Friends Helping Friends

The Claremont City Council meets tonight to for its regularly scheduled meeting in the council chambers at 225 Second St. in the Claremont Village.


CLOSED SESSION

The council convenes at 5:15pm in closed session for a conference with counsel over the latest Palmer Canyon lawsuit. The current dispute with the Palmer Canyon Homeowners Association has to do with land the City pledged to cede to the HOA as part of the $17.5 million lawsuit settlement reached over damage from the 2003 Padua Fire. The homeowners claim the City did not transfer ownership of all of the land that it said it would.

Claremont was supposed to have its answer to the HOA's complaint this month, so perhaps the council will be reviewing that in their closed session. You can see that agenda here.


REGULAR SESSION

The regular session begins at 6:30pm. You can review that agenda here.

Among the more interesting items are:

• Agenda item 10, the continuation of a remote caller bingo ordinance. We'd never heard of such a thing, but we did see the city's public notice of that item in the February 17 edition of the Claremont Courier:
  
  
  Click to Enlarge
  
  
  
  We assume that some non-profit in town with friends on the City Council wants some sort of fundraising event using remote calling bingo. This apparently is an arrangement in which different locations are linked together via video links into a single bingo game. A company in Ontario called Bingo Innovations, Inc., has more information on how this all works.
  
  In any event, something must have come up between last Wednesday when the Notice of Public Hearing for the discussion of the proposed ordinance was published in the Courier and Thursday when the agenda for tonight's meeting was posted on the city website.
  
  
  
• The other main item of interest to us was item 13, the termination of the operating covenant with Claremont Toyota for the old Chili's property at the northwest corner of Indian Hill Blvd. and Auto Center Dr.
  
  
  Back on September, 27, 2005, the City Council agreed to help Claremont Toyota owner Roger Hogan acquire the property by giving him $100,000 with the understanding that Hogan would use the land to expand his dealership. The City was also supposed to kick in another $200,000 in street and signage improvements (we're not sure what happened with that bit of change).
  
  The big selling point, as Councilmember Peter Yao said when he was explaining his "Yes" vote, was that the expanded Claremont Toyota would generate much more sales tax revenue for the city. City staffer Anthony Witt promised in his report that the council could expect between $600,000 and $700,000 in additional sales tax revenue for the first five years of the agreement, and $1,000,000 for every year thereafter.
  
  Well, the dealership never expanded onto the Chili's land, never generated the promised payoff, and now Roger Hogan wants to pay the city back only half of the $100,000 the city gave Hogan and release him from the agreed upon covenant. That operating covenant stipulated that Hogan would use the land for auto sales for at least seven years, from 2006 to 2013.
  
  None of it happened, and now the current council seems prepared to make an apparent gift of $50,000 worth of public funds to Claremont Toyota. Tonight's staff report on the issue, this one by Claremont Housing and Redevelopment Manager Brian Desatnik, is remarkably brief and notes that Hogan hopes to sell the 1.25-acre parcel to someone interested in putting a restaurant there.
  
  Oh, baby, now that's a deal!
  
  With the city facing another year of cutbacks in staff, employee benefits, and services, this all looks like just another case of the city staff papering over one of their blunders. There's another twist to this story, but we'll withhold commenting on that part of it until we see how this one plays out.

You can catch all the action in person tonight, or you can watch it on the city's website.

Thy Many Gifts

A small tempest has blown up over the contradictions between Claremont city council candidate Bridget Healy's recent campaign insert in the Claremont Courier and her sworn testimony in a 2006 deposition. The flyer, posted here and on the Daily Bulletin website states,

"Claremont is a better place today because of the many gifts Bridget shared with us during her 18 years as Assistant City Manager of our City... Here is a partial list of accomplishments to which Bridget made significant contributions during her years of public service to Claremont's citizens: 1. Acquired more than 1,600 acres of hillside property that became the Wilderness Park as well as the Padua Hills Theater [sic] at no cost to the tax payers of Claremont;..." [emphases added]

Tony Krickl, in yesterday's Claremont Courier (the article is not online; you'll have to buy the newspaper and it is well worth the 75 cents), carries the story a little further after interviewing Healy.

"When asked her specific role in acquiring the Wilderness Park land, Ms. Healy said that 'very early on' she negotiated with the Independent Cities Financial Authority on financing the purchase through them. She also reviewed agenda reports on the topic [emphasis added]..."

Since the property was paid for at first, as we recall, with money from the City sewer fund, and the Independent Cities Financial Authority was never involved, her negotiation must've led nowhere.

So here we have the sum total of Bridget Healy's "substantial contribution" to the acquisition of the Wilderness Park: an unsuccessful negotiation (more likely a single phone call) and the heavy lifting of reviewing agenda reports as she describes on page 15 of her deposition:

Grotefeld: You also talked about one of the duties that you held as assistant city manager for Claremont, the preparation of agendas?

Healy: Uh-huh.

Grotefeld: When you say preparation of agendas, what do you mean by that?

Healy: I guess the best way to describe it was to say I was the quality control person.

Grotefeld: And by that, what do you mean?

Healy: Reading all the reports, making sure that they were grammatically correct, the answer was in the presentation, that they were understandable to the public.

We wonder if her "substantial contributions" to the other 20 "accomplishments" cited in the campaign piece are equally thin--or equally non-existent. Certainly some of the so-called "accomplishments" themselves seem a bit vague and non-specific, e.g., number 12 on the list, "Enhanced the City's partnership with the School District."

And this excellent article by Krickl raises other questions. If Ms. Healy is now claiming a specific role, however meager, in the acquisition of the Wilderness Park, isn't that pretty clearly at variance with her sworn testimony in her deposition? What is that called, class?--It starts with a "P" and ends with "jury".

Moreover, is she really seriously claiming that "substantial contributions" to the acquistion of the Wilderness Park were reading over agenda reports for grammatical errors and typos? Wow.

For this she is receiving a six-figure pension of which Claremont's contribution is nearly $100,000 per year: Proofreading agenda reports and holding Glenn Southard's hankie.

* * * *

See our earlier post for a full copy of Bridget Healy's 2006 sworn deposition.

Page One, Below the Fold

"Apparent Inconsistency Haunts Candidacy"

For those preferring paper-and-ink newspapers to the newfangled e-versions, we present the bottom half of page one of today's Daily Bulletin. We suggest you go to the newstand to get your own copy.

The article referred to in the previous post made the front page.

click on image to enlarge

You've got to think it's not your day when you are running for Claremont city council and you have to decline comment on an article until you can consult with your attorney. The article explains, "...an attorney was going over the statement and she [Bridget Healy] would make a comment after the attorney's review."

