{"id":159945,"date":"2026-02-02T06:37:11","date_gmt":"2026-02-02T06:37:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/159945\/"},"modified":"2026-02-02T06:37:11","modified_gmt":"2026-02-02T06:37:11","slug":"anaheim-city-manager-james-vanderpool-driven-out-of-office-by-ragtag-militia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/159945\/","title":{"rendered":"Anaheim City Manager James Vanderpool driven out of office by \u201cRagtag Militia.\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I gotta take issue with Mayor Ashleigh on this: She finds it outrageous that the public heard about the closed session vote last Tuesday that temporarily saved James Vanderpool\u2019s bacon. She called it \u201ccorruption,\u201d saying \u201cyou see what kind of corruption I have to deal with?\u201d If leaks are \u201ccorruption\u201d then I do not think the word \u201ccorruption\u201d means what she thinks it means. Anaheim City Hall is indeed full of leaks, and it\u2019s generally a good thing \u2013 it\u2019s not like it\u2019s national security or something, it\u2019s the people\u2019s business in the OC\u2019s biggest town. <\/p>\n

And our favorite leakers in Anaheim City Hall are now telling us that the upcoming staff resignation posted in the agenda for THIS Tuesday\u2019s meeting<\/a> is indeed that of City Manager Vanderpool. And they tell us that his office upstairs, his office of five and a half years, is all but cleared out. And word is that some \u201cragtag militia\u201d drove Jim out \u2013 I guess by that they mean my friends and I, who used to be known as the \u201cgadflies,\u201d or \u201ccorruption fighters,\u201d or \u201cthe Clean Up Anaheim Coalition.\u201d Ragtag Militia will do just fine though.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

But wait a second, I am WAY over my skis. If we are going to write, and read, a story about Vanderpool, who was famously dubbed a \u201cchameleon\u201d by a department head for his useful flexibility under any sort of political leadership, we need to hear that great Herbie Hancock jam. Just click play and keep reading, it is really good background music for this purpose:<\/p>\n

\n

As the walls began to close in for Jim just before last Christmas \u2013 unexplained eruptions of incriminating documents from Todd Ament\u2019s old computer fueling bombshell stories in the Times and Voice, implacable opposition from both the Mayor and the Ragtag Militia, a whistleblower who wouldn\u2019t stop<\/a> \u2013 he lamented by e-mail<\/a> of \u201csignificant mischaracterizations and misrepresentations of events dating back more than five years now.\u201d Receiving a response of \u201c100% support\u201d from the most Cabal-connected of the Council, Natalie Meeks, Jim replied to Meeks<\/a>, <\/p>\n

\u201cThank you, Natalie. Really means a lot. I can\u2019t believe the story is going to surface five years later. Ridiculous.
I\u2019m very concerned that certain people are trying to sabotage any Angels deal.
It won\u2019t stop me!\u201d<\/p>\n

Huh? That \u201csabotaged Angels deal\u201d raised eyebrows \u2013 what Angels deal now? But first, let\u2019s go back and revisit that time five-and-a-half years ago, when Jim first became our city manager, and see what ghosts from 2020 are bedeviling him. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Jim Vanderpool did not just flop out of the pool of Buena Park onto Anaheim shores like some evolving fish \u2013 he was the specific choice of Jeff Flint (right) and if you don\u2019t know who Jeff Flint is, then you really need to. There was probably nobody with more power than him in Anaheim between 2018 and the May 2022 scandals when he fled \u2013 especially once his puppet Harry Sidhu became Mayor at the end of 2018. <\/p>\n

Lobbying prolifically as \u201cFSB Core Strategies\u201d with an office adjoining that of Todd Ament\u2019s Chamber of Commerce and the tourist agency Visit Anaheim, Flint also managed most of the big PACs that got councilmembers and mayors elected, and by the Sidhu years he completely controlled 5 of 7 councilmembers. He and Ament cutely referred to themselves as \u201cThe Cabal,\u201d and their most loyal, trusted politicians they called \u201cThe Family.\u201d We know of at least two \u201cretreats\u201d they conducted, where they\u2019d lay out strategies to their trusted politicians and city staff. <\/p>\n

The Cabal\u2019s biggest project in 2019-20 was the Stadium Heist \u2013 their plot to unload the Angel Stadium and all the valuable land surrounding it, at a bargain basement price, to billionaire team owner Arte Moreno. Anaheim\u2019s most VALUABLE public property. Flint was actually a PAID CONSULTANT for the Angels\u2026 WHILE he was giving orders to the Council majority and staff. No wonder it was such a shit deal for us Anaheim taxpayers, and we\u2019re very lucky the FBI finally came along in 2022 to blow it out of the water.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u201cheh-heh\u2026 Democracy Dies in Darkness.\u201d<\/p>\n

COVID and Mayor Sidhu \u2013 a match made somewhere dark and bad \u2013 Covid and Sidhu ruled Anaheim in the year 2020. Covid made our attempted recall of the abysmal mayor impossible. And meanwhile every other city our size began using Zoom meetings to allow public participation during the pandemic, but Sidhu jumped at the chance to increase secrecy and held Council meetings by TELECONFERENCE with shitty audio that whole year. <\/p>\n

