The on-line version of the Fullerton Observer is now available to those inclined to be misinformed, or as in my case, to be entertained.
In the lastest version I discovered a lachrymose rewind of the November District 4 campaign by the loser, one Vivian “Kitty” Jaramillo.
Poor Kitty thought she had a lock on it, so no wonder her outrage that the plans went askew. She sued the City to make a district for her. She sat on the committee that endorsed her district. She had all the endorsements, a pile of money, the county party, and even a fake, perjuring candidate to help take votes away from her obvious competition: Linda Whitaker. She also had an $85,000 Independent Expenditure Committee mostly funded by out-of-town marijuana lobbyists, laundered through the grocery store workers union.
Why write about news when you can try to make your own! (Photo by Julie Leopo/Voice of OC)
Jaramillo had the undying love of her pals, the Kennedy Sisters at the Fullerton Observer, who could be counted on to whisk away her problems and drop innuendo on Linda Whitaker, when called upon to do so.
How could she lose?
Not really that agile…
What Poor Kitty and her Team Jaramillo failed to take into account was the arrival of a new face on the scene who raised lots of money and got the police and fire union support. And she didn’t figure on Fullerton Taxpayers For Reform, a political action committee with the means and issues to beat her.
Yes, I was a phony from Day 1. And it was obvious…
And she didn’t count on the Scott Markowitz scam to backfire badly on her as it became apparent that her own supporters were involved in the fraud.
Smart and willing to learn…
Jaramillo takes the time to swipe at her old pals in the police and fire unions, and of course her unnamed opponent, a smart professional, who, alas, doesn’t seem to know anything about Fullerton, unlike herself who has spent her whole life, yadda, yadda. Pathetic.
But I checked all the right boxes!
It would never occur to a self-entitled person like Jaramillo that her entire, adipose campaign was something right out of the year 2000 playbook: lots of endorsements, clunky mailers, paid precinct walkers, tons of money wasted on political “consultants,” etc. She had the agility of a canal barge. And the product itself was flawed: elderly, otiose, statist, whiny, self-righteous, “good guys” to the end. And for Miss Kitty, the end has finally come to her political aspirations.
Where’s the lie”
Kitty was undone, she says, by the wave of “lies” about her, but she never says what they are and why they are not true. Neither have her sisterhood at the Fullerton Observer who certainly would have had the journalists’ ethic to enquire, had they been journalists, so of course never did.
In the end, Kitty says she is grateful. And so are a lot of other people in Fullerton. And the Observer “editor” has thoughtfully provided the names of contributors to Fullerton Taxpayers for Reform so we know who to thank.
In a typical display of childish petulance, Fullerton City Councilman Ahmad Zahra displayed why he is unfit to be our Mayor last Tuesday.
At the December 10th Special Meeting, Zahra just couldn’t help himself at one point from interrupting Mayor Nick Dunlap who was trying to talk – before letting Zahra speak his piece.
Zahra demanded to be heard on some footling “point of order” or something and refused to shut up, so the Mayor did it for him.
What to do? Zahra got up yammering and sulked into the room behind the dais. Here’s the video:
From everything we’ve heard about Zahra this sort of behavior is typical when the cameras aren’t rolling. In one instance he went so far as to file an hysterical and fraudulent police report on one of his fellow councilmembers. Comically, his devoted claque continually fails to understand why his colleagues refuse to make him Mayor.
For 50 years California has enjoyed/suffered the benefits of CEQA – the California Environmental Quality Act. The intent of the law was to assess the environmental impacts of various projects proposed by private developers and even the government itself – be it dams, roads, civic projects, etc. Some projects, mostly the big ones, required EIRs – Environmental Impact Reports, that cited impacts and measures of mitigation.
If the paper fits, push it!
