Their Fair Share - UPDATED*

 

Last Tuesday, the Claremont City Council voted 3-2 to impose a new, one-year contract on the Claremont Police Officers Association and the Claremont Police Management Association.  The vote came after the City was unable to reach any agreements with the two police organizations in recent contract negotiations.
 
The CPOA, which represents Claremont's rank-and-file public safety workers, was extremely vocal in the days leading up to last week's vote.  As we previously noted, the CPOA's attorney, Dieter Dammeier, deployed his political action committeee, COPFIRE, to issue a threat to Claremont City Councilman Corey Calaycay, warning him that they would target him in future elections if he didn't vote the CPOA's way.

You can review the video of the council meeting here.  The Daily Bulletin's Wes Woods II also had a write up of the meeting.

The City had been asking for the police to start paying their own retirement contributions with a three-year, phased-in system.  The City also offered a 1.5% cost of living adjustment.  The police associations didn't want to accept the City's terms unless they got a 3% COLA, twice what the City was offering.  The council then proposed imposing the new contract with its requirement that the police start paying two-thirds of their 9% salary contribution to their CalPERS retirement accounts.  (Currently, the City is picking up the entire 9%.)

Of the many arguments made by the CPOA at last Tuesday's council meeting, the one that really caught our interest went like this:  If you don't pay us what we want, your community's safety will suffer.  Underlying this sentiment is the idea that Claremont would lose good police officers to surrounding communities that are willing to pay their police higher salaries and better benefits.  The CPOA's justification for police deserving better compensation than other municipal employees is that police have a more dangerous job.  They put their lives on the line every night.

To this line of thinking, we say our police are already paid higher salaries commensurate with their greater responsibilities.   While we appreciate their good work, we also think they are already adequately compensated.  Further, the danger they place themselves in is relative.  The CPD and their negotiator Dieter Dammeier make it sound as if they're patrolling the streets of Kabul every night.   Let's face it, in terms of threat levels, Claremont is pretty light duty.   The Claremont Courier's Saturday Police Blotter is invariably filled with stories about domestic disputes and drunk-and-disorderly arrests, not gang shootouts.

Let's be honest, folks, Watts we ain't.

The CPOA claims its members would leave for other Dammeier cities, like La Verne or Azusa, because the compensation is better there.  We thought about this and then realized that in his remarks to the City Council, Dieter Dammeier let slip a factor we hadn't thought about before.  Dammeier told the council that he represents all of the police associations within 20 miles of Claremont.  He then said that the contract the council was considering would make it difficult for Claremont to compete for qualified police officer applicants.   This struck us as an admission by Dammeier that he controls what amounts to a labor cartel.  He gets to set prices in the form of salaries and benefits, and there really is no competition as long as Dammeier and his clients get their way.

What Dammeier really fears is a city such as a Claremont going against the grain and breaking Dammeier's hold on the local public safety labor market. That monopoly, though, really could use some busting.   In his remarks to the Claremont City Council last week, Dammeier mentioned Pomona's police, another department Dammeier represents.  The Bulletin covered Pomona's budget problems in an article yesterday, noting that the single biggest annual expense was personnel costs, of which the Pomona PD accounted for the lion's share:

When it comes to expenditures by category the largest was personnel which took up 48 percent of the general fund, followed by the city's fire contract which took up another 28 percent.

If the expenses are broken up by department the highest cost is the Police Department which had about $38 million in expenses and fire costs totaled about $24 million.

It's the sort of financial problems Pomona is contending with that Claremont seeks to avoid.  You'd like to think that CPD officers would want to help with that effort, but getting people to give up something to which they think they're entitled, like having the City pay the employees' share of their retirement contributions, is never easy.  

The Bulletin, by the way, also had an editorial last week that said that the sort of strong-arm tactics Dammeier has used in Claremont are wrong and that Claremont is correct in seeking to get the police employees to fund their own retirements.  The Bulletin pointed out that by all rights, these payments are something our public safety workers should have been making in the first place:

It's called the "employee contribution" for a reason - it's the part each employee is supposed to contribute toward his or her own pension. But back in headier economic days, most government bodies in California started paying not only the employer's contribution but the employee's as well. In some cases it was a matter of courting union political support, in some it came in lieu of a raise or a bigger raise.

Trouble is, the economy has tanked and tax revenues along with it. Cities are finding their pension contributions unsustainable, diverting money that might have gone to employee salaries and services for residents. Hence, prudent city councils are looking for employees to kick in the employee's contribution once again. It doesn't reduce pensions in any way, it just means employees contribute to their own eventual retirement while they're working in good jobs and can afford it.

* * * * *

That 3-2 council vote on the police contract was a peculiar one.  The two fiscal conservatives, Corey Calaycay and Opanyi Nasiali, voted against imposing the contract on the public safety employees, which on the face of it would seem to be a vote in support of Dammeier and the CPOA. 

The other three council members, Mayor Sam Pedroza, Mayor Pro Tem Larry Schroeder, and Joe Lyons, are all left-leaning and are generally supporters of public employee unions but all voted in favor of the imposition of the contract. 

We suppose this could be seen as a validation of Dammeier's intimidation tactic, but Calaycay and Nasiali both said they couldn't support the contract because it included that 1.5% COLA, something they were against. 

*UPDATED, 11/1/11, 7:20PM:  As the Claremont Courier's Beth Hartnett reports in today's paper, Calaycay's and Nasiali's main objection to the one-year police contract was that they felt the 9% CalPERS contribution should have been instituted all at once, rather than phased in.   

Additionally, Hartnett notes that the one of the things the CPD officers object to is having the 6% contribution instituted immediately as opposed to having the 9% phased in over three years, as was done with the City's other employee associations. (At 8%, the City's non-public safety employees' CalPERS contribution is slightly less than the police.)

The City's response is that because of timing of the imposed contract, splitting the 6% into two 3% increments would have meant that the next 3% increase would have been in nine months when the next fiscal year begins in July, 2012.  Hartnett reports that the City's negotiator, Richard Kreisler, argued that they accelerated the public safety employees' CalPERS phase-in because of the uncertainty the City faces with the CPD employee associations.  

