Taylor to Step Down in 2009

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We're hearing through the grapevine that Claremont Mayor Ellen Taylor announced Saturday that she will not run again for the City Council in March, 2009. This leaves former Claremont Assistant City Manager Bridget Healy (the Claremont 400 replacement for Taylor) as the Claremonters' candidate of choice. Current City Councilmember Corey Calaycay is apparently going to run for re-election.

We'll have to wait and see whether or not the Claremonters target Calaycay the way they did four years ago with their Preserve Claremont campaign with the behind-the-scenes support of certain City Hall staff members. Candidate Healy was still working in Claremont at the time, and we can't wait to see what tricks she and her friends have up their sleeves this time around.

We'll know what they have in mind in another month. The period for candidates to file papers for the March election ends December 10th. If the Claremonsters do intend to go after Calaycay, they'll run a second candidate along with Healy. They'll also encourage a shadow candidate who has no chance of winning but who will draw votes away from Calaycay (anyone remember Mike Maglio in 2007?).

Oh, the games people play.

The City Council Writes Us

A FAMILIAR TUNE

Our post from Wednesday was a riff on a theme we here at the Insider have written about several times. It's been our contention, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, that the net effect of that social network known in local circles as the Claremont 400 has been the creation of an inflexible, counter-productive, regressive, intolerant system of local governance.

On the surface, things look swell, but look deeper and you will see a consistent pattern of missteps and misjudgments that in a non-dysfunctional community would result in a change in leadership, a change in direction.

Here, however, given the unique and an entrenched nature of the 400, when Claremont started down the road to a more responsive city council beginning 2001 in reaction to the fatal shooting by Claremont police of 18-year-old motorist Irvin Landrum, the 400 snapped into action, working tirelessly by spreading false rumors about critics of the local scene in an effort to undercut anyone who stood to threaten their control of City Hall.

The result has been that voices of critics like ourselves have been either been silenced or driven underground. The 400 and their main representatives on the Claremont City Council (Ellen Taylor, Linda Elderkin, and Sam Pedroza) refuse to acknowledge this past and current behavior on the part of the people who got them elected.


A BRIEF HISTORY OF PACS

The August 18th edition of the Claremont Courier carried a very good article (not available online) by Tony Krickl that explored the phenomena of local political action committees that really began in 2003 with Residents United for Claremont (RUC), a PAC organized to support the three city council incumbents in that year's municipal election.

RUC was organized by Claremont Human Services Commission Chair Valerie Martinez and received the support of many former councilmembers and commissioners, as well as one future councilmember: Sam Pedroza.

RUC was the precursor to the Preserve Claremont campaign two years later that attacked sitting Councilmember Jackie McHenry and then-candidate Corey Calaycay. The Krickl article noted:

Mr. Calaycay referred to a full-page advertisement in the COURIER in February 2005 featuring a letter written by a man whom Mr. Calaycay had never worked with that offered false information about his career and character. Paid for by Preserve Claremont, a political action committee active during the 2005 election, the ad was one of several that the group received criticism over for being negative and malicious.

Preserve Claremont included spokespersons Valerie Martinez (again), former Claremont Mayor Paul Held and Homer "Butch" Henderson, the former head pastor at the Claremont United Church of Christ and the recent chair of the city's Youth and Family Master Plan Steering Committee.


2007 - ALL ROADS LEAD TO CASM


What happened after that Preserve Claremont debacle? Was there a backlash against PACs? Hardly. In this year's campaign there were two active PACs. The Krickl article noted that the anonymous Claremont Progress group was created by two former Claremont residents, including a Newport Beach attorney who largely funded the groups $2,000 operating budget.

Claremont Progress sent out a pre-election mailer critical of Mayor Peter Yao and candidates Elderkin and Pedroza. The mailer endorsed McHenry and candidate Opanyi Nasiali.

The other group that was active in the 2007 election was Claremonters Against Strip Mining (CASM), which Krickl noted spent more than four times the amount Claremont Progress did - over $8,000 total. CASM was organized to fight the proposed Vulcan Materials Co. gravel and aggregate mining project in Northeast Claremont.

