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November 12, 2023November 12, 2023Ahmad Zahra

The Park To Nowhere?

Back in August when they voted against accepting State grant money to build the now infamous “Trail to Nowhere,” Fullerton City Councilmen Jung, Whitaker and Dunlap voted to take down the barrier around the fenced-off Union Pacific Park. I thought that was a pretty good idea for a trial run.

But wait! Was there a tacit decision to redesign and reconstruct a new park? Must have been, although there is no funding to do it. Not yet, anyway, although at the last meeting City Manager Eric Leavitt said he was meeting with the State Natural Resources Agency to see if the “greening” grant money that was supposed to go to the trail could be diverted toward building a new park where the old UP Park is located. The proposed park looks a lot like the old one – without toilets or shade structure to accommodate the borrachos.

This would be a political victory for Jung, Dunlap, and Whitaker who have been defending themselves with the argument that the grant funds might be repositioned. But this is really irrelevant if spending the money ends in failure. The trouble with reopening the park, if it happens, is that Fullerton, sadly, would likely only be repeating the failure of the past. And an expensive failure it was. A complete waste of several million dollars back in the early 2000s.

When the original UP Park was built it had no community support. It was the brainchild of the Parks Department Director, Susan Hunt, and funded with Redevelopment and Park Dwelling Fee play money. After it was opened it was found to be contaminated; and after the contamination was cleaned up, the park was soon closed. It seems that it had become infested with drug addicts, homeless, and gang members. And there it has languished for the better part of twenty years.

So what has changed to make this a workable idea now? There are more homeless than ever and Fullerton Tokers Town hasn’t gone anywhere, either. Will anybody be responsible when this new facility follows the trajectory of the old one? Nobody was ever held accountable for the failure of UP Park #1, so that seems pretty unlikely.

This scheme has been drawn up and is going to the Parks Commission tomorrow night, to be rubber stamped and passed to the City Council for their November 21 agenda. There seems to be a big rush to get this going, and I certainly hope someone on the City Council raises the same pertinent questions that they raised when they axed the Trail to Nowhere. Here are some ideas:

How much is it going to cost to maintain?
Why has there been little to no maintenance of the adjacent “Phase I” of the trail?
Who will be responsible for the success/failure of the reopening plan?
Who, exactly, do they think will be using this facility?
How will the UP Park be any different this time around?
What will the neighbors on Truslow Avenue think about reopening the park?

It doesn’t matter how it turns out. It’s the gesture that counts.

It will also be fun to see how the Zahra Parade will react, especially if the trail money is used. All the same silly arguments and generalities used to support the trail could be used to defend the UP Park reopening: trees, green grass, fresh, air, playground for the ninos, etc. And ironically, just a couple years ago Zahra tried to privatize the park into an events center, proving that he is not the least bit interested in the healthy community script he has bamboozled his followers into reading.

August 23, 2023August 23, 2023Ahmad Zahra

Another Tough Trail Truth

by Mr. Peabody63 Comments

During the recent Trail to Nowhere kerfuffle one of the big problems the limo liberals had was bending their brains around the possibility of a multi-modal facility that might improve circulation and offer development flexibility, particularly in light of the massive development the City staff is going to try to cram into the 30 acres adjacent to the UP right-of-way.

Bikes and traffic don’t mix, came the anguished cry of people like Egleth Nucci and Shana Charles who would have never ridden a bike, or even ambled a long the Trail to Nowhere, and ignoring a world full of urban examples where bicycles and cars get along just fine.

These same self-appointed “experts” seemed unconcerned that their beloved trail would have to negotiate intersections at both Highland and Richman Avenues.

To find and example of a space shared by trail and car lane, all these Option 1/trail-only people had to do was look across Highland to their much bragged about “Phase I.” Here’s a satellite image:

Please note that the Phase I portion accommodates both a roadway and a recreation trail! Land o’ Goshen! Is it really possible? Well, of course it is. The trails cult has already built, and often described this existing configuration between the closed UP Park and Highland Avenue as the inevitable prelude to Phase II; but now for some reason, a paved portion west of Highland is verboten.

Oh, well, one thing we can expect in Fullerton, and that is a complete lack of reason and intelligence when it comes to this sort of thing. It’s more important that the so-called professionals do what they want, and there will always be enough dopes in the City to go along and to even be a called a “community.” And then there are those politicians like Ahmad Zahra who decide to score cheap points patronizing their constituents by giving them “nice things” that aren’t nice at all.

