City Attorney Firm Subpoenaed in Bell Investigation - UPDATED

The LA Times reports that the two parallel investigations into the Bell scandal, one by Los Angeles County District Attorney Steve Cooley's office and one by state attorney general Jerry Brown, have proceeded with brisk election-year dispatch, an efficiency that will no doubt fade quickly after the first Tuesday in November.

The Times said that an LA grand jury has issued subpoena's in the DA's investigation. The Times also indicated that Brown's office served subpoenas to obtain records and depositions from nine former Bell officials.

The Times article also said that the AG's office served subpoenas on Best, Best & Krieger, the law firm Bell employed for its city attorney services:

The attorney general also said Monday that his probe was expanding to include the city's former law firm, Best, Best and Krieger, which also received subpoenas. The city last week ended its contract with the lawyers. Shortly thereafter, a longtime city attorney, Edward Lee, who worked for Best, Best and Krieger, announced that he was leaving the firm. A spokeswoman for Best, Best and Krieger said the firm had received the subpoena and is "assisting in any way we can."

BB&K contracts with many municipalities to provide city attorneys. Claremont's city attorney, Sonia Carvalho, is a partner at BB&K.


- UPDATED 9:20AM

The city of Maywood, which outsourced nearly all of its services earlier year, was also in the LA Times today. An article in the paper's LA Extra section described how the turmoil in Bell has spilled over into Maywood:

In late June, Maywood fired most of its workers and turned over operations to its neighbor city. But the scandal over eye-popping salaries in Bell has become a "distraction," and Maywood leaders said they would look for someone else to run their affairs.

"We're caught in a situation where we need to move forward," said Maywood Councilman Felipe Aguirre. "We don't want to be distracted by things that are not germane to our city."

Aguirre said doesn't want Maywood to "become a laughing stock of a city," a term used to describe Bell by one of its own embarrassed council members.

When it began to look outside the city for its services, Maywood hired Angela Spaccia, who was at the time the assistant city manager in Bell, as its interim city manager. Spaccia's Maywood contract paid her $10,000 a month. Spaccia was also earning $376,288 at her regular job in Bell and received benefits that drove her total compensation up to $845,960. Bell let Spaccia go when it fired its former city manager Robert Rizzo when Times broke the news of Rizzo's exorbitant compensation package.

Maywood's three-month contract with Spaccia ends on Thursday. During her short time in Maywood, Spaccia oversaw the dismantling and outsourcing of the city's various departments, and under her Maywood signed a $50,833 a month contract with Bell to run Maywood's basic operations.

Maywood also retained BB&K's Edward Lee for its city attorney, and Lee resigned from Maywood on August 2.

The photo that accompanied today's Times' Maywood article showed angry residents at last night's Maywood city council meeting. The protesters were upset over Maywood's alliance with Bell, and the photo showed one person waving a sign that said, "BBK and Spaccia Brought Bell to Maywood."

It Tolls for Thee - UPDATED

A TAXING SITUATION

The LA Times coverage of municipal salaries in the city of Bell has focused a lot of attention on what had previously been an area examined mainly by gadflies. Local newspapers haven't seemed to care much about such arcana and that lack of scrutiny has allowed city governments, including Claremont's, to dismiss citizen's concerns about such things as city employee and city council compensation.

The excesses in Bell, however, have turned up the heat on city councils everywhere, including our little burg. At Tuesday's meeting of the Claremont City Council, mayor Linda Elderkin felt compelled to point out that Claremont's council members only receive a $400-per-month stipend. Elderkin neglected to mention, however, what she and other council members receive for attending meetings of the Claremont Redevelopment Agency or various regional boards the council members serve on, which is where Bell's council members made the bulk of their nearly $100,000 per year. Still, in Claremont, the total compensation is a fraction of what was seen in Bell, and readers can rest assured that Claremont City Manager Jeff Parker doesn't earn anywhere near the $787,000 former Bell City Manager Robert (not to be confused with Ratso "I'm walkin' heeyuh") Rizzo received.

