Protecting the Queen

Wednesday's Claremont Courier had a letter from reader Carlynne McDonnell, who cc'd the Courier on a letter the submitted to the Los Angeles Times regarding the Times article about Claremont Mayor Ellen Taylor and her fight with some local cookie-selling Girl Scouts.

McDonnell seems to feel that Times' job should be to cover Claremont the way McDonnell wants it portrayed:

Imagine my excitement when I saw that the LA Times actually covered something in Claremont, California. Given that sometimes it seems as if the LA Times forgets that we are part of the greater LA Area. Imagine my disappointment when I read that you wasted space on covering Mayor Taylor's Girl Scout episode—and on the front page. YAWN! And the Blog—Double YAWN! What about covering Claremont’s efforts on sustainability and affordable housing (both areas that Mayor Taylor has promoted and worked hard for). To minimize Taylor’s contribution to the community to the Girl Scouts and the Blog is one-sided journalism at its best. Like her or not, her contributions to Claremont have made this a better place to live.

Carlynne McDonnell
Claremont

[Is it our imagination or is that second-to-last sentence missing a couple commas? We do certainly acknowledge Taylor's contributions to our humble blog. Without her, life here in the far digital reaches would be boring indeed. -Ed.]

McDonnell, who is the development director for the local chapter of the League of Women Voters, might be forgiven for reflexively jumping to the Mayor Taylor's defense. Taylor, after all, is a former president of the LWV and sees that group as her base.

What McDonnell in her defense of Taylor misses is the fact that the incident is of a piece with Taylor's contempt for the electorate and the citizens of Claremont in general. Let's take affordable housing, for instance. Taylor and the local LWV pushed a project at Base Line Rd. and Towne Ave. and refused to compromise or accommodate concerns from the project's neighborhood as well as the wider community.

Rather than get a project built at an better alternate location like the old Courier building site, Taylor and the LWV stubbornly, irrationally shoved the Base Line Rd. project down our collective throats for over two years. And now that the Base Line project failed to qualify for LA County affordable housing grant money, Taylor and the LWV, after forming a special task force to study the matter, have come to the surprising conclusion that the Courier site is the best location.

So, thanks in large part to Ellen Taylor, we spent over two years getting nothing done on affordable housing, basically chasing our tails and bleeding city staff time and money in the process. This, more than Girl Scouts cookies, is Taylor's and the LWV's legacy to our humble town.

And therein lies the real story. What the Times writer missed is the fact that the Girl Scout incident is merely a hook that illustrates a public and private behavior pattern that those of us who have live here have endured for far too long. Proper context was the missing factor, not the sort of blind boosterism McDonnell and her LWV friends have come to expect from the echo chamber that is the Claremont social scene.

So, McDonnell is right in a sense. The Times writer did minimize the incident by not putting in context. Taylor's real contributions to the community have been to ignore a large segment of the population, to listen only to people who think exactly like her, and to use her official power arrogantly and with little respect for the Joe Taxpayer and Jane Voter.

It is fitting, though, that the LWV representative who jumped to the defense of the narcissistic Taylor was McDonnell, who runs a jewelry business called "Its All About ME!"

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We also received an email in support of Taylor:

I recently read the story in the L.A. Times about the "Claremont Cookie Monster". I believe a couple of key points were overlooked. The first is the the quote "We were just yelling 'Girl Scout cookies!' and the lady ...." I can see if the half dozen girls were quietly soliciting their cookies this probably would not be an issue. When you get 8- to 10-year-old girls together, they can make quite a bit of noise. I question the troop leader allowing the girls to try to solicit sales from passing motorists on a busy intersection. The other issue the troop leader doesn't live in Claremont but outside of Claremont for 9 years. Is this Girl Scout troop from Claremont? I certainly don't condone the Mayor's actions and then trying to cover it up saying, "I reacted like a mother hen...." I believe she reacted to the fact there were half a dozen girls yelling outside a place of business. As with opinion, everyone has one and if you weren't there to witness what actually occurred, it becomes a "he said, she said, can you believe that" type scenario.

The reader's point about the Girl Scout's residency issue is an interesting one. We're not sure, but we believe the particular troop has a mix of Claremont residents and kids from surrounding areas. This would be because the Girl Scouts' troops are organized into "Neighborhoods" defined by school districts, and some Neighborhoods contain more than one district. Claremont Unified School District, for instance, encompasses a very small part of Pomona.

The larger point is does it matter if the Girl Scouts were from Claremont or from Timbuktu? Doesn't our mayor have an obligation to treat everyone with the same courtesy?

As to the "he said, she said," aspect, yes, there is that. However, when seen in the context of Taylor's history in Claremont - Carlynne McDonnell request - one sees that this is merely one more instance of Taylor's contempt for people she sees as less powerful than herself, hence the term "The Queen."