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.

Claremont on the Hook for $1 Million

The city of Claremont has lost a $1 million state grant to pay for the purchase of Johnson's Pasture, according to Will Bigham in today's Daily Bulletin.

Escrow has closed on the $11.5 million open space purchase, and Claremont has already made its municipal bond offering to pay for the land with the assumption that it would have that $1 million in state money. So there is no more bond money to be had.

In other words, Claremont is stuck with an additional $1 million tab that it did not anticipate. The problem, according to Bigham's article, is that the state grant agency argued that because when the city bought the land, Claremont had language placed in the deed to keep the parcel open space. The state argued that this lowered the value of the land since it cannot be developed. The state is claiming that the appraisal the city used overvalues the land.

This is the second time a city's appraisal has caused the state to pull its money. Earlier this year, the city had to get the buyers to agree to lower their sale price from $12 million (under the first city appraisal) to $11.5 million (under the second appraisal).

It occurs to us that all of this could have been avoided by simply waiting until after the purchase was recorded to have the open space deed restriction placed on the land. Then there would have been no problem with the second appraisal.

Of course, as the article indicates, to city officials this really is no problem. We've got plenty of money laying around, they tell us:

[Mayor Peter] Yao said that the $1 million expenditure was within the city's means.

"Last time I heard, we had about $5 million cash sitting in the general-fund reserve," he said.

We're hearing rumblings that the city is a lot more concerned about the egg on their face than Mayor Yao is letting on, and that the $1 million hit is pretty significant if the city ends up paying it out of their reserve.

They seem to be scrambling around to find grant money somewhere else.

Pay Stubs

Our long-time readers will know that the Insider is nothing if not accommodating. Now we make no claim at having the stratospheric IQ of Claremont City Attorney Sonia Carvalho, and with respect to Google, the owner of Blogger, who took down the images from our Labor Day post, if we're so smart, how come we're not rich.

It took us a little while to get both neurons connected and firing, but we think we finally figured out a way to post the Claremont City Employee Pay Stubs to the satisfaction of both City Attorney Carvalho, and the Google Gods:

Claremont Follies

City Attorney Action

We got to thinking about the Claremont City Attorney Sonia Carvalho's use of attorney-client privilege as a rationale for her refusal to release a copy of her complaint to Google about our "Labor Day" post. Carvalho's refusal came after
reporter Will Bigham at the Daily Bulletin requested the complaint.

A question for the lawyers among us: Can Carvalho assert a privilege of confidentiality for a third-party communication, one not between herself and her client (the city of Claremont)?


Daily Bulletin, Freedom Friday

The Daily Bulletin continued its coverage of the issue today with a front page, above-the-fold article skewering Carvalho's confidentiality argument. The Bulletin's graphic consisted a small stack of the pay stubs in questions with the names redacted.

The article, again by Bigham, is part of the Bulletin's ongoing Freedom Friday series. In the piece, Carvalho continues her revolving door reasons for withholding the information, having moved from the pay stubs are confidential to the stubs are copyrighted and, today, to asserting the privacy rights of city employees:

City Attorney Sonia Carvalho said the pay stubs contained private, personal information such as references to survivor benefits, use of vacation and sick time, and information on life-insurance benefits.

"Details as to how that employee directs his or her money - be it to a retirement plan, or to a union for dues, or for reimbursement for a holiday party - should not be released to the public for inspection and discussion," Carvalho said.

Public records experts interviewed by Bigham disputed Carvalho's contentions about the stubs:

But according to public- records experts who considered, item by item, the information included on city pay stubs, the documents are a public record that the city would be required to release upon request - with fewer redactions than Carvalho indicates should be made.

The pay stubs include a "grouping of little factoids about various little entitlements that (employees) have from the city, which says nothing about them as human beings or as city employees," said Terry Francke, general counsel for Californians Aware.

