We Stand Corrected

Our post last Friday generated this response from Claremont Police Chief Paul Cooper (photo, right):

Date: Mon, March 21, 2011 7:11:16 AM
Subject: [ No Subject ]
From: Paul Cooper
To: claremontbuzz@yahoo.com

Hi Claremont Buzz,

A friend sent me the link to your most recent story on March 18, 2011. I thought I would share with you that the proposed communications tower project was presented at City Council, Police Commission and Community Services Commission meetings. We have discussed the project with Cable Airport management and they have no issues with the project. We have also submitted the project to the FAA and received a “No Hazard” certification. Following the council presentation, the tower project was also in the Courier and the Daily Bulletin The most recent agenda report is to simply update the new council on the project and its status. There’s been no attempt to “slip this one in.” If you have any questions about the project, I am always available.

Sincerely,


Paul


Paul Cooper
Chief of Police
Claremont Police Department
909-399-5401
pcooper@ci.claremont.ca.us

We noticed that Chief Cooper's concerns about clarifying the record must have extended to the City's public relations arm. Over the weekend there was a change in the City's online materials for the tower. When we originally looked on the City's website last Friday, this is what we saw:


This is what you see now:


So the City's information on the tower is much more helpful now than it was last week. However, we'd still like to see a link to the so-called "Initial Study". Among other things, apparently, this contains the deadline for public comment. Presumably it also contains a discussion of the height and how the initially-proposed 200-ft tower in Upland transformed into a 174-ft tower in Claremont.

We checked the City's records, and we were able to find the references Chief Cooper mentioned. Cooper made presentations regarding the tower to the City Council, the Police Commission, and the Community Services Commission. Searching the City's document archives when we were composing our original post didn't turn up the documents the Chief was able to point us to, so we took another look.

We were glad the Chief wrote us because, when we looked for the meetings he referred to, we were struck by how much all of it seemed to serve seemed to underscore our original concern about the City "slipping one in." For instance, the tower was originally slated to be located in the northeast corner of the City Yard on Monte Vista Ave. That placement, however, put the 174-foot tower in Upland and under the aegis of Upland's planning process, which didn't give the Chief and City Hall to opportunities to maneuver that having the tower on the Claremont side of the property did.

(It also reminded us that when Claremont originally built the building, at the end of the Glenn Southard regime, they built out past the city and county limits without getting the permission of Upland, which cause a minor row at the the time.)

Click to Enlarge

Chief Cooper mentioned the change in the tower's placement in his 2/10/11 report to the Community Services Commission:

The location of the tower was originally proposed in the far northeast corner of the city yards which is actually in the City of Upland. As staff worked with Upland staff, it became apparent that this project could not move through Upland's process in the timeline needed to meet the needs of the project and the grant. The tower was moved approximately 20' from its originally proposed site so that it is now located within Claremont while still being constructed in the far northeast corner of the facility. This will allow the management of the project to be handled within Claremont's process and staff has the ability to manage the timeline better.

The communications tower is on the agenda for tonight's City Council meeting, by the way. The Chief's report for the council lays out a timeline for the the tower's installation. Note the implied inevitability:

March 22 Report to council for FYI on project.
Agenda Published March 17. Report due March 14.

March 25 - April 19 Publish CEQA (21 days).

April 4 Bid Specs Completed.

April 19 Planning Commission Meeting. C U P approval. CEQA hearing and approval.
Agenda Published April 14. Report due April 11. Notice April 7. Appeal until May 2.
April 27 Architectural Commission Design Review.
Building design needed.
Agenda Published April 21. Report due April 18. Notice April 14.

April 4 Bid Specs Completed.

May 10 City Council approval to go to bid
Agenda Published May 5. Report due May 2.

May 24 Approval for bid if CEQA Appealed.
Agenda Published May 19. Report due May 16.

June 27 Open Bids.

July 12 Award Bid.
Agenda Published July 7. Report due July 5.

July/Auqust/Sept Build Project.

