Council - CUSD Meeting Tomorrow

The Claremont City Council and the CUSD School Board are having a joint meeting tomorrow night - no doubt to use the opportunity and the combined city staff and school board resources to shore up support for the candidates handpicked by the the Claremont 400 and the sitting and outgoing school board members.

The Council and school board will meet at 6pm tomorrow at the Alexander Hughes Center at 1700 Danbury in Claremont.

They'll be, among other things, installing former Claremont United Church of Christ senior pastor Butch Henderson as chair of the Committee on Youth and Family. Henderson, you may recall, is still trying to rehabilitate his image after his disastrous stint as co-spokesperson for Preserve Claremont in 2005. (He's trying to accomplish this without having to actually apologize for anything.)

As chair, Henderson has the power to appoint his friends to the committee. Which, if you have followed Claremont politics, is how these things work - set up a committee or a commission for some specialized task, fill the positions with Claremont 400-approved members, then use that committee (or city commission) as a springboard for the school board or the city council.

What they don't tell you is that they consciously exclude qualified applicants so that those people, which leaves the Claremont 400 as the city's gatekeepers. You must agree with them completely or forget any chance of participating or having your ideas heard on an equal footing. And should an excluded person decide they want to run for a local office, the 400 will say, "Ah, but they haven't been active in local issues."

And because they control the meetings, the Claremont 400 also controls the agendas, allowing for the appearance of open, public meetings and public comment, without actually having to take those comments into real consideration. This is what gives a process queen like City Councilperson Linda Elderkin the ability to puff out her chest and say, "It's been through x number of meetings. We've had plenty of input."

You can see the City and the 400 setting this very same thing up with their Sustainable City Task Force. Mayor Pro Tem Ellen Taylor has forced herself onto the Council committee that will interview the task force applicants. She's done this into order to impose control of process (that is, skew it). Count on Taylor to fill the task force with her League of Women Voter friends.

You'll likely see someone like Planning Commissioner Bob Tener come out in the end as the task force chair so that he can use it on a resume for City Council at some point. Tener's the sort of power-ego type that the Claremont 400 just love.

The sad thing is that Taylor and the rest use paid city and school board staff to aid them in these power plays. You pay for the staff time through taxes and fees, but you aren't really allowed an even playing field if you disagree.

If you've got an independent streak, if you are a skeptic or want a reason-based process, too bad. That door was closed to you a long time ago. You don't count. Just behave nicely and don't forget your place.