2010 Fullerton Voter Guide

The generally non-partisan bloggers here at Friends for Fullerton’s Future have come up with a handy election guide for Fullerton voters. Whether you are a Republican, Democrat or independent voter, everyone hates to see public resources mismanaged and squandered by political opportunists, bureaucratic excuse-makers and drowsy incumbents.

These recommendations are based on a preference for candidates who represent the principles of limited government, personal freedom and courage to stand alone when necessary.

Fullerton City Council – 2 Year Seat

Bruce Whitaker

Bruce has always been independent and principle-driven, and he has proven himself to be a real tax-fighter. His past victories have already saved Fullerton residents over $150 million in unnecessary utility taxes.

Fullerton City Council – 4 Year Seat

Greg Sebourn

Greg’s platform centers around cleaning up waste in local government and bringing fiscal sanity back to Fullerton. He has already called out several wasteful projects and agencies on our blog and his own while proposing very reasonable alternatives.

Barry Levinson

Barry has shown courage in publicly denouncing Redevelopment boondoggles and he promises to rein in ridiculous public employee pensions. His background as an auditor may come in handy, too.

Fullerton School Board

Chris Thompson

Chris has courageously challenged the school bureaucracy on behalf of children more than any parent in the history of Fullerton. He will truly be a voice for children and taxpayers on the Fullerton school board.

Beverly Berryman

Beverly is easily the best of the current school board members, and has voted against bad policies and tax increases when necessary in the past.

Measure M – Term Limits

Yes on Measure M

Term limits are on the ballot as a response to Don Bankhead’s 22 years of representing city staff instead of Fullerton taxpayers. Measure M will help counter the often overpowering advantage of incumbency.

Orange County Supervisor – 4th District

Shawn Nelson

His opponent is a perjuring carpetbagger who sold out to the public employee unions.

47th Congressional District – South Fullerton

No Recommendation

Both Loretta Sanchez and Van Tran have way too many core faults to make them even mildly acceptable. One of our bloggers suggested a write-in vote for himself, but he is a dog. Consider choosing an alternative candidate.

Barry Speaks: Redevelopment Loans and the Lack of Public Input

This just came in from council candidate Barry Levinson:

Barry Levinson

Last Tuesday night was the vote on the issuance of housing bonds by the RDA in the amount not to exceed $29 million. The Mayor spoke and indicated that there will be no public comments on this issue.

The city attorney right before the vote was to begin, rightly reminded Mayor Bankhead that since the people cannot vote on whether or not to approve the bond issue, we should at least be allowed to voice our non-binding opinions.

Here are some of my comments I presented to the council:

Mayor and council shame on all of you for almost forfeiting our right as Fullertonians to speak out on this housing bond issuance.

We need better oversight over the RDA projects.  The city council and the rest of the RDA should not be the ones policing themselves.

The RDA is the only taxing authority that requires no voter approval. We as taxpayers, S/B given more information and more time to review these bond measures before it comes to a vote by council.

Since there will be 2 possibly 3 new council members as of November 2,  I suggested that this item be postponed to after the next election.

The council’s answers largely were defensive.  No one touched on the third rail issue of no voter participation!  Mayor Bankhead remained conspicuously quiet throughout the council’s responses to our objections.

And there you go; another council meeting where our rights as citizens were eroded and $29 million was obligated by the city council without a single vote cast by the people!

Bankhead Forgot to Submit an Argument Against Term Limits

Weather's gettin' colder...

Measure M will be on the ballot in November, but the arguments presented in the official voter materials will be a bit one-sided.

Nobody submitted an argument against the measure to enact term limits against Fullerton city council members.

Was anti-term limit incumbent Dinosaur Don Bankhead asleep at the switch, or was he actaully smart enough to disassociate him self with that position during an election campaign? Who knows?

I really like spinkles on my frogurt...

Sharon Quirk-Silva authored the opinion in support of the measure, which summarizes them as:

  • Term limits increase the number of competitive elections
  • Term limits bring in more opportunities to serve in public office
  • Term limits disfavor seniority
  • Term limits promote fresh ideas

Of course, she missed the most important purpose of term limits: they will end the seemingly endless political careers of staff yes-men: folks like Don Bankhead and Dick Jones, who have tormented taxpayers for decades by voting for almost every single boondoggle and corporate welfare project put in front of them.

Whadya know. A promise was kept...

And for that we thank SQS for sticking by the promise she made way back in January of 2009.

Term Limits Are On The Ballot

Fullerton voters will soon be deciding if they’ve had enough of the jurassic councilmen Don Bankhead and Dick Jones. Sharon Quirk-Silva has championed Measure M, which puts the enactment of term limits up to voters.

