Solis and Friends Honored

U.S. Labor Secretary Hilda Solis (pictured, right) was back in the San Gabriel Valley last week to accept an award from the San Gabriel Valley Economic Partnership and the San Gabriel Valley Council of Governments.

Solis, and three others each received Jack Phillips Awards for their "outstanding contributions to the betterment of the San Gabriel Valley." The ceremony took place in the City of Industry last Thursday evening.

One of the other award winners was none other than former Claremont city manager Glenn Southard. We don't know about any betterment Southard contributed to the SGV, but ol' fellow was never shy about the betterment of Glenn Southard, at least in terms of his public compensation.

The San Gabriel Valley Tribune covered the awards ceremony and had this to say about Southard's award:

Former Claremont mayor Judy Wright gave an award to Southard, who currently serves as city manager in Indio.

A founding member of the COG, Southard worked hard in the organization's early years to make sure it got off on the right foot, Wright said.

One thing is for sure: no one worked professional networking as well as Southard (left). He and his staffs exploited these things to no end in tireless efforts to get appointed to boards of organizations like the Municipal Managment Association of Southern California or the California City Management Foundation, which Southard also helped found.

You notice, when you look at some of these groups, that there are an awful lot of municipal vendors - like engineering and law firms - that either have employees on the groups' boards or that donate money to the associations. Once on the boards of these groups, Southard and his staff would leverage those networks to do things like find a new job if they wore out their respective welcomes, as Southard did when he fled Claremont for Indio.

Southard's betterment program for the City of Indio hasn't fared well, incidentally. The desert city faces a deficit of $14 million. Southard and Indio also face a $10.5 million lawsuit by the developer of a regional transportation center, and a recent Desert Sun article indicated that Southard may be up to his old tricks, promising one thing but meaning something else with the project. Here's a hint to our friends in the Coachella Valley: Compare notes.

In any event, it won't be long before Southard wins another award for his betterment of Indio. In the meantime, he and Hilda Solis can savor their Jack Phillips Awards.

Catch the Fever!

Below:
Atascadero City Manager Wade McKinney and Indio City Manager Glenn Southard pose for the April, 2008, edition of the City Manager Newsletter, a publication of Trackdown Management and Jack Simpson. All three, McKinney, Southard, and Simpson, are on the board of the California City Management Foundation, which Southard helped found.

We've been writing this past week about the situation in Indio where a portion of the city's utility tax has reportedly gone uncollected from nearly 8,000 homes and 650 businesses. Our fascination with the story has less to do with the fact that former Claremont City Manager Glenn Southard in now ensconced in that desert down and much more to do with the opportunity to view the story as a case study in crisis management by Southard.

Southard would like to have the public believe the under collection of the 23-year-old Indio utility tax preceded his administration by decades. But has anyone bothered to look at how many of those 8,000 homes and 650 businesses were constructed in the past three years during Indio's great real estate boom? Indio's population, according to U.S. Census estimates, went from 49,116 in 2000 to 76,896 - a better-than-50% increase.

So if the taxes that weren't collected came as newly constructed properties, and if many or most of those new properties were built during the Southard years in Indio, then he would have to bear a much greater share of the blame than he's been willing to up to this point.

We also suspect that Southard will do his best to slip any blame at all for the mess, which likely runs into the millions of uncollected tax dollars. As we've noted, Southard survived a number of crises in Claremont by effectively controlling the public message - defining the story himself; by using his ability to charm councilmembers into supporting his actions even at the cost of their council seats; and by marshaling the power of city employee unions to get involved politically to exert pressure on councils (see the Preserve Claremont campaign of 2005).

Spinning the public and the press is certainly not a new phenomena. It's really not much different than a medieval king having his favorite scribe write a chronicle of the monarch's most recent war of conquest.

We've seen it go on here in Claremont as well. The recent Cookie Monster flap with Claremont Mayor Ellen Taylor is a good example with Taylor trying to counter the negative attention she received by portraying herself as being concerned about the safety of the girls involved.

These things are scalable, from the local level to the highest international circles. In a lot of ways, the current Beijing Olympics is a massive PR campaign by China, complete with lip-syncing and digitally-enhanced fireworks.

And that's not all:


Chinese Officials: Deadly Virus Sweeping China Is Just Olympic Fever