The thing about human elections in a democracy is that you get the winners you deserve. You also get the candidates you deserve since once you winnow out the crackpots and the perennial also-rans you are left with a class of political grifters who see an opportunity based on past victories for their ilk.
Since our revivification came the day after the 2016 election, the nominating committee used our post-election coverage to determine the potential winners in this special category of loserdom. The committee therefore did not address some of Fullerton’s more colorful electoral flame-outs, with their confusing, crackpot, or just embarrassing displays.
Somewhere along the line slouching became a permanent posture…
Larry T. Bennett. Ol’ Larry had everything going for him if this had been 1984. Well it isn’t 1984, and all those endorsements from brain-dead repuglicans and brain-dead boohoos didn’t help. Not even a leg up by the FPOA and hard pimping by our lobbyist-mayor could get this inert sack of lethargy over the obstacle course wall.
looking for the exit…
Ling Ling Chang. This empty suit was the hand-chosen candidate of the old Redevelopment mob to be our State Senator. It was believed that her Asian-ness would counteract the Asian-ness of Sukhee Kang. Well, things didn’t work out quite the way the playahs anticipated. A lot of voters saw through her phoniness, including a history of lying about herself to get elected.
No there, there…
Young Kim. Ms. Kim managed to mismanage her way out of the job as our Assemblywoman despite what turned out to be a pretty decent Republican turnout. True, she was hammered by a relentless barrage of attack mail from the state Democrats, but her own effort was feeble, disjointed and smacked of desperation a mile off.
The simpering smile became a trademark
Sukhee Kang. Ah! The Irvine carpetbagger completely misjudged the electorate in the 29th State Senate District and he misjudged his own lack of appeal and ability, including the ability to run and hide from Larry Agran and his own disastrous record in the City of Irvine. Sukhee was so weak he couldn’t salvage his own campaign with a massive infusion of Sukhee Kash. He couldn’t get past the primary. The whole Sukhee Scampaign was a horrendous and embarrassing train wreck.
Hardhat Man. everybody is familiar with the politician who makes himself ridiculous by wearing an inappropriate hat. The result is always cringe-worthy. Here is your esteemed city council person Doug “Bud” Chaffee making like a construction worker. The little lapel flag is precious. We are in the presence of a patriot.
No comment
Medusa Flory. Sweet effervescent, glow-in-the-dark Jebus! This horrifying rendition of my former mistress makes me want to barf up my kibble. Such things should not be inflicted upon the living…or the dead. Grrrrr.
Poor Sappy
Sappy McTree. Poor Sappy McTree. Never hurt a fly. And I never even got a chance to pee on him. Ah! Only the good die young.
Auld lang syne…
Happy Joe. This image was used so often by FFFF that I almost got tired of it, but never did. Joe is gone now, but his happiness lingers on – especially in downtown Fullerton.
Sorry, the drawbridge is experiencing a temporary malfunction. We would fix it tomorrow but it’s our Friday off. Monday is a holiday. See you on Tuesday, bright and early, maybe…
Here, Friends, is the 5th installment of Professor J.H. Habermeyer’s scintillating essay on the seven figurative walls local government builds to protect itself from outside scrutiny and public oversight.
The 5th Wall
Having passed through the gauntlet of the four previous barriers erected to ward off our curiosity about what goes on inside the halls of local power, we are now confronted by the 5th wall. This wall consists of the impediments in the way of organized resistance.
The individual who has braved the ambuscades and man-traps placed in his way by the local bureaucracy has now learned that, mirabile dictu, he is not alone! Others of like mind have appeared along side him, to inquire, protest, admonish, to seek redress or even an iota of accountability from the local authority. There is nothing quite as reassuring as knowing that one’s misery enjoys company.
It is a well-known fact that in local government affairs any aroused amalgam of people is much stronger than the mere sum of its parts, and produces fear according to its numerical strength. This is because a group, unlike an individual, cannot be easily dismissed as a lone crank; and a united group, especially one with a name, suggests some other unknown number of silent supporters who at any moment may descend upon the town council or school board meeting.
But organization, with its attendant strength, also suffers from a concomitant weakness, to wit: keeping a band cohesive requires persistence and energy; time and lack of pecuniary resources are the enemy of both. Those inside the wall have all the resources at their disposal necessary to attain their goals in the face of opposition. Those outside the fifth wall do not. The fact that the government will use the resources extracted from the taxpayers, including the very wealth of its opponents, adds delicious irony to the utterly unequal engagement about to begin!
Temporizing, stalling, confusing, pettifogging are all the stock in trade of those in government. They can, and will, if opposition mounts, resort to tactics that will remind one of Dickens’ Bleak House, or better yet, Kafka’s The Trial. The aim, of course, is to outlast the opposition; to watch it dissolve, as it will inevitably do through natural entropy. Some may be appeased though co-option; others may drop away because of life’s other pressing business, or through resignation. But you may successfully wager that those inside the citadel will never resign, and have no more pressing business than to maintain control over the reigns of power.