The Chief doesn't foresee any problems arising in the public process that might change his timeline, and there's real no need for him to worry. His certainty is guaranteed by the fact that he can shepherd the project through Claremont's rubber stamping commissions. We assume the commissioners, especially the Architectural Commissioners, are in line on this matter and no one will raise the objection, well, that the tower is buck-ugly as proposed, looking like a cross between a rocket gantry and a 1920s Signal Hill oil well tower, except taller than either.

As to the FAA, we note that there wasn't much public comment on this matter. For example, we didn't see the City or Chief Cooper circulate the materials they presented to the FAA. Incidentally, though the owners of Cable probably didn't realize when Chief Cooper apprised them of the tower plans, in the long term building the tower might be good not only for police communications, but for the anyone who might want the for airport's land for some other use like commercial development or even future expansion for the Claremont Colleges. Somewhere far down the road, the tower's existence will make it easier to argue that development has so crowded around airport that safety will become a concern.

And this is how Official Claremont uses the process to batter the uninitiated. In Claremont, there's never one meeting you can point to and say, "You must be there." If you showed up for, say, the Police Commission meeting last November 4th, you could have heard Chief Cooper talking to the commissioners about the proposed tower. If you raised an objection, however, you would have been told that this was really just an informational agenda item to address your concerns and that you would have your chance to air your concerns at a future meeting.

So you then you would have gone to the Community Services meeting on February 10th. You again raised your concerns, but would have been told there was no need to worry and that your concerns would be addressed at the City Council on March 22nd, or at a future Architectural Commission meeting. By the end of it, when you've had more than your fill of meetings, you'll be told that you should have had your concerns addressed earlier on when you had the opportunity and that the project had already been vetted by the city's commissions and by the City Council.

The unstated fact of the matter is that none of the meetings really mattered. It was all just window dressing. The idea for a trolley gets floated at someplace like a dinner party at former Mayor's Judy Wright's home, and the next thing you know, the project is a fait accompli.

Only after you've experienced the vaunted Claremont public process will you come to appreciate the machinery at work in our town. Only then can you truly call yourself a Claremonter.

Burying the Past, Again

The Claremont Courier last week had a two-part series by Tony Krickl examining the 10th anniversary of the 1999 Irvin Landrum shooting, an incident that split the Claremont community, leading to deep soul-searching among some and outright denial in others. (Unfortunately, the Courier didn't post the articles on their website, which seemed a bit of an oversight considering the importance of the issue to the community.)

The incident became what some might call a transformational moment in Claremont's civic culture. In March, 2001, Llewellyn Miller, Claremont's first African American councilmember, was elected in the aftermath of the shooting; and, in 2003, Peter Yao became the City's first Asian councilmember.

The incident also caused a good many people to examine the city's management culture, one embodied by former Claremont City Manager Glenn Southard and endorsed by the city fathers and mothers, the so-called Claremont 400. Many of these people refused for years after the shooting to acknowledge the possibility of any imperfection within City Hall and allowed Southard and his faithful assistant, current City Council candidate Bridget Healy, to run roughshod over state open government laws and to treat the non-Claremont 400 public with open contempt.

In our view, this Southardian management culture lay at the heart of the Landrum matter. What happened on Base Line Rd. on the night of January 11, 1999, will never be fully known. But what we do know is that the City Council and Southard committed misstep after misstep, mostly because of their collective arrogance as well as the sharp disconnect between their egos and the values of a majority of voters.

The sense of the majority of voters that the Council was horribly out-of-touch with reality was what did in incumbents Karen Rosenthal and Al Leiga, and what forced Paul Held and Sandy Baldonado to not seek re-election. It was also what swept Miller, Yao, Jackie McHenry, and Corey Calaycay into office. (The sword cuts both ways, though. Miller and McHenry both lost their re-election bids in a particularly ugly campaign in 2005, and it remains to be seen whether or not Calaycay will break the string of incumbents either stepping down or getting voted out.)