CASM and its president Mike Kunce, were largely a single issue PAC. However, the Preserve Claremont group wasted no time in trying to co-opt CASM in order to get two candidates, Elderkin and Pedroza elected. CASM ended up endorsing those two and also endorsed candidate Mike Maglio, whom the 400 knew could not win.

The strategy was to use Maglio to siphon off votes that might have gone to McHenry and Nasiali. That much was evident from the involvement of Pedroza supporter and Human Services Commissioner Ed Leavell in Maglio's campaign.

According to the Krickl article,

Several local political leaders and observers believe that the group was influenced by behind-the-scenes players who were seeking CASM's endorsement for their favored candidates.... This was done, they say, by feeding CASM's leadership questionable information and rumors about the prospect of mining in the city and certain candidates' stances on the issue.

In the run up to the election, CASM president, Mike Kunce, approached the COURIER with unverifiable information, claiming that the city council had voted in closed session to authorize negotiations with Vulcan Materials Company to allow strip mining....

Mr. Kunce's named former mayor and spokesman for Preserve Claremont, Paul Held, as his source on the information leaked from closed session, as well as "someone very close to the inner workings of city hall." If the statement is true, Mr. Kunce's claim could imply that a Brown Act violation occurred on the part of either council members or city staff for leaking information out of closed session. [Emphasis added.]

No outcry from the public on that last bit, so we can assume it's okay for the Claremont 400, without being anonymous but manipulating behind the scenes, to break the law and to spread false rumors in order to get Elderkin and Pedroza elected.


PEDROZA RESPONDS

Another thing we've observed repeatedly is the habit of the Claremont 400 to constantly erase the past, to refuse to acknowledge any error in judgment. When critics arise with valid points, the 400 will never address the facts of those arguments. They consciously avoid engaging on the issues. Instead, they attack the person speaking out. So, we ask, is it really surprising that things like anonymous blogs would arise?

We think that what frustrates the 400 the most about our humble efforts is the fact that they don't have anyone to attack, so they are left with having to deal with the information we provide - something they tend to be inept at responding to intelligently.

A case in point. We received an email from Councilmember Sam Pedroza in response to our posting from Wednesday. Did Pedroza address the concerns we raised? Did he use his skills in debate and argument to refute our points of contention? We'll let Sam speak for himself:

Date: Wed, 22 Aug 2007 10:24:58 -0700 (PDT)
From: "sam" spedroza1@verizon.net
To: claremontbuzz@yahoo.com
Subject: Claremont Insider : Why are We Here?

sam has sent you a link to a blog:

weak response, if you are just providing another view then why hide... just another coward.

Blog: Claremont Insider Post: Why are We Here? Link: http://claremontca.blogspot.com/2007/08/why-are-we-here.html

We suppose cowardice takes many forms. The worst, we feel, is that of the weak, insecure man placed in a position of power and who allows himself to manipulated, who refuses to use his position to speak out against serious things like possible Brown Act violations and the leaking of information from closed session city council meetings in order to influence elections. Cowardice need not be limited to anonymity; often it is masked in respectability.

City of Angles

Northeast Claremont has changed drastically in the past 20 years, a period coinciding with the regime of former City Manager Glenn Southard, whose planning philosophies and "vision" (to use a Claremont 400 term) are embodied in the residential developments between Mills Ave. and Padua Ave. and north of Pomello.

The other northeast development that Southard managed to avoid dealing with is the ongoing attempt by Vulcan Materials Co. to mine aggregate in the San Antonio Spreading Ground area below the San Antonio Dam.

The Spreading Grounds (seen in photo at right) is owned by a non-profit corporation called the Pomona Valley Protective Association (PVPA). PVPA was founded almost 100 years ago and was created to protect the water rights for users in La Verne, Pomona, Upland and Claremont.

The Golden State Water Co. controls nearly 50-percent of the PVPA. Remember them? Golden State Water also supplies Claremont's water, and the city has been looking at buying out Golden State to form a municipal water utility. The price? Over $100 million. Wheels within wheels.

The Vulcan mining proposal was a big election issue, pushed by an anti-mining group called Citizens Against Strip Mining (CASM). CASM has pretty much disappeared since the election after being manipulated by the Claremont 400 into endorsing Linda Elderkin, Sam Pedroza, and Mike Maglio in the municipal election last March. (Hey, CASM, what happened to the two of you?)