We are reserving a space here for her comment, and just as soon as we receive it, or read it, we will put it in.


We can't imagine what her mouthpiece will tell her to say. Perhaps it depends on what the definition of "is" is. Probably it will be something along the lines of, "there's no inconsistency at all here", or maybe she'll try to foist the whole thing off on her hapless Honorary Chairs, Georgeann Andrus, Jim Merrill, and Mary Jane Merrill.

And what about that campaign manager, Gary Riley? As they say, "With friends like that..." Any statement that puts your candidate's name, Bridget Healy in this case, in the same paragraph with "low-down, underhanded, lie, cheat, [and] steal" well, that's got to be one for future textbooks.

See our first post on the this issue here.

City Council Meeting Tonight

The Claremont City Council meets tonight in the Council Chambers at 225 W. 2nd St. in the Claremont Village, beginning with a closed session meeting at 5pm, followed by the Council's regular session at 6:30.

Thanks to a change in state law, cable companies no longer have to provide local access channels, which means that you won't be able to see the meeting on Time Warner cable. However, Claremont does stream the meetings live on their website, and you can watch here if you are a glutton for punishment.

Tonight's regular meeting agenda is pretty light, perhaps because of the upcoming March municipal election. The closed session will allow the Council to discuss some ongoing litigation (Surbeck v. City of Claremont, et al, L.A. County Civil Case #KC045147). This case is the Palmer Canyon lawsuit over the 2003 Padua Fire. The City's insurer settled it for $17.5 million, but there is an ongoing dispute over control of Palmer Canyon Rd., which the city was supposed to turn over to the Palmer Canyon homeowners, and litigation may have reopened over that part of the case. The Council will give a brief report on the closed session at the beginning of its regular meeting.

Here's the closed session agenda, and here's the regular meeting agenda.

The Cost of Ownership

The Daily Bulletin reported last week that the city of Pomona owes $5.8 million to six families in the Phillips Ranch area of Pomona after losing a lawsuit.

The affected homes suffered damages from land movement in an open space area owned by the city. The Bulletin's Monica Rodriguez explained:

The families first realized there was a problem when they started seeing cracks in the floors of their homes and yards in February 2005 after a period of heavy rains.

The cracks grew quickly. Before long, they turned into gaps and drops of as much as 2 feet.

During the trial, information was presented that in the late 1970s and early 1980s engineers for the builder of the homes found an ancient landslide, said Michael A. Hearn, the lawyer representing the families.

The engineers produced a report that went to the city and recommended the landslide be removed and the area regraded, Hearn said.

The city approved a plan that left much of the old unstable landslide and area dedicated to the city for open space, he said.

"The judge found that when the city accepted the land, it accepted the liability," Hearn said.

Rodriguez went on to report that the plaintiffs had argued that city had stopped monitoring the area for gophers, which allowed the gopher population to run wild, opening holes in the slide area that made it easier for rainwater to seep into the ground, undermining the area. As the open space land moved, it affected the homes in question.

Pomona City Attorney Arnold Alvarez-Glasman indicated in the article that the city would appeal the decision. There's a lively discussion of this issue over at the M-M-M-My Pomona blog, where K has posted some thoughts on the matter.

K has a hard time seeing any liability on the part of the city of Pomona, and he seems to argue that the homeowners assumed the risk posed by a landslide when they bought their homes:

How on earth is it that the owner of a great big empty hillside (empty, because it can't be built upon due to fear of landslides) is responsible for maintaining the hillside so it doesn't slide or endanger the millions of dollars worth of real estate perched above the hillside!? Call me crazy, but I'd assume that the folks on top of the hill would have a strong interest in maintaining the integrity of the hillside, rather than the folks who own the (relatively) worthless hillside land. Especially when the folks on top picked the hillside location due to the great views.

This whole thing seems to us a lot like the city of Claremont's situation with the Palmer Canyon homeowners following the 2003 Padua Fire. In that instance, the homeowners argued that the city-owned Wilderness Park was not maintained according to Claremont's own Vegetation Management Plan for the Wilderness Park, allowing dangerous amounts of fuel to accumulate.

Claremont, and the Claremonsters, argued that it was the homeowners' own fault that their homes burned. They should have known Palmer Canyon was a fire area, the thinking goes.

Claremont, however, must have seen the writing on the wall in the Palmer Canyon lawsuit. Their attorneys and their insurer, the California Joint Powers Insurance Authority, settled the suit for $17.5 million.

Just because a land is open space does not absolve the owner of the land, in these cases the cities of Claremont and Pomona and the taxpayers funding those municipalities, from maintaining the land so that it does not damage neighboring properties.

In Pomona's case, for instance, they could have exterminated the gophers to control the population. Even if you think the plaintiffs' arguments were spurious, taking care of the gophers would have eliminated the argument that the holes allowed the hill to be undermined. In the same way, if the city of Claremont had simply cleared the brush around Palmer Canyon, as their own formal policies said they would, the plaintiffs would not have been able to make some of the key arguments in their case.

The moral of the story is that there are additional costs to preserving open space that cities need to take into account. The costs merely begin with land acquisition. With ownership comes responsibility, and cities, no less than individual property owners, are accountable for damages caused by their negligence.

Southard Sightings and Other News

WOULD YOU BUY A USED REDEVELOPMENT PROJECT FROM THIS MAN?

Several readers wrote in to report sightings of Claremont's former city manager, Glenn Southard, about town last Thursday. No doubt our esteemed friend was in the area to survey the wreckage he's wrought - for example, $17.5 million settlement to Palmer Canyon residents for fire damages resulting in part from the city's failure to properly maintain the Claremont Wilderness Park during Southard's administration.

Call it pride of authorship.

Or maybe he just wanted to check out the Village Expansion, where the exodus continues only a year after the opening of the Claremont Packing House.

One reader said:

Wonder what God's gift to Claremont could be stirring up now? Do you think he is here to take credit for the wonderful Village Expansion he gave us of which ersatz Claremont historian Judy Wright now says she is not so enamored ( according to John Pixley's column in Wednesday's Courier)? Only the Shadow knows!

The reader was referring to John Pixley's Observer column in Wednesday's Claremont Courier. Wright, who as mayor of Claremont was one of the persons most responsible for the imposition of Southardism on Claremont, spoke at the Claremont Museum of Art earlier this month and gave her thoughts on the Claremont Village Expansion, according to Pixley:

Regarding the Village Expansion, Ms. Wright is concerned that not enough thought was put into what its streets look like or the views they provide. She also said that the Indian Hill frontage remind her of Orange County. She urged that there be an outcry for public art. (What about the controversial fountain in the courtyard?)

