Wednesday Mail

We received this email from a reader who, while agreeing with some of what we wrote Monday about the Claremont Police Officers Association's latest negotiating tactics, disagreed with the idea that the city of Claremont has improved its responsiveness to public document requests:

SUBJECT: claremont pd
DATE: Tuesday, November 15, 2011 7:19 AM
TO: Claremont Buzz

I agree with most of your latest piece on the Claremont PD pension fiasco. However, suggesting that all of the documents Dieter was requesting could be obtained from the city clerk is not credible. I have tried to get documents from the city clerk in the past and was stonewalled by her higher ups. And when my attorney brother tried to do it for me the city demanded a several thousand dollar fee for "copying" and researching our request. My brother has done several of these requests (for pension, salary, and disability numbers) in Ventura County and he never meant the level of resistance to disclosure there as he did in Claremont. Transparency is not part of the Claremont way.

Well, we didn't say they were perfect. Lord knows we've had our own problems when it comes to obtaining copies of City employee pay stubs (see here, here, here, here, and here).

It Tolls for Thee - UPDATED

A TAXING SITUATION

The LA Times coverage of municipal salaries in the city of Bell has focused a lot of attention on what had previously been an area examined mainly by gadflies. Local newspapers haven't seemed to care much about such arcana and that lack of scrutiny has allowed city governments, including Claremont's, to dismiss citizen's concerns about such things as city employee and city council compensation.

The excesses in Bell, however, have turned up the heat on city councils everywhere, including our little burg. At Tuesday's meeting of the Claremont City Council, mayor Linda Elderkin felt compelled to point out that Claremont's council members only receive a $400-per-month stipend. Elderkin neglected to mention, however, what she and other council members receive for attending meetings of the Claremont Redevelopment Agency or various regional boards the council members serve on, which is where Bell's council members made the bulk of their nearly $100,000 per year. Still, in Claremont, the total compensation is a fraction of what was seen in Bell, and readers can rest assured that Claremont City Manager Jeff Parker doesn't earn anywhere near the $787,000 former Bell City Manager Robert (not to be confused with Ratso "I'm walkin' heeyuh") Rizzo received.

In any case, local cities are now taking steps to distance themselves from Bell, hence Mayor Elderkin's characteristically blissful lack of self-reflection when she declaimed Tuesday night, "We are not in the realm of the Bell councils." As usual, the obtuse Elderkin missed the point entirely. It's not that Claremont's level of veniality can begin to approach that of Bell's. What ever corruption we have here isn't at all of the same sort as Bell. We're not paying exorbitant salaries and benefits for corrupt officials. Rather, here we pay a premium, a stupidity tax, for want of a better term. It's why we four years ago Claremont's ruling class, the Claremont 400, tried to institute a $45 million assessment district to pay for a $12 million parcel of open space.

Our city's mistakes may not be criminal in nature, but they can be costly. Casual observers of our town see what a wonderful place it appears to be, but they don't understand that the same sense of wonder could have been achieved for a fraction of the costs - costs that include untenable employee pension obligations and unneeded or extravagant city services.


ADVICE OF COUNSEL

We also noticed that Bell's city attorney, Robert Lee, didn't escape criticism. The LA Times reported in today's edition that the city of Downey, which also employs Lee, is ending its contract with him and his firm, Best, Best & Krieger, simply because they don't want to risk being associated with the Bell scandal.

As the Times article noted, city attorneys have a tough balancing act. They have to represent the interests of the citizens of the municipalities they work for but only so far as those interests are represented by officials elected by those same citizens - that is, the city council members. So, what happens when a council acts illegally, unethically, or irresponsibly? Should a city attorney speak up publicly, should they resign, or should they be supportive of the council?

The idea that a city attorney doesn't represent citizens directly but rather represents the council majority is one that informs our own city attorney Sonia Carvalho's legal philosophy. Coincidentally, Carvalho also works for Best, Best & Krieger and has also once worked for a city, Colton in her case, that had council members who were subjects of a federal corruption probe about 10 years ago.

Carvalho's legal advice isn't always reserved for the controlling majority of the city council. It sometimes extends to free legal opinions for the Claremont 400, as it did in 2007 when Mayor Elderkin was first running for council. At that time, one of the big issues was the possibility that Vulcan Materials Co. might begin gravel mining operations on land in northeast Claremont. Elderkin had a potential conflict of interest in any city business with Vulcan because her husband Rick is a Pomona College mathematics professor. Pomona College had a small ownership interest in the land Vulcan was interested in.

When that potential conflict became an issue in the 2007 campaign, Elderkin sought and received an opinion from Carvalho that Elderkin faced no conflict of interest. Carvalho, who didn't provide legal consultations to any other 2007 council candidates, did give Elderkin a freebie. Carvalho's legal opinion should at least have been reported as an in-kind campaign contribution, but Elderkin couldn't even be troubled to do that much.

(By the way, state attorney general's office, tell us again why you didn't look into that?)

We believed then, as we do now, that Claremont and every other city in California would be best served finding city attorneys whose philosophies of governance incorporate a greater concern for the actual town citizens, not just the controlling majority of the five elected city officials and the people who in turn control those council members.


BEEN THERE, DONE THAT

One other Bell-related item on the LA Times' LA Now blog was a report that Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger called for cities to post the salaries of top officials online.

On this issue, the Insider was way ahead of the curve. Almost three years ago, we obtained and shared the city of Claremont's payroll information from the city's online document archive. The information was posted in the form of pay stub information.

