City Election News

COURIER ENDORSES PEDROZA, NASIALI, AND ?

Besides the story of Flyergate, last Saturday's Claremont Courier also carried to Courier's endorsements for the March 8 municipal election.

Like the Daily Bulletin, the Courier endorsed incumbent Sam Pedroza, who looked a little gaunt in his Courier photo, his weight loss apparently the by-product of a bicycling regime of one sort or another. As much as we hate to admit it, we really can't fault either paper for choosing Pedroza as one of its endorsees. We don't usually agree with him, but he gets the nod incumbents usually get absent any scandals or missteps in office.

The Courier also echoed the Bulletin in its endorsement of Opanyi Nasiali, who is running for the third time. The Courier cited Nasiali's volunteer work and his participation as a City commissioner and economic sustainability committee member. The Courier also pointed out that Nasiali worked both on the successful Johnson's Pasture Measure S bond campaign in 2006 and on the campaign against the $95 million Measure CL school bond.

While the first two picks were easy calls, the choice for the third and final seat was a tough one. Claremont 400 candidate Robin Haulman might have been the Courier's pick, but her campaign continually shot itself in the foot, with the final disgrace coming at the February 17 League of Women Voters candidate forum when Haulman's husband Alexander Sweida swiped a bunch of candidate Jay Pocock's fliers and threw them in the trash. So between her actions and her hubby's, Haulman's chances of that coveted Courier endorsement were nil.

Presuming the Courier didn't take Citizen Michael John Keenan, Joseph Armendarez, or Rex Jaime seriously, that left the Bulletin's third choice, Jay Pocock, and former Democratic State Senate candidate Joseph Lyons. The Courier went for Lyons, who because of his lack of past civic involvement has been something of a cipher. Lyons really is the a great Claremont 400 candidate, relying on them for their votes, especially from local retirement communities like Pilgrim Place, and apparently without any of his own opinions or experience in city issues to muck things up for the 400.

We'll see how the Courier and Bulletin endorsements hold up. The last three or four council elections the Courier has been the more accurate of the two newspapers, but a lot can happen between now and March 8. We await the Claremonsters' usual election eve surprise, either through a letter or ad in the Courier the Saturday before the election, or through a last minute mailer landing in the last few days of the campaign. The 400 usually tries to stir up some imagined scandal very late in the game - too late to be rebutted by their target.

As Flyergate, Pasturegate, Signgate, and Shillgate (say, they really are giving new meaning to the term "gated community") have shown in this election, the one thing we can count on is that the Claremonsters will do just about anything to win, and, much like Wile E. Coyote's schemes, their tricks often blow up in their faces.

* * * * *

Speaking of Flyergate, Courier reporter Tony Krickl has the Paul Harvey "Rest of the Story" on his Courier City Beat blog. LWV president Ellen Taylor doesn't come off much better than Haulman's husband does in Krickl's post:

Further defending his actions, Sweida said he was just following the League of Women Voter's policy on negative campaign material. He asked Ellen Taylor, president of Claremont's chapter of the League, if he could remove the fliers. Taylor told him to go ahead, even though she didn't inspect the material beforehand to see if it actually contained "negative" information.

This incident is troubling from many perspectives. With his actions, Sweida has certainly embarrassed his wife and may have cost her the election. Dirty tactics like this just don't sit well with voters.

Taylor defended her decision by saying the League is anti-biased in local elections. However by approving this behavior, she showed a clear bias against Pocock. And that reflects poorly on the entire organization.

And what do other League officials think about what happened?

"It would be better to actually look at the material before making a decision on what to do with it," said Jack Mills, Vice President of the League.

Krickl also quotes Mills as saying that he is unaware of any LWV policy against negative campaigning.

Signs, Signs, Everywhere There's Signs, Part 2

No Claremont campaign season would be complete without a little candidate sign craziness. You might recall that in the 2009 municipal election Bridget Healy's campaign stuck signs up illegally on city-owned property at the so-called "pork chop park" at the southeast corner of Harrison Ave. and Indian Hill Blvd. Bridget's signs came down pretty quickly after someone called them to the City's attention. We covered Measure CL sign issues here, here, and here.

