Been There, Done That

AN OLDIE BUT A GOODIE

As we've noted in the past, the Claremont 400's tried and true tactic to pushing some item on their private agenda through to completion (see the Claremont Unified School District's Measure CL) is to create a false sense of urgency, i.e., "if we don't do things this one way, chaos will ensue."

As we saw last November, there was no stoop too low for CUSD's board and their surrogates to take in order to try to get their $95 million bond passed.   The Yes on CL campaign outspent its opponents by more than $154,000 to $5,000, using money mostly raised from contractors who would have benefited from the bond.  And it still lost by a margin of 60.4% to 39.6%.

A rational person would conclude that, given such a decisive loss, there was something wrong with CUSD's claims about the necessity of the bond and that the No on CL campaign's arguments (no real accountability, conflicts of interest, the lack of any specific projects for the money, and the district's mismanagement of the previous bond, to name a few) resonated with voters.

One would have thought that the district's board would have sat down with the No on CL campaign and tried to get them on board to incorporate some of their ideas into managing CUSD's fiscal problems.  But this being Claremont, land of magical thinking, the lesson learned for CUSD was that they just need to wait and continue to let the district's infrastructure degrade so they could come back to voters in a year or two and say, "See, we told you it was bad."

It's a self-created crisis, of course, but CUSD's gang of four - Board President Jeff Stark, Vice-President Beth Bingham, Clerk Mary Caenepeel, and member Hilary LeConte - are committed to the idea that they know best.   So, get ready for the Return of CL.


FOLLOW THE MONEY

The only difference next time will be that, having changed the school board's norms to allow members to speak out on issues, CUSD will take a more active role in shaping the election message.  Exhibit A in our prediction for the bond-to-be-named-later is the fact that the Yes on CL campaign, whose treasurer is former school board member and Claremont 400 stalwart J. Michael Fay, continued to raise money after the election.

Below, courtesy of a reader, we've posted the Yes on CL campaign's 2010 Year-end Form 460 filing, showing post-election contributions and expenditures.   Notice that the campaign reported cash contributions of $182,155.69 and expenditures of $154,768.39, leaving a balance of  $27,387.30.

More significantly, the campaign received two post-election contributions, one small donation of $100 on 11/16/10 from Nancy Osgood, and one $10,000 whopper on11/12/10 from the architectural firm Flewelling & Moody, which advertises itself as "architects for schools."  

In the interests of truth in advertising, Flewelling & Moody should be marketing itself as "architects for school bonds."  The post-election CL campaign donation was F&M's second, bringing the firm's total or 2010 to $20,000.

Here's actual Form 460 (click on the icon to the right of the "S" on bottom of the frame to enlarge):





TO THE BRINK

This business of artificial crisis creation is by no means limited to Claremont.  Brinksmanship allows the extremists in a negotiation in to eliminate the middle ground and get their way. Writer James Suroweicki has a column in the August 1 edition of the New Yorker in which he argues that the current federal debt-ceiling crisis represents nothing more than a cover for politicians unwilling to make the tough decisions that real, constructive fiscal change will require (i.e., higher taxes, cuts in spending and services, or some combination of the two):

...politicians like the debt ceiling: it allows them to rail against borrowing more money (which voters hate) without having to vote to cut any specific programs or raise taxes (which voters also hate).

You might think that there are benefits to putting negotiators under the gun. But, as the Dutch psychologist Carsten de Dreu has shown, time pressure tends to close minds, not open them. Under time pressure, negotiators tend to rely more on stereotypes and cognitive shortcuts. They don’t consider as wide a range of alternatives, and are more likely to jump to conclusions based on scanty evidence. Time pressure also reduces the chances that an agreement will be what psychologists call “integrative”—taking everyone’s interests and values into account.

In fact, by turning dealmaking into a game of chicken, the debt ceiling favors fanaticism. As the economist Thomas Schelling showed many years ago, “It does not always help to be, or to be believed to be, fully rational, coolheaded, and in control of oneself” when it comes to brinksmanship. It doesn’t, in short, help to be President Obama. That may be why all the deals that have been taken seriously this season rely much more heavily on spending cuts than on tax increases: the deals represent Republican priorities, because the Republicans seem to be more willing than the Democrats to let the country default. It’s not pure craziness that’s rewarded—when some congressional Tea Partiers said that they wouldn’t vote to raise the ceiling under any circumstances, they became irrelevant to the conversation, since no compromise would make them happy. But recklessness does equal power: that’s why Eric Cantor, the House Majority Leader, and John Boehner, the Speaker of the House, have implied that they’re willing to go over the cliff (in part by suggesting that their fellow party members will force them to) but also that they can be persuaded to do the right thing.

