Monday Morning Mailbag

We received a comment in response to our Saturday post in which we quoted a 2000 California First Amendment Coalition press release regarding the City of Claremont's Black Hole Award. The release included some choice quotes from Karen Rosenthal, Claremont's mayor at the time.

As one reason for the award, the CFAC piece cited Claremont's proposal to station a "mental health professional" at City Council meetings to evaluate the potential dangers presented by speakers during public comment. The professional would have provided the City grounds to have offending speakers removed from the council chambers.

In case you've forgotten, the author of the staff report for that proposal was former Assistant City Manager Bridget Healy, who is chair-elect to the Claremont Chamber of Commerce board and who ran unsuccessfully for council in 2009.

Our reader wrote:

Date: Sat, March 26, 2011 5:28:47 PM
To: claremontbuzz@yahoo.com
Subject: crazy

"...its short-lived proposal to have mental health professionals standing by to assess the threat level posed by citizen speakers at public meetings..."

My guess is they dropped the proposal to have mental health professionals at city council meetings because the mental health professionals would have been able to witness the behavior of the city council members. "Yes, I was noticing the unstable person at the front of the room who keeps sighing loudly and rolling her eyes when other people speak. Have your officer keep a close eye on that one -- she covers about thirty pages in the DSM-IV."

(Pause)

"Also, about the man on the side of the dais who keeps turning beet red and screaming threats at people..."

At the end of the note, the reader alluded to Bridget Healy's former boss in Claremont and in Indio. Here we see him in all his red-faced glory as he does self-inflicted damage to his reputation:

Do No Harm

Our post about former Claremont mayor Karen Rosenthal upset a reader, who disliked our dredging up something her husband, Michael Rosenthal did to lose his medical license in 2001:

Date: Thu, March 24, 2011 11:43:46 AM
To: claremontbuzz@yahoo.com
Subject: Rosenthal

While the re-emergence of former mayor Rosenthal may be newsworthy, to bring up the near decade-old issue concerning her husband is just plain mean and totally irrelevant. Your humanity has hit a low point. Please apologize to your readers and to Mr. Rosenthal.

We stand by the post, dear reader. Yes, the former Dr. Rosenthal's license revocation happened 10 years ago, but we consider the matter quite relevant because it illustrates the egocentrism and the lack of empathy that the Rosenthals and the Claremont 400 possess still. They have yet to apologize for their own behavior. It's been our contention here at the Insider that the 400 put the citizens of Claremont through the wringer when they ran the town and then played extremely ugly politics when they saw their hold on City Hall weaken.

After the 2005 Preserve Claremont campaign, not one of the hardcore PC backers apologized publicly, even though they were roundly chastised in letters to the Claremont Courier and in several ads taken out by private citizens outraged by the PC witchhunt. In fact, they've continued to be very active in local campaigns.

A prime example is Mrs. Rosenthal, who quietly reentered the local political scene and who served on council member Joe Lyon's campaign committee. Not only did Karen fail to learn anything from the PC mess she and other supporters of Lyons and candidate Robin Haulman borrowed the same strategy this time.

Rosenthal's unapologetic behavior is consistent with the pattern of her public life. Consider the 2000 Black Hole Award the California First Amendment Coalition (CFAC) gave to Claremont and then-Mayor Rosenthal for their handling of Irvin Landrum shooting and for many other things. A CFAC press release from 2000 said:

Claremont was cited for:

• its refusal to disclose records relating to a lawsuit settlement;
• its protests contrary to fact that a federal court order precluded disclosure,
• its short-lived proposal to have mental health professionals standing by to assess the threat level posed by citizen speakers at public meetings;
• its city manager's disclosure of the criminal records of a man, in order to discredit him, who had called for an investigation of the death of his nephew, shot by police officers;
• its use of council committees to hold unannounced meetings on a variety of matters; and
• its refusal to allow citizens, during a permitted parade, to hand out leaflets to curbside spectators.

CFAC sent a faxed copy of the award citation, with a letter invitation to respond at the Assembly or otherwise, to Mayor Karen Rosenthal. In comments to the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin in Ontario on Sunday, October 15, after the Assembly, she denied having been given notice and dismissed the award as "a public relations scam" and fund-raising effort.

