I’ve been saying it for a year, but now that it’s in the LA Times people are finally taking it seriously: Consultant/lobbyist Jeff Flint, the mastermind of the Sidhu/Ament “Cabal” of 2018-22, is back in Anaheim, pulling strings behind the scenes again as he loves to do. Probably has been for the last COUPLE of years.

But before we get into the activities of this greedy leprechaun, let’s first discuss:

“The Pot of Gold At the End of Anaheim’s Rainbow.”

Anaheim’s leaders call this money the “LPMR” (“Lease Payment Measurement Revenues”) funds. Over $120 million a year “freed up,” and added to our general fund, in 2027. “Patience,” they’ve been telling us for many years, “just think of the things we’ll be able to afford when the LPMR funds are freed up. A senior center! More than just one public swimming pool! Legal assistance for the wrongly evicted! More public transportation! More cops if that’s your cup of tea! Unicorns if you prefer! Just as soon as those funds are FREED UP in 2027.”

Wait – “freed up?” What are these funds “freed up” from? Oh, that is a good one. As long as Disneyland has been here, we’ve been ruled by politicians who will bend over backward AND jump as high as Disney wants. And in the 1990’s, when Disney-loving Tom Daly was our Mayor, he somehow got us to take out a half-billion-dollar bond to help out Disneyland with infrastructure improvements, and especially building and gifting them the huge “Mickey & Friends” Garage. (Apparently Disney threatened to not build California Adventure if we didn’t do that for them or something!)

And we’ve been paying off that bond ever since. For 30 years now; we’ll finally be done next year. For 30 years most of the money we SHOULD have been getting from Disney has gone directly into repaying the bond we took out to help them. And for 30 years we’ve been living like a poor town while hosting a multinational business that makes $18 MILLION A DAY here. But just wait – next year, all that revenue will finally be “freed up” and ours to do WHATEVER WE WANT with.

Well… spoiler alert, that money is not actually coming, it’s almost all spent or answered for already. But we’ll get to that, let’s first return to our anti-hero…

Flint, the Cabal, the “Retreat,” and the Pot of Gold!

For students of Anaheim corruption, the FBI affidavit/transcripts of ’22 are like the Old Testament, and the taxpayer-funded JL corruption report of ’23 (which I’ll keep reminding you, Natalie Rubalcava tried hard to stop or limit) is the New Testament. It’s clear as day from the FBI transcripts of tapped phone calls that is was JEFF FLINT running everything in those years, telling Todd Ament and Mayor Sidhu what to do – Jeff was the Alpha Dog, Todd & Harry were the Patsies. (They ended up in trouble and Jeff didn’t – a testament to his slickness!)

We learned from the FBI that Jeff and Todd, with smartass audacity, called THEMSELVES “the CABAL” – we didn’t make that up! Jeff, the micromanager from Hell, scripted every word Sidhu said or “wrote” as Mayor (and lazy Harry would never rehearse and would stumble over unfamiliar words when he read Jeff’s scripts on the dais.) Playing both sides in the Angel Stadium negotiations, telling our Council and staff what to do and say while being paid as a “consultant” by team owner Arte Moreno, Jeff even organized a “mock council meeting” rehearsing, with our elected reps, how they could could most smoothly give away the stadium to Arte at a bargain basement price without risking a riot.

But we could go on and on about the dirty deeds of the Flint/Ament/Sidhu Cabal. In this piece I want to focus on the “RETREAT” Flint organized and led, for select councilmen and staff, at the Marriot in December 2020. Because that was ALL about keeping control of the “Pot of Gold,” the $120 million in “freed up” LPMR revenue expected in 2027.

We learned of the secret “retreat” from the FBI transcripts of wiretapped calls between Flint and Ament, and it was very special to get to hear their cynical banter about the various Councilmen – which ones they should bring to their “retreat,” which ones they could most trust to be both discreet and obedient. They eventually went with the three they knew best – Sidhu, Steve Faessel and Trevor O’Neil, whom they referred to as “family.”

