Upcoming Meetings

DRAWING THE LINE(S)


Former Claremont mayor Peter Yao and the California's Citizens Redistricting Commission are coming to town this month for its first public meeting. The City's website explains:

Citizens Redistricting Commission Will Hold Public Meetings In Claremont

The Citizens Redistricting Commission will hold its first public meeting in Claremont at the Claremont Colleges from February 9 to February 13, 2011. The 14 member Commission must draw the state's districts in conformity with strict nonpartisan lines designed to create districts equal in population taht will provide fair representation for all Californians. The 14-member Commission is made up of five Republicans, five Democrats, and 4 not affiliated with either of those two parties but registered with another party or as decline-to-state. The Commission must hold public hearings and accept public comment. After hearing from the public and drawing the maps for the House of Representatives districts, 40 Senate districts, 80 Assembly districts, and four Board of Equalization districts, the Commission must vote on the new maps to be used for the next decade.

You can read more about the CRC, watch videos of its meetings and review meeting agendas on the CRC website.



PLANNING COMMISSION MEETS TONIGHT

Harvey Mudd's amended master plan is on the agenda for tonight's Planning Commission meeting. HMC's north parcel, which used to be part of the Bernard Field Station, gets a very small mention in the amended plan.

Harvey Mudd Master Plan Amendment Review

Residents are invited to attend the upcoming Planning Commission meeting regarding an amendment to the ten-year campus master plan for Harvey Mudd College The Planning Commission will discuss the item at its meeting on Tuesday, February 1, 2011 at 7:00 p.m. The meeting will be held in the City Council Chamber, 225 W. Second Street, Claremont. All persons interested in the master plan amendment are invited to attend the meeting and provide comments.

The proposed master plan amendment is based on a maximum student population of 800 (currently 734), 335 faculty/staff (currently 307), and 297 assembly seats (currently 604). This is an increase of 66 students and 28 faculty/staff, and a decrease of 307 assembly seats. The master plan amendment proposes the following:

• no change in the maximum number of students permitted under the existing master plan (800),
• minor revisions to the design guidelines for the campus,
• new policies and guidelines emphasizing the sustainability of the campus,
• the incorporation of recently completed construction projects into the master plan,
• revisions to the campus parking plan to reflect recent changes to the campus, new ampus parking policies and City zoning code,
• deletion of previously approved yet unconstructed projects, and
• addition of new/revised buildings, most notably a new Teaching and Learning Building, which is proposed for the current site of the Thomas Garrett Building.

The Planning Commission is the final decision-making body on this matter.

City staff has completed a detailed environmental review of this master plan amendment and drafted an addendum to the environmental documentation for the original master plan, a mitigated negative declaration, to reflect the changes contained in the proposed master plan amendment.

Click Image to Enlarge

Questions regarding the project may be directed to Senior Planner Christopher Veirs, at (909) 399-5470. Written comments may also be submitted to Mr. Veirs at P.O. Box 880, Claremont, CA 91711.

* View Master Plan Amendment Documents

TREE SUMMIT

Also, the City is having a special tree committee meeting at 6pm tonight at the in the offices of the Community Services Department at 1616 N. Monte Vista Ave. We're not sure which is special, the trees, the meeting or the committee. They'll be talking about the City's tree replacement program.

Invasive Flora, Opportunistic Fauna

Click on images to enlarge

LOCAL TRAVELS

On a recent weekend, the Insider staff decided to get away and enjoy the wonderful spring weather in San Gabriel Mountains. We drove out past Wrightwood on the Angeles Crest Hwy. and found a relatively easy path that joined up with the Pacific Crest Trail near Vincent Gap.

The trail had a pretty good elevation gain up through an oak forest for the first mile or so, then it leveled out and followed a ridgeline dotted with pines. As we walked along, we noticed, nestled in a shaded pine needle bed, a group of what looked like bright red and pink hyacinths without any green leaves. As we got closer, we saw that they were supported by thick candy cane stalks.