I don’t know if I agree with Ms. Wright’s exact concern and solution, but I do agree that there is something to be concerned about in the Village Expansion. As impressive and exciting as it is, it appears that all is not well with the downtown addition. And it does have to do with views.

There has been noticeable rumbling in recent months, and the rumbling is coming from within. There have been accusations and finger pointing, talk of misleading and broken promises. Some artists have decided not to stay in the artist lofts in The Packing House, complaining that the rent is too high or that the lofts, which are upstairs on the second floor, don’t get enough foot traffic. Tally’s for Men is breaking its lease, with the owner saying that its Second Street location is a dead zone with almost no traffic.

These may well simply be the grumbling that comes with anything new. Almost by definition, there are always kinks to be worked out. But I am wondering if it isn’t something more that is happening.

Wright's concerns are touching, but disingenuous. Wright, her claims to the contrary notwithstanding, has been more than a mere observer or amateur historian with the Village Expansion and other projects in town. As usual, she and some of her fellow former councilpeople and city commissioners just do not want to take credit for their work when it goes bad.

Back in 2003, when the future was still bright, it was a different story. Even though Wright had been off the Claremont City Council for years when the Village Expansion ground-breaking occurred, this plaque was unveiled at the corner of Oberlin Ave. and First St.:


There you go. Dead center, right above Southard: "Judy Wright." In 2003, as ever, plaques represented the dominant form of public self-aggrandizement in the less-than-humble village of Claremont, CA.

Accountability

One of the hallmarks of Claremont's dysfunctionality is the lack of accountability practiced by the Claremont 400, groups like the Claremont League of Women Voters, and the Claremont city government.

The wonderful folks in the Claremont 400 love to prattle on about the perfection of city staff, the City Council, but they hate to stand up and take responsibility for the sometimes awful results of their actions and inactions.

The recent advertisement in the Claremont Courier by Claremont School Board candidate Hilary LaConte is but one example of them being wrong but refusing to come out and admit it in plain English.

Rather than apologize for attacking one of her opponents at a candidate forum for being right about the matter of inter-district transfers, in her ad LaConte issued this rather remarkable bit of prolixity:

My comment should only have referenced the application process, because in fact as I indicated, any student may apply to transfer to Claremont. The new insight to be gleaned is that the District does utilize a prioritization process to sort the list of students awaiting admission.

What is this person saying? Do literate people really use such passive constructions as "The new insight to be gleaned...?" And shouldn't a school board candidate at least be fluent in English?

The use of jargon and long-winded explanations is the last refuge of the bureaucrat responding to a problem. It allows one to sound erudite and impressive without saying anything at all. Sounds like a good fit for the Claremont school board.

* * *

The accountability hot potato was flying around the City Council chambers at the October 10th city council meeting when, in response to Dean McHenry's questioning about the $17.5 million Palmer Canyon settlement, Councilperson Linda Elderkin wondered aloud, in essence, "Why do we have to keep talking about this?" Or words to that effect. (We're working on video of this, but we're having some technical difficulties, so bear with us.)

Elderkin's question was its own answer. The harder the people at City Hall try to bury things, the more people are going to call them on it.

And City Manager Jeff Parker has been no better, claiming again and again that the settlement was an insurance decision and that the city had done nothing wrong. Yes, Jeff, this was a $17.5 million nuisance settlement. Right.

Let's face it folks, the city's insurer realized that the potential at trial for the plaintiffs to be awarded a much larger judgment led the city's insurer to seek a pretrial settlement. If the insurer did not believe there was a chance that a jury would find liability on the city's part, they would not have made such a generous offer. The insurer, the California Joint Powers Insurance Authority, has said as much.

By the way, that $17.5 million is believed to be the largest amount ever paid out by the JPIA, which is an insurance pool of California local governments. It's not like they pay out $17.5 million for every slip-and-fall and police or fire liability claim made against its member cities.

At the September 25th Council meeting, Councilmember Corey Calaycay made the lamest defense of all for the city's responsibility for the 2003 fire damage. Calaycay told about his father, who as a doctor was a defendant in a medical malpractice case in which Dr. Calaycay's insurance company made a settlement. Councilmember Calaycay said his father had done nothing wrong, but the insurer settled anyway.

Calaycay's comparison was a false analogy. We can infer from the lack of any malpractice awards being listed against Dr. Calaycay on the California Medical Board's website that the settlement was less than $30,000. In California, anything under $30,000 is not reportable to the Medical Board. These sorts of settlements are true nuisance offers and represent no admission of liability.

There's a big difference between such a low settlement and a $17.5 million one, and the public interest is not advanced by this sort of false reasoning.

It's high time for our elected and appointed officials and their staffs to speak honestly and truthfully to themselves and to us. We deserve no less.

Robbing from the Rich (and Poor), Paying City Hall

A reader pointed us to yesterday's Claremont Courier's letters to the editor. In particular, the reader wanted us to see a letter sent in response to Dean McHenry's recent Op-Ed piece about the irony of the juxtaposition of Claremont's centennial celebration with Paystubgate and the governmental secrecy (BlackOps?) practiced in closed session and other matters.

The letter writer, one William Rook, thinks Claremont's city government is building a fiefdom, complete with serfs - taxpayers.

Rook takes the city to task for the $17.5 million paid out by Claremont's insurer for the homes burnt down in Palmer Canyon and Padua Hills in the 2003 Grand Prix fire. Rook concludes by saying:

This [city's] government sounds like it is being run by Prince John and the Sheriff of Nottingham. Maybe we as the people should gather in Nottingham Wilderness Park and take to wearing Claremont green, (complete with appropriate lettering claiming our place as 5th best). Then they could send the code enforcement officer to cite us for illegal use of park property.

Jeff Parker, Restaurant Critic

We have commented before that the Claremont "City Manager Update" has in recent months become somewhat laughable with its puffery. Before it became just another obligatory PR vehicle, it would contain real information for the councilmembers to keep them up to date on events in the city. It would inform council about things such as significant police contacts, street closures, infrastructure work--things that constituents might be asking them about.

Now, however it has degenerated into a weekly piece flogging the town for another Money Magazine award, or perhaps recognition from the California League of Cities.

The example at hand today is city manager Jeff Parker's comments on the Three Forks Chop House (click on the image or here for a larger version). He lifts a review from gayot.com and makes this comment:

The review...gave it [Three Forks Chop House] one of the highest ratings, 14/20.

We here are no experts on restaurant ratings, but 14/20 didn't seem all that stellar to us. So we went to gayot.com and checked the website's rating scale. Take a closer look by clicking on the image.

