Wonky Ellen Taylor Picks Herself for Affordable Housing Task Force

No, she didn't literally pick herself. But she couldn't have done better if she had taken her genetic material and injected it into the cells of partially-formed automata. Shades of the Pod People.

At the meeting of April 22, 2008, the Claremont City Council ratified the recommendations of the ad hoc committee composed of Mayor Ellen Taylor and her trusty sidekick, Sam Pedroza. We don't blame Sam; as usual, he was without a clue.

We introduced this issue a couple days ago, here.

The people composing the task force are, Sharon Hightower, Jim Keith, Bruce Mayclin, Barbara Musselman, Kirk Pelser, John Tullius, and Andrew Winnick.

Claremont always makes a lot of its diversity. What about diversity in this group?

Age diversity? Nope. The median age is 62 years compared with the median age in Claremont of just under 36 years, according to the census. There is only one member of the committee born since 1950.

This committee is nothing if not geriatric. Does this look like the appointing authority? Mayor Ellen's age is within two or three years of the median age of the committee.

What about geographic diversity? Another failing grade, we're afraid. six of the seven members of the committee live north of Foothill. Only one lives in South Claremont, just south of Arrow. And that member is culturally and socially not really South Claremont, being the husband of a certified member of the 400 who was on the CUSD School Board and is currently on the Citrus College Board. (See the adjacent map for an idea of where the task force members make their homes. Click on image to enlarge) Northeast Claremont is, as usual, excluded.

Economic Diversity? Not so good there. The median home value of the members is some $600,000. (Much higher, by nearly $100,000 recently, but the economy is tanking. The Claremont Chamber gives the 2006 median home price as just under $506,000, whatever that means now.) The committee is diverse with respect to swimming pools: four of the members have them; three do not.

Political Diversity? Here, again, the committee does not reflect Claremont. The membership breaks 6 Democrats to 1 Republican, while Claremont as a whole splits roughly 6 to 5, Democrats over Republicans. A member of the public spoke up at Council meeting last night to note that four of the seven members of the committee were members of the Claremont Area League of Women Voters. Barbara Musselman serves as the LWV president. Thus, the League, which counts as its members far fewer than 1% of Claremont's residents--far fewer--has a voting and veto-proof majority on the task force.

We don't see too many "people of color" on the task force, though some did apply. The members are vastly white, old, well-off, and wonky. If not the fact of Claremont, then the stereotype of it. This committee is disconnected from the community and is as homogeneous a group as you could find. In fact, it looks like Ellen Taylor.

With the connections these people share (with each other), you don't have to worry about the views of Helaine Goldwater going unrepresented on the task force. Helaine Goldwater and Sharon Hightower were seldom seen apart at public meetings on affordable housing, and some even say they believed Helaine and Sharon thought with one mind.

The governing elite of Claremont like to pay lip service to the idea that it is a representative democracy. Paul Held--his absence in the public City precincts is unlamented--used to justify his actions that way. But given the composition of this task force, it's much more representative of the ruling clique headed today by Ellen Taylor.

Was the selection of this committee hard for Ellen? Let her explain it in this 40-second clip:

Affordable Housing Task Farce

Affordable housing is back on our radar. Item #12 on tomorrow night's Claremont City Council agenda is the City's Affordable Housing Task Force. An ad hoc committee comprised of Mayor Ellen Taylor and Councilmember Sam Pedroza interviewed 28 applicants and has recommended seven people for the task force.

With Queen Ellen running the show, we predicted that she would load up the committee with her Claremont League of Women Voter (LWV) friends, and we're pleased to say that Ellen did not disappoint. Ellen is nothing if not consistent in her spite.

The following people received the okay from Taylor and Pedroza:

• Sharon Hightower (LWV, former City Planning Commissioner)
• Jim Keith (Husband of Citrus College Trustee and LWV member Sue Keith)
• Bruce Mayclin
• Barbara Musselman (LWV President, City Police Commissioner)
• Kirk Pelser
• John Tullius
• Andrew Winnick (City Human Services Commissioner)

As you may know if you followed the contentious debate over the failed Base Line Rd. affordable housing project, the LWV pushed a poorly conceived project and refused to listen to anyone but people like Helaine Goldwater, Sharon Hightower, and League stalwarts. The project died when it could not qualify for county funding because of concerns about pollution from the 210 Freeway, something project opponents had cited as a problem from the first public meetings on the subject.

So what did Ellen do? Rather than reach out to the opponents of the Base Line Rd. project, she and Pedroza recommended three people most responsible for that debacle: Hightower, Musselman, and Winnick. And they only appointed one person, Mayclin, who had been a critic of the housing on Base Line. Mayclin was appointed as a token gesture so that Taylor could claim she was being fair in her recommendations.

If you go back and look at the minutes of the public meetings on the Base Line site, the crowds were pretty evenly split between proponents and opponents. Taylor, et. al., tried to tar the opponents with the NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) brush, which is their favorite tactic.

Rather than engage on the issue, Taylor & Friends seek to discredit the opposition with false labels and whispering campaigns among themselves: You don't like our pet project therefore you hate ALL affordable housing and ALL poor people. Instead of sitting down to try to work with all stakeholders, they try to steamroll ideas by gaming the committee and commission system so that their ideas are unequally weighted to guarantee the outcome they desire.