But we didn’t know what the topic of this retreat was till the JL Report came out a year later (the JL Report that Natalie tried to limit and suppress.) And the topic of the retreat was that “Pot of Gold,” the $120 million a year in freed-up revenue expected in 2027. Flint and his Cabal (believing they’d be in charge forever) wanted to make SURE they kept control of those funds, and not let them get spent on the populist dreams of Councilmembers like Jose Moreno. So at the retreat the Cabal resolved to divide up those funds three ways: A third for Debt Relief (can’t be helped), and a THIRD EACH to two entities Flint and Ament could control and disburse: the Chamber and their now-defunct astroturf group “Anaheim First.” And there at the Marriot they hatched plans to etch this framework into stone. (See JL Report p. 65-69)

But the FBI had other plans…

Exile and Return

Sidhu and Ament ended up BUSTED for other stupid shit, not even for the worst of what they-all did (shades of Al Capone and tax evasion.) Sidhu spent some time in prison, and Ament is still fighting off his prison sentence in court. Nothing happened to Flint – maybe he was slick enough to not actually crime, or more likely he rolled over on his two buddies. But his name was mud; he was discredited, everyone knew he was an “unindicted co-conspirator.” So he quietly folded his “FSB Core Strategies” firm, sold his San Clemente mansion and headed off to Tennessee (for some reason? Maybe that’s where he came from?)

But only for a couple of years! In 2024 word got around – Jeff Flint is back in Anaheim, and working as the political consultant for the Police Union! (APA) This time, with a big grudge against his old friends at Disney! His opening shot was the weird, failed, ’24 Council candidacy of former cop Andrew Sarega (who got his clock cleaned by Disney’s Kristen Maahs.) Then last year he got Natalie Rubalcava to bring forward a half-baked, unserious iteration of the Gate Tax – if you go back and hear the cop-union speeches from that night, Jeff wrote them every one!

But the astounding and unaffordable raise he got for Anaheim’s cops this month is not something we can laugh at! No. This will sting for a long time. We will have to tighten our belts, you and I.

Taking Sidhu’s and Ament’s place in Jeff Flint’s NEW cabal are Jeff’s old loyal lobbyist friend Todd Priest, and cop union president Jose Duran, whose close relationship to Councilwoman Rubalcava has tongues wagging (but not mine.)

But we digress.

The Pot of Gold is… GONE!

Nope. No more “windfall” of $120 million “freed up” LPMR funds. Where’d it all go? We had such plans for it!

Well… we’ve known for a few months that HALF of it will be used to cover our budget deficit that already exists. I thought – I coulda sworn – that something Natalie Rubalcava boasts of while running for re-election is “balancing the budget?” So that’s $60 million gone, we should have $60 million left?

Not so fast, compadre! On October 13, the Council unanimously, SILENTLY, spent $45 million of that on a mammoth 17% raise for the police. Literally, silently – they hid it in the consent calendar which most people don’t bother looking at, NOT ONE COUNCILMEMBER “pulled it” for discussion, and presto! – there went another $45 million of our LPMR “windfall.” A masterstroke of cop union lobbyist Jeff Flint, tying in our story in a neat bow. He’s been obsessed for years with controlling the Pot of Gold, well he got his hands on 3/8 of it so far!

So that leaves… an extra $15 million for the people of Anaheim next year, at least?

Not so fast, kemosabe! As Hosam explains in his really-good piece here, “officials note in the budget their projections don’t take into account increasing labor costs or potential recessions – noting contracts … for the fire and municipal employee unions expiring next year…

“The Five-Year Forecast does not include any salary adjustments that may be considered for labor contracts that have either expired, are due to expire, or are under negotiation, nor does it include any future adjustments that may be considered as a result of the Citywide classification and compensation study. The forecast also does not contemplate a recession or change in economic conditions,” reads the budget. 

