“I had a dream…”

Yeah, we thought so.

Anaheim and the people of Anaheim need a Gate Tax (or a Tourism Tax, that may actually be a better term), but it’s never coming from this Disney-dominated Council. Shot down six-to-one by the Disney-puppet majority, the Natalie Rubalcava proposal also had some flaws in it that were not addressed – it should have exempted Anaheim residents, it should have applied to more entertainment venues than just Disney, and shouldn’t have carved out the Honda Center. More problematic, it was driven by the Police Union (APA) and their new svengali, Cabal-master Jeff Flint, who were clearly plotting to reap most of the benefits.

Yes, Anaheim is in a time of re-alignment (though you wouldn’t know it from watching this Council.) With the “leadership” of Ament’s Chamber gone, the town’s second-biggest special interest (APA) has turned against the biggest (Disney), egged on from the shadows by the guy who ran Sidhu and Ament, plotted the Cabal Retreats, skipped clear of the law, and is back in town and BITTER. A time of re-alignment, when Godzilla turns against King Kong, COULD be an opportunity to sneak through something good for the people, if the people were awake, but that’s another story.

What were they thinking anyway, Flint, the APA, Natalie? Was last Tuesday just a show? They had to have known it’d turn out this way:

As longtime readers know, Anaheim residents have been trying to get a Gate Tourism Tax here since 1960, and it’s always been shot down by Disney for bogus reasons. EVERY OTHER COMPARABLE TOWN that depends on tourist attractions has a tourism tax, and with the billions that flow through Anaheim we should NOT have a deficit and a shortage of so many things the people need.

On Tuesday Oct 28, Councilwoman Natalie Rubalcava (NatR) proposed a 3% tourism tax paired with a 10% private-parking tax (for the big Disney lots etc.) It woulda needed FIVE votes from the dais (of which it only had one) to put it on the ballot for the people of Anaheim to approve in next year’s general election. “Let the People Vote!” we cried out to no avail.

At Tuesday’s meeting, ten speakers all from Disney-dependent unions and hotels came and gave the same old tired arguments against it. (ELEVEN against if you count Duane Roberts who opposed it because of the APA’s involvement.) Meanwhile FIFTEEN of us spoke FOR it – five from the Police Union, and ten of us progressives (although with conditions and trepidation.) So let’s rip up one thing at a time here, starting with the…

Cries of the Disney Dwarfs

This week the website “Inside the Magic” reported on this meeting under the headline “Political Muscle: Disney Flexes and Anaheim Backs Down.” Funny, none of us SAW Disney “flex.” What we saw was 16 non-cast-members eagerly carrying Disney’s water – ten union hacks and hoteliers dependent on Disney for their well-being, and six Disney-funded councilmembers steeped in the Gospel of Burbank and unquestioning, instructions all digested.

The problem for these 16 Disney shills is that their main arguments are 65 years old, totally divorced from reality, and widely laughed at by the public. Those being these:

• 1. “If folks from across the nation and world have to pay an extra 3 or 4 dollars on their $200 ticket, they’ll just decide not to come. And Disney will suffer. And Anaheim will go belly up.” When Disney told that story in 1960, their tickets were $3.75. And they’ve raised them every year since – over the past 10 years, by 114%! They now cost from $104 to $224. It is said that they raise their prices JUST IN ORDER TO KEEP THE CROWD SIZES DOWN. And we’re supposed to fret that folks will stop coming because of a couple extra dollars going to the host city? Give us a fucking break! People everywhere are ADDICTED to the happy shit this place peddles – very few of us are immune. (Us spoilsport misanthropes I suppose.) And relatedly:

• 2. With a Gate Tax we would be punishing our Golden Goose, without whom “we would be Stanton.” Punishing them how? We’ve already established the tourists aren’t gonna stop coming over a modest Gate Tax. (And yes, someone on the dais did say “We would be Stanton.” Stanton! Last I checked, Stanton is where classy people go to get their cannabis. Of course Disney has kept legal cannabis out of this town, to keep us more dependent on Disney. But I digress, threefold.)

