Council Meeting Tonight

The Claremont City Council meets tonight for its last meeting before the March 3rd municipal election. The council meets in its chambers at 225 W. 2nd St. in the Claremont Village.

The city streams its council meetings live. You can watch here.

The agendas for tonight are fairly light. There's the obligatory closed session meeting at 5:15pm, where the council will here a report on labor negotiations from City Manager Jeff Parker, Assistant City Manager Tony Ramos, and Shawna Urban, the City's Personnel Manager.

The council's regular session begins at 6:30pm with a brief report on the closed session. Among the items being discussed tonight are:

• The second reading and adoption of a council resolution reinstating the city's leaf blower ordinance. This is a messy item, one that we plan on delving into in greater detail in the future. The short version is that the council last year changed its existing leaf blower ordinance without the required environmental review. The city and City Attorney Sonia Carvalho were put on notice at the time by a resident who told the council that an environmental review was required by law to change such an ordinance.
  
  Carvalho and the council ignored the resident's warning. As a result, a neighborhood group filed a legal action. The city, which had no legal leg to stand on, had to reverse its decision and now has to reinstate the leaf blower ordinance. The city is also on the hook for the legal fees to the aggrieved parties.
  
  
• Authorization for staff to solicit bids for sidewalk construction on the south side of Foothill Blvd. between Mountain and Berkeley Aves. This is an item that originally came before the council on January 13th. The original plan was for the remval of tall trees on the south side of Foothill in the area in question. Staff wanted to replace those trees with a sidewalk (there is none now).
  
  The council, however, got an earful from resident whose backyards are on the other side of the trees and wall along that section of Foothill. Those residents complained that they need the trees to shield their homes from the lights of the commercial areas on the north side of Foothill. They also said that no one walks along the south side of the street anyway, so who needs a sidewalk there? There really isn't anything to walk to, the residents said.
  
  Staff, however, has got its money courtesy of a state Cal Trans grant, and they want to spend it. So, now, they're asking the council to either approve the original plan or give the okay to one of two alternate sidewalk plans that would preserve some of the existing trees but would narrow Foothill by extending the parkway out either three to four feet under one alternate plan or seven feet under the other.
  
  
• Authorization from the council for staff to hire NBS Corporation to prepare the City's annual Landscaping and Lighting District (LLD) report. The LLD has long been a sore point in town, and it comes back for its annual review. It will be interesting to see how much of an increase staff tries to justify. The LLD is not supposed to increase faster than the local inflation rate, and with prices flat, or falling in the case of energy, what rationale will the cash-strapped city and its consultant come up the LLD. What's your guess? Three percent? Four?
  
  
• Approval of a resolution allowing for a weekly Claremont Family Festival on First St., Second St., and Oberlin Ave. in the Claremont Village Expansion. Portions of those streets would be closed every Wednesday between 4pm and 9pm from March through October.
  
  The council is also being asked to approve a memorandum of understanding (MOU) between the City and the non-profit Volunteer Network International allowing VNI to run the event with an exclusive special event permit. VNI is willing to invest $40,000 to $50,000 up front to help get the event going.
  
  Staff also wants to the council to waive the special event permit application fee because the event qualifies as a public benefit.
  
  Although they include the disclaimer "Pending City Approval" for the Wednesday night festivals, the folks at VNI do seem to assume that, like most things in town, this is a done deal. The VNI site says: "Plan to be in Claremont, California, area sometime soon? Stop in to experience "Claremont Wednesdays."
  
  It also says that the event will kick off April 29th and tells us that VNI is proudly sponsoring the event in partnership with the Claremont Chamber of Commerce and the City of Claremont. All great stuff, but shouldn't they, the Chamber, and the City show the good graces to wait until this is all discussed publicly before making such official soundig pronouncements?
  
  Much as with the Claremont Trolley, this premature announcement is designed to pressure the council into approving this issue at the risk of looking like Scrooges if they question anything. It may very well be a good deal for everyone involved, but please respect the process rather than paying lip service to it.
  

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