They're Baaaack!

The Claremont 400 don't rest long, nor do they take their losses very seriously. You have to grant them this much: they are persistent.

At last night's City Council, we noticed several of the traditional power brokers present or represented by their surrogates. For instance, Helaine Goldwater, the former Police Commission Chair and keeper of The List (the 400's index of all potential candidates for city committees, commissions, and candidates for City Council), was present and spoke about Oakmont School.

Speaking of Helaine, her unsuccessful candidate for the March City Council race, Bridget Healy (pictured, left), got a mention in Saturday's Claremont Courier. The Courier ran a letter from a few members of Claremont Heritage board (Ginger Elliot, former Claremont Human Services Commissioner Suzanne Hall, and Don Pattison), thanking the all the people who made the July 12 Padua Hills Theatre open house a success, among them:

In particular, former Mexican Players were there along with many others who had enjoyed meals and plays at the Padua Theatre during its heyday from 1930 to 1974. Thanks to Bridget Healy and the Friends of the Padua Hills Theatre, a newly formed group of neighbors and friends, who planned the open house.

The letter was notable for a couple omissions:

• The Mexican Players and all Latinos (as well as any non-Caucasian) were barred by the racial restrictions from owning land around the Padua Theatre. Thanks for the entertainment, guys, but remember: Play, don't stay.
  
  
• The letter also praised the shuttle service Claremont Heritage got to ferry open house guests from the overflow parking at Mills and Mt. Baldy Rd. What they didn't say, however, was that so many people (over 1,000, according the Heritage) showed at the theatre on July 12, that traffic backed down Padua Ave. to Mt. Baldy Rd. Cars couldn't turn around easily in the parking lot after it filled up, and the someone removed the barriades that were supposed to prevent people from parking along Via Padova in front of homes there. So traffic flowed out onto the neighborhood around the theatre.
  
  Naturally, no one took responsibilty for the mess, and all the parties - the City of Claremont, Claremont Heritage, and Chantrelles (one of the partners in the Padua Theatre) - pointed the finger of blame at each other.
  
  

History is once again erased in Claremont.

If past behavior is any indicator, the Claremont Heritage letter to the Courier would represent an opening salvo for a 2011 Healy campaign for council. The 400 usually gets their candidates to front for civic-minded organizations in order to add to their communitarian resumes (something that Healy notably lacked in the last election). If Healy is indeed thinking of running, you'll see a parallel effort by the 400 to attack the current council by getting hot-button issues on the council's agenda and through letters to the local papers.

The 400 strategy has always been to divide and conquer: talk up your candidate, talk down your opponents.

Our thinking on Healy hasn't changed much at all. She represents the worst of the Glenn Southard years, left the City to follow Southard to Indio when the going got tough for her boss, and returned in retirement after having looted Claremont, Indio, and Pomona to the tune of a $150,000-plus CalPERS pension thinking that she could get a free pass in her failed bid for a council seat.

The 400 are in Healy image rehab mode now, but they have 18 months to fix things and to spin whatever image they want. The question is, will people buy into it?

* * * * *

We saw an article in the Onion about a new Apple product, the invisible iPhone, that reminds us a lot about about the forgetfulness and gullibility of Claremont voters:

SAN FRANCISCO—In a move expected to revolutionize the mobile device industry, Apple launched its fastest and most powerful iPhone to date Tuesday, an innovative new model that can only be seen by the company's hippest and most dedicated customers.

"I am proud today to introduce to those who really, truly deserve it, our most incredible iPhone yet," announced Apple CEO Steve Jobs, extending his seemingly empty left palm toward the eagerly awaiting crowd. "Not only is this our lightest and slimmest model ever, but as any truly savvy Apple customer can clearly see, it's also the most handsome product we've ever designed."

The packed auditorium, which had been listening to Jobs in hushed reverence for several minutes, then erupted into applause, with hundreds of men and women suddenly jumping to their feet and shouting, "I can see it!" "Look, there it is!" and "God, it's so beautiful!"

Remember, voters: No clothes, no clothes.

Healy Continuing to Provide Kicks - UPDATED

COURIER COVERS HEALY KICK-OFF

Claremont Courier reporter Tony Krickl had a blog post about Bridget Healy's campaign kick-off event last Sunday. Krickl wrote that a Claremont resident had an interesting question for Healy:

An interesting question came up at Bridget Healy's campaign kickoff party, held in the highly acoustic halls of the Packing House on Sunday.