That same group psychology is why, in the face their overwhelming Measure CL loss, the CUSD board has refused to be truly inclusive (to use their own term) and has behaved as if members of the public representing alternate viewpoints don't exist.   The CUSD board rules imperially, ignoring its own conventions at times (more on this later), and solemnly issues dicta that have no bases in reality while our district's fiscal problems worsen.

It has been ever thus in our fair city, and so it shall remain.  So sayeth our school board.

A Family Affair

This sidebar article appeared next to a more substantive article in the Claremont Courier on Saturday, September 18:

From the Claremont Courier

We posted twice on the advertising for a paid staff member, here, and here with the job description.

We're glad to see the support committee has filled those billets, but it's a little unnerving that the Committee a) has to hire someone to be for the School Bond and b) has the money to do so.

The article makes plain that Aly Stark is the daughter of CUSD Board member Jeff Stark. We've already noted there is nothing new under the Sun in Jeff Stark exploiting family ties in support of a Claremont school bond. What is interesting is that he not only did it upward, to his father, Jack (retired/emeritus CMC President in Measure Y, but now is doing it down the family tree through his daughter.

(By the way, was that Jeff Stark a friend of ours saw at Democratic congressional candidate Russ Warner's kickoff party last week? The phantom in the picture certainly looks like CUSD Board president Hilary LaConte. We heard Mary Caenepeel may have been there, too, for a non-Brown Act social occasion.)


What is not so clear at first glance is the family connection of Lisa Germano. From what we can tell, Lisa Germano is a mid-90s graduate of Claremont High, sometime substitute teacher, and the current Dance Team adviser. Who is on the Dance Team? Among others, the daughter of Measure CL Triumvirate Member Bill Fox.

Here is a copy of a photo from Bill Fox's daughter's Facebook page, showing the dance team and adviser Lisa Germano at lower left (we know the image looks like a badly-doctored Photoshop job, but we didn't think it fair to associate recognizable images of the team members, or even Fox's daughter, with this whole deal. So we blurred everyone but Germano).


This is more or less in keeping with the whole ethos of Measure CL: It's not what you know, it's who you know.

click to enlarge

Fear Itself (or $95 Million Fraud Alert)

We're going to go out on a limb here and predict that the Claremont Unified School District Board of Education votes this Thursday to approve a resolution to place a school bond measure on the ballot of the November election. They will do this on Thursday because that is the last regularly scheduled board meeting before the August 6 deadline for a bond to be placed on the November ballot.

As of this writing (3:10pm) the district has posted no agenda on its website for Thursday's meeting. They have not made any official announcement of their intentions because, as is the practice of the Claremont 400, they want as little public discussion about this matter. Discussion might lead to proposals of alternatives, not the least of which is a parcel tax.

The key here is that a bond cannot be used to pay teacher salaries, which is the most pressing budgetary need the district faces. A bond could only be used for things like improving CUSD facilities. A parcel tax, on the other hand, could:

1. Be worded in such a way as to specify that it would only be used for teacher salaries.
   
   
2. Contain a sunset clause that would allow the tax to lapse in, say, three years, enough to get the district through it's projected deficit.
   
   
3. Not have to be financed.
   
   Let's not forget that what happened when the district last went to voters for money with Measure Y in 2000. With the help of approximately $80,000 from CUSD contractors, $48.9 million Measure Y bond passed. The contractors were the primary beneficiaries of the voters largess, and, with the help of cost overruns, CUSD burned through the Measure Y money without completing the projects it used to sell voters on the bond in the first place.
   

This entire bond discussion was decided in the school board's collective minds long ago. The board and the people behind them (take your bow, Claremonsters) made that decision for the voters. The rest of the act, these dog-and-pony shows conducted by CUSD boardmembers Hilary LaConte, Beth Bingham, Jeff Stark, and Mary Caenepeel, have had one goal: to gin up fear in the hearts of parents, teacher organizations, and the rest of the voting public so that they will support the board's predetermination.

