Friends For Fullerton's Future
FFFF supports causes that promote intelligent, responsible and accountable government in Fullerton and Orange County
Uh, oh. More bad news for the Director of Admissions at the Fullerton Police Academy, that institute of higher education where Pat McKinley, who held the Albert Rincon Professorship in Women’s Studies, did some of his best work.
Well, those ladies weren’t like you…
We get a lot of e-mails from folks all over the place. The following, from a guy named Howard, is not atypical. A familiar thread is the theme of municipal cultures of corruption and lack of leadership across the republic.
Name: Howard McLay
Privacy: You may publish this under my name
Subject: Fullerton Leadership Mess
Since the death of Kelly Thomas, I have read the FFFF blog weekly.
I’m amazed at the depth of coverage of this clowncil.
I am also amazed at the height of the corruption and spending within the city.
This leads to an amazement of “How did it get this bad” considering all the info published in the FFFF blog.
This is not a criticism by any means of the good people involved or the people of Fullerton. For I live in Wayne County Mich where there is a FBI investigation ongoing with our leader, and the world knows about the Detroit mayor.
So my amazement is really…how in the world did our government get so lax in oversight, in checks and balances, to have these messes all across America.
My hope is that your recall, and the investigation into the killing of Kelly, comes to a just ending. Keep up the pressure!
Howard, thanks for the kind words and well-wishes. We will indeed keep up the pressure!
Here’s a clip of the Channel 4 coverage of the Recall signatures submission.
It’s entertaining and sort of sad at the same time. The sad part is the sight of the lonely “no recall” sign in Don Bankhead’s front yard, and of course the interview with Bankhead who seems completely lost, as usual. His wishful thinking about bad signatures is really sort of pathetic, and you might even begin to feel a sort of pity for the old fool. But of course he loses potential sympathy by claiming to rely on the experience of those with more campaign experience that he. The inference is clear enough: Good Ol’ Don is just an amateur, citizen-type elected representative: an innocent octogenarian babe in the woods.
But wait a minute! Let’s back up that bus and check out Lunkhead’s electoral experience:
1988 – Fullerton City Council
1990 – County Sheriff
1992 – FCC
1994 – recall from FCC (June)
1994 – election to a different seat FCC (November)
1998 – FCC
2000 – California State Assembly Republican Primary
2002 – FCC
2006 – FCC
2010 – FCC
That’s ten elections in 23 years!
Jebus O’ Jebus. Bankhead is addicted to running for public office. He craves it like a cheap junkie craves black tar heroin. This June’s recall election will mark his eleventh election. Now it might be a bit unfair to count recall elections in the mix, but, nevertheless I humbly submit that there is no one in OC more with more political experience than Bankhead. And I don’t mean that in a good way.
Here’s everyone’s favorite Fullerton council yokel F. “Dick” Jones robbing folks who are forced to listen of three minutes of their lives – precious time they’ll never get back. True there are none of the usual vertiginous rants about make-believe central Asian countries, Hitler, syphilis, or Galveston’s Red Light District; but I challenge you to follow a single thread woven into this rhetorical demolition derby.
I especially liked the irony of the Angry Big Gummint swerve there in the middle of the speech from this biggest of all Big Gummint boobs. Being afraid of change? Was that supposed to be some kind of joke?
And he doesn’t know the difference between a storm drain and a sewer? Really?
We now know Dr. Heehaw won’t pay twelve bucks for a car wash; and of course we already know this jackass is utterly clueless about why over 17,500 of his fellow Fullerton voters signed up to recall him.
How many tens of thousands of dollars of Pat McKinley’s pension bucks have Anti-recall leaders “Dick” Ackerman and Dave “Dick” Ellis squandered so far?
Tens of thousands? Here’s a hopeful blurb from Dick Ellis’ pathetic website:
Rescission Cards Flood In After Mailer Exposes Over 80 Bushala Code Enforcement Violations
Click here to view
Uh, yeah, right. Those were the cards wishfully cast out, blindly, into a sea of possible Recall signatories. The idea was that some folks would take back their recall signatures when they learned what a monster Tony Bushala is.