It came from resident Ken Corhan, whose been following Claremont politics for years.

“There were some tense moments with [city] staff, and you were here for some of that. How would you approach being a council member to avoid those kinds of tensions?” he asked.

Healy responded, “I think the current council has done a really good job of alleviating some of those tensions and working together to improve, and I will continue in that vein. I think it's well prudent when we look at the current council that working together and listening to each other is the key.”

I talked to Corhan after he asked the question. He was referring to the tense political environment after the Landrum shooting in 2001 and what appeared to be an unresponsive city staff to the council's and community's concerns.

He said that he was satisfied with Healy's response to his question. “She seemed to answer the question genuinely,” Corhan said.

Yes, excellent question there Ken. Of course, Krickl missed the fact that Corhan, who is married to former Claremont Human Services Commission Chair Suzanne Hall, has been far more than a mere observer of the local political scene. He and his wife have been intricately wound up in past campaigns for both the City Council and the Claremont Unified School District.

For instance, in 2005, he and Hall donated $200 to the Preserve Claremont campaign, and Hall herself was part of Official Claremont's culture of unresponsiveness as a commission chair at the height of the Glenn Southard regime in Claremont. And, make no mistake about it, Corhan, a graduate of Yale and the Columbia School of Law, is not your average Joe Citizen. In fact, he's counsel to the Lewis Operating Company in Upland, one of the largest real estate companies in Southern California.

(UPDATED, 1/15/09, 8:00am: Most significantly, Corhan's esposa Suzanne Hall is one of 30 people who signed Healy's nomination papers for the council.)

Nothing like having batting practice pitches lobbed to you by your friends in the crowd, eh? It's simply more of the old "River City" tactic the Claremont 400 has employed for years.


STRANGE FRUIT, STRANGER BEDFELLOWS

Not to pick too much on Healy, but her own responsiveness as Claremont's Assistant City Manager left much to be desired in the wake of the Irvin Landrum shooting that so concerned Ken Corhan. Landrum was killed on January 11, 1999. Large-scale protests began very quickly in the wake of the shooting.

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Two weeks after the shooting, on January 26, 1999, the Clarmeont City Council received an agenda report co-authored by Claremont police lieutenant Paul Cooper (our current chief of police) and Bridget Healy. The report was also vetted by the City Attorney and signed by then-City Manager Glenn Southard. That staff report laid out a proposed code of conduct for people wishing to address the City Council during meetings. It also included, under item M, "Threat Assessment," a provision for having public speakers evaluated by mental health professionals:

At the request of a council member, commissioner, committee member or staff member, mental health professionals will be called in to determine the level of threat an individual may be posing. Appropriate action will be taken based on the assessment findings.

Yes, under the staff proposal, a psychologist or social worker would have been on call for council meetings, and the Council or the City Manager could pick anyone they didn't want to hear and have that person detained and referred to the "mental health professional" for some helpful and timely straitjacketing and/or muzzling.

Incidentally, if there is any question as to authorship, the report was marked "P:/bhealy/Admin Policy - Public Mtg Disturb 1-20-99.doc." It represented nothing more than a heavy-handed, police state method of dealing with dissent, in large part by students from the Claremont Colleges, over the Landrum shooting.

Click to Enlarge

The proposal generated a good deal of controversy and was never enacted, by the way.

That's why it's utterly laughable to see supposed civil libertarians supporting Healy. One of Healy's nominators, for instance, is Scripps College Vice-President and Dean of Faculty Cecilia Conrad. Conrad, along with her husband Llewellyn Miller, were among those most moved to action by the Landrum shooting. You may remember that Miller ended up being the first African-American elected to the Claremont City Council as part of the community's reaction to the shooting. Yet here Conrad is, ten years later, supporting one of the people most responsible for the City's shoddy handling of that crisis.

The apparently infinite capacity of those smart, well-credentialed people who run Official Claremont to support contradictory positions and to bury the past continues to amaze us. It has nothing to do with what's right or just and everything to do with what one's friends tell one to do.

Local politics truly makes the strangest bedfellows.


MORE OF THAT HEALY TREATMENT

Finally, we recall that back in 2000, there used to be a website called ClaremontCA.com. It was a sort of Insider long before there was an Insider and was staffed by real, not digital, people.

In August, 2000, not only was the City having to deal with the aftermath of the Landrum shooting, but they received some bad PR over City Attorney Sonia Carvalho's reported role in helping the city oppose what later became the successful Measure A anti-conflict of interest initiative. The city decided to hold a press conference to clarify what they thought were some misperceptions about Carvalho's role in the matter.

