Friends For Fullerton's Future
FFFF supports causes that promote intelligent, responsible and accountable government in Fullerton and Orange County
After many years, and many splinters, my brother George and I recently finished our latest project.
For those that bought into the anti-recall propaganda that I’m some sort big-time developer, well here you go: I moved a 375 sq.ft. house about 200 feet and restored it!
To read more about my big downtown development project please read the article by The OC Weekly’s Brandon Ferguson, here.
In an ideal city our elected officials would know what the hell they were voting on. Alas, in Fullerton, such is not the case. Here is the egregious Pat McKinley last Tuesday demonstrating that he hasn’t got a clue what he is talking about. First he emphatically says there is no Ackerman project. Then, when corrected, he emphatically says he supports the Ackerman project.
McPension is totally clueless, except for one thing: He knows that his pal Dick Ackerman needs an approval of a lousy project with a massive subsidy to keep his oily hide employed. And that’s enough for McKinley.
The Fullerton FPD Culture of Corruption just got a new inductee into its Hall of Shame today, as reported by the OC Register’s Sean Emery, here.
It seems that FPD employee April Baughman, 52, is cooling her heels in the County jail, alleged to have swiped cash from the FPD property room for – get this – two freakin’ years!
The money quote comes from our friend “Acting” Chief Dan Hughes who is quoted as saying:
“When there are violations of public trust or actions which result in the reduction of confidence in the police department, disciplinary action will be taken swiftly and decisively.”
Uh, yeah, Dan, sure. Whatever you say. At least we didn’t have to read such inane bullshit as spoken by the otiose Sgt. Goodrich, although he probably wrote it.
Too bad swift and decisive disciplinary action wasn’t taken against the thugs who killed Kelley Thomas until ten weeks after he was murdered.
This latest humiliation begs two questions. One, how could there have been no accounting of property room inventory over this period without the collusion of at least one other miscreant; and two, how much will the Culture of Corruption created by Pat McKinley and tolerated by sleepwalking councilmembers Don Bankhead and Dick Jones end up costing us?
And naturally we are left to ponder the previous assertion of Acting Chief Hughes: anyone who believes there is a Culture of corruption in the FPD is either lying or misinformed.
Newsflash, Chief: we are not lying and we are not misinformed.
Which is a lot better than none. We would be remiss not to offer a tip ‘o the cap to County Supervisor Shawn Nelson for taking on the obscene pay raises handed out by the County CEO Tom Mauk to a couple of his cronies.
The egregious raises were given out three or four years ago within months of these employees being promoted to new jobs by Mauk. The multiple raises went well into double digit territory, as uncovered during a Performance Audit of the County’s own Human Resources Department.
As an ad hoc subcommittee studying the findings of the audit, Nelson and Supervisor Pat Bates recommended reversing the raises, and were supported by John Moorlach at the December 6th Board meeting. Supervisors Bill Campbell and Janet Nguyen fought hard to keep the astronomical raises in place.
Well, kudos to Nelson, Bates, and Moorlach for calling the CEO on his hypocrisy and for taking a big step in the direction of accountability at the County Hall of Administration.
My grandfather Casimir once told me you can always gauge the overall performance of an organization by its attention to seemingly small details. Here’s a video that shows that something’s not quite right at the Fullerton Public Library.
The idea that these folks are disabling their own DVDs is just sort of funny. But really? It takes the City four weeks to cut a $2 check? Of course processing and mailing that check is going to cost a lot more than two bucks.