SOME of these Disney flacks, conscious of their arguments’ manifest idiocy, attempted to improvise variations. For example Danny Fierro (left), the campaign dirty trickster now with the OC Hotel & Lodging Association, after reading his prepared remarks, gave a shot at extemporizing his own bright ideas: MAYBE a few extra dollars wouldn’t cause a family of tourists to forego the Magic Kingdom experience, BUT they would then sit and consult their balance sheets and decide not to retire to an Anaheim hotel but Garden Grove instead, thus robbing us of vital hotel “TOT” taxes. Sorry, Danny, that was as unconvincing as your prepared remarks. (2:54)

Hell hath no fury like what the OC Business Council (largest member Disney) showers upon its APOSTATE, Natalie Rubalcava. Our county’s official Temple of Trickle-Down Theory, where Natalie was C.O.O. a few short years ago till she became Councilwoman, sent their VP of Governmental Affairs Amanda Walsh to read Natalie the Riot Act over her Gate Tax Heresy. It was the same old BS, but entertaining because Amanda kept losing her temper, not only at Natalie but at some mysterious heckler that nobody else could hear. (3:27)

Let’s pan over to the Disney servants on the City Council, and watch THEM try to come up with good arguments against a gate tax. Norma Kurtz, elected with about 400k from Disney, started by suggesting our $72 million structural deficit isn’t serious enough to justify new revenue. My own councilwoman Kristen Maahs, (also funded by about 400k by Disney) began like a good representative by relaying my main concerns (Anaheim residents should be exempt, Honda Center should be included) before joining the worried chorus of how badly a Gate Tax would hurt our benefactors.

A NEW worry sprouted up from the mind of Natalie Meeks ($537k) – the Disney Corp., whether in retribution or showing “good business sense,” could STOP INVESTING in their Anaheim theme parks and invest elsewhere instead! What? And why? Why “stop investing” if we agree their attendance won’t be affected which it won’t? Why “stop investing” right after they’ve signed that $2 Billion investment known as “Disneyland Forward”? And why choose to invest elsewhere instead of here, when EVERY OTHER PLACE ALSO HAS A DAMN GATE TAX?

And a Red Herring most irrelevant: Soon all four Disney councilwomen were all “diversification, diversification, diversify.” We don’t want a gate tax, we want DIVERSIFICATION! As though the two things were contradictory, as though they ruled each other out. Apparently the word diversification is code for “attracting new businesses to the CANYON“, something that as Natalie says they’ve all been trying to achieve for years. But soon even Mayor Ashleigh was all “Not a gate tax, diversification instead!” Life tip: You don’t say “I don’t need a car, I want a PONY.” You say, “I need a car, and I would ALSO like a pony.”

Ashleigh was also concerned about the City not living up to its agreements with Disney and becoming known as an untrustworthy negotiator. HERE she had a point. Last year’s Disneyland Forward agreement allowed for entrance taxes ONLY IF they were a CITYWIDE tax, and this tax of Natalie’s, applying only to venues of 20k capacity, picked exclusively on the Disney parks. And Natalie never gave a persuasive reason why she wouldn’t take the threshold down to 10k so it’d include the Honda Center.

Natalie really did seem surprised and bitter at Ashleigh’s Register piece against her proposal; I was invited to write a rebuttal but it probably wouldn’t be relevant any more. I just have to point out that Matt Cunningham, who was paid to propagandize for Disney on his “Anaheim Observer” by Todd Ament since 2012, quickly re-posted Ashleigh’s piece the morning of the vote. Like he did with every ghostwritten piece of propaganda Harry Sidhu “wrote.” The more things change… [MUSICAL BREAK]

“All the same, we take our chances
Laughed at by time, Tricked by circumstances;
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose –
The more that things change, The more they stay the same.”

Lest we forget – Councilman Ryan Balius, who inherited the genius seat once held by Jose Diaz, announced that he was going to try a different approach, asking Finance Director Debbie Moreno: “How much gate tax would we get from Disney if Disneyland closed down?” And Moreno (currently in the news for firing a whistleblower accusing her of incompetence) took nearly a full minute figuring out the answer: “Councilman, the answer would be ZERO.” Seriously. (Later Natalie mocked the idea that Disneyland would move, and to be fair Ryan clarified that he was thinking of what if there was another pandemic. And MUCH later, Ryan got in his last jab by agendizing an item looking at how much staff time is wasted studying frivolous single-Councilmember fantasies.)

Gatekeepers Against Democracy.

It’s a familiar sight in Anaheim, the people wanting to be able to vote on something popular and the Council, knowing better, not letting them. “Let the People Vote!” was literally the name of a Tait-Galloway initiative back in 2012, to put luxury hotel subsidies to the popular vote, and back then it was Harry Sidhu, Kris Murray & Gail Eastman protecting us from ourselves.

Then for four years various councils wouldn’t “let the people vote” on whether we could have district elections – Sidhu, Murray, Eastman, & Lucille Kring all held the line on that, until finally losing in court after which the people voted in the reform by a resounding 70%.