* * *

A reader wrote in after the first of Krick's two articles appeared on Saturday, January 31st. The reader was bothered by something we also noticed about the article:

DATE: Tuesday, February 3, 2009 12:35 PM
SUBJECT: Landrum article from Saturday's Claremont Courier
TO: Claremont Buzz

Hi,

I wondered if I was the only person who read the article in Saturday’s Claremont Courier by Tony Krickl about the Landrum shooting and who didn’t recognize the Karen Rosenthal quoted therein. My recollection of the events surrounding the Landrum shooting are that then-mayor Rosenthal, with her tin ear and foot in mouth, exacerbated a difficult situation no less than Glenn Southard. And I cannot remember, nor can I believe, that she took down the award plaques given to officers Hanna and Jacks. Certainly, she could not have spoken to Glenn Southard about the awards in the way described in the article. Part of the reason that she lost so badly (finishing in last or next-to-last place) in the next City Council election is that the Council would not rescind the awards, muzzle the embarrassing city manager, or consider doing so.

She was simply “inexperienced”—certainly not arrogant, insensitive, and certain of the city manager’s rightness. Revisionist history at its finest.

Yes, dear reader, Official Claremont's habit of forgetting and erasing the inconvenient parts of the past is nothing new, as we once said a couple years ago, Chicken Creek may be long gone from Claremont, but the River Lethe flows strong through the heart of town. Drink, Claremonsters, and forget.

* * *

The reader's note alluded to study circles. This, you might recall was Ellen Taylor's way of trying to take credit for "healing" the city by organizing the study circles without actually having to trouble citizens with of any sort of real self-examination. It was simply enough to have Queen Ellen declare victory over the guilt the Landrum matter created among Claremont's progressives for the self-congratulatory back-slapping to begin, followed quickly by the forgetting.

All that remains now is a sort of faux-history, complete with a false set of recollections, tenderly evoked in Krickl's two articles by the people most responsible for trying to preserve Southard's job (hence, Preserve Claremont):

• Former Mayor Karen Rosenthal, currently agonizing over Southard's awarding Employees-of-the-Year awards (with $1,000 bonuses) to the two officers involved in the shooting, claims to have ordered Southard to take the awards down from the walls just outside the Council Chambers - a detail Rosenthal brings to light 10 years after the fact, if it ever really happened at all.
  
  
• Taylor expressing sympathy for Landrum's family: "....[Southard] refused to release information about the shooting to the family. If that were my child, I would want some answers. The protests happened because the family felt they had to protest to be heard." So where were Ellen's sympathies 10 years ago? Why, if she were so concerned about the Landrum family, was Taylor not out at City Hall leading the protests or meeting with the Tracy Lee, Irvin Landrum's mother?
  
  
• Taylor's eventual campaign manager (and Bridget Healy's de facto CM as well), in Krickl's second article last Wednesday claiming a healing victory through the creation of Claremont's Police Commission: "In 2000, the city set up a Police Commission to 'give the community a forum if concerns came up with the Police Department,' said Helaine Goldwater, former chair of the Police Commission.
  
  Goldwater conveniently forgets (that word again) to mention her role in neutering the commission so as to shackle its effectiveness, or Healy's role, beginning on 9/5/02 (the first meeting after Goldwater's commission term expired), as the staff member assigned to keep watch over the Police Commission to make sure they didn't stray too far off the reservation.

Click to Enlarge

In our view, Krickl's blog post on the subject gets closer to the truth of the matter than the two articles:

I interviewed Karen Rosenthal, who was not mayor when the incident happened but was throughout much of the aftermath. As the voice of the city, Rosenthal was certainly in a difficult position and struggled with being thrown into that role during the crisis.

Rosenthal cried while I interviewed her. Her emotions, which still exist today, personify how lasting an impact the incident had on the community, and all the raw emotions that it invoked.

The greatest criticism of Rosenthal throughout the aftermath was for being insensitive to Landrum and his family and making public statements about his character and personal life that many felt were irrelevant.

Does it matter that he fathered 2 children to 2 different women at the age of 18, as she brought up during our interview? Even going so far as to call him a “rapist, by the legal definition” because the women were underage.

....When Glenn Southard named the officers Employees of the Year award and released the criminal record of Obee Landrum [Irvin Landrum's uncle -ed.], he displayed his intent to take an extremely defensive stance over the issue. This did not sit well with those close to him and observers in the community.

