First we have to sadly announce the obvious – due to the severity of the pandemic in December and January, there was no way we could collect 17,000 signatures to recall the corrupt Mayor Sidhu by the deadline this weekend. The pandemic was also the main reason that the grassroots candidates fared so poorly in November against the candidates with millions of dollars for mailers and advertisements – Steve Faessel, Avelino Valencia and Jose Diaz.
Coronavirus has very much been Mayor Sidhu’s friend – he has also utilized it to keep council meetings as inaccessible as possible for these last ten months – more so than any other OC city – while silencing public comments until last month, making decisions involving hundreds of millions of Anaheim taxpayer dollars in as much secrecy, and with as little public input, as he possibly could.
One question that pops up especially today, February 5, as we officially end this effort, is what is he going to do now with all the money he raised at his big “Save the Mayor” fundraiser that he held exactly a year ago – his first reaction to learning of the Recall? Do all the folks who gave him $10,000 each to save him from the angry masses want their money back now? I’m pretty sure he can’t do anything else with it.
We know there are thousands of honest Anaheim voters who are very disappointed about this, but we encourage you to come to district 2 (basically between Euclid and Magnolia) and put your energy into something much more do-able this spring – remove one of Mayor Sidhu’s key faux-Democrat allies, Jordan Brandman. (The one who likes to say when he makes a bad vote, “I am going to just go with the judgment of the Mayor because he was elected at large and I wasn’t.”)
Getting 2000 signatures in this smaller area, and winning the election there this summer with the right candidate, is within our grasp. And if we can do that, we could do it again next year to another deserving member of Harry’s kleptocratic majority. (Diaz? Valencia? Faessel? Let’s see who makes the worst votes.) And ALSO we need to start thinking about what Democrat, Republican or independent could beat Sidhu in 2022, and coalescing behind them.
Meanwhile, here is the official (200-word max) list of reasons that Jordan Brandman is being recalled, followed by a big list of ADDITIONAL reasons that we couldn’t fit on the official page. (As if you needed a reminder…)
The grounds for recall are as follows:
Councilman Brandman has put the interests of his campaign contributors over those of Anaheim District 2 Residents in the following ways:
Sold the taxpayer-owned Angels Stadium property for a small fraction of its value, costing Anaheim residents as much as half a billion dollars, while allowing the team to drop “Anaheim” from its name.
Passed billions of dollars in subsidies to resort interests that fund him, including a promise to Disney of no Gate Tax for up to 45 years.
This year, drove our City into $500M+ debt by granting exorbitant raises to police and fire, whose unions help fund his campaigns, and diverted $6.5 million of federal Covid funds to advertise Disney and the resorts which couldn’t even open for months.
Attempted in late 2015 to postpone District Elections so as not to face Jose Moreno in the 2016 election.
Refuses to protect senior mobile home owners, or long-term apartment renters, from rent-gouging and no-cause evictions – by his contributors.
Prevents his Council colleague Moreno from placing any items onto the agenda, breaking a specific promise he made while campaigning.
Anaheim cannot afford another two years of this wasteful and corrupt Councilman.
ADDITIONAL REASONS TO RECALL BRANDMAN
In early 2020, while nobody in the District ever saw him in public, he was busy running for a second office – Orange County Board of Education. (A race in which he came in fourth out of four, functioning mainly as a spoiler splitting the Democrat vote so that charter-school backing Republican Tim Shaw could win.)
He and Lucille Kring were the most enthusiastic backers of legalizing cannabis dispensaries in this town, PROPOSING TO BRING EIGHT DISPENSARIES INTO WEST ANAHEIM, and he claimed that’s what most of his District 2 constituents want. (This blog, and the recall organizers, are not necessarily against marijuana, but we have the impression most of his constituents do NOT want eight legal cannabis dispensaries in West Anaheim.)
When he makes what he knows will be a controversial vote, he justifies it not by his own reasons but by following Mayor Sidhu: “I will follow the judgment of the Mayor since he was elected at large [by the whole city] and I wasn’t.” Thus he deprives his own district (which did NOT vote for Sidhu) of its own voice.
In January 2021 he broke his campaign promise to “designate” the Little Arabia district, when Councilman Moreno proposed it and he refused to give the motion a “second.” (Whether you think the district should be designated or not, it was still a broken campaign promise to District 2, justified by nothing more than silence.)
Before 2012 when he was on the School Board, he fought for a school bond that is STILL being paid off, and gave absolutely ZERO help to West Anaheim schools (but then he didn’t know at that point that he would EVER be moving to West Anaheim to be their Councilman.)
Carpetbagged in 2018 from his home in the Colony, just to run in West Anaheim against James Vanderbilt who he thought would be easier to beat than Jose Moreno.
Lied during the 2018 campaign – 1) claiming that Vanderbilt wouldn’t debate him, when Vanderbilt wanted to and it was Jordan who wouldn’t; and 2) claimed falsely that Vanderbilt workers were telling people not to vote for him because he is gay and Jewish.