August 29, 2024August 29, 2024Behind Closed Doors

Other People’s Money – The Silly F

by Mr. Peabody23 Comments

It’s axiomatic that when government agencies get money from some external source they often display a casual attitude toward spending it intelligently. Thus we get boondoggles like the infamous Trail to Nowhere, paid for mostly by a State grant.

The latest example of this is an $800,000 grant handed to Fullerton by Caltrans meant to improve transit centers. Here’s the staff report intro:

BACKGROUND AND DISCUSSION
The City received funding to enhance and beautify areas in and around the Fullerton
Transportation Center (FTC) through a competitive grant application process. The City
used the grant to work with a consultant to establish a downtown brand and wayfinding
program to assist mass transit users navigate the downtown area and improve
visitation. The FTC is one of the higher ridership stations in the region serving over
400,000 riders annually. The project would capitalize on visitors using both Amtrak and
Metrolink services.

At the last council meeting Community and Economic Development Director Sunayana Thomas and ED underling, Taylor Samuelson presented the fruits of all their labor so far in their effort to expend the Caltrans largesse.

And what they came up with is mostly just comical. And unnecessary.

It seems that our staff thinks the the most important way to “enhance” the FTC is by installing news signs. But of course “signs” is far too simple a concept, which instead is called “wayfinding,” a term implying that people are just too stupid to know where they’re going while “navigating.” But of course we know this whole thing is just make work for our crack “economic development” team who don’t develop anything except our pension obligation to them.

Of course a sign is inextricably tied to the notion of “branding,” an advertising phrase co-opted by bureaucrats pretending they have something to sell. And boy do they think they can “capitalize” on visitors. Why branding downtown Fullerton has anything to do with Caltrans is beyond me, but I leave that to greater minds to ponder.

Here are some branding ideas displayed at the council meeting.

Legendary music history? Local charm? A carnation? Botanical attributes? Modern and timeless theme? WT everlasting F? We paid somebody for this nonsense?

And, of course, new signs, repeating the theme, just in case you didn’t get it the first time.

Naturally, the “brand” looks outdated even before it’s installed on the signage, and we can be sure that in less than ten years the reigning economic development experts will be calling for a new brand, the old being so embarrassing. But in the meantime, fear not. The signs will be printed on “retroflective” vinyl attached to rigid aluminum panels.

The funniest idea of all is the notion of a “gantry” sign spanning Harbor Boulevard, welcoming people to downtown Fullerton.

Of course there already is a sign on the old UP bridge doing just that a few hundred feet to the south:

And how much is this nonsense going to cost the taxpayers of California? Check out the budget:

That’s $322,000, give or take, if you count thirty-one grand for some sort of mural. That’s a whopping 40% of the entire grant that is supposed to freshen up the Fullerton Transportation Center.

When you see this sort of circle wank, you really have to wonder if there is anybody providing any sort of adult supervision in City Hall when you look at footling crap like this.

August 2, 2024August 5, 2024Bad Cop

The Charge of the Light Brigade

by Mr. Peabody60 Comments

So, according to the article these ponies and their associated costs are to be paid for by the cops themselves. Their horsing around to take place in addition to their regular duties. This makes one feel less aggrieved about the maintenance cost, but I have to wonder if this implies additional pay since the union would not like their boys working for free. Perhaps this is considered to have PR value.

Believe it or not, Fullerton now has an equestrian cop unit.

What’s that you say? Why? Why the Hell on Earth?

I don’t know why, but I know it’s true because Orange County Register thief/scribe Lou Ponsi says so. You may remember Lou from his role as apologist for the FPD after six of their gang murdered Kelly Thomas in July, 2011. Before that he gained local fame by stealing a story from FFFF and pretending it was his.

Why, during the influx of an immense ocean of red ink Fullerton has assembled a horse troop is beyond me. Horses need to be fed, sheltered and given adequate veterinary care (one hopes), and the use of them on Fullerton trails is completely unnecessary. Five cops on ponies is five less than could be patrolling Fullerton’s streets. (See addendum, above)

Will these bold equestrians be patrolling the Trail to Nowhere? Of course not.