* * * * *

Incidentally, we received an email from another reader who got one of those robocalls from the Claremont Police Officers Association made prior to last Tuesday night's council vote.  Our reader questioned whether or not the CPOA used CPD call data to get phone numbers for their robocalls:

DATE: Wednesday, October 26, 2011 4:47 PM

TO: Claremont Buzz

SUBJECT: Claremont Police Officers Association robocalls

Hello all,

Like another of your readers, I also got a robocall from the Claremont Police Officers Association. It was a voicemail message left on my cell phone on Monday, two days ago, urging me to show up at Tuesday's city council meeting to support the police department against further budget cuts.

Here's the odd thing: few people have my cell phone number. And it has a 541 area code. So I'm wondering how did the Claremont Police Officers Association get my number?

Could it be because on 14 October 2011, I used my cell phone to call the police department (to report a coyote citing)? And if so, who at the police department is passing on incoming telephone numbers to the Claremont Police Officers Association. And -- if that is what happened -- was it legal?

Best,

x

Claremont CA

It Takes a Thief

DET. BAYLISS

These are the exactly questions I've been trying to answer.

DET. PEMBLETON

Well you can try, but you never will.

BAYLISS

Why?

PEMBLETON

Why?...You don't think like a criminal.  You don't have a criminal mind.

- Homicide: Life on the Streets,
Season 1, Episode 2 (1993)

HARDBALL
 
The best detectives have, in their heart of hearts, at least a touch of larceny.  It's something they have to possess in order to be able to inhabit the criminal mind.  The difference is that they also have an ethical code that's absent in the criminals they hunt.

So maybe that same mentality is what makes an effective negotiator of Dieter Dammeier, the attorney representing the Claremont Police Officers Association (CPOA) in their ongoing contract talks with the City of Claremont. 

Of course, we have no idea what sort of officer Dammeier was before he started his law practice, back when he was employed by the Cypress Police Department.  We can only judge his public behavior now, behavior that of late strikes us as close to thuggery.

Wes Woods II reports in today's Daily Bulletin that an organization called the Committee of Police and Fire Associations Inspiring Responsible Elections (COPFIRE) recently sent Claremont City Councilmember Corey Calaycay a letter accusing him of failing make public safety (i.e., police salaries) a top priority.

The letter, a copy of which the Insider has obtained, stated:

You have been brought to our attention as someone we should actively oppose in future elections as a result of your failure to prioritize public safety in your position as a Claremont City Councilman. Specifically, we have been informed that under your watch, the number of sworn police officers working the streets of Claremont has been cut by 15%. Traffic Enforcement has been cut, the School Resource position has been reduced, the Investigations Division has been reduced to a point where there is no more active gang, graffiti or narcotics enforcement.

Judging from the tenor of the letter, Calaycay has really PO'd someone at COPFIRE. And who, exactly, are they? Apparently, they're a political action committee and are made up of representatives from various local police unions. COPFIRE's letterhead has a list of its board members, the first of whom is one Dieter Dammeier, who is listed as the PAC's "Fund Administrator."

Click to Enlarge

It's not too hard to figure out what's going on here. The CPOA and the City of Claremont have been deadlocked in contracted negotiations. For years, the city has paid the police officers' share of their CalPERS retirement contributions, 9% of the public safety employees' annual salary. As part of its ongoing efforts at ensuring fiscal responsibility, the City is now asking CPOA members to start paying that 9% themselves, as they should have been doing in the first place.

The City originally offered to have that change phased in over the next three years (3%, 3% and 3%). The other employee unions have already agreed to contracts with phased-in CalPERS payments. In the case of non-public safety employees it's 8% over three years.

The CPOA, led by Dammeier, have stated they will only accept the phased-in CalPERS payments if the City gives the police officers a 3% cost-of-living increase in their salaries, which would pretty much offset their CalPERS contributions. The City is offering 1.5% for cost of living adjustments (COLAs) for each of the next three years, something the city's other employee associations have already agreed to.

Because the two sides have been unable to reach an agreement, the City Council has announced that it will impose a one-year contract with 6% CalPERS contribution for the police. That matter is on the council's agenda for their Tuesday night meeting. Dammeier clearly thinks he can strong-arm the council by trying to intimidate Calaycay, though Dammeier denied that in the Bulletin article today, saying that the letter and its timing were unrelated to the upcoming meeting.

COPFIRE, incidentally, has no Claremont PD members. The letter in question was signed by Arcadia Police Detective Mike Hale, who is a COPFIRE board member. Dammeier and COPFIRE clearly don't have a very good understanding of Claremont, or at least of the people who vote in our municipal elections. In this town it's very bad form for an outsider to tell us what to do, especially when it comes to COPFIRE's sort of bullying.

Interestingly, none of the other four councilmembers received a COPFIRE letter.  Only Calaycay did. In today's Bulletin article, Dieter Dammeier responded to Woods' question about COPFIRE singling out Councilmember Calaycay:

Dammeier said Calaycay was targeted because he has run in the past for the Assembly.

But, that doesn't really account for Councilmember Joe Lyons, who himself sought a seat in the state legislature when he ran for the California State Senate in 2008. If the justification for an outside PAC like COPFIRE going after a councilmember is the concern about what they might do at state level, then Lyons should have received a COPFIRE threat. Yet he did not.

Here's the actual letter in question (it's public record, so you can get your own copy at City Hall, if you're interested):

Click to Enlarge

TOUGH TALK

Boss Dammeier, with
  an offer you can't refuse

Dammeier's tactics should come as no surprise. In February, we predicted Dammeier and the CPOA would pull something like this.  And Dammeier's website lays out Dieter's philosophy:

The association should be like a quiet giant in the position of, "do as I ask and don't piss me off." Depending on the circumstances surrounding the negotiations impasse, there are various tools available to an association to put political pressure on the decision makers.

In other works, walk tall and carry a big baton.

One of the arguments CPOA's members have made is that their work is different from that of other city employees, so they should receive different, better compensation.

Mayor Pro Tem Larry Schroeder, who says he wants to treat all employees fairly, took issue with the CPOA's reasoning and was quoted Claremont Courier on 10/8/11, saying:

"Employees are all paid according to their amount of responsibility, and certainly policemen are compensated for working holidays and different shifts," Mr. Schroeder said. "Being a former city employee myself, I understand that people get paid different wages, and I think policemen are fairly compensated for that."