The more typical Claremont campaign games usually consist of election volunteers stealing other candidates' signs. In recent elections, candidates have stooped to putting up signs on lawns without permission. Sometimes campaigns will look around to see who has the most signs and then sneak their own signs up next to the other ones to try to create a coattails effect. People driving around see Candidate Smith's signs together with Candidate Jones' signs, and they just assume the two are jointly supported.

This year, the two worst offenders seem to be incumbent council member Sam Pedroza and candidate Robin Haulman. At least, that's what we gather from reading Claremont Courier reporter Tony Krickl's blog:

Gwen Brown, who lives on Scripps Drive, came home yesterday to find lawn signs from city council candidates Sam Pedroza and Robin Haulman in her front yard. They've since been taken down and put in the garage.

"I would appreciate if I was asked first before a political sign went up on my property," Ms. Brown said. "I really take offense to a controlling political party trying to push an opinion on me."

In another neighborhood in north Claremont, the same 2 candidate's signs appeared in another resident's lawn.

"I do not know anything about Robin Haulman, never met nor do I know her," said the resident, who asked not to be named. "Sam I am aware is on the city council now but I was surprised that someone had the hutzpa to plant their signs in my yard without asking permission. I have nothing personally against either one but thought it was rather rude."

For his part, Pedroza, à la Mission Impossible, disavowed any knowledge of his volunteers' actions, saying that if it were up to him he'd just as soon not have any signs because they're not worth the trouble. (Ya think?)

Still, two different incidents involving the same two candidates in two different neighborhoods? Something's rotten in the state of Claremont.

We think--and this is going to shock people--that the problem can be traced to the Claremont 400 and their fellow travelers. No, wait. See Sam Pedroza's Facebook page, screenshot below. Who appears to be the sign factotum but the redoubtable Judy Wright? We are sure her tentacles into the activist community in Claremont, such as the Democratic Club, are adequate to explain the goings-on. Also note, Sam is supported by Lee Jackman, leader of the Yes on CL organization.

click to enlarge

Red Alert?

A reader contacted us to say that they wished we would devote less space to the Measure CL school bond and more to other issues such as the disappearance last week of a developmentally disabled teen named Deontay Antone Barlow.

Deontay, who disappeared from his home on Thursday, October 21, was found five days later at a Kaiser Permanante facility in Downey. Claremont Courier reporter Tony Krickl wrote about the happy ending to this story on his Courier City Beat blog.

Our reader wondered why the Claremont Police Department didn't employ their CodeRED system to alert the community immediately after Deontay's family discovered he was missing. CPD's used the system before for community-wide emergencies like fires, so why not in this instance?

The CPD website does list missing persons as one of the emergencies CodeRED is for:

CodeRED WILL BE USED FOR EMERGENCY COMMUNICATIONS

CodeRED is intended to supplement our local law enforcement and public safety first responders with making timely emergency notifications. Examples of its use include:

• Evacuation Notice
• Fires or Floods
• Missing Persons
• Hazardous Material Spills
• Water Contamination
• Identifying Evacuation Centers
• Emergency and Critical incidents where rapid notification is essential.
  

Now, the CPD did use their Neighborhood E-Watch newsletter to email residents that Deontay had been found. Our reader wonders, why pay spend all that money for CodeRED if we don't use it for something like this?

7-Eleven Foes Take to Social Networking

You have to hand it to the residents who are fighting the proposed 7-Eleven convenience store at Foothill Blvd. and Mills Ave. Now that the applicant is appealing the Claremont Planning Commission's denial of the 7-Eleven's conditional use permit, the residents are gearing up to pressure the City Council into upholding the CUP denial.

Besides the expected opposition from the Preserve Our Neighborhoods (PON) group, whose attorney submitted a letter on behalf of PON to the Planning Commission, Claremont Courier reporter Tony Krickl writes on his COURIER City Blog that the 7-Eleven opponents have a Facebook page and even have a YouTube presentation:

It's a video posted on Youtube by David Sawhill, a resident who lives near the proposed 7-Eleven site. See below. Sawhill can't attend next Tuesday night's city council meeting due to an open house at Claremont High School where he works, so he's asked city staff to show the video during public comment in his absence.

