Mailbag

More reader mail. This time a letter from a reader concerned with the city's raising it's copy fees. Is Claremont returning to its past ways or is staff merely adjusting prices to the going rates of neighboring towns? You can read the staff report on the matter for next Tuesday's City Council meeting.

We suspect that if you're reading this post, you probably don't have an opinion about the copy fees because you can get most of the city's documents online for free. Also, raising copy fees from $ .10 to $ .25 per copy for black-and-white and $ .50 per copy for color pales in comparison things like:

• The $17.5 million settlement for the Palmer Canyon fire (although this was covered by the city's liability insurance).
  
  
• $675,000 to compensate The Tolkin Group for former City Manager Glenn Southard's decision in 2000 to put in all the utility hookups before any buildings were put in place.
  
  
• The $10 million instant pension deficit when Southard increased staff retirement benefits in the year before he left town for Indio (the pension increases were retroactive to employees' date of hire).

And on and on.

Still, may the reader has a point--watch the pennies and the dollars take care of themselves:

Subject: Item 10 on the 4-24-07 Claremont City Council agenda
To: "claremont buzz" claremontbuzz@yahoo.com

Take a look at item #10 on the City Council agenda for Tuesday, April 24th. It calls for an almost triple increase in the cost to the public for having the city copy documents (b&w copies). Thanks to Jackie McHenry and her survey of costs in the late 90's, the cost to provide black and white copies to the public was lowered from .25 to .10 a page. The cost of providing audio tapes was lowered from $5 to $2.50 (if the requestor supplied their own tape) and when video taping of council meetings began in late 2003, the cost for the video tape was the same as for an audio tape( with the requestor providing the blank tape).

Now that McHenry is gone, the current staff and council are turning back the clock to the good old days of gouging the public. Bad enough they are partying like crazy now that the watchdog is gone, but they are also going back to discouraging the public from accessing documents at a Reasonable cost. What is next? Look at the survey cites in the report and see that the charges for B and W copies ranges from .05 -.25 a copy. So why doesn't Claremont charge.05 or .10 which is reasonable? Because they now have a majority that can do whatever they want to do and get away with it.

As late as last year, if the Observers for the League of Women Voters wanted a copy of the packets for the Commissions or the Council meetings (if they did not have computers or preferred to have a paper copy), those packets, some of them quite lengthy, were given to them free of charge. The reason? According to a former councilmember, the LAW were grandfathered (or perhaps grandmothered) in when they set the fee policy. The rest of the community (but who knows who really had to pay and who did not) had to pay the scheduled fees.

They are not supposed to charge for the time it takes the staff member (usually the city clerk) to get the documents and then copy them, but only for the direct cost of making the copies, i.e., paper, toner, electricity figured out by the cost per copy. Is Claremont violating the Public Records Act by doing this? I am sure their attorney has ok'ed it. The public needs to know about this and e-mail or speak out at the council meeting on Tuesday. If anyone even cares about it, that is.