So that’s it then. For thirty years we paid off a bond to help Disney expand and profit, and we don’t even have a t-shirt to show for it.

Fix the Lobbyist Loophole?

A big part of the Ashleigh Council’s ballyhooed 2023 “Fall of Reform” was (supposedly) strengthening our lobbyist registration ordinance – requiring lobbyists to register – but on closer examination, one big exception was added that year, an exception that not only WEAKENS the ordinance any way you look at it, but also seems tailor-made for someone like Jeff Flint to drive a truck through it, I give you (page 5, .100, “Applicability”) –

“The provisions of this section shall not apply…

“7. to labor negotiators who are engaged in contract negotiations with the City regarding a collective bargaining agreement for City employees.”

Well, there you have it. There’s no good reason for that exception, but as long as it’s there, Jeff Flint, lobbyist extraordinaire who ran our city from behind the scenes for six long years, can lobby for anything to his heart’s content without registering because he is also the lobbyist for the cop union. This is a loophole that could either be explained, or closed up, by our Council, if they were not a collection of Deer in Headlights led by a Mad Alcoholic Princess:

But We Digress.

What can WE do, you and I, so close to Election Day, with a Council who won’t do shit? What can WE do, we who were so disgusted by the corruption uncovered in ’22 and rushed to re-elect a new squeaky-clean Ashleigh-Natalie council that promised to be different, but kept on the same guilty STAFF and now has the same puppetmasters behind the scene, as in the dark Sidhu years? Well, I don’t know about the rest of the city, but in Central Anaheim you can certainly:

VOTE ELIA in district 3!

Natalie Rubalcava with her biggest supporters – the Police Union (APA. Duran 2nd from left.)

Jeff Flint and the Anaheim Police Association have put $90,000 SO FAR into keeping Natalie Rubalcava on Council, and defeating Elia. And Natalie has a solid 100% track record of doing exactly what the cop union wants, and what Jeff Flint says.

That’s the same Natalie that I keep reminding you tried to squelch or severely limit the JL Report, without which there is SO much we wouldn’t know about Flint-era Anaheim corruption! (And how the crooked leprechaun Jeff Flint has always been after our Pot of Gold!)

Police unions want two things – more and more money – CHECK! And less and less accountability. Hence Natalie’s hostility to the Arzola family as they try to get justice and the truth for slain 19-year old Albert; Natalie celebrated Albert’s killer Nathan Garcia on her social media, and recently she lost her temper and blurted out from the dais that “Albert had a gun” – something that’s never been claimed – Albert was unarmed.

The police union IS NOT the Police themselves – there are police who support Elia too because of her 20 years of work with public safety – for example, former Chief Rick Armendariz (left) who was at Elia’s meet and greet in Jose Moreno’s back yard (I’ll be interviewing him soon.) Not all cops agree with the police union, and what the police union wants is probably NOT what’s best for the community.

Natalie says you should vote for her because she launched a “first-time homebuyer” program – but it turns out THAT has only helped ONE family so far (and by UNBELIEVABLE coincidence Natalie ended up knocking on that family’s door while canvassing!)

Natalie ALSO says that you should vote for her because, after promising this for years, RIGHT BEFORE THE ELECTION she finally arranged to have the City help with protecting tenants from lawbreaking landlords. That also seems to be a nothingburger – there are now forms online a tenant can fill out, get a little advice, probably get the number to the understaffed underfunded Public Law Center JUST LIKE BEFORE.

Elia, on the other hand, pledges to fight for RENT CONTROL.

I could go on and on, and will probably add to this, but Election Day is 2 days away, and if you live in District 3 and care about making a new Anaheim that’s not ruled behind the scenes by crooks and wealthy special interests, who blow our Pot of Gold before we ever see it, YOU’RE GONNA WANT TO VOTE FOR ELIA.