In any case, local cities are now taking steps to distance themselves from Bell, hence Mayor Elderkin's characteristically blissful lack of self-reflection when she declaimed Tuesday night, "We are not in the realm of the Bell councils." As usual, the obtuse Elderkin missed the point entirely. It's not that Claremont's level of veniality can begin to approach that of Bell's. What ever corruption we have here isn't at all of the same sort as Bell. We're not paying exorbitant salaries and benefits for corrupt officials. Rather, here we pay a premium, a stupidity tax, for want of a better term. It's why we four years ago Claremont's ruling class, the Claremont 400, tried to institute a $45 million assessment district to pay for a $12 million parcel of open space.

Our city's mistakes may not be criminal in nature, but they can be costly. Casual observers of our town see what a wonderful place it appears to be, but they don't understand that the same sense of wonder could have been achieved for a fraction of the costs - costs that include untenable employee pension obligations and unneeded or extravagant city services.


ADVICE OF COUNSEL

We also noticed that Bell's city attorney, Robert Lee, didn't escape criticism. The LA Times reported in today's edition that the city of Downey, which also employs Lee, is ending its contract with him and his firm, Best, Best & Krieger, simply because they don't want to risk being associated with the Bell scandal.

As the Times article noted, city attorneys have a tough balancing act. They have to represent the interests of the citizens of the municipalities they work for but only so far as those interests are represented by officials elected by those same citizens - that is, the city council members. So, what happens when a council acts illegally, unethically, or irresponsibly? Should a city attorney speak up publicly, should they resign, or should they be supportive of the council?

The idea that a city attorney doesn't represent citizens directly but rather represents the council majority is one that informs our own city attorney Sonia Carvalho's legal philosophy. Coincidentally, Carvalho also works for Best, Best & Krieger and has also once worked for a city, Colton in her case, that had council members who were subjects of a federal corruption probe about 10 years ago.

Carvalho's legal advice isn't always reserved for the controlling majority of the city council. It sometimes extends to free legal opinions for the Claremont 400, as it did in 2007 when Mayor Elderkin was first running for council. At that time, one of the big issues was the possibility that Vulcan Materials Co. might begin gravel mining operations on land in northeast Claremont. Elderkin had a potential conflict of interest in any city business with Vulcan because her husband Rick is a Pomona College mathematics professor. Pomona College had a small ownership interest in the land Vulcan was interested in.

When that potential conflict became an issue in the 2007 campaign, Elderkin sought and received an opinion from Carvalho that Elderkin faced no conflict of interest. Carvalho, who didn't provide legal consultations to any other 2007 council candidates, did give Elderkin a freebie. Carvalho's legal opinion should at least have been reported as an in-kind campaign contribution, but Elderkin couldn't even be troubled to do that much.

(By the way, state attorney general's office, tell us again why you didn't look into that?)

We believed then, as we do now, that Claremont and every other city in California would be best served finding city attorneys whose philosophies of governance incorporate a greater concern for the actual town citizens, not just the controlling majority of the five elected city officials and the people who in turn control those council members.


BEEN THERE, DONE THAT

One other Bell-related item on the LA Times' LA Now blog was a report that Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger called for cities to post the salaries of top officials online.

On this issue, the Insider was way ahead of the curve. Almost three years ago, we obtained and shared the city of Claremont's payroll information from the city's online document archive. The information was posted in the form of pay stub information.

Our advice to Governor Schwarzenegger on this one: tread lightly. For our having posted that very public information, City Attorney Carvalho contacted Google, which hosts our blog, and threatened to take them to court if they did not remove the pay stub information immediately. Carvalho falsely accused the Insider of having stolen the information. Then, after the theft accusations were shown to be false, she claimed the pay stubs could not be posted because they were protected by copyright laws (also a false legal theory).

The Daily Bulletin ended up posting an image of one of the pay stubs themselves, after redacting all the personal information. The Bulletin, unlike the Insider, did not receive any nasty-grams from Carvalho, who did have a heapin' portion of crow to chew on in the aftermath of Paystubgate.

The Claremont pay stub information, incidentally, showed that our city employees were compensated quite well, especially after one includes things like bonuses and benefits - information that the city has never been willing to release and information that is supposed to be public, according to California law.


