Friends For Fullerton's Future

Downtown Fullerton, tucked in the heart of North Orange County, is a lively crossroads where the buzz of nightlife meets the calm of residential living. Unfortunately, not all of us are college kids eager to party till sunrise and sleep through the aftermath. Some of us — like my family and me — actually need a decent night’s rest to function. Our neighborhood is a quirky blend of bars, restaurants, and single-family homes — charming on paper, but in practice, the nonstop thump of amplified music quickly drowns out the appeal. 

The amplified music is constantly disrupting our sleep, even on weeknights when rest is necessary for school and work. This inconvenience is impossible to get used to and negatively impacts our focus, energy, and frankly our wallets thanks to the obscene amount of caffeine it takes to stay functional.

In 2023, then Councilwoman Shanna Charles stepped forward with a practical solution: a curfew on outdoor amplified music. During the week, a 10 PM cutoff would provide much-needed respite, while an 11 PM cutoff on weekends would strike a balance between nightlife and residential needs. After the curfew, bars can continue to play music inside at any volume, preserving the lively atmosphere for patrons without disturbing nearby residents.

As residents, my family and I wholeheartedly support councilwoman Charles’ proposal as we believe that this act would create harmony in the diversity of Fullerton. The proposal recognizes that while nightlife and entertainment are vital to the city’s character and economy, so too are the families, students, and professionals who call this place home. By supporting this initiative, we’re not trying to quiet the city’s energy — we’re simply asking for a balance that lets Fullerton thrive without keeping its residents awake all night.

Let’s come together in support of Councilwoman Charles’s initiative to foster a community where residents and businesses can flourish side by side. Downtown Fullerton deserves a future where its lively spirit and the everyday comfort of its people exist in balance.

I noticed this closed session item on this Tuesday’s Fullerton City Council meeting agenda.

Commonwealth and Harbor LLC, AKA Mario Marovic has been in litigation with the City for a long time now claiming some sort of misfeasance on the City’s part in the ongoing saga of the Florentine stolen sidewalk.

Friends may remember that Marovic turned out to be just as big a scammer as the Florentine Mob. After they walked away from their lease, he took over and planned to open two new bars.

He actually remodeled the so-called pop out without permission as part of his redesign. Oops. The pop-out belonged (and still belongs) to the City.

In the fall of 2023 the City decided it wanted the sidewalk back; Marovic wanted to open his fake Irish pub. Yes it was a clusterfuck courtesy of the boneheadedness of a City bureaucrat named Paul Dudley over twenty years ago. He talked the Council into letting the Florentines put a new building on a public sidewalk, a building addition not owned by the guys who owned the main building to which it is still attached. Oops.

A deal was struck a deal under which Marovic could get opened and the City could finally get its sidewalk back. Marovic could open Mickey’s Irish Pub bars and had until March 2024 to begin demolition of the offending bump out. The remediation work had to be done by July 2024.

March 2024 came and went; March 2025 came and went. There was no work performed. Instead Marovic continued to use the public’s building and sued the City. I hope he was paying rent to us, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t.

Marovic has been in breech of his agreement for over a a year and a half. For some reason the City has been playing a protracted legal game with this individual instead of evicting him from our premises for being in default. Maybe the City-folk were trying to dodge personal embarrassment – just like their predecessors have done for the past two decades. Maybe they were still hoping that Marovic, somehow, would do what he was supposed to do – a hope so incredible as to be absurd.

My hope is that no settlement is made, at least not one where the City is not fully recompensed; that Marovic pays for the City to do the demolition work (he can repair his own building exterior), covers all our legal fees, and kicks back a portion of the profit he has made using our building.

I am not hopeful about my hope. The City can’t even seem to get Les Amis to pay their years late rent. Playing hardball just isn’t in their repertoire. My guess is that the City will vote to give Good Ol’ Mario a second chance. Or maybe they’ll just drop the thing altogether and the sidewalk will remain as is.

Incidentally, I wonder if Ahmad Zahra and his young sprout Elijah Manassero will give the stolen sidewalk item the scrutiny and transparency the public needs. Bet not.

Who says “nobody” reads the FFFF blog? Well, they do in City Hall, obviously.

It turns out that “Dr.” Ahmad Zahra’s campaign committee maybe wasn’t terminated after all. It’s now back on the active list on the City Clerk’s website! Looks like the “new crew” did another oopsy.

And that’s terrific news for those of us who were looking forward to next year’s Fullerton City Council election in District 5.

See, Mr. Zahra faces all sorts of challenges of his own creation, and he has voluntarily made enemies where he ought not to have. Here’s a partial list of Zahra’s transgressions – stuff that his blind followers love to ignore, but issues that may resonate with the electorate at large.