It has, in short, been a manipulation, an intellectual fraud, a con, complete with polling data designed to facilitate the bond's passage. The only boardmember not complicit in this game has been Steve Llanusa, whom we haven't always agreed with in the past, but who was at least independent enough to voice his dissent in a Claremont Courier opinion piece several months back.

It's really the school board's blatant manipulation that galls us more than anything. The fear they've cultivated creates a false logic: our schools will fail if we don't get more money; the only way of getting that money is bond; therefore, we must pass a bond to save our schools. It's that second premise that is a lie. The board knows there is another, better choice.

We've seen this fearfulness stirred up before. When the city was trying to purchase Johnson's Pasture in 2006, the same Claremonsters who were responsible for pushing Measure Y and who are behind the current bond effort told the public that we needed to urgently buy the land because developers were lining up to buy the property.

In fact, there was no real threat of such a purchase. Had the City waited until now, it could have obtained the pasture for half the price it paid in 2006, but the Claremont 400 decided what was needed was a "parks and pasture" assessment district at many times the eventual price of the land. The real intent was to create a slush fund which the City could borrow against to pay for anything it wanted.

The 400 lied to Claremont property owners the assessment when they said was the only way Johnson's Pasture could be saved. Even though the proposed assessment district needed only 50% approval to pass, property owners refused to support it because they saw it for what it really was.

The pasture was still saved - by the Measure S bond measure. That bond needed 67% voter approval and ended with 72% of the vote - a number the Claremont 400 had claimed was not possible. The Measure S bond succeeded because it was a quarter of the cost of the assessment district and because the only thing it could be used for was the purchase of Johnson's Pasture.

We see that same dynamic present here. The district uses fear to intentionally muddy the waters. They claim that in this instance a school bond, which needs only 55% approval, would be easier to pass than a parcel tax, which would need 67%. As happened with Johnson's Pasture, the school board (and the local papers, by the way) fails to note that a parcel tax would attract more votes because it would involve no financing, could be directed to the most urgent need, and could be directed to last only a few years, rather than the 30 a bond would require.

The school board's induced fear will be accompanied by kind of mob mentality. If you're not for this bond, you hate our schools and our children, they will say. This second manipulation is as intentional as the first, and the district, with the help of its consultants, will use a contractor-financed campaign to to prevent the better argument from gaining a fair hearing at all.

We saw this same strategy in 2000 with Measure Y, again in 2006 with the Parks and Pasture Assessment District, and we'll see it in the coming months with a costly school bond that will again enrich the district's contractors and election consultants without the same job-saving impact a carefully directed parcel tax would.

Below: CUSD Consultant Collecting from Claremont Taxpayer

UPDATED, 4:45PM

As we said they would, the CUSD board is proposing a $95 million bond. And as we correctly predicted, there are no specified projects that money would be used for. The board's resolution (agenda item XI.B.1) only says the money will be used for school renovations, repairs, and upgrades. They didn't dare give a list of school sites and the projects for each facility because then they could be held accountable for where the money really ended up.

Also, approximately $30 million will go right away towards paying off the money still owed on the Measure Y bond. Think of it as a cash-back refi. Ever since the 2008 financial meltdown, those vehicles have been out of vogue everywhere else in the financial world. However, in the CUSD world, they're still very much the rage.

As with the last school bond, the district promises a citizen oversight committee to make sure the money is properly spent. Rest assured, contractors and consultants, that committee will stocked with reliable Claremont 400 supporters to ensure there will be no questions asked. Every con needs its schill, after all.

CUSD has many needs. But this is a $95 million giveaway with no guarantees that the actual needs of students and teachers will be met. As we said, it is a con job, pure and simple.

CUSD to Poll Support for New Parcel Tax or Bond

The Daily Bulletin's Wes Woods II says that the Claremont Unified School District has voted 4-1 to hire a consultant to conduct a public survey to test the waters for a new parcel tax or bond. According to the Bulletin, the lone "No" vote was Steve Llanusa, who thought it wasn't the right time for such ballot measures.