After the Base Line project failed, those opponents tried to prove good on their word that they wanted to help find a solution to the affordable housing problem in Claremont. But, thanks to Taylor and Pedroza, most of those Base Line opponents were denied positions on the committee, and the result is a group that is hardly representative of the people who debated the Base Line Project.

This, of course, is Taylor and the LWV's modus operandi. Make a colossal goof at an enormous expense in city funds and staff time, get the city riled up and unnecessarily divided, then not only deny responsibility for the mess, but fail to acknowledge that their opponents were right all along. And, to add insult to injury, the Taylor folk shut out anyone who thinks differently and stubbornly refuse to allow those people to contribute to finding solutions to the problem Taylor and the rest created in the first place.

We saw this with the failed 2006 Parks and Pastures Assessment District (pushed by most of the same people as the Base Line Rd. project). In the assessment case, not only did the opponents prevail 56% to 44% when the matter was voted on, but those same opponents kept their word and turned around to help get the Measure S bond measure passed with 72% of the vote four months later. Johnson's Pasture was purchased with those Measure S funds. Taylor and the rest act as if none of that ever occurred. They have tried to erase history.

For all their talk about inclusiveness, this is as exclusive a group of people as you will find anywhere. Not one of us? Then get the hell out of here.

So, you can expect either Hightower, Musselman, or Winnick to be named chair of the task force. Also, expect more contentiousness to emerge from the task force. If the LWV and Taylor have proved anything in the past few years, it's that a bunch of individually intelligent people can be stunningly stupid as a group, mostly as a result of only listening to themselves. It's the Groupthink phenomena again, and more bad ideas along the lines of the Parks and Pasture Assessment and the Base Line Rd. project are sure to be in the offing.

Just to remind you how charming and winning these personalities are, we give you Andy Winnick in his own words, not only arguing for the Base Line Rd. project, but also condemning those who think differently from him (keep in mind this voice of authority was completely and utterly WRONG in the foundations of his arguments and his characterizations of the opposition):

Send in the Clowns - UPDATED

"This really is not a circus."

- Claremont Mayor Pro Tem Ellen Taylor, speaking at last week's City Council meeting during a discussion on the Base Line Rd. affordable housing project.

WRONG. Queen Ellen had it exactly backwards. This and every contentious issue that's come before the Claremont City Council since at least 1988 is a full-on three-ring circus.

Call it Cirque du Claremonsters.

We've called this thing a train wreck before. We just didn't know it was a circus train.

Saturday's Claremont Courier had an article by reporter Tony Krickl about last Tuesday's City Council meeting. As the article noted, the Claremonsters are not content to let the matter die and move on. [UPDATE: The Courier article is online now.]

Led by Ellen Taylor, Claremont League of Women Voters president and Claremont Police Commissioner Barbara Musselman (aka, Miss Personality), and Claremont Human Services Commissioner Andy Winnick, the increasingly small faction of Claremont 400 members backing the Base Line Rd. project were arguing that the city should question the legality of the L.A. County decision to not allow county funding of affordable housing projects within 500 feet of a major highway - a move that effectively killed the Base Line Rd. site as a viable affordable housing location.

During the meeting, Queen Ellen ordered her loyal retainer, city attorney Sonia Carvalho, to see if the L.A. County Community Development Commission (CDC) violated California's Brown Act sunshine law in making that decision. Taylor and company also hinted a dark conspiracy of county representatives who wanted to thwart the Claremonsters' affordable housing plans.

Such is the Claremont 400's outsized self-image of their town that they imagine that a county of over 10 million people would choose to scheme and skulk around in backrooms in order to single out one very small town of 35,000 people on the county's far eastern fringe.

The same group headed by Taylor has made similar arguments regarding the USC School of Medicine study that was published in the Lancet medical journal last year. That study formed the basis of the county funding policy change. Using Taylor's twisted reasoning, the USC researchers, using their evil prescience, knew 11 years ago that they would have to conduct their study in order to put a halt to the Base Line Rd. project.

Taylor, Musselman, and Winnick would have us believe that the researchers then falsely obtained grant money and 11,000 test subjects in order to justify their spurious findings, which they then handed over to the L.A. County CDC to cut off the funding for the Base Line project.

All of this kooky thinking really explains many of the Claremonsters' past actions. They actually believe that Claremont is the center of the universe. No wonder Claremont Heritage's map of the town (pictured at left) seems to lack a proper sense of scale.

We've preached the need for humility before, and the affordable housing issue certainly illustrates how the absence of that quality causes us no end of trouble.

So, now, instead of focusing on finding a viable alternative for the project they say is vital to Claremont, Queen Ellen and her court want to spend staff time and resources proving their odd, conspiratorial theories, mostly because they cannot admit they were wrong.

Citizen Michael John Keenan had the best commentary on this red herring. Keenan and remarked on the Brown Act question. He brought up the City Council's closed session decision last year to spend $1 million from the city's General Fund reserve to make up for the $1 million state of California grant that was denied Claremont for the purchase of Johnson's Pasture.

