Scared Straight

With Halloween fast approaching we might have expected to get a good scare from our beloved Claremonsters. The sky-is-falling strategy has traditionally been one the Claremont 400's favorite tactics to get people to vote for someone or something.

They used fear-based strategy when current council member Corey Calaycay was running in 2005 ("our city staff will all quit if he's elected") and again in 2006 with the failed Parks and Pastures assessment district ("developers will buy Johnson's Pasture if we don't act now"). Somehow the Claremonsters always manage to disregard reality in their attempts to get voters worked up for or against anything. With the park assessment district, for instance, they ignored the fact that the open space they were trying to save had been stuck in probate court for nearly 10 years without changing hands and that the City was the only likely buyer. The urgency they tried to create was false.

This campaign season they're at it again, telling Claremont Unified School District residents that we need to pass the $95 million Measure CL bond because our schools are falling apart. They tell us that our school buildings will collapse on top of our kids if we don't pass this bond. This past Wednesday, the Claremont Courier carried just such a letter in which Uncommon Good executive director Nancy Mintie compared the state of Claremont High's theatre to a slum. Mintie writes with the famous Claremonster voice of authority, saying she was an attorney who fought slumlords, so she should know.

In her letter, Mintie went on to say that the sorry state of CUSD's facilities is proof that Claremonters should support the proposed school bond. But if we read Mintie's letter correctly, what she's really saying is that CUSD is a slumlord! Just like the slumlords Mintie opposed in the past, our school board and the district's admnistrators took the $48.9 million from the last school bond in 2000 and squandered it. They didn't pump all of that money back into fixing up their properties, and they neglected the young people who occupied those building. We clip the first three paragraphs of her letter, right. Buy the Courier to read the rest. Click to enlarge.

Following Mintie's argument to its logical conclusion, one should be compelled to deny CUSD access to any further bond money because they can't be trusted with it. But, this being Claremont, Mintie drew the opposite conclusion, despite her rather persuasive evidence to the contrary. Instead, Mintie said she supports this bond in order to fix our decrepit school facilities - precisely what CUSD and its supporters said the last bond was going to accomplish.

If Mintie were being truthful with us and herself, she'd say that CUSD needs to borrow more money because it mismanaged the last bond and didn't keep its promises from 10 years ago. But, as we've seen, the Claremonster capacity for deceptions of all sorts is limitless.

We have every right to be fearful - of Mintie's screwball logic, of our school district's waste, of the money being pumped into the Yes on CL campaign by bond and building contractors, of the willingness of our school board and its friends to hide the truth and rewrite the past. Run as fast as you can away from these people!

City Council Recap

A brief note on last night's Claremont City Council meeting:

As we expected, Mayor Pro Tem Ellen Taylor was named Mayor during the council reorganization at the beginning of the meeting. Taylor's Girl Scout cookie escapade didn't stop Councilmember Corey Calaycay from nominating Taylor or the rest of the council from approving of the nomination. In Claremont, tradition still trumps bad behavior.

Some Girl Scouts did show up at the meeting and got to lead the Pledge of Allegiance. Then, during public comment one of them politely addressed the council without mentioning the Taylor incident, thanked the council for supporting the Girl Scouts and presented each council member with a box of cookies.

During the council reorganization, there were some indications of tension between outgoing Mayor Peter Yao and Councilmember Calaycay. The mayor and mayor pro tem positions are traditionally rotated by seniority, so with Taylor becoming mayor, that left Calaycay in line for the mayor pro tem slot. However, when the time came, Linda Elderkin first nominated Calaycay for Mayor Pro Tem. Yao then nominated Sam Pedroza, who showed remarkable class by declining the nomination. Because there were no objections to Calaycay's nomination, he was approved without a vote. Yao never did give his rationale for wanting to bypass Calaycay.

So there you have it: Mayor Taylor and Mayor Pro Tem Calaycay.

For the time being, Taylor seemed chastened by the reaction to her cookie fit and was on her best behavior. Though she no doubt wanted to dust off the old red light timer for members of the public addressing the council, she ran the meeting without it. And, the meeting's Internet feed also continued without Taylor pulling the plug.

As to business, the downtown trolley lease was approved, Phase One of Padua Park was okayed for placing out to bid, the downtown salon restrictions were approved, tweaking the Land Use and Development Code was debated, and the council reviewed a proposal by the Uncommon Good charity and Claremont High School's Teen Green club to build a "green dome" facility at Cahuilla Park.

The Uncommon Good proposal, incidentally, was pushed by two Claremont insiders (small "i"): Claremont Auto Center owner Roger Hogan and J. "Not a Claremont Resident" Michael Fay.

We'll try to delve into some of these matters in more detail in coming days.