Dept. of Corrections

A couple readers wrote in to comment about our post on the missing developmentally disabled person who went missing for a few days. We had noted that a reader had written in to ask why the City's CodeRED system wasn't used to notify the public about the missing person.

Turns out the Claremont police did use the CodeRED system as well as its E-Watch email alert system to let people know about the teen they were looking for. However, the reader who wrote in on this point noted this and was actually wondering why the CodeRED alert didn't get to him/her until four days after the person went missing.

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?

Fire Threat Fades

The U.S. Forest Service has been busy this past week managing the fire response personnel fighting the Big Horn Fire. The fire was listed as 72% contained yesterday, and is expected to be fully contained by 6pm Sunday, barring an unforeseen flare-up. The fire has burned 461 acres as of yesterday's incident report.

Demobilization of the firefighting crews has begun, and the number of personnel attached to the incident was down to 388 yesterday from a high of 755. Mt. Baldy Rd. remained closed at Shinn Rd. to non-residents, but the Mt. Baldy Village school reopened yesterday.

Today's Claremont Courier has a story by Tony Krickl on the fire. Krickl's article notes that Claremont's CodeRed system was used to notify about 21,000 residents of the fire's status. (Long-time readers may recall that CodeRed was implemented during the City Attorney-induced turmoil of Paystubgate last September.)

Krickl's article also reports that fire investigators believe the fire was caused by people, though it is unknown at this point if it was intentional.

The Daily Bulletin had an article of a different sort about the Forest Service. According to a piece by Rod Leveque, Rancho Cucamonga resident and former Forest Service accountant Kathy Stamps was arrested yesterday and stands accused of embezzling over $1.4 million from the Forest Service:

Prosecutors allege Stamps, who worked as an accountant for the Forest Service office in Arcadia, transferred the money from government coffers into the bank account of her family's corporation, DKLD, between January 2002 and October 2004.

They say the money had been allocated to the Forest Service by private companies for public-works projects in the Angeles National Forest.

The lost money was discovered by other employees after Stamps left her job.

According to public records and the corporation's Web site, Stamps and her husband used money from DKLD to open several franchise businesses in the Inland Empire, including a Wing Stop restaurant at 7212 Archibald Ave. in Rancho Cucamonga.

The restaurant, which opened in 2004, specializes in chicken wings.

Talk about the federal government pumping money into the local economy!

Claremont Follies

City Attorney Action

We got to thinking about the Claremont City Attorney Sonia Carvalho's use of attorney-client privilege as a rationale for her refusal to release a copy of her complaint to Google about our "Labor Day" post. Carvalho's refusal came after
reporter Will Bigham at the Daily Bulletin requested the complaint.

A question for the lawyers among us: Can Carvalho assert a privilege of confidentiality for a third-party communication, one not between herself and her client (the city of Claremont)?


Daily Bulletin, Freedom Friday

The Daily Bulletin continued its coverage of the issue today with a front page, above-the-fold article skewering Carvalho's confidentiality argument. The Bulletin's graphic consisted a small stack of the pay stubs in questions with the names redacted.

The article, again by Bigham, is part of the Bulletin's ongoing Freedom Friday series. In the piece, Carvalho continues her revolving door reasons for withholding the information, having moved from the pay stubs are confidential to the stubs are copyrighted and, today, to asserting the privacy rights of city employees:

City Attorney Sonia Carvalho said the pay stubs contained private, personal information such as references to survivor benefits, use of vacation and sick time, and information on life-insurance benefits.

"Details as to how that employee directs his or her money - be it to a retirement plan, or to a union for dues, or for reimbursement for a holiday party - should not be released to the public for inspection and discussion," Carvalho said.

Public records experts interviewed by Bigham disputed Carvalho's contentions about the stubs:

But according to public- records experts who considered, item by item, the information included on city pay stubs, the documents are a public record that the city would be required to release upon request - with fewer redactions than Carvalho indicates should be made.

The pay stubs include a "grouping of little factoids about various little entitlements that (employees) have from the city, which says nothing about them as human beings or as city employees," said Terry Francke, general counsel for Californians Aware.

The article pointed out as an example that the pay stub for City Manager Jeff Parker, one of two that we posted, contained no personal identifying information (Social Security numbers, dates of birth, etc....). It did quote Peter Scheer, executive director for the California First Amendment Coalition, as saying that bank routing numbers for the city's bank account might have to be redacted.


The Blogosphere Reacts

The story seemed to gain some traction in the Blogosphere and with journalists, two groups with huge stakes in the matter.

The USC Annenberg School of Journalism weighed in yesterday with a piece by Robert Niles questioning the city's copyright claim.

And the Foothill Cities blog has a great piece on the troubling way in which Google caved in to the city of Claremont and pulled the plug on the pay stubs without looking into the substance of the city's complaint. (Still no response from Google to our inquires into the exact text of Claremont's complaint.)

There's also a lively discussion on the FC post.

We've also received a lot of email, which we hope to get to this weekend.


Claremont PD Readies for Action

Meanwhile, we haven't been able to confirm if the Claremont Police Department has decided to activate it's vaunted CodeRed system in an effort to deal with Paystubgate.