Keenan was basically saying, "Claremonsters who live in glass houses...." You go, Michael!

Look for more silly council behavior in April, when Queen Ellen succeeds current Mayor Peter Yao.

* * *

There were more than a few notable absences at last Tuesday's meeting. Claremont 400 candidate-to-be, Planning Commissioner Bob Tener, has apparently gotten off the Base Line project train. No dummy he, Tener knows a dog when he sees one, and he no doubt doesn't want to be too closely associated with a loser. Wouldn't want to imperil your run at a council seat, would you, Bob?

The League of Women Voters point person on the Base Line project, Karen Vance, was also not at the meeting.

* * *

Saturday's Courier also carried a "My Side of the Line" op-ed piece by Courier editor Rebecca JamesCourie, who didn't mince words on the Base Line Rd. issue:

Let’s take the blinders off and direct staff to look for other viable locations. The old COURIER site certainly has our vote. Although we were loath to give it up, we consider the location to be ideal for affordable housing. Youngsters could walk to school, parents could walk to markets and the need for transportation would be minimal. Not to mention they would be right by the Metrolink to take them to other locations.

As far as the Baseline Road site is concerned, write the check! Please write the check, give it to the redevelopment agency and get on with it! Let the police department have their much-needed and larger facility. We have truly given this project too much of our time. It has become a political volleyball that has been tossed around for so long that it has become ridiculous. The idea of affordable housing is certainly relevant. Let’s make it workable.

Hear, hear! We would also add that if the city does go forward with a citizen's committee to look at alternatives to the Base Line Rd. project, they must take care to select a committee that includes people who were opposed to the Base Line Rd. project.

The Claremonsters have falsely claimed that the project opponents were NIMBYs (shorthand for Not In My Backyard). The 400 loves to pin the NIMBY label on anyone who questions one of their project. Now that the 400 have lost, though, they should forfeit the right to have exclusive control over the choice of an alternative. They screwed up the last one, what would lead us to believe they can be trusted to do any differently this time around?

Moreover, the equation the Claremonsters posit, opposition to the Base Line site = opposition to ANY affordable housing, is a lie. A number of Base Line opponents have expressed a desire to participate in the alternatives committee, and they should be welcomed into the process.

Let's see the 400 put their money where their mouths are. If the "process" is really fair and open, anyone who wants should be allowed to participate. Maybe then we can forestall the faulty decision-making that has plagued us for far too long.

Sunday Mailbag

A reader wrote in with some tips on how motorists ticketed by the Claremont Police Department for honking in support of anti-war protesters should deal with the citations. Like us, the reader didn't think using the First Amendment as a defense would get very far when it comes to Claremont:

Traffic court judges rubber-stamp everything that makes it into the courtroom -- traffic court is principally a revenue-production factory, and anyone walking in with constitutional arguments about freedom of speech is going to be cut off about three seconds into their comments. But I beat an illegal Claremont speeding ticket by paying $350 to a lawyer to file a demurrer -- it makes victory much more likely, and pays for itself in stable insurance premiums. A demurrer is a claim that even if you did what the police say you did, it wasn't illegal, so the matter shouldn't be before the court. The judge takes it up outside the regular traffic court session, and the city has to respond in writing and send a lawyer if they want to prevail. I went to Antonio Bestard, across the street from the courthouse. My bet is that these folks will lose without a lawyer, and win with a lawyer. FWIW.

Oh, and trying to get the city to agree to dismiss an unlawful citation? No. I still have a letter from what's-his-name, the last police chief (whose name I tended to forget even when he was still on the job), acknowledging that the citation I had received had been issued contrary to the provisions of the Vehicle Code. He suggested that I tell it to the judge. They don't give fine revenue back out of the kindness of their hearts. Hire a lawyer.

* * *

And Planning Commissioner Tom Lamb wrote in with his take on some housing developments in Claremont, including the Base Line Rd. affordable project. Lamb says he wouldn't have voted to approve two condo developments on Base Line if the information from the affordable housing Environmental Impact Report (EIR) and the USC School of Medicine study about the effects of freeway pollution on children living within 500 feet of housing had been available.

Lamb went on say that our interpretation of how policy decisions are made in Claremont didn't include the significant changes that have taken place since former Claremont City Manager Glenn Southard left town for the city of Indio.

Lamb says the commissions he has worked on (Planning and Traffic & Transportation) have been much more open to independence than that in the Southard days. We think that's a fair assessment, but would like to point out that some city commissions, most notably Human Services, continue to function as a political arm of the Claremont 400. Witness the full-page ad in support of the Base Line Rd. affordable housing project taken out in the Claremont Courier by the Human Services Commission and the Claremont League of Women Voters.

Also, Planning Commissioner Bob Tener was one of the Claremont 400 throwing his weight in along with Human Services Commissioner Andy Winnick in favor of the Base Line Rd. project.