It seems that a rating of 14/20 merits only one chef's hat. Far from being, as Parker asserts, "one of the highest ratings", this rating is in the bottom half of the numerical ratings. Of course, the rating system appears to be skewed to the high end--a little "grade inflation" in the restaurant criticism biz. Aren't there any "poor" restaurants? We've been to some in Claremont that would reasonably fall into that category, if fairly defined. But maybe if you are a restaurant critic, like Jeff Parker, with a city credit card, it doesn't pay to visit poor restaurants.

Just to be clear: Parker tells the City Council and the community that the restaurant received "one of the highest ratings". In fact, it received one star out of a possible four.

This is not all that different from Parker's comments at the council meeting. We watched the rebroadcast of the September 25 council meeting, and heard Parker "justifying" the use of $1,000,000 in general fund money for Johnson's Pasture after he made sure council knew that--we paraphrase--"the city never admitted any wrongdoing in the $17.5 Palmer Canyon fire settlement".

Everything is perfect in Claremont, the best of all possible worlds.

Claremont Capsule

The City of Claremont is preparing to unearth a 1983 time capsule on Wednesday, October 3rd at 5pm at City Hall. The capsule was buried near the City Hall flag pole.

A new capsule designed by Claremont Mayor Pro Tem Ellen Taylor's son Matthew Taylor (can you spell N-E-P-O-T-I-S-M?) will be sealed up and placed in the City Hall foyer as a bench. Apparently, this year's capsule is too nice to be buried, and we will not get into the respect exhibited by hundreds of people over the years sitting on the time capsule.

City Hall officials are taking ideas for things to put in the new capsule. Taking a cue from our city bird, the ostrich, here are the Insider's suggestions:

• The memory of the Irvin Landrum shooting.
  


• The memory of the Claremont 400's behavior in the City Council elections of 2001, 2003, 2005 and 2007.
  


• The memory of the Claremont 400's support of former City Manager Glenn Southard and his staff.
  


• The real story of Paystubgate.
  


• The memory of the $17.5 million settlement for the Palmer Canyon fire.
  


• The memory of the Claremont Unified School District's misspent $48.5 million from the 2001 Measure Y bond.
  


• The memory of the extra $1 million the city was forced to come up with to pay for the Johnson's Pasture open space after city staff and the city council failed to catch the language in the deed that caused the state of California to pull it's $1 million grant offer.
  


• The ballots from the failed 2007 Parks and Pastures assessment district vote.
  
  
• Claremont historian Judy Wright's selective "history."

Have your own ideas about what should go in the new Matthew Taylor time capsule? Contact Claremont Centennial Celebration Committee member Sylvia Hernandez at (909) 399-5498 or email her at shernandez@ci.claremont.ca.us.

Reader Mail

A former Palmer Canyon resident wrote in with some recollections about living in the area. The note includes some observations about some past events involving Claremont and Claremonters, past and present:

Thanks Claremont Insider for exposing Claremont's dirty secrets. I am a former homeowner of Palmer Canyon who lost my home to the rand Prix/Padua Wildfire. Long before the fire got us we had a long & acrimonious relationship w/ city officials. We simply did not fit into the master plan of North East Claremont - w/ it's half acre parcels, five & six thousand sq. ft. pretentious monstrosities whose motto should be consume more & more. I worked as a contractor for many years when I lived in Claremont.

I had the extreme misfortune of working for [a local home builder], who during this period in the late eighties had gotten his third DUI conviction that would result in Claremont's Chief of Police losing his job & Peter Popoff, who had just moved to the Blaisdell development after filing for Bankruptcy protection from his exposed televangelist scam. (One of his cronies actually bought it for him.) Blaisdell, of course, one of Claremont's first attempts at large scale development has seen highly criticized for it's total lack of any kind of architectural continuity. It was a typical Southern California land grab w/ all the avarice mixed in. Twenty thousand sq. ft. lots that sold for $80,000 in the mid eighties were going for $400,000 & up by the end of the decade.

It goes on & on - Snoop Dogg lived just down the street. He was up on a Murder One charge but had Johnnie Cochran for legal council & was acquitted. Just down the street DEA John Jackson was popped for selling drugs w/ two cohorts. A dermatologist got in trouble for taking porno pictures of his kids. The guy who owns the Toyota dealership in Claremont has a cozy relationship w/ a land broker selling the last large chunk of land on Padua buys it flips it & makes a huge profit in the course of weeks. There is some truly evil stuff going-just scratch that very thin veneer of civility to reveal it.

Sunday Editorial

Pay Stub News Continues

(Click on Image to Enlarge)

Okay, before anyone starts with their judgments, let's all take a minute and look at the image above. It's a city of Claremont pay stub with all individual information redacted. Now does anyone see a blank field for Social Security information? Date of birth? Home address? Home telephone? No. Nothing. Nada.

And, don't forget, this and 282 others were posted in a downloadable .pdf file on the city of Claremont's on-line document archive for anyone in the world to access. And there were dozens of these .pdfs on the city's website - one for every two week pay period going back at least a couple years. A search of the public archive for the terms "Jeffrey Parker performance" turned up the pay stubs.

The city has continued its claims that the information was somehow leaked to us or that we stole the material. Claremont's claims are false, and we believe they know the claims are baseless. After it's initial reaction on Friday, 9/7, city officials backed off referring the matter to the Claremont Police Department. Their press release issued on Monday, 9/10, made no mention of this blog and only spoke vaguely of "recent events" showing a "breach of confidentiality."

And Google, which pulled the initial posting that included two pay stub images, reversed course on why it censored our blog, first saying that the images contained confidential information, then claiming that the post was removed because the images were copyrighted.

Neither the city nor Google have responded to our requests that they provide us with the specifics of the city's complaint. We've received no email from the city or their attorney, Sonia Carvalho, telling us what information is confidential or seeking to work with us to verify the source of the information.

Instead, the city has had its IT people checking. Of course, we have to wonder, are these the same IT people responsible for posting the information in the first place? If so, you will likely never know the truth. Remember the movie "Breach?"

We believe that the city, when it pulled the plug on its on-line archive after we accessed the pay stub document, made some change in its system that prevents the search from pulling up the pay documents. How hard is it to identify all the changes that have been made in their system since the last week in August, when we pulled the material and then undo them long enough to conduct a test?

And the search takes a while. It's searching through decades of scanned documents. Are the city's IT geniuses even bothering let the search run?


Carvalho And The Ol' Misdirection

One thing is obvious to even the most casual observer: the city attorney is providing some highly questionable advice to her client. Carvalho's shifting rationales for withholding the original complaint to Google don't bear up to scrutiny. First, she claims a non-existent attorney-client privilege. But the complaint was between Carvalho and Google, a third-party, not her client, the city of Claremont.