Term limits are a practical countermeasure against the momentum of dimly lit incumbencies and perpetual perpetrators of barely-passable mediocrity.

Rawr.

In other words, Bankhead and Jones have been on this boat for far too long. We’ve shown you video after video of incoherent ramblings, procedural blunders and pharma-induced outbursts as these two men bask in the early stages of senility. Decades on the dais have made them callous to the concerns of Fullerton residents, proven by their constant bullying and dismissiveness during public meetings. And while we’re watching this sideshow, they have been cluelessly steering our city directly into boondoggle after boondoggle, at our expense.

Enough already.

On the Agenda – June 15th, 2010

With the Primary Election over and candidates licking their wounds we jump into Tuesday’s Council Meeting to see what STAFF has in store for our elected representatives. View the full agenda

In closed session there appears to be some labor negotiations going on. First is a discussion regarding Chris Meyer’s position which I hear will be vacated soon. Second, Fullerton Municipal Employees Federation (FMEF) is meeting with Council to determine what they will meet and discuss in the future regarding lay-offs. At least that is what the agenda says. Actually, it says, “Discuss meet-and-confer topics related to layoffs”. Amazing! A meeting to talk about a future meeting! That’s government bureaucracy and waste for you. Why can’t these be public? I don’t think they are talking about a specific person or maybe they are. Either way, I would like to see just how spineless the council can be when it comes to the public employee unions.

There is a plethora of presentations planned which will probably draw the usual hapless attempts at wit from our mayor and perhaps Texas colloquialism which won’t make sense to anyone but the person saying it.

(more…)

Q&A with Hugh Nguyen

A few days ago I decided to email Hieu “Hugh” Nguyen some questions about his plans for the Orange County Clerk-Recorder’s Office.

1. What is the first order of business, should you win the election?

Response:
I will complete a management audit within the first 90 days to review the organizations structure, authorized positions, workload statistics, systems performance, customer service, communications with Title/Mortgage Industry, fee schedule and operations of Clerk, Recorder and Vital Records functions. This will be the basis of preparing a long-term plan supported by short-term deliverables. I want to improve services to customers, improve department morale and productivity and reduce operating costs. This effort will be coordinated with the Board of Supervisors and CEO and Human Resources Department.

2. What are the top three issues facing the Clerk-Recorder’s Office in the coming years?

(more…)

Galloway Puff

Apparently the Precious Princess has sent out a campaign mailer, and boy is it hollow. Almost as empty as her noggin. Here’s one side:

I wonder how many of these people are going to end up suing me...

Ah, the Shining Path to a brighter future runs right through Galloway and her fortune cookie. Pedicures for everybody!

Here’s the other side:

Jobs, jobs, jobs!

Oh oh! Hide and Seek Sidhu has already staked out that territory. And come on, Lorraine, you’re taking credit for the All Star game and the Kaiser expansion? Hell, Kaiser already has a medical center in Anaheim only a mile away. What’s going to happen to that? The only thing Galloway can really take credit for is the massive ARTIC boondoggle that is siphoning off $140,000,000 Measure M tax revenue into Curt Pringle’s white elephant.

I wonder if Disney is going to like the Precious Princess taking credit for their expansion. Hmm.

The John Lewis Poll & The Voice of OC

Harry, the numbers are looking good!

I had some hopes for “The Voice of OC” as a source of information in Orange County, even though it was started by a former Democratic officeholder and funded by the County employee’s union.

Then on Friday I read Norberto Santana’s follow up to an earlier post about a poll repuglican John Lewis supposedly did that included results showing Sheriff candidate Bill Hunt within 1% of Sandra Hutchens. The problem was that neither the undecideds nor a % for Craig Hunter were released. How come? Lewis said he was restrained from saying. But it rendered the numbers pretty meaningless.

Instead of telling Lewis to cram his bogus “poll,” Santana gave the guy some more free publicity – whether there was even a real poll or not. And almost no inquisitiveness into who Lewis was working for or even if (as is quite likely) he’s just working for himself.

Well Santa was too incurious to press the matter, but I’ll speculate freely. I’m pretty sure Lewis is not working for Hutchens or he wouldn’t have released the numbers at all; ditto Hunter. Is he working for Hunt? Pretty unlikely since the unindicted members of Team Carona still show little but disdain for Hunt who would be unlikely to pay Lewis to do a poll in any case.

So who has the money and the resources to hire Lewis? The AOCDS union does, and since they are backing Hunt it would make sense – although the missing Hunter data would remain odd indeed – unless he, too were catching up with Hutchens. It would also make sense since the union is also backing a candidate in another important June race.