And from the documents which just keep leaping out of Ament\u2019s old computer, we know that every word Mayor Sidhu uttered at these meetings was carefully scripted by the micro-manager Jeff Flint. We could tell the Mayor was awkwardly reading sentences he\u2019d never seen, words he wasn\u2019t familiar with, and that as the meeting progressed nothing he\u2019d say would show any reaction to or awareness of anything anyone else had said. Now we have access to all the scripts Flint wrote for Sidhu, agendas with Harry\u2019s words printed large in RED. Sad\u2026 Here\u2019s the beginning of the Sept. 29 script<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Up till June of that year we had a decent City Manager. No rebel, no trouble maker, very competent, but with a streak of independence and honesty that was sometimes not appreciated by the Cabal. His name was Chris Zapata (right.) He would give his opinion \u2013 when asked! Once he said he didn\u2019t think $6.5 million of federal COVID aid should be sent to Visit Anaheim as a gift \u2013 that at most it should be a loan, with specific benchmarks. The Cabal didn\u2019t like hearing that, they wanted to get their hands on that money no strings attached! He also suggested at one point that we should try to get Arte Moreno to put Anaheim back in the team\u2019s name. That was way too much for the Cabal, and Zapata was roundly fired!<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Jeff Flint knew Zapata\u2019s perfect replacement, someone who\u2019d never be guilty of such insolence, someone the Cabal could work with \u2013 Buena Park\u2019s CM James Vanderpool, who had tried for the post before! So he ordered Sidhu and the four other council drones to install Jim forthwith. Reading Jim\u2019s e-mail<\/a>, he seems most defensive about the circumstances of his hiring, but nothing he writes refutes the Times account<\/a>. <\/p>\n

A slight irony (or something) that probably only I have noticed because I\u2019ve been fighting Jeff Flint for 18 years: Jeff\u2019s first big-paying political gig was running the anti-gay-marriage Proposition 8 from his Costa Mesa Schubert-Flint Consulting \u2013 that was something he believed in fervently. I know because I led a protest there in 2008<\/a>. Well, now he has pushed for hiring a happily gay-married City Manager \u2013 I wonder if Jim knows Flint\u2019s past? Maybe Jeff\u2019s homophobia has become less fervent over the years, or maybe the pursuit of money is just more urgent.<\/p>\n

And during most of that year, as far as the public knew, we were heading inexorably to selling our stadium and surrounding property for $320 million \u2013 an awful deal that many experts considered about $200 million short. Here is how we felt about that then:<\/p>\n

\n

Well, we hadn\u2019t heard nothing yet! Suddenly in September it was announced that Arte would NOT pay $320 million for our property. $150 million was the highest he would go \u2013 less than half of that! To make up for the difference he\u2019d build some affordable housing, as well as a public park near the stadium. This would be approved by Council at a teleconferenced meeting September 29, and in the 9 days leading up to that, Jeff Flint was a . . .<\/p>\n

. . . .<\/p>\n

[to be finished Monday \u2013 but I wanted to break the news of Vanderpool\u2019s resignation\u2026 V]<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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Mock Meeting Plan<\/a><\/p>\n

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But then SUDDENLY on Labor Day weekend, we were told the new sale price was only $150 million, Arte refused to pay any more. LESS THAN HALF what we\u2019d gotten used to that year, and Arte justified this by promising to build some affordable housing and a park. As the final vote on THAT NEW RAW DEAL approached on Sept. 29, our overlords (led by Angels consultant Jeff Flint) got real nervous \u2013 more nervous than we knew at the time \u2013 about outcry from the public as well as the two honest councilmembers Jose Moreno & Denise Barnes.<\/p>\n

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Vanderpool Self-Defense E-Mail<\/a><\/p>\n

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https:\/\/anaheim.granicus.com\/player\/clip\/2477?view_id=2&redirect=true&h=b1f89a28ca93358dc52e9f7939289c3a<\/a><\/p>\n

People forget that all this \u2013 the Sept 29 2020 meeting particularly, which finalized the swindle \u2013 happened in the height of COVID, and so the Sept 29 meeting was teleconferenced. Assholes. They didn\u2019t mind all getting together in Flint\u2019s office, but they couldn\u2019t come to Council chambers OR spend the extra couple hundred dollars to put on Zoom meetings like every other city did.<\/p>\n

Remember, not too long before, Carrie Nocella and Jeff Flint had co-written a big speech for Mayor Sidhu about the budget, and Carrie laughed by text (which the FBI acquired) \u201cHarry reads your script so poorly!\u201d and Flint replied \u201cYeah, he never rehearses!\u201d I bet this was in his mind when he insisted on doing a rehearsal this time! And these people had to do what Flint said, he ran their elections at this point, along with working FOR the Angels.<\/p>\n

ZINGERS. It was important, to Flint, for his puppets to be prepared with ZINGERS to disarm Moreno & Barnes and make them seem ridiculous. I remember, catching one of those \u201cZINGERS\u201d from Trevor and it was really stupid, let me see if I can find it\u2026 Damn I can\u2019t find it. It was REALLY STUPID. Like Trevor saying \u2026 oh, I can almost remember it. Oh yeah. It was some variation of \u201cWhen you don\u2019t have facts or the law you just throw things around. Councilman Moreno is the ?? something of something\u201d Yeah\u2026 was a takeoff from a Carl Sandburg quote, converted into a Jeff Flint zinger.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the Sept 29 meeting they were rehearsing for, warning it\u2019s like 8 hours and has no visual but the ironic \u201cIn God We Trust\u201d https:\/\/anaheim.granicus.com\/player\/clip\/2477?view_id=2\u2026<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I gotta take issue with Mayor Ashleigh on this: She finds it outrageous that the public heard about…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":159946,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[163,165,164],"class_list":["post-159945","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-anaheim","tag-anaheim","tag-anaheim-headlines","tag-anaheim-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159945","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=159945"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159945\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/159946"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=159945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=159945"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=159945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}