Because we care so much about the Friends, FFFF is alerting you to potential hazards caused by power company transformers, especially those locate inside in-ground vaults. Transformers have been known to explode on occasion and the results can be catastrophic. When this happens the lid or access manhole of the vault can rocket upwards and the super-heated oil inside the transformer can become a fiery shower.
Here’s a video of just such an explosion at the Old World Village in Huntington Beach back in 2019.
Yikes! That must have been pretty hairy for the folks in attendance. Here’s another video of the Biergarten restaurant owner who was burned pretty badly by the blast and was suing Southern California Edison for not replacing the faulty transformer.
Why Edison allowed lots of people regularly in this proximity to the vault is a damn good question. And why the City of Huntington Beach permitted this use in this site is another one.
So there’s an object lesson here, folks. Be aware of all public safety hazards, including if not especially those related to (monopolized) public utilities. Public safety is not just a matter for the cops or the fire department – until something blows up.
Yeah. It’s about time. For decades Fullerton’s citizenry have picked up the tab for one bad idea after another. So if Mayor Jung really did say he wanted the City run with an iron fist, let’s get going with the plug pulling.
It’s a total waste of money, but it sure is short…
The Trail to Nowhere
The abysmal Trail to Nowhere, a bad idea that was germinating for 14 years before the grant was finally approved at the end of 2023. City staff has never told the truth about this fiasco, and because of incurious and stupid councilmembers, they never had to. I can simply say that it would accomplish none of things its backers promise, mostly because the wishful thinking behind it was so untruthful from the start. No users, possible contamination, no linkage to anything, no destination at either end. Just a waste of 2.1 million bucks.
Oh, and yeah – the milestones for design submittal to the State and start of construction were blown past 9 months ago and still no status update from anybody.
Enhanced with genuine brick veneer!
The Boutique Hotel
The boutique hotel next to the train station started out as just a stupid idea by then Mayor-for-Hire Jennifer Fitzgerald. Then as the likelihood of failure increased, the City kept doubling down on dumb, adding density to density until an appended apartment block raised the density to at least 2.5 times the already dense limit in the Transportation Center Specific Plan. No one seemed to care, because those plans are only occasionally adhered to.
Nobody bothered to ask why useful City property had to be deemed “surplus.” Bruce Whitaker didn’t.
And last we looked the whole thing had been turned over to a couple of con men who paid 1.4 million for a property whose new entitlements made it worth ten times that much. Fullerton, being Fullerton. Those guys haven’t met any of their milestones and must certainly be in default. Not a peep out of City Hall, of course. I’ll bet my last dollar Sunayana Thomas is desperately looking for a new “developer” to assign the mess to, without a backward glance.
Forgotten but not quite gone…
The Florentine/Marovic Sidewalk Heist
This 20 year+ scandal is still alive and kicking thanks to the stupid and cowardly attitude of staff/city council toward first, the Florentine Syndicate, and now, a new scofflaw, Mario Marovic. Somehow, the City let Marovic do remodeling construction work on our building on our sidewalk – an illegal trespass if ever there was one. Then the City let him open his newly remodeled place with promises to remove the “pop-out” as a condition of re-opening.
Zahra Congratulates Marovic for his lawsuit…against us.
Naturally, Marovic gave the City a big fuck you on that agreement, as he no doubt planned to do all along. He had six moths to start and nine months to finish. That was two fucking years ago, and Marovic is drawing income from our property the whole time. Nowadays this matter is safely hidden in closed session, where the painful subject of accountability for this quagmire can be safely discussed away from embarrassing public revelation.
Fortunately for the cast of characters involved there are so many culpable people in this story that blame can be diluted to the point where nobody feels the least bit compelled to explain what happened over two plus decades, just so long as the municipal humiliation goes away once and for all.
So, yes. Let the Fullerton Observer sisters and their ilk boohoo about iron fists and poor, intimidated staff. Fullerton has been in need of some accountability, even a tiny bit, for a long, long time.
It seems that the name Tony Bushala has once again become a byword for selfish self-interest among a certain segment of Fullertonions. This time it’s the the ultra-liberal boneheads who want to waste public money on stupid make-work boondoggles like the Trail to Nowhere and the idiot Walk on Wilshire, ideas catapulted forward by ideology instead of commonsense.
Pay no attention to the dinosaur behind the curtain…
Last time, it was the the balding Fullerton Republican Establishment that objected to Bushala’s political involvement in creating the 2012 recall. At the time, these sad relics of an earlier epoch claimed that Bushala wanted to buy the City, failing to admit that it would have been an awful lot cheaper to just give the incumbents a few grand and a pat on the head.