Mining, though, hasn't gone away, and this City Council won't be able to avoid dealing with it and the litigation Vulcan has thrown at the city in order to exercise the mining rights they lease from PVPA.

PVPA, in the meantime, is working on a deal to sell about 400 acres of the spreading grounds' 560 acres of open space. Will Bigham in last Sunday's Daily Bulletin had an article about a new report commissioned by PVPA that found that developing the 400 acres in question would not affect the spreading grounds' ability to collect runoff to recharge local groundwater basins.

Tony Krickl in the Claremont Courier also had an article on the subject. For more information on the background of this issue, check out the CASM website.

The land is still zoned by the City of Claremont as open space, so any proposal for housing or mining would have to be approved by the city. Seems like there's a lot of angles to work here.

Luckily, we have the Claremont 400 to guide us. Of course, these are the same geniuses who leased away Claremont's water rights in 1998 and who signed off on our current water rate structure - something that has allowed Golden State Water to justify charging Claremont much higher water rates than its neighboring towns. The minutes for that 1998 Council meeting noted that then-Councilmember Diann Ring was all for the water deal:

Councilmember Ring thought the proposal was historic and that many such agreements take twenty years to final[ize]. Mayor Smith agreed and thought it set a good tone for the future.

[City Council Minutes Minutes of 5/26/98 Agenda Item #17]

Not exactly a record to inspire confidence.

Faint Praise

One thing we've noticed, now and in the past, is the lack of irony among the Claremont 400. Face it folks, this is a town of literalists in almost all things. There is one notable exception, however. When they praise someone, most of the time they're being sarcastic!

We noticed this in the March City Council election when so many of the 400 were spending their time trying to pump up candidate Mike Maglio. Privately, they thought, "Poor sap. He's a loser, but he'll steal votes from McHenry and Nasiali." This a prototypical Diann Ring strategy (Ring, a former Claremont Mayor, gave a speech about getting "our city back" at a Sam Pedroza kickoff party in January, 2007).

So at every opportunity, they would assure Maglio that he was doing a great job and that he belonged with them. "You should apply for a commission if you don't win," they said.

And, of course, Maglio ended up with about 800 votes--a quarter of what he needed to get elected. But, most importantly for the Claremonsters, the margin of victory for third-place Linda Elderkin over Jackie McHenry was 600 votes. Bravo, Maglio! Bravo, Ring!

There has actually been research into the phenomenon of sarcastic praise, as The Onion reports this week:


Report: 70 Percent Of All Praise Sarcastic

(Hint for Claremonsters: The foregoing is known as "satire." In the rest of the country, it's considered humorous.)

Bulletin Redux

This was also in today's Bulletin:

Ethical tin ears in Claremont

Article Launched:02/20/2007 01:00:00 AM PST

Wednesday's City Council forum in Claremont was helpful in allowing the seven candidates to make her or his case before potential voters.

Unfortunately, it revealed that two of the candidates have an ethical tin ear. Linda Elderkin has an apparent conflict of interest involving any issue such as mining or proposed residential development on 560 acres in northeast Claremont. In just the past week, Michael Maglio has given three different answers on the extent to which he supports development on this property. Further, he has repeatedly misrepresented the facts of his position on the biggest open space issue of the past year in Claremont: funding for purchase of the Johnson's Pasture open space.
Linda Elderkin continued to fail to disclose a conflict of interest in her answer to a question about development on open space. The open space in question is owned by the Pomona Valley Protective Association (PVPA), which holds lands for water spreading purposes. Elderkin hinted darkly at the forum about the suspect form and structure of PVPA, and of its intentions for the property.

What she failed to explain was that if elected she could not participate in any discussion or action involving the PVPA property. The reason is simple. Her husband's employer, Pomona College, is one of the six owners of PVPA. There is ample precedent in Claremont, in situations involving Lew Miller when he was on council and with Mayor Pro Tem McHenry in the past year, where similar conflicts required them to recuse themselves.