Mayor Rosenthal was not quoted on most of the specifics, but said overall, "They just like to fabricate these very volatile stories out of things that didn't happen or weren't as dastardly as they claim or are unresolved at this time," with the last item apparently referring to a continuing investigation into the shooting. She said the mental health observer was simply a committee recommendation that had not been adopted, and the anti-leafleting restriction was "to prevent littering and disruption of neighborhoods" and had "nothing to do with free speech."

Similarly, the attitude both Rosenthal and her husband demonstrated after Michael Rosenthal lost his medical license was unremorseful, unapologetic. Mr. Rosenthal was more concerned about any harm to wife's reputation than to the patient who lost 2,000 cc of blood during a D & C procedure Mr. Rosenthal performed. The woman later had to have an emergency room hysterectomy. Some things time cannot heal, dear reader.

Mrs. Rosenthal (photo, left) continues to display the same lack of remorse she did publicly as mayor and as Mr. Rosenthal's wife when the news of his license revocation became public. This failure to own up to their past actions occurs repeatedly among the Claremonsters. It's why we at the Insider keep coming back. Every time we think they've finally learned to play nicely and we go into hibernation, this group returns thinking they can turn the clock to 1998, before Landrum, before they started losing elections.

The harm Karen Rosenthal and her fellow 400 members caused cannot be undone, and without some little public act of contrition on the part of the 400, a good segment of the city's voting population will always suspect the Claremonsters of the worst motives in anything or anyone they back.

You are right, dear reader. Apologizing is always a good place to start, but Mrs. Rosenthal and her compatriots are the ones who need to step up and take ownership of their actions. That, unfortunately, is a step they have been incapable of taking.

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.

Joe Lyons: Did Claremont Really Elect the "Smartest Man in the Room"?

Here is Joe Lyons' "thank you" ad in Saturday's Courier. Check the spelling of the word "privilege". Is this really the guy who uses his ability to "understand how complex and dynamic system operate"? How 'bout the ability to spell simple English words in headline text?

click to enlarge

Also, two of his people unburdened themselves of kooky opinions in the letters on page 2. Karen Rosenthal, at whose home in the Village Joe Lyons had his election night gathering, ruminated on whether satire would be appropriate in a councilman.

And Leo Kretzner, colleague of Lyons at the City of Hope...well, he must be about the most un-fun guy around.

Humor-impaired

Here's the main point of his letter, referring to Nasiali's satirical letter of last summer: "...I've reread it yet again and I just don't see any hint of satire or sarcasm... A satirical piece needs to have a least a little hint that it is indeed satirical--a verbal 'wink-wink, nudge-nudge' that is unfortunately missing..." We don't propose to re-parse the original piece. Too many people smarter than us have done so and the consensus is in. Get some humor training, Leo.

Another letter on page 2 of the Courier (you really ought to go out and buy your copy) alludes to the idea that the Gerecke hit piece ad that has been the subject of so much discussion seems to have emanated from Joseph Lyons' camp. He has done nothing thus far to dissuade us from that thought. Shouldn't he and his people be healing rather irritating?

Take a look at his campaign committee--Gerecke, Rosenthal, and Kretzner. What a coincidence:

click to enlarge

This is gonna be an interesting time in Claremont. Read his "thank you" if you have the fortitude. Somebody may actually have found a candidate--now a councilmember--who will gas more than Linda Elderkin.

Campaign 2009 Mail

As you might expect, we've received some email regarding the problems the Bridget Healy for City Council campaign has had with inconsistencies that have popped up in the candidate's campaign literature.

Some of Healy's claims have been directly contradicted by her sworn testimony in a lawsuit the city had to defend three years ago. A reader wrote in after having noticed yet another Healy campaign exaggeration:

DATE: Sunday, March 1, 2009 2:34:10 PM
SUBJECT: Healy's Gifts
TO: Claremont Buzz

Dear Buzz,

With keen interest, I have been following the newspaper and Insider Blog reports on city council candidate Healy's inconsistencies regarding her purported contributions and gifts to Claremont. While her inconsistencies have focused on the acquisition of the Wilderness Park, I should point out that her claims to have "established the Police Commission.." are also questionable. I recall that the establishment of the Police Commission was a recommendation, to the City Council, of an Ad Hoc Committee which was formed to look into necessary changes in the behavior of the Police Department following the Landrum shooting incident. She makes it sound as if she alone - as in her other claims on the "accomplishments" list - established the Police Commission.