Maybe they’re there for riot control, since a 900 lbs. horse is a substantial deterrent to all those rioters Fullerton deals with on a regular basis.

Whatever the the pretext for this nonsense, one wonders if this deployment was actually approved by our City Council. It hardly matters, does it?

I love the cowboy hats. A true sign that the spirit of the Old West, despite Doc Heehaw’s plea for “New West” behavior, is alive and well.

July 19, 2024July 19, 2024Ahmad Zahra

The Poison Park Gets Some Federal Dough

by Mr. Peabody34 Comments

At last Tuesday night’s Fullerton City Council meeting the annual CDBG show took place.

CBDG stands for Community Development Block Grant – money that is doled out by the Department of Housing and Urban Development to local governments to fritter away with no accountability after slicing off the lion’s share for themselves to “administer” stuff.

The local do-gooder community surround this federal largesse like hungry koi wanting to be fed. Some get money, some don’t. Most of these applicants are centered in the homeless industrial complex, that cluster of NGOs that are the recipients of untold government paychecks who are never held accountable for anything.

One of the items that caught my eye was money – $350,000 for the abandoned Union Pacific Park – the municipal embarrassment that has created an eyesore on Truslow Avenue for two decades. It was described in two different documents. The first mention is in the staff PowerPoint presentation:

This laconic slide is most unhelpful since there are no details. We know it’s a 1.4 acre park, but we also know there is a plan for a new park; so why this cryptic reference? You can’t boil a government potato for $350,000, so what’s the plan, a partial rehabilitation?

We know if the walkways are “damaged,” it was because the City damaged them last year – when pressure was put on staff by the City Council to reopen the park. Do they mean sandblasting the graffiti?

The term “sports courts” is unhelpful because there is only one – an old basketball slab. Some people wanted pickle ball courts but can you do them without the rest of the park? What gives?

The staff report is accompanied by a slightly more specific “action plan” that gives details about the various grant applications. Here we discover this:

There is no existing trail in UP Park, so what are they talking about? Who knows? Are they referring to the dilapidated Phase I of the dismal Trail to Nowhere? Do they want to fix the barrio’s equestrian trail railing? No, the public may not know, but one thing is certain: nobody in City Hall wants to discuss the failure of the UP Park and Phase I of the Trail to Nowhere; they just want to waste more money on them.

The presentation did elicit a few words from some staff guy who stood up saying the City wants to add new “courts” and ADA improvements at the little parking area, language implying that there is indeed some sort of concept to rebuild this park in pieces, an idea which makes sense in a perverted sort of way – everything about this park has been screwed up by City staff since the proverbial Day One.

Tellingly, not one councilmember bothered to question the idea of phasing construction of anything, and whether this is a good idea. It may be that some of them want to plant grass and then forget about the Big Plan. If that is the plan, no one wants to talk about it publicly, and the UP Park Committee has vanished, never to be heard from at all.

At this point the piecemealing pantomime is good for appearances, and the appearance seems to be to be seen doing something, no matter how futile the flailing.

I guess the otherwise laughable piecemealing means that this next inevitable failure will happen in less a less expensive manner.

July 3, 2024July 3, 2024Ahmad Zahra

Foes of Fullerton’s Future Fail

by Mr. Peabody6 Comments

I wasn’t able to watch the Fullerton City Council meeting last night to see If my predictions would take place. But I’ve heard about it. Some did, some didn’t.

If I knew what I was talking about this wouldn’t be Fullerton!

The item for consideration of a plebiscite 13% sales tax increase, placed on the agenda by Ahmad Zahra and Shana Charles, went nowhere as I supposed it would. In the end the staff report was “received and filed,” a polite way of saying sayonara and into the round file with you.

As predicted Zahra and Charles pleaded ardently for putting the tax on the ballot – even cutting the amount and placing some sort of sunset term. No takers.

What didn’t happen was the appearance of Zahra’s Zanies, his coterie of cult followers, to harass and harangue the Council majority. A little gaggle of folks spoke, discussion was held, and then the proposal was sent to the dead letter office. In almost no time the meeting was adjourned and everybody went home very early.

I wonder if Zahra even tried to marshal his forces, or whether he couldn’t muster any support. Why else agendize the issue knowing failure was certain. Maybe just to check the box.

Put your money in the bucket over there!

It could be that Ahmad’s Aimless Army was busy elsewhere, maybe even pursuing recreation on his famous Trail to Nowhere.

