Claremont Insider: Claremont Mayor Ellen Taylor, Scofflaw

Thursday, June 19, 2008

Claremont Mayor Ellen Taylor, Scofflaw

Taylor Drives Wrong Way down a One-Way Alley

Sometimes you just live right and your everyday experience confirms what you fervently believed anyway.

The ol' Insider was heading to the Village this morning on an Important Mission to Undermine the Foundations of Society, and was law-abidingly waiting to turn left from Indian Hill to east-bound Harrison. Whom should we espy but our esteemed Mayor, Her Honorable Majesty, Royalty-on-the-Hoof, Ellen Taylor? She was crossing in front of us on Harrison, west to east, destined (as we later found out) for the parking lot behind former mayor Sandy Baldonado's office.

Birds of a feather and all.

Mayor Ellen was driving her fancy late-model Lexus; the Insider was in Mrs. Insider's late-80s Ford Pinto with the broken air conditioning--a beater like this would not have registered on her Queenship's radar.

Anyway, due to the circumstances of Fate and the operation of Kismet, we found ourselves following Mayor Taylor, radiator to tailpipe as it were. We were a little surprised when she stopped just a bit short of Yale to wait for a car to exit the one-way alley (one-way, northbound). Ah, we thought, a little noblesse oblige and courtesy to one of her Citizens. But then we saw, no, she was waiting to turn south down the alley, against the two bright red "DO NOT ENTER" signs and arrow showing the alley was one-way, and that way was against Ellen's intended and actually-taken route (see above, for Actual Image).

There oughta be a law.

We were so shocked, shocked to see this transgressive behavior on Ellen's part that we could do nothing other than continue on our errand but a bit later we returned to the quote scene of the crime unquote to see if we should believe what our lying eyes had shown us. Sure enough, there was Ellen, Lexus, Sandy, and ladies of the club numbering near a half dozen. It must have been some kind of hen party, because even later Ellen, Lexus, Sandy, and said ladies were gone.

Now we understand that this crime is not of the caliber, say, of the Crime of Xavier Alvarez, and we disdain (well, maybe we actually embrace) the Politics of Gotcha. And we presume that Chief Paul Cooper is at one of the many excellent local donut shops working on that waistline of his, so "no harm, no foul".

But you must remember this when you are on the wrong end of one of those preachy little lectures that Ellen likes to give, or snide comments she likes to make: that she is just as big a hypocrite as you are, and maybe more so. We didn't have to go any farther back than the June 10 council meeting to hear her expound on another traffic matter. (20-second clip, below) She writes the policies for you and me to obey, but of course they don't apply to her.