* * * * *

Healy's apparently been taking some hits because of her misstatements. Naturally, the Claremont 400 has circled the wagons. Saturday's Claremont Courier had three letters from different 400 representatives in support of Healy.

The first Courier letter was from Tom and Donna Ambrogi. Tom Ambrogi lives at Pilgrim Place and his wife is a Pilgrim boardmember. Following the Irvin Landrum shooting, he was one of the people who led a largely ineffective, toothless campaign to try to address the City's handling of the matter. We call Ambrogi's efforts ineffective because he ignored the central problem: the City's management culture under then-City Manager Glenn Southard, and his right-hand woman, Assistant City Manager Bridget Healy. Ambrogi focused on the symptom rather than the structural disease.

So, it's no surprise that Ambrogi would demonstrate a similar blindness in his current support of Healy. Ambrogi apparently has no inkling that supporting Healy is a direct abnegation of everything he claimed to stand for when the Landrum shooting occurred. But with Ambrogi, like so many of the 400, friendships trump reality, and the high status he and his wife possess in Pilgrim Place gives them a potential platform to influence other residents of that retirement community.

The second letter was from former Claremont City Planner and former Claremont League of Women Voters president Sharon Hightower. Hightower says she has two things she considers when she evaluates candidates. First, does the person understand "Claremont's past achievements (and blunders)?" In this, as in most things Healy, Hightower gives no concrete examples. And, as we know from Healy's advertisements, the candidate's understanding of past achievements is highly suspect.

Hightower's second criteria is the vision thing. Does the candidate share Hightower's, the League's, and the 400's vision of what Claremont should be? (More on the word "vision" in a moment.)

The last letter is signed by eight former Claremont mayors, including Queen Ellen Taylor (right), who was so bad on the council that she was reportedly told by the powers-that-be not to run again. And some of the others on the list - Diann Ring, Karen Rosenthal, Paul Held, and Al Leiga - were no better than Taylor and in several instances were even worse.

Parsing the three letters is easy. There are two code words the 400 always uses: consensus and vision. "Consensus" is their belief that no dissent whatsoever should be tolerated. Not on the part of the council and certainly not on the public's part. In short, it is groupthink at its worst. The Ambrogis' letter mentions consensus, and Diann Ring is always prattling on incessantly about the need for 5-0 votes on the council.

"Vision" is the opinion formed by 400 at their various social events. They come up with some cockamamie notion about this or that, then hold sham public meetings to give the imprimatur of the public process to these opinions. Unknown to the public, the process is a done deal long before it ever reaches an official public meeting. All three Courier letters Saturday mentioned vision.

To those in the know, when you hear "vision" and "consensus" together in candidate endorsements, you're supposed to know that this is the 400's chosen person. When you parse all three of the Saturday Courier letters, you not only see the code words, but you see the eight mayors giving away their secret. They don't call it Bridget Healy's vision. They say, "our vision for Claremont...."

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, we give you EXHIBIT 1 in this case:

1A

She has a fine record of 18 years service in city government, where she showed strong leadership in bringing consensus on many important issues....

We need [Healy's] passion and her vision and her proven leadership to implement our common vision for the future of Claremont.

Tom and Donna Ambrogi
Claremont

1B

....Does he/she have a vision for the future of Claremont? If so, is it one I share? Can he/she always keep that vision in mind while solving today’s problems?

Sharon W. Hightower
Claremont

1C

....She is committed to working with you, the citizens, to make our vision for Claremont this community's future.

Please join us in voting for Bridget for City Council.

Ellen Taylor
Suzan Smith
Sandy Baldonado
Algird Leiga
Paul Held
Diann Ring
Karen M. Rosenthal
Richard Newton
Past and Present Mayors of the City of Claremont

Friday Mailbag

Is brevity the soul of wit, Polonius? If so, then we received a soulful one-line email from a reader in response to our post about the 10th anniversary of the shooting of 18-year-old driver Irvin Landrum by Claremont police during a traffic stop on Base Line Rd. on the night of January 11, 1999.

Here's what the reader had to say about former Claremont Mayor Karen Rosenthal's tear-filled display of remorse while she was being interviewed by Claremont Courier reporter Tony Krickl:

DATE: Tuesday, February 10, 2009, 8:45 AM
SUBJECT: i just vomited in my brain
TO: Claremont Buzz

"Rosenthal cried while I interviewed her."

