A small tempest has blown up over the contradictions between Claremont city council candidate Bridget Healy's recent campaign insert in the Claremont Courier and her sworn testimony in a 2006 deposition. The flyer, posted here and on the Daily Bulletin website states,
"Claremont is a better place today because of the many gifts Bridget shared with us during her 18 years as Assistant City Manager of our City... Here is a partial list of accomplishments to which Bridget made significant contributions during her years of public service to Claremont's citizens: 1. Acquired more than 1,600 acres of hillside property that became the Wilderness Park as well as the Padua Hills Theater [sic] at no cost to the tax payers of Claremont;..." [emphases added]
Tony Krickl, in yesterday's Claremont Courier (the article is not online; you'll have to buy the newspaper and it is well worth the 75 cents), carries the story a little further after interviewing Healy.
"When asked her specific role in acquiring the Wilderness Park land, Ms. Healy said that 'very early on' she negotiated with the Independent Cities Financial Authority on financing the purchase through them. She also reviewed agenda reports on the topic [emphasis added]..."
Since the property was paid for at first, as we recall, with money from the City sewer fund, and the Independent Cities Financial Authority was never involved, her negotiation must've led nowhere.
So here we have the sum total of Bridget Healy's "substantial contribution" to the acquisition of the Wilderness Park: an unsuccessful negotiation (more likely a single phone call) and the heavy lifting of reviewing agenda reports as she describes on page 15 of her deposition:
Grotefeld: You also talked about one of the duties that you held as assistant city manager for Claremont, the preparation of agendas?
Healy: Uh-huh.
Grotefeld: When you say preparation of agendas, what do you mean by that?
Healy: I guess the best way to describe it was to say I was the quality control person.
Grotefeld: And by that, what do you mean?
Healy: Reading all the reports, making sure that they were grammatically correct, the answer was in the presentation, that they were understandable to the public.
We wonder if her "substantial contributions" to the other 20 "accomplishments" cited in the campaign piece are equally thin--or equally non-existent. Certainly some of the so-called "accomplishments" themselves seem a bit vague and non-specific, e.g., number 12 on the list, "Enhanced the City's partnership with the School District."
And this excellent article by Krickl raises other questions. If Ms. Healy is now claiming a specific role, however meager, in the acquisition of the Wilderness Park, isn't that pretty clearly at variance with her sworn testimony in her deposition? What is that called, class?--It starts with a "P" and ends with "jury".
Moreover, is she really seriously claiming that "substantial contributions" to the acquistion of the Wilderness Park were reading over agenda reports for grammatical errors and typos? Wow.
For this she is receiving a six-figure pension of which Claremont's contribution is nearly $100,000 per year: Proofreading agenda reports and holding Glenn Southard's hankie.
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See our earlier post for a full copy of Bridget Healy's 2006 sworn deposition.
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