This Week's City Meetings

The city of Claremont will have several meetings this week.

CITY COUNCIL MEETING

The Claremont City Council holds its regularly scheduled meeting tomorrow night at 6:30pm i the City Council chambers at 225 W. 2nd St. Among the agendized items are:

• CITY BUDGET FOR FY2008-09 AND 2009-10
  The city's two-year budget plan is up for approval. The city splits the budget in two parts: the operating budget (costs of services) and the capital improvement works plan (CIP) budget. Operating budget for the next two years runs between $37-38 million per fiscal year. Then, you tack on another $7 million or so in the CIP budget in FY2008-09 for projects like sports park lights and Phase I of the Padua Ave. Sports Park.
  
  
• MEDICAL MARIJUANA ORDINANCE
  After having voted down an ordinance to approve allowing a medical marijuana dispensary in town, Claremont tomorrow night will vote on an ordinance banning the dispensaries. Read the staff report here.
  
  
• LEAGUE OF WOMEN VOTERS PUSH $7.6 MILLION MARSH
  or INTERESTING THINGS FLOW DOWN HILL
  This is a strange matter. The League of Women Voters (LWV) pushed by the League's high priestess Marilee Scaff, is asking the San Gabriel and Lower Los Angeles Rivers and Mountains Conservancy for $7.6 million to acquire land around the Thompson Creek Dam and the Thompson Creek Trail in Northeast Claremont just west of Mills Ave.
  
  Scaff's idea is to have the land developed into a park that would include a cienega, such as the ones that used to dot the area, according the League's grant application, which you can see here.
  
  For those of you who don't know, a cienega is a nice sounding word for marsh. In days gone by, water flowing out of the San Gabriel mountains used to percolate through the ground and bubble up through artesian wells, such as you can still see in Claremont's College Park. Pilgrim Place has historically had problems with drainage because of the way the underground water flows.
  
  The grant application addresses these problems by claiming, without proof, that they're already solved. For example, there's this paragraph on page 4 talking about the potential for those old drainage problems to reappear:
  

  LADWP [LA County Dept. of Public Works] may have been concerned that spreading the water [from Thompson Creek Dam] might overflow in local cienegas [i.e., Pilgrim Place]. However, rising water is not an intractable problem as shown by the "Mitigation Alternatives to Rising Groundwater Study" prepared for Three Valleys MWD by CDM Engineering in May 2006.

  
  The LWV grant writers state this with such confidence you want to believe them, but they didn't quote a fact, result, or conclusion from the report.
  
  Further, the fact that mitigation might be needed shows that there is a potential problem. So, what do they have to do? Put the LWV's cienega in an underground concrete liner to prevent water from seeping to lower lying areas such as Pilgrim Place?
  
  Of more concern to Claremont taxpayers is this bit on page 8 about who will foot the bill for the ongoing costs of maintaining the LWV Memorial Marsh:
  

  If the land is turned over to the City of Claremont it will cover supervisions tasks and other expenses as part of the local recreation and park maintenance budget.

  
  Taxpayer, this means you; AYSO parent, this means your lights and fields are now competing with the maintenance costs of Marilee's Marsh. Those costs, by the way, could be considerable depending on what mitigations might be needed to keep Pilgrim Place from floating away.
  
  The LWV marsh grant application is signed, by the way, by LWV president and Claremont Police Commissioner Barbara Musselman, who also sits the city's Affordable Housing Task Force. When you're a Claremont 400 member, you get to wear many hats.
  
  By the way, this item was on the agenda for the last city council meeting two weeks ago, and we wrote that there had been no public discussion of the issue by the city. Oddly, it was pulled at the last minute, and is back on for tomorrow night.
  

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AFFORDABLE HOUSING TASK FORCE MEETING

The city's Affordable Housing Task Force meets Wednesday, June 25th, at 5pm in the Citrus Room at City Hall. LWV member Sharon Hightower is chair of this task force and is also co-chair of the City's Sustainability Task Force. She also chaired the city's General Plan "citizen's committee."

We know the city's into recycling, but this is getting a little ridiculous.