At the time, the following video was made. It’s still worth watching 13 years later.
Well, the answer to that question depends on who you are and what you want.
Last Tuesday’s Fullerton City Council agenda featured an item to modify some of the current roster of committees and commissions. The idea was to schedule fewer meetings for some, get rid of “at-large” members in others and in one case, the Active Transportation Committee, roll it into the Transportation and Circulation Committee. The Planning Commission was to be expanded to seven members by adding two at-large members.
Naturally, the true nature of these committees and what they actually accomplish was not part of the discussion.
Almost no city committees are legally necessary according to State law – except, I believe, Library Boards and Planning Commissions. The rest are there, presumably, to give the public a chance to contribute to the charming swindle known as participatory government. This is almost always a fiction, as anybody who has spent any time watching these shows, knows. The committees are little better than rubber stamps.
Never in doubt…
City staff likes committees because it gives them a chance to build momentum behind one of their pet projects – to create an aura of inevitability about this or that. It’s an opportunity to go to the City Council and explain the unanimous support for their item. And if, perchance, a committee shows a little independence then their ideas and their votes are mere suggestions with no legal standing.
Some of the bureaucratic enthusiasm for committees must have waned a bit when Fullerton went to direct Council appointments a few years back. Previously choices were made by review panels made up of council and committee members who could be relied on to pick “sound” people, that is, folks who could be trusted not to rock the proverbial boat.
Application denied…
In the olden days staff liked larger committees. The reasoning seemed to be that the more members you had the more impotent the commission really was.
City Council members like to put friends and allies on committees, and, in the case of the Planning Commission, maybe even someone moving up in Fullerton’s political arena. This is how you build a political machine: you help people, they help you.
It is not uncommon that if there is an annoying member of the public, an irritant at Council meetings, he or she might just be shut up by being put on a committee, becoming part of the team, so to speak. It worked shockingly often. John Henry Habermeyer, Estelle Geddy Professor of Political Science and Economics at RPI for many years, describes the scenario eloquently:
“The answer is to asphyxiate the irritant in a smothering embrace; to draw said miscreant into the circle of government itself by appointing this him to some footling committee or other, thereby causing him to voluntarily silence himself in deference to the grand fraternity to which he has been officially welcomed. He has a name plate; perhaps even a coveted parking space! Many an underdeveloped and agitated ego has been assuaged by such a maneuver and its proprietor thereby silenced.“
Committee members who are not impatient with bureaucratic doubletalk like to be on committees, especially if they can sit up on the dais in the City Council chamber. It makes them feel good about things, an ego boost.
Of course the public is completely unaware or even interested in committee meetings which are almost always held in empty rooms.
Since almost everybody seems to like the current set-up, why the proposed alterations? The staff report referred to economies, efficiencies, and such-like. The verbiage didn’t sound very heart-felt or persuasive and the reader gets the impression of a top down diktat from Mayor Fred Jung to clean things up.
In the end most of the proposed reductions to five directly appointed members of certain commissions was approved, which is basically a smart move. The inconsistent proposal to increase the Planning Commission membership to seven (actually the way it used to be) failed. The motion to keep it the way it is passed 3-2 with Fred Jung and Jamie Valencia voting no.
On a side note, Fullerton Boohoo was at the meeting to display their unhappiness. Why not? The altar of probity, the Fullerton Observer had tried to stir up opposition earlier with one of their editorial/news mishmashes. The funniest part of this effort was to explain that these committees help keep staff “accountable,” an obvious misdirection from the Kennedy Sisters who have never cared about staff accountability before.
Whether or not the changes would have saved anybody time or money is debatable. What is not debatable is that these footling committees are there to look like public participation is going on, when it hardly ever is.
And what anniversary might that be, Friends may be asking.
Not gone, but almost forgotten…
This Wednesday, March 27th, marks the one-year anniversary of a deadline date agreed to by the City of Fullerton and one Mario Marovic, a downtown bar owner. Not much of a deadline, huh?
Hey, that’s not yours!
By March 27th, 2023, Mr. Marovic was required to have started demolition of the so-called “bump out,” an illegally constructed room addition built by the Florentine Mob two decades ago on City property. Marovic had gotten rid of the Florentines, finally, but decided that the leasehold on the room addition was somehow ripe for the encroaching. So he began remodel work on the leasehold right along with the rest of the building that he does own.
Busted.