With all the poor decisions that he made during the crisis, it calls to question his decision-making abilities on other, less important issues. The city of Claremont may very well be better off without him.

Claremont, as Krickl notes, is a better place now. But it is not because of Karen Rosenthal's retroactive compassion or Ellen Taylor's study circles. It's because there has been a bit of a shift in thinking in City Hall, a little more openness, a slight willingness to take the risk of making information easily available to the public. Televising and streaming Council meetings has helped, too, if for no other reason than the Council's fear of the camera has eliminated the eyerolling and sighing that confronted people questioning the Council on their decisions.

It's a quieter town, a less contentious town, than it was 10 years ago. The question should be, why did it take a shooting to set into motion the six-year-long chain of events that led to Southard's leaving? And, maybe, a second question: Why in the world would any sane person want that way of thinking back?

Tonight's Council Meeting

The Claremont City Council meets again tonight, beginning with another one of their closed sessions at 5:15pm at City Hall. Do you get the impression this is where the real business of the people gets done?

The Council reconvenes at 6:30pm in the Council Chambers for its public session. Here's what's on tap tonight:


CLOSED SESSION

In their ultra-secret bunker, the City Council will:

• Meet with their labor negotiators, City Manager Jeff Parker, Assistant City Manager Tony Ramos, and personnel manager Shawna Urban to discuss negotiations with the Claremont Professional Employee's Association.
  
  
• Discuss the Protect Our Neighborhood lawsuit against the City and Claremont McKenna College.
  
  
• Meet with Jerry Tessier regarding price and terms for the Padua Theatre renovation.

REGULAR SESSION

When the Council reconvenes, they'll give a report on their closed session actions, then jump into the regular part of the meeting, beginning with public comment. Among the agenda items are:

• A second reading of the residential parking ordinance.
  
  
• Authorizing City Manager Parker to sign a lease agreement with Tri-City Mental Health to lease that agency the city's Youth and Family Support Center facility.
  
  
• Awarding a $2.2 million contract with Mega Way Enterprises of Pomona to build Phase 1 of the Padua Ave. Park. According to the staff report, Phase 1 will include one unlit soccer field and 52 parking spaces.
  
  Additionally, the staff report says that the City is expecting to receive $850,000 from the San Gabriel and Los Angeles Rivers and Mountains Conservancy for aspects of habitat restoration and water conservation. The city's agenda report seems to indicate that if the City receives the money, staff wants the council to shift $850,000 of money already budgeted for Phase 1 and go forward with Phase 1A, which is the lit soccer field and 58 more parking spaces.
  
  This money transfer keeps the RMC's hands nominally clean when it comes to taking out the sensitive habitat they are supposed to be saving, but in reality it allows the City to go forward not only with removal of habitat but also with introducing sports field lighting that is not in keeping with the City's Draft Sustainability Plan or the rural area lighting restrictions for Northeast Claremont.
  
  The report says the total for Phases 1 and 1A is $3,667,859. If the City receives the RMC money and goes forward with Phase 1A, it will have to appropriate another $527,000 from the City's General Fund Reserve to build Phase 1A with its lit field.
  
  The RMC was supposed to vote on granting the $800,000 to the city yesterday, and the staff report seems to indicate that the deal was a done one ahead of time, so it's likely that the council will be voting on raiding the General Fund Reserve for that extra $527,000 to go forward with Phase 1A.
  
  The Daily Bulletin's Wes Woods II had an article on the Padua Park agenda item in today's paper.
  
  
• Considering the Police Commission's recommendation for the Corey Nursery site at 1650 N. Monte Vista as the best location for the proposed new Claremont Police Station. The Council is also being asked to direct staff to seek funding for the station, which is projected to cost between $20-25 million.
  
  
• Considering recommendations from the Architectural and Planning Commissions on streamlining approval of wireless communication towers. Not enough of these in town, and the do generate a steady revenue stream.
  

• An appointment to the Human Services Commission to replace Commission Chair Gwen Carr, who recently resigned her position. Carr was a casualty of former Human Services Chair Valerie Martinez's Preserve Claremonster scheming. No good deed goes unpunished is the lesson here. Maury Feingold will replace Carr on the commission.