The police have been been doing their best to refute Schroeder and have followed Dammeier's lead with scare tactics, claiming that they are overworked and underpaid. They claim, among other things, that the ranks of the CPD's street cops have been reduced 15%, implying that crime is on the rise and we are in perilous state. However, the police fail to mention that, in the long term, crime has generally been on the decline in most areas, not just Claremont. They also don't want the public to consider the possibility that the number of police was bloated in the first place, at least for a community of 35,000.

The police have also brought up things like the reductions in graffiti enforcement and gang unit staff, but they don't acknowledge such that gang activity in Claremont is extremely low. Similarly, they claim the auto theft task force has suffered because of the city's cutbacks, which is a lot of hogwash. Claremont doesn't have a separate auto theft task force. The LA County Sheriff's Office is in charge of coordinating the Taskforce for Regional Autotheft Prevention (TRAP), a multi-jurisdictional entity funded by vehicle license fees, and TRAP hasn't gone away at all.

Virtually every claim the CPOA and Dammeier have made has only one goal, a political one designed to get citizens to put pressure on the Claremont City Council to cave into CPOA's demands. Our bet is that they've greatly misjudged Claremonters and that they've overreached.

We'll find out Tuesday night how well Dammeier has read the political terrain. The City Council's regular session begins at 6:30 pm in the council chambers at 225 W. 2nd St. in the Claremont Village.  You can also watch it here.

Act II

There are no second acts in American lives.

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

Tanned, rested, and ready...
However, Claremont, being a sovereign nation, offers up as many chances at redemption as its nobles need. Case in point, the comeback of one Karen Rosenthal (photo, left), a former Claremont mayor. After a long hiatus, Rosenthal was back on the Claremont political scene this year as a member of Joe Lyons' campaign committee.

In addition to hosting Lyons' campaign night party, Rosenthal was in charge of hospitality for Lyons' campaign. Those of you who were around when Rosenthal was mayor can appreciate the cognitive dissonance induced by the sight of Rosenthal's involvement in Lyons' election. While mayor, Rosenthal was best known for her eye rolling behind the dais when she disagreed with some speaker during public comment at council meetings. Rosenthal's official nastiness exceed even that of her fellow Weird Sisters Ellen Taylor and Sandy Baldonado.

Rosenthal's letter prompted this response by one of our readers:

Date: Sat, March 12, 2011 7:38:08 PM
To: claremontbuzz@yahoo.com
Subject:the one thing at lyons4citycouncil that made me laugh out loud was listed under the "campaign committee" heading


Hospitality
Karen Rosenthal

If you are at all familiar with Rosenthal's history, you know that her defense of smear tactics is consistent with her remarkable ability to rationalize just about anything. In 2003, it was Rosenthal's heavy-handed mismanagement of the Irvin Landrum shooting that prompted voters to reject Rosenthal's reelection bid. Ever resilient, Rosenthal has from time-to-time tested the waters to see if people had forgotten how badly she behaved while on council.

Lyons' success has apparently emboldened Rosenthal's post-election renaissance. After the March 8 election, she had a letter in the Claremont Courier justifying the smear campaign on councilmember Opanyi Nasiali by a group that included members of Lyons' campaign.

Rosenthal was back in the council chambers Tuesday night, berating council member Corey Calaycay and trying to imply that he's a misogynist. Claremont's mean girls are using this as an opportunity to knock Calaycay down a peg or two and to soften up the ground for their next campaign. The Courier's Tony Krickl describes how Calaycay's comments about the diversity on the council are being twisted into an attack on women:

At the ceremony, he applauded the ethnic diversity of the new council. He also pointed out its geographic diversity since the 5 council members all live in different parts of town.

But he didn’t mention that there are no women on the council; a fact not lost several women sitting in the audience. It’s the first time since 1962 that Claremont doesn’t have a female councilmember.

After Calaycay’s remarks, a few women in the audience remarked about the lack of female council members and didn’t like that Calaycay pointed that out. Even though he actually didn’t.

As Krickl points out, these latest attacks by Rosenthal and her fellow former mayor Judy Wright (photo, right), prompted Calaycay to apologize for remarks he didn't make. One of our readers commented on the fact that Krickl rightly noted that the lack of women on the present council is quite possibly a result of the lack of women candidates (a total of two women versus nine men in the last two elections). Our reader also remarked that the missteps of mayors Wright and Rosenthal may have contributed to the council's present gender disparity:

Date: Wed, March 23, 2011 12:41:09 PM
To: claremontbuzz@yahoo.com
Subject: Corey Calaycay

So I just read on the CourierCityBeat blog that apparently Karen Rosenthal and Judy Wright took exception to Corey’s remarks about diversity. Perhaps, as the CityBeat pointed out, if more women ran there would be a greater chance of having a woman on the Council. Or perhaps it is a case that the voters are smarter than Karen and Judy think……the matriarchs of Claremont didn’t do all that wonderful a job and perhaps women candidates lose because of that association in the voters’ minds. Perhaps they are thinking……well, how much worse could it get…..might as well give the guys a chance. After all, both Karen and Judy had their shot. Judy during the Orange County debacle, if I remember correctly, and Karen during the Landrum affair where her greatest achievements were opening her mouth and pouring gasoline on the fire.

[FYI, Claremont, with Wright on the council, invested and nearly lost $5.4 million dollars when the city used reserve money to buy into the failed Orange County Investment Poll in the early 1990's. After five years of litigation, the City got its principal back but lost out on that many years of interest on the money.]

The powers of rationalization possessed by Claremonsters like Judy Wright and Karen Rosenthal never cease to amaze us. For instance, we recall that one of the other items that caused voters to reject Rosenthal involved her husband's medical practice. Dr. Michael Rosenthal ran a birthing center in Upland and was twice disciplined by the Medical Board of California, once in 1997 and again in 2001. The first action resulted in a five-year medical probation. The second resulted in the revocation of Dr. Rosenthal's license.

LA Times reporter Tipton Blish covered the story:

The board accused him [Michael Rosenthal] of mishandling three abortions in 1999, when he was running his own Upland-based Family Birthing Center serving women with low-risk pregnancies.

He admitted to the board that he misled patients, lied to another physician, failed to reveal an abnormal pap smear result, failed to perform an ultrasound on a patient who had already delivered four babies by caesarean section, and started an abortion procedure on a patient in her second trimester.