Meet the new proprietor, same as the old proprietor…
Well, the Earth has made an entire revolution of the Sun.
The City Council may occasionally talk about this in their hush-hush, top secret “Closed Session” meetings, but the public is not to know what is happening, even as our money and property are being frittered away. We do know that Marovic has threatened a claim against the City, but so what? Why would that be cause for the City to ignore Marovic’s breech of contract and seize the public property that Marovic encroached on illegally?
Staying awake long enough to break the law…
The reason could be that our esteemed lawyer, Dick Jones of The I Can’t Believe It’s a Law Firm, believes upholding agreements is not a winning strategy. Of course this third rate pettifogger has won so few cases for us, and has lost so many that we may feel confident questioning his judgment.
Or, it could be that the feckless and spineless City Council has been individually persuaded by Marovic that it’s in their best interest to ignore the deal, and that they should just let Marovic keep raking in the bucks thanks to a Conditional Use Permit that was contingent upon the removal of the room addition.
While I was strolling along the ill-fated Trail to Nowhere the other day, I came across a small shrine-like set-up just where the UP right-of way starts its parallel run with the BNSF mainline.
This is what I saw.
This small memorial is dedicated to somebody called Emmanuel Perez who died at 28 years of age, six years ago. I did some quick searching and found no news references to anybody dying here, whether by foul play or by train accident. But Fullerton has a history of keeping bad news out of the news.
Naturally, Voice of OC “photojournalist” Julie Leopo failed to publish this image after she took her guided tour of the area, helpfully provided by “journalist” Skaskia Kennedy. That would not have been good for the pre-arranged narrative.
Death on the Trail to Nowhere is not new, but this is one I hadn’t heard of. If anybody can shed some light on the life and death of Emmanuel Perez, let FFFF know.
A few weeks ago I published a post on the extremely dubious efforts of a paid consultant to begin a renewed effort to raise a new sales tax in Fullerton. The consultant is an operation called FM3.
We’ve seen this movie before. Many times.
In an effort to build momentum toward justifying a new tax a consultant is tasked with cooking up a poll, a survey that is worded in such a way as to make the question of a new tax sound not only plausible but even desirable.
The information that is collected is meant to probe the electorate’s weak spots, just like an army might send out reconnaissance to figure out where to attack.
Another benefit is to begin the process of developing ballot statement language that will push and persuade voters to the correct decision – a decision that will always be to vote for the tax. The reasons will be a short recital of the usual, low-hanging fruit, public safety being at the top of the list, but with no explanation that our public safety corps – emergency medical personnel (formerly known as :firefighters) and cops already suck up the majority of Fullerton’s General Fund. Mention of parks, quality of life, libraries and now “homeless” will be thrown in to the pot; and infrastructure maintenance will be included, disingenuously, to get support of the more hard-headed voter, just like last time.
Let me count the ways…
And of course this language will be also be used by the inevitable political action committee formed to wage the propaganda war.
Make no mistake about it. The consultant hired to undertake this effort will know at the outset what his mission is. He knows who hired him and he knows what his employer wants.
Here’s a fun little Aussie video that spells out the process succinctly:
And so it goes. The start of a charade in which the taxpayers foot the bill to be “educated” into supporting a pre-determined outcome. The line between education (legal) and propaganda (illegal) is not bright, as asserted by Councilmember Bruce Whitaker. The fuzzy demarcation is exploited all the time by government agencies – always based on information collected in the original poll.
Don’t Reward the City’s Stupidity
The hopeful part of this is that the electorate is not always as easily persuaded as is supposed by the would be taxers. This was demonstrated in Fullerton in 2020 when voters rejected the ill-considered Measure S, and property tax-based bond floats by Fullerton’s two school districts.
In the end the Council (Jung, Zahra and Charles) voted, vaguely, to keep the “education” process going, a process that we know is nothing other than political propaganda aimed at persuading a majority of voters and coordinating with a special political action committee set up to scare, cajole, and bamboozle the voters.
It’s a sad fact that local politicians usually have no qualms about spending money from off-budget sources – like State and Federal grants to do this or that uber-important thing. And these things don’t really undergo much scrutiny at all because the money the locality gets, if it finds itself awarded such a grant, isn’t competing with other municipal needs. And, better still, the awarding agency very often has no interest in seeing how successful the grant actually was. See, this requires a rear-view mirror, which the government go-carts just don’t have.
