Friends For Fullerton's Future

In 2018 Ahmad Zahra, the immigration fraud and woman batterer and plagiarist popped up out of nowhere, an unknown, and got himself elected the D5 councilman in a split race.

Is he returning to that anonymous swamp from whence he emerged?

His candidate committee for re-election in 2026 is now listed on the City Clerk’s inactive committee page. I don’t know how or why it is there instead of on the active committee page. Could it be that the Deadbeat Damascene Doctor is giving up on Fullerton politics? Maybe the Kennedy Sisters will let us know.

Zahra’s political departure, if true, is a pleasant thought.

For almost seven years we’ve been putting up with his lies, his manipulations, his machinations and his saccharine, high handed sanctimony. He has been so unpopular with a majority of his colleagues that they have continually denied him the mayorship, something he has obviously coveted so as to burnish his political reputation. Good job, too. He filed a false police report against one of them and has denigrated them in his frequent moods of high dudgeon.

It’s possible that Zahra sees no political future, given the gay man’s phony Green Card marriage to an Arkansas woman has been discovered and would obviously play a prominent part in a 2026 campaign. He spent well over $100,000 to keep his $800 per month gig in 2022 and only won because OC Dem Central created a fake Latino candidate to siphon votes away from Oscar Valadez. And this was before the marriage fraud was discovered. Thin ice, indeed.

Zahra also knows that his malevolence directed at the Bushala family is reciprocated, and that Tony Bushala has the means and the motive to finally get rid of this creep. The fact that Mr. Valadez says he is running again must be a problem for the Middle Eastern man of medicine.

Fullerton Boohoo has clasped the prevaricating fraud to its collective bosom, believing all the tripe he dishes out to them. This won’t help him stay elected.

Soon we will find out if Zahra is leaving, going back to his “day job” (whatever that job may be) full time. Or maybe we will learn that a clerical error by the “new crew” has been made, assigning his committee to the inactive list.

Obviously FFFF will remain interested.

Last night the Fullerton City Council was presented with a noise ordinance, the principal target being the bar-owning noise scofflaws in Downtown Fullerton. It was basically the same thing that was sent back to the Planning Commission due to its utter insufficiency. Fullerton. Being. Fullerton.

FFFF has documented ad nauseam the comical efforts of the City to address this issue over the past 15 years. I’m not even going to review the dance of death anymore. You can follow the entire history, here.

Here’s an example of what happens when a scofflaw “club” blasts noise from their establishment.

Now imagine three or four of these establishments doing the same thing at the same time.

But back to a brief synopsis. Basically, there have been two forces working hard in City Hall to continue this embarrassing, bungling misadventure in government activity.

First has been the gymnastic effort to protect the lawbreakers by refusing enforcement of the law because “changes are on the way” a cunning and never ending Dickensian dodge. We know that our former Mayor-for-Hire Jennifer Fitzgerald and her Planning Director Ted White were actively running interference for the scofflaw bar/club owners.

The second active force has been the continual effort to water down the code, making enforcement so difficult as to look impossible, thus relieving Code Enforcement and the cops from having to do their jobs. This is the shrug-it-off position of Community Development Director Sunaya Thomas and her predecessors, one and all.

Last night the a majority of the council chose a second option with changes, but an option that had no draft ordinance to accompany it. The only draft presented to the council and the public was to accept what was given to them as the favored staff recommendation.

But then, abracadabra, City Attorney Dick Jones produced an Option 2 draft ordinance from his back pocket almost like a magician summoning a rabbit from a top hat! Mr. Jones declared that the council could approve his newly minted draft, unread, and read up on it and modify it before the obligatory “second reading” in a couple weeks. Unpersuasive.

The council voted 5-0 to bring the damn thing back in two weeks to yak about all over again.

One unintentionally amusing observation during the discussion was made by Shana Charles, who wondered aloud if curtailing the amplified musical free-for-all might not end in the demise of outdoor dining in downtown Fullerton. I can’t really say I’m surprised that something so dumb was uttered by one of Fullerton’s professional know-it-alls.

Things must have really gotten bad for the scofflaws over at Les Amis. One might assume that they’ve resorted to selling their furniture in the public right of way in order to pay all the back rent they owe the City of Fullerton for their use of a closed off sidewalk but I’m at a loss for words here so help me caption these pictures.