Now, I don’t pretend to be an expert on CEQA, but I’ve been told that all too often it is just a bungling paper chase that enriches “consultants,” and instead of addressing impacts, coughs up lots of gobbledygook and ginned up “studies” to talk around the problem. And this is just as true for governments’ reports as for those of developers.
Last night I listened to Fullerton’s beloved City Council vote for a new zoning law – the Housing Incentive Overlay Zone (HIOZ), including an explanation of why it was exempt from CEQA even though over 13,000 new units were being incentivized. The excuse was that no specific building was being proposed. You might think that is reasonable enough given that specific location has a lot to do with environmental impacts on thing like roads and street lights and traffic, etc.
And yet the new mandates from Sacramento dictate that because there is some sort of housing “crisis” new developments may be built “by-right” that is to say, without local controls over specific aspects of projects that would normally be comprehensively addressed in Conditions of Approval. Which means that those 13,000 units may not be attached to amelioration of the impacts they create.
And of course 20% of the new units must be reserved for low income tenants, another philanthropic mandate with unknown repercussions on the community.
Here’s the summation: the single-party legislature has serially made such a mess of California over the past 30 years that the fixes for the problems require that they jettison other mandates previously deemed critical, such as CEQA.
Locally, cities have been threatened with legal action by the State’s Governor and Attorney General if they don’t comply; and they are threatened by deprivation of State funding and grants by the Housing and Community Development Department, run by faceless bureaucrats. If cities try to fight back, like Huntington Beach has, the legal results are costly and a foregone conclusion.
And so Fullerton’s City Council went along with the inevitable, acquiescing to the demands of Sacramento in a sad 4-1 vote. Only Bruce Whitaker voted no in what is his last official vote.
I’ve heard it said that government spends half its time trying to fix problems it created during the other half. Sounds about right.
A special meeting of Fullerton’s City Council is taking place tonight. Why? To address the so-called 6th Cycle of the Housing Element of the General Plan and the concomitant Housing Incentive Overlay Zone, or HIOZ, for those who prefer government acronyms.
Where’s the Class 2 Bikeway?
The City Council has already postponed rubber stamping this twice which is odd, because they usually clean their plates like good little boys and girl.
People who need people…
Friends may recall that City staff proposed the opportunity overlay to construct as many as 30,000 new units with almost zero City control. This, even though the Sacramento houseacrats only demanded 13,000. I say “only” even though this lower number would still add twenty to thirty thousand new residents to Fullerton with new, massive apartment blocks on re-zoned commercial and industrial property.
I previously opined that the 30,000 number was just a dodge, to give the City Council the appearance of having fought a tough fight to “save” Fullerton, while quietly acquiescing on the destructive 13,000 mandate. This would be of particular benefit to the 2026 re-election chances of Shana Charles and Ahmad Zahra, both of whom are ardent lefties and both of whom would love to see those 13,000 units without regard for the damage dome to the City’s schools, roads, infrastructure and neighborhood cohesion.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see a roll-out of the usual suspects singing hosannas to the Council for acceding to the 13,000 units.
Somebody’s gotta suck it up…
And that hypothesis seems right on. The Council has already directed staff to remove the Chapman and Commonwealth “corridors” from the HIOZ plan where the application would have been the most damaging and controversial. And paring back the scale of the disingenuous plan gives a victory to the Save Fullerton crowd who may have actually believed the 30,000 units was an authentic proposal. That group includes some our friends at the Fullerton Observer who will happily embrace the 13,000 as a wonderful compromise.
Pantomime…
Why all these meetings? Maybe it’s a necessary part of this Kabuki to give the façade of public review to something that was always a foregone conclusion – satisfying the knuckle headed legislators and the faceless bureaucrats in Sacramento; and their running buddies in the Southern California Association of Governments, and the California League of Cities.
And why a Special Meeting, other than to instill a sense of Heap Big Emergency about bowing to the diktats of an out-of-control legislature?