CUSD has been quietly doing the PR work to push public sentiment to support a new tax of some sort. Recently, the district had a town hall-style meeting that they used to prepare the ground for the campaign they envision, and you can expect to see school district representatives pushing the idea of a tax or bond in the Op-Ed pages of the local papers.

What sort of tactics will the school board use? Well one thing they will do is talk about how our facilities are falling into disrepair. Another talking point will be that it's been 10 years since CUSD's last bond measure. Here's what the board had to tell the Bulletin:

Board president Hilary LaConte said an assessment in 2008 showed district facilities are in need of repair. She said it was important to determine if the community is willing to approve more spending for these repairs and replacements.

"I will be interested to see the community's perception," LaConte said.

We wrote about the city of Claremont's shaping of public perception yesterday. Now it's CUSD's turn.

The key to that "community perception" is TBWB Public Finance Strategies, LLC., the consulting firm the CUSD board is hiring for up to $25,000 to conduct its polling. The last time we heard from TBWB was during CUSD's 2000 Measure Y campaign. That year, you will recall, Measure Y supporters (i.e., CUSD board surrogates) raised $80,000 primarily from school building contractors for the Yes on Measure Y campaign.

Know this: in TBWB the school board is not hiring some mere polling firm. TBWB specializes in helping clients pass bond and tax measures. They are also not new to Claremont. TBWB's online CV lists Claremont's Measure Y among its successful projects.

Here's how TBWB advertises itself on its website:

If your school district, city or agency is considering a bond measure, parcel tax, sales tax increase or other funding measure, TBWB has the experience to help you. We know how to guide public agencies through the process of making tough decisions, and we know how to lead campaigns to victory in tax elections.

TBWB has the experience that wins.

Unfortunately, the narrative TBWB spins ends with the successful passing of the ballot measures it has worked on. They don't tell you what happened to all that money after the elections were over and the clients' checks were cashed.

As we've said before, Measure Y was really a partial failure. In rewarding those contractors for their generosity during the campaign, the Claremont school district misspent the money in such a way that they used up the $49 million they raised long before they complete all the projects they promised the measure would pay for. It's been 10 years, and we're still waiting for that desperately new elementary school at the La Puerta site. And, why do we need to modernize our antiquated facilities now in 2010? Wasn't Measure Y supposed to take care of that?

Here at the Insider, we'd just as soon not vote for another school district financing measure until CUSD comes clean and admits first that they didn't properly handle the finances of their last bond measure. We'd also like to see the measure's supporters (CUSD surrogates again, primarily the Claremont 400) pledge to not take any consultants' or building contractors' money to fund their new campaign.

Really, when you think about it, the situation is extremely ironic. CUSD's supporters would tend to be against the recent Supreme Court decision that opened the doors for future corporate campaign donations. Yet, in the last bond measure and in the upcoming one, all money is good money, particularly money coming from the potential district contractors who would profit from whatever measure comes of TBWB's dog-and-pony shows.

Our biggest problem supporting the CUSD board in the ballot measure TBWB will help them concoct is the board's historical lack of institutional integrity. Look for them to use every trick in the electoral playbook to get their measure passed, including guilting the public into supporting the measure. During last November's school board election, incumbent Mary Caenepeel stood up at one candidate forum and basically implied that if you don't support a school tax or bond, you hate our kids.

We'd suggest Caenepeel and the rest of the school board find some other tactics. The public's not quite as naive as in 2000, and all they have to do to educate themselves on how these public perception campaigns work is to turn on an episode of the the NBC series "Parks and Recreation":



(Really apropos of a certain city of Claremont community project coming online this spring.)

Steven Llanusa

We've always thought the election of Steven Llanusa to the Claremont Unified School District Board to be a little queer. Here was a guy, out of nowhere, who all of a sudden had the support of lots and lots of people in Claremont, seemingly centered around the remnants of Sam Pedroza's failed 2005 city council campaign.

We know that early in his campaign he had absolutely no clue about some of the sources of revenue for the district nor the financial issues facing it. His kickoff was filled with generalities, vague statements, and Apple Pie.

And yet.