The article pointed out as an example that the pay stub for City Manager Jeff Parker, one of two that we posted, contained no personal identifying information (Social Security numbers, dates of birth, etc....). It did quote Peter Scheer, executive director for the California First Amendment Coalition, as saying that bank routing numbers for the city's bank account might have to be redacted.


The Blogosphere Reacts

The story seemed to gain some traction in the Blogosphere and with journalists, two groups with huge stakes in the matter.

The USC Annenberg School of Journalism weighed in yesterday with a piece by Robert Niles questioning the city's copyright claim.

And the Foothill Cities blog has a great piece on the troubling way in which Google caved in to the city of Claremont and pulled the plug on the pay stubs without looking into the substance of the city's complaint. (Still no response from Google to our inquires into the exact text of Claremont's complaint.)

There's also a lively discussion on the FC post.

We've also received a lot of email, which we hope to get to this weekend.


Claremont PD Readies for Action

Meanwhile, we haven't been able to confirm if the Claremont Police Department has decided to activate it's vaunted CodeRed system in an effort to deal with Paystubgate.

Paystubgate: Latest News

A few new links on the Claremont employee salary story:

• The Daily Bulletin has a update brief update - the city looks to sue somebody, anybody. Nothing like a little malicious prosecution to spice up the day.
  


• Tony Krickl in yesterday's Claremont Courier also covered the story. (Sorry, this one's not posted on the Courier's website.)
  


• Courier reader Chris Bray (and former Courier reporter) offers some perspective in a letter to the Courier.
  
  

Desperately Seeking

We received this urgent note today:

desperately seeking tickets for the claremont wine walk friday night...will pay premium. email: th91711@yahoo.com

The wine walk is in the Claremont Village tomorrow evening between 5-9pm. Tickets are sold out.

_______________________

For those desperately seeking more news on city employee salaries, see the posts below.

Slopping at the Public Trough--Claremont Employees

One thing that amazes the naif when going through the December 2006 City of Claremont pay stubs (See our "Labor Day" post below) is the inventive variety of ways the City employees have found to tap the public keg. We realize this post has its limitations--among them lack of context--but we are pretty sure no confidentiality or copyright issues are involved in merely listing most if not all of the "Earnings" categories found by reviewing all of the pay stubs.

Below, we list for your enjoyment all or nearly all of the categories we found, along with typical amounts paid. We tried to ensure that the amount listed was neither the highest nor the lowest we found, but was more or less representative in amount. All amounts are Year To Date for all of 2006 for a single (representative) employee.

This represents a compendium of more than 200 employees (for a city of 35,000). Where we are inclined, we make editorial comment. Don't expect anything too intelligent. Remember, we are not public employee compensation specialists; to hear the city tell it, we are low-life borderline criminals.