The best I could come up with is “Les Amis in the Flea Market Business”, can you do better?

Ah, those pesky unintended consequences. When government is involved you can be sure of them, mostly because official activities are so often based on wishful thinking, and because no one is ever held accountable for adverse results.

Let’s consider the Trail to Nowhere, a stupid idea from the start whose in-city cost exploded from $170,000 to $630,000. There were no real identified users, just hopes an prayers that somebody might show up to use it.

Guess what? They will.

That’s because the Crossfit gym on Richman Ave. is located right next to it. The gym members will get to use the DG path to jog on, instead of the paved streets in the neighborhood.

The gym gets a free, taxpayer subsidized amenity which is great for them and good for their landlord, too, come lease renewal time.

The landlord? Why none other than Fullerton Boohoo Public enemy #1, Tony Bushala. Oops.

Just yesterday our old friend Aaruni Thakur sent out notice that he was quitting the Fullerton School District board after 7 years of “service.” It’s a strange communication. He recites his own success story and talks about his wonderful wifey and kids. He extolls the board’s accomplishments during his tenure, including higher property taxes. He thanks the educrats in the district; and the teachers and lunch ladies. But he doesn’t explain his reason for quitting with only a little more than a year left in his term; at least not in the snippet submitted electronically to FFFF.

Hmm. Very strange indeed.

Friends may remember Aaruni, and not with fondness. He ran against Bruce Whitaker for the Fullerton City Council in 2020 under a fake address. He was rightly tattooed as a carpetbagger, and a phony one at that. His phony address in Fullerton’s D4 wasn’t in FSD’s District 2 which he represented and didn’t quit. What an ethical model for the kiddies.

In the spring Thakur was identified as the moving force behind the fake and perjurious candidacy of Scott Markowitz by none other than Ajay Mohan, who allegedly said he had been recruited by Aaruni T. to guide Markowitz through the paperwork and cook up a phony MAGA ballot statement

Was the latter episode in anyway related to Thakur’s departure from the FSD board? I don’t know. Todd Spitzer, our cowardly DA, never pursued the co-conspirators who got Markowitz to commit perjury. I do know that Thakur’s political career seemed over. He never won a contested election for school board.

Of course the Markowitz scam ended up doing a lot more damage to Cannabis Kitty Jaramillo, than it helped, in getting her elected. Maybe the backfire is seen in Democrat political circles as Thakur’s signature failure.

Now the board will undoubtedly appoint a right-thinking successor with the backbone of a donut to represent the district. Look for someone whose job it may be to eventually replace Fred Jung on the City Council in 2026 or 2028.

I new it was coming. Following fast upon the proverbial heels of a deliberately misleading City press release, the Kennedy Sister named Sanka regurgitated the same bullshit about the Union Pacific Park.

The headline says it all:

“Union Pacific Park Project Makes Progress Toward Long-Awaited Opening After 22 Years”

No, Siaska, the Union Pacific Park was already built and open 20 years ago. True, the site was contaminated – purchased by the City without due diligence – and was remediated.

But hey, why stop the lies coming? The park had been a gathering ground for gangs, drunks, and junkies. The City, under City Manager Chris Meyers and his successors, demolished the toilets and kept the fence surrounding the park in place. Why? Because due to social pathologies the place was an embarrassing multi-million dollar fiasco. The less said the better, and nothing said, better yet, for the masterminds of the disaster.

According to Kennedy, the site was so disrupted by the remediation it became useless, a statement that is a false. When the toxic stuff was discovered it covered less than half the park. The rest was wide open. Siska intentionally fails to explain the real reasons the park was completely closed after remediation: misuse, abuse and law breaking. The neighbors across Truslow Avenue complained.

Sometime after 2011 a fence was put up around the whole park and it had nothing to do with soils remediation. It was a reaction to the dystopian park. There has been plenty of opportunity in the past 15 years to re-open the park. Nobody wanted it re-opened. No one, that is, until Fred Jung, Nick Dunlap, and Bruce Whitaker voted to do that a couple years ago. But of course no accountability for the decades long disaster needed to be pursued. That wouldn’t be the Fullerton Way.

The solution now at Parks and Rec and its Fullerton Observers, is to pretend that because of the toxic contamination there has never really been a park, and that this “beloved neighborhood space” is finally being opened to cries of enthusiasm from all. That’s another lie.