Burying the Past, Again

The Claremont Courier last week had a two-part series by Tony Krickl examining the 10th anniversary of the 1999 Irvin Landrum shooting, an incident that split the Claremont community, leading to deep soul-searching among some and outright denial in others. (Unfortunately, the Courier didn't post the articles on their website, which seemed a bit of an oversight considering the importance of the issue to the community.)

The incident became what some might call a transformational moment in Claremont's civic culture. In March, 2001, Llewellyn Miller, Claremont's first African American councilmember, was elected in the aftermath of the shooting; and, in 2003, Peter Yao became the City's first Asian councilmember.

The incident also caused a good many people to examine the city's management culture, one embodied by former Claremont City Manager Glenn Southard and endorsed by the city fathers and mothers, the so-called Claremont 400. Many of these people refused for years after the shooting to acknowledge the possibility of any imperfection within City Hall and allowed Southard and his faithful assistant, current City Council candidate Bridget Healy, to run roughshod over state open government laws and to treat the non-Claremont 400 public with open contempt.

In our view, this Southardian management culture lay at the heart of the Landrum matter. What happened on Base Line Rd. on the night of January 11, 1999, will never be fully known. But what we do know is that the City Council and Southard committed misstep after misstep, mostly because of their collective arrogance as well as the sharp disconnect between their egos and the values of a majority of voters.

The sense of the majority of voters that the Council was horribly out-of-touch with reality was what did in incumbents Karen Rosenthal and Al Leiga, and what forced Paul Held and Sandy Baldonado to not seek re-election. It was also what swept Miller, Yao, Jackie McHenry, and Corey Calaycay into office. (The sword cuts both ways, though. Miller and McHenry both lost their re-election bids in a particularly ugly campaign in 2005, and it remains to be seen whether or not Calaycay will break the string of incumbents either stepping down or getting voted out.)

* * *

A reader wrote in after the first of Krick's two articles appeared on Saturday, January 31st. The reader was bothered by something we also noticed about the article:

DATE: Tuesday, February 3, 2009 12:35 PM
SUBJECT: Landrum article from Saturday's Claremont Courier
TO: Claremont Buzz

Hi,

I wondered if I was the only person who read the article in Saturday’s Claremont Courier by Tony Krickl about the Landrum shooting and who didn’t recognize the Karen Rosenthal quoted therein. My recollection of the events surrounding the Landrum shooting are that then-mayor Rosenthal, with her tin ear and foot in mouth, exacerbated a difficult situation no less than Glenn Southard. And I cannot remember, nor can I believe, that she took down the award plaques given to officers Hanna and Jacks. Certainly, she could not have spoken to Glenn Southard about the awards in the way described in the article. Part of the reason that she lost so badly (finishing in last or next-to-last place) in the next City Council election is that the Council would not rescind the awards, muzzle the embarrassing city manager, or consider doing so.

She was simply “inexperienced”—certainly not arrogant, insensitive, and certain of the city manager’s rightness. Revisionist history at its finest.

Yes, dear reader, Official Claremont's habit of forgetting and erasing the inconvenient parts of the past is nothing new, as we once said a couple years ago, Chicken Creek may be long gone from Claremont, but the River Lethe flows strong through the heart of town. Drink, Claremonsters, and forget.

* * *

The reader's note alluded to study circles. This, you might recall was Ellen Taylor's way of trying to take credit for "healing" the city by organizing the study circles without actually having to trouble citizens with of any sort of real self-examination. It was simply enough to have Queen Ellen declare victory over the guilt the Landrum matter created among Claremont's progressives for the self-congratulatory back-slapping to begin, followed quickly by the forgetting.

All that remains now is a sort of faux-history, complete with a false set of recollections, tenderly evoked in Krickl's two articles by the people most responsible for trying to preserve Southard's job (hence, Preserve Claremont):

• Former Mayor Karen Rosenthal, currently agonizing over Southard's awarding Employees-of-the-Year awards (with $1,000 bonuses) to the two officers involved in the shooting, claims to have ordered Southard to take the awards down from the walls just outside the Council Chambers - a detail Rosenthal brings to light 10 years after the fact, if it ever really happened at all.
  
  
• Taylor expressing sympathy for Landrum's family: "....[Southard] refused to release information about the shooting to the family. If that were my child, I would want some answers. The protests happened because the family felt they had to protest to be heard." So where were Ellen's sympathies 10 years ago? Why, if she were so concerned about the Landrum family, was Taylor not out at City Hall leading the protests or meeting with the Tracy Lee, Irvin Landrum's mother?
  