We returned home and later consulted the old man of the mountains. We described the fantastical plants to him, and he told us in his gravelly voice, "When we were kids, we called that snow plant."

Snow plant, we've since learned, is a fungus-like parasite called a "mycotrophic wildflower" that gets its nutrients from tree roots.


CLOSER TO HOME

One is never quite sure what one will find when one wanders into the local mountains and foothills. A couple weeks after our mountain adventure, we decided to stick closer to home and explore some of the flatter alluvial areas around northeast Claremont. The undeveloped alluvium is home to the plant and animal community called riversidean alluvial fan sage scrub habitat, or RAFSS.

RAFSS is rapidly dwindling in southern and Baja California. Ten years ago, there was only about 2,000 acres of it left in California. It's disappearing because most of the stuff happens to be located on real estate coveted by developers (that is, until the real estate market tanked).

RAFSS is an odd sort of habitat. It's not at all liked a picturesque English woodland. Instead, if you go during the summer, you're likely to find it brown and sere. That is, in fact, why the city of Claremont had its commissioners trucked to the Padua Park site in July, 2000, to ensure that all they saw was what looked like a weedy lot desperately in need of improvements. About half of the 20-acre main park site consisted of RAFSS.

If the city's commissioners had gone to the same spot three or four months earlier, they would have seen it alive with greenery and flowers. All of which serves to underscore how diligently our town works to manipulate perception to get its projects done.

In any case, when we ventured out to take a look at an area near where the sports park has been installed, we found it teeming with wildflowers. Water percolated up in places from artesian springs (the cienegas that Claremont doyenne Marilee Scaff yearns to build below the dam near the Thompson Creek trail).

As we walked along, a couple quail that had been foraging in the brush, and they scooted off, chittering alarm calls as they took flight. We wondered about rattlesnakes, but it wasn't terribly hot the day we were out, at least, not hot enough to get the snakes stirred up.

Purples, blues, and lavenders seemed the dominant color that particular day. We saw blue-eyed grass and lupine (photo, right) with their five-lobed leaves. There was showy penstomen (below) as well, sitting in large groupings of blue jets arrayed along long, thin spears.

The generous storms of January and February brought so much water that the plain held an abundance of chamise, buckwheat, and bronze-green castor bean, too. Other flowering plants hadn't quite come into their season yet. White sage and short coastal prickly pear cactus looked as if they would burst into bloom any minute.


INVASIVE EXOTICS: STRANGE FLORA, STRANGER FAUNA

As we got closer to the park site, approaching it from the east, we noticed that the soil was considerably disturbed by the construction equipment. Black mustard and other invasive exotics had taken over those disturbed, more open areas. We could see the strangely out of place weeds mixed in and projecting above the RAFSS:



As we got closer, we saw that they had overrun the area completely:


















And, along with the weeds that choked off the local coastal sage habitat, some even more more opportunistic and parasitic fauna appeared, blindly devastating up entire plant and animal communities from Claremont to Whittier Narrows:



From "Pave to Save," LA Weekly, April 22, 2010:

Shepherded by a group of unwieldy bureaucracies that include two water districts, the San Gabriel & Lower Los Angeles Rivers and Mountain Conservancy and the County of Los Angeles, the San Gabriel River Discovery Center is designed to replace the aging 2,000-square-foot Whittier Narrows Nature Center, buildings including a garage, and "non-native landscaping" with a 14,000-square-foot museum of interactive exhibits for children that would explain the existing state of the watershed, show what the natural rivers were once like and feature a covered, outdoor classroom.

"You're going to bring awareness of the sense of place where the kids sense that they're part of something much bigger," declares Sam Pedroza as he reels off interconnections between man, river and sea. "Everything that we do from the mountains and the inland cities affects the ocean. It's as small as throwing a wrapper in the street or in the parking lot — that can all end up in the ocean."