Our advice to Governor Schwarzenegger on this one: tread lightly. For our having posted that very public information, City Attorney Carvalho contacted Google, which hosts our blog, and threatened to take them to court if they did not remove the pay stub information immediately. Carvalho falsely accused the Insider of having stolen the information. Then, after the theft accusations were shown to be false, she claimed the pay stubs could not be posted because they were protected by copyright laws (also a false legal theory).

The Daily Bulletin ended up posting an image of one of the pay stubs themselves, after redacting all the personal information. The Bulletin, unlike the Insider, did not receive any nasty-grams from Carvalho, who did have a heapin' portion of crow to chew on in the aftermath of Paystubgate.

The Claremont pay stub information, incidentally, showed that our city employees were compensated quite well, especially after one includes things like bonuses and benefits - information that the city has never been willing to release and information that is supposed to be public, according to California law.


UPDATED, 2:15PM:

A reader contacted us and noted that yesterday's weekly report from City Manager Jeff Parker had the news that Claremont had started posting the salaries of top city officials, including Parker and the city council, on the City's website. Here's what Parker's report said:

CLAREMONT ADMINISTRATIVE AND COUNCIL SALARY INFORMATION AVAILABLE TO THE PUBLIC

As the media reports on the City of Bell's salaries for council and administrative staff, residents across the country are discussing the compensation of their own City officials. In accordance with the City of Claremont's open communication philosophy, the City of Claremont makes this information readily available to the public.

Each member of the City Council receives $400 per month compensation and an additional $30 per Redevelopment Agency meeting. The City Council does not receive retirement benefits and during the 2010-12 budget process, medical benefits were eliminated from council's budget. City commissioners are appointed by the City Council and receive no compensation.

As detailed in the budget, the City Manager's annual salary is $211,000 and the Assistant City Manager's annual salary is $165,000. The Police Chief's annual salary is $174,000. These salaries are based on surveys of comparable cities with similar services and populations to Claremont's 37,000 residents. Cities surveyed include Upland, Brea, La Verne, Glendora, Arcadia, Azusa, Covina, Rialto, Montclair, Monrovia, and Chino.

A complete list of salary ranges for each City position is available upon request through the City Clerk's office. For additional information, please call the City Manager's Office at 909-399-5441

Parker fails to inform the public that transparency only goes so far. We still don't get any information on bonuses and benefits, which together constitute a good chunk of total employee compensation.

According to another LA Times article on Bell, the idea of posting the salary information was supposed to be discussed in Sacramento yesterday at a meeting of city managers hosted the League of California Cities. The public disclosure is one action the League thinks will mute the public's ire over the Bell situation. It also shows that the League is more concerned with the plight of city employees than with the concerns of actual citizens.

The Times described the purpose of the meeting as "damage control," which implies the League wants to put its spin on the story rather than considering whether Bell is an extreme example of a wider malaise. The League is an interest group like any other, and its interests lie in preserving as much of the status quo as possible, to the greater detriment of the people who have to actually pay municipal bills.

Another Anniversary

Today marks one year since we posted our "Labor Day" piece about city employee salaries. You might recall that we discovered that the city's online document archive contained pay stubs for city employees and that we posted the salaries and other compensation paid to a number of employees as well as an image of Claremont City Manager Jeff Parker's pay stub.

No personal information such as social security number nor even the ever-important "bank routing number" was included in the pay stub information we found on the city's website. In a failed attempt to shut down this blog, Claremont City Attorney Sonia Carvalho falsely claimed the information we had found on the Claremont website was stolen.

Carvalho also falsely asserted that the information we had posted was private and confidential (in California, public employee salaries and benefits are public information). Carvalho demanded that Google, which owns our Blogger host, shut down the Insider. After we pointed out to Google that the information in the pay stubs was public information, the city then made yet another false assertion that the pay stub images could not be posted because they were copyrighted material (government documents such as the pay stubs cannot be copyrighted).

Carvalho ended up having to eat a triple serving of crow.

Oddly, we're both still here, Carvalho and the Insider. Reminds us of a poem we saw someplace or another:

Award

[A Gold Watch To The FBI Man
Who Has Followed Me For 25 Years]

Well, old spy
looks like I
led you down some pretty blind alleys,
took you on several trips to Mexico,
fishing in the high Sierras,
jazz at the Philharmonic.
You've watched me all your life,
I've clothed your wife,
put your two sons through college.
what good has it done?
sun keeps rising every morning.
Ever see me buy an Assistant President?
or close a school?
or lend money to Somoza?
I bought some after-hours whiskey in L.A.
but the chief got his pay.
I ain't killed no Koreans,
or fourteen-year-old boys in Mississippi
neither did I bomb Guatemala,
or lend guns to shoot Algerians.
I admit I took a Negro child
to a white restroom in Texas,
but she was my daughter, only three,
who had to pee.

- Ray Durem (1915-1963)

Readers Chime In

A sampling of the Insider mailbag showed that readers seem to be as skeptical of Claremont Mayor Ellen Taylor's claims of impending fiscal doom. This correspondent has figured out how to save the city coffers a buck or two:

Wonderful email. Two things to add:

1.) As you showed, the second deputy assistant dogcatcher makes a six-figure salary. The city manager got a $24,000-a-year *raise* last year, and some *extremely* marginal performers at city hall are making $150,000+ in pay and benefits. Government employees deserve to be compensated reasonably well for their work, but the salaries you revealed were out of kilter with reality. Give me a list of employees and salaries -- I'll save the city a couple hundred grand in five minutes.