If Lewis were working for the his old Measure D pals the Lewis poll results in the 4th Supervisor’s race will indeed be interesting. If they are even released, it’s a safe bet that Harry Sidhu will miraculously receive credible numbers despite a campaign marked by perjury, carpetbagging, ignorance, and general buffoonery. Shawn Nelson is bound to come out badly since neither the AOCSD nor Lewis can tolerate a Nelson victory. Or are we too cynical about Lewis doing a phony “push poll”? Maybe. But we do recommend counting your fingers if you ever have to shake  his hand.

Anyway, Lewis also has a way of working on spec so he can make lobbying calls later, so  maybe he’s just trolling. What his motivations for hiding the Hunter data might be will become clear by early June.

But c’mon Norberto. Why wait?

Nelson Shines at Otherwise Dismal Event. WAND Candidate Forum Comes, Goes

UPDATE: Anaheim’s Cynthia Ward has an excellent summation of the forum on Red County, here. 

And what a depressing event it was. The WAND (West Anaheim Neighborhood Development Council) forum was almost as bad as the NUFF event in January. Give them credit for giving it a go, but they didn’t have a lot to work with.

This time Tom Daly was gone, but Harry Sidhu and Lorri Galloway actually showed up. Better for them if they hadn’t.

Apart from the consistently coherent and concise answers to audience questions by Fullerton Councilman Shawn Nelson, the remainder of the five candidates could only demonstrate their almost complete ignorance about what a County Supervisor does. Their answers were alternatively muddled, idiotic, or evasive. It was pretty painful to watch. But watch I did. And I filmed the event to harvest future fruits.

A summation: Art Brown is a typical government statist-type guy; Rosie Espinosa is truly virtually clueless, still knows nothing about the County government and isn’t afraid to show it; Richard Faher is actually starting to become annoying – running against the Federal government – except when it comes  to marijuana laws when he becomes a big government pussycat.

Of the seeming top tier candidates, I have to say that nothing has changed my previous observations. Harry Sidhu is just an empty suit; his answers, when intelligible at all, were evasive. He did admit to living in the district for only two and a half months – since February 1st – thus confirming his previous perjury. Galloway’s responses were generally equally feather-headed, and most seemed to hinge upon “collaboration” – that lefty cure-all for everything that ails us. She also made a big deal about pandering to the Anaheim residents about getting their “fair share”, bragged about the money she’s spent on them, and the need to elect somebody from Anaheim (presumably her). And significantly, neither Sidhu nor Galloway who are both making “jobs, jobs, jobs,” their platform, could name a single specific job that they, as a Supervisor would create.

On the High Speed Rail boondoggle Galloway came out as a big booster since there is no amount of your money she isn’t willing to flush down the toilet; Sidhu waffled hard, pretending for the evening that he wasn’t already bought and paid for by Curt Pringle’s money machine. Nelson, as he has in the past, came out strongly against the ill-conceived fiasco in the making. Ditto on Pringle’s massive ARTIC plan that requires $140,000,000 Measure M money. Incredibly, Galloway tried to claim that ARTIC was not tied to the HSR; and Sidhu got excited and blurted out that the cities of north Orange County voted for the extension of Measure M, despite the fact that the claim by Nelson was that what they had voted on did not include  all that dough for an Anaheim transportation center. Comically, Galloway claimed it would become the transportation hub of Southern California. Anybody wanna bet?

Except for Nelson, who demanded departmental audits and outsourcing, all the others completely botched the budget question – turning it into a Rock Candy Mountain wish for jobs, jobs jobs. Of course Galloway’s solution is to spend our way out of the budget hole with public works projects. Somehow.

On the really topical issue of County island annexation they all pretty much fumbled it, seeing it as an autonomy issue, and failing to recognize the inherent dysfunctionality of the County as a service provider, although to his credit Nelson was the only one to provide examples to fix some of that dysfunction. On the issue of equalization of funding none of the other five really knew what they were talking about, and showed it, although once again Nelson recognized the issue as a purely political problem. Sidhu’s feeble response was to work hard with others. Somehow. Galloway pandered to Anaheim, as usual.

On the question of code enforcement none of them could say much of anything that was informed. If any of them are aware of current County code enforcement policy or procedure, none of them shared that knowledge with the audience.

Questions on marijuana, eminent domain, bike trails in Carbon Canyon and the homeless invited meandering, uninformed responses, and got them.

Maybe the best question had to do with length of residence in the district with Nelson clocking in at 39 years and Art Brown at 36. Galloway claims she has lived in the district a whopping 7 months, although if she did, she spent the first four months living illegally in a Lincoln Avenue office use zone.  As noted above, Sidhu confirmed his perjury on voter registration documents.