Skakia remembers an ad hoc UP Park committee but ignores the fact that it withered away without doing anything. No plans reviewed contemplated a Kaboom Park.

Then Skansia shares this jargon-filled gem: “These surveys (Ed. done by no one knows who, no one knows when, participated in by someone, somewhere) highlighted safety and engaging programming as primary concerns, aligning with the broader goal of enhancing neighborhood security through increased recreational opportunities.” Probably the same useless patter uttered by City Hall Parks Department bureaucrats in 1999, and identical to the same wishful thinking that supported the recent Trail to Nowhere boondoggle.

Ah, yes! Positivity springs eternal in the precincts of Fullerton City Hall, and Sanskia concludes her drivel with a pathos-meringue filled appeal to hope and glory: “…the upcoming renovations aim to transform it into a vibrant community hub that fosters pride and engagement among residents. The goal is to create a safe, inviting environment that enhances the overall quality of life in the neighborhood.“

Here’s the text of a recent City of Fullerton press release about upcoming activity at the dismal Union Pacific Park on Truslow Avenue. See if you can read it without gagging.

The City of Fullerton Parks & Recreation Department, Smile Generation®, and KABOOM! are teaming up to bring a new kid-designed, community-built playground to Union Pacific Park—revitalizing a beloved neighborhood space and ensuring local children have a safe, inspiring place to play.

On Saturday, September 13, volunteers come together to construct the playground in a single day, with a ribbon-cutting and photo opportunities at 2:30 pm. The build begins at 8:30 am at Union Pacific Park, 121 W. Truslow Ave., Fullerton, CA 92832. Media and community members are invited to attend and experience the transformation in real time.

“Union Pacific Park’s reopening represents a new chapter for this neighborhood,” says Edgar Rosales, Fullerton Parks & Recreation. “The new playground will be at the heart of the park—where children can play, and families can connect and grow.”

Union Pacific Park, which had been closed due to past soil contamination, has since been fully remediated and declared safe for public use—clearing the way for its exciting rebirth as a vibrant community hub.

This project also advances KABOOM!’s 25 in 5 Initiative to End Playspace Inequity, a nationwide effort to ensure every child—especially those in under-resourced communities—benefits from the physical, social, and mental health advantages of play. Smile Generation joins as a proud partner committed to community wellness.

Let’s just ignore the tsunami of silly bureaucrat-speak about under-resourced neighborhoods, new chapters, vibrant community hubs, families connecting and growing, inspiring places to play, and the like. That’s just the sort of hyped-up rhetorical nonsense you’d expect from any semi-literate municipal scribe. It’s actually pretty funny in an unintended way.

But what’s this nonsense about the park being closed for “remediation” of contaminated soil, but now having been declared safe? That’s just a damned lie. The remediation happened at least 15 long years ago. The fact is that City Hall kept the park closed due its attractive quality to borrachos, drug addicts, Fullerton Toker Towners, and homeless vagrants. It’s been sitting there, a ugly monument to the incompetence of Fullerton’s six-figure pensioners, and two generations of city councils that never bothered ask any questions.

This multi-million dollar disgrace is not a “beloved neighborhood space.” Nobody asked for it. Nobody wanted it outside City Hall employees with other people’s money to waste.

And now the current city council is poised to dump more millions into the beloved space even though there is nothing changed from the societal pathologies that kept it closed in the first place. And nothing has changed about the City’s inability to properly maintain the parks it already has.

Oh well, I guess this makes sense in a certain perverse way. The council just agreed to blow 2.5 million bucks on the Trail to Nowhere without a single backward glance to note the complete failure of the UP Park and the embarrassing “Phase I” of the so-called trail that doesn’t even connect to Phase II. The current council seems no more curious about past failures than their predecessors. In fact, they’re doubling down on the previous Union Park fiasco. The only difference is they seem to want to fail in smaller increments.

A few weeks ago, the Fullerton Observer’s eager young cub reporter, Elijah Manassero, wrote an article about some misuse of the official Fullerton city seal by a “private company” with ties to Mayor Fred Jung.

The company in question is a Korean-American showroom of some kind on Harbor Boulevard that promotes the Fullerton-Seongnam City Sister City relationship. The offending sign had been changed by the time young Elijah wrote his “story.”