At the time, Rosenthal was on probation for two other incidents, one in 1986 and one in 1992. In the latter case, medical board prosecutors said he gambled that a pregnancy would be without incident and didn't tell his patient that he had lost his privileges in San Antonio.

His privileges were revoked after his insurance company stopped his malpractice coverage in 1992.

Never mind that the medical board complaints state that Dr. Rosenthal was self-prescribing himself Prozac while he was operating his birthing center, that he failed to notify his patients that had no malpractice insurance or no hospital privileges, or that when serious complications arose in a couple procedures, he dumped the patients at San Antonio Community Hospital's emergency room.

No, for the Rosenthals, the biggest concern wasn't the medical board's findings or Dr. Rosenthal's treatment of the patients listed in the complaints, but rather, personal responsibility be damned, that their reputations remain untarnished, which is ever foremost in the minds of our Claremonsters. The Tipton Blish article conclude with a pair of quotes from the Rosenthals:

"The single biggest thing is embarrassing Karen," he said. "I have resolved this in my own mind a long time ago.... For myself, I just don't care."

Karen Rosenthal defended her husband, saying that none of the charges were ever proved in court.

"He is a great doctor. He delivered over 5,000 babies and is very well loved in the community," she said.

* * * * *

It's not too hard to see where all this is headed. This isn't about gender disparity on the Claremont City Council. This is all about Plan B for getting former Assistant City Manager Bridget Healy (image, left) on the council. Healy, who lost badly in 2009, desperately wants her own second act. Plan A, spearheaded by failed candidate Robin Haulman, didn't work out, so now the Claremonsters are trying to claim that we need more women on the council. They plan on arguing this for the next two years and then offering up exactly one woman, their woman, to run in 2013.

What they don't get is that as long as they keep offering up the wrong women, their candidates are going to fail. Not because voters don't like women, but because the rest of Claremont isn't quite as stupid or forgetful as the Claremont 400 would like them to be.

City Council Meeting Tonight

The Claremont City Council meets this evening for their last session before the municipal election on March 8. The next time the council meets, it will be to have the three winning candidates sworn in on Tuesday, March 15.

The council will meet in the council chambers at 225 Second St. across from Saca's Mediterranean restaurant (you're welcome for the free product placement).

As always, you can watch the meeting here.

CLOSED SESSION

Tonight's council action starts with a closed session meeting beginning at 4pm. These closed session meetings typically start at around 5:15, so there may be some longer discussions involved in the three items on the closed session agenda.

The first agenda item involves undisclosed potential litigation. The second has to do with negotiations involving the Peppertree Square shopping center at the southeast corner of Indian Hill Blvd. and Arrow Hwy.

The last closed session item has to do with a lawsuit filed in Pomona Superior Court in June last year. We haven't had a chance to run down to the courthouse to review the suit, but the plaintiff is a dentist named Dan Sizemore. The case is a civil rights suit, and the defendants are the Claremont Police Department and several of its officers, the City of Claremont, and a Glendora marriage and family therapist named Ilissa Banhazi:

Case Number: KC058857
DR. DAN SIZEMORE, D.D.S. VS CITY OF CLAREMONT


Filing Date: 06/02/2010 Case Type: Civil Rights (General Jurisdiction) Status: Pending

Future Hearings

02/22/2011 at 08:30 am in department O at 400 Civic Center Plaza, Pomona, CA 91766 Conference-Case Management (M/STRIKE)

Parties

SIZEMORE D D.S. DR. DAN - Plaintiff
BARUCH JOEL W. ESQ. - Attorney for Plaintiff

CLAREMONT CITY OF - Defendant
CLAREMONT POLICE DEPARTMENT CITY OF - Defendant
COSTA J. SERGEANT - Defendant
ABARCA C. OFFICER - Defendant
J. TING. OFFICER - Defendant
MEDRANO J. OFFICER - Defendant
GROSSBERG SCOTT J. - Attorney for Defendant

BANHAZI MFT. ILISSA - Defendant
CAUDILL O. BRANDT - Attorney for Defendant

REGULAR SESSION

Tonight's regular session convenes at 6:30pm. You can see the agenda here.

There's one ceremonial matter, recognition of Jerry Tessier of Arteco Partners, developer of the Claremont Packing House and the Padua Hills Theatre; Jonathan Tolkin of The Tolkin Group, developer of the Claremont Village Expansion; and Harry Wu, developer of the Old School House and Griswold's complex.

After public comment, the meeting moves on to the consent calendar, which includes a couple items of interest:

• The Comprehensive Annual Financial Reports (CAFRs) for the City of Claremont and the Claremont Redevelopment Agency. This is something of particular interest this year thanks mostly to Governor Jerry Brown, who has proposed eliminating redevelopment agencies.
  
  
• A memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the Claremont Management Association, unrepresented employees, and the Claremont Employees Association.
  
  The MOUs lock the city into agreements that the employees will start contributing their share of their CalPERS pension payments (a total of 8% per year). The employees will start contributing 2% each year until they reach 8%. CMA safety employees (police management) will end up contributing a total of 9%, which is supposed to be their contribution.
  
  Currently, the employees pay nothing with the City picking up the employees' share. This proposal came out in the Mayor's Ad Hoc Committee on Economic Sustainability's recent report and has been a council campaign issue.
  
  Candidate Opanyi Nasiali, who was a dissenting vote on this matter while on the Mayor's committee, believes the employees' contributions shouldn't be graduated because the City can realize an immediate savings of $1.2 million per year if the employees simply switched to paying their entire contributions - something the city's waste management workers agreed to do in their contract last year.
  
  
• Authorizing NBS Corporation to prepare the City's annual Landscaping and Lighting District (LLD) engineer's report. Always a point of contention, this. We'll undoubtedly have more on this once the report is released. We'll see if the LLD gets increased this year.
  
  
• Request for council approval of a land acquisition agreement for the 150-acre Cuevas Property, which will be added to the Claremont Wilderness Park. The purchase price, "not to exceed $4,850,000," was negotiated by the Trust for Public Land and will be paid through two grants of $2,425,000 each from the San Gabriel and Los Angeles Rivers and Mountains Conservancy and from the state's Wildlife Conservation Board.
  