The “flood” turned out to be more of a trickle that evaporated before it could even form a puddle.
Now that signatures have been submitted, we also know the fruits of Dick Ackerman’s campaign genius: 145 cards returned for each of the Three Dithering Dinosaurs. 145. And many of those are the names of dead jazz musicians, infamous criminals, and assorted fictional movie characters living at impossible addresses.
Consider that when compared to over 17,000 signatures gathered for the Recall on each of the Ossified Fossils and you will understand the breadth and depth of the Anti-recall failure. And be sure to recall Pat McKinley’s winning margin in 2010 – 90 votes.
How many tens of thousands of dollars were wasted on the Anti-recall mass mailing efforts? I don’t know. But I suggest that if you want to find out, you inquire of the experts in wasting our money: Bankhead, Jones, and McKinley.
Well, really, are you surprised? You shouldn’t be.
Political fixer, bag man, phony charity rip-off artist, carpetbagging spouse, lynch-type mob manager, lobbyist and, not coincidentally, head of the Fullerton anti-recall effort, Dick Ackerman, is about to be haunted by the Ghost of Crookedness Past.
Vern Nelson, the editor of the Orange Juice Blog, and staunch defender of the OC Fairgrounds against a swindle set up by Toad-in-Residence (and, not surprisingly, Anti-recall campaign manager) Dave Ellis, will be delivering a challenge to the DA’s whitewash of Dick Ackerman’s role as an illegal lobbyist in the slimy attempt to sell off the Fair to a group of insiders composed of Fair Board members themselves.
The dirty deal took place in the summer of ’09 when Ackerman started making calls to legislators on behalf of enabling legislation (that he only admits he “helped write”) even though he, himself had been out of office for less than a year – in direct violation of State law. Predictably, our honorable DA gave Ackerman a clean bill of health in the fall of 2010; but Lo and Behold!, in early 2011 Norberto Santana of the Voice of OC uncovered Ackerman’s actual billing records! You know, those embarrassing records the DA didn’t bother to look for. These records indicate illegal calls to legislators – which is exactly what Ackerman apparently told DA investigators he didn’t do. Uh, oh! Dick’s in a wringer!
When Santana published his discoveries, DA spoksholetress Susan Kang was quick with the smarmy defense: we reached the conclusion we did based on the evidence we had.
Wow. It’s amazing what you can’t find when you don’t look!
Well, Nelson is now calling Ms. Kang’s bluff and challenging on our do-nothing DA to do his job by re-opening the Ackerman case.
A year has passed, but the Statute of Limitations hasn’t.
UPDATE: Of course the comment from “Do the math” is right on the money. The 10% in-lieu fee is defined as a percentage of gross revenue – including the in-lieu fee itself! This tricky little dodge adds 10% of the 10% – an add-on of yet another 1% to the cost of your water bill! Uh, oh! Quadruple dip!
– The Desert Rat
Way back in 1970 the Fullerton City Council passed Resolution No. 5184 dictating that 10% of the gross revenue collected by the Water Department was a reasonable amount to cover ancillary costs from supporting City departments. Here’s the key language from the Resolution:
That an amount equal to ten percent of the gross annual water sales of the Municipal Utilities Department during the fiscal year ending June 30, 1970 is hereby transferred to the General Fund in payment for the services of the Finance Department of the City and of the City Administrator, the City Attorney and the City Clerk to the Municipal Utilities Department of the City as a part of the operating costs of the waterworks system of the City during the fiscal year ending June 30, 1970.
That at the end of the fiscal year ending on June 30, 1971 and at the end of every fiscal year thereafter, a sum equal to ten percent of the gross annual water sales of the Municipal Utilities Department of the City shall be transferred to the general Fund of the City in payment for the services, during such fiscal year, of the Finance Department of the City and of the City Administrator, the City Attorney and the City Clerk to the Municipal Utilities Department of the City.