Lamb also has an interesting proposal for the Padua Ave. Park site. Here is Lamb's letter (the name is used with his permission):

As a Planning Commissioner, I voted to approve the two recently permitted condominium complexes along Baseline Road. I did so partly because the initial study submitted by staff indicated no major environmental concerns. I do not fault staff for this, the Affordable Housing EIR and the USC study were not available to us at this time. Had the EIR been available, I know that I would have demanded an EIR for the other projects and I feel that the Commission as a whole would have as well.

In passing, each of these projects also include an Affordable Housing component in accordance with the City Code. 15% OF THE UNITS ARE DESIGNATED AS AFFORDABLE.

With regard to the Baseline Affordable Housing Project now under consideration, I am opposed to it principally because of the stigma placed on families who would reside there--it would be a "Project" rather than an integrated residential development. The other, and from my perspective, the most compelling argument against the development is the fact that the site is not a good one from a planning perspective.

Logically, the best site would be the Padua Park area. Perhaps dividing the 20+ acre site in two with half retained as a neighborhood park and the the other ten acres developed into an integrated residential development.

And, lastly, not all commissioners, in fact, I suspect less than you might believe are blindly following the party line. Since the departure of Glenn Southard I have seen a collective effort on the part of Commissioners, at least in the two Commissions of which I have been a part, to question the staff and to challenge their assumptions and recommendations in an effort to achieve the best for the City, rather than to accept everything as a fait accompli.

Tom Lamb

Mismanaged Risk

PAST IS PROLOGUE

We've written quite extensively over the past several months on the affordable housing project on Base Line Rd. We've chosen the issue because we feel it offers a perfect case study for what has gone wrong in our local decision-making over the past 20 years.

Whether it's fiscal policy, police policy, parks and recreation policy, redevelopment policy, maintenance policy or employment policy, the same factors in mismanagement by city staff, elected and appointed officials, and the social network that ties them all together have been at the heart of all our various crises.

It's been very easy to predict the actions that staff, city officials, and the Claremont 400 will take because they have the same kinds of actions again and again in the past. As the saying goes, "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me." Or, "The definition of stupidity is to do the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result."

Still, we have to wonder, what sort of growth as a community is it going to take to break out of this stupid cycle?


RISKY BUSINESS

On Monday we wrote about the lack of understanding of risk that clouds the arguments of proponents of the affordable housing project. The proponents, groups like the Claremont League of Women Voters or individuals like Claremont Democratic Club president Bob Gerecke and Human Services Commissioner Andy Winnick (more on the apoplectic Mr. Winnick in future posts), have criticized opponents who feel that the Base Line project should be moved to a different site because the project's Environmental Impact Report found that the site's proximity to the 210 Freeway will present hazardous pollutant impacts to children.

We find it odd that Winnick, Gerecke, and others who are nominally liberal Democrats in their politics would so eagerly abandon the environmental plank of their party's platform to push this project through. But, as we've said again and again, this sort of hypocrisy is what undermines the credibility of Winnick, et. al., in this particular instance and the Claremont 400 in general.

The ease and willingness with which they contradict and abandon previous positions is why such people cannot be believed. This capriciousness underlines the lack of rational thought involved in their positions on this and other issues. Measured against their own words, they are inconstant, emotional, and insincere - some of the very things they attribute to their opponents.

Winnick and others in the January 8th Claremont City Council meeting railed against the opposition to the Base Line Rd. project in condescending, patronizing and mocking voices. Worse, not only did they choose to ignore the weight of considerable scientific and medical evidence (a 10-year long study by the USC School of Medicine involving 11,000 subjects), but they pretty much called anyone who use such evidence in their arguments ignorant and racist.

In their arguments, Winnick and other proponents of the Base Line Rd. project say that it is not for the city of Claremont, the project opposition, the USC researchers, or anyone else to determine what risks the future affordable housing tenants should take. Winnick and company say that it should be up to each individual tenant to decide for themselves.

It is this Winnickian point that we find most hypocritical of all. One of the main complaints of Democrats with our current economy (Winnick, an economist, should know this) is that the burden of risk has increasingly shifted to individuals, away from employers and away from the government.

Private corporations, for instance, are requiring employees to pay ever larger portions of their health insurance (if it's even offered). And the private retirement pension is pretty much a thing of the past. Employees have to fund their own 401(k)s or other individual retirement accounts.

Or consider the debate over privatizing Social Security. Conservatives argue that individuals would be much better and much more efficient at managing their own investment risks than the government. Liberals, on the other hand, say that Social Security is supposed to be a safety net, a kind of insurance policy, and that it's best managed by the government in the safest, lowest risk sorts of investments.

Yet, in this one particular, local project, the local League of Women Voters, Winnick and the rest - who are all on the liberal to moderate end of the political spectrum - are making the argument for less government intervention (except for construction money) and much more individual risk.


REVERSED PSYCHOLOGY

We've been left puzzled by the upside-down world that Winnick and the League have been inhabiting. However, we did manage to find some very useful scholarly advice written in October, 2004, that helps us understand or at least recognize such hypocrisy. The essay we found discussed the need for students to think critically when evaluating information:

By Critical Thinking I mean developing the habit, the routine reaction, to question everything one reads or is told -- and to do so from two perspectives:

First, we have to train our students to always ask – “What is the veracity of the author or speaker?” – which itself has two aspects:

• Does the person have an agenda, is s/he likely to be trying to persuade in support of some cause and how likely is the person to be shading the truth in support of that cause? – and
  
  
• Even if the person is attempting to be honest and “objective”, even if the person thinks s/he is being “scientific” or as the principles texts call it thinks s/he is “practicing Positive theory” – nevertheless, we have to train our students to ask: “What is her/his ideological perspective?” – “Where is s/he coming from?” – for we must all understand, and we must teach our students to understand, that no one is truly objective.