I have to admit I haven’t been paying much attention to the development of Fullerton’s “6th Cycle” General Plan Housing Element. I figured it to be a fruitless paper chase in which a consultant got paid a bunch of money to produce umpteen pages of incomprehensible gobbledygook. Turns out I was right about that.
If the paper fits, push it!
The other thing that caused indifferent resignation on my part was the housing mandate decreed by the State Housing and Community Development Department, often referred to as “State HCD.” It so happens that their mandate for Fullerton was to create the opportunity for 13,000 new residential units, as determined by yet another faceless bureaucracy, Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG), whose mission is to do whatever the State wants, regardless of what is good for its constituent members. The 13,000 units are part of SCAG’s Regional Housing Needs Assessment (RHNA, pronounced ree-nuh). These people sure love them some acronyms.
Where these 13,000 unit opportunities are supposed to go in a built out city is no mystery. It will require re-zoning commercial, office professional, and industrially zoned property to admit new residential use. Lots of it.
Well, that’s bad enough, but our crack Community Development Department saw fit to propose a new zoning overlay that could accommodate 30,000 new units. You read that right. 30,000 units, a sum that could increase Fullerton’s population to near the quarter million mark. Their justification? It’s so they won’t have to do anymore bowing and scraping to State HCD. At least not for a while. Or so they say.
The whole thing is ludicrous. First, the rationale for giving the Sacramento boneheads more than they demand is crazy. It’s like paying a million bucks in ransom when the kidnapers only asked for half a mil with no guarantee they won’t do it again. Then there’s the practical side of this. There would be no new roads, no new sewer and water superstructure added, no new schools built, and sixty thousand new auto trips daily. And don’t forget the inadequate parking. It’s a farce piled on top of another farce. But somehow everything will work out, our six-figure experts tell us..
The mechanism to perform this new housing miracle is the called the Housing Incentive Overlay Zone (you guessed it, there’s an acronym – HIOZ). Staff and their consultants have identified hundreds and hundreds of real estate parcels that would receive the new overlay zone, but they don’t seem to be unduly concerned about the effect to the City of Fullerton of losing land for commercial and industrial purposes. It seems that in the grand bureaucratic scheme of things, satisfying other bureaucrats in Sacramento is even more important than losing that sales tax revenue they’re always hunting around for like rabid wolverines.
Pantomime…
Well, fear not, Friends. In reality the 30,000 units was likely just Kabuki theater meant to look like a good faith effort to outdo even the demands of anonymous paper-pushers at SCAG. The City Council discussed this issue last week and there’s no way any of them are going to give the State more than it wants.
Of course, there’s another possibility, too. A political one. The utterly incompetent Ahmad Zahra and Shana Charles, Fullerton City Council’s two ultra-liberals, are up for re-election in 2026, and, cynic that I am, I have to wonder if they both won’t use this silver-platter opportunity to campaign on how they defended Fullerton’s quality of life by fighting hard against 17,000 apartments that were never going to happen anyway. Now that would be cynical, wouldn’t it?
Here’s a fun snippet harvested from Vivian Jaramillo’s facebook page. It seems she is unsettled that neither she nor her acquaintances know “her opponent,” Jamie Valencia.
This is the age-old Fullerton establishment deprecation: “no one knows him/her/them.”
Gee, Kitty, it’s too bad you and your pals don’t know your opponent, especially since she’s getting more votes than you. Maybe many of your would-be constituents don’t know who you are. And, as is likely the case, maybe many of them do know you and decided to vote for someone else, maybe even Scott Markowitz, the phony candidate and confessed perjurer your supporters created to help you win. And you’re “good?” Wow. Talk about delusional.
And that’s Team Jaramillo – the ones we can see and the ones who are trying to remain hidden.
Pray all you want for the Almighty to alter ballots after the fact. But God doesn’t like liars and cheaters and thieves. Or so I’ve heard.
