Affordable Housing Closed Session

[Updated below]

The Claremont City Council, in keeping with its tradition of considering anything substantive only in closed session, has scheduled an extraordinary closed session for this evening, Tuesday, December 11, at 5:15 p.m.

This session was shoe-horned in late on Monday afternoon, just under the legal wire that requires 24-hour notice. That's 24-hour notice if you happen to be passing by the City Hall bulletin boards and read the notices carefully. Or if you inhabit the City website. Otherwise, it's word of mouth.

We don't pretend to know what the subject will be. Anything and everything is fair game under the Brown Act rubrics of "Conference with Real Property Negotiators" and "Price and Terms". Our guess is that somebody sees the avalanche starting and is in a panic. First the EIR calls the site on Baseline dangerous to children's health, then the AQMD weighs in calling for the siting of the affordable housing elsewhere in the city, then Saturday's Courier reports that the Police Commission has gotten off-script and has "identified the plot of land slated for the affordable housing project as one of its top choices for a new police station." (Sorry, no link available. Buy the paper.)

[A reader writes, a couple of hours after this post went up, "Do you really think this City Council could be so enlightened as to see an alternative use for the property? They are probably talking about firing the Police Commission!" Probably.]

Maybe the City will discuss requiring the developer to purchase the item below to mitigate the respiratory health hazard.