As election day approached, the most popular yardsign grouping was Jeanne Hamilton, Mary Caenepeel, and...Steve Llanusa. As we recall, more money went to Llanusa (from the usual suspects) than went to either the incumbent, Hamilton, or long-time-toiler-in-the-public-school-vineyard Caenepeel. In the end, there were hundreds of votes--make that 2000 votes--of daylight between the group of Hamilton, Caenepeel, and Llanusa, and the out-of-the-money finisher Kevin Arnold.
The Claremont 400 had scored again. But who did they put on the school board in Steven Llanusa?

Apparently someone whose judgment is at least open to question.

For example, in 2006 Llanusa and one of his children seem to have scoured his Claraboya neighborhood removing American flags and tossing them into a dumpster in Fontana. Nice headline in the Courier on September 9, 2006: "DA forgoes criminal filing for Steven Llanusa" That's the kind of headline you want to see about your school board member. Well, we guess its better than, "School Board member Steven Llanusa charged in vandalism incident."

And now we read in the Daily Bulletin that Llanusa has apparently annoyed some of his handlers by the frequency and tone of his emails to Superintendent David Cash. Cash decided to be the sole conduit of information between the Board and the District Staff, and then stopped answering Llanusa's emails. The School Board had an illegal closed-session discussion of the matter on February 12. From the Bulletin article,

Board communication with the superintendent was discussed in closed session Feb. 12, Llanusa said.

Hamilton expressed concern Monday that Llanusa publicly discussed an issue that was addressed in closed session.

She said there had been no discussion of censuring Llanusa for the action, but she also said "I suppose it's possible."

We don't know that there are any heroes in this story. We do know that there are echoes of the epic McHenry-Southard battles circa 2004-5. So far, though, we are unaware of any district employee alleging hostile work environment, harassment, theft, hurt feelings, or other Bad Acts. History repeats itself, the saying goes, first as tragedy, then as farce.

Maybe this is an example of running with the other lemmings. You might go over the cliff.

And can anyone think of one positive contribution that Llanusa has made?

Coming Soon: CUSD RV Park

Will Bigham reports today in the Daily Bulletin that the Claremont Unified School District (CUSD) voted 4-0 Monday night to convert the district building on Baseline Blvd. into an RV and boat park and to move the district headquarters to a building on San Jose Ave.

This after the CUSD school board spent Measure Y bond money to upgrade the existing facility. The district feels it can get more money out of the RV park - money that can be used to generate much needed revenue to replace its squandered Measure Y dollars ($48 million or so). That way, they can build more RV parks.

Board members Steve Llanusa, Jeanne Hamilton, Jack Mills and Mary Caenepeel voted for the RV park. Board President Joan Presecan was absent.

Here is an artist's rendering of the new facility:

CUSD RV and Boat Park: Your Tax Dollars at Work

Reader Mail - CUSD

[This entry was posted this morning. Since then, we've been contacted and asked to take down the reader comments. We have honored this but are concerned at the the ability of the Claremont 400 to chill free discussions.]

There's much news to talk about this week, and we'll try to squeeze all of it today and tomorrow. From the hidden costs of keeping the nickname "City of Trees" to affordable housing, Claremont's plate is pretty full.

We wanted to start off, however, with a bit of mail we received. A reader wrote in to comment on the Claremont Unified School District's (CUSD) discussions about tearing down their building on Base Line Rd. and allowing an RV park to go in there. Apparently, School Boardmember Mary Caenepeel thinks this is a smart move. According to the reader, though, CUSD spent a lot of the 2001 Measure Y bond money to upgrade the building while other promised Measure Y projects went unfinished.

Now the Measure Y money's running out, and CUSD may have to come back to the voters for more in another school bond vote, perhaps in the not-so-distant future. The Claremont Board of Education is a wholly Claremont 400 institution--all five seats are controlled by the 400. So it's not surprise that they'd misspend the money they claimed we so needed or that they're breaking promises. Recall that in order to help get the bond passed, they promised residents near Claremont High School that the new "temporary"football stadium would not be lighted. Now, there's been talk that it may end up with lights after all. They got the votes they wanted, now they're free to break their promises - an old pattern (see our LLD discussion).

In any case, here's our reader:

[Since posting this, our reader has contacted us and, concerned about negative reactions, asked that the comments be removed. So the comments have been removed at the reader's request.]

The reader added some clarification in a second note:

[Comments removed at reader's request.]