Lower committee decisions may be appealed to a higher authority, of course – if you have the time and can afford the appeals fee. Studies may be commissioned by those in authority with no other purpose than to forestall action. The opposition may even be engaged in a cynical, time-consuming pas de deux only meant to drag out proceedings while attempting to appear conciliatory. In the end the result will almost invariably be the same: a dragged out “process” that ends exactly the way the bureaucracy want it to, the opposition having withered away.
A while back Fullerton City Councilman Bruce Whitaker proposed the creation of an audit oversight committee, rather like the one they have at the County. His concern was that the City do more than just meet the bare minimum of accounting standards, but is actually doing the things that are legally required by some of our budget funds. This is called accounting for management. Are you curious to see how his colleagues felt about the idea? Enjoy this clip:
The head and the hat were a perfect fit.
How entertaining! Bud Chaffee sees the proposal as bureaucratic metastasis and preposterously claims to want to reduce the number of city commissions! The proof of this big government liberal’s insincerity (okay, he’s a liar) can be found by counting the number of commissions proposed for elimination by Chaffee both before and after this escape of gas. What? You want a round number? How about the roundest number of all: 0.
The bars stayed open and the band played on…
Missus Flory chimes in with her generous offer to act as “interpreter” with her staff for Mr. David Curlee, who has actually uncovered evidence that the City government most assuredly did not want advertised: very possible misfeasance in the Brea Dam area accounting, (including out of fund transfers) that could actually jeopardize the whole enterprise. Apart from the fact that Flory couldn’t understand the illegal water tax ripoff in 2012, she is hardly qualified to discuss accounting issues at all. She is so drenched in venom; just look at the utter disdain she demonstrates for a “a few verbal allegations.”
I hear you. Well, no I don’t, not at all.
Finally we see our Lobbyist-Mayor buzz in. She “hears” what Whitaker is saying but her retort is that Fullerton only hires “experts.” She includes the lamentable example of hiring Michael Gennaco to oversee the FPD Culture of Corruption, one of the most egregious examples of a cover-up anybody could possibly think of (she says she’s proud of it!). She too, seems to believe that the “expert” accountants the City hires to look at the financial documents do anything other than make sure the numbers all add up at the end, don’t ruffle any feathers, and collect their fat taxpayer funded fees. Of course Ms. Lobbyist-Mayor’s statements are just as phony as Chaffee’s. See, un-expert Fitzgerald herself sits on a citizens’ audit oversight committee – for the Fullerton Joint Unified High School District.
No, you didn’t fill the form out right. We can’t let you in!
It’s time, Friends, for the fourth installment of Professor J.H. Habermeyer’s eloquent essay about the fortresses local government bureaucracies erect around themselves in their relationship with their own constituents. And what erections they are!
The Fourth Wall
Let us now recapitulate our history of public participation in local government affairs. Public apathy, official obfuscation, physical and bureaucratic intimidation have weeded out almost the entire population of the commonwealth. And yet, to the consternation of the denizens of the citadel, not all have bowed their heads in submission to the purported expertise of the purported experts.
The few survivors who have passed through the bureaucratic gauntlet have not been cowed by process or pabulum. They press their case and may do so effectively. The common local government species known as the gadfly may be dismissed without further ado. These irritants are the boils on the bottom of the body politic who, likely as not, suffer from personal issues of megalomania and narcissism; they are annoying, but not life threatening. The challenge, rather, is with the informed and militant citizen who is demonstrably not suffering from dementia and who, once aroused, is not likely to demur to the “professionals” and who may very well re-appear on particularly inopportune occasion.
What to do?
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.
Even more subtle is the way that the political realm offers its siren song to those recently initiated to the world of public affairs. The electoral process can be counted upon to woo those infected by the virus of newly discovered political ambition. And, if by some strange twist, one of these individuals should be rewarded with electoral success, the chances of a quick devolution into the typical public servant are high, indeed. And why not? Such an individual, unless unusually perspicacious and independent will soon find himself at the mercy of his bureaucracy!
Nothing is quite as demoralizing as the sight of a once independent spirit “going native” as our cousins across the Atlantic refer to the syndrome. And yet it happens all the time. And thus a potential adversary is subsumed into the system.
We’ve all heard the words “follow the money” as if said process will magically unveil itself to us. Certain insight and skills are necessary when confronted by a doozy like this one:
ICSC is the International Council of Shopping Centers who held their Global Retail Real Estate Convention May 22-25, 2016 in Las Vegas, which, ironically, cost $570 to attend, the same amount of the first transaction (above).
As if taxis, bagels, and Starbucks charged to the City procurement card wasn’t enough, two days of room service at the Hard Rock Hotel made the trip all worthwhile:
Just because there’s enough material in the City’s records to write blog posts like these… (more…)
On Thursday, November 17, the North Orange County Community College District held an the Environmental Impact Report scoping session for the Measure J funded improvements to Fullerton College.