2.) When Al Leiga left the council, I went to his (city-funded) going away party, where one speaker after another celebrated the city's "accomplishments" during Leiga's tenure: A new this, a new that, more of this, more of that. It was a laundry list of government growth in things like recreation programs at the community center. (Leiga, best part, is a Republican.) Can the people of Claremont get through a tough economic cycle without a massive sports park, extensive recreation services, a fully staffed community center, and a new LWV-sponsored wetlands project? Yeah.

"We're desperately poor -- come to the groundbreaking ceremony at the sports park!"

So, so dumb.

* * *

We also received some comments on Xavier Alvarez's journey into the criminal justice system, including this from an army vet:

I am retired from the U.S. Army after 20 years and service as an Infantryman in Vietnam. The value of military service has shrunk since the all volunteer army, but for those of us who have served, whether voluntarily or as draftees, service is an earned badge of honor.

Alvarez is a low life who took advantage of those who actually served and has dishonored us. But, even worse, he has dishonored the members who earned the Medal of Honor. They earned it by "service above and beyond the call of duty". If you check, you will find most of the Medal of Honor winners died earning the medal.

I live in Claremont so I can have no say in who represents Pomona. I, and I am sure all other veterans, can only hope that those who can participate recall this scumbag.

Pay Now, Pay More Later

Look out, Claremont. Your city staff just may cost you a trip to the poorhouse. A reader wrote in to tell us that the city of Vallejo voted earlier this month to file for bankruptcy.

According to an Associated Press article about the bankruptcy:

VALLEJO — With hundreds of concerned residents looking on, the Vallejo City Council voted unanimously late Tuesday to file for bankruptcy, making the city the first of its size to seek protection due to unaffordable labor contracts.

The dramatic vote came despite a last-minute appeal by state Sen. Pat Wiggins, D-Santa Rosa, and an aide for Assemblywoman Noreen Evans for the city to avoid bankruptcy....

....Vallejo has been slammed by increasing costs of its public safety contracts, the housing crisis, lower property values and state raids on local coffers.

The city faces a $16 million deficit in the 2008-09 fiscal year which starts July 1. Tuesday night's dramatic vote came after months of fruitless talks between city and labor representatives.

After those talks, which continued through the weekend and failed to produce a long-range fiscal plan, Vallejo's top administrators recommended bankruptcy as the only option remaining.

Chapter 9 bankruptcy will allow the city to gain temporary protection from creditors and enable the city to continue to offer citizens necessary services.

Another AP story explained the reasons why employee costs are dragging down city budgets and talked about the downside to a municipal bankruptcy:

Like Vallejo, many U.S. cities are saddled with labor contracts that offer salaries, overtime pay, pensions and health benefits they say they can't afford. Those expenses are expected to balloon as health care costs soar and employees retire earlier and live longer.

Vallejo officials hope the bankruptcy judge will allow the city to rewrite its labor contracts and bring compensation down. If they're successful, other cities may follow their lead, experts say.

"The solution that will come out of Vallejo may very well be a model for other cities facing similarfiscal challenges," said Marcia Fritz, vice president of the California Foundation for Fiscal Responsibility. "If Vallejo turns out better after declaring bankruptcy ... that will be an avenue (other cities) look at to break contracts."

But bankruptcy is not without risks. It will cost the city millions of dollars in legal fees and damage its credit rating. As a result, borrowing money to build roads, schools and other projects will become much harder - and more expensive.

Claremont has some experience with ballooning employee costs. Before he left for Indio, former Claremont City Manager Glenn Southard got the Claremont City Council to raise city employee pension benefit to 2.5% at 55, meaning that once employees reach 50 years of age, they are qualify for a pension equal to 2.5% of their annual salary at retirement for every year of employment. So an employee who started working for Claremont at, say, 25, and who retired at 55, would qualify for a pension benefit of 75% of their salary - 30 years of service, times 2.5%.

Claremont police officers qualify for an even higher pension. CPD gives out 3% at 50.

To those of you working in private industry, do you receive such generous pension benefits? If you are a worker in one of the 87% of private businesses not offering a defined benefit pension, you're pretty much on your own to fund your own retirement through a 401(k) plan or an IRA. But public employees are in a different class from you.

Prior to the current pension benefit going into effect in July, 2004, Claremont's non-public safety pension benefit was 2% at 55. What Southard didn't tell you, what he didn't care about, was that the .5 % increase was retroactive back to each employee's date of hire. Consequently, Claremont's non-public safety pension account with the California Public Employee Retirement System (CalPERS) became instantly underfunded by as much as $10 million - a fact that Councilmember Peter Yao tried without much success to get Southard's staff to face.

Those of you who recall the meeting where Claremont's City Council voted on the pension increase may remember the unseemly spectacle of senior city employees lined up in the front row and cheering when the council approved the pension.

This all raises the a second problem - that of the blurring of the line between employee and friend. While it's great that the elected and appointed people who run the city love their staff, it's terribly irresponsible for them to abandon their duties to safeguard the public coffers by allowing themselves to become too close to their employees.

Claremont Human Services Deputy Director Mercedes Santoro, for instance, is no doubt a very nice person. She and her family live in Claremont, and they are involved in the community. However, is she really worth $130,000 in salary and benefits (as of the end of 2006)? Is anybody? And she is relatively young. What will her pension be when she retires?

