Coming Attractions

A glance at the ol' community calendar (really old community, really old calendar) tells us of some upcoming events:

CITY STUFF

Claremont Human Services Director Mercedes Santoro (Mercy to her Claremont 400 friends) honors her bureaucratic fiefdom with Claremont Night at the California Reign Saturday night, the city's website says:

Claremont Night at the Ontario Reign Game March 6

The City of Claremont and the Ontario Reign Hockey Team are hosting Claremont Night at the Citizen's Bank Arena on Saturday, March 6, 2010. Join Claremont fans as the Ontario Reign take on the Las Vegas Wranglers starting at 7:00pm Proceeds from the ticket sales will be used to support park improvements for Claremont's youth sports organizations.

The City of Claremont's parks and fields are used by more than 3,700 youth each year in organized sports groups. By providing quality sports facilities, the City hopes to encourage the community's youth to engage in healthy behaviors. The benefits of youth sports are numerous and include a reduction in obesity, self esteem building, a sense of teamwork, and improved physical development.

Tickets to the Ontario Reign game can be purchased individually are at a discounted rate for groups. Tickets are available in the upper or lower levels of the arena and range from $12-$20 for adults and $10-$15 for children. To purchase tickets, please contact the Human Services Department at (909) 399-5490. This discounted ticket price offer is not available at the Arena Box Office or TicketMaster.

The Citizen's Bank Arena is located at 4000 E. Ontario Center Parkway, CA 91764.

ANGEL'S FLIGHT

Fans of the angel in Claremont's Mallows Park, located in at the northeast corner of Indian Hill Blvd. and Harrison Ave., will want to weigh in on whether or not the angel, Ambrosia, should be moved. Again, the city website speaks:

Mallows Park Angel Feedback

The City is considering moving Ambrosia, the angel located at Mallows Park on Indian Hill Blvd.It is one of the City's public art pieces, originally located on the south side of the park. The City is seeking input from the surrounding neighborhood on if they would like it to remain at the park or if they would like to see it moved to a different location. Please contact Francine Baker, Arts Coordinator at (909) 399-5391.

• E-mail Francine Baker, Arts Coordinator

COUNCIL BUDGET MEETING

The Claremont City Council is having a budget workshop this Saturday, March 6, from 12pm to 5pm in the council chambers at 225 Second Street.


ATHENAEUM SPEAKERS

If you want your thoughts provoked, check out the upcoming speakers at the Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum at Claremont McKenna College. The lectures begin at 6:45pm, except for the one tomorrow, which starts at noon.

The Athenaeum is located at 385 E. 8th St., and the lectures are free and open to the public. You can get more information by calling (909) 621-8244. You can also check their website. Here are the speakers for the next couple weeks:

Thursday, March 4	Larry Diamond, professor by courtesy of political science and sociology; senior fellow, Hoover Institution; Stanford University; author, The Spirit to Build Free Societies Throughout the World (2008) and Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to bring Democracy to Iraq (2006); "Asian Values and the Future of Democracy in Asia"
Friday, March 5	Peter Bossaerts, William D. Hacker professor of economics and management, California Institute of Technology; author, The Paradox of Asset Planning (2002) and Lecture Notes in Corporate Finance (2001); "What Decision Neuroscience Teaches Us about Financial Decision Making" (12:00 p.m.)
Monday, March 8	Ian Frazier, author, Gone to New York: Adventures in the City (2005) and On the Rez (2000) and Jamaica Kincaid, Josephine Olp Weeks Chair and Professor of Literature, CMC; author, Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalayas (2005) and The Autobiography of My Mother (1996); "Ian Frazier and Jamaica Kincaid in Dialogue"
Tuesday, March 9	Abdourahman Waberi, visiting professor of literature, CMC; author, The Land Without Shadows (2005) and In the United States of Africa (2009); "A Nomadic Soul"
Wednesday, March 10	Joanna Strober, senior managing director of private equity, Sterling Stamos; co-author, Getting to 50/50: How Working Couples Can Have It All by Sharing It All, and Why It's Great for Your Marriage, Your Career, Your Kids,... and You (2009); "Getting to 50/50"

City Council Election Kicks Off

CAMPAIGN SEASON BEGINS

The 2009 Claremont City Council race begins this month with the smallest field in many years. Three candidates are vying for two council seats (in alphabetical order): Corey Calaycay, Bridget Healy, and Larry Schroeder.