When I discussed this with Elderkin after the forum, she clearly knew the facts. She told me that even if there were a conflict, she could participate in discussion but merely could not vote: her words were that "she could not take any action." I don't believe she is right, nor that her position meets the spirit of the ethical guidelines. The purpose of recusal - it comes from the Latin recusare, to refuse - means that the person tainted with the conflict neither participates in the deliberations nor the action.

The conflict of interest rules protect all parties. They protect the citizens who have an expectation that decisions will be made on the merits and not on extrinsic factors; they protect applicants who may then be assured that their applications are considered fairly, and they protect the city from potential litigation alleging an unfair process. As a self-described "process person," Elderkin should know this without the need to consult her advisers or the city attorney.

With the apparent conflict, Elderkin, if elected, cannot participate in any discussion or decision relating to the property owned by PVPA because of the ownership interest of Pomona College, her husband's employer. She has not disclosed this conflict in three candidate forums - deception or a tin ear?

Mike Maglio has shown that he will say anything in this campaign. I attended his ice cream social on Feb. 10 to hear his views on Claremont issues. He was in favor of housing to keep away the mining on the PVPA property. I asked him pointedly if that meant that as a council member he would vote to rezone the area from "open space" to "residential." He answered, "Yes."

After the Chamber forum on Tuesday morning, he elaborated on this by saying that he thought the residential housing would be a good thing because the developer fees from such a large project would be a boon to the city.

At the League forum the very next day, however, Maglio stood for the proposition of open space now and forever on the property.

At the social in the park, I asked him also about his positions on two recent open space issues in Claremont, the failed assessment district of last summer, and Measure S which passed by a 71 percent to 29 percent margin. He said he had opposed Measure S because he didn't think people should be taxed for something that benefited just a few people in town, and he had supported and voted for the assessment because it provided money for parks all over Claremont. He gestured over to the nearby restrooms at Blaisdell Park and said they would have been improved had the assessment passed. He reiterated his vote for the assessment once more at the forum on Wednesday.

His problem is that he voted no on the assessment. The City Clerk has the assessment ballots on file and they are disclosable public records. It was simple to get a copy of Maglio's ballot with his signature, not his wife's, on the NO ballot. I gave him a copy and urged that he view the original at City Hall.

Maglio's ethical tin ear is that he has a hard time with the truth. If he won't tell the truth about small things such as his vote on the assessment, can we believe anything he says?

There is more than a little irony in the fact that a local organization opposed to mining has endorsed both of these candidates. On the one hand, its board has endorsed a candidate who will be unable to participate in the mining issue. On the other hand, it has endorsed a candidate who doesn't tell the truth. No one can take such endorsements seriously.

- Ludd A. Trozpek is a resident of Claremont.

The author, who has been a thorn in the side of the "400" for many years, is a bit of a crank, but he's also been obsessive in his fact-finding. He lives in Padua Hills, which is in unincorporated L.A. County land, surrounded by Claremont. Look for the "400" to tell you to ignore the piece because the person is a non-resident. If you listen to their screeching, you'll notice they never address the substance of the claims, which maybe says something about the facts of the matter.

Claremont 400 Rule #1: Always attack the person, attack their credibility, never engage on the issues--avoid, avoid, avoid getting involved with facts. This much is pretty predictable: You don't have to listen to him/her because he/she is ....

FYI, Googling "Trozpek Claremont" shows the author has a Claremont address--the U.S. Postal Service seems to think this is Claremont. And, J. Michael Fay, another 400er, lives in the same unincorporated area, but he's OK--as is evident from his position as Honorary Chair of Sam Pedroza's campaign. What's a little hypocrisy between friends?

Back Online - Election Season

Yes, we're back after a much, much too long hiatus from still zany, still silly Claremont.

Folks, it officially crazy season in Claremont--Election Time! That moment that comes every two years in which the goofy, so-called Claremont 400 (Paul Held, Valerie Martinez, Diann Ring, Helaine Goldwater, Randy Prout, Al Leiga, Patrick Sullivan, Judy Wright, Sue Keith, Jeanne Hamilton, Michael Fay, et. al.) get their Friday night dinner group together to campaign for their typically inane candidates.