UPDATED, 2:15PM:

A reader contacted us and noted that yesterday's weekly report from City Manager Jeff Parker had the news that Claremont had started posting the salaries of top city officials, including Parker and the city council, on the City's website. Here's what Parker's report said:

CLAREMONT ADMINISTRATIVE AND COUNCIL SALARY INFORMATION AVAILABLE TO THE PUBLIC

As the media reports on the City of Bell's salaries for council and administrative staff, residents across the country are discussing the compensation of their own City officials. In accordance with the City of Claremont's open communication philosophy, the City of Claremont makes this information readily available to the public.

Each member of the City Council receives $400 per month compensation and an additional $30 per Redevelopment Agency meeting. The City Council does not receive retirement benefits and during the 2010-12 budget process, medical benefits were eliminated from council's budget. City commissioners are appointed by the City Council and receive no compensation.

As detailed in the budget, the City Manager's annual salary is $211,000 and the Assistant City Manager's annual salary is $165,000. The Police Chief's annual salary is $174,000. These salaries are based on surveys of comparable cities with similar services and populations to Claremont's 37,000 residents. Cities surveyed include Upland, Brea, La Verne, Glendora, Arcadia, Azusa, Covina, Rialto, Montclair, Monrovia, and Chino.

A complete list of salary ranges for each City position is available upon request through the City Clerk's office. For additional information, please call the City Manager's Office at 909-399-5441

Parker fails to inform the public that transparency only goes so far. We still don't get any information on bonuses and benefits, which together constitute a good chunk of total employee compensation.

According to another LA Times article on Bell, the idea of posting the salary information was supposed to be discussed in Sacramento yesterday at a meeting of city managers hosted the League of California Cities. The public disclosure is one action the League thinks will mute the public's ire over the Bell situation. It also shows that the League is more concerned with the plight of city employees than with the concerns of actual citizens.

The Times described the purpose of the meeting as "damage control," which implies the League wants to put its spin on the story rather than considering whether Bell is an extreme example of a wider malaise. The League is an interest group like any other, and its interests lie in preserving as much of the status quo as possible, to the greater detriment of the people who have to actually pay municipal bills.

Claremont, At It Again

We received an email the other day from a resident complaining about the noise of the construction at the Padua Ave. Park worksite. As you may recall, the city, in the face of a $3.5 million budget deficit, has gone forward with spending $2.4 million from its General Fund on the park.

Here's the reader's note:

DATE: Monday, February 16, 2009 7:51 AM
SUBJECT: construction noise
TO: Claremont Buzz

Dear Insider,

I live near Padua Ave. and have been watching the construction of the new park. The noise from the bulldozers clearing the ground is deafening! They push the boulders they collect as they dig up the ground, and then they dump them into trucks to haul the boulders away. They boulders create a huge racket as they get dropped into the metal sided trucks. It's like marbles rolling around in a tin can except the marbles weigh hundreds of pounds.

Do you know if there is anything we can do about the construction noise?

To tell you the truth, we're not sure. The City has all sorts of rules for construction noise with specific decibel levels for property lines. If you can hear the boulder sounds loudly inside your house with the windows closed, the noise probably exceeds the limits set by Claremont's municipal code. As we've seen in the past, mixing Claremont and bulldozers is a guarantee for trouble.

The Environmental Impact Report for Padua Park made a number of representations that the City would abide by the noise restrictions and would implement mitigations to limit the noise. These included the construction of a wall on the park's south border at Chaminade Ct. In addition, if the rock noise exceeds the City's noise limits, there are things the construction company can do to mitigate the sound. This includes things like putting dirt in the loaders to muffle the sound as the rocks are dropped in.

Here a couple pages from the EIR that describe the specific mitigations the city and its contractor were supposed to do during the construction phase:

Click to Enlarge

As far as we know, the City has failed to do several of the mitigations outlined above. They certainly have failed to construct the wall that the EIR said would be done before any grading commenced. And the contractor has apparently failed to use any sound dampening mitigations.

