Claremont Secrets

What Are They Hiding?

No, that sound of metal on stone you hear isn't the beginning of gravel mining in Northeast Claremont. It's the sound of the City Hall portcullis slamming shut as the Claremont 400 and city staff cut off all on-line access to city documents.

The city's reaction came last Friday afternoon after our Labor Day post laid out a sample of what Claremont citizens are really paying the people at City Hall.


City Cries, "THEFT!" (Wolf)

As might be expected from city staff, a cry of "Theft!" went out. But there was not theft or even leak of information. All the information we obtained was done on the up-and-up on the city's public, on-line website archive. In response, the city restricted public access to those documents:



The city posted an explanation of the on-line public access change late yesterday. The city seemed to back off its claims of theft and in their press release stated:

...recent activities have demonstrated that there has been a breach of confidential documents.

Notice no mention of hacking or theft. Just the usual vague, passive-voice bureaucratese convenient for evading specifics. No explanation of what was confidential, no proof of any breach at all.


City Attorney Acts


After stewing this past weekend over the Insider's posting of Claremont city employees' salaries and bonuses, City Attorney Sonia Carvalho sent a complaint to Google, which hosts our humble blog. We received an email from Google advising us of the complaint. Google did not forward us the actual complaint, which is also public record in California.

Oddly, Carvalho did not contact us directly, and the Google note did not say what exactly was confidential. The pay stubs, after all, were on-line, and they contained no personal identifiers - no Social Security numbers, no dates of birth, no personal bank account information. They only contained full names and payroll information.

It's important to note that the California Supreme Court ruled just last week that public employee salaries are public information. We hope the city attorney was completely truthful about the sourcing of the information in her note to Google, and we also hope that she didn't make the wild sort of false accusations of theft of information that staff was making last week.

However, out of respect for Carvalho's concerns, we reposted our Friday Labor Day note minus the pay stub images. If the City or Carvalho have any concerns about the information contained in that post, we ask that they contact us directly at claremontbuzz@yahoo.com with any specific complaints.


Daily Bulletin Coverage

Will Bigham has been on this story since last Friday, and he had a follow-up story in today's Bulletin.

The article said that city staffers were unable to confirm the fact that we here at the Insider found the payroll information on the city's website. (Guys, how hard is that? Just go on your document archive search engine and type "Jeff Parker salary" or "Jeff Parker pay.")

City Manager Parker was cited it the article as having concerns about low-level employees' salaries being posted, but as Bigham noted, all public employee salaries and compensation are public information. The public is, after all, the employer here - you pay the bill, you should know how much you're paying. The article, quoting Terry Francke at the California First Amendment Coalition, reported:

...the California Supreme Court ruled that all compensation information about all California public employees is a matter of public record, Francke said.

Councilman Corey Calaycay, who works full time as a district representative for state Sen. Bob Margett, said he "has little sympathy" for public employees who do not want information on their compensation publicly available.

Calaycay's salary is listed in the online database of the Capitol Weekly, a Sacramento newspaper that covers state politics.

On the Capitol Weekly site, you can do a search by job title, secretary, say, and find a whole list of state-employed secretaries along with their salaries, so we don't buy Parker's claimed concern about the posting of low-level employee salaries at all.

The bottom-line here is Claremont's reverting to its old ways of hiding information because of the embarrassment factor. In this, so-called liberals such as Mayor Pro-Tem Ellen Taylor and Councilmember Sam Pedroza have no qualms about rolling back the openness that Claremont has displayed in the past two years.

Expect more of the same in the future.