Why write about news when you can try to make your own! (Photo by Julie Leopo/Voice of OC)
Right on cue, the Fullerton Observer has begun to bitch about the Fullerton’s 4th District election, as their favored candidate, Vivian Jaramillo, tool of the Marijuana Cartel, slips farther behind Jamie Valencia. The target of their irritation is Fullerton Taxpayers for Reform. The author? “Staff.”
Staff.
Once again Fullerton Taxpayers for Reform sent out fliers to homes filled with disinformation and outright lies this election targeting District 4 City Council candidate Kitty Jaramillo. In past elections, the same group made outrageous and false claims against candidates Ahmad Zahra, Shana Charles, and Ruthi Hanchett – all won their races.
The US Supreme Court has ruled that the Free Speech Clause protects false speech when viewed as a broad category, but the government may restrict limited subcategories of false speech such as defamation and fraud. A very good discussion of deception in political advertising is available by visiting https://www.freedomforum.org/lie-political-ads/
Hoo boy, whataloada bullshit. The rest of the article is a recitation of money collected and money spent, derived from public documents. What is completely missing is a single example of an untruth told about Vivian Jaramillo. Dispensing legal advice is not the Kennedy Sisters’ strong suit, obviously. And the reference to fraud is positively comical, given their diligent effort to ignore the fake candidacy of Scott Markowitz created by Jaramillo’s supporters to help her win.
See my badge? I’m a reporter!!
The Kennedy who seems responsible for this diatribe is most likely Sharon, the elder sister. She had been engaging the public in the effort to peddle the “Markowitz acted alone” narrative, and “anyhow none of it matters cuz we say so.” By her own admission she consulted with one of the key participants in the fraud, namely Diane Vena – who “willingly”signed the Markowitz nomination papers even though she had endorsed Jaramillo. Team Jaramillo. Jesus H., Vena’s name was on Jaramillo’s website!
“Sharon K.” actually replied to one person on her blog who questioned the Observer assertion:
BradyRhoades
Are there examples of what’s being called “disinformation and outright lies”? That would be helpful, thanks.
Sharon KBrady – the “Team Jaramillo Busted “ mailer sent out by Fullerton Taxpayers for Reform shown at the beginning of this article is a good example of outright lies. Kitty and her team had nothing to do with the candidate who was charged with falsely signing his nomination papers.
Now how on Earth does Sharon Kennedy know that Kitty and her team had “nothing to do” with Markowitz? Because they told her? The fact that Jaramillo’s active supporters were involved in the creation of the Markowitz candidacy is more than sufficient evidence that her “team” knew about it and at the very least failed to report what they knew after a crime had been committed.
But now the Observer Sisters have sunk to a new low. Not only using “staff” as a byline, but also responding to comments by inserting an “edit” into the comment itself. Check it out.
Sharon K
Brady – the “Team Jaramillo Busted “ mailer sent out by Fullerton Taxpayers for Reform shown at the beginning of this article is a good example of outright lies. Kitty and her team had nothing to do with the candidate who was charged with falsely signing his nomination papers.
BenjaminHow do you know that? Did you investigate the matter? Or did you ask Kitty and her team? Just because you believe something doesn’t make it fact or truth or journalism. It is just opinion right?
(Reply to Benjamin – Happily we know who putout the disinfo negative mailers claiming “Team Jaramillo Busted” because of the required disclosure on the mailer clearly naming Fullerton Taxpayers for Reform. The OCDA investigated the candidate who falsely claimed he had witnessed the signatures on his nomination papers and found no connection to Jaramillo campaign.)
This is another another way to make up stuff and be non-responsive without using her name. Notice how Sharon answers a question that nobody asked. Benjamin wants to know what about the fliers is untrue. She responds by saying who created the fliers (there’s nothing mysterious about the origin). What sort of fool would be satisfied by that sad misdirection?
