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.

City Attorney Firm Subpoenaed in Bell Investigation - UPDATED

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

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

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

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

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


- UPDATED 9:20AM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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