1. In the 1990s gay immigrant Zahra committed marriage fraud by marrying an American woman (a federal felony), so he could stay in the United States and pave the way for eventual citizenship.
2. In 2020 Zahra was charged with assault and battery and vandalism against a woman, “M. Farias.” He claimed exoneration, which was a lie. He has shown no evidence.
3. In 2020 and 2021 Zahra committed plagiarism by taking articles written by somebody else and having them published in the Fullerton Observer under his own name.
4. In October of 2022 Zahra filed a false police report to the FPD claiming that his colleague, Fred Jung assaulted him (or some such thing). The report was rejected.
5. In 2020 Zahra tried to raise taxes on his “underserved” peeps during the Covid pandemic.
6. When he was first elected in 2019 he proclaimed the need for an election to fill the vacancy left by Jesus Quirk-Silva; a month later he voted to appoint the execrable Jan Flory in exchange for a well-paying appointment to the Orange County Water District, his only identified source of income.
7. In 2022, Zahra and the OC Democrat party created a phony Latino candidate, Tony Castro, to draw votes away from his Latino opponent.
8. Zahra is currently being investigated by the California Fair Political Practices Commission for numerous violations of campaign rules regarding unreported campaign payments that may have been illegal payments…to himself.
9. In 2021 Zahra tried to convert the UP Park into a private, for profit event center, an illegal move that would have landed the City in multiple lawsuits.
10. Zahra voted to pursue the disastrous lawsuit against David Curlee, Joshua Ferguson, and FFFF that cost the City the better part of a million bucks.
11. Etc., etc., etc.

If he stays in the race, Zahra would go up against Oscar Valadez, the guy who would have beat him last time around, except for Castro, and who’s returning to the fray in 2026. Then there’s his biggest antagonist, Tony Bushala, who seems to want to make it his business to rid the city of this con artist. Mr. Bushala has the means and the motive to do so.

In 2022 Zahra spent well over $100,000 to squeak out a tainted victory. Right now he has less than six grand in his committee account. While we may expect the OC Dems to enlist another candidate to draw votes from Zahra opponents (the Scott Marowitz Experience may frighten them off), it’s hard to see a path forward for the disingenuous doctor from Damascus.

About a week and a half a go the Fullerton Observer ran an update on their earlier propaganda about the rebuilding of the Union Pacific Park. You may remember the slight-of-hand article that mischaracterized the history of the park. FFFF pointed out that it wasn’t the toxic soil issue that closed the park. Rather it was the derelict state of the majority of the park that hadn’t been closed at all.

Truslow residents will surely remember that the park had become a magnet for drunks, druggies, and FTT gang members who claimed it as their own turf. The City Manager, Joe “Wild Ride” Felz decided to put up a fence around the whole disaster, and forget about it. And it’s been that way ever since.

On September 13th a horde of volunteers showed up to install a “Kaboom Park” – prefab plastic kiddie equipment surrounded by what look like wood chips to cushion the fall of the young children. Three pitiable sycamore saplings were planted.

The whole thing was an exercise in political, public mobilization since a little crew could have done the job in a few hours, but that would have missed the point: a bountiful opportunity for speeches, selfless volunteering, photo ops, demonstrations, and of course the usual liberal hosannas about “public health” and “underserved communities.”

Two weeks later the Kaboom park sits there alone, still fenced off from the community who is said by the Kennedy Sisters to have longingly waited for the park’s re-opening. When is the fence coming down? I bet nobody has asked. Sometime in the near future the rest of the park is supposed to be worked on. Will it be after that? Was the Kaboom operation just an empty feel-good gesture to show that something, anything was happening?

It seems to me that this little playground assembly should have been the last thing to go in, not the first. But what do I know about parks? Surely not as much as City Hall does.

Anyway, several local politicians showed up to get their picture taken, including Ahmad Zahra of course, who never misses a self-promotional opportunity. He reportedly didn’t stay to actually do any work – not even to claw at the dirt with a rake or to give moral support. He supposedly left after the pictures were taken.

The future of the re-opened park, whenever the fence comes down, doesn’t look promising. Nobody has asked about the condition and influence of the social pathologies that caused the park to be closed by Felz in the first place. Everyone has decided to conveniently forget the true history of the park

The rundown “Trail Phase 1” hasn’t been cleaned up and is usually occupied by somebody selling drugs of some sort. The Harbor bridge leading to the park from the east is a disgusting mess of graffiti, trash and broken light fixtures. Fullerton Tokers Town is still around, still marking its territory with regularity.

Last month FFFF published a post about how sweet, fresh Elijah Manassero scribbled an article for the Fullerton Observer attacking Mayor Fred Jung for misusing Fullerton’s city seal. A little later we noted with some amusement that the young sapling Manassero posted his string of attacks on the council majority and the Bushala family on a subReddit that swiped…Fullerton’s city seal!

Well, it appears that somebody, somewhere took notice of the problem. Sometime in the past week the subReddit page quit using the city seal and replaced it with this image.

Hmm. Now that looks sort of familiar. Oops!

Turns out the newly adopted image of r/Fullerton is a protected trademark, registered by the City with the United State Patent and Trademark Office over 20 years ago! Ouch.

Now that’s not very good is it? More bad behavior by r/Fullerton and hypocrisy from their frequent contributor, youthful Elijah.

I don’t think that the dainty fleur Elijah cares much about the sort of legal niceties involved with intellectual property theft, and probably knows even less about this sort of thing than he does about commercial leases (BTW, has fresh young Elijah sought legal recourse about the Bushala depot lease like he said he would, or was that just the loud screeching of a baby paper tiger?).

The irony of a self-righteous purveyor of prevarication getting tangled up in this sort of embarrassment is palpable. However, Fullerton Boohoo characters are not known for the kind of self-introspection needed to understand irony. After all, they celebrate the deadbeat Ahmad Zahra’s brainy outpourings, despite his getting busted for plagiarism – another kind of intellectual theft.