As to adminstrative items, the council will also receive and consider the City's Youth Sports Facilities Needs Assessment report, of which we'll try to have more at a later date.

There's also a police department staffing report that will disappoint some of the candidates and the police officers' union with it's assurances that the police department should be able to get along fine at its current staffing level. The police officers and some of their allies in the Claremont 400 have been working hard to put a scare into the public about understaffing as the City prepares to negotiate the CPD officers' contract.

Lastly, there's a recommendation from the Council's Ad Hoc Committee on Commission Appointments (council members Larry Schroeder and Corey Calaycay) to appoint residents Donna Lowe and Glen Hood II to the Community Services Commission.

Scared Straight

With Halloween fast approaching we might have expected to get a good scare from our beloved Claremonsters. The sky-is-falling strategy has traditionally been one the Claremont 400's favorite tactics to get people to vote for someone or something.

They used fear-based strategy when current council member Corey Calaycay was running in 2005 ("our city staff will all quit if he's elected") and again in 2006 with the failed Parks and Pastures assessment district ("developers will buy Johnson's Pasture if we don't act now"). Somehow the Claremonsters always manage to disregard reality in their attempts to get voters worked up for or against anything. With the park assessment district, for instance, they ignored the fact that the open space they were trying to save had been stuck in probate court for nearly 10 years without changing hands and that the City was the only likely buyer. The urgency they tried to create was false.

This campaign season they're at it again, telling Claremont Unified School District residents that we need to pass the $95 million Measure CL bond because our schools are falling apart. They tell us that our school buildings will collapse on top of our kids if we don't pass this bond. This past Wednesday, the Claremont Courier carried just such a letter in which Uncommon Good executive director Nancy Mintie compared the state of Claremont High's theatre to a slum. Mintie writes with the famous Claremonster voice of authority, saying she was an attorney who fought slumlords, so she should know.

In her letter, Mintie went on to say that the sorry state of CUSD's facilities is proof that Claremonters should support the proposed school bond. But if we read Mintie's letter correctly, what she's really saying is that CUSD is a slumlord! Just like the slumlords Mintie opposed in the past, our school board and the district's admnistrators took the $48.9 million from the last school bond in 2000 and squandered it. They didn't pump all of that money back into fixing up their properties, and they neglected the young people who occupied those building. We clip the first three paragraphs of her letter, right. Buy the Courier to read the rest. Click to enlarge.

Following Mintie's argument to its logical conclusion, one should be compelled to deny CUSD access to any further bond money because they can't be trusted with it. But, this being Claremont, Mintie drew the opposite conclusion, despite her rather persuasive evidence to the contrary. Instead, Mintie said she supports this bond in order to fix our decrepit school facilities - precisely what CUSD and its supporters said the last bond was going to accomplish.

If Mintie were being truthful with us and herself, she'd say that CUSD needs to borrow more money because it mismanaged the last bond and didn't keep its promises from 10 years ago. But, as we've seen, the Claremonster capacity for deceptions of all sorts is limitless.

We have every right to be fearful - of Mintie's screwball logic, of our school district's waste, of the money being pumped into the Yes on CL campaign by bond and building contractors, of the willingness of our school board and its friends to hide the truth and rewrite the past. Run as fast as you can away from these people!

Church & State, Revisited

From the More Things Change file:

The Insider has learned that the circle of people officially associated with the Yes on Measure CL campaign has widened from the original three - Bill Fox, Mike Seder, and Lee Jackman - to include insurance agent and Claremont 400 heavyweight Randy Prout, former Claremont United Church of Christ pastor and current city Human Services commissioner Butch Henderson (photo, left), and former Human Services Chair Suzanne Hall, wife of the ubiquitous Ken Corhan.

We shouldn't be surprised to see Prout or Henderson or Hall/Corhan, popping up in the Measure CL campaign. All were associated with the 2005 Preserve Claremont campaign that tried to derail the candidacy of Claremont city council member Corey Calaycay. We should also remember that the PC campaign was as much about censoring council member Jackie McHenry and keeping then-City Manager Glenn Southard in charge as it was concerned with barring Calaycay from the council.

That the current school bond campaign and its supporters don't mind twisting the truth shouldn't come as a surprise either. During the 2005 city council election and after, Henderson, who seemed to use his position in our town's main church to unduly influence people to support the Claremonsters' agenda, was a spokesperson for the Preserve Claremont campaign and was quoted in the Claremont Courier on 2/19/05. In that article, Henderson admitted not only that his campaign employed manipulative tactics, but that such games are a natural part of any political campaign, even one involving the Claremont UCC's head pastor:

Mr. Henderson responded to a complaint he had heard that the [Preserve Claremont] ads were "manipulative".

"Of course they are," he said. "That's what politics is all about. Claremonters like things to be real nice. They say, 'Let's do powerbrokering behind the scenes and be real nice.' But politics is about leaders. Mr. Calaycay s running for office and we're trying to get factual information out about him."

Click on Images to Enlarge

It mattered not a whit that the "factual information" Henderson alluded to consisted of nothing more than rumor, innuendo, and outright lies, much of which was supplied by city staff. But, rather than being shocked that a former man of the cloth would engage in such self-acknowledged manipulations, we should expect it.

We can't help but recall the last Claremont Unified School District Measure Y bond campaign in 2000. During that lead up to that campaign, school district officials held a public meeting at which residents who lived near Claremont High School showed up to protest the planned use of Measure Y money to put a football stadium in at the high school.

When it became clear during the meeting that the football facility plans were going to imperil Measure Y's passage, the district officials took a break, held a quick sideline huddle with Superintendent Keeler calling signals, and then reconvened to assure the audience that no Measure Y dollars would be used for the high school stadium. At that meeting, one Butch Henderson, who happened to live very near the high school, stood up and said he was happy with the district officials' plan to accommodate his neighbors.

With no opposition from the Towne Ranch neighborhood, Measure Y passed by a little more than 100 votes citywide. Within a matter of a few years, the district, flush with Measure Y dollars, installed the permanent football field, lights, and bleachers at the high school. In fact construction workers are installing a second course of permanent seating right now.