Then, she apparently claimed the material was copyrighted. But government forms apparently aren't copyrightable.

Lastly, she seems to be setting up a claim that her complaint is attorney work product.

All of this lawyerly footwork has prompted some comments on the Internet. The Slashdot website carried this comment from an attorney yesterday under a discussion thread titled, "Wow, that is one clueless lawyer":

...more ridiculous is the City attorney's refusal to release her communications with Google, citing "attorney-client privilege." Any communication shared with a third party (i.e., someone other than the lawyer or client) is automatically not privileged. She starts to set up a claim for attorney work product by explaining how Google might become adverse, but again, a communication with a third party -- particularly the adverse party -- cannot be covered by the AWP doctrine.

I thought it was hard to pass the California bar, how did these idiots ever do it?

A Familiar Pattern

The Slashdot community seems to hit it right on the head with a few comments about the city not wanting to release their Google complaint because it would show that the city was making things up as they were going along. They overreacted and made some unfounded claims to Google. Combine that with the intense need to hide the true amount of compensation city employees receive, and you get Carvalho's responses and non-responses.

To those of you who haven't heard of Claremont before this, it's nothing new. Carvalho has made a career out of finding ways of withholding public documents through claims of confidentiality, work product, and attorney-client privilege. She has said more than once that she represents not the people of Claremont, but the city council majority. Her philosophy has been to force people and news organizations to sue the city in order to use the bottomless pit of city funds to outspend them in litigation.

We've seen this time and again in Claremont's past, and Claremont's been recognized for its traditional policy of governmental secrecy. Claremont's reformed its ways in the past couple years, but crises bring out the worst in this town (see the Irvin Landrum shooting or the $17.5 million Palmer Canyon fire settlement).

What the salary and especially employee bonus information shows, what Claremont seeks to hide, is the fact that in the past and present incompetence have been amply rewarded. No wonder they want to hide that from you.

The Fire Next Time

CLAREMONT AFLAME

[Editor's Note: Thanks to the readers who sent in information and links for this posting.]

It seems as if wildfires burn with a certain regularity through the local foothills, and it makes sense that once the accumulated brush has burned, it takes a few years for the fuel load to build back up to dangerous levels.

The fire that burned through Claremont on the night of Saturday, October 25, 2003, started near Fontana four days earlier and was known as the Grand Prix Fire. It burned to the east and joined up with another fire that is now known as the Old Fire. Both blazes stemmed from arson incidents.

To the west, when it crossed the Los Angeles County line, the Grand Prix Fire became known as the Padua Fire. When the Padua Fire swept through the Claremont Wilderness Park in the early morning hours of Sunday, October 26th, it blew south through Palmer Canyon, taking out 44 of 48 homes there, then continuing on down into Padua Hills, where it damaged the Padua Theater, and destroyed several more homes, including a home built and owned at one time by Millard Sheets, the famous California artist who designed the mosaics on the old Home Savings buildings in Southern California.

The fire continued west and reached a number of homes in the Claraboya area. The city, state, and federal agencies, as well as numerous charitable groups reached out to help victims of the fire.


THE ROOTS OF DISASTER

As the embers cooled, people who lost their homes surveyed the wreckage. The city and county called the Padua Fire an act of God, saying that 100 mph winds whipped up a firestorm. But, as with most catastrophic failures, the roots of the disaster lay not in our stars but in ourselves.

As it turned out, in May of that same year, 2003, the city was re-examining it's Vegetation Management Plan (VMP) for the Claremont Wilderness Park. At the May 8, 2003, Community Services Commission meeting, which included then-commissioner Sam Pedroza, city staff presented a report arguing for the need to change the VMP in response to the slow-moving Williams Fire of 2002 which burned through much of the brush on the upper slopes of the local mountains.

According to the May, 2003 meeting minutes, a representative of the LA County Fire Dept. explained why the changes needed to be made:

The threats have now changed. The original concern was about a large, disastrous fire coming down out of the north from the Angeles National Forest.... There is now a need to address the interior of the park and structural areas, for examples, the homes along Via Padova [near the Padua Theater].

The minutes for that meeting go on to say that Mark Hodnick, at that time Claremont's Facilities and Construction Manager, told the commission that the city really needed to go through and clear brush where homes met up with the Wilderness Park boundaries:

Mr. Hodnick said staff's primary responsibility is the urban wildland interface area that runs along Via Padova through the lower part of Palmer Canyon. That was hand cleared about four years ago, and it is time to go back and do it again.

[Emphasis added.]

The VMP was instituted in 1998 and recognized the need to reduce the buildup of the fuel load in the park through a three-step process of brush clearing using goats, hand-clearing, and controlled burns. Unfortunately, as often happens with maintenance issues, the VMP was never fully implemented. The controlled burns, for instance, were never done because the city claimed it did not have the money.

Back in 1998, the city paid the California Conservation Corp. to go through and clear some of the brush in the park. The CCC did this, though a number of areas were apparently left untouched. Goats were used, and we seem to recall that a number of them died in the Padua Fire.

A new round of hand-clearing and light machine clearance of brush was supposed to have been paid for by a $29,500 grant from the US Dept. of Agriculture. The grant application, written by Mark Hodnick and dated 2/9/2003, recognized the dangerous level of fuel loads on city-owned land that had built up in the Palmer Canyon and Via Padova areas:

The heavy fuel loads caused by this 23 year absence of fire, the presence of flammable ornamental vegetation, and the proximity of structures to the Claremont Hills Wilderness Park have combined to create an extreme fire hazard....

The [brush clearing] project would protect structural and biological assets [people] at risk by clearing hazardous fuels along the eastern border of the Wilderness Park including areas adjacent to residential homes along Lower Palmer Canyon and Via Padova. The goal is to not only protect adjacent structures but to also protect the surrounding wildland/urban interface community from a wind driven conflagration.

Prophetic words indeed. The grant application was denied by USDA, and the brush-clearing was never done.


AFTERMATH

The residents of Palmer Canyon, and a number of residents in the Padua Hills area eventually filed suit against the City of Claremont for its alleged negligence in failing to properly maintain the brush clearance in the Claremont Hills Wilderness Park.

As any of the residents could have told the city, with ownership comes responsibility. The city had a responsibility to keep the land it owned clear of brush in the areas adjacent to homes. As the minutes and agenda packet from the Community Services Commission's May 8, 2003, meeting show, the city clearly recognized the responsibility but failed to at on it.

The city did not receive its $29,500 from the federal government to do brush clearing, but the city certainly had that money in its discretionary funds. And the $29,500 was well within then-City Manager Glenn Southard's $75,000 spending authority - Southard did not even have to go to the council for approval.