Good advice from a professor of economics and statistics, to which we might add the question, to what extent are the speaker's words consistent with past statements and positions?

The author of this piece? Andrew J. Winnick, California State University, Los Angeles.

League Maneuvers

TAYLOR POWER PLAY

As we noted in Wednesday's post, the Claremont City Council ended up certifying the environmental impact report (EIR) for the project. However, they only did so after two votes.

Councilmember Ellen Taylor made the first motion, which would have approved the EIR but which would also have removed from consideration any of the possible alternatives to the project. This was a power play on Taylor's part because if approved there would have been no chance of the project being moved.

Taylor's motion was defeated 3-2 (FOR: Taylor, Yao; AGAINST: Calaycay, Elderkin, Pedroza).

The second motion, which was approved 4-1 (with Calaycay dissenting), kept the alternatives available for future consideration.

Perusing the video for Tuesday night's council meeting, we counted a total of 32 people who spoke during the public comment on the project EIR. Of those, 22 were against the project and 10 for - more than a super-majority against putting the project on Base Line Rd.

What was more interesting than the numbers was the composition of the speakers. The people who spoke against the project were not members of Claremont's elite. They were average citizens. The proponents, on the other hand, were mostly all either connected to the Claremont League of Women Voters or they were city commissioners (or both). Among them were:

• C. Freeman Allen (LWV member)
• Bob Tener (Planning Commissioner, former Architectural Commissioner, City Council aspirant)
• Gwen Carr (LWV member, Human Services Commission Chair)
• Bob Gerecke (LWV member, Claremont Democratic Club President, spouse of Katie Gerecke, former LWV President)
• Andy Winnick (Human Services Commissioner)
• Mary Noonan (LWV member)
• Sharon Hightower (LWV Member, former Planning Commission Chair, chair of the city's General Plan Advisory Committee)
• Helaine Goldwater (LWV member, former Police Commission chair)

Looking at the above names really underscores the main problem with the process for approving these sorts of projects. If you are an average citizen you are really competing on an unequal playing field in trying to have a voice in the process. Your voice is really worth less than half of any of the people listed above. (Odd to see Mary Noonan throwing in with these folks, but such are the times we live in.)

The process is inherently unfair because there are no checks and balances. In these matters, the Claremont 400 and their representatives act as proponents, legislators, and judges. That is why people are compelled to challenge the city in court or in elections (RECALL!, as was shouted out more than once Tuesday night).

Moving the matter to court at least removes the city as final arbiter. Of course, litigation is never easy, but as the Palmer Canyon lawsuit showed, the city can be roundly defeated when the case is strong enough.


THE LEAGUE ON THE ATTACK

What's particularly odd about this case is the ignorance displayed by people like Winnick, Tener, Gerecke, Hightower, Goldwater, and the like. They've tried to take the main significant issue raised by the EIR - the fact that there will be unavoidable hazardous environmental impacts to children growing up on the Base Line site - and frame that as if it were an invalid argument raised by the project opponents.

This is, of course, a lie. The environmental concern about the site was NOT created by the people opposed to the Base Line project. The issue was raised by the city's EIR and by the USC Keck School of Medicine study that found children who lived within 500 feet of major highway had a much higher likelihood of impaired lung development.

When speakers like Mary Noonan get up and say that their children grew up next to the 10 Freeway and that their lungs are just fine, they think they're criticizing the project opponents. However, they are really taking on the USC Keck School work, which was a 10-year, peer-reviewed scientific study involving 11,000 children and published in the British medical journal The Lancet in February, 2007.

To someone watching from the outside, Noonan and the others sound every bit as ignorant as Flat Earthers in their remarks. We seriously doubt that Noonan or Winnick or Goldwater have spent 10 years, as the USC researchers did, compiling data on lung development in their children.

Yet, the League and Claremont 400 proponents of this project seem to be arguing that the USC study was part of a grand conspiracy of Base Line Project opponents to defeat their well-intentioned plan for affordable housing.

Imagine the cunning it took for the USC researchers to plan more than 10 years ago to set about to undermine the Claremont affordable housing project, to apply for grant money for their study, to gather research subjects, to devote 10 years of research time, resources and energy to their devious plan!

The ignorance of Winnick, et. al., extends to other arguments. For instance, they blur the distinction that the USC study made between living within 500 feet of major highway and merely living in the vicinity. To the study authors, there is a very significant difference. That is why some of the study's authors have weighed in on the subject.

And, Winnick and the like say that since we've built such developments in the past, we should continue to, which is really the same logic as saying that since we allowed certain kinds of auto exhaust systems in 1949, we shouldn't have catalytic converters.