So, yes, the neighborhood was lied to. But in Claremont anything associated with the school district approaches a certain religious fervor, complete with a kind of priesthood to deliver CUSD's holy word. The truth is whatever that priesthood says it is. As Pastor Henderson could tell them, all's fair in politics and war.

Not a Stadium

Pension Tension

To follow on Friday's post about Bell, CalPERS, and Glenn Southard, we came across a New York Times article by Ron Lieber titled "The Coming Class War Over Public Pensions." (The NYT has toned the title down to "Battle Looms Over Huge Costs of Public Pensions.")

Lieber writes that our labor force is evolving into a two-class system. On the one hand are public employees, who continue to receive generous, taxpayer-funded defined benefit pensions with built-in cost of living increases. On the other are private sector employees, most of whom do not have pensions but who may, if they work at the right place and happen to be savers, have 401(k) or IRA accounts in which they, not taxpayers, bear all of the risk.

According to Lieber, taxpayers will likely be asked to rescue underfunded public pension plans for cities and states when those begin to go underwater. As Claremont city council member Peter Yao said a couple weeks ago, our own employee' CalPERS pension account is underfunded to the tune of up to $50 million, something that the majority of the council (Elderkin, Pedroza, and Schroeder) and the Claremont 400, refuse to admit.

Claremont's pension problems are just one small part of a national problem. How much money are we talking about? Lieber tells us:

At stake is at least $1 trillion. That’s trillion, with a “t,” as in titanic and terrifying.

The figure comes from a study by the Pew Center on the States that came out in February. Pew estimated a $1 trillion gap as of fiscal 2008 between what states had promised workers in the way of retiree pension, health care and other benefits and the money they currently had to pay for it all. And some economists say that Pew is too conservative and the problem is two or three times as large.

So a question of extraordinary financial, political, legal and moral complexity emerges, something that every one of us will be taking into town meetings and voting booths for years to come: Given how wrong past pension projections were, who should pay to fill the 13-figure financing gap?

As Yao could tell Lieber, here in Claremont we won't be having those public meetings until the City is at the verge of bankruptcy. The same is true with nearly every other municipality in the state and nation. As a result, the people Lieber calls "have-nots," private sector workers, will also be the ones asked to bear the burden of maintaining the lifestyles of our current public sector retirees, who for the most part refuse to give any concessions on their benefits.

Our public sector pension costs are compounded by the practice of pension spiking, in which public workers in their final year of employment manipulate the rules to drive up the value of their pensions. CalPERS offers a couple different ways of determining pension payments. Under many, such as in the city of Bell, the amount is determined by the employee's final year of compensation. If employees game the system by working a lot of overtime or by cashing out unused vacation time, their pensions can end up significantly higher than their final base salary.

Those spiked pensions cause additional problems for already underfunded CalPERS plans because the employees end up earning much more than can be covered by the money they and their employers actually paid into the system.

To no one's surprise, former Bell city manager Robert Rizzo has become the poster boy for outrageous public pensions. The Daily Bulletin ran an article Saturday by reporter Sandra Emerson, who explained that as a result of how CalPERS formulates pension payments, the city of Rancho Cucamonga, where Rizzo worked for about eight years, will be on the hook for about $125,000 of Rizzo's estimated $650,000 a year pension, assuming Rizzo survives his tarring and feathering long enough to collect.

As we said Friday, when former Claremont city manager Glenn Southard retired from Indio, his base salary was $300,000 a year. However, Southard also could have earned as much a $30,000 performance bonus, and he cashed out $162,000 in unused vacation and sick time. If Southard's pension is based simply on his final year of earnings, and if any bonus and accured vacation/sick time count towards that amount, he could end up with a pension well in excess of his salary.

Whatever pension Southard gets, because of CalPERS' crazy rules, Claremont will be on the hook for a considerable portion of his pension. Because Southard worked here for 17 years, Claremont will have to pay for those 17 years, but the payout will be based on his final year in Indio. For Claremont's share of his retirement, Glenn will qualify for 2.5% of whatever that final Indio figure was times 17 (each year that he worked here).

The California Foundation for Fiscal Responsibility (CFFR) has a website that takes public information from CalPERS and CalSTRS (the California State Teachers' Retirement System) and posts the names and annual pension payments for anyone getting more than $100,000 a year.

Southard isn't on there yet because the figures haven't been updated since his retirement earlier this year, but another familiar Claremont personality did have her information posted. Our own Bridget Healy, Southard's right-hand woman in Claremont and Indio, retired in 2008 .

CFFR puts Healy's CalPERS pension at $166,701.84, of which Claremont will pay around $100,000 for Healy's roughly 18 years in Claremont, based on her $220,000 final year's salary in Indio. Healy, who seems to be maneuvering for another run at a Claremont city council seat, never has explained how she would manage her conflict of interest when it comes to pension matters here. However, we're going to guess that Healy's the pull-the-ladder-up-after-me type and probably won't have any qualms when it comes to cutting future employee benefits.

Here from CFFR are the Indio retirees in the six-figure club, soon to be joined by our friend Glenn:


And, in case you were wondering about our fair city, here is our $100,000+ CalPERS club:


We also present the Claremont Unified School District's CalSTRS pension high rollers:



There will be others joining these lists. Former Claremont Human Services Director Dick Guthrie, for instance, isn't on Claremont's CalPERS list, though his pension has to be well over $100,000. Former Claremont Community Services Director Mark Harmon and former Community Facilities Manager Mark Hodnick, too will join the exorbitant pensions club.

We're also struck by the presence of a number of prominent Claremonters on these lists. Council member Larry Schroeder is represented on the city of Lakewood's CalPERS pension rolls. Also, two influential members of the Claremont League of Women Voters own hefty public pensions: Bridget Healy and Anita Hughes, the wife of the late former Claremont mayor and CUSD assistant superintendent Alexander Hughes.

Yet another person, LWV president and Claremont Police Commissioner Barbara Musselman, is a former San Bernardino County Human Resources Director and receives a large San Bernardino County Employees' Retirement Association pension (SBCERA doesn't make its individual pension payouts readily available for the public).

Claremont's unsustainable pension obligations are the number one long term threat to our city's financial security. Yet, no one in any position of power, with the exceptions of Council members Yao and Corey Calaycay, are willing to deal with that threat. Instead, groups like the local League of Women Voters, who remained preoccupied with rehabilitating former Claremont mayor Ellen Taylor's image and helping Healy get elected to the council, are content to allow the City fly into a fiscal abyss.