ClaremontCA called the city and asked to attend the press conference. Their website recorded what happened:

Informed that there was to be a news conference Wednesday, ClaremontCA.com called the city manager's office for time and place information. Assistant City Manager Bridget Healy, a bureaucrat paid $105,000 per year to represent the city, told ClaremontCA.com that the meeting was "only for the invited press." When cautioned that such an arrangement was improper, Ms. Healy responded, "Whatever". When asked to include ClaremontCA.com in the meeting she refused to assist. "There's nothing more I can do for you". When asked if ClaremontCA.com would be allowed into the meeting Ms. Healy laughed and said "You'll just have to go and find out for yourself". When pressed to extend the invitation to ClaremontCA.com Ms. Healy hung-up the phone in mid-sentence.

Can’t we all just get along, Bridget?

Indeed. Which makes Tony Krickl's closing sentence all the more deliciously ironic:

Her supporters [including Ken Corhan] would say that having Healy on the council is bringing the best from the past into Claremont's future.

August Blues

DOG DAYS

It's August - that time of year just before schools start back up, and when the city power brokers take a collective vacation. The City Council and City Commission take a month-long break, and the town relaxes.

But, the Claremont 400 never takes a break. For them, late-July and August have traditionally been harvest time, the time when they can let city or school district staff take action on all those controversial agenda items that have been festering through the year. Last year, for instance, the votes for the Parks and Pasture Assessment District were counted on July 25th, and the council had a special meeting on August 1st to certify the vote before slinking out of town to lick its wounds after the assessment failed by a 12-percent margin.

What surprises does the 400 have in store for us this year? We'll just have to wait and see....

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FORGETTING THE PAST, AGAIN

In other news, Will Bigham writes in the Daily Bulletin today of Claremont Progress, a group funded by a Riverside attorney who sent out a citywide mailer in the last election that the article says "urged support for incumbent Jackie McHenry and candidate Opanyi Nasiali, and opposed Pedroza, Linda Elderkin and Mayor Peter Yao."

The article quotes Councilmember Sam Pedroza:

"That's the thing with the anonymous campaigning: You don't know who it is, and it allows for people to lob bombs and not have to account for it," said Councilman Sam Pedroza....

As opposed to Pedroza, who, thanks to his Claremont 400 support, doesn't have to be accountable for anything either. We did some checking and found that in the 2003 Claremont municipal election, a group calling itself Residents United for Claremont also sent out a city-wide mailer on the eve of the election.

The group was organized by Claremont Human Services Commissioner Valerie Martinez, who is a professional political consultant by trade. The Residents United mailer urged Claremonters to reject candidates Jackie McHenry and Peter Yao and to vote for the three incumbents: Al Leiga, Karen Rosenthal, and Sandy Baldonado.

The Residents United mailer was not anonymous. It used the opposite strategy - to use the names of influential Claremont 400 members to try to convince voters to go their way. Among the signers were: Former mayors Nick Presecan, Diann Ring, Bill McCready and Judy Cody; city commissioners Bill Baker, Nancy Brower, Suzanne Hall, John Seery, Muriel O'Brien, Bob Ryan and SAM PEDROZA.

Also on the list were Randy Prout and Nick Quackenbos, both of whom would two years later participate in the Preserve Claremont campaign, for which Valerie Martinez was a co-spokesperson.

The mailing address for Residents United was Randy Prout's insurance agency on Baseline Rd.



Don't see any accountability there, do you? What Pedroza and his Claremont 400 supporters want is accountability for everyone but themselves.

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Current Councilmember Linda Elderkin was also quoted in the Bigham article:

"I just feel the society benefits so much from open dialogue," said Elderkin, who was elected to a City Council seat in March. "These anonymous approaches are very regrettable."

"We have the most fabulous disagreements on every subject here," she added. "It is one of the great strengths of Claremont that we have so much open dialogue."

Here, Elderkin is just so typically Claremont 400 in her remarks. The problem is that what she calls "open dialogue" has been anything but that. The 400 has controlled all the levers of power and has effectively stifled dialogue.

They talk, you listen. Elderkin conveniently ignores that behavior. Our main complaint with the 400, with Elderkin and Pedroza, is that they themselves refuse accountability. And they have all the power in town!

Until Bigham and other observers wake up to the reality of this power relationship, the 400 will continue to play the victim while all the time playing out their petty politics without consequences.