No wonder cities - not just Claremont - seek to hide their employee compensation and are willing to take any step, no matter how questionable to cut off access to that public information. But just look to Vallejo or San Diego to see what happens when elected officials ignore their financial responsibilities.

Ring Day

As the Diann Ring Watch in the left-hand margin reminds us,tomorrow will mark the one-year anniversary since former Claremont Mayor Diann Ring accused this blog of publishing lies and made a thinly veiled threat of lawsuits against the Insider. Well, a year's gone by, and we're still standing.

City Attorney Sonia Carvalho took her best, laughable shot at shutting us down last year and failed. So, here we are, quite happily chugging along here on the digital highway.

In observation of anniversary, the shadowy cabal that runs the Insider has issued the following:

PROCLAMATION

WHEREAS, May 22nd marks the one-year anniversary of Diann Ring's ill-considered attempt at prior restraint,

WHEREAS, the city of Claremont has failed in numerous attempts in the past at quelling free speech,

WHEREAS, Diann Ring has been in the past a foremost defender of the City's actions, no matter how wrongheaded,

WHEREAS, the public welfare and community-building are always advanced by remembering the errors of the past,

NOW THEREFORE the Insider Governing Board hereby proclaims May 21st to henceforth be known as

DIANN RING DAY

Celebrate Ring Day by speaking your mind. Don't be silenced or intimidated by those in power, and let them know what you think.

It is your government, after all.

CPD to the Rescue

A reader wrote to point us to a quote from City of Claremont Information Systems Manager Steve Senkle on the website of a company called Laserfiche. Laserfiche is the company that provides the city´s online archive service - you know, the one where the employee pay stubs were publicly posted a while back.

Turns out that Laserfiche asked Senkle, the one in charge of Claremont´s stellar IT department, to give them an endorsement. Here's what he wrote (see page 4):

“Our Laserfiche document management system was working so well for City Hall we decided to try it in the Police Department. It took half an hour to get Laserfiche working with the law enforcement CAD/RMS system.”

—Steve Senkle,Information Systems Manager, City of Claremont,
California

Odd, no mention of the city having to shut down their archive access or City Attorney Sonia Carvalho ending up with egg on her face trying to quash the posting of the information Senkle made available with the help of Laserfiche´s system.

Knowing Claremont´s record of placing competent people in key positions, you´d think that Senkle had his Ph.D in electrical engineering and a long history in the tech industry or some such equivalent level of education and expertise. Guess again. Senkle came to us courtesy of the Claremont Police Department.

All of which prompted our reader to comment:

The real question is was the guy ever qualified to get a $126k+salaried IT job being his only background appears to be working as apolice officer in the City of Claremont. I doubt he has any degree in the field, nepotism being his only qualification. Moreover, he is making more money that most people I know who work for tech leaders Yahoo! and Google in their Los Angeles offices.

All of which makes us wonder where the real crime is in town. At least it´s good to know we´ve got Barney Fife watching over our sensitive tech issues.

Claremont: "Security through Obscurity"

A reader sent us a reaction to the City's plan to hide the report of the security consultant on problems with the City of Claremont website and computer system.

As a computer professional, I'm astounded that the city would decide to hide the results of their security audit. "Security through Obscurity" is a widely-derided concept. It isn't that hard to make a website secure, and it really shouldn't involve any deep secrets. Presumably thousands of cities across the country have done it.

What this regular human being does not understand is that secrecy and obfuscation is a way of life, a credo, a hard-wired response with these people. It is a reflexive reaction that occurs without thought or consideration. It is limbic. It won't change until the voters make it change. Our guess is that the City Council will sit up there like potted plants on this matter. We get the kind of government we deserve.

Staff Efficiency

Claremont's city government has become a model of efficiency. Our city staff has figured out how to shrink 55 pages of analysis into a mere three, as you can see from the agenda materials for tonight's city council meeting.

Item #11 on the agenda is a proposed amendment to the city's Land Use and Development Code. Staff proposes that the council approve raising the amount charged to businesses for the city's in-lieu parking fee from $9,000 per parking space to $20,000.

The in-lieu fee is charged to Claremont Village businesses - a restaurant adding seating spaces, for instance - that want to increase expand or intensify their use but don't have land available to add parking spaces for the additional customers. The business can instead pay the in-lieu fee, which is supposed to go into a fund dedicated to buying land for parking or to building new parking structures.

In 1990, the last time the in-lieu parking fee was raised, the council agenda materials contained 55 pages that included a breakdown of how staff arrived at the per-space cost estimate:

Click on Image to Read

The 55 pages of staff materials also included an initial study under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), and a negative declaration with several mitigations to offset adverse impacts.

So, in 1990 you had at least the appearance of staff doing the work to justify their recommendation that the in-lieu fee be set at $9,000.

Fast-forward to tonight's council meeting, and you see a three-page document with no supporting analysis. And two of the pages are taken up by the proposed council resolution language with the code change concering the fees. Community Development Director Anthony Witt and Housing and Redevelopment Manager Brian Desatnik simply have one sentence that says "The average cost of a structured parking space today is approximately $20,000."

Click on Image to Read

No supporting data, as in 1990. They just pull a number out of thin air that may or may not be true. We don't know because there's no information to evaluate the statement - Claremont 400 reasoning distilled to perfection!