It's a shame Citizen Michael John Keenan (pictured right, courtesy of CMJK) isn't running this time around. From time to time we get missives from him, and he brings a perspective to these races that's different from most of the other candidates. Sorry, Michael, if we haven't gotten around to posting all the news and info you pass on, but we do appreciate the tips.

We'll know more about the three candidates in this year's council race in a few more weeks. The nominator lists are out, with each candidate having filed their nomintation papers with the City last month. These are lists of the 30 people who nominated their respective candidates for the election, and they offer a preview of the wider support the candidates will end up receiving.

As the election draws nearer, you'll start seeing ads in the Claremont Courier with supporter lists, which typically number in the hundreds of names for viable candidates. Judging from the nominator lists that are out, there's may be some fence mending going on, at least with the Calaycay and Healy campaigns.


A LITTLE BACKGROUND

Incumbent Calaycay, you might recall, ran as a change agent in 2005 and was the target of a uniquely ugly smear campaign that year. That campaign was organized by a group of town fathers and mothers who called themselves "Preserve Claremont." The PC group, which was really an independent PAC, raised nearly enough money to fund a candidate of their own. They used all those thousands of dollars to run full-page ads (at $680 or so a pop) twice a week in the Claremont Courier during the height of the campaign.

Preserve also had a spin-off called "Claremont Business PAC" that got money from people like commercial realtor Nick Quackenbos and Claremont Toyota owner Roger Hogan, who donated $2,000 to the CB PAC (calendar year donations are limited to $250 per person to city council campaigns, but PACs have no such limits). The spin-off was a last minute thing, the brainchild of Human Services Commissioner Valerie Martinez, who used the CB PAC money to send out two city-wide mailers on the Friday before the 2005 election (you've seen the reasons for this tactic before).

Preserve Claremont, incidentally, had a paid city staff member, City Arts Coordinator Francine Baker, as its treasurer, and there seemed to be a number of ways in which some city staffers tried to influence the election. A couple employee unions, for instance, were involved in a parallel political attack on Councilmember Jackie McHenry, who had been critical of then-City Manager Glenn Southard, an attack that featured Valerie Martinez standing up at a city council meeting during the election and calling McHenry "a cancer on this community."

Southard provided the motivation for the twin attacks. He and some of his employees spread the fear that if Calaycay were elected, he and McHenry would team up and cause an exodus of city staff (even though they represented only 2 votes out of 5).

The real reason Southard spread this fear seemed to be his own fear - a fear of a council reining him in and questioning things like his own spending. Everyone forgets the thing that really set Southard off against McHenry was her asking him to provide receipts for his expenses. All of Southard's false claims of harassment that McHenry had created a "hostile work environment" stemmed from that. Keep in mind that Southard's outburst occurred right at the outset of the 2005 campaign and served as the jumping off point for Preserve Claremont in all its incarnations:

GLENN SOUTHARD GOES BERSERK



Southard quickly abandoned his attack on McHenry after seeing that the witchhunt was turning the Councilmember into a sympathetic figure with a lot of citizens, and he left it to his Preserve Claremont friends to press their offensive against Calaycay. Shortly after Calaycay won election in 2005 (along with Ellen Taylor), Southard announced he was leaving Claremont for Indio and was taking his longtime faithful assistant, Bridget Healy, with him.

Like any bully will, after enough people finally saw through the blustering and stood up to him, Southard took his ball and left.