And if $29,500 sound like a lot of money, consider this:

• The city's insurer settled the Palmer Canyon lawsuit for $17.5 million in March, 2007 - an amount believed to be a record for the insurer, the Joint Powers Insurance Authority.
  


• $29,500 is less than the $30,000 self-insured amount the city has to pay on its liability policy (sort of like a deductible) when lawsuits settle.
  


• In 2003 the city spent about $13,000 on going away parties for outgoing Councilmembers Al Leiga and Karen Rosenthal.

The city, of course, has not admitted any fault, and the Claremont 400's reaction has been to label the victims of the fire as ingrates. How dare they sue us after we helped them after the fire.

The city's official response is that the Padua Fire was a wind-driven act of God. But we hear through our readers that one of the pieces of evidence in the suit was a security camera videotape in Palmer Canyon shortly before the fire swept through. The camera shows a bit of cloth hanging on limply on a line - no wind.

The Claremont 400, of course, remains in denial over the mismanagement of the Wilderness Park by staff, past councils and past commissions. One hopes they might have been humbled by the fire, might have some pangs of guilt over the loss of homes and personal property, might have learned some lesson from the fire of 2003. One hopes....

The lesson here is no different from the recent bridge collapse in Minnesota, or for that matter any other failure of a human construct. Failure to implement the measures they recognized as crucial for the Wilderness Park was no different than owning a car and failing to change the oil. As we've discovered the hard way, you can pay now for preventative measures or pay later in punitive damages.

Usually paying now is much cheaper in the long run.

Claremont #5 Best Place to Live

Money magazine has named Claremont #5 on its list of top 100 U.S. cities to live in.

Money editor Jean Chatzky was interviewed on NBC's Today Show this morning and explained the criteria used. Money focused on towns with populations between 7,500 and 50,000, which eliminated cities like New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, and a host of others.

California had 9 cities in the top 100 with Claremont being the highest ranked in the state.

_______________________

So, how does this all square with a website like ours, where we've been very critical of the people in charge of running Claremont?

Oddly, it fits perfectly with what we've been saying. First, like most of our neighbors, we've chosen this place because it's a nice place to live. The weather's unbeatable, the Village shops and restaurants are great, and the colleges offer many cultural and educational opportunities.

We just don't happen to think that the Claremont 400, the group that runs the Claremont City Council, it's city commissions, and the local schools, deserve credit for all of that. Do they make the weather? And many of the good things would exist here without the 400. We also think that as long as they're taking credit for good things, they ought to take responsibility for the many and costly bad things that have happened. Instead, they run from those issues and refuse to even address them.

Take the trees here, for instance. Claremont's got 23,000 of them, most of them planted and maintained by the city. The trees are a great amenity. They create the shady walks that give Claremont a real college-town feel. Yet, homeowners have to foot the bills for damages caused by city-owned trees, the City Council routinely denies claims against them for those costly damages, and the city bars citizens from doing preventative maintenance on those same damage-causing trees.

People like Claremont 400 representative and current Councilperson Linda Elderkin apparently believe that if you can't afford to pay for the damages the city trees cause, you shouldn't be living here. We think that there could be better, more mature, more reasonable ways of working with citizens who have legitimate complaints. Instead, Claremonters like Councilmember Elderkin want them to take a hike if they don't like it.

So, Claremont's a great place to live as long as you don't have a run-in with the city and the Claremont 400, as Irvin Landrum and his family did in 1999.

Or as the residents of Palmer Canyon did in 2003.

______________________


We expect there'll be a lot of gloating on the part of the 400 and their supporters over the Money ranking. We should be happy that our town ranks so high on the Money list. But we also ought to look more carefully at the information. If we don't we're likely to misinterpret the information, as the 400 will inevitably do when they use it as an endorsement of their ill-conceived actions.

The rankings really seemed geared towards retiring baby boomers. Money editor Chatzky noted, "The big trend is that people really want to stay...." People, she said, are "aging in place." That is, they're not retiring to Scottsdale, AZ; they're staying put in these top 100 places. That means that people are looking to places like Claremont for retirement opportunities, and one of the things the Money survey looked at was the availability of elder care facilities.

Of course, we've argued this before. The demographics show that Claremont is aging, and housing here is not really affordable for young families looking for starter homes. Don't believe us? Check out Money's data. The median price of a Claremont home is $643,549 - 179% higher than the average median home price for the Money top 100 list.

People are staying here longer, and new people moving in tend to be folks looking primarily for retirement advantages. But we don't seem to be realistically facing up to that reality.

The Gift That Keeps On Giving

We missed another eminent domain story yesterday, but thanks to a regular reader who passed it on to us.

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Former City Manager Glenn Southard, as we've written in the past, is indeed an ongoing gift. You almost have to wonder if Southard took some sort of perverse pleasure in leaving behind landmines to explode years later.

There was the $17.5 million settlement for the October, 2003, fire that destroyed homes in Palmer Canyon, Padua Hills, and Claraboya. The fire burned through the City of Claremont's Wilderness Park, which homeowners claimed had not been properly cleared of brush. The city had a Vegetation Management Plan for the park to address the areas bordering homes, but failed to implement the plan fully, according to the plaintiffs in the suit.

Then, there was the $675,000 paid out this year to the developer of the Village West expansion project, The Tolkin Group, because Southard and his staff had put the utility connections in place long before anyone decided on the actual details and locations of the buildings going in. So the developer had to pay to have the hookups moved around.

And let's not forget that instant $10 million pension deficit Southard created by pushing a city employee pension upgrade in the year before he left. (The pension increase, based on years of service, was retroactive back to each employee's date of hire.)

There are other problems that have come up since Southard left. Just yesterday Will Bigham had an article about Harry Wu, the developer of the DoubleTree Hotel and the Old Schoolhouse project on Foothill Blvd.

According to the Bigham article, Wu is unhappy because he would rather own the DoubleTree property than lease it. He has not been able to negotiate a purchase, and in the article yesterday he complained that in early 2005, before leaving Claremont for Indio, Southard had given Wu private assurances that the city would use eminent domain if needed to help Wu obtain the property.

Wu told Bigham that he would not have sunk $10 million into the DoubleTree without Southard's assurances.

Sound familiar? At the same time Wu says Southard was promising the use of eminent domain, Southard's staff also worked with Roger Hogan, the owner of Claremont Toyota, to assist Hogan in obtaining the old Chili's site in South Claremont. The threat of eminent domain against the property owner was raised during those negotiations because of the tax advantages to the seller if eminent domain was threatened. Southard left, and the eminent domain talk died down.

And last year the Johnson's Pasture owners complained that they, too, had been promised a threat of eminent domain by the city during early 2005 to give them a tax advantage.