It might work…
This topic came to light during discussion of the ill-fated “Trail to Nowhere” that was going to built with almost $2,000,000 bucks raised from some State of California bond rip-off or other. We heard from the drummed up “community” that the money had been awarded, so better take it; these people being not at all concerned that just maybe the money could be better spent on a project elsewhere. And let’s not worry about the fact that nobody will be responsible for the failure of the scheme.
Phase 1 was a complete failure so Phase 2 is bound to work!
Which brings me to Fullerton’s history of grant money, utterly wasted, and with absolutely no accountability. Specifically I am referring to the long-lost Core and Corridors Specific Plan. I wrote about it seven years ago, here.
I’ll drink to that!
Back in 2013 or so, the City of Fullerton received a million dollars from Jerry Brown’s half-baked Strategic Growth Council to develop a specific plan that would sprawl over a lot of Fullerton, offering by-right development for high-density housing along Fullerton’s main streets – a social engineering plan that would have drastically changed the character of the city. The reasons for the entire project’s eventual disappearance off the face of the Earth are not really important anymore. What is important is that the grant money – coming from Proposition 84 (a water-related referendum!) was completely and utterly wasted.
A page on the City’s website dedicated to the Core and Corridors Specific Plan had quietly vanished by 2017, never to be heard of again.
It doesn’t matter how it turns out. It’s the gesture that counts.
The lesson, of course is that Other People’s Money causes public officials – the elected and the bureaucratic – to take a whole other attitude toward spending on stuff than it does if the proposed projects were competing with General Fund-related costs – like the all-important salaries and benefits; or competing for Capital Improvement Fund projects that people actually expect a city to pursue. And it’s very rare indeed for a city council, like ours, to realize that grant money can be misused and actually wasted.
And so I salute Messrs. Dunlap, Whitaker and Jung for voting to return the Trail to Nowhere grant money – an act of true fiscal and moral responsibility.
So last time I resurrected the disaster of the proposed “boutique” hotel at the Transportation Center and noted that the land had already been sold – even before the so-called entitlements were in place. It was all crammed into the end of the year to avoid compliance with the new State requirements for getting rid of “surplus” land. The fact that the land in question is not surplus – it provides much needed parking for commuters and our esteemed downtown revelers – doesn’t seem to have entered any decision makers’ noggin. Common sense be damned, this is The Tracks at Fullerton Station.
Yes. I could do that job.
But I discovered the real travesty while watching the Planning Commission hearing on the proposed site plan and conditions for a hotel use.
See, the hotel concept somehow metastasized over the past five years to include a standard, massive housing block – yet another cliff dwelling – giving indication that not only was the new developer trying to cram his pockets with all he could get, but that that this new element may have been needed to ensure success for the whole endeavor.
And here’s where the swindle comes in. The density of the apartment block was developed using the entire site area. So our sharp planners took the 1.7 acre site and multiplied it by the Transportation Center Specific Plan limit of 60 units per acre. That’s 99 units. Then, because the developer was proposing 13 “low to very low” units he got a “density bonus” of another 42 units, per State law. If you’re counting, that’s 141 units.
But wait! Those 141 units sit on only 60% of the property, the other 40% being dedicated to the hotel.
Think about that. The whole site is being used to justify the massive density on only a portion of the site. Meantime the hotel proposal has an additional 118 rooms on its part of the site. Friends, let’s do some math. 118 plus 141 equals 259 units for the entire site, or a jaw-droppingly massive 152 units an acre, 2.5 times the density allowed in the Transportation Center Specific Plan!
How do I know the percentage of use for hotel and apartment block? Because the developer is asking for, and getting, a legal parcel division that shows separate parcels for the hotel and apartment. And here’s the Tentative Parcel Map submitted to the Planning Commission:
Based on the developers own Tentative Parcel Map, the land underneath the apartment component amounts to 42,684 square feet, which is 98% of an acre. This entitles him to only 59 units per the Specific Plan. Adding the State density bonus of 40% brings the allowable total to 83. But he’s getting 141. And a hotel with another 118 roomson the same 1.7 acres.
Finally, I have to point out that the City Council itself – specifically Zahra, Charles and Whitaker already approved a Mitigated Negative Declaration for this half-baked obscenity in December, even though it clearly violates the Specific Plan that all the planners kept nattering about. That isn’t legal, although this, is Fullerton, meaning that nobody gives a damn.
I would like to report that the Planning Commission was all over this scam and was outraged. But of course I can’t. Instead the 5 commissioned turnips quibbled over electric car charging stations and other gnats on their way to swallowing this camel whole. Honestly, you could take five average people off Harbor Boulevard and you would end up with a more intelligent and sensible commission.
