Back Online - Election Season

Yes, we're back after a much, much too long hiatus from still zany, still silly Claremont.

Folks, it officially crazy season in Claremont--Election Time! That moment that comes every two years in which the goofy, so-called Claremont 400 (Paul Held, Valerie Martinez, Diann Ring, Helaine Goldwater, Randy Prout, Al Leiga, Patrick Sullivan, Judy Wright, Sue Keith, Jeanne Hamilton, Michael Fay, et. al.) get their Friday night dinner group together to campaign for their typically inane candidates.

This time up, the Claremont 400 has nominated Sam Pedroza and Linda Elderkin to be their candidates. If elected, the two will join Ellen "The Slapper" Taylor to form a group of three to control the five-member city council.

Pedroza, for those who haven't followed city politics, is a man who has never met a policy position he didn't like, depending on who his audience is. Pedroza has taken alternating positions on: the Baseline Rd. affordable housing project (first opposing, then supporting it); and Padua Sports Park (pushing for it, then lobbying for putting a sports complex in the gravel pit at Baseline and Monte Vista).

Pedroza has also never met a tax he didn't like. As chair of the Claremont Community Services Commission, he pushed to have the city's Landscape and Lighting District (LLD) brought before his commission each year for review. In 2006, Pedroza voted for a larger increase to the LLD (6.48%) than the city council eventually voted for (4.67%).

Pedroza also backed last year's failed Parks and Pasture Assessment District to pay for the purchase of Johnson's Pasture and to fund park maintenance in town. Pedroza was on the Parks and Pasture Steering Committee and along with other people like Al Leiga, Diann Ring, and Judy Wright, hijacked the Claremont Wildlands Conservancy for the Parks and Pasture issue. That assessment failed 56% to 44%.

After last year's assessment failed, all these people, including Pedroza, pulled a disappearing act, refusing to help work on the Measure S bond for Johnson's Pasture that ended up passing 71% to 29%. Pedroza, ever the opportunist, had his name put on the Measure S steering committee, but those who worked on the issue say that Pedroza showed up for very few meetings and was mostly missing in action, other than for a couple photo ops--a typical Pedroza move.

Linda Elderkin, the other Claremont 400 candidate, is another in a long line of Claremont League of Women Voter dilettantes. Elderkin is much in the mold of Sandy Baldonado and Ellen Taylor, both of whom have bothered even their own supporters by their negative, no mean, behavior while in office. Recall that after the Parks and Pasture assessment lost, Baldonado was quoted in the papers as saying that Claremont did not deserve her services (yes!). And Taylor told Claremont Courier reporter Will Bigham to shut up when he questioned Taylor about the $10,000 per year retirement benefit she is taking (Taylor and Peter Yao are the only ones of the five current council members to take the council benefits--Yao's mostly in the form of health insurance).

So voters shouldn't be surprised if Elderkin follows in the footsteps of Baldonado and Taylor if she elected (i.e., turns a deaf ear to the public; blindly follows what her handlers tell her; must get the last word in to show how much she knows about anything). Listen to Linda at one of her coffees, and you can probably guess why the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin didn't endorse her--she's a know-it-all. Elderkin was another who backed the Parks and Pasture assessment and latched on to the Measure S campaign when she was deciding to run for office.

Elderkin has been endorsed by Claremonters Against Strip Mining--a group oppposed to the Vulcan Materials Co. proposal to mine aggregate in northeast Claremont. She's an odd choice because her husband Rick works as a math professor at Pomona College, which a part-owner of the land Vulcan wants to mine. If elected, Elderkin would have a conflict of interest that would almost certainly force her to abstain from any discussion or vote on the mining issue.

CASM's odd choices for endorsement--Elderkin, Pedroza and Mike Maglio--don't seem so odd when one remembers the discredited Preserve Claremont smear campaign from 2005. Recall in that one, Preserve Claremont, through Paul Held, got the CASM people all worked up with false rumors that then-candidate Corey Calaycay was taking money from mining interests. To no one's surprise, CASM appears to be spreading similar false gossip this time around.

And why did CASM endorse Mike Maglio? Because he splits the opposition vote. The Claremont 400 and the Preserve Claremonters (who are trying to take a much lower profile in this election) have been taking turns pumping Maglio up. Poor goof, they've got him thinking he actually has a chance. Anyone who's heard Maglio speak knows that this is a guy who seems to be running on a lark. Maglio himself has pretty much said in several candidate forums that he's learning on the fly. Voter records show that Maglio hasn't voted in the last three city council races, he hasn't ever served on a city commission, and he has only attended one city council meeting--EVER! Maglio has consistently displayed an ignorance of the issues and has changed positions of such things as the gravel mining land--housing development there good (prevents mining, generates development fees) and housing development bad (we want open space).