I don’t know if District 4 candidate, Vivian Kitty Jaramillo even showed up.

When the video is available I may get details of who said what, but I’m not sure it matters.

July 1, 2024July 1, 2024Ahmad Zahra

The Tax Meeting

by Mr. Peabody27 Comments

The City is meeting tomorrow to to talk about putting a sales tax on the November ballot.

The staff report wrongly states that the City Council requested this item, which is an intentional lie. The matter was placed on the agenda by the minority of Ahmad Zahra and Shana Charles, two individuals I wouldn’t trust to run a lemonade stand.

These two fought long and hard to discuss the issue on June 4th, even though no public notice of a tax was on the silly revenue-grab agenda.

Tomorrow we will see a small army of Fullerton Boohoos crying out for a 13% sales tax increase on the ballot. Obviously they want to go for a general use tax because that only takes 50%+1 to win, whereas a special use tax requires 66% – an almost impossible hurdle.

But there’s the rub. A general use tax requires a 4/5 council majority to put it on the ballot, and the pro-tax Zahra and Charles don’t seem to be able to manage the simple majority required to put a special use tax on the ballot.

So what’s the point of this charade? We’ve seen this Zahra act before: mobilize his coterie of “underserved” residents to harangue the Council, and thus embarrass Jung, Whitaker and Dunlap.

But this is not the ludicrous Trail to Nowhere, and bullying won’t work. There’s only one meeting available to get this done, and tomorrow won’t be it.

The only question I have is whether District 4 candidate Vivian Kitty Jaramillo will stand up and support the tax.

June 5, 2024June 4, 2024Ahmad Zahra

New Well. Same as Old Wells

by Fullerton Engineer19 Comments

A new testing well has recently appeared on Walnut Avenue next to the source of trichloroethylene contamination at 311 South Highland Avenue. Friends may remember that this contamination has been monitored by the Feds and the State agency responsible for tracking such things. Here’s the drill rig crew hard at work installing the well casing.

Of course FFFF has already noted the existence of the contamination of the property and its neighbors in the context of the dismal $2,000,000 Trail to Nowhere, pet project of Ahmad Zahra and his colleagues on the City Council; FFFF also identified ten testing wells on the trail site, plus a couple more in the middle of Truslow Avenue. Apparently testing is now taking place to the north, on Walnut Avenue, too. That’s not very good, is it?

The City of Fullerton claimed and still claims that there is no problem with their trail site and apparently the State Natural Resources Agency, the bureaucracy that doles out grant money, remains incurious as to why no mention of trichloroethylene has ever been made by Fullerton’s environmental consultants in their reporting.

Meantime the City continues its silence about the growing plume that could be moving northward, too.

Of course public employees are indemnified for their activities, no matter how incompetent or based in misfeasance. It’s the public that gets to pick up the check.

May 14, 2024May 15, 2024Ahmad Zahra

No Solution in Search of a Problem

by Mr. Peabody25 Comments

Back on its May 7th meeting the Fullerton City Council had a hearing about street sweeping ticketing. It was such a super-critical issue that the Voice of OC wrote about it here. The author is none other than Mr. Hossam Elattar, the same boob who missed the Trail to Nowhere scam.

Reading the Voice article you get the idea that the ticketing was a great social injustice, affecting the lives of what the author charmingly calls the “working class” in overcrowded parts of town. This is the editorial narrative the Voice of OC always deploys in its “news” – the oppression of the underserved.

Of course at the meeting, this same tack was immediately propounded by Councilmember Ahmad Zarha, who would go on to conflate this parking issue with the principle one affecting neighborhoods with too many cars: overnight parking bans. But a hero needs a problem to fix for the “poorer part of town” as he put it. The two issues are quite different since cars of the “working class” are used, presumably, to take those people to work and are gone when the sweeper rolls by. Oops.

The sweeping problem is that regular street sweeping keeps our trash out of the Pacific Ocean and instead goes to a big hole in a Brea hillside. The storm water system is regulated by National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permits. The age-old practice of allowing cars to park on street sweeping days is no longer a thing.

Good Lord, what a to do over a non-problem.

Staff, to their credit, recommended to keep things the way they are – weekly sweeping of each side of each street, and tickets for those vehicles that haven’t been relocated.