  
• Taylor's eventual campaign manager (and Bridget Healy's de facto CM as well), in Krickl's second article last Wednesday claiming a healing victory through the creation of Claremont's Police Commission: "In 2000, the city set up a Police Commission to 'give the community a forum if concerns came up with the Police Department,' said Helaine Goldwater, former chair of the Police Commission.
  
  Goldwater conveniently forgets (that word again) to mention her role in neutering the commission so as to shackle its effectiveness, or Healy's role, beginning on 9/5/02 (the first meeting after Goldwater's commission term expired), as the staff member assigned to keep watch over the Police Commission to make sure they didn't stray too far off the reservation.

Click to Enlarge

In our view, Krickl's blog post on the subject gets closer to the truth of the matter than the two articles:

I interviewed Karen Rosenthal, who was not mayor when the incident happened but was throughout much of the aftermath. As the voice of the city, Rosenthal was certainly in a difficult position and struggled with being thrown into that role during the crisis.

Rosenthal cried while I interviewed her. Her emotions, which still exist today, personify how lasting an impact the incident had on the community, and all the raw emotions that it invoked.

The greatest criticism of Rosenthal throughout the aftermath was for being insensitive to Landrum and his family and making public statements about his character and personal life that many felt were irrelevant.

Does it matter that he fathered 2 children to 2 different women at the age of 18, as she brought up during our interview? Even going so far as to call him a “rapist, by the legal definition” because the women were underage.

....When Glenn Southard named the officers Employees of the Year award and released the criminal record of Obee Landrum [Irvin Landrum's uncle -ed.], he displayed his intent to take an extremely defensive stance over the issue. This did not sit well with those close to him and observers in the community.

With all the poor decisions that he made during the crisis, it calls to question his decision-making abilities on other, less important issues. The city of Claremont may very well be better off without him.

Claremont, as Krickl notes, is a better place now. But it is not because of Karen Rosenthal's retroactive compassion or Ellen Taylor's study circles. It's because there has been a bit of a shift in thinking in City Hall, a little more openness, a slight willingness to take the risk of making information easily available to the public. Televising and streaming Council meetings has helped, too, if for no other reason than the Council's fear of the camera has eliminated the eyerolling and sighing that confronted people questioning the Council on their decisions.

It's a quieter town, a less contentious town, than it was 10 years ago. The question should be, why did it take a shooting to set into motion the six-year-long chain of events that led to Southard's leaving? And, maybe, a second question: Why in the world would any sane person want that way of thinking back?

Charity Fatigue

The Daily Bulletin's Susan Sproul has an article about the Claremont Community Foundation's (CCF)annual Party Parade, which is already underway.

The Party Parade is a sort of serial fundraising event, with various events hosted by different community members. The CCF began a dozen years ago and raises money that it doles out to various community organizations.

Mostly, the Party Parade is an excuse for the elites of Claremont to get together and do what they do best: socialize. Oh, and they do raise a little money, which they give back to charities run by mostly by themselves.

The Bulletin's Sproul puts a good spin on the festivities, though:

The Claremont Community Foundation is throwing a party - well, make that parties - and you're invited.

The foundation has hosted Party Parade for 12 years, and it has proved both effective and successful in raising needed donations and helping to establish friendships. Party Parade 2008 shouldn't be an exception.

Taking advantage of leap year, the fun actually got started Friday with a jewelry design get-together, but the busy schedule of events takes off in earnest tonight with a "retro-metro" dinner described as an "atomic era meal" served at a private hillside Claremont home. And the ball keeps rolling throughout the rest of this month with various parties scheduled. They are as diverse and interesting as the community supporting them.

Want proof? How about tours of several noted Inland Valley artists' homes, a dinner showcasing the talents of Spaggi's chef Henry Gonzales, a night of dancing with members of the National Championship Claremont Colleges Ballroom Dance Team or a sunrise stroll in Johnson's Pasture? There shouldn't be any excuse for not going to one of these delightful mini events.

The Claremont Community Foundation stands by its name, encouraging the community to get involved with raising money that ends up back in the community, according to Nickie Cleaves, executive director.

