Affordable housing is back on our radar. Item #12 on tomorrow night's Claremont City Council agenda is the City's Affordable Housing Task Force. An ad hoc committee comprised of Mayor Ellen Taylor and Councilmember Sam Pedroza interviewed 28 applicants and has recommended seven people for the task force.
With Queen Ellen running the show, we predicted that she would load up the committee with her Claremont League of Women Voter (LWV) friends, and we're pleased to say that Ellen did not disappoint. Ellen is nothing if not consistent in her spite.
The following people received the okay from Taylor and Pedroza:
- Sharon Hightower (LWV, former City Planning Commissioner)
- Jim Keith (Husband of Citrus College Trustee and LWV member Sue Keith)
- Bruce Mayclin
- Barbara Musselman (LWV President, City Police Commissioner)
- Kirk Pelser
- John Tullius
- Andrew Winnick (City Human Services Commissioner)
As you may know if you followed the contentious debate over the failed Base Line Rd. affordable housing project, the LWV pushed a poorly conceived project and refused to listen to anyone but people like Helaine Goldwater, Sharon Hightower, and League stalwarts. The project died when it could not qualify for county funding because of concerns about pollution from the 210 Freeway, something project opponents had cited as a problem from the first public meetings on the subject.
So what did Ellen do? Rather than reach out to the opponents of the Base Line Rd. project, she and Pedroza recommended three people most responsible for that debacle: Hightower, Musselman, and Winnick. And they only appointed one person, Mayclin, who had been a critic of the housing on Base Line. Mayclin was appointed as a token gesture so that Taylor could claim she was being fair in her recommendations.
If you go back and look at the minutes of the public meetings on the Base Line site, the crowds were pretty evenly split between proponents and opponents. Taylor, et. al., tried to tar the opponents with the NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) brush, which is their favorite tactic.
Rather than engage on the issue, Taylor & Friends seek to discredit the opposition with false labels and whispering campaigns among themselves: You don't like our pet project therefore you hate ALL affordable housing and ALL poor people. Instead of sitting down to try to work with all stakeholders, they try to steamroll ideas by gaming the committee and commission system so that their ideas are unequally weighted to guarantee the outcome they desire.
After the Base Line project failed, those opponents tried to prove good on their word that they wanted to help find a solution to the affordable housing problem in Claremont. But, thanks to Taylor and Pedroza, most of those Base Line opponents were denied positions on the committee, and the result is a group that is hardly representative of the people who debated the Base Line Project.
This, of course, is Taylor and the LWV's modus operandi. Make a colossal goof at an enormous expense in city funds and staff time, get the city riled up and unnecessarily divided, then not only deny responsibility for the mess, but fail to acknowledge that their opponents were right all along. And, to add insult to injury, the Taylor folk shut out anyone who thinks differently and stubbornly refuse to allow those people to contribute to finding solutions to the problem Taylor and the rest created in the first place.
We saw this with the failed 2006 Parks and Pastures Assessment District (pushed by most of the same people as the Base Line Rd. project). In the assessment case, not only did the opponents prevail 56% to 44% when the matter was voted on, but those same opponents kept their word and turned around to help get the Measure S bond measure passed with 72% of the vote four months later. Johnson's Pasture was purchased with those Measure S funds. Taylor and the rest act as if none of that ever occurred. They have tried to erase history.
For all their talk about inclusiveness, this is as exclusive a group of people as you will find anywhere. Not one of us? Then get the hell out of here.
So, you can expect either Hightower, Musselman, or Winnick to be named chair of the task force. Also, expect more contentiousness to emerge from the task force. If the LWV and Taylor have proved anything in the past few years, it's that a bunch of individually intelligent people can be stunningly stupid as a group, mostly as a result of only listening to themselves. It's the Groupthink phenomena again, and more bad ideas along the lines of the Parks and Pasture Assessment and the Base Line Rd. project are sure to be in the offing.
Just to remind you how charming and winning these personalities are, we give you Andy Winnick in his own words, not only arguing for the Base Line Rd. project, but also condemning those who think differently from him (keep in mind this voice of authority was completely and utterly WRONG in the foundations of his arguments and his characterizations of the opposition):
Posts
