Sorry State

The Claremont Chamber of Commerce is hosting the second annual "State of City" luncheon 11:30am today at the Candlelight Pavilion on Foothill Blvd. The Gas Co., Golden State Water Co., Southern California Edison, and VVS, Inc., are co-sponsoring the event.

The Chamber's website had this information:

State of the City Luncheon
Thursday, July 15, 2010, at 11:30 AM
Candlelight Pavilion
455 W Foothill Blvd.

Claremont Cost per person is $35 RSVP's to Marlene at 909-624-1681 or Marlene(at)ClaremontChamber.org with "State of the City" in the subject line.

We'll probably get the sanitized spin on how well the city is weathering the recession because it's in the Chamber's self-interest to justify the $40,000 per year the City pays them to attract businesses and visitors to Claremont. There will probably be no mention of those 140 foreclosed residences on the market or the empty commercial space around town.

There's been an ongoing argument, in and out of City Hall, regarding the Chamber's real usefulness. Is that money really all well-spent, or would we be better off hiring a professional firm to market the town. Of course, the buy-in for a credible marketing campaign would be much, much more than $40,000 a year. The question is, would a larger expenditure result in a higher return for the City?

One thing is for sure, the Claremont 400, who are without shame, are well-represented in the Chamber. The Chamber's immediate past chair is former mayor and Preserve Claremont organizer Paul Held. The chair-elect is failed council candidate Bridget Healy. And former mayor Sandra Baldonado, current mayor Linda Elderkin, and official council photographer Sonja Stump are among the current board members.

(By the way, Healy, whom the 400 have also welcomed into the ranks of the Claremont League of Women voters, will almost certainly be back for another run at the council once her resume plumping campaign is complete. Fool us once, shame on you; fool us twice....)

With the Chamber, you might just be getting what you pay for.

David Allen's Election Observations

As we've noted in the past, Claremont is a small town. Claremont resident and Daily Bulletin columnist David Allen ran into a couple local personalities at his polling place at Sycamore School in the Claremont Village this past Tuesday.

As Allen's column reported, Allen spent a little time chatting with former Claremont Chamber of Commerce president Sonja Stump and current Claremont Mayor Ellen Taylor, two of the people responsible for the Claremont Trolley, among other things:

On Tuesday, there was a line of a half-dozen people out the door and a full house inside. It's the busiest I can remember Sycamore in three presidential elections and numerous primaries and off-year balloting.

"We had 62 people in line before we opened at 7," poll worker Larry Clark told me. "I'm sure it will be a record."

By 9:25 a.m., 218 people had voted, with more streaming in.

"We've had days when we haven't had this many people all day," precinct captain Sonja Stump said.

Mayor Ellen Taylor cast her vote minutes after I did. (We canceled each other out on Measure R.) The mayor affixed her "I voted" sticker and said she was off to Starbucks to claim a free cup of coffee.

Earlier, Stump had demonstrated the Ink-a-Vote method to those of us waiting in line. This prompted an elderly Massachusetts transplant to say she preferred her home state's voting levers and curtained booths.

"No one here is going to look over your shoulder," Stump kidded her.

"And yet people in California are all about their personal space," the woman continued. "They want space all around them. No line in Massachusetts would be spaced out like this. People stand closer together."

Allen had a column in today's Bulletin recapping the election. Allen mentioned Pomona's John Mendoza, who was involved in not one, not two, but three contests Tuesday:

In Pomona, John Mendoza was all over the ballot. He ran for two offices: Three Valleys Water Board and City Council. He won the former and was runner-up on the latter.

Yet only 28 percent of voters supported a utility tax increase put on the ballot by, yes, John Mendoza.

I guess voters like Mendoza more than they do his ideas.

Taylordum & Peterdee

On Tuesday night, the Claremont City Council approved putting the Off Track Trolley idea out to bid, no doubt pleasing Judy Wright ....er, the citizen's committee... that came up with the idea.

An old Claremontster favorite, Sonja Stump, Claremont Chamber of Commerce president, devoted Claremont 400 member, and official city council photographer (her photo of then-Councilmember Jackie McHenry ended up in a Preserve Claremont attack ad in 2005), was at Tuesday night's meeting stumping for the trolley.

The trolley, which is basically a 25-foot bus made up to look like an old-fashioned street car, will run a 1.5 mile loop with four stops from the Metrolink station and the Metrolink parking lot, to a spot near Walter's restaurant, and then over to Oberlin and the Village Expansion.