One would expect people like Musselman or Healy to express a little more empathy and gratitude toward the people who fund their wealthy lifestyles. Instead, we constantly see them pushing this or that costly toy - a trolley, say - that only adds to the burden borne by the working stiffs who have to pay for for Musselman's and Healy's retirements as well as their own.

Lost in all this is the unfairness of forcing the public, the majority of whom do not have the luxury of unearned, spiked pension benefits with automatic cost-of-living increases, to rescue these underfunded public pension systems when they become insolvent. If our local and state elected officials and their supporters continue on their present course, that class war that Ron Lieber wrote of will move very quickly from metaphor to reality.

Golden Eggs

HEADED FOR A FALL

As we said last week, the scandal in the city of Bell will probably end up being a good thing for California municipal governments. Right now, they have to worry about the unusual attention their residents are devoting to cities' financial affairs.

That is, in fact, what's happened in our own town. At the July 27 meeting of the Claremont City Council, Mayor Linda Elderkin went to great lengths to contrast Bell's $100,000 city council annual salaries with Claremont's $4,800 per year for council members. Claremont city staff also made some salaries available online as a show of fiscal transparency.

But in the long run, cities like Claremont will weather the current scrutiny, public attention will fade, the LA Times and other media won't have anywhere near the staff and resources to cover every area of Southern California, and things will revert to the status quo.

Bell represents the far extreme, and their council and city management were caught because they allowed greed to get the better of them. In a town like Claremont, financial losses result from poor decision-making rather than outright fraud or embezzlement, and simply looking at employee and council salaries doesn't begin to capture the full impact of the money flowing out of city coffers.

That kind of financial leakage flourishes on the local level, mostly because, even when citizens are paying attention, elected officials refuse to deal with problems with long time horizons or because city officials refuse to release all of the information needed for a full public accounting.

Consider that July 27 council meeting.

Item number 7 on the consent calendar was a request by staff for the council to adopt a resolution implementing a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the City and the Claremont Police Management Association. The CPMA agreed to conceding a 1.9% cost of living increase for the current fiscal year and to the implementation of a two-tiered CalPERS pension system. Current safety employees receive a 3% at 50 pension (that is, at the age of 50, 3% of their final year's salary for every year of employment).

In return for those CPMA concessions, the City agreed to continue paying for the employees' 9% CalPERS contribution. You can see the discussion here (at around the 57:40 mark).

Councilmember Peter Yao (photo, right) asked for the MOU to be pulled for discussion. Yao, who has been on top of the City's the unfunded pension liabilities, put that amount in the tens of millions and said that by his personal calculation, it was closer to $50 million. (The Courier and Daily Bulletin later reported the unfunded liabilities as $40 million.)

Yao pointed out that the City doesn't possess $50 million in assets, which Yao said meant that "by definition we're insolvent." Yao's problem with the MOU was that, although it introduces a two-tiered pension system, one for current employees and one for future employees, the MOU defers any actual details of the new pension tier until next year. He added that the new tier wouldn't have any effect on the CalPERS problem for anywhere from 15 to 30 years from now, when new employees would be entering retirement.

We might add, too, that there's a hiring freeze on right now and that could extend for several years if the economy doesn't turn around soon. That means that any savings from the new pension benefits wouldn't apply quite a while.

Yao was also unhappy with council members Elderkin, Sam Pedroza, and Larry Schroeder for their failure to address that 9% employee CalPERS contribution the City continues to cover. Elderkin's and Pedroza's refusal to ask the employees to pick up their own 9% contribution was almost certainly out of self-interest. They, along with Yao, could be campaigning for reelection. Linda and Sam may be figuring there's no sense in angering the employee union gods at this point, even if it imperils the City's solvency.

Schroeder's reluctance to correct the CalPERS problem is more puzzling. Schroeder spent 10 years in banking and 19 years as a finance director for the cities of Lakewood and Glendora. And in the July 27 pension discussion, Schroeder acknowledged that "we do have a pension problem." Should that not be a huge red flag, especially coming from Schroeder?

In the end, Schroeder, perhaps because he himself is a CalPERS pensioner, voted along with Elderkin and Pedroza to implement the MOU. Council member Corey Calaycay voted with Yao against the MOU, citing the City's responsibility to not make promises it cannot keep (an ethical sticking point that has never bothered Elderkin, Pedroza, and the Claremont 400).


THE GOOD LIFE

Today's LA Times had an article in its LA Extra section about concerns that CalPERS authorities failed to notify the California attorney general's office in 2006 when they discovered a 47% increase in Bell City Manager Robert Rizzo's salary while conducting an audit of Bell's .

That increase raised Rizzo's salary to $447,000. According to the Times:

Documents released by CalPERS on Thursday show that the fund was also informed of a 42% raise for the assistant city manager and nearly 38% raise for City Council members. That brought council members' pay to $62,000 by 2005 for part-time jobs that in other small cities pay about $400 per month. The newly released records include Bell's explanation to CalPERS of why its officials were worthy of such salaries.

Assistant City Manager Angela Spaccia told CalPERs in writing in October 2006 that the city manager's salary was hiked "to reflect his contributions to the city," which included helping Bell resolve a multimillion-dollar deficit. She said her own pay hike was "provided to reward her for her efforts and new responsibilities" related to a promotion the city had given her.

"It should also be noted that the City Council, also members of the Executive Management classification, were compensated accordingly for their contributions and efforts toward the City's dramatic financial recovery," Spaccia wrote.

The Times said that CalPERS found Bell's documentation sufficient and never did any subsequent audits. CalPERS has already been criticized for using overly optimistic rates of returns in figuring how much local governments and their employees should contribute to their pension accounts. CalPERS has also suffered from a scandal involving a former CalPERS executive and a former board member.

So if you're a public employee, there's no time like the present to retire, if you are eligible. There will be a day of reckoning for California public employee pensions, and chances are that day will arrive sooner rather than later.

One recent retiree familiar to us is former Claremont City Manager Glenn Southard. You'll recall that Southard went to Indio for five years following 17 years in Claremont. He retired from Indio earlier this year.