Pedroza, a Claremont city councilman, chairs the San Gabriel River Discovery Center Authority's Stakeholders Committee. "I know that we look like the Goliath here," he tells the Weekly, but "by every definition this is an environmental project that's aimed at protecting the watershed."

Others aren't so sure.

Teresa Young, who studies insects in habitats near the existing nature center, shares Pedroza's concern for the remaining open space. But she does not agree that the construction of a large building and parking lot somehow improves the environment.

Save by destroying, and then put up a commemorative bronze plaque to describe for future generations that which we've plowed under. It's a truly bizarre logic we've become accustomed to in Claremont, the City of Trees.

Bulldozing Reality

The January 19 Claremont Courier had a Tony Krickl article about Claremont Community Services Director Scott Carroll leaving Claremont to take a job as general manager for the Costa Mesa Sanitation District.

(Sorry, no link to the actual article, which is archived behind the Courier's paywall.)

December 31 was Carroll's last working day. The article detailed some of Carroll's more notable accomplishments, such as his negotiating a deal to have Claremont's trash taken to an Orange County landfill, a move that saved the city $200,000.

The article also also touched on the 2008 bulldozing of the Claremont Hills Wilderness Park that was one of the low points in Carroll's Community Service tenure. You might recall some of the damage done by the contractor the city hired to clear brush mechanically, rather than hiring crews to do the work by hand as Claremont had promised to do under its own Vegetation Management Plan for the park. Here's what the park looked like in the summer of 2008 shortly after the brush clearance:

(Click on images to enlarge)

After the damage occurred, the city faced scrutiny from county, state, and federal agencies. As part of the City's penance, Claremont was supposed to monitor the area to see what grew back and then was supposed to come up with a plan to replant the area with native plants to restore the area to its former state.

The City made a lot of representations to the public and to the various government agencies it was dealing with. But did they follow through?

You have to remember that, this being Claremont, once the spotlights go off, then the real work of holding City Hall to its word begins. In the Courier's article on Carroll's departure, Carroll addressed the Wilderness Park damage:

"That was really unfortunate," Mr. Carroll said. "But I took full responsibility for what happened and was determined to resolve the issue. We got the approval of different interested parties involved and fixed the problem before the rainy season began. Now if you go up there, it looks the same as before the damage was done."

Really?

We didn't recall any of the promised revegetation happening, so we went up to the park a few weeks ago and snapped this photo:

The photo was taken facing north from the S-curve at Via Padova. All you have to do is compare the right side of the photo (the damaged east side of the canyon) to the left or west side. The creek runs down the center of the canyon, and that is marked by the trees. Although the damaged areas are now green, what has grown back are non-native grasses that will have be cut back each year. Those golf course fairways on the right side of the photo should actually look like the hills on the left side.

None of the revegetation has occurred. Not that it matters. The California Department of Fish & Game and the Army Corps of Engineers have gone away without any apparent follow-up enforcement. Ditto for the press. Hence the Scott Carroll farewell quote.

And that, dear readers, is how public perception is shaped. One thing hasn't changed a bit, as was demonstrated by the inadvertent felling of the elm tree at Tenth St. & Indian Hill Blvd. in December, Claremont's trees and city-hired construction machinery don't mix.

Oh, Shenandoah, I Love Your Bowers

Claremont, AKA Tree City, has a love-hate relationship with its woody friends. On the one hand, the trees gracing the Claremont Village and the various neighborhoods around town create an urban forest ambiance that makes for nice photos and summer evening strolls.

On the other hand, the city's trees - many non-native species - suck up increasingly costly water and wreck havoc on underground utilities. Citizens who've had a tree root from a city-owned parkway tree break a sewer line can attest to the troubles they have historically had collecting any compensation from the city.

Click to Enlarge

The residents of Claremont's Shenandoah Dr. area that surrounds the Claremont Club recently had to confront both aspects of our tree policies in trying to work with the city to deal with damage done to streets and sidewalks in their neighborhood.