This is the "process" that City Councilperson Linda Elderkin and her friends over at the League of Women Voters crow on and on about. And businesses in town will pay for that process - a process the Claremont Chamber of Commerce seems to endorse, given its silence on the matter.

No doubt Witt and Desatnik cut the material down to three pages to save the city the expense of their staff time (Witt: $148,223.77 in earnings per year, plus $51,532.43 in benefits; Desatnik: $111,846.06 in earnings, plus $43,450.38 in benefits).

Sometimes you don't get what you pay for.

Demand to Terminate City of Claremont Website

click on image to enlarge

We have received a copy of a letter sent to the City of Claremont over the weekend. We expect that we've seen the last of the City of Claremont website.

What you will soon see:

$7430.65 Performance Bonus in 2006 for Claremont Information SNAFU Manager

Saturday's Claremont Courier had a page 3 article on Paystubgate which was teased on Page 1 with the headline, "Payroll SNAFU explained". It seemed a little curious for "SNAFU" to appear in all caps until we were reminded of the etymology of "SNAFU". It is apparently, or perhaps apocryphally, an acronym derived from a phrase going something like, "Situation Normal, All Fouled Up". Since this is a family blog, we think we will leave it at that.

The article in the Courier (which regrettably is not on the Courier website or we'd link to it) adds a little to the earlier Daily Bulletin article. For one thing, it says that the City has no intention of making the report on this, well, SNAFU, public:

"The experts have requested that the report not be released due to the fact that the information in the report could create security threats to our computer system," said [City Manager] Mr. [Jeff] Parker, citing the report's detailed examination of the city's security practices.

"It's definitely their choice. There is a lot of information in those reports that could compromise security going forward," said Michael Fitzpatrick of NCX [a computer security consultant hired by the city to investigate the incident].

Excuse us?

Do the hypersensitive antennae of the Insider detect a common Claremont ploy at play here? Parker blames the "expert" for hiding the ball. The expert says that hiding the ball is the City's decision. Did somebody not get the memo?

(You don't have to go too far back in city history, say to the October 9th Council meeting, to hear about a similar two-step concerning information on the Palmer Canyon fire settlement.)

We are wondering what the California government code says about this. We suspect someone will be making a public records request for this report, because we know there are scads and scads of people wanting to see it. You'd think if NCX and the City of Claremont have built an impenetrable system, they'd want people to know it.

Steve Senkle, Claremont's Information SNAFU Manager, was quoted in the Courier article, "It won't be possible in the future for this mistake of the confidential records being made available because our confidential database will not be connected to the Internet". There you have it. Can't happen. Won't happen. Believe it. This time.

By the way, Steve Senkle is another of Claremont's $200,000 Men. In 2006, his total earnings including allowances, vacation, sick and other compensation amounted to $126.563.38. He received a remarkable $7430.65 performance bonus, amounting to more than 9.1% of his regular pay. His benefits were a staggering $78,296.80. His total compensation through 12/22/06 for 2006: $204,860.18. Not bad for a computer guy with a broken system.

[note: the emphases in the quotes above by Parker and Fitzpatrick were added by us. See here for another example of the Claremont two-step.]

Oh, for an interesting image still up on Google, click here. Don't blame us, Sonia. We've reformed, as you see. Take it up with Google.

City Archives Back On-Line

Without much hoopla, the city of Claremont has restored access to its on-line document archives.

Now that they've gotten to the bottom of things, maybe they'll get around to issuing the Insider an apology, or at least a thank-you. Without the ever-helpful Insider, the city's IT department would never have known what all information they'd made accessible on their website.

You're welcome, Claremont.

One sad thing about the pay stubs not being available any more - we'll never get to see what kind of raises and pay for performance bonuses the staff IT guys get this year.

* * *

The FC Blog has a discussion thread going on the lastest Paystubgate news. They included these comments by one in-the-know reader:

Only the most predictable thing in the world, although it’s still an incredible pleasure to watch. Here’s the rule: Anything you hear out of Claremont city hall, flip it and assume that the reverse is true. It’s like a law of physics.

But what I love is that they do it EVERY. EFFING. TIME. They spew and rant and threaten: The police are investigating, and we’re gonna sue these people, and and and we’re gonna send a report to the sheriff’s department and and and, uh…

(sotto voce)We regret that an error occurred, but human error is a natural phenomenon. Mumble mumble cough.

Clown shoes and fright wigs. Extra-hilarious to watch them row back every word they’ve spoken in the last month.

We couldn't have said it better ourselves.

* * *

And then there was this email from one of our readers:

What a surprise!
http://www.dailybulletin.com/news/ci_7220158

So, no doubt an apology is in order...(crickets...crickets...) I guess we won't hold our breath...

Keep up the great work-you are performing an honorable and necessary service to our community! Our founding fathers would be proud...

City Admits Error in Paystubgate

Will Bigham reports in today's Daily Bulletin that we at Insider were right all along about the city of Claremont having employee pay stubs available on their on-line document archive:

CLAREMONT - The release of city employee pay stubs through the city's Web site was caused by human error, according to a report commissioned by the city.

The report confirms claims made by the Claremont Insider blog that the information was available on the city's online public document archive.

The report also confirms that there was no security breach or theft related to the release of the pay stubs.

"I regret the error was made, but human error is a natural phenomenon that occurs in life," City Manager Jeff Parker said.

Where to begin...?

It's always great to hear that bureaucratese passive voice - "the error was made," not a simple, "We goofed." (For the record, anytime you hear that passive voice from these people you know that they are trying to avoid responsibility for something.)