Well, that’s enough of that. My next post is going to be about the idiotic solution to a made-up bus station problem.
Here at FFFF HQ we always leave the door open for Fullerton citizens to share their issues. This instance is a little different. We received (anonymously) a statement that purports to be by a 5th District resident. I don’t know who wrote it, or in what context it was written. I don’t need to know. It is a well-written, eloquent, and damning indictment of Ahmad Zahra’s weepy, sleezy, self-serving 4 year tenure on the Fullerton City Council.And it’s all true.
Money talks…
Here’s the statement as we received it:
“1. Mr. Zahra denied the voters of Fullerton the opportunity to elect a member to a half term on the Fullerton City Council. Although he at first vocally supported an election to fill the at-large seat vacated by Jesus Silva on the Fullerton City Council, Mr. Zahra ultimately voted to appoint someone to the two year remainder of this term despite dozens of public speakers from all backgrounds pleading for a special election. Mr. Zahra argued that a special election would be too expensive, but went on to support at least one other questionable expenditure far in excess of the estimated cost of such an election.
“2. Following the appointment of Jan Flory to the aforementioned two year seat on the city council, she joined council member Jennifer Fitzgerald and Mr. Zahra himself in appointing Mr. Zahra to a paid seat on the Board of the Orange County Water District, supplanting the city’s then current representative, whose term had not yet expired. The vote gave the appearance of an obvious quid pro quo, wherein Mr. Zahra supported appointing Ms. Flory to the council in exchange for her support in appointing him as Fullerton’s representative to the OCWD.
“3. Mr. Zahra consistently voted to support spending over a million dollars on legal fees to sue two writers from the Friends for Fullerton’s Future blog who downloaded private files from an unguarded and publicly available folder on the city’s website— a folder to which the city itself had directed the bloggers. The blog’s publication of of at least some of these files revealed incompetence and malfeasance on the part of the city’s administration and police department. In addition to being an enormous waste of public funds on a suit the city was unlikely to win, this lawsuit represented a serious attack on freedom of the press, on par with legal actions taken against the publication of the Pentagon Papers fifty years ago—that is, an attempt by government to suppress publication of materials embarrassing to it and to punish news outlets who would do so. Council member Zahra’s support of this lawsuit alone should be reason for any news organization to decline to endorse him for public office.
“4. Mr. Zahra participated in a council subcommittee consisting of himself and then Council member Jennifer Fitzgerald. This economic development subcommittee held meetings behind closed doors with no publicly available agendas, no publicized meetings times or places, and no subsequent public notes. The public were not invited to attend. No one knows what was discussed in these meetings.
“5. No notes were ever made available from the aforementioned subcommittee meetings, but Mr. Zahra subsequently supported, with great enthusiasm, the development of the former Kimberly Clark property into a massive warehouse distribution site for Goodman Logistics, a frequent host of Amazon delivery services. It is no exaggeration to state that Goodman subsequently stripped the site of every living tree, including a perimeter of large, mature pine trees and groves of fruit trees that included the last orange tree orchard in Fullerton.
“6. Mr. Zahra falsely claimed authorship of a story about the Orange County Water District submitted for publication and ultimately published by The Fullerton Observer. Subsequent discovery that the article was actually authored by OCWD staff caused public embarrassment to the Observer and revealed that Mr. Zahra was willing to uncritically and deceptively pass along an agency’s public relations material to The Fullerton Observer as his own writing, casting clear doubt about the independence of his representation of Fullerton on the Board of this agency as well as his trustworthiness as a public official.
“7. Mr. Zahra has refused to reveal the ultimate disposition of criminal charges brought against him while serving on the council. Although the charges were reported by the Observer to have been dismissed, court records were sealed, denying the public the right to know what actually happened in the case of a public official accused of assault and vandalism. Whether or not the charges were judged to be justified, Mr. Zahra should have revealed exactly how this case proceeded and how it was ultimately concluded to dispel any doubt in the minds of his constituents.
“8. Mr. Zahra appointed to the Planning Commission, arguably the most important and powerful committee or commission in the city, a representative for a pro-development organization Her role as director of this organization represented a clear conflict of interest between her profession and her public service. She ultimately resigned from the Commission part way through her term with no prior notice during one of its meetings, leaving before the meeting has been concluded the the evening. Such an appointment, in my opinion, calls into question Mr. Zahra’s judgement.
“Additionally, we should remember that the 5th District was created to accommodate representation by the area’s largely Latinx population—the only such district in the city. Endorsing the only non-Latino in this contest would not seem to advance this goal.”