Sawhill, by the way, is a graduate of the Claremont Colleges (Pitzer '01) and teaches math at Claremont High School. He is also a CHS yearbook adviser. In his video, Sawhill also tells us that he got his teaching credential at Claremont Graduate School. Sawhill may have a problem getting an airing of his video before the City Council: There's a four-minute limit on public comment and Sawhill's video runs over seven minutes. Then again, new mayor Linda Elderkin, who is against the 7-Eleven, may show her foolish consistency and allow the video to run.

As an aside, it strikes us as so typically Claremont how, whenever a group of neighbors opposes a project that most of the Claremont 400 would rather not have, the group is considered community activists. On the other hand, when a group opposes something the 400 is for, they are NIMBYs. These quintessential Claremont inconsistencies drive us nuts, and we have some more to illustrate on this and other subjects in the next week or two.

In any case, here's Sawhill's video:

Farewell and Adieu

Tony Krickl tells us on his blog that Claremont has finally unloaded its trolley. The trolley, which had been mothballed at the City Yard, is bound for the Aloha State, Krickl says:

Claremont's trolley has moved on to greener pastures. And sandy beaches. At Tuesday's city council meeting, city manager Jeff Parker announced that the city had sold the trolley to a buyer in Hawaii.

The city's trolley broker (who knew there was such a thing?) found a buyer willing to pay $75,000 for the thing.

More Donut Talk

The Claremont Courier's story about the arrest of Moun Chau, the donut shop owner accused of violating the federal Endangered Species Act, brought some sharp words from Courier reader Hal Hargrave in a letter published in last Wednesday's Courier. (Sorry, the letter is stuck behind the Courier's new pay wall, so no link. You'll have to get a subscription if you want to read it online.)

Hargrave felt that the Courier coverage unfairly singled out Chau's business, Pixie Donuts, which, aside from accepting some ivory shipments three years ago, seems to be a fairly average mom-and-pop business. Hargrave wrote:

Pixie is poetry in motion every morning as June and her staff know the orders of most and work in harmony to move the masses through their small, simple donut shop. They are a Claremont family with their kids going through Claremont schools. They support us and I know I will continue to support them despite the twisted article written about something that took place in 2006. You should have stuck to reporting on “Storm Watch Twenty Ten!”

As I read your description of the all-powerful Department of Fish and game and their aid on Pixie in 2006, all I could picture was the TSA finding a shampoo bottle. Whew, I feel so protected by these almighty governmental agencies.

This all prompted Courier reporter Tony Krick, who wrote the article about Chau, to defend his naming the Pixie Donut Shop in the article. On his COURIER City Beat blog, Krickl argues for the newsworthiness of including the business' name in his news piece. He says:

I am not doubting that Pixies has good doughnuts or the owners are friendly to their customers. But the fact remains that federal agents found dozens of pieces of ivory in the business as well as tools to carve them into decorative products, likely to be sold on to collectors.

While we don't see anything wrong with naming the business in the article - it is, after all, the place that took delivery of the shipments. However, we also don't see the need to boycott the business. The federal indictment didn't name the business or Chau's family as additional defendants, so the implication is that the alleged crime was Chau's alone.

The feds have had over three years to put a case together, so if they had any reason to go after the business itself, they would have. So, in from our vantage, we don't see anything wrong with continuing to patronize Pixie. As we've said before, they do make the best donuts around - at least their weekday fare is very good - not too doughy or greasy, and just the right amount of stuff on top. And, Hargrave is right, the family does seem like good people, whatever personal shortcomings Moun Chau may have had.

A Second Moment of Silence, Please

The local MSM (mainstream media for the acronymically impaired) had plenty of coverage of last Saturday's Claremont 4th of July celebration.

The Daily Bulletin's David Allen blogged about the annual parade, which gave him much amusement.

And the Claremont Courier's Tony Krickl wrote of running in the 5K. Krickl also covered the Opening Ceremonies and the Speakers Corner. Oddly, one important person was notably absent - Claremont Mayor Corey Calaycay (photo, above left), whom Krickl says overslept, causing him to miss his speech following the Flag Raising at 10am. Calaycay also missed his 11am opening Speakers Corner speech.