Just as the sun rises in east, you can count on a non-apology from these folks, from the Claremont 400, from their candidates for office, and from city staff.

Parker is right that errors happen. We understand that and do not fault anybody for an honest mistake. It's the constant claims of infallibility by the Claremont 400 that cause them to look stupid. So when the inevitable fall comes, as it did this case, it's a just one - call it karma or schadenfreude.

And, it's not just that they refuse accountability, it's that they treat you as stupid or worse if you cross them, no matter how right you are. In the case of Paystubgate, the city assumed the Insider stole the information we published, falsely accused us of theft, had the city attorney contact Google to have this site terminated (does that sound temporary?) in an unsuccessful attempt at illegal and unconstitutional prior restraint, and had Google remove the pay stub images from this site (either because the information was confidential, because the images were copyrighted, or because the information was stolen, depending on what day it was).

Stop to consider who was right and who was wrong in this matter. Then apply the same lessons to any divisive issue that has come before the city in the past 20 or so years: the Landscaping and Lighting District, the roundabout at Indian Hill Blvd. and Bonita Ave., the Irvin Landrum shooting, the Padua Sports Park, the homes destroyed by fire in Palmer Canyon and Padua Hills, the Parks and Pasture Assessment District, the affordable housing project on Base Line Rd.

Everyone who has dealt with the city in those issues and many more has experienced the same thing we have with Paystubgate. That incompetence and the refusal to acknowledge their wrong actions have been constants in the city, and it will not change because the Claremont 400 will not let it and because city staff and the city attorney lack the integrity to tell them when they are wrong.

It is up to you to demand accountability. Until you do, get ready for the next Paystubgate, in whatever form it takes.

Robbing from the Rich (and Poor), Paying City Hall

A reader pointed us to yesterday's Claremont Courier's letters to the editor. In particular, the reader wanted us to see a letter sent in response to Dean McHenry's recent Op-Ed piece about the irony of the juxtaposition of Claremont's centennial celebration with Paystubgate and the governmental secrecy (BlackOps?) practiced in closed session and other matters.

The letter writer, one William Rook, thinks Claremont's city government is building a fiefdom, complete with serfs - taxpayers.

Rook takes the city to task for the $17.5 million paid out by Claremont's insurer for the homes burnt down in Palmer Canyon and Padua Hills in the 2003 Grand Prix fire. Rook concludes by saying:

This [city's] government sounds like it is being run by Prince John and the Sheriff of Nottingham. Maybe we as the people should gather in Nottingham Wilderness Park and take to wearing Claremont green, (complete with appropriate lettering claiming our place as 5th best). Then they could send the code enforcement officer to cite us for illegal use of park property.

Ready, Fire, Aim: Transcript of Claremont City Attorney Remarks

We notice that the article in the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin originally reporting the Claremont City Attorney's "my bad" now contains a transcript of her remarks. We urge you to follow this link to the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin site and read them there in full, in context, and standing alone.

The transcript of her statement follows, with our inevitable comments in red:

I would like to add a few comments of my own, and respond to the editorial that appeared in the Daily Bulletin today.

I know it has been alleged that I used my position as city attorney to exercise prior restraint against the Claremont [Insider] blog and those that host it, administer it, and use it to express their point of view.

I want you to know, mayor and City Council members, as my employer and as the person you hold and trust to advise you on legal issues, it was never my intent to pursue legal action to permanently take the blog and its content entirely off-line.

My intent was to make sure that the city carried out its duty to its employees to protect their privacy information. The letter I sent to Google was a very quick reaction to a very serious problem that I was informed of at about noon or 12:30 that Friday [September 7, 2006].

I responded with the information I had at hand that day. I was hundreds of miles away from City Hall and from my office [in Sacramento, at a League of Cities conference attended also by most of the city council], and the information I had at that time was that there was a serious and extensive breach of employee privacy, and as posted on the blog itself, all other sorts of official city business [All sorts of official city business? We could only hope...]. The post suggested that further information would be posted upon request of people who were reading the blog.

At that time I had absolutely no idea what might appear next on the blog. I knew, based on reading that blog, [Oh, so she read it. She knew there was nothing private posted, nor social security numbers, nor anything else from her little shop of private horrors.] that perhaps the information had been placed in a trash can outside of City Hall. I didn't know the extent as to how that information got there. But I had to react and protect the city's interest in terms of protecting the employee privacy issues immediately, without the benefit of an extra few days.

Seriously, I did not know whether social security numbers, direct bank deposit account information, home addresses and phone numbers, were also out - were placed in those trash cans or were somehow available through our portal on the Web site [So, to cut to the chase, she was demanding prior restraint with respect to other pieces of information that had not been posted, that she imagined might be in our hands, but that she had no rational basis for believing anyone even had.] And therefore, I sent the letter demanding that Google honor its own privacy policies, which state that Google reserves the right to remove a post or the entire blog.

It was sort of in the spirit of Google's own privacy policies that I parroted their information. [Yeah, City Attorneys do a lot of parroting, usually in incomprehensible legalese, usually to intimidate.] And you know what, I have to tell you in hindsight I can see how the structure of the letter, the raised statement in the letter, and the demand itself might appear offensive to those who abhor the idea of prior restraint.

I can see how the very thought of using government resources to silent those who wish to comment on their government absolutely would not be tolerated in this community, the city of Claremont, that I've worked with and worked for for over 15 years now. [...so we here at BBK are going to write off this month's bill to the City.]