The League also falsely argues that the timetable for building the affordable housing project makes the alternatives impossible. They claim that if we were to switch to one of the other possible sites it would take much longer than sticking to the current plan. This is nonsense and quite the opposite of the real situation.

In reality, if the city doesn't go to an alternative plan, one without the environmental concerns of the Base Line Rd. site, they will not qualify for the grants the city is counting on to build the project - that is, after any litigation on the matter has been hashed out. All you have to do is look at the Padua Park project to see where such stupidity leads. Seven years after a similar fight, after litigation finally ended, the park has no outside funding and the city is having to build the project in stages.

So, we have to ask, does the League really believe that changing to an alternative site would take seven years? Of course not! For one thing, an EIR would likely not be needed, and there would likely not be the opposition there is to the current plan. But the path-of-least-resistance strategy is lost on the clueless League, whose members seem to take an almost sadistic pleasure in hammering flawed projects down the throats of the public.

The League and friends also like the Andy Winnick tactic of disparaging members of the public who disagree with him. On Tuesday night, Winnick said he found the arguments opposed to the project (which by extension includes the arguments of the SCAQMD, the USC researchers, LA County Supervisor Michael Antonovich's oiffce) reprehensible. What Winnick is really peeved about is that ANYONE would question his assumptions. There is no logic or reason at work here.


THE EXAMPLE OF 2006

In the end, you can count on the League and the Claremont 400 will do as they always do: Turn on the opponents. They aren't just making bad arguments, the League says. They are EVIL.

In the 2006 Parks and Pastures Assessment District vote, they attacked opponents of the assessment saying that the claims of those people that they supported an alternative funding measure to buy Johnson's Pasture were false. The assessment proponents in essence called the opposition liars.

In that assessment campaign, the League, who just as they have done with the affordable housing issue, ran a large newspaper ad in support of the assessment. Further, the assessment proponents argued that the alternative, a bond measure, would never pass and that the assessment opponents would not work to help get a bond passed.

The reality was, after the assessment failed 44% to 56%, that a number of people who had opposed the assessment stepped up and worked with people they had formerly opposed and got a bond passed with a remarkable 72% of the vote in November, 2006. And many of the Claremont 400 people who had worked on the assessment - former mayors Diann Ring, Judy Wright, Al Leiga, Paul Held, and many others - were nowhere to be seen in the bond campaign.

So when the League and others claim that their affordable housing opponents are disingenuous in saying they support affordable housing at any other site but the current one, you have to take that with a grain of salt. There's the clear, recent example of Johnson's Pasture to show that people who've opposed one thing can turn around and work together to get an alternative accomplished.

If anything what that past example showed is the unreliability of the Claremont 400 when it comes to compromising and to working together with the larger community to achieve the consensus the League is always prattling on about.

This is where a community relies on its elected officials for guidance and leadership. The problem is that in the past the Claremont 400 has controlled all of the levers of power so that any compromise was impossible. Whether or not that control is as monolithic as in past years remains to be seen.

COMING UP: The Insider is at work on more video from Tuesday's meeting, including plenty of footage of a sour Andy Winnick so that you can see for yourself just how humorless and angry he can be.

Andy Winnick: The Gift That Keeps On Giving

We noticed in the Courier of December 19, 2007, that there was a letter from a Marc Selznick in support of the proposed affordable housing project on Baseline [not currently linked on Courier website]. It made many of the same specious points as the December 1 letter by Andy Winnick, noted here earlier, but without the incisive analysis and eloquence and the uber-paternalistic 'tude.

That got us to wondering how a man of Andy Winnick's superb but nonetheless merely human ability could have written such an obviously divinely-inspired letter. Sure, we had found that it must have been in his DNA: that was made clear by the discovery of the 1939 letter from Andy Winnick's distant relative discussed in our previous post.

But if it was such a strong expression of nature, wouldn't it have appeared elsewhere in Winnick's genetic line?

Then we ran across a mini-scandal concerning the FEMA trailers used to house Katrina hurricane victims. Seems that they were loaded with poisonous formaldehyde and people in FEMA knew it and let the poor victims live in them anyway. (the government protocol was to blow the trailers out with forced air for a half hour before even entering them.) We thought, "there must be a Winnick involved in this."

And what do you know? A quick FOIA request to the Federal Goverment turned up this August 29, 2005 letter from Brownie Winnick, a mid-level bureaucrat at FEMA. Must be a cousin of Andy's at some remove or another.

Compare this language with the language of Andy Winnick's December 1 letter to the Courier [reproduced below]. You'll see why President Bush was really referring to Brownie Winnick when he famously said, "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."

Andy, you're doing a heck of a job.

[Click on image for an enlarged readable version. Compare the two letters side-by-side.]

Saturday Mail

We've got quite a backlog of email to get to, and we'll try to tackle that as time permits.

One frequent reader wrote in to comment on yesterday's post about some local Democrats and the Base Line Rd. affordable housing:

Now now Buzz, I am an ultra liberal tree hugging Democrat. And very against the proposed site for the low and affordable housing site only because of the environmental impact on longer term childhood residents. So lets not jump on Democrats. First of all you now know why I am no longer a member of the Claremont Democrat club, because I did find them to not be democratic but a front organization for the fascist Claremont 400. True Democrats would never condone the erection of such a facility that could be so harmful. The site in question should only be for use of a governmental or business nature. Please note to the Faux Claremont Democratic Club that even the Ontario Montclair School District in the face of school closures are consider those schools closest to the freeway as the ones to be closed first.