Admin Leave, $2,109.01
Admin Leave Mandatory, $1,006.50
Admin Leave Payoff, $2,291.08. We don't really understand any of these Administrative Leave items. And why would someone get an Admin Leave Payoff? Is a certain amount of Admin Leave a right?
Auto Allowance, $4,200. Lots and lots of employees get this. Amounts differ.
Bereavement Leave, $122.21
Bilingual Pay, $750.00
Comp Time Payoff, $1,612.02. If you don't use your Compensatory Time Off, looks like you get paid for it.
Comp Time Used, $3,209.73
Court 1.0, $451.08
Court 1.5, 1,224.91. Most of the policemen are smart enough to go to court when they get paid time and a half.
CPMA Longevity Pay, $5340.40. Lots of the senior policemen appear to receive this.
CRA [Claremont Redevelopment Agency] Board Comp, $600.00. For the councilmembers.
Education Incentive, $3,750.00. Knowledge must not be its own reward.
Family Sick Leave, $7,073.11
Floating Holiday, $1,328.17. We've heard of this, but no one we know gets this benefit.
Hol Payoff, $164.88
Holiday Pay, $1,540.43
Holiday Regular, $4,363.81
Incentive Bonus, $1,000. This seems to be like a signing bonus, but we aren't sure.
Jury Duty, $392.97
Motor Pay, $375.00. For riding that Harley.
On Call CS, $6740.00. Several policemen really score on this one. Not a clue as to what it's for.
Other, $7,227.98. Several employees got large amounts this way. Guess they had seven grand left over when the pay was handed out.
Other Pay-Correction, $1,768.40
Overtime 1.0, $433.35
Overtime 1.5, $11,956.63. What good is overtime if it can't be time and a half?
Part time Hourly
Part time w/PERS, $7,551.96. You can be part-time and still get the employee retirement system.
PD Reserve, $280
Performance Bonus $7,430.55. Oh, there were lots and lots of these; more in a later post.
Physical Reimbursement, $1,200. Reimbursement for running shoes and memberships at The Club. The Insider pays his own way.
Regular Pay, $57,638.40
Reg Training 105%, $32.98
Retro Pay, $4,437.92. This one is a mystery. Most employees get it. And it's usually hundreds or thousands of dollars for the year. The total over all of 2006 is very large. More later.
Shoot Pay, $95.47
Shoot Pay 1.5, $692.37. Again, most cops are smart enough to do their shooting when they are paid time and a half.
Sick, $2839.05
Sick Leave Bereavement $2,074.51
Sick Payoff, $950.93
Special Detail, $779.96. We think this is guarding the council meetings, and similar important duties.
Technology Reimbursement, $3,000.00. Usually $1,500 max, but one employee scored three grand.
Uniform Pay, $480.00
Uniform Pay/PERS. Do they pay retirement on your uniform?
Vacation, $9,634.51
Vacation Bonus, $1,748.97. What is this? Nice to get, though.
Vacation Part Time, $1,205.35. Maybe the same part-timers getting retirement also get vacation.
Vacation Payoff
Workers Comp, $33,277.96

Dem Bones III

The Inland Valley Daily Bulletin reports that the reported human foot bones found in in a metal can in the Wilderness Park appear to animal bones. They may have been placed there by someone involved in the high-tech treasure-hunting game of geocaching.

Dem Bones II

We are now hearing from a Very Reliable Source that something was found in a metal box Tuesday morning in the Wilderness Park, and that the authorities are examining it.

Dem Bones

To avoid accusations of being "All Pay Stubs, All the Time", we post an inquiry from a reader. We admit to being at first a bit skeptical, but we are hearing more and more about this from reliable sources:

While hiking on Claremont's wilderness trail this morning [Tuesday, September 11, 2007] we came upon a young man on the phone with the police. He seem upset and we asked him if he was ok. He responded by telling us that he was on hold and that he had come upon a human foot in an old army case that was behind the small water tower that sits about a mile or so out from the entrance. Now the group I walk with have been hiking the trail for years and besides the rattlesnake (a baby) the most interesting thing we have witnessed is some beautiful deer a coyote or two and a plethora of colorful birds.

The young man said the officer on the phone didn't know how to get to the trail so he proceeded to give directions. While we were disturbed by the incident, we weren't sure we believed his assessment until he told us her was a veteran of the war. He apparently had seen a lot worse than the foot he stumbled upon in the box.

While we had commitments and had to leave our young good Samaritan foot finder...we are curious as to the end of the story. Our friend said it was a small adult foot and the case contained items that may have belonged to a child.

Shades of Blue Velvet. We assume the story, if it has legs, will be buried by the City of Claremont.

Insider to Blogger: Huh?

Monday Afternoon

Our odyssey into the inner workings of Claremont City Hall and Google's Blogger began last Friday with our posting of city employee salaries and benefits, along with scanned images of the pay stubs for Claremont City Manager Jeff Parker and city Human Services Director Jeff Porter.

Over the weekend, the city complained loud and long with false allegations that the Insider had somehow stolen the information or had obtained it through a leak in city hall. In fact, the information was posted all along on the city's on-line archive (which has since been taken off-line).