I want you to be assured that it was not my intent to interfere with the First Amendment rights of the bloggers. It was my intent to see whether Google would honor its privacy policies in the event that further breaches of employee privacy occurred. Google acted in accord with its blog-hosting policies, and I'm confident that they'll do that again, and that's the reason I've not taken any further action.

I've given a lot of thought on a personal and professional level as to whether you respond to information that's placed on the blog, or how do you respond to a newspaper like the Daily Bulletin when they accuse you of doing something improper, and accuse your client of doing something like violating the Brown Act.

You know, I have to tell you that I have a very deep respect for the First Amendment, and I wasn't going to say this tonight, but I think in the spirit of Corey, council member Calaycay, I'm going to say this. Like all of you, I've taken an oath to uphold the United States and California constitutions. As a member of the state bar I take that oath very seriously.

And you know what, I've been personally attacked by the blogs, and I have to admit to you it doesn't feel good. And if the aim of those bloggers were to make me suffer personal pain, then they've succeeded [Not our intent. Ms Carvalho, as City Attorney, not as a private person, has a tremendous amount of power, power that she chooses when and how to wield.]. But what they won't succeed at doing is making me give you, the city of Claremont, any less effort in being your city attorney and serving the interests of the city of Claremont.

Kudos to the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin and to reporter Will Bigham for their detailed and comprehensive work on this story. It was reporter Bigham who got the copies of Carvalho's letter to Google, and who, we presume, caused the transcript quoted above to be made.

Foothill Cities Commentary

The FC Blog is up this morning with some commentary on Paystubgate. (Click on "Den of Falsehood" under the image on Foothill Cities for the text. Their writer Centinel takes some jabs at Claremont's City Attorney and City Hall in general.

City IT Security Report Forthcoming?

Paystubgate continues to generate comments from our readers. The coda may not be come until the release of the investigation report by the outside IT consultants hired by the city of Claremont.

Will Bigham's Daily Bulletin article yesterday mentioned the fact that Claremont City Manager Jeff Parker received the report Monday. No word on whether or not it's been released or if it's been sealed into the 2032 time capsule in City Hall, which may be what one esteemed reader is thinking:

It seems to me, reading Ms. Carvalho’s “emotional” statement as printed in the Daily Bulletin, that she says she didn’t have all the facts, she didn’t bother to get them, she was in a hurry, she was miles away (I presume she means geographically), she was freaked out by the thought that someone (everyone) would know what city employees make, she was only interested in protecting Claremont, and she didn’t mean it anyway. Remember Emily Litella from SNL—“never mind”. She does not bother to explain how she knew about the information being out there and who asked her to write to Google on behalf of the city and its employees.

What is the fine city of Claremont paying this unprepared attorney who cannot admit she made a big mistake (on behalf of the city and its employees)?

Keep the heat on. I can’t wait for the security consultant’s report to be made public sometime next year after much kicking, screaming, whining, protesting, and efforts to seal it away.

Claremont English (or The Ol' Misdirection)

The Daily Bulletin reports today that at Tuesday night's Claremont City Council meeting Claremont City Attorney Sonia Carvalho clarified the intent of her September 7th letter to Google in which she insisted that Google "...terminate the hosting service for this blog [The Claremont Insider]..."

In her letter, Carvalho went on to demand:

If the blog is not taken off line by 5:00 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time today [September 7, 2007] we will seek an injunction in Los Angeles County Superior Court on Monday, September 10, 2007 to compel the removal of the confidential personnel information from the blog and any other website hosted or controlled by Google.

Seems pretty clear, no? Terminate, take off line, doesn't that sound like Carvalho ordering Google to kill the Insider?

Here's the letter itself for you to see:

Click on Image to Enlarge

Apparently, though, you and we were wrong about what we read. Claremont English turns out to be a different language from standard American English. The two sound similar, but have entirely different meanings, with the primary difference being that Claremont English means whatever the speaker wants it to mean (up is down, left is right, white is black).

In American English, saying something that is not true is called lying. In Claremont English, it is called "clarification."

Today's Bulletin article by Will Bigham reports that at Tuesday's City Council meeting Carvalho "delivered an emotional statement":

"I have to tell you in hindsight I can see how the structure of the letter, the raised statement in the letter, and the demand itself might appear offensive to those who abhor the idea of prior restraint," Carvalho said.

The intent of the letter was not to demand that the blog be shut down completely, Carvalho said, but that Google "honor its privacy policies in the event that further breaches of employee privacy occurred."

According to the article, Carvalho now says that at the time she wrote the letter, she had "incomplete information on what the blog possessed."

Oh.

Then shouldn't the first act of a responsible, competent attorney be to gather as many facts as possible before placing false accusations and false claims in a letter? How hard is it to send an email to the Insider's email address asking for the source of the information? To date, no one from the city, including Carvalho, has contacted us.

Carvalho's actions betray a trait all too common among Claremont's representatives: a troubling tendency to stand up a city meetings and deliver incomplete, incorrect, or even false information with the voice of authority. Because these confident, smiling figures (Sonia Carvalho, City Manager Jeff Parker, City Human Services Director Jeff Porter, other senior staff, as well as our esteemed Councilmembers) deliver these dubious statements with such certitude, they are accepted as fact.

This happens at every City Council meeting on virtually any topic. To prove our point, we will review Tuesday's meeting after it is broadcast on cable TV next Monday and will provide some clips to back up our claims.

