"House of Lies" - McCullough's Record

Yesterday we looked at Council woman McCullough’s past reaction to the revelation that some of the things she says do not have a basis in reality. Today we’ll go through some specifics. Some of these have been covered previously, but it’s revealing to bring them together in one place.

SAFEST CITY

Along with Scott Voigts and others, McCullough was fond of saying that Lake Forest “is one of the safest cities in the U.S.” This is, of course, nonsense. There are hundreds of cities in the U.S. with lower crime rates than Lake Forest. In fact, right here in Orange County, for the past 3 years, when you compare our crime rate with those of our 10 neighbors, we consistently show up with higher crime rates than almost all of our neighbors. We are not even one of the safest cities in Orange County, much less the U.S.  Click here for the latest statistics  These are the true statistics. What Mrs. McCullough has claimed over the years is a lie. Perhaps to be fair to her, it’s merely a half lie instead of a bald faced lie. It turns out, when Lake Forest is compared to the 400+ largest cities in the U.S. we come out very well. That’s because at 80,000 people we are one of the smallest “large cities” in the U.S., so almost all the cities we are compared with on the list of 400 are larger than we are, and there is a high positive correlation between city size and crime rate. Had Mrs. McCullough wanted to be truthful, she could have chosen a better way to express the result, but the bottom line is that we are not one of the safest 20,000+ cities in the U.S., and this has been explained to her several times. Her choice to repeat this lie, or distorted truth, or half lie, flies in the face of reality, although it makes for a good sound bite when you run for re-election.

GRAND JURY REPORT

In early 2013 during a discussion of website transparency Mrs. McCullough claimed that the City had received “flying colors” and we had a “raving report” for transparency by the Grand Jury. In reality it turns out that Lake Forest was rated “A” (excellent) for accessibility (i.e., you could find our webpage), but “C” (average) for Executive Page Content and Clarity and “D” (poor) for Employee Content and Clarity. Now I don’t know about your family, but in my family, getting a “C” and a “D” for two of the three major components in a report is not what we call “flying colors”. In fact, when compared to our 11 neighboring cities, Lake Forest came in 9th. Only two cities (Laguna Niguel, Mission Viejo) did worse than we did.

Of course, maybe Mrs. McCullough wasn’t lying. Maybe she has a poor memory. Or maybe her standards are so low than an A, C, and D are something to “rave” about. But whether it’s a lie, a bad memory, or very low standards, it should be an issue of concern to voters.

CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTIONS

In mid-2013, in the middle of a discussion of term limits, Mrs. McCullough claimed that in her long career she never spent more than $27,000 cumulatively - that's the amount former Councilman Peter Herzog spent in 2010 alone. McCullough was trying to say that in her whole career, she never spent as much as Herzog did in a single election. The truth is that from 1994 to 2012, McCullough spent more than $30,000, and that figure is qualified because some data is missing due to poor reporting on behalf of Mrs. McCullough.

McCullough also claimed that the people who gave her money were her family "and a few little friends." Here's a sample –

• $1,000 from Farino Construction

• $1,000 from Faubel Public Affairs

• $1,000 from Waste Management

Does that sound like "little friends" to you?

Not only was McCullough lying about these contributions coming from “little friends”, you’ll recall her earlier (and oft repeated) claim that she didn’t take money from “vested interests”. Of the $30,000+ McCullough’s campaign committee pocketed, about half was from businesses or people who came before the Council asking for favors, which she granted with her vote. In fact, the first 3 of these “little friends” listed above are companies that had contracts with the City, and the fourth is a company that benefited from a vote from the Council which tried to prevent day laborers from gathering outside his business. In other words, McCullough is as guilty as Voigts and/or Robinson in her acceptance of money from businesses that have issues before the Council. This type of behavior is specifically forbidden by the City’s code of ethics.

SOCIAL RELATIONSHIPS

Mrs. McCullough’s BFF is Marcia Rudolph, and together they spent two decades on the City Council. So when Rudolph was ignominiously voted out of office in 2012, McCullough was anxious to see her get back in, and with the resignation of Peter Herzog, a window opened. But McCullough knew that the only vote Rudolph would get was her own vote, so Rudolph had no chance of being appointed to the Council. Thus, McCullough refrained from voting for Rudolph and then proceeded to vote during several preliminary rounds for Terry Anderson. Somewhere in the middle of the chaos that passed for Parliamentary process that night, McCullough got frustrated and then angry, and confessed that her votes for Terry Anderson had not been honest or sincere, and she only voted for him because she thought no one else would. It wasn’t clear why she would waste her vote on someone whom she believed nobody else would vote for, but whatever the twisted logic, she admitted her deception and for the rest of the meeting, simply refrained from voting.

Mrs. Rudolph then appeared again in an attempt to get appointed to the vacant seat on the Planning Commission, and Mrs. McCullough once again claimed she wouldn’t vote for her BFF (again, knowing there was no support for her from the others), but in the process, she made a statement that everything people needed to know to satisfy their inquiries about the City’s code of ethics could be found on the FPPC 460 forms filed with the City Clerk. Of course that’s not true. The City’s code of ethics refers to “social and financial relationships” and there is nothing on the FPPC forms that addresses social relationships. Thus, if C.J. Brower works for Scott Voigts and helps him in his campaign, and then Voigts votes for him as a Planning Commissioner, you won’t find that information in the 460s because the 460s only list financial contributions, not social relationships. If David Bass votes for Tom Ludden to be a Planning Commissioner, and they’ve been friends for 15 years, that doesn’t show up on an FPPC form.

Even if the financial relationship is listed, it’s often difficult to connect the dots. Just because Valley Building Materials gave $2000 to Mrs. McCullough, you’d have to do your homework to figure out that Valley had been lobbying for an ordinance to prohibit day laborers from soliciting work on the streets adjacent to their business, and McCullough supported the ordinance. McCullough’s claim that having the Form 460 in front of you was all you needed to know is not only a lie, it’s a self-serving lie. (BTW – can you guess which other Council member supported McCullough in this assertion? If you guess Scott Voigts, the first occupant of the “House of Lies”, you’d be correct).

At the last City Council meeting, Councilman Nick, who never took any money from vested interests, used the comment portion of the meeting to ask his fellow members to support his call for a code of ethics “with teeth” and before he could finish his sentence, McCullough burst in claiming once again that everything is hunky dory. Annoyed at her breach of etiquette and parliamentary procedure (something McCullough does frequently), Nick cut her off. But the plain fact is that the City’s code of ethics has no teeth, which is why McCullough, Voigts, and Robinson are literally free to do anything they want. Yes, there is a code. But, no there is no procedure for identifying violations or for adjudicating the issue, and certainly there is no list of possible consequences.

Tomorrow we’ll summarize.