The CCF is one of those things that the Claremont 400 love to create - a non-profit that raises money for good causes, so that they can feed their egos. It's really confession for the non-Catholic, absolving the givers of guilt for all the bad things they've done over the years while at the same time getting together for an ego boosting good time.

You wonder, especially with a possible recession coming, if Claremonters will be cutting back on donations to our plethora of local charities: the CCF, Friends of the Library, House of Ruth, the RFB&D, Uncommon Good, to name a few.

The CCF's current board of directors describes itself thusly:

About Our Board

Our Board is broadly representative of our diverse community. Board members commit their time, talent and financial resources in service of their community. New Board members are nominated and elected by the current Board, serving 3-year terms, up to a maximum of 6 consecutive years. Board members are expected to attend monthly board meetings, along with a variety of committee meetings and community events.

Board of Directors, 2006-2007

Suzanne Hall, Chair - (Former Human Services Commission Chair)
Brenda Barham Hill, Vice Chair
Phil Hawkey, Vice Chair
Barry Ulrich, Secretary
Jack Miller, Treasurer
Opoku Acheampong
Marilyn Bidwell
Dawn Grimes
Tim Harrison
Bernadette Kendall
Al Leiga (Former Mayor, 3-Term Councilmember)
Sue Likens
Marshall Taylor (Husband of current Mayor Pro Tem Queen Ellen Taylor)

The CCF's Argus Commission is made up of former board members and includes many former councilmembers and city commissioners, including such Insider favorites as Glenn Southard, Randy Prout, Nick Quackenbos, Karen Rosenthal, Diann Ring, and Judy Wright.

Not all of the board and Argus Commissioners are what we'd consider hardcore Claremonsters, but you have to wonder how diverse the board can really be when they are self-selecting their successors. Sounds like more of that echo chamber effect that has dominated most aspects of our city government.

You can check out the upcoming events on the CCF's website. Sam and Julie Pedroza and Amy and Wade Mathieson host a "Rockin' Lobster" party March 22nd. Diann and Robert Ring host a "Quintessential France" dinner April 5th with Nick Quackenbos and others lending a hand. Those and many other events allow you to see many of the 400 in their native environments. Enjoy!

Watery Vision

You may have caught our notices of charitable events going on around town and seen that a good many Claremont 400 people are members and leaders of these organizations--the League of Women Voters, the Claremont Community Foundation, Friends of the Library, the Rotary Club, the Kiwanis, the Claremont Educational Foundation, etc....

As we've pointed out in the past, these people and these organizations do many good works. The problem is when the prejudices of the 400's social networks collide with the challenges of managing a city and a school district where the constituents may have different ideas about how they'd like things run. The problems arise when the Claremonsters assume that they have every solution and are incapable of making a mistake.

Looking back at Claremont's proposed purchase of the water company ($100 million and counting), one of the complaints the city and Claremonters have is the fact that our current water provider, Golden State Water (GSW), has lumped Claremont's rates together with high desert towns like Apple Valley and Barstow, where GSW has to pay to install the water infrastructure for a rapidly growing area--a cost we in Claremont help underwrite. This combining of different towns into one rate schedule is called regionalization.

But if we examine the roots of regionalization, we see that Claremont, under then-City Manager Glenn Southard and a City Council wholly owned and controlled by Claremont 400ers like Diann Ring, Al Leiga, Paul Held, Suzan Smith, and Karen Rosenthal, contributed to the problem.

In 1998, Claremont was also in negotiations with the other agency members of the Six Basins Watermaster, which resulted in Claremont receiving 535 acre-feet in water rights annually. Claremont's water company at the time was Southern California Water Co. (SCWC), which later changed its name to Golden State Water after being bought out by American States Water.

On 5/26/98, the Claremont City Council received a staff report by Scott Miller (now working for the City of Beverly Hills), who at the time was the Assistant to the City Manager. Miller's report outlines a proposed water deal the city wanted to make with SCWC. The deal would lease Claremont's 535 acre-feet of water rights to SCWC (now Golden State Water) for 30 years. In exchange, the city would receive annual payments amounting to $123,000 based on 1998 rates. In addition, SCWC would give the the City of Claremont a 50% rate reduction, amounting to $177,000 in annual savings at that time.

Miller's report recommended making the deal because Claremont stood to benefit by $300,000 a year. What the report didn't mention was that Claremont also agreed not to oppose regionalization when SCWC applied for its next rate increases in 1999. The City of Claremont, in effect, signed off on regionalization and in return got a nice yearly water rights payment and now only pays half of what the citizenry has to pay for water.