The Insider hereby proposes a $100 fine for every fib a councilmember or a city staffer tells at a public meeting. The money can be put back into the city's General Fund. We just might have found a way to pay for that $12 million Padua Park!

Stay tuned.

* * *

Will Bigham's article also noted that Citizen Michael Keenan got up at public comment and used his four minutes to read employee names and salaries into the record. You go, Michael!

According to Bigham, Active Claremont president Dean McHenry also got up and said, "I think that's the first time since this city was founded 100 years ago that you've gone to the extent of demanding the shutdown of a news source."

* * *

We'll be back tomorrow with a trip to the mailbag. A couple readers have chimed in with thoughts about the Claremont school board race.

Real letters! Real English!

Free Speech Update

The Daily Bulletin carried a letter from Dean McHenry today criticizing the city for it response to Paystubgate.

McHenry defended the Insider from the city's attempt at prior restraint:

Rather than apologizing to the citizens of Claremont for its violation of their right to know, the city decided to attack the messenger over the form in which the information was provided. The city did not simply ask that the blurry, scanned copy of two pay slips be removed from the blog, it demanded the complete removal of the whole Web site. That is equivalent to a demand that the Daily Bulletin be shut down because someone did not like the way information was being presented.

McHenry's letter ends by pointing out the irony that Claremont is celebrating it's centennial (second one in the past 20 years) by quashing free speech.

City Says, "Death to the Insider!"

Death Penalty

We've been working on a post trying to tie some of the events of the past month together, in particular the attempt by the city of Claremont to shut down our blog, as well some of the other acts of official secrecy that really seem to fly in the face of the openness Claremont officials give occasional lip service to.

Well, the Daily Bulletin editorial board beat us to the punch. They have an editorial in today's Bulletin that neatly ties a lot of these observations together in a far more clear and concise way than we ever could.

The Bulletin picked up on one particularly disturbing comment a city official made last week:

Mayor Peter Yao said the demand to remove the offending posts and the demand to terminate the blog were "one and the same," but that's not the case at all.

Mayor Yao seems to have absolutely no understanding of the concept of prior restraint. It's one thing to ask Google to remove a post the city finds objectionable - even that is a questionable action - but it's quite another to try to bar all future publication by arguing that the alleged offender (the Insider) might do some other as-yet unknown, objectionable thing in the unspecified future.

The thing has to be published first, then objected to. Claremont, Mayor Yao, and City Attorney Sonia Carvalho have no power to prevent publication beforehand, which is what the city was trying to do. It amounts to a banana republic shutting down the printing presses.

Further, as we've argued, and as the Bulletin points out, the city's claim that the pay stubs we published contained confidential information is very doubtful:

Besides, it's not at all clear that the offending posts were illegal, or obtained illegally, or even consisted of privileged information. The California Supreme Court ruled in August that pay records for public employees are a matter of public record.

The pay stubs that were posted itemized dollar amounts for earnings, benefits, leave earnings and deductions. It did not reveal private information such as Social Security number, date of birth, home address or bank account numbers. The post did include information about types of medical deductions that we would not reveal; Carvalho says that information is privileged, some open-governments say it's not, some are unsure.

This all points up the greater need for original source documents. The city would rather provide lists of names and salary numbers instead of the actual pay stubs. But the city clearly cannot be trusted to just give out sanitized spreadsheets. If confidential information is on the pay stubs as they claim, that can be redacted, but the public should be able to see the type of information being withheld.

Clearly, Claremont has sought to hide the amounts of money it pays to its employees and to conceal certain things like performance bonuses. Why? Because that information might reveal that public employees are much more highly compensated than the majority of workers in the private sector. And that would raise the question of whether or not the public is really getting its money's worth for some of these positions.

They're just mad at themselves for posting the material on their on-line document archive where we, and anybody else interested, could easily read and download the pay stubs.


Secrecy

Another thing that this sad episode reminds us of is Claremont's history of conducting its official business in secret. Claremont, after all, was awarded a Black Hole Award in 2000 by the California First Amendment Coalition (CFAC), and the city seems to have learned nothing in the intervening years.

Today's Bulletin editorial states:

The cases are stronger, in our opinion, that Claremont's council violated the Brown Act:

In June, went it met in closed session to discuss negotiations between two private parties concerning the city's DoubleTree Hotel.

In January 2005, when it met in closed session to discuss a councilwoman's actions and how to respond to them.

Twice in early 2003, when a councilwoman participated in a committee meeting of a council subcommittee consisting of two councilmen, turning it into an unagendized council meeting; and when a councilman contacted his colleagues one by one to ask for another term as mayor, constituting an unlawful serial council meeting.

The hypocrisy of it all is that some of the our current councilmembers - Ellen Taylor, Linda Elderkin, and Sam Pedroza - and the organizations that back these people (the Claremont Area League of Women Voters, the local Democratic Club, and others) would surely argue against governmental secrecy on the national level but tolerate, support, and encourage it on the local level.

Sadder still is to watch these groups abandon all they claim to stand for, time and again, merely for the sake of keeping control of the city.

It's easy to speak out against something 3,000 miles away, something you have little chance of influencing. The real test is when it's in your own backyard. Will you stand up, even if it means criticizing your friends and neighbors, or will you deny all those things you thought you believed in: free speech, open government, rule of law, fundamental fairness?

In Claremont, we know the answer: Res ipsa loquitur.