Bridget Healy, Carpetbagger

So, the wind from Indio not only blows hot and hard, it blows ill. The stories on the ether turn out to be true. Bridget Healy, Assistant City Manager to Glenn Southard in Indio plans not only to return to Claremont in December but to run for City Council in the March election. Shades of the Reconstruction-era cartoon by Thomas Nast, above. Maybe that's the plan for Claremont: Reconstruction.

This is a piece of news that parodies itself.

Though she was a mid-level staffer when Glenn Southard arrived in Claremont twenty years ago, she became identified with him, joined at the hip as it were, through the years she was his "Hammer" or Assistant City Manager here. So close they were that she even preceded him to Indio by two weeks in 2005 while he took care of the unfinished business of getting the compliant Claremont city council to fix up the top city employees' pension arrangements with the International City Management Association. As we recall, Bridget even presented the first agenda report on this subject that was shot down by council two months before, in February. (This was in the time, some may recall, when Southard had gotten into a profane shouting match with councilmember Jackie McHenry, and pulled that February item in a huff when councilmembers Yao and McHenry started asking questions.)

Can anyone think of anything Bridget Healy has done for this community, good, bad, or indifferent, in the past three years?

Somehow the Powers That Be must think that Claremont is governed best when it is guided by former City staffers such as Bridget Healy and Sharon Hightower, an "inside" person and an "outside" person if the plans work out.

It would be just like the old days in a warped sort of way: instead of approving the agenda reports beforehand, which was Bridget's former job, she wants to approve them afterward as a member of city council.