Oh, and the city also benefited when the water company was allowed to raise its rates and instituted regionalization. You see, higher rates means higher utility tax revenue for Claremont. It was a win-win for the city, and a lose-lose for the citizens.

How did the debate go before the city council? See Item 17 of the Council Minutes. Here are some excerpts:

Councilmember Ring thought the proposal was historic and that many such agreements take twenty years to final[ize]. Mayor Smith agreed and thought it set a good tone for the future.

Moved by Ring, seconded by Leiga, and carried 4-0 to approve the agreement for execution by the mayor.
(Absent: Rosenthal).

Incidentally, the only person on record questioning the agreement was Jackie McHenry, who "asked how citizens would save money. It costs the city less, may cost citizens more." (Who's the one with vision?)

Like so many problems in Claremont, the city council and staff long ago sowed the seeds for water rate woes by going along with SCWC and by not mounting a coordinated effort to lobby the state Public Utility Commission to oppose regionalizing our water rates.

Ironically, at the same 5/26/98 meeting, the matter of the Claremont Wilderness Park came up (Item 14). Mayor Smith inquired about the fire and vegetation management plan. The city's failure to implement that plan fully became a central argument for the plaintiffs in the Palmer Canyon fire lawsuit (settled in March, 2007, for $17.5 million). Smith was assured by staff that fire safety in the park was under control. We know what happened in October, 2003, when the Grand Prix fire swept through the area.

All of this really argues against any notion of competence under Southard, Ring, Held, et. al. It really argues for the need to avoid at all costs going back to that sort of mismanagement and to hold those people accountable for the bad their incompetence has inflicted on our community. It's simply folly to fail to see how all the good the Claremont 400 has accomplished is counterbalanced by a large body of incredibly boneheaded decisions for which they refuse to accept responsibility.

When you turn on your tap, when you pay your water bill, or if your house burned down in 2003, think of Diann Ring; in fact, call her up and thank her personally for her "vision."

Chickens Coming Home to Roost

I see your hair is burnin'
Hills are filled with fire.

--Jim Morrison, from L.A. Woman

Everyone in Claremont should be clear on the fact that the $17.5 million settlement for the foreseeable destruction by fire of the Palmer Canyon community puts the blame squarely on the doorstep of the City of Claremont. This is yet another example of the wisdom and skill of the Claremont 400 in running this community over the years. If one wishes to name names, one might name Glenn Southard (now with Indio), Sharon Z. Wood (now with Newport Beach), Betty Sheldon (now retired), and Mark Hodnick (now with Indio).

It would be too tedious to name all of the council members who failed in their planning and oversight duties over the past decade, but former City Councilmembers Diann Ring, Judy Wright, Paul Held, Al Leiga, Sue Smith, and Karen Rosenthal - all of them mayors - come immediately to mind. It's really all part of the game plan: make any promise and proceed to ignore it.

The fundamental fact in this matter is that the City failed in its ministerial duty to adhere to the vegetation management plan adopted when it took over the Wilderness Park property. The City promised in its process to do certain things to mitigate the fire hazard. It failed to do these things, always citing cost, manpower, or some other externality.

What a record! The City has owned the Wilderness Park for ten years and already it has cost an unbudgeted extra $1.7 million per year.

Of course, those in power are already clucking at their cleverness in offloading the lion's share of this expense onto the JPIA. Maybe the JPIA will figure out that the City of Claremont is not such a good risk. (An added advantage is that the JPIA involvement allows council members to say the City didn't really do anything wrong, this was merely a tactical decision recommend to us by our experts.)

The Insider isn't yet privy to any additional terms of the settlement. Our guess is that the City will try to seal most everything associated with this. It's surprising that the amount is public. The Insider would've expected something like this headline: "City settles for undisclosed amount; admits no wrongdoing; JPIA mum; Plaintiffs sworn to secrecy as condition of settlement."

We would love to see the transcripts of some of the depositions. We hear that Southard's and Hodnick's are especially juicy.

We doubt, though, that there is any truth to the rumor that Mark Hodnick channeled Jim Morrison in his deposition, paraphrasing the sequel to the verse above when answering a question about cutting back the chaparral before it burned,

If they say I never trimmed you,
You know they are all liars.