Because of the City's money problems, they may be trying to skirt the mitigations they promised in the EIR. This would be no surprise. The EIR process is mostly there to get projects passed and to create a cash cow for EIR consultants. As environmental protection, EIRs at least in the hands of cities like Claremont, fail miserably. Once construction begins, if the City chooses to not observe the rules in the EIR, then it is up to residents to get a court order stopping construction until the promised mitigations are enforced.

There's also a punitive aspect to the City's behavior here since residents around the park site had opposed the City's original plans for the project. Don't put it past Claremont Mayor Ellen Taylor (pictured, left) and Claremont City Manager Jeff Parker to take a "Stick it to them!" approach to the construction phase of the project.

We suggest you do three things. First, check the city's EIR for the project mitigations (they are in Appendix C). You can find it here. Second, check Title 16 of the City's municipal code for the applicable city law (16.154.020). Third, spend a little money to hire someone with a calibrated sound meter (the calibration part is important) to measure the construction sound levels at various property lines throughout the neighborhood.

As near as we can gather from the municipal code, the maximum decibel level allowed anywhere in Claremont at anytime is 85 dB. This is the maximum limit because anything above that can cause permanent hearing damage and is considered dangerous. If you are hearing the sound of the rocks in the trucks with your house windows closed, the exterior sound levels outside are likely maxing out at above 85 dB.

If the sound levels exceed Claremont's municipal code restrictions, and if they have failed to institute any of the other EIR mitigations they promised when they approved the EIR, then contact an attorney to get the construction halted. We're not in the habit of endorsing anyone for these sorts of things, but you might contact Ray Johnson in Temecula. He's the attorney the local Protect Our Neighborhoods group has used, and he's had some success against the City and its City Attorney, Sonia Carvalho of Best, Best & Krieger.

Incidentally, if you prevail, the court will generally grant you your attorney fees. You can find Johnson's contact information here.

One other point. All of this should serve to underscore the fact that the city of Claremont has consistently failed to keep its promises and has taken an attitude that says, "So sue us." It really was this attitude that led to the Wilderness Park bulldozing last year, and it is an attitude that continues to manifest itself from time to time in the City's actions. In our view, it should not take litigation to force the city to keep its word to its citizens, but that is what is happening here.

The Padua Park construction also perfectly illustrates how useless things like EIRs are. The City spent $125,000, plus about the same amount for their attorney fees, for the Padua Park EIR, yet the City has failed to implement most of the EIR provisions for the construction phase of the park. You don't see any of the local environmental groups out monitoring this, and the city's youth sports parents could not possibly care less about the impacts their projects cause.

It's a shame a takes a lawsuit to make them and the City care.

City Council Meets Tonight--UPDATED

The Claremont City Council holds its first meeting of 2009 tonight, beginning at 5:15pm with another in a seemingly endless series of special closed session meetings. (You get the impression this is where the real business of the city gets done, without that bothersome public to interrupt the flow of things.)

The closed session agenda lists two items up for discussion:

• A conference with the city's labor negotiators: City Manager Jeff Parker, Assistant City Manager Tony Ramos, and Personnel Manager Shawna Urban.
  
  
• A conference with the city's legal counsel, City Attorney Sonia Carvalho, regarding "anticipated litigation." Or, money in the bank for Carvalho's firm, Best, Best & Krieger - gotta love those billable hours.
  

The regular, public City Council meeting will convene at 6:30pm, beginning with a sanitized summary of the earlier closed session. The regular agenda seems pretty pedestrian:

• Ceremonial matters: Introduction of new Human Services Commissioner Bob Miletich and a recognition of the Doubletree Hotel for their sponsorship of the city's Christmas Tree Lighting Celebration.
  
  
• Consideration of City Manager Parker's "proposed and amended" employment contract. As a result of the Council's December evaluation of the City Manager's performance, they've rewarded him with a 3% raise and a pay-for-performance bonus of an undisclosed amount. Of course, the devil is in the bonus details, conveniently hidden away.
  
  At least Parker, whose salary will now be $211,150 per year, made out better with his raise than his predecessor, Glenn Southard.
  