But then it gets even worse. Kennedy the Elder is still pretending that Markowitz acted alone (really only a minor clerical error), but she asserts without a shred of evidence that the Orange County District Attorney found no connection to the Jaramillo campaign. The DA has said nothing of the kind and most certainly would not have confided in either of the Weird Sisters.
Here’s another example of the response embedded in comment technique:
Marian
I do not appreciate that the clickbait title and the story supports only 1 side. There was another group supporting Vivian Jamarillo that spent much more money. Why are you not citing that?
Answer to Marian – because the group that supported Jaramillo did not use dirty deceptive campaign tactics which is what this article is about. There are a few more in this Dirty Politics series coming up.
Sharon will not talk about the massive infusion of pro-marijuana money supporting Jaramillo. Oops. That would be bad. So the issue is brushed aside because they didn’t deploy what she considers “dirty deceptive tactics” although she hasn’t shared any of those with her readers. She does promise more of these undocumented claims in a breathtaking “Dirty Politics” series that will no doubt knock the wind out of contemporary journalism as we know it.
A comment by “Jeff” suffers the same fate as poor Marian’s:
Jeff
Wasn’t the other candidate in District 4 running so the Latino votes can be taken away so Kitty could win? That’s dirty campaigning!
Also, I would like to know what false claims were made against Zahra?
===== Response to Jeff: please remember that one comment from you is enough. If you continue with the various pen names you will be blocked. You are mistaken about the District 4 issues. Search for “Markowitz” or “Zahra” to come up to speed on either of those stories that we printed quite some time ago. All the character assassination hit pieces put out by Fullerton Taxpayers for Reform are totally false and meant to lower the bar for their favorite candidate to win – which, by the way, is not Whitaker.
Jeff’s remark about “Latino votes” is off, but he wasn’t going to get a honest answer anyhow. His point about the Markowitz candidacy being “dirty campaigning” is right on the mark, so naturally it must be ignored. He asks for examples of false claims made against Zahra, too, a perfectly reasonable request. He is admonished to do his own Observer searches which would of course, only discover more Kennedy unsubstantiated claims, but no concrete examples.
Sharon isn’t done. No. There has been “character assassination” (oh Lordy!) by “totally false” hit pieces meant to “lower the bar” so the favored candidate would win. Her description sounds a lot more apt for the Markowitz caper, doesn’t it? Finally, the mind reader Kennedy interjects that the favored candidate was not Linda Whitaker, a bit of information meant to be meaningful, somehow, but that is irrelevant to any topic at hand.
Let’s give this some more thought…
Finally, one of Kennedy’s commenters who seems to think journalism is going on there, explurts:
P.D.
Great article, but why don’t you unmask the membership of this libelous outfit?
I think Kitty SHOULD sue for libel!
Well, P.D. I agree. I think Jaramillo should sue for libel, too. I’m not sure what the cause would be, or what damages have been incurred, but it sure would be fun to get Jaramillo, Markowitz, Dem operative Ajay Mohan, Diane Vena, and even Sharon Kennedy deposed under oath.
There’s a couple things we know about the Kennedy Sisters, Sharon and Skaskia, the people who bring to Fullerton their confused mix of opinion, “news,” innuendo and spite known as The Fullerton Observer.
It has long been a purveyor of hard left perspective, in 1994 joining the establishment in a hearty defense of anything cooked up in the bowels of City Hall. There has been no crackpot idea, no new tax, no illegal venture that they were not willing to defend, ignore, obfuscate as they thought the situation demanded.
Why write about news when you can try to make your own! (Photo by Julie Leopo/Voice of OC)
The Kennedys have also believed in the completely unethical practice of joining in making the news. Why simply report on something honestly when one could involve oneself in actually drumming up support for some harebrained idea if it checked the right box? And the right box was about virtue signaling, to wit: it didn’t matter if something made sense, or was even legal, so long as it sent the message you believed in. Efficacy matters not; it’s the gesture that counts, see?
