Southardism, Rosemead Style

Oliver Chi, Claremont's former Assistant to the City Manager, has been picked to be Rosemead's new city manager, as an article in the San Gabriel Valley Tribune reported this past week.

Chi, who is 27, was approved to fill Rosemead's vacant top city staff spot on a 3-2 vote by the Rosemead City Council.

While in Claremont, Chi, whose obsequious personality resembled the Eddie Haskell character on the old "Leave It to Beaver" show, attached himself to former Claremont City Manager Glenn Southard and cozied up to the Claremont 400, leaving a number of lingering problems in his wake when he left.

The largest of these problems with the appraisal for Johnson's Pasture which set the price of that open space land at $12 million, overvaluing the land by about $500,000, according to the state of California. This imperiled the city's chances of qualifying for a $1 million grant from the state because the granting agency wouldn't allow the grant for the city's appraised value.

Chi was the staff member we see as most responsible for the faulty appraisal, and he was the staff member who steered the city, at the behest of the Claremont 400, towards the failed first attempt at buying the land through the 2006 Parks and Pastures Assessment District, which failed 44% to 56% when voted on by Claremont property owners.

Chi worked on the Parks and Pastures campaign, which was filled with such Claremont 400 luminaries as Diann Ring, Judy Wright, Al Leiga, and a host others. In the debate over whether Claremont should go with an assessment district or a bond to fun the purchase of Johnson's Pasture, many people warned that an assessment would never get the 51% it needed to pass and that a bond, even though it needed 67 percent win, had a better chance because of the lower total cost. One suspects that to Chi it mechanism didn't matter and that the only important thing was that the 400 was pushing the assessment.

Events proved the 400 and Chi wrong and the people who favored the bond right - a few months after the assessment lost, Claremont voters passed the Measure S bond with over 71% of the vote.

Chi's biggest fault as a city staffer was his constant need to size up the political landscape and then joining in with the people he felt most powerful, in this case, the 400. In doing so, he failed to recognize the sentiments of the greater community, so it's no wonder he was so remarkably out of step with and disconnected from the needs and wishes of the majority of town.

Some might attribute Chi's miscalculations to his age and immaturity, but we think his behavior in Claremont betrayed a fundamental character flaw: a willingness to place his ambitions over the good of the community. Chi struck us as the prototypical Southard senior staffer, intelligent on the one hand, but weak and manipulative on the other.

If there is any doubt that Chi isn't plugged into the Southardian network, check out the California City Management Foundation website. That's the organization that Southard helped get started. Chi is now listed as a member of the foundation's Board of Trustees along with Southard and a number of municipal counsultants, including Bill Mathis, the city manager headhunter who helped Southard land that $300,000 a year job in Indio.

We suspect Chi's flaws have caused him problems in the past, and we guess that at some point in the future, they will catch up with him again. Claremont's gain is Rosemead's loss.