Since when does a politician pass on a free public-speaking gig? Turns out Calaycay wasn't observing the obligatory moments of silence for recently departed Speakers Corner founder T. Willard Hunter. Krickl ran this one to ground:

By 11:30 a.m., city staff was getting seriously worried about his safety. Police, fire fighters and assistant city manager Tony Ramos were sent to Calaycay's house to make sure he was okay.

They found him, alive and well, if not a bit sleepy-eyed. The mayor had simply overslept. He eventually made his way down to Memorial Park to join in the fun and apologized for his earlier absence.

"It's never a nice thing to have to begin a speech with an apology but I must do that," he said at the Speaker's Corner. "It's tradition for the mayor to open the speaker's corner and I was truly looking forward to that and I'm embarrassed to say I overslept this morning."

If only we could get the pols in Sacramento to sleep in more often, the people's work might actually stand a chance of getting done.

Mercado Economy

Tony Krickl of the Courier had an insightful piece last week on his CityBeat Blog. It is worth your reading. He covered the story of Tally for Men in the Village, with its perpetual "Clearance" signs, all designed to indicate a distressed business and opportunity for bargains bargains bargains.

Courier photo

The owner of Tally for Men got a majority of City Council (Mayor Calaycay, and councilmembers Yao and Pedroza) to overturn a Planning Commission decision and allow the perpetual outdoor display pictured above. Mayor Pro Tem Elderkin and rookie councilmember Schroeder couldn't go along with this outdoor sales gimmick, though they have had no trouble in the past few months rolling over for the Claremont Wednesdays/Claremont Family Festival which brings the look of the Guatemalan mercado to Claremont every week.

Susan Brunasso/Claremont Wednesdays image

Krickl wonders if we are becoming "Swap Meet Claremont": "We'll see if applications start pouring in for similar outdoor displays from other businesses. Hopefully, Claremont's Village doesn't begin to look like a swap meet instead of its current upscale look, " Krickl writes.

Susan Brunasso/Claremont Wednesdays image

Are we seeing a new strategy from the Chamber of Commerce and City business development types--those old marketing geniuses Aldrich and Parker and Ramos? A recognition that the brick and mortar stores can't be helped, and emphasis instead on rug-merchant strategies and blanket-on-the-sidewalk vendors of the Rambla.

Why, next thing you know, the Mayor himself will be hawking vendors' wares.

Staffer David Monroy of State Senator Bob Huff's office (left)
and Claremont Mayor Corey Calaycay (right)
hawk wares at Claremont Family Festival.

Susan Brunasso/Claremont Wednesdays image

Courier-TSL Faceoff

Left to Right (literally, not politically):
Pepperdine School of Law Dean Kenneth Starr
and UC Irvine School of Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky.

We'd meant to write up something about the March 5th mock debate at Pomona College between Pepperdine Law School dean Kenneth Starr and Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the new UC Irvine School of Law. The debate's subject was the Presidental War Powers Act.

Starr came to the debate the same day he argued before the California State Supreme Court on behalf of Prop. 8 proponents who sought to have 18,000 gay and lesbian marriages voided under the new state law.

Tony Krickl covered the event for the Courier, wrote about the goings on in a March 11 article:

Mr. Starr, who serves as the Dean of Pepperdine University’s Law School, was invited to speak by the Pomona Student Union. Along with Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean of the new Law School at University of California Irvine, the 2 deans staged a mock debate on constitutional powers of the U.S. President in a hypothetical war situation. Mr. Starr was invited to speak before becoming involved in the Prop. 8 case.

When asked why he would choose to represent a minority like violent death row prisoners rather than “a minority that who just wants to marry the one they love,” Mr. Starr responded, “because you are representing a particular cause doesn’t mean you are necessarily approving of that particular cause.

“[In this case,] I was pleased to represent what I feel is a very important principle,” he added. “That is the sovereign power of the people. However you vote is to protect the sovereign right of the people, until we change that mechanism for amending the constitution.”

After the debate, students gathered in the nearby Smith Campus Center quad to stage mock same sex weddings as a form of protest to Mr. Starr’s visit.

Called “Wedding Under the Starrs,” the light-hearted event featured wedding cake and cider, music from an A cappella group and Mariachi band and several staged same-sex weddings.