And so things like the Trail to Nowhere and the Wank on Wilshire were the Observer subjects not just of editorial approbation, but active organization and dissemination of misinformation.
These two characteristics lead, in course, to sanctimony and self-righteousness; and the belief that one’s political piety must be accompanied by active participation. These traits are to be expected in political parties and their minions, but are forbidden in the precincts of ethical journalism.
Okay, Joe, I hear you saying. But the Observer is not a professional journal or an ethical one, and we always knew it. Well, you’re right, of course. However this issue could be bigger than an illegal water tax here, a cop cover up there, or a look-the-other-way when a few million are wasted once in a while. This is about an honest election.
Yes, I was a phony from Day 1. And it was obvious…
FFFF knew almost immediately that the candidacy of Scott Markowitz was a scam. The facts were so clear and so pernicious that only one intelligent conclusion could be drawn. The man was a plant to interfere in an election by diverting Republican votes away from Linda Whitaker to Markowitz. The beneficiary of the scam was Vivian Jaramillo, the favored candidate of the Democrat Party and the Observer crowd. And the Kennedy Sisters never made any attempt to even explore the possibility that the obvious conclusion was correct.
Instead, the Kennedys, Soeur et Soeur, ignored the story in the Observer, and in internet conversations actually pretended that Markowitz was a legitimate candidate – until the news broke that he had been arrested for perjury. After Markowitz pleaded guilty to perjury they talked about how he “dropped out” of the race, even though his name was still on the ballot. Even then their emphasis turned to “unrelated” conspiracy theories” submitted to the DA by Tony Bushala.
See my badge? I’m a real reporter!!
In the meantime Sharon Kennedy had been active on social media trying extremely hard divert attention to the irrelevant. She posited the ridiculous idea that maybe Markowitz was afraid to leave his house for candidate forums because he feared for his safety – after a mean threat on a blog that somebody should go to his house and talk to him. She volunteered unsolicited information that her pal and fellow “Observer,” Diane Vena, was a “kind” person and that she simply signed the nomination papers of a MAGA-sounding Republican candidate “at the request of a friend.”
Sharon Kennedy’s conversation with Vena is where ethical debasement and self-righteous political ideology climbed onto the same small raft with honesty. What was said between them, precisely, we’ll never know. But we do know that the conversation had nothing about it that looked like honest journalism, and may well, in fact, have included both coaching, and a plan to respond to criticism from FFFF. If this is what happened then the Kennedys went from negligent reporting to participating in an effort to hide the activities of the conspirators in this slimy episode.
An honest person, let alone an “incubator of journalism,” would have gotten the name of the “friend” who convinced the evidently doltish Vena to sign Markowitz’s papers, even though she had already endorsed Vivian Jaramillo and actually appeared on the latter’s website. An honest journalist would also have gotten the name of the person who circulated the nomination papers. Maybe Sharon Kennedy did get the name, or names. But if she did, neither she nor her sister ever shared it with Observer readers.
So very popular…
It’s abundantly clear that the Fullerton Observer had no intention reporting on the Markowitz story. The aim was to distance the candidacy of their favored Vivian Jaramillo from what had really happened
I also note that in the same vein, the Kennedy Sisters have been completely mute about the massive influx of marijuana lobbyist cash into a pro-Jaramillo Independent Expenditure PAC, with the loot laundered through the national office of the grocery workers union. There’s another story we’ll never read about in the pages or website of the Fullerton Observer, although they have never shied away from reporting this sort of thing with the attendant innuendo when it came to people they didn’t like.
But very soon, I predict, we’ll hear all about the money contributed by Tony Bushala.
Otiose Fullerton 4th District candidate Vivian Jaramillo pulled ahead of her rival, newcomer Jamie Valenzuela yesterday – by 13 votes. Jaramillo has steadily gained since election night in what seems to be a non-statistical anomaly. It’s pretty clear that the late Jaramillo GOTV mail-in effort is paying off now.