Don't defame us "good" Democrats.

Our apologizes to our reader. We were just pointing out what seemed like obvious contradictions between actions of a number of prominent local Democrats, several of whom are on the board of the local Democratic Club, and the party's traditional position on environmental issues.

Human Services Commissioner Andrew Winnick, who pushed the Human Services Commission to issue a resolution in support of the Base Line Rd. project (to give the City Council cover, as Winnick will tell anyone who will listen), continually makes a false argument that the Base Line Rd. site is the only possibility for affordable housing.

Winnick gives the public a false choice between Base Line Rd. or no project and tosses aside the environmental plank of the Democratic Party's platform. What's this doing here? Plunk.

Rather than turn to finding and achieving viable alternatives, Winnick and his friends move farther and farther out of step with their party and with rationality in their pronouncements on the project. In the face of contrary evidence, they're unable to veer from their pre-detemined course and are unwilling to listen to reason. Must...stay...the...course, stay the course.

In any case, sorry if you felt tarred by our critical brush yesterday. Winnick's hypocrisy obviously does not extend to our reader or all the Democrats the reader represents.

Friday's Environmental Report

EIR BLUES

A Claremonter was in the news recently for Claremont's favorite pastime: A lawsuit involving an Environmental Impact Report.

James Walters, a professor of bioethics at Loma Linda University, likes to build houses on the side. Developer Walters owns a prime piece of real estate outside of Lone Pine, CA, on the road to Whitney Portal, where a trailhead to Mt. Whitney is located. The area, in the foothills of the eastern Sierras, is described as pristine.

Walters made the news in the Los Angeles Times in 2005 when he was trying to build a 27-home luxury development called Whitney Portal Preserve on the property.

(We've figured out how to develop anything - just add the word "Preserve" to the project. Remember Centex Homes' Stone Canyon Preserve at Mt. Baldy Rd. and Padua Ave. in northeast Claremont?)

An organization called the Save Round Valley Alliance (SRVA) argued that the Environmental Impact Report (EIR) for the project was inadequate. SRVA sued Inyo County, which approved the EIR, and has been trying to get them to consider an alternative to the project, namely working a land-swap deal whereby the developer could get a parcel of land in a less environmentally significant area in return for not building on the proposed site.

According to an article posted on the Sierra Fund website, the Whitney Portal Preserve EIR was improperly passed by Inyo County officials. A three-judge panel in Riverside ruled that the EIR did not fully consider alternatives to the project:

SRVA Advocates for Smart Growth, the plaintiffs in the case, have long advocated for a better blueprint for development in the region. They argued that Inyo County decision-makers should have considered the possibility of a land swap, whereby the threatened landscape could be protected and growth could be focused closer to existing development.

The panel of judges agreed. “We agree with SRVA that the analysis of the land exchange alternative is legally insufficient and reverse on that ground. The failure…effectively preclude[d] informed decision-making and informed public participation, thereby thwarting the statutory goals of the EIR process.”

....

State law requires that environmental review provide decision-makers with adequate information to assess the impacts of a proposed project, including alternatives to the proposal. But, according to the final ruling, environmental review for this project "…includes only the barest of facts…, vague and unsupported conclusions about aesthetics, views, and economic objectives, and no independent analysis whatsoever of relevant considerations.”

The decision is another important example of citizen action to stop illegal approvals of Sierra development. “We are delighted with this decision," said Tamara Galanter of Shute, Mihaly & Weinberger LLP, counsel for SRVA. "The 47 page ruling reflects a careful analysis of the applicable law and recognizes the importance of considering alternatives as part of the environmental review process."

Walters isn't giving up without a fight, as the LA Times reported today.


ODD TIMES

Another sign of the Apocalypse:

Given the nature and location of the development, you might rightly figure that Professor Walters is a card-carrying, property-rights, small government Republican. Guess again. His political donations have been to Democratic candidates: $1,250 to John Kerry in 2004 and $1,000 Barack Obama in 2007.

Perhaps we should expect this. After all, in Claremont's own current EIR battle over the Base Line Rd. affordable housing project, we have such staunch Democrats as Human Services Commissioner Andrew Winnick, HS Commissioner Valerie Martinez, local Democratic Club president Bob Gerecke, Claremont Graduate University professor Dean McHenry, City Councilmember Ellen Taylor, and the entire cast and crew of the Claremont League of Women Voters, arguing that the project go forward.

In this upside-down world, the local Democrats have essentially adopted the logic used by tobacco companies to sell cigarettes, choosing to ignore a 10-year-long study by the USC Keck School of Medicine cited in the EIR that found that building a project so close to a major highway will likely lead to impaired lung development in children living there.

Winnick and the city believe, wrongly, that making the adults who move into the proposed units sign a notice that they are aware of the potential health hazards will waive any city liability in the future should kids living in the project develop lung problems. (Parents cannot sign away the rights of their minor children to sue.)