Three proposed “options” added significant costs for more complicated logistics and signage, or a violation of the NPDES permit. Whether these costs were legitimate or just jacked up to undermine the options is open to cynical speculation. Obviously, the violation option was just an obvious non-starter made to look like a choice. And with our latest budget crisis nobody is going to waste hundreds of thousands down this rathole.

Our city council (Fullerton, being Fullerton) hemmed and hawed and finally decided the current system was flawed and requested new options. Our Mayor, Nick Dunlap was not happy with the “one size fits all” approach and found an ally in Ahmad Zahra who again pitched the issue as a discriminatory one since the most ticketing took place in south Fullerton. Fred Jung didn’t say much except to say he wanted something better, or to leave the status quo. All so helpful. Dunlap even proposed possible refunds to ticket receivers.

So just as with the downtown noise fiasco this issue will be kicked around some more. I’m surprised it wasn’t sent to the Traffic and Circulation Commission for lengthy cogitation.

No one really bothered to ask what the big deal was and how come people can’t get off their asses and move their cars. Yes, multiple-hour windows of time are used for sweeping, but in reality the sweeping schedule is an extremely predictable period of time, easily planned for. No tickets are handed out after the sweeper passes. While it’s true people may forget to attend to their vehicles, the cost of a ticket is educative, as I well know. Also, my street is a few blocks away from an overcrowded collection of 1950s apartments with too many cars. And yet, on street sweeping days these good folk are astute enough to relocate their vehicles by the time the sweeper rolls through. And after it does the streets slowly fill up with cars again.

I’m left wondering how this item was even agendized in the first place. Staff didn’t want it, obviously, so it must have been done at the behest of councilmembers looking for an issue to waste their time and our money on.

February 20, 2024February 20, 2024Behind Closed Doors

The Abdication

by Joe Sipowicz43 Comments

I’ve been watching Fullerton politics and governance for for a long time – since 2008 or 2009, in fact. One thing that has consistently struck me is the way in which Fullerton’s elected officials have completely and almost happily abdicated their responsibility to determine the direction of policy.

It has always been the goal, in principle if not in practice in modern representative democracy, that policy would be established by electeds, and administrated through a protected civil service bureaucracy.

Determining policy – the philosophical direction you want the town to take – isn’t easy in the “City Manager” form of government, a form deliberately created to remove any sort of executive authority from elected representatives. But with that set-up came something else, too: the difficulty of people’s representatives in establishing policy direction, and doing it without violating the Brown Act strictures on open meetings.

Nevertheless, the responsibility is still there, even if it easier to have photo ops, and ribbon cuttings and the like. Sadly our electeds have failed; failed with remarkable banality and complacency. Former Councilman and Fullerton Police Chief Pat McKinley once illustrated the point when challenged for his “failure to lead.” He exclaimed that councilmen weren’t there to lead – that was the City Manager’s job.

Lately the policy role abdication has been seen with the regurgitated, spit out, re-consumed and regurgitated again noise ordinance, an ongoing embarrassment that has plagued honest citizens for over fifteen years. I read the staff report on the recent noise effort, a report that justifies a decision to actually increase acceptable levels, protect offenders by including an ambient noise mask, and locates the noise metering away from the source whence it can be muddled by an equally noisy neighbor.

The staff report is nothing but a list of events that have occurred since 2009 when the City Council last expressed a coherent position. Nowhere in the staff report is there any discussion on the policy decisions behind any of the activities. Why not? Because there weren’t any. In the same way that the incredibly costly, drunken binge known as Downtown Fullerton has escaped any intelligent policy conversation, the noise nuisance issue, a subset of the former, has evaded policy discussion as City staff – behind the scenes – has diligently avoided doing anything to enforce existing code, and worked very hard to reduce the requirements.

So what has happened is a vacuum in which each new action seems disembodied from policy conversation; that’s because it is. And our council steadfastly refused to have an open and honest conversation of what it wants, abdicating its responsibilities.

There is a long list of issues that our elected representatives should be addressing from an overarching policy level and aren’t. This sort of thing takes thought; and some hard work in ascertaining whether your city employees are really doing the thing you want; or not, as in the case of the Trail to Nowhere. It’s easier just to ram through the Consent Calendar on the nod, rubberstamp the ridiculous, clean your plate like good kids, and move on to the photo ops and the trophy ceremonies.