Now it’s Aitken, Meeks, Campos-Kurtz, Balius, Leon & Maahs not LETTING THE PEOPLE VOTE. On something that every tourist town has, that wouldn’t hurt business at all, and that apparently POLLS REALLY WELL. But our Council, like previous Anaheim Councils, knows better than the people.

Let me remind you WHY we need a five-vote supermajority to put a Gate Tax on the ballot: 2016’s Measure U, pushed & passed by Cabal members Murray, Kring and Brandman PRECISELY to make it hard for future Councils to put a Gate Tax on the ballot. Mayor Tait, no lover of taxes but a responsible leader, opposed Measure U because he didn’t want to tie future Councils’ hands if they decided some day that the revenue was necessary. The ghosts of Murray, Kring and Brandman live on, protecting Disney’s greed from us unruly masses. But Disney never had to worry about the Aitken Council!

Gatekeepers Against Democracy. Not a good look.

*****************

All of that being said, here’s…

PART TWO: “On the other hand…”

Good stuff here, listen:

Well said. That was Gabby Sutter, Executive Director of Anaheim’s police union (followed by Breana Castro, also from the union.) Telling the story of how the agreements in the 90’s between Daly’s Anaheim and Disney led to record Disney profits but only minimal TOT/sales taxes going to the city’s coffers. I hope you listened, I don’t feel like typing it out, but I may steal some of it in the future. (These two speeches were probably written by Jeff Flint, but they are good and true.)

Problem is, that was Gabby Sutter, Executive Director of Anaheim’s police union, and it was the police union that BROUGHT this Gate Tax to the Council (along with Natalie.) And the police clearly want the lion’s share of this Gate Tax revenue for themselves. I would say NO. Since time immemorial, nearly half our budget goes to the police. That’s over $213 million this year.

Ten percent of our spending on police this year is on OVERTIME. $21 million a year on police overtime. Much of that seems to go to the upper brass, attending things that don’t really seem necessary at such a cost. For example, Jose Duran, the president of the union who spoke Oct 28 on the need for a Gate Tax, pulled in over half a million last year, 1/4 of that in overtime:

Police departments are huge ravenous beasts that always want more. They can always use more military hardware and surveillance programs now that you mention it. And our APD adds, quietly but firmly, that it needs a $350 million Taj Mahal for a new police station.

More than a 1/3 of a billion this station will cost! What will it look like, where will it be? We can only guess, but it’s clear that they need the revenue from a Gate Tax to make such dreams possible!

***************************

The Curse of Jeff Flint.

If the APA was the driving force behind this Gate Tax, Jeff Flint was the mastermind who put them up to it (and wrote all their actually very good speeches.) I’ve been fighting this Flint character for 17 years, and he pretty much ran this town since 2018 when his former partner Curt Pringle moved away. But we only need to go back to the corruption scandals of 21-22, read the FBI affidavits and the JL Report, to see that it was Jeff Flint who was telling Sidhu and Ament what to do, and only the latter two who got into trouble… because, we can only guess, Flint was the first to roll over.

Smooth Flint stayed out of legal trouble but the stench of disgrace stayed on him to this day. He sold his place in San Clemente, moved to Tennessee for a while and then possibly Sacramento, and now he’s back in the OC, possibly in Newport where he and his loyal friend Todd Priest are helping push STR’s. No longer a lobbyist or someone an image-conscious company like Disney wants to be seen with, he’s become the “strategic consultant” to Anaheim’s police union, APA, with whom he now shares a beef with the Disney establishment.

We first saw this last year in the bizarre candidacy of unhinged carpetbagger Andrew Sarega in District 5, which focused on the need for more police funding and the corruption of Disney and the establishment (which Flint would sure know about firsthand.) District 5 voters looked at this Sarega character, scratched their heads, and chose the Disney-backed Maahs. Me too. First time voting for a Disney-backed candidate!

Then last August a puzzling text survey came out gauging support for a Gate Tax – the first time one had been mentioned in a few years! – and it was mixed with odd police-related questions, whether they should be given more money, and obscure questions about how disputes between Disney and the police should be resolved. We all sort of wondered where this survey came from, and recently Duane Roberts researched and determined it was from the APA, and was a trial balloon for this latest “Tourism Tax” attempt.

