In 2020, Fullerton voters were promised a reset. Candidates Fred Jung and Nick Dunlap ran against prior city councils, whom they accused of fiscal irresponsibility, deferred maintenance, and general mismanagement. Their message was simple and appealing: tighten the belt, fix the roads, and bring competence back to City Hall.

Five years later, the results tell a very different story. Soon after taking office, the new council majority made a series of disruptive decisions. City services were cut. The City Manager was fired, creating instability at the top of city administration and costing taxpayers in severance and turnover. In 2021–22, City budget documents showed a roughly $9–10 million structural gap in the General Fund. Rather than fixing the underlying imbalance, the City relied on one-time measures, including $3.8 million in vacancy savings, to temporarily reduce the presented deficit.  Rather than addressing long-term structural problems, the council leaned heavily on one-time federal COVID-19 relief funds to patch visible issues, most notably road repairs. Those funds were always temporary. Using them to address ongoing infrastructure needs didn’t solve Fullerton’s problems; it only postponed them.

Today, the consequences are hard to ignore. Fullerton’s budget deficit has grown, not shrunk. Road conditions remain poor by most objective measures, with deferred maintenance still looming. And now, after years of claiming fiscal responsibility, the same officials are asking residents to approve a tax increase to stabilize city finances. That can only be described as a bailout.

Fiscal responsibility does not mean cutting services while ignoring long-term costs. It does not mean firing top administrators without a clear plan for continuity. And it certainly does not mean funding recurring needs with one-time money and hoping future taxpayers won’t notice the cliff. Good governance requires boring discipline: aligning ongoing revenues with ongoing expenses, maintaining institutional knowledge, and making unglamorous investments that don’t always show up in campaign mailers. Fullerton did not get that. Instead, residents were sold a narrative of toughness and accountability while the city drifted into a weaker financial position. The result is a city worse off than it was five years ago; less stable, still struggling with infrastructure, and now facing a request for higher taxes to clean up the mess.

What makes this especially concerning is that this record is now being presented as a qualification for a higher office. Mayor Jung is seeking a seat on the Orange County Board of Supervisors, one of the most powerful and consequential governing bodies in the region. The Board oversees a multibillion-dollar budget affecting public health, housing, transportation, and social services for over three million residents. If Fullerton’s recent history is an example of fiscal stewardship, Orange County should be worried.

This is not about ideology or personality. It is about outcomes. Leaders who campaign on competence should be judged by results, not rhetoric. Promising to fix the roads and balance the books, then leaving a larger deficit and deteriorating infrastructure, is not success by any reasonable standard.

Fullerton deserves better than slogans. Orange County deserves better than ambition untethered from performance. And voters deserve an honest accounting of what has actually happened over the past five years, not a rebrand of failure as experience.
If there is a lesson in Fullerton’s recent history, it is a simple one: good governance cannot be improvised, and slogans do not replace sound financial management. Running a city poorly should not be a stepping stone to running a county.

Click here to watch a short documentary of Fullerton roads called Road to Ruin.