Southard, naturally, denied making any eminent domain promises to Harry Wu. Bigham quoted Southard's response:

"I couldn't do that as city manager anyway," said Southard, who is now the city manager of Indio. "The only people who can issue a notice of condemnation are the City Council at a public meeting and with public notice."

Notice Southard didn't said, "I didn't do that." There is no flat denial. He only says, "I couldn't do that...." Yet, there does seem to be a pattern of eminent domain talk floating around in early 2005 as Southard was exiting Claremont.

Back in March this year, we received an email from Mike Vasilove, one of the Johnson's Pasture owners. Vasilove said in his note:

We have in our possession, a letter from the City signed by the City Manager dated April, 2005 telling the owners of JP the City is interested in purchasing the Pasture and will recommend to the City Council the
use of eminent domain against us if we don't agree to sell the Pasture under the price and terms set forth by the first appraisal and agreement. We agreed to sell under those terms and price. The City backed out of the contract due to the adjustment made by the State regarding the appraisal.

We asked Vasilove for a copy of that note, but he never provided it to us. However, it seems odd that both Wu and Vasilove would complain of the same promises from Southard in different transactions.

Bigham also interviewed former city employee Scott Miller for yesterday's piece. Miller, unlike Southard, did acknowledge the fact that eminent domain had come up during the discussions with Wu in 2005, but Miller claimed that though the subject did get mentioned, it was not promised. Miller was the city's assistant executive director (to Southard) of the Claremont Redevelopment Agency.

In the Bigham article, the city acknowledged having sent a letter to the owners of the DoubleTree property saying that Wu had promised to pay the costs of any eminent domain proceeding--so it had indeed come up, and in the form of a letter, just as the Johnson's Pasture owner had claimed.

Of course, the city, and Southard and Miller, would argue that a mention is not a promise.

Malice Towards None

Back in March, we posted a commentary by root2 titled "Kremlin Watching" that likened the constant need to decipher the actions of the Claremont city government to the old Cold War study of Kremlinology.

We thought of that as we parsed former Claremont Mayor Diann Ring's comments from last week regarding our humble blog:

"It's someone without a job or a life," she said. "Someone with too much time on their hands. It's done with malicious intent and some of it is downright lies. Some day someone's going to get so mad they call (a lawyer)."

The key to Ms. Ring's thinking, we think, is the word "malicious." You see, to defame a public figure, according to the standard set forth by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1964, the public figure would have to show "actual malice" on the part of the person making the statement in question. Ms. Ring's no dummy. She's spent a great deal of time in the public eye, and she's chosen her words with care. She's trying to create an impression of malice to try to quell criticism.

Of course, Ms. Ring is not yet a U.S. Supreme Court justice, though she may sometimes act as if she were one. Also, as we noted previously, Ms. Ring threw the word "lies" around without any support or justification. We ask her now, as we did last week, to produce support for her claims. As of today, she has not responded.

But, that is really the modus operandi for Ms. Ring and the Claremont 400. Speak as if you are the authority, and because your name is Ring or Wright any contrary facts can be discarded. By the time the reality catches up and the crisis hits, it's too late and people have likely forgotten the root causes (the 2003 Padua Fire and the resulting $17.5 million settlement by Claremont's insurer, for instance).

In Claremont, who you are means more than what you are saying. That's why the City Council election ads alway feature long lists of supporter names. They say: I, Diann Ring, am voting for this person, and so should you.

So it isn't really that odd that there is so little communication between Ms. Ring, former Mayor Judy Wright, the Claremont 400, the Claremont City Council, city commissioners, city staff, the Claremont Board of Education, the local League of Women Voters (LWV), any number of other city organizations and the citizens who've been on the other side of a number of issues now and in the past.

As of today, there has been more talk between the Iranian and U.S. governments than there has been between most of the organizations above and the majority of opposition groups in town. What little talk is usually one way and from on high: We talk, you listen.

For groups that define themselves with words like dialogue, diversity, tolerence, consensus and inclusiveness, they display a stubborn unwillingness to listen and to adopt a wider range of ideas. Real leaders build bridges, reach out to other groups and seek to construct communities of all different sorts of people. This group, the Claremonsters, for want of a better term, has constantly and consistently done the opposite to the unending detriment of our town.

Watery Vision

You may have caught our notices of charitable events going on around town and seen that a good many Claremont 400 people are members and leaders of these organizations--the League of Women Voters, the Claremont Community Foundation, Friends of the Library, the Rotary Club, the Kiwanis, the Claremont Educational Foundation, etc....

As we've pointed out in the past, these people and these organizations do many good works. The problem is when the prejudices of the 400's social networks collide with the challenges of managing a city and a school district where the constituents may have different ideas about how they'd like things run. The problems arise when the Claremonsters assume that they have every solution and are incapable of making a mistake.

Looking back at Claremont's proposed purchase of the water company ($100 million and counting), one of the complaints the city and Claremonters have is the fact that our current water provider, Golden State Water (GSW), has lumped Claremont's rates together with high desert towns like Apple Valley and Barstow, where GSW has to pay to install the water infrastructure for a rapidly growing area--a cost we in Claremont help underwrite. This combining of different towns into one rate schedule is called regionalization.

But if we examine the roots of regionalization, we see that Claremont, under then-City Manager Glenn Southard and a City Council wholly owned and controlled by Claremont 400ers like Diann Ring, Al Leiga, Paul Held, Suzan Smith, and Karen Rosenthal, contributed to the problem.

In 1998, Claremont was also in negotiations with the other agency members of the Six Basins Watermaster, which resulted in Claremont receiving 535 acre-feet in water rights annually. Claremont's water company at the time was Southern California Water Co. (SCWC), which later changed its name to Golden State Water after being bought out by American States Water.

On 5/26/98, the Claremont City Council received a staff report by Scott Miller (now working for the City of Beverly Hills), who at the time was the Assistant to the City Manager. Miller's report outlines a proposed water deal the city wanted to make with SCWC. The deal would lease Claremont's 535 acre-feet of water rights to SCWC (now Golden State Water) for 30 years. In exchange, the city would receive annual payments amounting to $123,000 based on 1998 rates. In addition, SCWC would give the the City of Claremont a 50% rate reduction, amounting to $177,000 in annual savings at that time.

Miller's report recommended making the deal because Claremont stood to benefit by $300,000 a year. What the report didn't mention was that Claremont also agreed not to oppose regionalization when SCWC applied for its next rate increases in 1999. The City of Claremont, in effect, signed off on regionalization and in return got a nice yearly water rights payment and now only pays half of what the citizenry has to pay for water.

