blight. That was just a fraudulent attempt to divert property tax revenue from legitimate recipients.
Now that Redevelopment has been killed off by the Legislature and the Governor, I really have to wonder what has and will become of that small army of government economic planners, boondoggle promoters, bribers, bagmen, design guideline perpetrators, and the rest, whose job it was to gin up sales tax revenue and property tax increment (usually at the expense of somebody else) while dictating land use development in Redevelopment project areas across California.
Lest anybody think I’m just grousing about an abstract problem, consider an article here in the OC Register that points out the exorbitant amount that Fullerton Redevelopment Agency wasted on administration.
Anyway, these folks were in the business of playing developer without taking any of the risks, and with a compliant city council there was never any fear of them being held accountable for their manifest failures.
Some of the former Redevelopment employees will be kept around to close things out. The rest? Who knows? In Fullerton, some of them have already been absorbed into the regular bureaucracy, to be supported by the General Fund – as if these people were simply interchangeable and indispensable parts. The message that move sent to the citizens of Fullerton is a really bad one – that the government has no appetite to shrink, even though a specific purpose has been ended.
I keep hearing on the Fullerton grapevine that Fullerton City Manager Joe Felz, doggone it, just can’t get one of the recalled Three Bald Tires to show up to validate the June 5th Recall election. Without at least one of these clowns there is no quorum and a meeting can’t be held. Apparently they have been individually agreeing to show up then later, suddenly have other plans.
This could go on for quite awhile, and if left to their own devices, these miscreants may actually file to run for election in November before they’ve officially been run out of office.
Well, this might explain why it’s been three weeks since the election and the new councilmen Kiger, Sebourn and Chaffee have not been sworn it yet. That’s pretty reprehensible, if you ask me, and it begs the question – how much longer is this farce going to go on before somebody goes to a judge and gets a court order validating the election?
I remember well in 1994 that the three recalled councilmembers simply refused to schedule a replacement election (different laws then) until ordered to do so by a judge. Then as now, the incompetent, arrogant Old Guard refused to go quietly into that good night. And Don Bankhead, recalled the first time, got himself elected again.
And here’s a final thought for you Fullerton water rate payers. Every single day that passes costs you all another $7000 in an illegal tax that is still being collected.
Heh heh. The hardest part of the game is gonna be keeping the score down. Heh heh.
If you think about it, anti-recall managers Bennett, Ackerman and Ellis really screwed the pooch (and I don’t use that phrase lightly).
The Three Bald Ties put their reputations in the hands of Amateur Hour.
The metamorphosis into an oxygen breathing creature was slow and painful…
Remember the stupid rescission cards fiasco? The embarrassing website that just reproduced damning posts from FFFF and nonsense from Fullerton’s delusional gerontocracy?
Rock on!
And the of course there was the idiotic Stop Bushala campaign, ultimately doomed to fail since the name Bushala did not appear on the ballot.
Larry had sacrificed speed for size.
Stupid door hangers, stupid mail piece, stupid signs. Remember that awful video they touted as “hard hitting”?
These assclowns found the Recall team waiting for them with knives drawn around every corner as they kept pitching thousands of dollars into old school repuglican moneypits like Jim Bieber and Adam Probolsky.
And they lost by thirty points.
Need a jump?
True, the Three Dead Batteries put almost none of their own money into this disaster, perhaps showing the greatest wisdom of which they were capable. But even so, somebody should be asking for his money back.
Here is a clip from Rick Reiff’s program featuring our own admin, and the sorry sack of guano known as Larry Bennett. He’s the clown who blew a hundred grand defending the Three Bald Tires from a much deserved recall.
Observe that Bennett is not only a bad loser he is still a liar, which seems to come so naturally. He is still dodging the easiest question of all: if Tony Bushala wanted to control the City Council to further his own mythical development schemes, how much easier would it have been to simply donate to the Three Dead Batteries’ campaigns? The answer of course is a lot. A lot cheaper too.
Did you enjoy how Bennett glossed over the illegal water tax? He still likes it!
Bennett is also still going by the title Planning Commissioner. I wonder how much longer he’ll keep that job.