We now know who paid for that effort – the Marijuana Dispensary Cartel – who dumped in an astounding $60,000 into a pro-Jaramillo PAC, the green laundered through the grocery store union.
We can also surmise with a lot of confidence that it was the Dope Cartel that had a hand in the creation of the fake candidate, confessed perjurer, Scott Markowitz.
The shoe fit…
If Jaramillo wins, Fullerton will have a pro-dope majority, and Jaramillo, the candidate who made it her platform to bitch about incumbents “not listening to the people,” will, ironically, jam the dispensaries into Fullerton, despite overwhelming opposition from her common folk – real working families.
I will get what I want, one way or another…
Just as importantly Ahmad Zahra, the immigration fraud, “doctor” and “film maker” would finally get to play gay Arab Muslim Mayor. One wonders how the often hysterical Zahra would handle a steady stream of abuse like the kind he orchestrated against his colleagues over the past four years.
As far as municipal finance goes, a new majority could exercise its wisdom without being able to blame Mssrs, Whitaker, Dunlap, and Jung. There still would not be a 4/5ths majority to put a general tax on the ballot, but Zahra, Charles and Jaramillo could certainly put a specific tax on a 2026 ballot. And all that new brainpower ought to be able to come up with something to address Fullerton’s economic cliff.
The Commission’s job was to make recommendations to the City Council about the City’s plan to placate the State of California’s Department of Housing and Community Development’s demand to plan for the inclusion of 13,000 new housing units in a city that is effectively built out. The housing numbers are ejaculated by the Southern California Association of Governments – an unelected body run by bureaucrats – and adopted by the State. And cities can just sit down up and shut the fuck up. The numbers are appalling and would mean another 25,000 residents with the attendant traffic, parking and burden on schools and infrastructure.
Amazingly, California being California, the environmental impacts are brushed aside with a bureaucratic flick.
The specific agenda of the evening was to review the new Housing Element of the General Plan, and the pertinent Zone Code Amendment that adds a “Housing Incentive Overlay Zone” or (HIOZ) to hundreds of commercial and industrially zoned parcels of land.
I have never seen five people so confused and so fundamentally incapable of dealing with the business in front of them in my life. Motions were made; substitute motions were moved; secondary substitute motions were made. Some were opaque; some were vague; some disappeared altogether; some were retracted. Some blossomed into nonsense. Some issues were bifurcated. Confused discussion was interlarded into motions without seconds. Staff was dragged into the motion process.
The Chairman, poor Peter Gambino lost control of the meeting, try as he might.
One Planning Commissioner, Arnell Dino, seemed particularly adept at muddling everything up; another, Doug Cox, seemed to want to run the meeting, and kept interjecting and interrupting out of order, and kept asking for repetition after repetition of proposed motions; Commissioner Patricia Tutor seemed just as befuddled as the rest, trying to connect motions to the three resolutions proposed by staff. Commissioner Arif Mansouri, who unfortunately oversimplifies his pronouns and drops definite articles at least stuck to his motions, all most to the end; his goal was to removed the Chapman and Commonwealth corridors from the proposed housing overlay incentive zone that could put high density housing up against low density, single family neighborhoods.
An hour of everybody’s time was completely wasted as the sinking Commissioners struggled mightily to grasp a hold of any plausible object that appeared to float.
Ironically, at the end of the meeting a self-exhausted Planning Commission just rubber stamped everything that was put in front of it and passed it along to the City Council for approval.
In the end some of the participants actually seemed to be laughing in a mirthless sort of way. What the audience thought of this clownish death march is best left to the imagination.
Some zoning details were kicked to a Special PC Meeting that was be held last Wednesday. I declined to watch fearing for my sanity.
The issue is coming to the City Council on November 19th and we can be sure of two things. Ahmad Zahra and Shana Charles will push hard for the maximum urbanization of Fullerton, and clarity will be the first casualty of the hearing.
