Outsourced!

We've talked before about how the issue of outsourcing services is a sore point in Claremont. People in town are particularly attached to the Claremont Police Department, but they're nearly as protective of the City's trash service.

In its February 27 issue, the Claremont Courier carried a letter from resident Gregory Toliver, who wrote in to say:

The city of Claremont's sanitation department has served us well in all the time I've lived here [over 20 years, according to Toliver], and so I was surprised to learn that there was actually a proposal under discussion to contract this service out to private companies. This is apparently part of somebody's plan to address the city's budget problems.

Toliver pointed out that the sanitation department takes in $1.7 million in much-needed municipal revenue and that a trash contractor would provide "lower quality service" at a higher price. Toliver questioned the need to make a change and concluded, "As my dad used to say: 'If it ain't broke, nobody needs to fix it...'"

Apparently, the communitarians at the Claremont Unified School District didn't get Toliver's memo. A reader pointed out to us that if you visit any CUSD school and try to find the familiar green Claremont city dumpsters, you'll search in vain. CUSD, whose board is supported by the same trash fanatics who insist that the City continue to provide its own waste hauling service, has contracted out to Orange County-based Ware Disposal for its own trash service.

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If you go to Condit Elementary on Mountain Ave. (the site of the repeated wiring hazards), and you will see two gray Ware Disposal bins. One of them is in the photo to the left.


It's not just Condit. Every single CUSD facility has the same trash service. The same bins are present at Sycamore Elementary, for example (photo, right).

All of which makes us marvel at the hypocrisy of the Claremont 400, who force you to pay a premium for your trash service while allowing the Claremont Unified School District to shop around for the best deal. (Presumably the cash-strapped district wouldn't be using Ware if it weren't cheaper than the city service.)

In case you are curious about price comparisons, here's a contact number for Ware, courtesy of CUSD:

Democracy Takes a Hit

The end of the latest political season is nigh, which means campaign hi-jinx on all sides are running rampant. File these latest events under the heading HYPOCRISY:

Saturday's Claremont Courier had an article by Tony Krickl with the headline "It's the Season for Dirty Campaign Tricks and Literature." (The Krickl piece is not posted on the Courier website.) The article talked about some of the usual stuff like campaign lawn signs going missing, and it also mentioned complaints about an anti-Obama mailing with racist overtones.

Krickl wrote that local Republicans, too, had complaints about an unidentified man who left a leaflet that had a list of "The Early Signs of Fascism" outside the local Republican headquarters.

And the Daily Bulletin reported last week that the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office is investigating a complaint from a Pomona resident:

POMONA - Roberta Perlman-Hensen has been a resident of Los Angeles County for nearly three decades, so she was surprised when she recently received an unsolicited absentee ballot - from San Bernardino County.

Perlman-Hensen lives in Pomona but has a business address in Chino.

"It was really odd. Apparently someone filled out a card with my name," she said.

The matter was odd enough that the San Bernardino County Registrar of Voters Office is having the county District Attorney's Office investigate.

What a lot of these complaints have in common is that the incidents are pushed by independent groups who support their candidates of choice not by offering up reasons to vote for those persons but by giving negative messages about their candidates' opponents.

These sorts of occurrences are by no means limited to state and federal elections. In the last three Claremont municipal elections, for instance, city-wide mailers went out to voters on the last Friday before the respective elections. That particular day is chosen because the targeted candidates cannot respond in time before election day to rebut the charges raised in the mailers. We saw an unsubtle and ineffectual dig at Elderkin, Yao, and Pedroza in the last election. Before that, it was Valerie Martinez's and Roger Hogan's Claremont Business PAC. And who can forget, six years ago, Residents United for Claremont, the forerunner of the 2005 Preserve Claremont.

So it came as no surprise late last week that a hit piece mailer went out attacking incumbent Congressman David Dreier (R-26). The piece was a large, four-color, glossy mailer that had the photo of two men in swim trunks lying on beach towels together with the headline: "Why are taxpayers paying for David Dreier's Homosexual lifestyle?" The headline was in white letters, except for the word "Homosexual", which was in red.

The mailer claimed that "...Dreier took 92 trips overseas with his male partner on our tax dollars." The mailer also indicated that it was paid for by Blue America PAC, which is an organization headed by DJ, record producer and political blogger Howie Klein. Here is the mailer itself:

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What was disturbing about the Blue America mailer is that it so clearly seeks to stir up homophobia to help Dreier's Democratic opponent, Russ Warner, win tomorrow's election. Isn't a Blue America supposed to be a tolerant America? We are finding it a little tough to square that circle.

Update, November 5, 10 a.m. The Federal Election Commission has posted the campaign finance document for the mailer. It is available at the FEC website, and also reproduced here. Click on the image at the right to enlarge so that the disclosure is readable.

Warner, who has not disavowed the Blue America mailer--that we have heard*, stands to benefit here. Silence seems to be the rule on this one: silence from the Daily Bulletin and the Courier; silence from the Claremont Colleges, where quelling hate speech is a daily event; and silence from Warner and his supporters.

Where, one must ask, is the outrage? It's more than a little hypocritical to rightly complain about racist hit pieces on the one hand and to support with silence homophobic pieces on the other. And, whether from the left or the right, what do exactly you win when you abandon all first principles to win an election?

