Saturday's Claremont Courier had a letter from reader Ray Garvin, who was critical of the city's new solicitation law, which he feels unfairly included Girl Scouts as an organization that must now register to solicit door-to-door for fundraising activities.
Garvin felt the Girl Scouts' inclusion stems from lingering animosity Claremont Mayor Ellen Taylor (a real superheroine, as we Insiders well know) harbors towards the Girl Scouts following her Cookie Monster incident:Well, mayor and fellow council members, I guess you showed them little girls just how petty you can be.....I guess you needed to get the last word because your image was so badly tarnished by the last incident that you included the girl scouts in this latest ordinance....nice....I hope the voters have the last word in the next election....
We received an email a while back from one of our readers who had similar suspicions about Taylor's and the council's actions:
Hello There!
I was wondering what the Claremont Insider may know about this new Solicitation Ordinance and the Do Not Knock" list. While I'm all for keeping the weird people from knocking on my door (there have been plenty and I'm good at looking through the peep hole and deciding for myself whether or not to open the door), I happen to be the proud mom of a Girl Scout and I'm wondering who may be behind this lovely new ordinance and if this will effect our ability to sell our cookies door to door? Will the "queen" slap our girls with a $1000 fine then say it's for safety reasons when all we're doing is trying to support positive activities for our girls?
To be fair, the new law seems to be a response to some attacks on Claremont residents by door-to-door magazine subscription solicitors rather than the Girl Scouts, and we suspect the Girl Scouts will not be hassled too much - bad publicity, you know. Not that Taylor wouldn't get some satisfaction out of that (nothing she'd admit to, of course).
Our apologies to the reader who sent in that email. We'd meant to post it earlier, but it got lost in the shuffle, as these things do from time-to-time.
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