The trolley line will run three-year pilot program three days a week (Fridays through Sundays or Thursdays through Saturdays) from 11:00am to 11:30pm. The projected total cost is about $887,000. It will cost over $10 per passenger to operate, according to the city's figures.

There will be no fare to ride the trolley, and no plans at the present for advertisements.

City staff claims the cost will be paid for entirely through money from county and state funds, so it won't cost the city anything. However, if the state's budget problems get bad enough, the state may take that part of that money away, and the county money comes from sales tax revenues, which could be down significantly given the current economic downturn, especially in Claremont, where 57 percent of the sales tax is generated from auto sales. All of which could end up leaving Claremont stuck with a good chunk of the trolley bill.

Of course, the city, led by Mayor Peter Yao and Mayor Pro Tem Ellen Taylor are jumping right onto to what could end up being TrolleyGate.

The two, Yao and Taylor, seem of one mind on this and other issues, including the Base Line Rd. affordable housing project, on which neither will budge an inch.

Councilmembers Sam Pedroza and Linda Elderkin also voted in favor of the trolley. Corey Calaycay voted against it, saying he wanted to wait until the May state budget revision to see what was going to happen with that state money.

The discussion on the trolley and other topics, including the lighting of the second baseball field at College Park, was noteworthy, and we'll be up with video of some of that shortly.

We managed to capture the entire meeting from the city's live video stream, and we've been storing it and hours of other meetings, along with all future City Council meetings on the servers at the Insider's new DataCenter in a secret chamber at 207 Harvard Ave. in Claremont.

We plan on putting the video to good use and are going to hold the council (and future councils) true to their words.

Climb under the dais in the council chamber, use the secret code on the hidden panel, and you too can be an Insider:

Whatever Happened to...?

We were watching the current Claremont Unified School Board race unfold when the thought occurred, What ever happened to Preserve Claremont?

Those Preserve Claremont folks and their associated group, Claremont Business PAC, mucked up the 2005 City Council election with false, libelous campaign ads but have been awfully silent this time around. They were really the militant arm of the Claremont 400. Do you think they have gone away?

If this were the typical Preserve Claremont ("Claremonsters") campaign, we'd expect them to come out with a last minute, full-page attack ad in the Claremont Courier on Saturday, November 3rd.

The ad would single out one of other the candidates (call that person Candidate Z) and would make a bunch of false accusations. They would pick this coming Saturday because it would be too late for Candidate Z to respond before next Tuesday's election.

They would also have someone like Judy Wright - their past ghost writer of choice - gin up a slew of letters to send to the Courier and the Daily Bulletin stressing the very same talking points as their ad.

But, maybe this is a different time, a different kind of election.

* * *

We were looking at the supporter list for one of the three candidates (let's call the person Candidate X), when we noticed how many Preserve Claremont contributors and supporters were also backing this one particular current school board candidate.

Here's a list of some of Candidate X's campaign committee members and their roles in the 2005 Preserve Claremont smear campaign - dollar amounts are drawn from Preserve Claremont's 2005 campaign finance disclosures filed with the Claremont City Clerk; "supporter" indicates they allowed their names to be used in PC ads:

• J. Michael Fay, $100 to PC, $100 to Claremont Business PAC


• Randy Prout, $200 to PC, $100 to Claremont Business PAC


• Jeff Stark, $250 to PC


• Bob Fagg, PC supporter


• Sonja Stump, PC supporter


• Ken Corhan, PC supporter

We also noticed that some of the very same people are on one of the other candidate's campaign committees as well (let's call that person Candidate Y). Those double dippers are: J. Michael Fay, Jeff Stark, Sonia Stump, and Randy Prout.

And, Art Parker, Candidate X's campaign treasurer, has signed on as a supporter for Candidate Y. Ken Corhan, a Candidate X committee member, is also listed as a supporter of Candidate Y. Do you detect a pattern?

This probably goes a long way toward explaining all those post-candidate forum confabs between the two campaigns in question. Hey, do we detect the hidden hand of former Claremont Police Commissioner Helaine Goldwater manipulating things again? At least Helaine has good enough judgment to be on only Candidate Y's campaign committee.

So, they're still around. Whether or not they're up to their usual tricks is another matter.