LWV Finds Police Station Site

Leave it to the Claremont 400 to always pick the hardest, most costly way to do things.

Saturday's Claremont Courier had an article by Tony Krickl reporting that the city's Police Commission has identified a site for a new $25-35 million police station. The site is located on Monte Vista Ave. just south of the Claremont City Yard and is currently owned and occupied by the Corey Nursery.

The Courier article gave the background for the decision:

In December 2007, an architectural firm was contracted to review the top 10 sites identified by the commission as viable locations for a new police station. The 7-acre site was the top pick by the firm and won unanimous support among police commissioners.

The location is ideal for several reasons, said Carol Painter, Chair of the Police Commission. It is not located in the middle of a residential neighborhood, which could hinder mobility for emergency vehicles. It would be adjacent to the city yard where city vehicles are fueled and repaired. It would also be located across the street from the Pomona Valley Hospital development.

The commission has been looking for a 4- to 5-acre site that would provide enough room for a single or two-story building and ground level parking. The 7-acre site along Monte Vista Avenue would offer plenty of space for current needs and allow for future expansion, according to the architectural firm’s report.

The article also noted that the Police Commission eliminated the former affordable housing site on Base Line Rd. as a consideration, as well as the Holliday Rock site to the north of the city yard.

We're betting the city will have to use its eminent domain powers to take the land, not necessarily because the Corey Nursery would be an unwilling seller. As we've seen in other Claremont land transactions, private parties selling and to Claremont want the threat of eminent domain because that confers a certain tax benefit. The Johnson's Pasture owners wanted this threat at one time, and it was also used to help Claremont Toyota acquire the former Chili's property (another great deal for the citizens of Claremont).

So, we rather than using the land at Base Line Rd. and Towne Ave. that Claremont already owns, the city is going to have to go buy land and then build the station. The Corey Nursery land also has the added problem of extending over the county line into Upland, adding the problem of having to negotiate the running of the police station with San Bernardino County.

Moreover, the Base Line Rd. site raised the possibility of a joint facility with the neighboring city of La Verne. Something that would allow for sharing the cost of building and running the station and jailing facility - a not-so-insignificant hurdle that La Verne's City Council has been grappling with.

Why not use the Base Line Rd. site? One reason that the Base Line Rd. site is smaller than what Claremont Police Chief Cooper is seeking. Of course, there's always the chance that he's been told, "Hands off the Base Line site," by the Claremont League of Women Voters (LWV), League president and Police Commissioner Barbara Musselman, and Mayor Ellen Taylor (herself a former LWV president).

Musselman and Taylor, you may recall, were two of the LWV forces behind the failed affordable housing project at the Base Line site. Musselman is also on the city's Affordable Housing Task Force, along with several other LWV members. We suspect they will try to resurrect the Base Line Rd. site for affordable housing sometime in the future. So, whether it would work for a police station or not, that land is spoken for.

Another problem with getting a larger property is that the city and the CPD will want to fill it. Give them more land and they'll just build a larger facility. Give them two acres, they might just find a way to make do for a lower cost.

With the city contemplating a $100 million or more water company take over, building an affordable housing project somewhere, and starting in the fall on the first stage of $12 million Padua Sports Park, they may have a hard time going to the citizens of Claremont for the bonds to pay for that $25-35 million police station, especially at a time when Claremonters and people everywhere are having to cut back on their own household budgets.

Proposed CPD Station Site
(Click on Image to Enlarge)

Good Neighbors

Something there is that doesn't love a wall

That sends a frozen groundswell under it

....
Before I'd built a wall, I'd ask to know

What it is I was walling in and walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.

Robert Frost, Mending Wall

The saga continues. Our story so far: the city with attitude and a serious inferiority complex to compensate for (Claremont) decides it's going to build its new police station at the corner of Towne Ave. and Bonita Ave. on the site of a 10-acre vacant lot owned by the Xerox Corp.