HANDICAPPING THE RACE

Now that Calaycay's been on the council for nearly four years and Southard's been gone for three years and eight months, the ill-will the former city manager stirred up against Calaycay seems to have abated. In fact, some people who didn't endorse Calaycay the last time around, and even some who supported other candidates in 2005, are listed as Calaycay nominators this time around. There is even one name, that of Citrus College board member Sue Keith, that appears on both Calaycay's and Healy's nominator lists. So maybe the peace has finally been made in some backroom in town.

Community Services Commissioner Larry Schroeder's nominator list doesn't have a lot of names we've seen associated with past candidates, so it's difficult to assess at this point where his support comes from or what his stands on different issues are.

When the wider supporter lists come out, the campaign finances are released, and the candidates have had a chance to debate each other in forums, we'll be better able to gauge how the race is shaping up. Conventional wisdom would say that Calaycay and Healy are the favorites, with Schroeder the dark horse. But these are strange times, and the signs can be difficult to read.

Magic 8-Ball says, "Ask again later."


CANDIDATE FORUMS

Speaking of candidate forums, there are two scheduled that we know of:

• Active Claremont
  Thursday, January 15th, 7pm
  
  Active Claremont will host its candidate forum on the 15th in the Padua Room of the Alexander Hughes Community Center at 1700 Danbury Rd. in Claremont.
  
  Call (909) 621-5412 for information.
  
  (Thanks to the Daily Bulletin's Wes Woods II for that event news.)
  
  
  
• League of Women Voters of the Claremont Area
  Monday, January 26th, 7pm to 9pm
  
  This one's also at the Hughes Center. According to Wes Woods:
  

  Claremont League of Women Voters president Barbara Musselman will moderate but the public can write questions down they want the candidates to answer, said the league's voter services vice president Angela Bekzadian-Avila in a news release.
  
  Once the questions are gathered, Musselman will "choose a range of questions to ask the candidates," officials wrote in the release.
  
  Of course, I don't know if your question will be picked or if it will be answered but go and find out.
  
  Information: Angela Bekzadian-Avila at (909) 621-7809 or angelanb25@yahoo.com

That last bit about Musselman picking and choosing the questions points up one of the problems with the League of Women Voters' forum. Musselman, who was a big Glenn Southard and city staff defender back in 2005, is far from unbiased and will be the gatekeeper at the LWV forum. Additionally, the jungle drums are saying LWV member and former Claremont Police Commission member Helaine Goldwater (the woman who gave us Cookiemonster Ellen Taylor) is one of the behind-the-scenes people responsible for Healy's candidacy. So don't expect any questions that might make Healy look bad.

The odds for real questions to be asked are much higher at the Active Claremont event simply because they tend to just read the questions that are submitted, though they do combine multiple questions on the same topic into one.

Here's a useful experiment:

If you have the time, go to both events and submit the same question at each one. Then see if it gets asked. Something about city pensions might be a good. Claremont's own employee pension account with CalPERS is underfunded by several million dollars, thanks to some generous benefits that Healy, in her former capacity as Claremont's Assistant City Manager, helped push.

The public pension question is a big one, with several California cities facing bankruptcy because of the benefits they lavished on city workers when times were good. As the Wall Street Journal recently noted, the city of Pacific Grove is close to bankrupt because of its employee pension plan.

The city of Vallejo is even worse off, having already declared bankruptcy. Vallejo is trying restructure some of its employee contracts, and, if successful, other California municipalities may use Vallejo bankruptcy as a template to get out of employee contracts and benefits they can no longer afford. It would interesting to hear how Healy, who as an employee benefited greatly from the city's generosity to its staff, would handle such benefits as a councilperson in the current fiscal crisis. Also, would Healy's status as a former assistant city manager raise any conflicts of interest if, as we assume, she is elected?

In the past, important issues would never be fully addressed, at least not at the League of Women Voters event, which generally attracts the largest crowds. The LWV has usually offered up softball questions to the candidates it privately supports and has avoided posing the tough questions in their candidate forums, much to the community's detriment.