The final wrap up statement provided a fitting end to the evening. Faher was out cutting the grass in left field – but not in his front yard, apparently. Espinosa was exploring County “crevices.” Brown was fixing non-partisan potholes. Galloway expressed her profound faith in the Almighty and the depth of her “compassion” and her “caring,” oblivious to the irony of having to publicly advertise one’s own empathetic excellence; of course this is just code for taxing us to satisfy her political agenda. Sidhu, sticking as closely as possible to his prepared script demonstrated his willingness to go down with the same, lame sinking “jobs, jobs, jobs” ship. And he almost seemed to get angry that somebody wouldn’t be impressed that he has represented 40% of the district for six years – even though he has almost nothing to show for it.

Which leaves us with Shawn Nelson. Of all the candidates he was the only one who could muster intelligent and informed and decisive answers. And in the end his closing statement reflected the same message, delivered unequivocally: accountable and conservative leadership for the 4th District.

A Little Common Sense Could Go a Long Way

The other day one of our Friends asked Shawn Nelson for his impressions on the much-discussed High Speed Rail project. Our Friend has helpfully forwarded Nelson’s reply:

I have been struck lately by the supporters of the high speed rail and their seeming lack of common sense when it comes to problem solving; my observations have led me to believe that the current leadership of the program has become more focused on getting a pot of government gold to spend (the more the merrier) and enriching the myriad players involved in the process. By ignoring existing opportunities to run the rail project on the already existing lines of the Metrolink and Amtrak the current design for the high speed rail (HSR) to run from Anaheim to Los Angeles provides a windfall to those in the consulting industry by requiring countless hours of public outreach and environmental impact study.

Why aren’t the leaders of the program asking the basic questions and looking for basic answers? Case in point: I went to a presentation in Anaheim two weeks ago given by the project team of HSR. They explained that the HSR will be able to connect Anaheim and LA in 23 minutes. Of course to accomplish this the tracks would need to be able to cross existing streets that are not presently separated from the rail line (think at grade rail crossings with the drop arms and flashing lights) and some improvements to a curve in the tracks in the Buena Park area. They admitted that the first leg could be a stand alone service in case the rest of the project were never built!

After a few follow up questions we learned the existing system only takes 30 minutes as is and with a few of the improvements that are necessary for the HSR the Metrolink will be able to achieve the same speed as the HSR from Anaheim to LA. With a few of the upgrades being made to the existing system we could all make it to downtown LA in about 26 minutes.

In layman’s terms the first leg of the project is a likely multi-billion dollar effort to shave a few minutes off the average commute from Anaheim to LA. It would save ZERO time if we just made the grade separation improvements and ran an express line (i.e. no stops in between) once per hour! Is there anyone on the HSR board that is thinking this through? Clearly we do not need to spend billions of dollars to avoid running an express train once an hour to LA do we?

The concept of HSR in California could be a useful project tying the central parts of the state with the major metropolitan areas of the San Francisco Bay area and greater Los Angeles. Why isn’t the current effort focused on getting the communities in between tied in to the anchors on each end? Couldn’t Amtrak funding be tied in if the train went to the exact same locations on the route? As things stand now both ends of the line have currently operating rail systems that could be used and result in tens of billions in savings. Can’t the HSR start out by connecting the southern most terminus of BART with the northern most terminus of Metrolink?

Art Leahy, former OCTA president and now the current head of the MTA in Los Angeles, has gone on record acknowledging the problems with the existing approach. I applaud Art for standing up. He has a working knowledge of these systems and we should listen to him. I hope he takes a prominent role in the discussion going forward. Another public figure to recently demand some common sense be included in this process is Assemblywoman Diane Harkey of south Orange County who recognized the disaster we are walking into if we sell bonds to cover the costs for the current proposals.

There are a number of other problems such as why would our Measure M dollars be used to fund the vast majority of the HSR train storage facility/transit link planned in Anaheim? Isn’t measure M money generated here for the purpose of helping all commuters get around Orange County? This is a state and federal project not a local project. Getting people from San Francisco to Anaheim was never the purpose of Measure M. To make matters worse, the $140 million or so in Measure M funds being proposed for the train parking facility are desperately needed by cities like Placentia and Fullerton to finance underpasses at railroad grade crossings – grade separations that will make life better for everybody in North Orange County.

The road we are on now is going to exhaust all the funding available at the state and federal levels, enrich a few well-connected consultants, ruin many neighborhoods that don’t need disturbing and accomplish virtually nothing but duplication of service already provided. Why can’t common sense have a place at the table? Government doesn’t have to be the home of poor execution, but in order to get results that are good for the citizens we need to demand accountability before it is too late.