What sort of justification proved that 10% of the water revenue in 1970 should have gone to the General Fund is anybody’s guess.
In 1982 the City Council passed an ordinance permitting itself the authority to collect an “in-lieu” fee from the water utility as a fixed percentage of revenue. Despite the name change, the City continued to add the historic 10% to Fullerton’s water bills, and rake it off directly into the General Fund – without so much as a second thought.
A bit confusing? Not really. The original justification for the fuzzy 10% figure was to reimburse the City for vague incurred costs; calling it an in-lieu fee never changed the inescapable fact that the 10% amount was supposed to pay for actual costs associated with running the waterworks. Either way, as of 1997 and the implementation of Prop. 218, that became illegal.
Flash forward to today, and peruse this year’s budget documents. The Water Fund is Fund 44. Check out the total column on the right.
Summary of Appropriations by Fund.
Notice the amount directly allocated in the 2011-12 budget to the City Manager and Administration: $1.7 million ($29,917 + $1,678,962).
Now let’s see some actual charges. Observe Fiscal year 2009-10, over there, in the left column.
Summary of Expenditures and Appropriations by Fund
Good grief! As you might have guessed (based on this year’s budget), in 2009-10 the City directly charged the Water Fund over $1.5 million for the City Council, City Manager, and Administrative Services; plus fifty grand for Human Resources, and $100,000 for Community Development!
And this means that those services that were originally being used to justify the 10% levy on our water bills are already being charged directly to the General Fund. Double Dip!
Of course it gets worse. We now know the 10% is a double dip; but hold on to your water bill. Because the directly charged costs for “administration” are considered part of the base waterworks cost; the automatic 10% in-lieu fee (which was supposed to pay for “administration” but that pays for nothing), is applied to that! That increase this year is at least $170,000, if you add 10% to that $1.7 million figure we saw in the first table. Triple Dip!
And that, Friends, is a triple gainer off the high board and right into the deep end of the pool.
The bright morning of July 19, 2011.
Kelly Thomas was taken off life support only a few days before, the cops who did him in are patrolling the streets of Fullerton, and the public still believes FPD PIO Andrew Goodrich’s lie that cops suffered broken bones in some titanic struggle with a felonious, homeless superman.
Despite the recent string of FPD bad behavior that had been coming to light, Goodrich is upbeat. Great returns for CalPERS that might take the heat off from critics who deride the defined benefit pension plans for cops who get to retire at age 50! Nasty unfunded liability!
File under better late than never. Teri Sforza of the Register has advertised Fullerton city government’s dirty little secret. Well, I guess it was really a big secret. Not any more.
A little MSM attention will help get the word out: F. Richard Jones and Don Bankhead have been ripping us off for 15 year by adding 10% to our water bills to pay for their perks and pensions. A $27,000,000 rip-off. Now that’s not very nice, is it?
Here’s an e-mail we just got from a Friendly reader:
I just got done reading how the Fullerton Police Department tried to harass a law-abiding citizen by pursuing a phony prosecution against his brother. This behavior is absolutely despicable. And I noted that the police employees have been trying to use their fraudulent case by posting comments on-line.
The idea that that one of the police employees leaked what they assumed would be harmful information about a political adversary that turned out to be phony is also indicative of a department that is absolutely steeped in corruption. This is not the first time. They tried this with State Assemblyman Chris Norby and they will try it again. No one with an ethical fiber in his body is in charge of the Fullerton Police Department.
Something is really rotten in our City and we need to flush the toilet. Now.
It is time the voters and citizens of Fullerton reclaimed their city from the crooked police and the entrenched special interests in City Hall that are using the senile and incompetent civil authority to promote their own interests. The police have declared war on the citizens of Fullerton. Okay, war it is.
God bless the Recall, and God help Fullerton.
J. Stanley