Yorba Linda Shows Tammy the Door

The Orange County Register reported yesterday that Yorba Linda City Manager Tamara S. Letourneau, née Tamra Gates, was removed in a closed session of the Yorba Linda City Council. The Register article said:

Letourneau's contract allows for her removal without cause, Winder said. She will receive a $209,592 severance package.

"Our goal is to have a new staff and go in a new direction," he said.

In making the announcement during the council meeting, Winder gave no reason for Letourneau's removal, but her salary has been an issue with residents in the city. The decision was unanimous among the council members.

Letourneau was Glenn Southard's Assistant City Manager before moving onto Sierra Madre for four years. She was hired by Yorba Linda in 2004. Letourneau just received a $22,000 raise last November, so the removal was something of a surprise to casual Yorba Linda observers.

Letourneau had previously been the subject of criticism in 2006 when a person named Jim Drummond claimed that Letourneau had spoken to a developer about the developer's ability to fight a Yorba Linda slow-growth referendum. The developers tactics reportedly included the hiring of "blockers" to interfere with petition signature gatherers hired by the slow-growth group.

There was no word on whether or not Yorba Linda is satisfied with its city attorney's services. (Yorba Linda's city attorney is our own Sonia Carvalho of Best, Best & Krieger.)

Facing Up To Reality

A reader pointed us to an interesting link concerning sports parks. As many of you know, Padua Sports Park has been on the city of Claremont's and the Claremont 400's to-do list for many years now.

The issue, like many pushed by the Claremont 400, has been extremely divisive and has pitted neighbor against neighbor. Rather than seek a solution, the Claremont 400 has used the park as a wedge issue for its candidates. Sam Pedroza, Linda Elderkin, Ellen Taylor, Al Leiga, Sandy Baldonado, and Peter Yao have all campaigned as champions of the park.

Claremont's City Attorney, Sonia Carvalho and the firm of Best, Best & Krieger, provided the legal defense for a lawsuit challenging the park's Environmental Impact Report. Ms. Carvalho is also city attorney for the city of Yorba Linda, where former Claremont Assistant City Manager Tamara Gates Letourneau now works.

Our reader pointed out some information regarding Ms. Carvalho. Our reader stated that during the long fight over the park, Ms. Carvalho told the reader after one public meeting that she and her husband had recently purchased a home near a large sports park in Fullerton. The reader voiced concerns to Ms. Carvalho about the lights and noise being imposed on an area that is unlit and extremely quiet at night. The City Attorney told the reader that from her own experience a sports park wasn't so bad and you get used to the noise and lights.

What prompted our reader to write us was a link the reader found to minutes from the May 6, 2006, City of Fullerton Parks and Recreation Commission meeting. Ms. Carvalho, her husband Wayne, and a group of her neighbors were there to address agenda item #3: Fullerton's Good Neighbor Policy at the Fullerton Sports Complex.

According to the minutes, neighbors were seeking one day without any sports activities and a limit on the use of public address systems. Fullerton's Good Neighbor Policy arose out of concerns with the noise generated by the park's PA system.

The minutes state that:

The commissioners asked questions of the speakers, staff and field users, and accepted a petition signed by neighbors of the Sports Complex. Resident Sonia Carvalho pointed out that the funding for the Sports Complex came from park impact fees, and said that there was no environmental review conducted as required prior to amending the development agreement for the building of the Sports Complex.

So, where City Attorney Carvalho argued to our reader for the benefits of a sports park in Claremont and defended Claremont's Environmental Impact Report, Citizen Carvalho was complaining about her own city's sports park and questioned Fullerton's environmental review.

Like many other things in Claremont, one finds the sports park reality is full of irony.

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As we've discussed in the past, the Claremont Unified School District (CUSD) and Claremont as a whole, including the youth sports groups, are facing a demographic crunch. Families are having fewer kids, household size is declining and parents are hanging on to homes after their kids grow up. Claremont's population is graying, and the rise in home prices have made single-family homes in Claremont unaffordable as starter homes to most young families with children.