This time up, the Claremont 400 has nominated Sam Pedroza and Linda Elderkin to be their candidates. If elected, the two will join Ellen "The Slapper" Taylor to form a group of three to control the five-member city council.

Pedroza, for those who haven't followed city politics, is a man who has never met a policy position he didn't like, depending on who his audience is. Pedroza has taken alternating positions on: the Baseline Rd. affordable housing project (first opposing, then supporting it); and Padua Sports Park (pushing for it, then lobbying for putting a sports complex in the gravel pit at Baseline and Monte Vista).

Pedroza has also never met a tax he didn't like. As chair of the Claremont Community Services Commission, he pushed to have the city's Landscape and Lighting District (LLD) brought before his commission each year for review. In 2006, Pedroza voted for a larger increase to the LLD (6.48%) than the city council eventually voted for (4.67%).

Pedroza also backed last year's failed Parks and Pasture Assessment District to pay for the purchase of Johnson's Pasture and to fund park maintenance in town. Pedroza was on the Parks and Pasture Steering Committee and along with other people like Al Leiga, Diann Ring, and Judy Wright, hijacked the Claremont Wildlands Conservancy for the Parks and Pasture issue. That assessment failed 56% to 44%.

After last year's assessment failed, all these people, including Pedroza, pulled a disappearing act, refusing to help work on the Measure S bond for Johnson's Pasture that ended up passing 71% to 29%. Pedroza, ever the opportunist, had his name put on the Measure S steering committee, but those who worked on the issue say that Pedroza showed up for very few meetings and was mostly missing in action, other than for a couple photo ops--a typical Pedroza move.

Linda Elderkin, the other Claremont 400 candidate, is another in a long line of Claremont League of Women Voter dilettantes. Elderkin is much in the mold of Sandy Baldonado and Ellen Taylor, both of whom have bothered even their own supporters by their negative, no mean, behavior while in office. Recall that after the Parks and Pasture assessment lost, Baldonado was quoted in the papers as saying that Claremont did not deserve her services (yes!). And Taylor told Claremont Courier reporter Will Bigham to shut up when he questioned Taylor about the $10,000 per year retirement benefit she is taking (Taylor and Peter Yao are the only ones of the five current council members to take the council benefits--Yao's mostly in the form of health insurance).

So voters shouldn't be surprised if Elderkin follows in the footsteps of Baldonado and Taylor if she elected (i.e., turns a deaf ear to the public; blindly follows what her handlers tell her; must get the last word in to show how much she knows about anything). Listen to Linda at one of her coffees, and you can probably guess why the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin didn't endorse her--she's a know-it-all. Elderkin was another who backed the Parks and Pasture assessment and latched on to the Measure S campaign when she was deciding to run for office.

Elderkin has been endorsed by Claremonters Against Strip Mining--a group oppposed to the Vulcan Materials Co. proposal to mine aggregate in northeast Claremont. She's an odd choice because her husband Rick works as a math professor at Pomona College, which a part-owner of the land Vulcan wants to mine. If elected, Elderkin would have a conflict of interest that would almost certainly force her to abstain from any discussion or vote on the mining issue.

CASM's odd choices for endorsement--Elderkin, Pedroza and Mike Maglio--don't seem so odd when one remembers the discredited Preserve Claremont smear campaign from 2005. Recall in that one, Preserve Claremont, through Paul Held, got the CASM people all worked up with false rumors that then-candidate Corey Calaycay was taking money from mining interests. To no one's surprise, CASM appears to be spreading similar false gossip this time around.

And why did CASM endorse Mike Maglio? Because he splits the opposition vote. The Claremont 400 and the Preserve Claremonters (who are trying to take a much lower profile in this election) have been taking turns pumping Maglio up. Poor goof, they've got him thinking he actually has a chance. Anyone who's heard Maglio speak knows that this is a guy who seems to be running on a lark. Maglio himself has pretty much said in several candidate forums that he's learning on the fly. Voter records show that Maglio hasn't voted in the last three city council races, he hasn't ever served on a city commission, and he has only attended one city council meeting--EVER! Maglio has consistently displayed an ignorance of the issues and has changed positions of such things as the gravel mining land--housing development there good (prevents mining, generates development fees) and housing development bad (we want open space).