Knowing Flint and the APA were behind this certainly gives us mixed feelings in retrospect – did we “dodge a bullet” with this measure failing, or is this just “sour grapes?” I need only remind you of Flint’s SECRET “RETREAT” of 2021, revealed by the FBI and JL – a secret gathering of trusted politicians and staff with the sole purpose of divvying up expected revenue to make sure it didn’t fall into the hands of any popularly elected councilmembers, and get wasted on things we actually need.

That is what Flint does. And it woulda been a real challenge to pry any Gate Tax revenue from THIS cat. And probably another Flint failure will be a good thing for everybody, maybe even the APA will part ways with him.

The Rubalcava Enigma

So, why did this happen? Did Natalie really think this was gonna succeed, or did this play out as planned? When she was running, the then-OCBC chief told me she’d never support a Gate Tax, yet here we are three years later and she’s sounding like her old nemesis Jose Moreno. Did she have a total change of heart after 3 years of seeing how the government works up close? Is this to look good and independent in her re-election next year and fend off a progressive challenger? If she did this just to please her APA supporters, why choose them over her much more generous supporter Disney?

Natalie campaigning with APA – pic from Anaheim Investigator

1

It was a true story when she told how she first decided to propose the 10% private parking tax, and it had nothing to do with any cops. Angry like so many of us Anaheim people that we’re STILL paying off a bond from the 90’s to build Disney’s Mickey and Friends Garage, from which Disney makes $70-90 million a year while we get nothing, Natalie took the opportunity at Disneyland Forward hearings last year to ask then-CEO Ken Potrock if they’d consider sharing some of that revenue with the city through some sort of “assessment.” Potrock ignored her as you would a nagging wife, and in Natalie’s head the parking tax was born. It’s true – I remember that!

2

I never understood Natalie’s visceral irrational hatred of her district 3 predecessor Jose Moreno, a hate so strong she cannot even speak his dirty name, so I’d been wondering how she’d deal with now being in many ways the new Jose Moreno, Gate Tax crusader? On October 28 she explained the difference, or tried to:

“The person who sat in my seat, possibly, back a couple years ago, maybe had different intentions behind a tax like this – it was probably to HARM our largest employer, but that’s not the intention behind THIS…”

OH brother. Jose’s attempts to get a TWO percent Gate Tax were intended to be harmful to Disney, NOT LIKE Natalie’s proposed THREE percent tax. Whatever, LOL, moving on…

3

Finally, Natalie was sincerely taken aback at both Ashleigh’s attack in the Register and her own failure to get even one vote from her colleagues. Because, as she told me the day before, “EVERYBODY I talk to in the public wants this Gate Tax, once they understand it.” And she’d probably also had the results of the August APA survey shared with her, showing the idea’s popularity.

Well, WELCOME TO OUR WORLD, Natalie. The Anaheim where no matter how popular and sensible an idea is, the Council will either ignore you or act like you’re crazy. That’s our Anaheim. DON’T FORGET ABOUT US NOW!

Finally…

What SHOULD happen.

Hey, read this part and you’ll be smarter then some of our councilmen, ones I won’t embarrass here, who had to have this explained to them Oct. 28, and probably will again:

• 1. If a tax is voted on by the people, it only needs a majority IF the revenue goes to the general fund, and “what the revenue will be spent on” is kept a vague suggestion as it was here. It can’t be for a SPECIFIED purpose.

• 2. If the revenue coming from a tax is for a specific purpose – for example, if it’s specified that it will go to fund public pools, a senior center, affordable housing, a couple attorneys to enforce the Tenant Protection Act, and NOT to be drained away by police and fire and debt – then it would be what’s called “a SPECIAL TAX,” and would need a TWO-THIRDS VOTE from the public, a high bar to clear.

Remember just a few years ago when there used to be nonprofits like OCCORD, OCCCO, unions like UNITE-HERE, even a Democratic Party of Orange County that helped get great reforms for the people of Anaheim like District Elections and Measure L? Whatever happened to them?

It would sure be great if those organizations were still around, and took an interest in either the Gate Tax or Rent Control or both, wouldn’t it? Ah, the fanciful dreams of a November afternoon…

The Democratic Party of Orange County. All they care about now is electing politicians with a “D” next to their names, who cares if they vote just like Republicans. Look at the Anaheim Council – five Democrats, hell of a lot of difference that makes.

“My grandma used to say, pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered.”
– Ashleigh Aitken

“The hogs aren’t getting slaughtered, they’re thriving, but not Anaheim’s people.”
– Natalie Rubalcava

“It’s TIME, ANAHEIM!”
– Jose Moreno

Vern out.