Oh, and the city also benefited when the water company was allowed to raise its rates and instituted regionalization. You see, higher rates means higher utility tax revenue for Claremont. It was a win-win for the city, and a lose-lose for the citizens.

How did the debate go before the city council? See Item 17 of the Council Minutes. Here are some excerpts:

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.

Moved by Ring, seconded by Leiga, and carried 4-0 to approve the agreement for execution by the mayor.
(Absent: Rosenthal).

Incidentally, the only person on record questioning the agreement was Jackie McHenry, who "asked how citizens would save money. It costs the city less, may cost citizens more." (Who's the one with vision?)

Like so many problems in Claremont, the city council and staff long ago sowed the seeds for water rate woes by going along with SCWC and by not mounting a coordinated effort to lobby the state Public Utility Commission to oppose regionalizing our water rates.

Ironically, at the same 5/26/98 meeting, the matter of the Claremont Wilderness Park came up (Item 14). Mayor Smith inquired about the fire and vegetation management plan. The city's failure to implement that plan fully became a central argument for the plaintiffs in the Palmer Canyon fire lawsuit (settled in March, 2007, for $17.5 million). Smith was assured by staff that fire safety in the park was under control. We know what happened in October, 2003, when the Grand Prix fire swept through the area.

All of this really argues against any notion of competence under Southard, Ring, Held, et. al. It really argues for the need to avoid at all costs going back to that sort of mismanagement and to hold those people accountable for the bad their incompetence has inflicted on our community. It's simply folly to fail to see how all the good the Claremont 400 has accomplished is counterbalanced by a large body of incredibly boneheaded decisions for which they refuse to accept responsibility.

When you turn on your tap, when you pay your water bill, or if your house burned down in 2003, think of Diann Ring; in fact, call her up and thank her personally for her "vision."

Mailbag

More reader mail. This time a letter from a reader concerned with the city's raising it's copy fees. Is Claremont returning to its past ways or is staff merely adjusting prices to the going rates of neighboring towns? You can read the staff report on the matter for next Tuesday's City Council meeting.

We suspect that if you're reading this post, you probably don't have an opinion about the copy fees because you can get most of the city's documents online for free. Also, raising copy fees from $ .10 to $ .25 per copy for black-and-white and $ .50 per copy for color pales in comparison things like:

• The $17.5 million settlement for the Palmer Canyon fire (although this was covered by the city's liability insurance).
  
  
• $675,000 to compensate The Tolkin Group for former City Manager Glenn Southard's decision in 2000 to put in all the utility hookups before any buildings were put in place.
  
  
• The $10 million instant pension deficit when Southard increased staff retirement benefits in the year before he left town for Indio (the pension increases were retroactive to employees' date of hire).

And on and on.

Still, may the reader has a point--watch the pennies and the dollars take care of themselves:

Subject: Item 10 on the 4-24-07 Claremont City Council agenda
To: "claremont buzz" claremontbuzz@yahoo.com

Take a look at item #10 on the City Council agenda for Tuesday, April 24th. It calls for an almost triple increase in the cost to the public for having the city copy documents (b&w copies). Thanks to Jackie McHenry and her survey of costs in the late 90's, the cost to provide black and white copies to the public was lowered from .25 to .10 a page. The cost of providing audio tapes was lowered from $5 to $2.50 (if the requestor supplied their own tape) and when video taping of council meetings began in late 2003, the cost for the video tape was the same as for an audio tape( with the requestor providing the blank tape).

Now that McHenry is gone, the current staff and council are turning back the clock to the good old days of gouging the public. Bad enough they are partying like crazy now that the watchdog is gone, but they are also going back to discouraging the public from accessing documents at a Reasonable cost. What is next? Look at the survey cites in the report and see that the charges for B and W copies ranges from .05 -.25 a copy. So why doesn't Claremont charge.05 or .10 which is reasonable? Because they now have a majority that can do whatever they want to do and get away with it.

As late as last year, if the Observers for the League of Women Voters wanted a copy of the packets for the Commissions or the Council meetings (if they did not have computers or preferred to have a paper copy), those packets, some of them quite lengthy, were given to them free of charge. The reason? According to a former councilmember, the LAW were grandfathered (or perhaps grandmothered) in when they set the fee policy. The rest of the community (but who knows who really had to pay and who did not) had to pay the scheduled fees.

They are not supposed to charge for the time it takes the staff member (usually the city clerk) to get the documents and then copy them, but only for the direct cost of making the copies, i.e., paper, toner, electricity figured out by the cost per copy. Is Claremont violating the Public Records Act by doing this? I am sure their attorney has ok'ed it. The public needs to know about this and e-mail or speak out at the council meeting on Tuesday. If anyone even cares about it, that is.

A Fine Mess

First the recent $17.5 million Palmer Canyon fire settlement, now a very costly goof with Claremont's Village West project. He's over two years gone, but as our readers have pointed out, Glenn Southard is the gift that keeps on giving.

A Will Bigham article in the Daily Bulletin today indicated that back in 2002, when Village West was just beginning to take shape, then-City Manager Southard and his staff decided it'd be a good idea to put in the utility infrastructure ahead of time. Southard's reasoning was that it would attract businesses to the project by having all the sewer, electrical, communication, water and gas connections in place ahead of time.

Southard's staff told the developer, The Tolkin Group, that when the businesses eventually went in, several years later, it wouldn't cost much to adjust the utility connections to whatever configuration the buildings actually took.

But it turns out that the price of adjusting the utility connections to fit the actual project is going to be $675,000--a bill the city is having to foot. Unfortunately, this is something we've seen emerge time and again from the Southard management style. It's akin to the old Soviet-style five-year plan. Decide what the shape of the future is going to be, price in all your false assumptions, devote manpower and resources to achieve it, and then discover that when it arrives the reality is different from what you'd assumed. Next step: come up with another misguided five-year plan to adjust for the mistakes you made before. And so on.

The city staff report on the problem states:

As construction of the project has progressed, the developer has incurred approximately $1.5 million in additional site and utility costs that were not in its construction budget, as a result of having to relocate utilities and reconstruct portions of the public streetscapes.

Staff has negotiated that $1.5 million down to the $675,000 the city will now have to pay to Tolkin Group to compensate them for their additional costs. (Compensate is a key word that comes up time and again with the landmines Southard left behind.)

Sadly, this is the same sort of planning that Councilmembers Ellen Taylor, Linda Elderkin, Sam Pedroza, and their Claremont 400 supporters want to return to. This is the "vision" they speak of. As we've said before, sometimes "vision" is blind.

Mayor Peter Yao, who can always be counted on to say something appropriately ironic, was quoted in the Bulletin article: "'I hope future councils don't have to clean up messes that we create,' Yao said."

We couldn't agree more.