We were curious about Glenn's retirement. It couldn't possibly be near Robert Rizzo's $600,000-plus annual retirement pay. Figuring pensions is guess work, though there is a website called CaliforniaPensionReform.com that does post a searchable database with all of CalPERS' six-figure pensions. Glenn isn't on their yet, but he will be the next time CPR updates its records.

Southard's base salary his last year in Indio was $300,000. That's important because CalPERS uses that last year when figuring retirement payouts. That's why you used to see certain CHP employees putting in a lot of overtime during their last year of work.

We were able to find an estimate on the size of GS's retirement after a reader alerted us to a blog called Inflection Point Diary that had a couple recent posts about Glenn's compensation. IPD carried a thorough breakdown of Southard's Indio contract, which IPD posted along with the analysis.

As IPD notes, most people, including our local papers, only focus on base salaries when they examine public employee compensation. But buried in the details of their contracts are things like bonus agreements that can add a good chunk more to a fellow's pension. IPD reveals that in addition to the $300,000, Indio also agreed to give Southard an annual bonus of up to 10%, or $30,000 for Southard's last year.

The analysis goes on to say that Southard was eligible for a deferred compensation account with an apparent maximum contribution of $16,500 a year, paid entirely by the city of Indio. There's also the matter of unused vacation time, for which Southard also received compensation. In fact, IPD posted a follow-up on Southard that said he cashed out around $80,000 worth of unused vacation during his time in Indio.

IPD also cited a Desert Sun article from February 24 that said in 2008 Indio overpaid by $5,949.52 for 40 hours worth of vacation time he didn't have, an error that wasn't caught until Southard was getting ready to retire.

IPD estimated that Southard's final year's salary could have been closer to $400,000 the the $300,000 base. Upon retirement, the Desert Sun said, Southard was also supposed to get $162,000 for 136 hours of accumulated vacation and sick time. All in all, not a bad payday for a man who left Indio sitting on a $13.5 million budget deficit. Good thing he didn't stick around for his 2010 performance bonus.

59th Assembly District News

MONEY RACE

Now that the primary elections are over, the November general election for the 59th Assembly District, which includes Claremont, is shaping up. Republican Tim Donnelly will square off against Democrat Darcel Woods.

The money race usually tells a lot, though this year the dynamics may be different. Donnelly won a very close primary race over Chris Lancaster in June. Donnelly's margin of victory was 631 votes and can be viewed as a sign of grassroots voter discontent this year with Donnelly, a self-described "tea party Republican," beating his party's insider candidate. Lancaster spent far more money than Donnelly ($167,000 to $23,500, respectively), but Donnelly still won.

According to the California Secretary of State's records, as of June 30 Donnelly's campaign had $626.78 in cash. The largest donor was Anna McBride in Palm Desert, who donated a total of $3,400.

Darcel Woods' campaign reported raising a total of $22,575 for the period from 1/1/10 to 6/30/10. Woods had $3,789.35 in cash remaining at of June 30. Woods' big contributors were unions:

• Service Employees International Union United Long-Term Care Workers Local 6434 State PAC - $7,800
  
  
• United Domestic Workers of America Action Fund - $3,900
  
  
• SEIU Local 721, CTW CLW State and Local - $3,900
  
  
• Service Employees International Union 121RN PAC - $1,500
  
  
• UAW Region 5 Western States PAC - $1,000
  
  
• California Teachers Association for Better Citizenship - $500
  
  
• United Transportation Union PAC - $500

The money Woods has raised is almost certainly an indication that Democratic Party supporters feel that Woods has a chance against Donnelly. This is certainly a change for an assembly district that has traditionally been a safe Republican seat. With redistricting on the horizon, it's likely that whatever replaces the 59th will be much more evenly divide between the two parties, so if Woods were to get in, she would presumably have an incumbent's advantage in subsequent elections.

A win by Woods might put a crimp in Claremont Mayor Pro Tem Sam Pedroza's long term plans. We suspect Pedroza may have been planning his own campaign in the 59th or its successor district. If Pedroza were ever to get elected from this area, he'd break a long losing streak by Claremont city council members in state legislative races. Sandy Baldonado, Al Leiga, and Corey Calaycay all failed in their bids to get represent our area in Sacramento.

The Daily Bulletin has an article today on the 59th Assembly race that mentions the idea that Woods may be able to appeal to moderate Republicans in the district. However, CMC's Jack Pitney thinks the election dynamics this year favor Republicans, and that may blunt any advantage Woods would traditionally have with moderates over Donnelly:

This is the kind of race where Democrats might have a very strong shot in another year," said Jack Pitney, a Claremont McKenna College political science professor who has said Democrats are battling Republican momentum this year. "But even so, it's not completely out of reach for them."

If Woods wins, she might represent the final vote Democrats in the Assembly need to solidify a two-thirds majority, an important benchmark in California politics. That thinking played a part in the union's decision, [SEIU-United Long Term Care Workers Local 6434 spokesman Wyatt] Closs said.

ADAMS ON SOCIAL NETWORKING

Speaking of the 59th district, current Assembly 59 representative Anthony Adams was quoted in the Daily Bulletin today. You'll recall that Adams chose not to seek reelection after angering Republicans for supporting last year's state budget agreement. Because he was one of a handful of Republicans in the state legislature who crossed the aisle to get the budget passed, Adams drew the ire of a good many Republican voters and would probably have faced a tough primary campaign.

The Bulletin article quoted Adams' comments on the possible regulation of campaign-related content on social media sites like Twitter or Facebook. The Bulletin piece said that California's Fair Political Practices Commission asked one of its subcommittees to look into the issue. The commission will consider the suggestions from the subcommittee next week.

Here's what the Bulletin said about the recommendations (we've included the Adams' quote):

Campaigns would face the same disclosure rules they do now, such as identifying who is financially behind an ad, but, for the first time, they would apply to Internet communication.

The report draws a line between paid political activity and unpaid grass-roots efforts. Political commentary by people unconnected to a campaign would not be affected, nor would sending or forwarding e-mails, linking to websites or creating independent websites.

....

"In order to keep our system honest, we need watchdogs," Adams said. "What these disclosures end up achieving is putting watchdogs, self-appointed or otherwise, in a position to maintain some integrity in the political campaigning area."

Jack Pitney, by the way, was quoted in this article as well.