Shenandoah Dr. and the cul-de-sacs that run off it were planted with Calabrian pines when the area was originally built. The trees have matured beautifully, but the pines turned out to be a poor choice for an urban area because many of their root systems have destroyed the curbs, sidewalks, and streets around them.

Shenandoah Dr. and Claremont Blvd. facing west.

Those uplifted sidewalks and streets have created a liability nightmare for the city, making for trip-and-fall hazards throughout the neighborhood. In April, 2005, the city put out to bid a three-phase plan to deal with the Shenandoah trees. Phase I called for the removal of 22 mature pines, the repair of the road, curbs and sidewalks around those trees. and the replacement of the old trees with less problematic species. The total cost of that first phase was $109,803.94. All three phases were expected to take six years to complete.

Phase I of the Shenandoah Tree Mitigation Project, as it was called, went through. However, a number of Shenandoah area residents, however, took exception with the destruction of the existing trees and sought to have the city implement an alternative plan to save the trees and rehabilitate the streets, curbs and sidewalks.

The residents who wanted the trees saved had a couple main arguments:

• They felt the city was looking only at the cost of infrastructure damage and litigation and not considering the value mature trees worth thousands or ten of thousands can add to property. Older, upscale neighborhoods (the San Rafael area of Pasadena, for example) often possess older, fully-grown trees that give those neighborhoods their distinct feel, as opposed to seemingly sterile neighborhoods - urban, industrial areas and newer, suburban ones -that don't have mature trees.
  
  
• Large, mature trees are more cost effective than small trees because they absorb moisture more efficiently, reducing soil run-off. Larger trees also contribute more to reduction of carbon dioxide and also save residents money by cooling neighborhoods with their canopies, leading to lower summertime electric bills.
  
  

The city, the argument went, should include the above savings and benefits in their cost analysis for the tree mitigation.

Shenandoah Dr. and Gettysburg Cir. facing south.

In response, the city came up with three alternative plans (Plans A, B, and C), and those were laid out in a city staff report on July 8th. Plan C was the original plan from 2005 that called for the removal and replacement of 66 trees. Plan B was a plan staff came up in response to Shenandoah area residents who wanted to see the area's trees maintained. It removed the fewest trees but was the most costly because it required narrowing the street and reconfiguring driveways and sidewalks. It also included a proposal to use rubberized pavers around that could be easily removed to inspect tree roots. Estimates for Plan B ran between $365,692 and $511,100, depending on if the pavers were used or not.

Click to Enlarge

In the end, the council unanimously selected Plan A (right), which would allow for most of the remaining trees along Shenandoah to be saved. The plan approved called for the use of the rubberized pavers but did not require any reconfiguration of the street. Plan A also calls for removing portions of the sidewalk and moving them away from the existing trees. Plan A was also endorsed by The Club Homeowners Association, the neighborhood's HOA, which seemed to be very much opposed to the more costly Plan B.

The approved replacement tree for the pines on Shenandoah Dr., according to the staff report, is the California Black Oak. The replacement trees will be in 24-inch boxes, so it will take quite some time for them to fill in. Plan A requires that in the future the city to have an independent certified arborist examine trees deemed candidates for removal to see if the trees can be saved.

Some called the compromise plan a "Band-Aid fix" according to the July 12th Claremont Courier (that article is not available online). The tree damage problem for Shenandoah will be back before the City Council in another 5-10 years, this thinking goes, and that's probably an accurate assessment.

The Courier article, incidentally, was accompanied by a a large photo of a pine that fell onto the street at the southwest corner of Shenandoah and Stanislaus Cir. the day after the City Council approved the tree mitigation plan. The photo may have been a bit misleading, however, because the tree appeared to be on private property. If so, it would have been up to the homeowner, not the city, to maintain that particular tree, which wasn't even listed as a candidate for removal on the approved mitigation plan.

It was still an interesting debate, occurring as it does at a time of municipal belt-tightening. The city had to conduct it's cost-benefit analysis, which was disputed by a number of resident who wanted an alternate plan.