Church and State

Tonight at 5:30pm at the Alexander Hughes Center, the Claremont City Council will hold a special meeting on the adoption of it's Youth Master Plan Update. The Steering Committee for the update was chaired by Homer "Butch" Henderson (pictured at left), the retired senior pastor from the Claremont United Church of Christ. For those of you who are out-of-towners, the UCC is the church in Claremont.


LOOKING BACK ON BUTCH AND THE PRESERVE CLAREMONTERS

Back on July 20th, we wrote about Henderson's role as a spokesperson for the Preserve Claremont campaign during Claremont's 2005 City Council election.

We decided to take a trip in the Wayback Machine and looked up the 2/19/05 edition of the Claremont Courier. In that issue, reporter Melissa S. Mansfield had a long story about the Preserve Claremont effort and the uproar it was causing. The issue isn't available online, but you can try the Courier, as well as the Claremont or Pomona Public Libraries.

The Preserve Claremont campaign had two goals: 1) To publicly censor City Councilmember Jackie McHenry, who had been elected as reform candidate, and who had been critical of then-City Manager Glenn Southard; 2) prevent candidate Corey Calaycay from being elected.

The PC organizers raised thousands of dollars and ran a series of full-page ads in the Claremont Courier. A number of them, headed by Claremont Human Services Commissioner Valerie Martinez, also formed a second PAC called "Claremont Business PAC" and sent out two last-minute city-wide mailers to try to boost the support for Councilmember Llewellyn Miller, who was running for re-election.

The 2/19/05 Courier article quoted Butch Henderson in a telling couple paragraphs:

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 nice. They say, 'Let's do powerbrokering behind the scenes and be real nice.' But politics is about leaders. Mr. Calaycay is running for office, and we're trying to get out factual information about him."

The "factual information" Henderson spoke of included an ad containing false statements that alleged that Calaycay had left the employment of a California state legislator's office under a cloud. That legislator sent not only endorsed Calaycay but sent a letter refuting Henderson's "factual information." The legislator's letter ran as a full-page ad in the Courier.

Perhaps what is most disturbing is that here we have Butch Henderson, senior pastor at the main church in town, the Claremont United Church of Christ, basically acknowledging that his group was manipulating public opinion. It confirmed what we and others have complained about for years regarding the Claremont 400.


NO CONSEQUENCES

The Courier article also reported that "The PAC was formed under the name and address of Francine Baker, the art director in the Human Services Department, who is listed as the group's treasurer. So, in addition to the UCC's senior pastor, Preserve Claremont also had city employees working to influence the election of the people who would be their bosses.

What is striking about the article is how no one would take responsibility for the group's organization:

Ms. Baker declined to comment on how she became treasurer, saying, "I don't remember, it was a ways back." [The group got their first donations less than one month before the article came out.]

She referred all questions about the committee to Ms. Martinez, [former Councilmember Bill] McCready and Mr. Henderson. When asked who founded the group, none of the 3 indicated a specific ringleader or group of leaders.

And then there was this representative of one of the 2005 council candidates:

Ed Leavell, a 26-year resident of the city, said [former Claremont Mayor Paul] Held invited him to come as a representative for one of the council candidates. "He was vocal at the meeting but wasn't running it. It seemed like [former Claremont Councilmember Bill] McCready was running it."

As we've noted in the past, several of the candidates from the 2005 campaign benefited from the false claims made by the Preserve Claremont group. For instance, current City Councilmember Ellen Taylor won election and refused to speak out against the false campaign claims the Preserve Claremonters were making. Further, several of Taylor's supporters, including her treasurer Cindy Sullivan's family, were also Preserve Claremont financial supporters.

The Preserve Claremonters needed a lot of public image rehabilitation, especially their spokespersons. They and their Claremont 400 friends know that the public's memory is short, so given enough time and good works like the Youth Master Plan Update, people will forget how truly awful they were in the no-so-distant past.

It's up to you to remember. Thank them for their contributions to the community, but also hold them accountable for their other misdeeds as well.