Pomona College's student newspaper The Student Life seems to have found Krickl's coverage of the event wanting. The TSL editorial board wrote an opinion piece for their March 13 edition that excoriated the Courier for what TSL thought was a "lack of journalistic ethics," as well as other lapses. The TSL editorial, titled, "Courier Article Shows Unprofessionalism [see page 8]," said this about the Courier article:

The content of the article barely mentions the actual debate, or Ken Starr’s opponent Erwin Cherminsky. Instead, the Courier implied that Starr was on campus solely to field questions about “gay rights and his role in the controversial case being heard before the Supreme Court of California.” We stand on a pedestal of perfect reporting here at TSL; in fact, we are well aware of our own missteps.

We do, however make a conscious effort to cover news items with depth, clarity, and balance. What was published in the Courier on Wednesday was a gross breach of journalistic ethics and reporting etiquette.

TSL felt that the Courier article missed the main point of Starr's visit, which was the mock War Powers Act debate, and that Krickl's coverage wasn't balanced because Starr's comments on the Prop. 8 litigation weren't balanced in Krickl's article by the opposing litigants' views.

Krickl, meanwhile, took exception to the TSL editorial and blogged about TSL on the Courier City Beat in a post titled "Big Talk, Little Content from The Student Life." In the blog post, Krickl defended his coverage:

First and foremost, what TSL editors may not realize is that at many professional newspapers, reporters are limited by page inches or number of words for stories they are assigned to cover. Given these limitations, reporters are forced to focus their articles on the meat of the news while cutting out as much fat as possible.

With the high profile nature of the Prop. 8 case and Starr's role as the lead attorney, clearly the presidential war powers debate was the fat. In showing up for the event, I never intended to cover the debate. I was there to report on any comments Starr might make on the landmark case and the planned protest outside.

And:

The COURIER article did not take any sides on this topic. It never criticized or praised Mr. Starr for his position on Proposition 8 or his role in the case. The article simply laid out Mr. Starr’s positions on the issue, his responses to questions on the topic and provided a description of the student protest.

I'm not so sure I could say the same about the TSL's coverage of the event. In their article (see page 1 and 3), the TSL reporter interviewed or used statements from 4 different people who were directly criticizing Starr, his appearance on campus or Prop. 8 itself.

But TSL's report fails to counter these statements with a single voice of opposition, making the student paper's political leanings on Prop. 8 clear for all to see. Is this the neutral or balanced coverage that TSL editors are demanding?

As Krickl notes, TSL is a student paper, so maybe you have to grant them a little more latitude than you would a commercial publication. Still, TSL has had some notable missteps in the recent past. For instance, TSL's coverage of the Jonathan Petropoulos matter last year, when they ran the wrong painting on the front page, along with some other errors, led to the April 4, 2008, edition being pulled from newsstands.

There have been some other newsworthy things happening at Pomona College, including the banning (and subsequent unbanning) of two Claremont McKenna College students, David Daleiden and Kyle Kinneberg, from Pomona's campus. The ban occurred without much respect for due process and drew a good deal of criticism for the "Ready, Fire, Aim" mentality that Pomona Dean of Student Miriam Feldblum displayed in her mishandling of the situation.

We haven't had much time to explore the banning/unbanning, but we may have post or two on the subject in the coming week. The Claremont Conservative, though, has been all over this issue from the beginning.

The Quest

With the March 3rd city election fast approaching, the Claremont Courier posed several questions to each of the three candidates for Claremont City Council - Bridget Healy, Larry Schroeder, and Corey Calaycay:

• Why are you interested in serving on Claremont's City Council?
  
  
• What can the city council do to make sure the city's finances will be safe in these troubling economic times?
  
  
• Village West is struggling to find tenants as more businesses are closing up shop. What kind of economic development tools can the city implement to attract more customers and secure more businesses in the area?
  
  
• What makes you different and unique from the other candidates running and who are currently on the City Council?
  
  
• What are your favorite TV show, favorite book and favorite movie?
  
  

You can read the candidates' respective responses on the Courier's website, minus the Village West question, which was omitted on the website, along with the corresponding answers. Also, Courier reporter Tony Krickl had a bonus question about the candidates' views on building a new police station. That last question, and the candidates' answers, are posted on the Courier City Beat blog.