This instance was really the perfect situation for an assessment district, a funding mechanism originally designed to allow neighborhoods who want specific improvements limited to their own specific area to vote to tax themselves to pay for those improvement. With the assessment district costs aren't bourne by an entire city, just by the neighborhood receiving the benefit.

Claremont, however, with its Landscaping and Lighting District (LLD) and the failed 2006 Parks and Pasture measure, abused that funding mechanism to the point that they've probably poisoned that well for the near future. And, in any case, the majority of homeowners around Shenandoah do not seem attached enough to their neighborhood trees to approve an assessment on their homes, so that possibility was never considered.

Claremont, the City of Trees and Ph.d's, will no doubt be wrestling with this one for a long time to come.

Shenandoah Dr. and Stanislaus Cir. facing northeast. The tree that fell and was photographed for the July 12th Claremont Courier is the one nearest the street corner on right side of the photo.

Tonight's Council Meeting

The Claremont City Council meets tonight at 6:30pm in the City Council chambers at 225 W. 2nd St. in the Claremont Village.

It's a busy agenda tonight as the council and Mayor Ellen Taylor scramble to get all their business done this month before the City Council and city commissions take their traditional August break. Hey, shouldn't we start thinking about reversing this? Let's have them meet in August and take the rest of the year off. You know, above all, do no harm.

Interested parties can also watch the proceedings here tonight beginning at 6:30pm.

In any case, the council tonight at 5:15pm starts with another in a never-ending series of closed sessions in which, the special meeting agenda says, they'll discuss "anticipated litigation" with an unidentified party as well as the possible water company takeover. The council will give a brief report of their closed session after they return for the public portion tonight.

The regular agenda includes the following items of interest:

• The second reading of the new marijuana dispensary ordinance that was approved at the last council meeting.
  
  
• An appeal of the Planning Commission's decision to approve a 162,000 square-foot academic and administrative building on the Claremont McKenna College campus. The appeal has been lodged by Peter Farquhar, Ray Fowler, Lydia Henry, and Ginger Elliot on behalf of Claremont Heritage.
  
  The appeal seems to center around the appellants concern about parking and the way the parking allowances for the new building were figured. City staff, naturally, argues that the appeal should be denied. We'll see who has more clout here, CMC or Claremont Heritage's Ginger Elliot.
  
  
• The renewal of the city's agreement with the Chamber of Commerce, a wholly-owned Claremont 400 subsidiary currently led by photographer Sonia Stump. The proposed new agreement will pay the Chamber $59,935 for the 2008-09 fiscal year and $61,756 for FY 2009-10.
  
  This is a sort of automatic renewal, and we've not seen much public discussion of whether or not the city's merchants are getting a good bang for your tax buck. Has anyone asked if the Chamber has done a good job of increasing foot traffic to the Village or the Village Expansion, not to mention the other areas of town?
  
  
• The proposed $50,000 grant to the Friends of the Claremont Library to fund a special collection of Claremont authors. A reader just commented on this one:
  
  
  I was up early this morning and read the post about the Friends of the Claremont Library asking the city for $50,000 to catalogue books by Claremont authors and several things came to mind. Don't we pay taxes to the county library already to have every book catalogued that is given to or purchased by the county system? Doesn't the county already have many of the books by Claremont authors in it's collection already and have already catalogued these books? Doesn't this city already have plenty of retired librarians that could volunteer to catalogue these books? And lastly, if the city is in such dire need of money with the anticipated shortfalls this year and next, why not put the money into reserves? I also wondered if these books are going to circulate to other libraries in the system or if they are going to circulate at all? If they are not, this is not the best use of taxpayer funds to enable the creation of what will essentially be a private collection, something that is better suited to a private library, not a public library whose beginnings were meant to provide the masses with free circulating books to educate and uplift themselves. I hope the council will reconsider this issue and not respond with a knee-jerk reaction to this request.
  
  Yep.
  