  [Update: See today's Wes Woods Daily Bulletin article here. Parker will offer to freeze his COL raise for 90 days. He has "no problem" leading on this one. Makes one even more curious about the TOP-SECRET "pay for performance" portion. The comments to the aforementioned Bulletin article are especially biting.]
  
  
• Delaying discussion of a sidewalk installation plan for Foothill Blvd. between Mountain and Berkeley Aves. until staff can consider some alternatives. This plan generated some controversy because it would involved removal of the large trees that line that section of Foothill. The residents in the homes on the other side of the block wall there weren't too happy about the prospect of losing those trees.
  
  The council is being asked to hold this one over until their February 24th meeting.
  
  
• Review of the Human Services Commission Strategic Work Plan. This is the guiding template for most of Claremont's community programs and services. The most interesting bullet point under the work plan is "Alternative Revenue Generation," which includes "Approval and Implementation of Sponsorship Policy."
  
  Can you say, "Naming Rights?" Imagine, if you will, a newly built Padua Park with a great big neon Claremont Toyota sign festooning the entrance. Or the "Metamucil Senior Center" in Larkin Park.
  
  This is how things get done in Claremont. Policy changes buried as tiny bullet points in little-read commission work plan.
  
  
• Approval of an entertainment permit for Walters Restaurant. This link was dead, so we have no idea what sort of entertainment is being proposed.
  
  
• Appointments to the City's Sustainability Committee. A number of names listed here. The most interesting of which is Barbara Musselman, the president of the local League of Women Voters chapter, chair of the Police Commission, a member of the city's Affordable Housing Task Force, and a member of the city's Committee on Human Relations.
  
  Talk about recycling! Barbara's taking up enough space as it is. How about opening this one up to one of the many equally qualified community members who don't have a committee or a commission seat?
  

Claremont City Council Meeting
Tonight, 7:00pm
City Council Chambers
225 Second St.

Legal Briefs

The Daily Bulletin had a couple articles mentioning public agencies that use the law firm of Best, Best & Krieger (BB&K), the same firm that supplies Claremont with its city attorney, Sonia Carvalho.


WANTED (MAYBE): NEW ATTORNEY FOR SEWER DISTRICT

The first Bulletin article concerned the Jurupa Community Services District (JCSD), which supplies water and sewer utilities to unincorporated areas in western Riverside County.

Apparently, the JCSD, which has used BB&K for 30 years, may seek another firm for legal counsel. According to the Bulletin article:

There has been some discord between [Board President R. M. "Cook"] Barela and the counsel. Last month, the firm sent a four-page confidential letter to everyone on the board except Barela regarding the firm's qualifications as legal counsel for the district.

The letter was in response to a comment that Barela allegedly made at a Dec. 10 meeting regarding Best, Best and Krieger's services.

"Director Barela stated that the district has not been receiving good legal advice and service from our firm and told Mr. Horst that he wanted him to solicit proposals for general counsel legal services," the letter stated.

It went on to state, "Jurupa Community Services District has been a valued client of our firm for more than 30 years, and we hope the relationship will continue for a long time in the future."

The Riverside Press-Enterprise explored the matter in more detail in a January 14th article:

Barela's suggestion that the community services district look at proposals from other legal firms prompted a letter from Best Best & Krieger attorney Richard Anderson touting his firm's accomplishments on behalf of the district since 1976.

Anderson, who served as the district's legal counsel until May 2007, called the land sale to the Calvert partnership "an unfortunate mistake" but stressed that he was never consulted before the property was sold.

Anderson said he was not at the meeting at which the sale was approved and did not learn of the transaction until after it was completed.

Anderson's letter also was openly critical of Barela. It was sent to [JCSD Board Directors] Jane Anderson, Betty Anderson, [Kathryn] Bogart and Kenneth McLaughlin, but not Barela. [EDITOR'S NOTE: Jane and Betty Anderson are not related to Richard Anderson or to each other.]

Noting that he had not received a copy, Barela called the letter an attempt to divide the board.

Barela said last week that his Dec. 10 comments were not meant to disparage the work of Best Best & Krieger and that the law firm would be able to submit a proposal.

JURUPA SCHOOL DISTRICT CENSURE

Another BB&K client in the news is the Jurupa Unfied School District, where boardmember Michael Rodriguez was censured in January, 2007.