The big surprise on that police station question is candidate Healy's response. She is now pushing the former affordable housing site on Base Line Rd. and Towne Ave. Apparently, she's been hearing one of her opponents, Corey Calaycay, talk about that location and thought it was a good enough position to borrow. It may also mean that Healy's League of Women Voter supporters have finally given up on that location for affordable housing.

These sorts of candidate forum/interview questions are always a kick, especially ones like the "What's your favorite...? One senses that the questioner, whether it's the Courier's Krickl or Barbara Musselman at the League of Women Voters, serves as a kind of public gatekeeper of taste as well as policy.

These sorts of gatekeepers have been around a very long time, and those fill-in-the-blank questions can occasionally surprise, sometimes with deadly consequences for our brave, aspiring leaders:

The World of Local News Blogs

The Foothill Cities blog had a post back when in December about the state of journalism blogs. It was written by an anonymous Southern California newspaper employee who tried to explore the reasons why journalists aren't generally good bloggers.

The post identified three reasons for the lack of better journalistic blogging:

• They don't promote their own content. In other words, they are not doing a good job of networking to get more clicks on their sites.
  
  
• They don't know what the reading public wants. In the FC writer's view, this means giving readers some additional insight into their newspaper's coverage of the scene rather than random observations by the aspiring blogger.
  
  
• They don't need to be successful - the journalist gets compensated the same whether one person reads his/her blog or no one reads.
  

We're not sure about the FC writer's criteria for blogging success, but there are a few local journalistic blogs we think are worth following.

The David Allen blog is always good finding interesting tidbits about the Inland Empire. Whether it's a place to eat, an interesting issue before a local city council, a cultural event, or a good read, Allen covers it with wit and manages to keep the subjects separate from his Daily Bulletin column for the most part. Maybe, as the FC writer's post noted, it is easier for a columnist to blog than for a regular news reporter since the columnist's work generally involves the sort of personal observations that lend themselves to blogging.

Tony Krickl's Courier City Beat is also a fairly decent local news blog. We like it because Krickl blogs about some of the story bits that don't make it into his Claremont Courier stories. His post on the 10th anniversary of the Landrum shooting strikes us as a good example of the sort of additional information that gives some nuance to a news piece.

We also follow former Courier reporter Gary Scott's blog, not so much for the local news as for Scott's observations about the state of journalism, local and otherwise. If you want to witness the unravelling of the print news industry, Scott's posts are an excellent place to start.

Friday Mailbag

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

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

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

"Rosenthal cried while I interviewed her."

Courier Blog Up and Running - UPDATED

KCRW producer Gary Scott's blog pointed up a bit of local news: Claremont Courier reporter Tony Krickl has a new blog called COURIER City Beat.

Krickl put up his first post yesterday and is open for comments and business. Krickl's blog profile reads:

I have been covering Claremont city news for over 2 years. In my time with the COURIER, I have reported on everything from city council meetings, the 2007 council election, crime & public safety, business news, the Claremont Colleges and much more. I hope that I can bring some insight into the what's happening around town and tell some interesting stories about the people and events that make Claremont such a unique place to live.

The first Krickl post is about the March 3rd City Council election and is titled "Are the Council elections non-partisan? I don't think so." Krickl fills us in on the talk council candidate Larry Schroeder gave to the Democratic Club of Claremont yesterday. He also talked about a bit of history from the 2007 city election when the DCC, under its president Bob Gerecke, got involved.

UPDATED, 3:00PM: Today's Courier has a My Side of the Line piece by Courier publisher Peter Weinberger that explains what the paper would like to do with their new blog:

Even though we are excited about starting our first blog, having one is not unusual. Just about every newspaper website has them because it’s a great way to involve readers. Some blogs from my perspective are quite poor, since they seem more like a calendar than a forum for new ideas and perspectives (I won’t name that daily newspaper just east of Claremont.)

But COURIER City Beat does something unique from just about any blog on the Internet. We will take the best comments and publish them in the newspaper. What a concept! Our thinking is not everyone accesses the COURIER online, so why not bring the blog to print. In an era of cutting back anything printed on paper, we will provide yet another way for the COURIER to be a unique forum for Claremont residents.