Our Democrats are also ignoring the recommendation by the South Coast Air Quality Management District and LA County Supervisor Mike Antonovich's office that the project be built elsewhere because of the pollution concerns.

Strangely, Winnick, Martinez, McHenry, and the rest have made their main talking point the argument that people have long lived near freeways, so we should allow the city to continue to build this project next to the 210 Freeway. In doing so, they reject the scientific evidence - evidence not on hand, not presented, when those older homes were built. (People have been smoking for years without harm, they need to be allowed to continue to use our safe, time-tested product.)

And, just as in the Whitney Portal Preserve case, the City Council, Winnick, Martinez, McHenry, et. al. (sound like defendants in a lawsuit?) are ignoring the alternatives. In fact, Winnick and others, have failed to mention the very realistic alternatives to the Base Line Rd. site. They act as if the alternatives don't exist. (Maybe if we don't talk about it, no one will remember there are other possibilities.)

Incidentally, does anyone know where Winnick, Martinez, and the rest were when Claremont's Village Expansion was being developed. Maybe they can explain why, with all the housing units that went in, there was no affordable housing component there or in any of the other housing developments that have been put into Claremont in the last 15 years. Apparently, it wasn't important to them.

Coincidentally, the Washington Post recently had a list of top 10 potential government ethics scandals. Number 10 has special significance for Claremont:

10. FEMA knowingly let Katrina victims live in hazardous trailers: Records indicate that the Federal Emergency Management Agency had cautioned its workers about trailers contaminated with formaldehyde. But the agency has been accused of delaying testing for the substance in trailers occupied by people left homeless by the hurricane.

A Republican adminisration's faux-pas serving as a template for Claremont's future foibles. Left is right, right is left. Strange times indeed.


BB & K WINDFALL

Of course, not everyone loses if there is an EIR challenge because of Winnick & Co.'s muleheaded intransigence. At least City Attorney Sonia Carvalho's firm, Best, Best & Krieger, will likely get to defend the challenge, and litigation will mean hundreds of billable hours of defense work for the firm or whomever gets the case.

It may not be the best public policy, or the best process for developing that policy, but it's what we allow it to be.

Andy Winnick Channels Distant Relative

Yesterday's post mentioned Andy Winnick, a distinguished member of the Claremont Human Services Commission. You may recall that on December 1, 2007, Mr. Winnick unburdened himself of a letter to the Courier on the affordable housing issue. It is online at this link.

In our relentless researches to understand the minds of such people, we have found an interesting letter from a 1939 number of the Bronx Times Reporter. It is by a Mr. Morris Samuel Winnick, a distant relative of Andy Winnick. We would never accuse Professor Winnick of plagiarism. We believe that channeling relatives qualifies as fair use.

We believe moreover that the discovery of this letter will inform the debate here in Claremont on the issue of health hazards at the Baseline site for the proposed affordable housing development, and we make it available as a public service.

Here is Andy Winnick's December 1, 2007 letter side-by-side with Morris Samuel Winnick's July 4, 1939 letter.

Click on the images to enlarge and to read. Or click on image below for a larger, more readable copy of the antique Morris Winnick letter. Best to print them or open two windows to compare them side-by-side.

The Windmills are Weakening

The Courier had an informative article in Wednesdays paper (December 12, 2007; you need to buy the paper because the article is not linked online.)

Under the head, "Baseline Project Still Under Fire", Tony Krickl reports the sands shifting even more under the foundation--such as it is--of the Baseline Affordable Housing proposal.

Comes now the spokesman for Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich quoted as saying, "He [Supervisor Antonovich] clearly has concerns about the project, and he has communicated them to the city and the developer."

Might those be the horrible reviews the project has received in the City-sponsored Environmental Impact Report, or perhaps the letter form the South Coast Air Quality Management District saying, "SCAQMD staff considers it [the affordable housing project on Baseline] to be incompatible land use based on proximity to the freeway."

According to Brian Desatnik, the City staffer pushing this project, it would be "in serious jeopardy" if Supervisor Antonovich and the Board of Supervisors deny funding to the developer. (The Courier article discusses why Supervisor Antonovich is important to the funding process)

There is $2.5 million needed from the Feds and the State for this project. One of the things that these entities consider is community support. It is short-sighted for the City to persist in pushing a project that so clearly divides the community while having the manifest health problems that it has.

Of course, Human Services Commissioner Andrew Winnick can always be counted upon to be the stern no-nonsense teacher. No nonsense about economic justice. No nonsense about environmental justice. No nonsense about children's health. No nonsense about community buy-in. No nonsense that I, Winnick, could learn anything from anybody else. He sponsored a resolution at Human Services last week that is quoted in the article: "The Commission believes this project will provide low and very low-income members of the community the opportunity to live in Claremont, and therefore afford their family [sic] the many options and opportunities that go along with living in this city."

And so would the feasible alternative sites.

The handwriting is on the wall on this project, and it is our hope that Mayor Yao can gracefully find an off-ramp. Otherwise, the vision we had, coming from a 60s-era comedy album, might come all too true: