Highway Robbery

Yes, as through this world I've wandered

I've seen lots of funny men;
Some will rob you with a six-gun,
And some with a fountain pen.

Pretty Boy Floyd
- Woody Guthrie

DEAL GONE BAD

Well, if you happened to catch last Tuesday's Claremont City Council meeting, you would have seen the council vote 4-1 to approve terminating the operating covenant that Claremont Toyota and the City agreed to back in September 2005. Mayor Corey Calaycay was the lone "No" vote.

As we discussed in our last post, the property in question is a 1.25-acre parcel that once contained a Chili's Restaurant and a small parking lot. It's located on the west side of Indian Hill Blvd. next to the offramp from the eastbound 10 Freeway. Claremont Toyota owner Roger Hogan had originally wanted that property to expand his existing operation.

Back in 2005, Hogan, who exerts a great deal of influence in town thanks to the fact that his dealership provides the City with about half of its annual sales tax revenue, talked the council into giving him $100,000 to help him acquire the property. The City also agreed to put in $200,000 in street and signage improvements and used its eminent domain powers to threaten the previous owner. The "threat" was a paper one only. It allowed the seller a tax advantage, so the City had to engage in a oddly legal, wink-and-nod IRS tax dodge for the seller's benefit.

The payoff for the city was supposed to millions of dollars in tax revenue over the minimum seven years Hogan agreed to use the Chili's property to expand his Toyota dealership. So, some time soon after the city council agreed to the deal on a 3-1 vote (then-councilmember Jackie McHenry voted against it; Calaycay abstained), Hogan took possession of the property, had the restaurant structure torn down and paved over, and started parking cars on the lot.

Unfortunately, the car market, and the economy as a whole, crashed, which caused Hogan to reconsider his need for the Chili's lot. With three years remaining on his agreement, Hogan wanted out of the deal, so last week city staff urged the council to allow Hogan to back out of the 2005 agreement and payback only half of the $100,000 of the City's investment.

You can see the actual discussion here (scroll down to agenda item 13 and click on that link).


NOPE, NO CONFLICT HERE

Of course, the council agreed to the deal Tuesday, but not without some squirming on the part of an uncharacteristically sober councilmember Sam Pedroza (carousing, at left). Pedroza received $1,000 in campaign contributions from the Hogan family.

How much did the Hogans love Sam in 2007? Well, the maximum allowable contribution for a Claremont City Council campaign is $250 per person. Hogan got around that by having his wife, as well as his adult son and daughter, contribute $250 each to the Pedroza campaign. Roger Hogan, Jr., by the way, for his campaign donation listed his occupation fleet manager of Claremont Toyota.

One other interesting thing about the Hogan donations is that none of them - father, mother, daughter, son - live in Claremont. Roger Sr. and his wife live in Newport Beach. For all the talk about how much Roger Sr. gives back to the community, it certainly seems like he takes an awful lot out, and we have to wonder if there isn't sometimes an implicit threat to take his dealership out of Claremont if Roger doesn't get what Roger wants.

Yesterday's Claremont Courier had an article by Tony Krickl (sorry, no link) that quoted Pedroza's rationale for not recusing himself from the vote for his auto dealer patron:

"It just astounds me as we're talking about the challenges to our businesses at this time and people are talking about charging this number one income producer $100,000," Councilmember Sam Pedroza said. "I just think it's the wrong direction."

Mr. Pedroza defended himself at the meeting after Mr. [Dean] McHenry pointed out that some city council members had received campaign contribution money from Mr. Hogan and questioned whether their votes would be swayed due to a conflict of interest.

The other councilmember who received a campaign contribution from Hogan was Mayor Pro Tem Linda Elderkin (pontificating, at right). Elderkin, whom we like to refer to "The Process Queen" for her supposed adherence to rules that enforce orderly, fair government, received $250 from the elder Hogan in her 2007 campaign.

Neither Pedroza nor Elderkin were on the council back in 2005 when the City agreed to operating covenant with Hogan for the Chili's property. But it never hurts to have some allies when a vote is needed, as it was on Tuesday night. Fortunately for the council, it has always reliable city attorney, Sonia Carvalho, standing by. Tuesday, Sonia leaped to the defense of Pedroza and Elderkin. Krickl's article quoted Carvalho:

"Campaign contributions for the purposes of conflicts are not sources of income," City Attorney Sonia Carvalho added. "So you can receive campaign contributions and not have a conflict of interest."

Carvalho also said in her comments that as long as the council can claim a "legitimate public purpose" for any expense, there is no gift of public funds involved.

Thanks for that, Sonia. So, Hogan gets a break, and the city gets back $50,000 of it's $100,000 investment, a 50% loss on the investment. Think of what services that $100,000 might have purchased, or how much interest the city might have earned over the past four years if it had merely invested the money in a long-term bond or CD.

Pedroza was careful to point out that there was no conflict on his part because he hadn't accepted any money from Hogan, et. al., in the last 12 months. It's also good to know that 12 months hence, in his presumptive 2011 campaign, Pedroza will again be cleared to accept even more Hogan money.

Who in 2007 knew the best return on investment might be a Claremont City Council campaign? (Start with $1,250, $50,000 returned = a 4000% gain over about three years.)

Check out these 2007 City Election campaign finance documents:

(Click on images to enlarge)

Pedroza 2007 Campaign Finance Statement

Elderkin 2007 Campaign Finance Statement

POSTSCRIPT

The funniest thought of all occurred to us as we were driving past the Claremont Auto Center last week. What if three years from now Roger Hogan decides to pull up stakes and concentrate on the Orange County car market? Who can guarantee he doesn't anyway? We couldn't help but noticing how his Claremont Toyota ads now say "Claremont/Capistrano." Capistrano is sure a lot closer to Newport Beach than Claremont.


The sight of the Claremont Auto Center last week wasn't exactly a confidence inspiring image. There certainly seemed to be a lot of empty spaces. The Chili's lot appeared empty except for six vehicles:



So, we wonder, how long did Hogan's operation really use the property? The answer is less than three of the agreed upon seven years. As always, Google Earth tells all (the Chili's lot is outlined in red):

4/1/05 - Before the deal

3/15/06 - Restaurant gone

6-17-07 - Cars. Now you see 'em....

6/27/08 - ....Now you don't

6/19/09 - More cars gone

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.

City Council Election Kicks Off

CAMPAIGN SEASON BEGINS

The 2009 Claremont City Council race begins this month with the smallest field in many years. Three candidates are vying for two council seats (in alphabetical order): Corey Calaycay, Bridget Healy, and Larry Schroeder.

It's a shame Citizen Michael John Keenan (pictured right, courtesy of CMJK) isn't running this time around. From time to time we get missives from him, and he brings a perspective to these races that's different from most of the other candidates. Sorry, Michael, if we haven't gotten around to posting all the news and info you pass on, but we do appreciate the tips.

We'll know more about the three candidates in this year's council race in a few more weeks. The nominator lists are out, with each candidate having filed their nomintation papers with the City last month. These are lists of the 30 people who nominated their respective candidates for the election, and they offer a preview of the wider support the candidates will end up receiving.

As the election draws nearer, you'll start seeing ads in the Claremont Courier with supporter lists, which typically number in the hundreds of names for viable candidates. Judging from the nominator lists that are out, there's may be some fence mending going on, at least with the Calaycay and Healy campaigns.


A LITTLE BACKGROUND

Incumbent Calaycay, you might recall, ran as a change agent in 2005 and was the target of a uniquely ugly smear campaign that year. That campaign was organized by a group of town fathers and mothers who called themselves "Preserve Claremont." The PC group, which was really an independent PAC, raised nearly enough money to fund a candidate of their own. They used all those thousands of dollars to run full-page ads (at $680 or so a pop) twice a week in the Claremont Courier during the height of the campaign.

Preserve also had a spin-off called "Claremont Business PAC" that got money from people like commercial realtor Nick Quackenbos and Claremont Toyota owner Roger Hogan, who donated $2,000 to the CB PAC (calendar year donations are limited to $250 per person to city council campaigns, but PACs have no such limits). The spin-off was a last minute thing, the brainchild of Human Services Commissioner Valerie Martinez, who used the CB PAC money to send out two city-wide mailers on the Friday before the 2005 election (you've seen the reasons for this tactic before).

Preserve Claremont, incidentally, had a paid city staff member, City Arts Coordinator Francine Baker, as its treasurer, and there seemed to be a number of ways in which some city staffers tried to influence the election. A couple employee unions, for instance, were involved in a parallel political attack on Councilmember Jackie McHenry, who had been critical of then-City Manager Glenn Southard, an attack that featured Valerie Martinez standing up at a city council meeting during the election and calling McHenry "a cancer on this community."

Southard provided the motivation for the twin attacks. He and some of his employees spread the fear that if Calaycay were elected, he and McHenry would team up and cause an exodus of city staff (even though they represented only 2 votes out of 5).

The real reason Southard spread this fear seemed to be his own fear - a fear of a council reining him in and questioning things like his own spending. Everyone forgets the thing that really set Southard off against McHenry was her asking him to provide receipts for his expenses. All of Southard's false claims of harassment that McHenry had created a "hostile work environment" stemmed from that. Keep in mind that Southard's outburst occurred right at the outset of the 2005 campaign and served as the jumping off point for Preserve Claremont in all its incarnations:

GLENN SOUTHARD GOES BERSERK



Southard quickly abandoned his attack on McHenry after seeing that the witchhunt was turning the Councilmember into a sympathetic figure with a lot of citizens, and he left it to his Preserve Claremont friends to press their offensive against Calaycay. Shortly after Calaycay won election in 2005 (along with Ellen Taylor), Southard announced he was leaving Claremont for Indio and was taking his longtime faithful assistant, Bridget Healy, with him.

Like any bully will, after enough people finally saw through the blustering and stood up to him, Southard took his ball and left.


HANDICAPPING THE RACE

Now that Calaycay's been on the council for nearly four years and Southard's been gone for three years and eight months, the ill-will the former city manager stirred up against Calaycay seems to have abated. In fact, some people who didn't endorse Calaycay the last time around, and even some who supported other candidates in 2005, are listed as Calaycay nominators this time around. There is even one name, that of Citrus College board member Sue Keith, that appears on both Calaycay's and Healy's nominator lists. So maybe the peace has finally been made in some backroom in town.

Community Services Commissioner Larry Schroeder's nominator list doesn't have a lot of names we've seen associated with past candidates, so it's difficult to assess at this point where his support comes from or what his stands on different issues are.

When the wider supporter lists come out, the campaign finances are released, and the candidates have had a chance to debate each other in forums, we'll be better able to gauge how the race is shaping up. Conventional wisdom would say that Calaycay and Healy are the favorites, with Schroeder the dark horse. But these are strange times, and the signs can be difficult to read.

Magic 8-Ball says, "Ask again later."


CANDIDATE FORUMS

Speaking of candidate forums, there are two scheduled that we know of:

• Active Claremont
  Thursday, January 15th, 7pm
  
  Active Claremont will host its candidate forum on the 15th in the Padua Room of the Alexander Hughes Community Center at 1700 Danbury Rd. in Claremont.
  
  Call (909) 621-5412 for information.
  
  (Thanks to the Daily Bulletin's Wes Woods II for that event news.)
  
  
  
• League of Women Voters of the Claremont Area
  Monday, January 26th, 7pm to 9pm
  
  This one's also at the Hughes Center. According to Wes Woods:
  

  Claremont League of Women Voters president Barbara Musselman will moderate but the public can write questions down they want the candidates to answer, said the league's voter services vice president Angela Bekzadian-Avila in a news release.
  
  Once the questions are gathered, Musselman will "choose a range of questions to ask the candidates," officials wrote in the release.
  
  Of course, I don't know if your question will be picked or if it will be answered but go and find out.
  
  Information: Angela Bekzadian-Avila at (909) 621-7809 or angelanb25@yahoo.com

That last bit about Musselman picking and choosing the questions points up one of the problems with the League of Women Voters' forum. Musselman, who was a big Glenn Southard and city staff defender back in 2005, is far from unbiased and will be the gatekeeper at the LWV forum. Additionally, the jungle drums are saying LWV member and former Claremont Police Commission member Helaine Goldwater (the woman who gave us Cookiemonster Ellen Taylor) is one of the behind-the-scenes people responsible for Healy's candidacy. So don't expect any questions that might make Healy look bad.

The odds for real questions to be asked are much higher at the Active Claremont event simply because they tend to just read the questions that are submitted, though they do combine multiple questions on the same topic into one.

Here's a useful experiment:

If you have the time, go to both events and submit the same question at each one. Then see if it gets asked. Something about city pensions might be a good. Claremont's own employee pension account with CalPERS is underfunded by several million dollars, thanks to some generous benefits that Healy, in her former capacity as Claremont's Assistant City Manager, helped push.

The public pension question is a big one, with several California cities facing bankruptcy because of the benefits they lavished on city workers when times were good. As the Wall Street Journal recently noted, the city of Pacific Grove is close to bankrupt because of its employee pension plan.

The city of Vallejo is even worse off, having already declared bankruptcy. Vallejo is trying restructure some of its employee contracts, and, if successful, other California municipalities may use Vallejo bankruptcy as a template to get out of employee contracts and benefits they can no longer afford. It would interesting to hear how Healy, who as an employee benefited greatly from the city's generosity to its staff, would handle such benefits as a councilperson in the current fiscal crisis. Also, would Healy's status as a former assistant city manager raise any conflicts of interest if, as we assume, she is elected?

In the past, important issues would never be fully addressed, at least not at the League of Women Voters event, which generally attracts the largest crowds. The LWV has usually offered up softball questions to the candidates it privately supports and has avoided posing the tough questions in their candidate forums, much to the community's detriment.

Limits

With the the economy tanking, the stock and housing markets plummeting, and a credit freeze just beginning to thaw, you'd think that there'd be some serious talk at Claremont's City Hall about what contingencies need to be in place for the inevitable hits the city budget is going to take. But don't hold your breath.

This past week, the credit markets loosened up enough for California to sell $5 billion worth of short-term revenue anticipation notes that allow the state to bridge the gap between now and the beginning of 2009, when tax revenue starts rolling in.

The news for California and local governments like Claremont isn't especially rosy, however. And, as the LA Times noted on its front page today, the potential damage will likely be widespread:

Some of the most dire problems are emerging in states such as California and Florida, where the housing collapse has been the most pronounced.

California lawmakers, who faced a $15.2-billion deficit going into the fiscal year, argued over the budget for months. In the final draft, state services took a big hit: Medi-Cal was temporarily cut by 10%, and the education budget was set at $3 billion less than last year.

The bad news continues to mount. Last month, the state's revenue fell about $1 billion short of projections. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and legislative leaders have been meeting weekly to discuss the problem and are considering calling lawmakers to a special session. In Florida, lawmakers faced a similar challenge as they wrote their yearly budget. The plan they devised was nearly $6 billion smaller than the year before. It resulted in 200 net job losses, tuition increases, cuts to nursing homes and the shuttering of 13 driver licensing offices.

Now the Legislature is scrambling to patch a new $795-million gap. Lawmakers may face yet another multibillion-dollar shortfall when they sit down to craft a budget for the fiscal year starting in 2009. Declining revenue is just part of the problem in Florida: Education costs are soaring because of the passage of a 2002 class-size-reduction ballot initiative, and rising enrollment and healthcare costs are bloating the Medicaid program.

Budget woes engulfed more than 40 states beginning in 2001, a result of the dot-com crash. At the time, economists said it was the biggest fiscal crisis for states since World War II.

"If you look at some of the basics of the economy -- unemployment, the stock market decline, the decline in consumer spending -- there is some reason to fear this crisis will be worse," said Nicholas Johnson, an analyst with the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Local governments, in particular, may get hammered harder this time around. In 2001, Johnson said, cities and municipalities, flush with cash from high property tax rolls, were able to pick up the cost of services that states had abandoned. But that will be more difficult now because declining home values have dragged down property tax revenues.

Yet, despite the obvious looming budgetary problems, no one in Claremont is talking, at least publicly, about the hard decisions that we may have to make. Rather than having an open, public discussion of our fiscal realities, the powers-that-be in town are carrying on as if the party's still in full-swing on the one hand, and on the other they sneak in things like trash collection rate increases based on false and misleading information.

The City took steps earlier this year to try to address reduced sales and property tax revenue by instituting across the board spending reductions and putting a hiring freeze in place. But we suspect that no one anticipated things like a nationwide 32% decline in Toyota auto sales - something that has dire implications for a city like Claremont which gets over 50% of its sales tax money from Roger Hogan's Claremont Toyota.

In trying to cement what she considers her legacy, Claremont Mayor Ellen Taylor has placed a lot of costly projects on the city's plate - an affordable housing project, Padua Park, a new police station, to name a few - but her real legacy may be committing the city politically and fiscally to things that will push the city's budget far into the red.

We like to believe in a limitless future, but that simply does not square with today's reality. We hope our city's leaders have the vision to understand that reality.

Local News Briefs

tThe Daily Bulletin had a couple pieces on local Claremont news:


BYOF: BRING YOUR OWN FINANCING

The Peppertree Square shopping center at Indian Hill Blvd. and Arrow Hwy. is getting a facelift, according to the Daily Bulletin:

The center, at the southeast corner of Indian Hill Boulevard and Arrow Highway, has been a source of consternation in recent years because its owner, who lives overseas, hasn't performed basic upkeep, city officials say.

"Fifteen years ago it was a pretty nice neighborhood center, and it's really just deteriorated," said Brian Desatnik, housing and redevelopment manager.

Four of its retail spaces sit vacant, including two of its largest - a space that used to house a small market, and another that used to be a music store.

Nick Quackenbos, a commercial real estate agent who is responsible for leasing in the center, said renovation plans could be presented for city approval by the end of the summer.

You may recall that Quackenbos is also the realtor trying to broker the sale of the land adjacent to the Claremont Auto Center on the south side of the 10 Freeway. A portion of the land is the former site of a Chili's Restaurant, and the City sunk several hundred thousand dollars into infrastructure improvement as part a deal to help Auto Center owner Roger Hogan acquire that land back in 2005.

That deal was sold to the City Council by then-City Manager Glenn Southard and his staff with the promise that Hogan would expand the Auto Center onto the Chili's property, which would lead to increased auto sales tax revenue that would give the city a great return on their investment.

Tony Krickl in the Claremont Courier reported on the possible sale of the land earlier this month. Krickl's article said:

The right decision?

In 2005, the city mediated the sale between the Chili’s property owner and Mr. Hogan, who had plans to expand his dealership there. A financial review of the agreement shows that the city may have gotten the short end of the stick, while Mr. Hogan appears to be the bigger beneficiary of the deal.

As part of the agreement between the 3 parties, the city’s Redevelopment Agency was required to invest $200,000 in street and signage improvements. It also purchased an operating agreement for $100,000 “that requires the new land area be used for the Toyota dealership for at least 7 years,” a September 2005 city staff report reads.

The report indicates that the return on the city’s investment could be between $600,000 and $700,000 annually for the first 5 years as a result of Toyota auto sales taxes, with millions more to follow in years after. But it remains unclear if the city made back its hoped return on its initial investment.

When Claremont Ford shut down in January, Claremont Toyota’s expansion plans shifted from the Chili’s property to the Claremont Ford property, which already had some infrastructure and equipment on site. The Chili’s land today remains unused by Claremont Toyota, except for the display of some used cars at the site.

In addition, doubts remain that any future use of the property will generate the level of sales tax revenue for the city that a successful auto dealership is capable of.

As with most of these sorts of things, the city staff report painted a wonderful picture of the revenue stream that would issue from the deal. The land was never developed for additional auto sales, and now Hogan is selling a large chunk of the land with the prospect of making several million dollars off the deal.

At the time the Chili's land purchase was debated, Councilmembers Corey Calaycay and Jackie McHenry expresed reservations about the deal and questioned whether it would pay for itself. Calaycay and McHenry were criticized for their dissent and were labeled as being negative. A number of Claremont luminaries, including former Mayor Judy Wright, stepped up to the council podium urging the city to make the deal. And Sam Pedroza, who was not on the council at the time, had a letter published in the Courier in support of Hogan and all he's done for Claremont. The letter was clearly written to add pressure on Calaycay and McHenry.

Well, time has proved the negativists right. And Wright, Pedroza, and the rest were just your typical Claremont 400 dupes, throwing your money away needlessly, foolishly.

At least Quackenbos can make a buck off helping sell Hogan's land, a good portion of which the city helped him buy. Incidentally, Quackenbos is a former city commissioner and was a contributor to the "Claremont Business PAC" mailer that was part of the Preserve Claremont smear campaign in 2005.

Quackenbos is also pretty well connected to City Hall, having endorsed Mayor Ellen Taylor and Councilmember Sam Pedroza. Maybe he can land a gig as the city's leasing agent for any future city affordable housing since Taylor and Pedroza were the ones who selected the new Affordable Housing Task Force.


NEW AND IMPROVED SOLICITATION LAW

Tuesday night the Claremont City Council approved a new municipal ordinance governing door-to-door salespeople, who will now be required to obtain permit and ID from the city.

The ordinance is the city's second attempt at regulating the such visitors. According to another Daily Bulletin article by Will Bigham, a previous law was too restrictive and applied to religious and political solicitors as well as commercial ones. Bigham tells us that in 2002, the Supreme Court ruled that such laws were unconstitutional.

Bigham explained the new ordinance:

The law, characterized by city officials as one of the toughest of its kind in the nation, was in response to two rapes committed by door-to-door magazine salesmen in the last year and a half, officials said.

For commercial solicitors - those going door to door selling goods - each salesman must undergo a background check and be issued an ID card from the city.

All solicitors - both commercial and noncommercial - must obtain a permit from the city before going door to door.

The new law also establishes a "do not knock" registry that allows residents to sign up requesting that solicitors stop visiting their homes.

The latest solicitation ordinance also carves out an exception for people with religious and political purposes.

City Council Recap

A brief note on last night's Claremont City Council meeting:

As we expected, Mayor Pro Tem Ellen Taylor was named Mayor during the council reorganization at the beginning of the meeting. Taylor's Girl Scout cookie escapade didn't stop Councilmember Corey Calaycay from nominating Taylor or the rest of the council from approving of the nomination. In Claremont, tradition still trumps bad behavior.

Some Girl Scouts did show up at the meeting and got to lead the Pledge of Allegiance. Then, during public comment one of them politely addressed the council without mentioning the Taylor incident, thanked the council for supporting the Girl Scouts and presented each council member with a box of cookies.

During the council reorganization, there were some indications of tension between outgoing Mayor Peter Yao and Councilmember Calaycay. The mayor and mayor pro tem positions are traditionally rotated by seniority, so with Taylor becoming mayor, that left Calaycay in line for the mayor pro tem slot. However, when the time came, Linda Elderkin first nominated Calaycay for Mayor Pro Tem. Yao then nominated Sam Pedroza, who showed remarkable class by declining the nomination. Because there were no objections to Calaycay's nomination, he was approved without a vote. Yao never did give his rationale for wanting to bypass Calaycay.

So there you have it: Mayor Taylor and Mayor Pro Tem Calaycay.

For the time being, Taylor seemed chastened by the reaction to her cookie fit and was on her best behavior. Though she no doubt wanted to dust off the old red light timer for members of the public addressing the council, she ran the meeting without it. And, the meeting's Internet feed also continued without Taylor pulling the plug.

As to business, the downtown trolley lease was approved, Phase One of Padua Park was okayed for placing out to bid, the downtown salon restrictions were approved, tweaking the Land Use and Development Code was debated, and the council reviewed a proposal by the Uncommon Good charity and Claremont High School's Teen Green club to build a "green dome" facility at Cahuilla Park.

The Uncommon Good proposal, incidentally, was pushed by two Claremont insiders (small "i"): Claremont Auto Center owner Roger Hogan and J. "Not a Claremont Resident" Michael Fay.

We'll try to delve into some of these matters in more detail in coming days.

The Nice Faces of Claremont

We were looking at our earlier post on Sue Keith and got to admiring her photo. How, we wondered, can someone who looks like anyone's favorite grandmother be bad?

With the Claremont 400, we think it all gets back to studying the actual words and deeds and seeing past the smiling faces. We must look beneath the surface.

EXHIBIT 1: Homer "Butch" Henderson is the retired senior pastor from Claremont's United Church of Christ. The UCC goes back to Claremont's earliest days, and Henderson, like Keith, has done many good works. This year he was chair of the city's steering committee for the Youth and Family Master Plan Update.

Yet, he was also a spokesperson for Preserve Claremont, the organization of city staffers, former councilmembers, commissioners and other Claremont 400 people that in 2005 attacked current Councilmember Corey Calaycay and then-Councilmember Jackie McHenry.

The Preserve people ran ads containing false information and also organized two citywide bulk mailings the weekend before the election - mailings that were funded primarily by a $2,000 donation from Claremont Toyota, owned by Roger Hogan whose auto center property is responsible for 57-percent of the city's sales tax revenue (big fish, little pond).

All nice faces, not so nice words and deeds.

EXHIBIT 2: We've run this a couple times before, but it's worth revisiting. Former Claremont Mayor Sandy Baldonado can be charming and winsome. Just like Keith, Baldonado is a Claremont League of Women Voters member. A photo of her doesn't betray any hint of pettiness or a mean spirit. Yet, at a city council meeting in 2005 she let her guard down and took some potshots at the city of Victorville and the state of West Virginia.

Again, let the words speak for themselves:

Hard Times?

CLAREMONT FORD CLOSING

The Daily Bulletin reports today that the Claremont Ford auto dealership will be closing at the end of the year.

Claremont Auto Center owner Roger Hogan plans on using the Ford dealership space for his own Claremont Toyota business. He indicated Claremont Toyota will expand into the space now occupied by Claremont Ford. Hogan was quoted in the article:

"We're very sorry that a fellow business operator is going to go away. That's concerning," Hogan said. "Knowing that, knowing we're going to get the property back, we're going to make the best of it."

Hogan said the Claremont Ford dealership is one of about five in Southern California that will be closed by the end of the year.

"The car market ... is having a very difficult time right now," Hogan said.

All of which should be troubling news for the City of Claremont, which thanks to former City Manager Glenn Southard, is very heavily dependent on sales tax revenue from the Auto Center.

According to the city's website, from 1986 through the end of June, 2004, Claremont invested over $2.6 million in the Auto Center and received over $16 million in revenue from car sales.

A downturn in car sales and a loss of a dealership could represent a big blow for the city coffers at a time when revenues from other sources may be headed down and during a period when the city is planning on a number of other large expenditures: $25 million for a police station, $10-12 million for Padua Sports Park, $100-150 million to buy the water company.

In recent years the city has recognized the danger of placing too many of its fiscal eggs in the Auto Center basket. The city's been consciously trying to diversify its revenue stream. Back in a July, 2005, City Council retreat, Councilmember Peter Yao indicated he wanted to "reduce potential liability in the event [the] auto center goes 'sour'...."

Click on Image to Enlarge

At that time, in 2005, the city had indicated that over 50-percent of it's sales tax revenue came from the Auto Center, and it's still by far the largest source of sales tax money for the city.

So, if auto sales really are headed down, that could represent fiscal storm clouds on Claremont's horizon.

Goings On

The Daily Bulletin had a blurb about a senior voucher program for the Claremont Sunday Farmers' Market. The $20 vouchers come courtesy of Los Angeles County. There are 190 available and low-income seniors over 60 can pick them up at the Joslyn Senior Center and the Blaisdell Senior Center.

Joslyn Senior Center
660 Mountain Ave.
Claremont, CA
(909) 399-5488


Blaisdell Senior Center
440 S. College Ave.
Claremont, CA
(909) 399-5367

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Pomona College Magazine lists the Farmers' Market on its list of "47 Things Every Sagehen Should Do Before Leaving Pomona." Why 47 things to do? It's a number with a great deal of mystery and significance, according to the college's website.

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The Bulletin also reported that Claremont Heritage is holding their annual fundraiser at the Santa Fe Depot on First St. between Indian Hill Blvd. and College Ave. The depot was built in 1926, and Heritage's Judy Wright recently had a piece in the Courier suggesting a Centennial celebration for the Depot in 2026. So maybe Buzz's posting wasn't so far off-base!

The event is being hosted by Roger Hogan and Claremont Toyota.

News Briefs

Will Bigham in today's Daily Bulletin reports that the family of an 83-year-old pedestrian killed at Mountain Ave. and Ninth St. last year has filed a $15 million claim against the City of Claremont, alleging that the city should have installed a crosswalk at the intersection where the accident occurred.

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Bigham also had a short note on the city's sustainability forum scheduled for this Saturday at the Alexander Hughes Center from 8:30 to 11:30 a.m. As we noted yesterday, the League of Women Voters for the Claremont Area is co-sponsoring the event.

We are always struck by the irony implicit in Claremont's and the League's call for sustainability. League stalwarts like Judy Wright, Diann Ring, Ellen Taylor, and Helaine Goldwater talk a good game about the subject while at the same time supporting Claremont's dependence on sales tax revenue from Roger Hogan's Toyota dealership.

Sure, Hogan sells a lot of Priuses, but he also sells a lot of gas-guzzling, greenhouse emission producing 4Runners, Tacomas, Highlanders, Sequoias and such. According to the city's website, Hogan's Claremont Toyota is sixth largest Toyota dealership in the world in terms of sales volume. (Notice the big pickup on Hogan's website?)

Today's Courier

The Courier decided against endorsing candidates this election, although we hear that the editorial board may have been ready to endorse three people (none of them Pedroza or Elderkin). The family that owns the Courier intervened and decided they would simply not endorse, using Martin Weinberger's recovery from surgery as an excuse.

Today, the Courier ran responses from the seven council candidates to two different questions:

1. What has been the most difficult or challenging aspect of running your campaign?
   
2. What do you feel is one of the most pressing issues affecting Claremont and how would you solve this?
   

The Courier website didn't post the story, so we can't provide a link to it.

The answers were for the most part what you'd expect: safe, motherhood-and-apple pie responses. Peter Yao did have an interesting comment regarding CASM when he talked of "running a clean and positive campaign while enduring the below-the-belt hits from a misguided, well-financed group with its own lawn signs and massive mailers."

Sam Pedroza's response to the first question was curious: "There were some learned lessons from my campaign two years ago, where I came in at 168 votes shy of winning. Claremont experienced some of the worst electioneering in our history. Although I and my campaign had nothing to do with negative campaigning that took place, we did vow to run a very positive campaign focused on the positive and my qualifications."

One thing Pedroza ignored was the fact that he came in 168 votes short of Corey Calaycay primarily because Calaycay was the sole target of what Pedroza called "some of the worst electioneering in the history of Claremont" by Pedroza's friends at Preserve Claremont. Further, in that election in 2005, Pedroza, while running a "clean campaign," also refused to denounce the smear campaign Preserve Claremont ran. Why? Because Pedroza benefited from having others do his dirty work.

This time around, Pedroza is not being so coy. He has taken to bad-mouthing McHenry and Calaycay (who is not up for re-election) off the record. Pedroza has repeated several untrue rumors to voters in an effort to undermine his opponents. And then he has denied doing that when confronted with his statements. Further, Pedroza has taken direct support from Preserve Claremont. His supporter list includes the following people who were listed in Preserve Claremont's smear ads:

• Bo and Laura Bollinger--donated $500 to the Preserve Claremont campaign
• Suzanne Hall and Ken Corhan--$200 to Preserve Claremont
• J. Michael Fay--donated $100 to "Claremont Business PAC", now Honorary Co-Chair of Pedroza's campaign
• Paul and Kay Held--Paul Held was spokesperson for Preserve Claremont, donated $100 to "Claremont Business PAC"
• Frank Hungerford--$200 to Preserve Claremont
• Valerie Martinez--$250 to Preserve Claremont, $100 to "Claremont Business PAC"; spokesperson for Preserve, treasurer for Claremont Business PAC
• Lissa Petersen
• Randy and Rhonda Prout--$200 to Preserve Claremont
• Nick Quackenbos--$150 to "Claremont Business PAC
• Jil Stark--$200 to Preserve Claremont
• Roger Hogan--his business gave $2,000 to the "Claremont Business PAC" in 2005; his family gave $1,000 to Pedroza in 2007
• Patrick Sullivan--$250 to Preserve Claremont
  

(The dollar figures listed above come from the 2005 city election campaign filing documents on record with the Claremont City Clerk.)

So, all of the above were unabashed Claremonsters, and none ever disavowed their involvement or condemned it. And Pedroza now takes their support. This would seem to make his concerns about running clean campaigns seem to ring hollow. Pedroza benefited from their interference in the 2005 election, and he is dependent upon their support this time around. Nothing has changed, not Pedroza's dependence on the Preserve Claremonsters, nor his dishonesty about it. Pedroza's simply trying to play a game of "Good Cop/Bad Cop."

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Speaking of supporter lists, today's Courier featured an ad for Linda Elderkin that listed her campaign committee. Among those listed were:

• All of the Preserve Claremonsters listed above for Pedroza.
• Michael Fay, a non-Claremont resident who is also an Honorary Co-Chair for Pedroza.
• Bridget "The Hammer" Healy, former assistant city manager under Glenn Southard.

If you were appalled by the Preserve Claremont campaign of 2005, if you were opposed to the the witch-hunt they conducted against McHenry and the lies and rumors they spread and published against Calaycay, then you cannot possibly support Elderkin or Pedroza, who are so clearly the children of Preserve Claremont today.

Reader Mail - The Unexamined Life

Our friend Lynn Forester recently wrote us to endorse three candidates for city council. Forester serves on the city's Community Services Commission. She's a nice person, but like a lot of the 400, she also cannot stand people who disagree with her. She puts a nice face on it, but her letter, which runs two pages and is far to long to quote at length here, contains many inaccuracies and out-of-context information.

Forester endorses Elderkin, Pedroza, and Yao, the three the Claremont 400 and Preserve Claremonters have pushed. Forester claimed to be at a meeting in December 2007 where two unnamed councilmembers (McHenry and Calaycay) condoned behavior which she considered "embarrassing at the least and unconscionable at the best."

We were not at that December meeting, so we contacted several people who were. Their take on the matter was that Forester dished out as much rude behavior as anyone there, interrupting speakers and assuming her position as a city commissioner gave her more authority, even though she was just another member of the public in attendance.

Forester's claims of condoning by the unnamed councilmembers are flat out lies, the other attendees say, unless silence mandated by the Brown Act constitutes "condoning." As one of the three councilmembers in attendance pointed out at the meeting (Taylor was also present), the Brown Act prevented them from speaking because having three councilmembers together would constitute a quorum, and it would be considered an official meeting of the council if they participated. So all three, Calaycay, McHenry and Taylor all remained silent. They had to by law. All three behaved the same way. Yet, to Forester, two of the three condoned the behavior she disapproved of.

Forester writes that she wants "Councilmembers who make decisions based on the good of the community and not on the interests of citizens with the money to bully the city for their own interests." Yet, she endorses Pedroza, who this election has taken $1,000 from the Roger Hogan family ($250 each from husband, wife, and two other family members). Roger Hogan owns Claremont Toyota, which generates over 50% of the city's sales tax revenue. In other words, when Roger Hogan sneezes, the city of Claremont catches cold.

You may remember in the 2005 election, after Preserve Claremont ran their smear campaign against then-candidate Calaycay, Roger Hogan spent $2,000 to fund two last-minute, city-wide mailers in support of a group called "Claremont Business PAC," which was organized by Valerie Martinez, another city commissioner and a spokesperson for Preserve Claremont. The mailers Hogan funded supported one person, incumbent Llewellyn Miller. Around the same time, Hogan was about to negotiate a 10-year loan from the city of Claremont to help with the purchase of property near his Toyota lot--a property that had been appraised for much less than the $3 million Hogan was paying for it. And Pedroza later co-wrote a letter to the Claremont Courier in praise of Hogan and his millions in sales tax dollars that feed the city coffers.

So, Forester really should be pointing the finger at her own candidate, Pedroza, when she writes about councilmembers basing decisions on the interests of "citizens with the money to bully people." We also saw that Roger Hogan is on the Linda Elderkin supporter list as well. Elderkin is also a Forester choice.

Forester also writes, "My intention is to not tell you how to vote...." Yet, she ends by enjoining people to vote with her.

Again with hypocrisy Lynn?

We'll be back with more mail later this evening.