Today marks one year since we posted our "Labor Day" piece about city employee salaries. You might recall that we discovered that the city's online document archive contained pay stubs for city employees and that we posted the salaries and other compensation paid to a number of employees as well as an image of Claremont City Manager Jeff Parker's pay stub.
No personal information such as social security number nor even the ever-important "bank routing number" was included in the pay stub information we found on the city's website. In a failed attempt to shut down this blog, Claremont City Attorney Sonia Carvalho falsely claimed the information we had found on the Claremont website was stolen.
Carvalho also falsely asserted that the information we had posted was private and confidential (in California, public employee salaries and benefits are public information). Carvalho demanded that Google, which owns our Blogger host, shut down the Insider. After we pointed out to Google that the information in the pay stubs was public information, the city then made yet another false assertion that the pay stub images could not be posted because they were copyrighted material (government documents such as the pay stubs cannot be copyrighted).
Carvalho ended up having to eat a triple serving of crow.
Oddly, we're both still here, Carvalho and the Insider. Reminds us of a poem we saw someplace or another:
Award[A Gold Watch To The FBI Man
Who Has Followed Me For 25 Years]
Well, old spy
looks like I
led you down some pretty blind alleys,
took you on several trips to Mexico,
fishing in the high Sierras,
jazz at the Philharmonic.
You've watched me all your life,
I've clothed your wife,
put your two sons through college.
what good has it done?
sun keeps rising every morning.
Ever see me buy an Assistant President?
or close a school?
or lend money to Somoza?
I bought some after-hours whiskey in L.A.
but the chief got his pay.
I ain't killed no Koreans,
or fourteen-year-old boys in Mississippi
neither did I bomb Guatemala,
or lend guns to shoot Algerians.
I admit I took a Negro child
to a white restroom in Texas,
but she was my daughter, only three,
who had to pee.- Ray Durem (1915-1963)
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