As Anaheim Council’s representative to the OC Water District, he has continually voted to go forward with Poseidon’s $1.5 billion HB desalination plant, which is unnecessary for our water needs, will raise Anaheim ratepayers’ water rates, and is also environmentally devastating. Poseidon has given thousands to Jordan’s various campaigns for over a decade. (Jordans’ predecessor on the water board, James Vanderbilt, opposed the project.)
Contact us if you want to help, and we’ll keep you updated! FACEBOOK PAGE HERE.
POSTSCRIPT – on a humorous (but true) note
It occurred to me the other day that Jordan Brandman and Mayor Sidhu have ANOTHER connection besides that of servant and master: ridiculous behavior in connection with County Clerk Satellite Offices.
Notoriously, during his first council campaign of 2012, Jordan was paid $24,000 of county money by his patron Tom Daly (now Assemblyman, then County Clerk) to produce a report on the benefit of “satellite offices” – that is, secondary County Clerk offices in several places around the County. This enabled Jordan to spend half a year doing nearly no work except campaigning for office, and his final product received universal ridicule, turned in WAY past deadline and mostly copied and pasted from Wikipedia. Current Clerk and Orange Juice friend Hieu Nguyen deemed it “useless,” but Jordan weathered the embarrassment.
This was right before Daly was leaving the Clerk position for his new Assembly seat, and a dozen people lined up hoping to be appointed by the Board of Supervisors to this well-paying plum position. Several of those were out-of-work politicians who thought they could charm their friends on the Board, and one of THOSE was Harry Sidhu. English is NOT his first language, and when Supervisor Moorlach asked Harry what he thought about SATELLITE OFFICES, Harry looked a little startled and confused for a second, but then answered in the way he thought Moorlach might like, with bright enthusiastic eyes: “Well, sir, if we can afford it, then let’s do WHATEVER WE CAN IMAGINE!” A few of us laughed, because it was clear that Harry thought “satellite offices” were something having to do with outer space – maybe even ORBITING COUNTY CLERK OFFICES! (And of course, Harry weathered THAT embarrassment.)
After all, gobs of campaign cash can always cover up a multitude of asshat-ism. And how true that is.
Harry in 2018, happy after saving Anaheim Hills’ July 4 Parade, and still dreaming of Satellite Offices!
*Where does the lovely Lucille Kring sit on this issue?
On a waffle iron.
James ‘Van’…is The Man for District 2 in ’22!!
No, Mark. ’21, AND ’22.
James is considering it actually; we have a couple of good choices.
Mark who?
I am correcting, or quibbling with, my friend Mark Richard Daniels.
That’s pretty good.
And just to attest to Jordan Brandman’s fine character, he pretty much stole $24,000 and change when his buddy Tom Daly ( Orange County recorder at time and Jordan was running for City Council for the time) gave Jordan a contract to do some consulting work and write a report on the demographics of Orange County for $24,000 and change.
After Brandman won his city council seat and Tom Daly won his assembly seat, Brandman was pressed for the report, no report, the pressure continued until finally Brandman produced a report. Upon examination the report bore a uncanny resemblance to Wikipedia. The way I remember it the the board of supervisors said “ it may be copied from Wikipedia but it is a report. And that lady’s and gentlemen is how Jordan Brandman made off with $24,000 and change of your county’s tax dollars.
Oh man, I’d forgotten, I was going to put that and something else into the story, at the end, for comic relief. I just realized yesterday that SATELLITE COUNTY CLERK OFFICES are one more thing that Brandman and Sidhu have in common! I’ll add that in tomorrow.
(Sat. morning – done!)
Who would have thought $25,000 to plagiarize Wikipedia could have an even better outcome?
Of course, if Vanderbilt runs, DPOC will run a Democrat against him, because of course it will. And they will split the vote, which will allow a Sidhu Republican to win.
Just as likely – DPOC will run another Sidhu Democrat in the mold of Jordan or Avelino. Although they’ll have to find one in that district, it’ll be too late to spirit one in like they did with Jordan.
Of course we’ve never been through a recall process against an Anaheim klepto candidate – maybe they’ll put all their effort into defending Jordan.
They’d be damn fools if they wasted a dime on Brandman. What’s a 6-1 edge versus a 5-2 edge worth? Not much. Might be fun to see the Kleptos find another stooge in a recall election. Still, gotta get the siggies, first.
I don’t think that that’s how they see it. They are more likely to act in accord with their philosophy: “Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever.”
I’ll put this here, speeches from Matt Mariscal and myself at the last (Jan 26) Council meeting, AFTER TEN MONTHS OF BEING SILENCED BY MAYOR SIDHU:
There’s another meeting tonight, if you wanna speak you gotta go to Council chambers, sign up out front, wait out front, and speak from a mike in the lobby. (That mike wasn’t working Jan 26, so they let us go into Chambers.)