That seemed like a real stretch to create news as the Observer is always doing because performing real journalism is too darn challenging for the Kennedy Sisters.

But wait for it.

On the internet chat site reddit, there is a “subreddit” called r/Fullerton. And guess what? r/Fullerton features our City seal right there on its banner, and done so, apparently, for years.

And that’s not all of course.

Guess who religiously cross posts his own anti-Jung, anti-Bushala, anti-Dunlap propaganda on reddit, not to mention the self-righteous crapola he writes for the Fullerton Observer? That’s right. Sweet young Elijah Manassero who is so alarmed by “unauthorized” use of Fullerton’s city seal.

It’s really not very hard to submit the necessary campaign finance and statement of economic interest forms required of candidates and elected representatives. But apparently it is for Shana Charles, who has evidently been busy with other stuff over her summer break, social justice warrioring, for one. Even with a kindly nudge from the Fullerton City Clerk.

Form 460s (campaign financial activity) for the first half of 2025 were due by July 31, 2025.

It’s now five weeks later and per the City Clerk’s webpage, Shana Charles still hasn’t submitted the required form, her last submittal being for the second half of last year.

Even more interesting is the fact that the CC’s site shows no annual Form 700 (Statement of Economic Interest) from Charles since February, 2024. She’s over six months late.

To be fair, Dunlap and Jung show being one and two months behind in their annual 700, but Zahra is a whopping seven months late, so there’s something not right in the City Clerk’s office, either in the enforcement or the recording of this stuff.

The irony here is that Charles’s (and Zahra’s) followers are always nattering about transparency this, and transparency that. But the application of the concept is selective, as shown by the Fullerton Observer Sisters and their new Jimmy Olsen, the impressionable, young Elijah Mannasero.

Sometimes stuff pops up that you couldn’t possibly make up. The latest Fullerton Observer includes a piece co-authored by Curtis Gamble and Sankia Kennedy and features the headline I used, above.

To start off with I have to say I can’t think of two people less likely to come up with a potential solution for anything.

Poor Curtis Gamble is just a perpetually discombobulated fellow who takes an opportunity a couple times a month to polish his sense of self-importance at city council meetings, generally offering comments on things he knows nothing about. He presumes to advocate for the homeless, bus drivers, seniors, students, etc., etc.; people who would probably just as soon forgo his representation. Co-author Saska Kennedy is thoroughly annoying too, although she, like her older sister, Sharon, is propelled by the ideological dogma of the self-righteous and sanctimonious left.

Their “article” presumes there is a homeless crisis in Fullerton. And it offers that homeless seniors represent 20% of this crisis. Their potential solution? Use the Rancho La Paz senior mobile home park as some sort of permanent housing for the homeless, moving them into trailers as they are vacated.

I can’t conceive of a worse idea: a village of homeless people assigned property, not their own, to live in and presumably maintain. Somehow the pathologies of homelessness – schizophrenia, drug abuse, living in filth would be rectified by mobile home park living. Cooking, cleaning, job hunting, health maintenance all self-performed by the newly housed, one concludes. Of course professional do gooders from Illumination Foundation (as a for instance) will be on hand to dispense “behavioral” admonitions and the necessary modalities.

The biggest unstated obstacle, and one that Curtis and Skansia work really hard to ignore is the fact that the mobile home park has an owner. When last I heard, that fellow is a real estate and numismatist named John Saunders who has been villainized by Fullerton Boohoo for raising rents on his ground leases and who, I believe, is highly unlikely to go along with Homeless Village. Well, maybe he would if the City were to reimburse him for rents and maintenance costs and policing of the village. That would cost a fortune.

The article fails to mention that typically land, not the mobile homes are owned by a guy like Saunders. A trailer wouldn’t be available unless purchased by somebody for the homeless purpose, or just abandoned by the owner.

Then there’s the issue of joint sovereignty. The south half of Rancho La Paz is in Anaheim, not Fullerton, so there’s that.

When I was done reading this nonsense I was left wondering its purpose. Is it just gratuitous virtue signaling? A Big Idea hatched by the disoriented Curtis Gamble and advertised by the Kennedy Sisters? Hard to say. But one thing is certain. The piece projects the typical lack of pragmatism that is the hallmark of the Homeless Industrial Complex, so maybe it has a chance – if politicians can be seen to be throwing money at a problem absent results.