BB&K has some prior experience with the censure process in the Inland Empire.

In January, 2003, the city of Ontario, which also used BB&K, censured Councilperson Debbie Acker. According to a Bulletin article published on 8/17/2004:

Acker was officially reprimanded by her colleagues through a censure resolution in January 2003.

A five-month independent investigation found that her conduct with city employees violated laws or city policies and could result in claims against the city.

As a result, she was required to make all her inquiries to a handful of staff members through a special phone line - a number she has never used - and was barred from nonpublic places in City Hall without prior appointment.

Acker insists that her dealings with employees were within her rights as a council member.

And in 2005, then-Claremont City Manager Glenn Southard accused Claremont Councilperson Jackie McHenry of creating a hostile work environment. Other city staffers, former city councilmembers like Paul Held and Sandy Baldonado, and many Claremont 400 members jumped on the censure bandwagon with the zeal and bloodlust of a mob at a Salem witchhunt.

As in the Acker case, Claremont proposed having an independent investigation conducted. In the Claremont case, there certainly did not seem to be broad public support for censure, and a number of citizens spoke out against it. The city council voted against an investigation, and Southard, possibly sensing that he risked making McHenry into a martyr, backed off.

The matter was dropped, though it quickly segued into the Preserve Claremont campaign against McHenry and current councilmember Corey Calaycay. Many of the same people who railed against McHenry, including some city staffers, became involved in Preserve Claremont's unsuccessful and discredited smear campaign for the March, 2005, city election.

* * *

In the Jurupa Unified School District matter, JUSD Board Member Michael Rodriguez was censured on January, 2007, after complaints of sexual and verbal harassment by some district employees against Rodriguez.

The Daily Bulletin reported today that Rodriguez has filed a lawsuit against JUSD Superintendent Elliot Duchon and Board President Carl Harris, alleging they and the district violated Rodriguez's civil rights and his right to due process. The article also said that the JUSD Board has voted against distributing Rodriguez's lawsuit to residents.

Fortunately, if you're so inclined, the Riverside County Courts have a great website with civil case information, including many scanned documents. The complaint for Rodriguez's suit can be seen here (click on the little camera icon on the line that says "complaint").

No answer to the complaint has been filed yet, but a January 9th Press-Enterprise article indicated the community was divided over the lawsuit. One of the people quoted in the article as being sympathetic to the Jurupa school board was former school board representative R. M. "Cook" Barela, the same person who is president of the Jurupa Community Services District.

The article indicates that Rodriguez feels his censure was done as retribution for his dissent on the board. Rodriguez now faces a recall campaign to remove him from office.


ULTIMATE COSTS

We can't speak to the truth behind the allegations in these cases, but we can say that in the one in Claremont in 2005, there did seem to be the witchhunt aspect that we mentioned earlier in this post. To be fair, we do recall in that instance the city attorney appearing to be counseling the city towards moderation, and the McHenry censure was averted, though by the time of the council vote on whether or not to go forward with an investigation, it was pretty clear that the public wasn't biting on the censure idea.

When you consider the expense that an elected official threatened with censure has to endure to provide a competent defense against a public agency's considerable resources, even the mere threat of censure could potentially have a chilling effect on dissent. So you could have non-elected officials acting as a de facto Praetorian guard, making and unmaking empires.

We would be extremely concerned if censure started becoming a common practice and if it were ever used to silence an elected official unfairly. We'd also be interested in any academic studies of censure in local politics - studies perhaps examining the frequency, the cost to defend and the public cost to carry out a censure, the actual charges presented (harassment and hostile work environment seem pretty common), the underlying political environment.

We could easily see a hypothetical situation where a city staff member, perhaps seeking to conceal some activity, could make false accusations of harrassment or false claims of a hostile work environment in order to initiate a censure proceeding against an elected official seeking to look into that staffer's activities. In such a case, censure could be improperly used to cut off a legitimate inquiry, much to the public's detriment.

We wonder, has anyone ever really studied what are the ultimate effects on local democracy when public agencies seek to censure, and is that process ever abused?