Further, a recent Pew Research Center study showed that as a measure of marital happiness, having kids has declined to number eight on a list of key factors for a successful marriage. The survey results placed children below things like "faithfulness" and "sharing household chores" in order of importance.

The Daily Bulletin yesterday ran a front page, above-the-fold article about declining enrollment in the Ontario-Montclair School District (OMSD). The article quoted OMSD's Pete Peterson as saying that statewide half of all school districts are facing declining enrollment, no doubt from some of the same demographic pressures affecting Claremont.

Given the decline in kids, it seems self-serving and irrational for CUSD and youth sports groups to prop up the numbers of children in their programs by allowing in kids from neighboring areas. It's time to face reality squarely, rather than cling to false notions about what our future holds.

Again we ask, at a time when we're contemplating a $100-150 million city purchase of the local water company and building a new police station at $20 million or more, maybe it's time to reassess where we're allocating our resources instead of asking voters and tax payers to shell out more and more for services that are reaching fewer and fewer actual Claremont residents. Maybe its time to think about partnering with our neighboring cities - La Verne, Montclair, Pomona, Upland - on some of these services since they are experiencing the same demographic changes.

It's time for reality-based programs and services.

Where are They Now?

We thought we'd take the time to track down a few of the alumni of the Glenn Southard era in Claremont (1988-2005). Southardism was more than an attitude, it was a political philosophy, a way of being.

Southardism was marked by several characteristics:

• The use of highly compensated consultants to justify a position already decided. Remember back in 2002 when the Padua Park Environmental Impact Report came out? The city used a botanist named Thomas Leslie who misled the public by signing his biology report for the project "Thomas Leslie, Ph.D/Biologist." As was reported in the Claremont Courier, Leslie in fact got his Ph.D (in theology not biology) from the Universal Life Church, an online degree mill that charged $100 for the degree.
  
• The use of mass marketing and media to get messages out on an issue in order to shape public perception.
  
• Disregard for public input and public participation.
  
• Hardball tactics when dealing with council members and private individuals who disagree with the party line.
  
• Refusal to admit any wrong.

A number of Southard's upper-level managers--Bridget Healy, Mark Hodnick, Mike Busch--followed him to Indio when he left Claremont. Others like Jim Lewis went to Atascadero. In leaving, they took Southard's philosophy with them and have instituted it in varying forms in the cities they now work for.

Tamara Gates, who was once Southard's Assistant City Manager, left quite a while ago to go to Sierra Madre as a city manager and is now the city manager for Yorba Linda. She now goes by the name Tammy Letourneau. It seems "our Tammy", as former councilmember Sandy Baldonado called her, has taken Southardism to new heights, at least according to an October 2006 opinion piece in the Yorba Linda Star.

As the article by Jim Drummond indicates, in late 2005 and early 2006 a Yorba Linda citizens group circulated petitions seeking a public vote on zoning ordinances for Old Town Yorba Linda. The residents were low-density housing advocates who opposed certain housing and commercial buildings in the city's Old Town area.

A group called Old Town Yorba Linda Partners (OTYLP) had an exclusive negotiating agreement with the city for the projects. The Drummond piece claimed that a man named Greg Brown who was a principal in OTYLP, came forward and said that Yorba Linda officials made it clear to him that any extension of OTYLP's negotiating agreement would depend on their funding an information and petition suppression campaign against the citizen's group.

The Drummond article also claimed that Brown stated that City Manager Letourneau asked Brown directly if OTYLP "had sufficient monies to wage the campaign and what our projected budget was to be." (According to Brown, OTYLP was told by a consultant that they should be prepared to spend up to $150,000.)

The anti-referendum campaign also included the use of hired "blockers"--people paid to interfere with signature gatherings.

Letourneau, according to Drummond, denied Brown's claims. Brown, incidentally, apologized to the citizens of Yorba Linda after the fact.

Strictly speaking, the picture painted by Drummond seems straight out of the Southard playbook.