As you know from our previous report on this matter, the proposed improvements include a football field (estimated during the presentation to cost $4 million to build, so consider that a low floor to the likely final cost) but does not include improvements to the Veteran’s Center. When this discrepancy was addressed, Fullerton College President Greg Schultz gave the following explanation:
We have to understand that the NOCCCD cannot do everything it would like to do with Measure J funds, so they have not been able to make the improvements to the Veteran’s Center at this time;
The stadium will be funded through other funds, not Measure J money and he promises to not use Measure J money to build the stadium.
Let’s take these two responses one at a time, shall we?
First, the characterizing of the veteran’s center as just one of many improvements that the NOCCCD would like to perform is extremely dishonest. Let’s re-wind the clock again to back when NOCCCD sought voter approval for their $574 million construction bond:
When you are in charge of the City’s bureaucracy, it’s really easy to get what you want. You simply hire a “professional” opinion to validate your own desire. Good God, it happens so often and yet they continue to get away with it.
For fun, lets’ consider the case of the City of Fullerton’s illegal water tax tax. In 2011 the City was finally caught with its pants down. And what was revealed wasn’t pretty: an illegal 10% tax stuck onto the annual cost of selling water to the ratepayers of Fullerton. In an attempt to stall the inevitable and obfuscate the obvious, the comatose council handed the job of analyzing the tax to an ad hoc water rate committee that had been previously established.
Now we all know that a citizen’s committee is incapable of figuring out things on its own and so staff helpfully hired one of those paid opinion consultants to help out; one of those consultants whose sole mission is to validate whatever the staff wants them to do. In this case the mission was to keep as much of that 10% as possible. After all, that 10% was a much necessary ingredient for for keeping up CalPERS payments and sending Pam Keller and Don Bankhead and Doc HeeHaw to four star hotels in far off Long Beach.
True to form, the City Council’s “consultant” returned with a helpful finding that the water fund owned the City between six and seven percent annually, principally on the weird fiction that the water utility owed the City rent for land that the water reservoirs and pipes sit on.
Naturally, nobody bothered to explain the embarrassing fact that the land in question had little or no commercial value; or that the water utility could have bought that land for virtually nothing fifty years ago had a true arms-length distance actually existed between the utility and the City that was milking it like a rented cow.
An, worst of all, nobody had explained the self-serving nature of this sudden discovery of a true distinction between the water utility and the City, particularly in light of the fact that the utility had supplied the City with free water for decades.
That’s right. The very mechanism lade upon you and me to “incentivise” conservation, was deemed unnecessary when the City itself was wasting water. How many hundreds of thousands of acre feet of water has been used for free by the City in the past fifty years? Of course nobody knows. But the value is worth millions.
It’s been a long, tough year of ups and downs and believe me, as a regular recipient of broomstick whackings from my former mistress, I know tough.
This year’s version will be, of necessity abbreviated since I have spent the past month undergoing a series of painful distemper treatments. And so I leap straight into the awards.
All that criminal stuff was just the result of complaceny.
In the category of Most Egregious Whitewashes there really was no competition. Register writer Lou Ponsi and the wanker who publishes FullertonStories were simply outgunned by the ridiculous “Gennaco” Report, a notorious mutual stroke-job between the City and the obscenely expensive stooge it hired to help make the Kelly Thomas murder go away. The various secretions of this pabulum outdid one another in saying nothing and studiously avoid naming names and demanding accountability. Too bad. But we know who did what and we know what it is: A Culture of Corruption.
FFFF added a new category this year, Biggest F-U From The FPD. There have been many instances of the usual arrogant claptrap, the one instance that caught the selection committee’s eye was the promotion of the egregious Andrew Goodrich, the department spokeshole who has been peddling self-serving half truths and outright fabrications for years as FPD P(Mis)IO. If any single gesture signaled that there was no internal self-reflection or repentence in the aftermath of the Thomas killing and the falsehoods peddled by Goodrich, this was it; and, also a sure sign that the continued reign of error will go on. Even Dan Hughes admitted it was a communications failure; and the failure was promoted. Got it?
A co-winner is in order, of course, to recognize the campaign conducted by Tony Bushala, a local hero, to root out the disease in the body politic known as the Three Dead Tree Stumps. And so we recognize the Great Fullerton Recall of 2012 that laid a 2-1 whumpin’ on the Ancient Regime.
I’ll turn any trick for five dollars and a bottle of Two-buck Chuck.
Speaking of Flory, here is the winner of the Best Campaign Sign of 2012, a terse yet eloquent reminded of who Flory will work for now that she has managed to slither back into office.
As expected, the new council voted 3-2 to begin “negotiations” with Dan Hughes to become Fullerton’s police chief.
Flory, Chaffee and Fitzgerald took their vote even as questions remain unanswered about Hughes’ role in the aftermath of Kelly Thomas murder, and accusations that Hughes himself was involved in an incident which is now the subject of a lawsuit against the City; and of course ongoing suspicion that Hughes has been an active part of the Culture of Corruption every step of the way.
Now watch ’em give away the store.
Oh, and yeah: you will not be getting a police oversight committee.