Update, election morning, 7 a.m. We received a note from a member of the Claremont community on this issue pointing out hypocrisy on the Dreier side: "The fact that Dreier is gay, closeted, and enjoyed a multi-decade relationship with his chief-of-staff has been well-known since the story broke in 2004. Many GLBT Americans are offended by Dreier's hypocrisy, and your post would have been better for mentioning that fact."

We are agnostic on Dreier's re-election. Or not. And were a bit tentative in even exposing this whole affair. Our reader implies that the piece in question was along the lines of an Act Up! action--queer, here, and in your face.

*We checked the Warner for Congress website about 11:15 a.m. Monday and couldn't find anything authoritative or otherwise. We'll check as we can throughout the day and tomorrow.

7:00 a.m. Tuesday. Still no statement one way or the other from the Warner camp. Our purpose here is not to put pressure on Warner--God knows he's probably busy enough today--but this note was the easiest way we could come up with to allow for an anticipated change in the fact situation underlying statements in this post. We checked several times yesterday afternoon and evening, but have removed the times in this footnote because they had too much of a "countdown" look to them. Probably Warner doesn't even read the Insider, and has the intelligence not to respond if he did. This is getting way too complicated for us--"lotta ins, lotta outs, lotta threads,"

10:00 a.m. Wednesday. We will stop posting on this subject now. Dreier apparently has won re-election.

Leap of Faith - Updated

Janus has got to be the patron god of Claremont. We've long noted the incredible skill with which Claremonsters of all stripes are able to hold two contradictory ideas in their heads at the same time. It's a talent they constantly use to argue one way when it's convenient for their purposes and then adopt the opposite position when it's not.

A case in point: As we noted on Monday, the City of Claremont has applied for a grant of over $1.6 million from the San Gabriel and Los Angeles Rivers and Mountains Conservancy (RMC) to help pay for Padua Park in Northeast Claremont.

The first of three phases of the park has gone out for bid, and the city has allocated approximately $2.4 million to the project, whose total cost is estimated by the city to be between $10-12 million. Because of the flaws with the park design, the city has already been turned down for three state park grants worth a total of $3.2 million.

The city's RMC grant is curious because the RMC is a conservancy. It's supposted to save the type of habitat that the city will have to bulldoze when they build the second and third phases of Padua Park. (From what we're hearing from a number of outraged readers, bulldozing seems to be Claremont's mitigation of choice when it comes to native habitats, and the city's stewardship of its open space in a number of areas seems to consist of ripping it out and putting up a plaque to commemorate that which they've destroyed - but that's a story for another post.)

Below we've posted an image of page four of the RMC's updated listed of Tier 1 grant applications. These are projects for which the RMC staff is recommending granting money. Padua Park, which had been a lower priority Tier 2 project, has gotten a bump up to Tier 1 as of the most recent listing:

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Notice the difference, though, between the city's intentions for Padua Park and what the RMC staff is recommending. Also note the omission of certain information inconvenient to Claremont's money-grab. Here is the present Padua Park description:

Padua Park is planned to be a 22 acre facility located in the northeastern portion of the City of Claremont. When fully developed the park will feature both active and low impact recreation spaces. This funding request is for Phase 1 which includes the entryway, parking, nature trail with fitness stations, native plantings, restroom and soccer field. Phase 1A and 2 are planned to include an extension of the networked walking trails with fitness core training stations, along with ball fields, tennis courts and play areas.

What the city of Claremont neglected to tell the RMC, however, was the fact that of that 22 acres they're speaking of, 8.9 acres is a certain kind of habitat known as Riversidean Alluvial Fan Sage Scrub - the same stuff the city was arguing needed to be saved from gravel mining by Vulcan Materials on the land adjacent to the Padua Ave. site. No wonder the city had to find a man who had a mail-order Ph.D in theology to be their biology expert for the park's Environmental Impact Report (EIR) - like all city of Claremont endeavors, rationality and reasoned argument went out the window. This one was a faith-based initiative from the beginning.

On top of the city's hypocrisy over the sage scrub, the city also ignores the fact that their own EIR for the park states that the park will drink 86,400 gallons of water every day or 31.5 million gallons a year and at peak times water usage would be up to 50% higher, hardly the portrait of a xeriscape paradise the city painted in their RMC grant application:

From the Padua Avenue Park DEIR, Page 3-10.3
Go to page 169 of the City's online document.

The RMC staff recommendation is to approve Claremont's application for about half the requested amount:

Partial funding recommended ($800,000) of the passive and natural elements. RMC funding for this project includes a portion of RMC funds for restoration of the habitat on site, and a feasibility study of the site should be completed. Also a recommend a commitment from the City to seek funding from appropriate sources to undertake restoration activities.

But if the city goes ahead with its plans for Padua Park, those plans will necessarily include the removal of all of the very on-site habitat the RMC is talking about. How do they make the two square? Right now, the city is going forward only with Phase 1. As soon as they start the next part, Phase 1A, the habitat in question will be removed and replaced almost entirely by an asphalt parking lot and active-use park space with sports field lighting.

So, again we have to wonder if the city is merely using a bait-and-switch tactic with the RMC, promising on the one hand to restore habitat in order to qualify for the grant, then on the other hand proceeding to do the opposite of what RMC suggests once the city receives its money. We have no idea if the RMC's grant conditions are binding, but they sure ought to be given Claremont's history of manipulating or misrepresenting facts to get what it wants.

This one appears to be heating up, and we'll try to keep you up-to-date on the double-speak as it flows out stereoscopically from the two faces of Claremont.