  
• Tree mitigation for homes on Shenandoah Dr. The staff report provides three alternatives (Plans A, B, and C) ranging in price from $251,000 to $511,000. The discussion provides an good window into the true costs of being a Tree City - costs which tend to be ignored until the sidewalk is cracked and lifted up all throughout a neighborhood.
  
  
• A parking permit plan for residents of Via Santa Catarina at the Johnson's Pasture trailhead in Claremont's Claraboya neighborhood.
  
  Another example of what happens when easily foreseeable consequences are ignored. Claremont bought Johnson's Pasture, but failed to deal with the fact that a small residential cul-de-sac with no extra parking sits at the beginning of the trail. As a result, the neighborhood feels overrun with hikers' vehicles taking up all the limited parking along with a perceived increase in crime-risk and general nuisances.
  
  The other way in to the pasture is from the Claremont Wilderness Park entrance over on Mills Ave. A long trek indeed.
  

Seeing the Forest for the Trees

Claremont has a well-deserved reputation as the "City of Trees and Ph.D's." The Claremont Village really is defined by its tree-lined streets, which give the town the New England feel the town founders sought.

But with trees come hidden costs. There's the cost of maintenance: trimming, watering, pest management; and then there's the cost of the damage done by trees to property, and in some cases lives. We tend to forget that in February, 1998, two students were killed when a eucalyptus tree fell on their SUV at 4th St. and College Ave. The families of the two students settled a lawsuit against Pomona College for $1.6 million, as this March, 2000, article from The Student Life reported.

The article points out that even though the tree was on campus property and was owned by Pomona College, a city of Claremont crew showed up and quickly removed the tree and root ball, which the families considered evidence in their suit. No one could say who called the city in. Another "Town and Gown" cooperative event.

The city of Claremont has its own tree problems, as the FC Blog noted yesterday. The types of trees we have planted in the past can cause homeowners a great deal of damage to sewer and water lines, driveways and walks. Claremont regularly denies claims made by homeowners against the city for those damages, even though the city severely restricts the homeowners' ability to trim city trees and their roots. These damages are often not covered by homeowner insurance, so citizens are stuck with the costs of repairing the damaged lines.

To make matters worse, the city's Landscaping and Lighting District assessment creates the impression that the city has funds dedicated to things like tree maintenance. So, folks naturally get upset when the city tells them they're liable for any damages caused by city tree roots.

And those property damage costs are on the rise, according to an article by Will Bigham in yesterday's Daily Bulletin. The article reported the city estimates that the $230,000 per year it pays to maintain trees now will rise to $625,000 in 10 years as our tree population ages. Since 2005 there have been 202 tree-related claims against the city, and the city ended up paying out $220,000 because of tree damage in 2005 and 2006.

The article also noted that a city staff report placed part of the blame for current tree problems on past City decisions:

"The city is now experiencing the effects of past aggressive planting programs," the city staff report states. "In the past, trees were planted ... at 40-foot intervals. "Although this provided an equally dispersed tree population, no thought was given to the impact that a tree's growth would have on surrounding infrastructure. "The city is now seeing the financial implications of these decisions in the number of tree-related claims submitted," the report said.

Once again, our past, short-sighted decisions have large financial costs in the present, and the people who made those decisions (like two-term Community Services Commission member Sam Pedroza) have moved on and take no responsibility for those costs.

The new tree policy discussed at last Tuesday night's City Council meeting is at least a step towards reining in the costs of damage claims by engaging in preventative actions. Part of the policy includes hiring full-time arborist to manage the city's "urban forest" of 23,000 trees. Another is to plant types of trees that don't cause the damage that the we're now seeing.

The lesson of all of this is a simple one: pay now or pay a lot more later. It's well and good to have a plant a lot of trees, but if it's done without thinking out all of the consequences, there's hell to pay in the future. It's a lesson revisited time and again on Claremont.

Hats off to our current staff. At least they seem willing to try a different, more sensible path.