One big problem is the land isn't part of Claremont. It's in Pomona, a much larger city with its own inferiority complex. Another is Claremont forgot to tell the Pomona City Council it was planning on annexing the police station land. Not exactly the best way to start off a friendly negotiation, especially when Claremont and its ruling caste, the Claremont 400, has a reputation for snootiness, snobbery and arrogance.

From the 400's point of view, Pomona should be thankful for ceding that little plot of land to its much superior neighbor. After all, Pomona is to blame for all of Claremont's problems, beginning with crime. The Claremont Police Commission took up the matter last week, as Will Bigham in the Daily Bulletin was kind enough to detail yesterday.

Pomona Mayor Norma Torres didn't seem to happy to hear the news when it originally broke, and she pretty much told Claremont to take a hike. Claremont's elite, used to ignoring its own citizens, applied their same classy charm to this issue. Claremont Police Commissioner Gary Soto in Bigham's article wooed Pomona by calling Mayor Torres "someone who lacks political savvy and professionalism."

Obviously, in Soto's view, professionalism means doing what he says without question. Soto, a former Fontana middle school principal, must still think he's dealing with seventh-graders. We're not sure who needs to grow up here.

It really is hard not to laugh at the situation, something Bulletin columnist and longtime Claremonter David Allen had no trouble doing.

It was also nice of Police Chief Paul Cooper to let us know the cost of acquiring the land and building the station: $29 million. Toss in the $100 million-plus for buying the water company, the $10 million-plus to build the Padua Sports Park, the $11.5 to 12.5 million to buy Johnson's Pasture, and you have quite a pricey agenda for Claremont. Of course, just as it's not their land, it's not their money either. Chief Cooper said in the Bulletin that the city would probably take out bonds to pay for the station.

Maybe Cooper should just ask Pomona to pay for the thing since Claremont is being kind enough to police Pomona's crime problem. Sort of hearkens back to the 1970's, when Claremonsters still called our police "the border patrol"--something former Mayor Judy Wright omitted from her "Claremont: A Pictorial History."

As long as we're shelling out the money, why not build a wall around our town? Something there is that doesn't like a snob.

Carnac: Claremont Gets Its Chief

Claremont has a new police chief. As we predicted, Paul Cooper has been named Police Chief. Rather than going outside for a chief, Claremont stayed with one of its own.

We remember Cooper as the man who with former Assistant City Manager Bridget Healy co-authored the 1999 staff report (open the PDF) justifying the city's proposal to have mental health professionals on call at city council meetings to monitor speakers. The reason? So that speakers deemed threats to public safety by the council or city manager could be silenced and removed. That should give you an ideal of Cooper's management style.

Cooper is a product of the Southard School of Business Management, meaning he can be counted on to surround himself with yes-men, and punish those who try to propose views and ideas that are different his own by giving them lower raises and by denying them promotion. As our piece on Philip Zimbardo and James Suroweicki indicated, this is generally guaranteed to design in institutional failure.

Hubris always precedes crisis, and Claremont is no exception. Write this down and put in an envelope: There will be another Landrum crisis. It is as inevitable as the fire that burned down the homes in Palmer Canyon. It's simply a function of fuel load and heat.

That mess was a byproduct of a system, of which Cooper was a part. When it happens, call Helaine Goldwater and thank her, if she's still around at that time. Goldwater, a former Police Commission Chair and a key Claremont 400 member, has been behind the push for Cooper. Goldwater and the 400 Cooper, who is a son of Claremont, because is will take the Police Department back to the Southard days.

Call current Mayor Peter Yao, too, when the crisis comes. He may still be on the council at that time. Yao, who was hired in large part in reaction to the Landrum incident, has stood by while the the Police Commission has been neutered and the Vehicle Stop Study was halted. Yao's backing of Cooper represents his bowing to the will of Goldwater and the 400.

One of the ironies of Will Bigham's Bulletin piece on the hiring is that Bigham writes:

The response to the [Landrum] shooting - including the two officers involved in the incident being named city employees of the year - led to charges of institutionalized racism and cast a pall over the department and City Hall.

So the answer to hire a key member of the institution to bring change to that agency's management culture?