CAMPAIGN SEASON BEGINS
The 2009 Claremont City Council race begins this month with the smallest field in many years. Three candidates are vying for two council seats (in alphabetical order): Corey Calaycay, Bridget Healy, and Larry Schroeder.
It's a shame Citizen Michael John Keenan (pictured right, courtesy of CMJK) isn't running this time around. From time to time we get missives from him, and he brings a perspective to these races that's different from most of the other candidates. Sorry, Michael, if we haven't gotten around to posting all the news and info you pass on, but we do appreciate the tips.
We'll know more about the three candidates in this year's council race in a few more weeks. The nominator lists are out, with each candidate having filed their nomintation papers with the City last month. These are lists of the 30 people who nominated their respective candidates for the election, and they offer a preview of the wider support the candidates will end up receiving.
As the election draws nearer, you'll start seeing ads in the Claremont Courier with supporter lists, which typically number in the hundreds of names for viable candidates. Judging from the nominator lists that are out, there's may be some fence mending going on, at least with the Calaycay and Healy campaigns.
A LITTLE BACKGROUND
Incumbent Calaycay, you might recall, ran as a change agent in 2005 and was the target of a uniquely ugly smear campaign that year. That campaign was organized by a group of town fathers and mothers who called themselves "Preserve Claremont." The PC group, which was really an independent PAC, raised nearly enough money to fund a candidate of their own. They used all those thousands of dollars to run full-page ads (at $680 or so a pop) twice a week in the Claremont Courier during the height of the campaign.
Preserve also had a spin-off called "Claremont Business PAC" that got money from people like commercial realtor Nick Quackenbos and Claremont Toyota owner Roger Hogan, who donated $2,000 to the CB PAC (calendar year donations are limited to $250 per person to city council campaigns, but PACs have no such limits). The spin-off was a last minute thing, the brainchild of Human Services Commissioner Valerie Martinez, who used the CB PAC money to send out two city-wide mailers on the Friday before the 2005 election (you've seen the reasons for this tactic before).
Preserve Claremont, incidentally, had a paid city staff member, City Arts Coordinator Francine Baker, as its treasurer, and there seemed to be a number of ways in which some city staffers tried to influence the election. A couple employee unions, for instance, were involved in a parallel political attack on Councilmember Jackie McHenry, who had been critical of then-City Manager Glenn Southard, an attack that featured Valerie Martinez standing up at a city council meeting during the election and calling McHenry "a cancer on this community."
Southard provided the motivation for the twin attacks. He and some of his employees spread the fear that if Calaycay were elected, he and McHenry would team up and cause an exodus of city staff (even though they represented only 2 votes out of 5).
The real reason Southard spread this fear seemed to be his own fear - a fear of a council reining him in and questioning things like his own spending. Everyone forgets the thing that really set Southard off against McHenry was her asking him to provide receipts for his expenses. All of Southard's false claims of harassment that McHenry had created a "hostile work environment" stemmed from that. Keep in mind that Southard's outburst occurred right at the outset of the 2005 campaign and served as the jumping off point for Preserve Claremont in all its incarnations:
GLENN SOUTHARD GOES BERSERK
Southard quickly abandoned his attack on McHenry after seeing that the witchhunt was turning the Councilmember into a sympathetic figure with a lot of citizens, and he left it to his Preserve Claremont friends to press their offensive against Calaycay. Shortly after Calaycay won election in 2005 (along with Ellen Taylor), Southard announced he was leaving Claremont for Indio and was taking his longtime faithful assistant, Bridget Healy, with him.
Like any bully will, after enough people finally saw through the blustering and stood up to him, Southard took his ball and left.
HANDICAPPING THE RACE
Now that Calaycay's been on the council for nearly four years and Southard's been gone for three years and eight months, the ill-will the former city manager stirred up against Calaycay seems to have abated. In fact, some people who didn't endorse Calaycay the last time around, and even some who supported other candidates in 2005, are listed as Calaycay nominators this time around. There is even one name, that of Citrus College board member Sue Keith, that appears on both Calaycay's and Healy's nominator lists. So maybe the peace has finally been made in some backroom in town.
Community Services Commissioner Larry Schroeder's nominator list doesn't have a lot of names we've seen associated with past candidates, so it's difficult to assess at this point where his support comes from or what his stands on different issues are.
When the wider supporter lists come out, the campaign finances are released, and the candidates have had a chance to debate each other in forums, we'll be better able to gauge how the race is shaping up. Conventional wisdom would say that Calaycay and Healy are the favorites, with Schroeder the dark horse. But these are strange times, and the signs can be difficult to read.
Magic 8-Ball says, "Ask again later."
CANDIDATE FORUMS
Speaking of candidate forums, there are two scheduled that we know of:
- Active Claremont
Thursday, January 15th, 7pm
Active Claremont will host its candidate forum on the 15th in the Padua Room of the Alexander Hughes Community Center at 1700 Danbury Rd. in Claremont.
Call (909) 621-5412 for information.
(Thanks to the Daily Bulletin's Wes Woods II for that event news.) - League of Women Voters of the Claremont Area
Monday, January 26th, 7pm to 9pm
This one's also at the Hughes Center. According to Wes Woods:Claremont League of Women Voters president Barbara Musselman will moderate but the public can write questions down they want the candidates to answer, said the league's voter services vice president Angela Bekzadian-Avila in a news release.
Once the questions are gathered, Musselman will "choose a range of questions to ask the candidates," officials wrote in the release.
Of course, I don't know if your question will be picked or if it will be answered but go and find out.
Information: Angela Bekzadian-Avila at (909) 621-7809 or angelanb25@yahoo.com
That last bit about Musselman picking and choosing the questions points up one of the problems with the League of Women Voters' forum. Musselman, who was a big Glenn Southard and city staff defender back in 2005, is far from unbiased and will be the gatekeeper at the LWV forum. Additionally, the jungle drums are saying LWV member and former Claremont Police Commission member Helaine Goldwater (the woman who gave us Cookiemonster Ellen Taylor) is one of the behind-the-scenes people responsible for Healy's candidacy. So don't expect any questions that might make Healy look bad.
The odds for real questions to be asked are much higher at the Active Claremont event simply because they tend to just read the questions that are submitted, though they do combine multiple questions on the same topic into one.
Here's a useful experiment:
If you have the time, go to both events and submit the same question at each one. Then see if it gets asked. Something about city pensions might be a good. Claremont's own employee pension account with CalPERS is underfunded by several million dollars, thanks to some generous benefits that Healy, in her former capacity as Claremont's Assistant City Manager, helped push.
The public pension question is a big one, with several California cities facing bankruptcy because of the benefits they lavished on city workers when times were good. As the Wall Street Journal recently noted, the city of Pacific Grove is close to bankrupt because of its employee pension plan.
The city of Vallejo is even worse off, having already declared bankruptcy. Vallejo is trying restructure some of its employee contracts, and, if successful, other California municipalities may use Vallejo bankruptcy as a template to get out of employee contracts and benefits they can no longer afford. It would interesting to hear how Healy, who as an employee benefited greatly from the city's generosity to its staff, would handle such benefits as a councilperson in the current fiscal crisis. Also, would Healy's status as a former assistant city manager raise any conflicts of interest if, as we assume, she is elected?
In the past, important issues would never be fully addressed, at least not at the League of Women Voters event, which generally attracts the largest crowds. The LWV has usually offered up softball questions to the candidates it privately supports and has avoided posing the tough questions in their candidate forums, much to the community's detriment.
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