The city attorney last Friday apparently contacted Google, which operates the Blogger site that hosts the Insider. City Attorney Sonia Carvalho never tried contacting us directly with the city's concerns about our post, so we do not know the specifics, other than some unsubstantiated allegations that the post contained confidential city employee information.

Friday's post stayed up all weekend, but on Monday afternoon, after the story had gotten legs, we received the following email from Blogger:

from Blogger Help

date Sep 10, 2007 3:06 PM
subject [#197705772] Blogger complaint received
mailed-by trakken.google.com

Hello,

We'd like to inform you that we've received a complaint that your blog claremontca.blogspot.com contains confidential information. Please note that our Terms of Service prohibit posting confidential items on your blog. Accordingly, we have had to remove the content in question.

Please refer to our Terms of Service for more details:
http://beta.blogger.com/terms.g

Thank you for your understanding.

Sincerely,
The Blogger Team

So, according to Blogger, the offending material was confidential in nature. Okay, but still no specific information on what was confidential. Clear as mud, as they say.


Monday Evening

On Monday evening, we responded to the Blogger note requesting the specifics of the complaint and advised Blogger that we contended that none of the information in the post was confidential. We pointed out the lack of personal identifiers in the post, and the fact that public employee salaries are public information in California. We also reminded Blogger that the source of the "confidential" information was the city of Claremont's own, very public on-line archive.

Here is our response to Blogger:

to Blogger Help
date Sep 10, 2007 7:35 PM
subject Re: [#197705772] Blogger complaint received

Blogger Support,

Could you be a little more specific about the "confidential" information you referred to. The content was obtained from the City of Claremont's online document archive, so it was public information, free for anyone to look up. Additionally, there were no Social Security numbers, dates of birth, bank account information, or other such personal data. There was salary and bonus information for public employees at the city of Claremont. However, in California, that is public information:

http://www.officer.com/web/online/Top-News-Stories/High-Court-Makes-California-Officer-Salaries-Public/1$37599

Please review the actual post and advise what specific items are confidential. Again, we do not believe anything posted can be considered confidential, especially since the source is the city of Claremont's own public records archive available to anyone with an Internet connection - or at least until they decided they didn't like our post, at which point they removed access to the site:

http://www.ci.claremont.ca.us/ps.fyi.cfm?ID=1805

Thank you for looking into this matter.

We went ahead and reposted the Friday piece, minus the pay stub images, which seemed to be the most concern to the city and waited for an explanation from Blogger.


Tuesday Noon

On Tuesday at high noon, we heard back from Blogger. Their note informed us that the problem wasn't confidentiality at all. The pay stubs were copyrighted by the city, so their images can not be reproduced without the city's okay.

But that's not been what the city has said in any of its public statements or on its own website. According to the the city, the problem has been the confidentiality issue. Yet, Blogger tells us it's a copyright issue.

Well, folks, which is it? Here's the Blogger response:

from Blogger Help
date Sep 11, 2007 12:02 PM
subject Re: [#197705772] Blogger complaint received
mailed-by trakken.google.com

Hello,

We have removed your post due to the images of the paycheck stub of the City of Claremont, which in actuality is their copyrighted material. If you would like to reload the post that we removed, feel free to do so as long as you leave out the images of the paycheck.

Thank you for your understanding in this regard.

Sincerely,
The Blogger Team

Today's News

Will Bigham in today's Daily Bulletin had an article on the subject. Mayor Peter Yao continues with the false hints that the pay stub information somehow obtained through subterfuge:

...attempts by the city to duplicate the search yielded no pay stubs, said Mayor Peter Yao, fueling concerns that the documents may have been obtained by other means.

Hint to Mayor Yao: Go to your archive search engine and try typing: "Jeff Parker performance." It's not rocket science, Peter.

Meanwhile, City Attorney Sonia Carvalho and City Manager Parker have stolen the "hide-the-ball" page from the playbook of Parker's predecessor, Glenn Southard, the article reported:

In an interview Tuesday, Carvalho would not elaborate on her communication with Google and refused to release the city's e-mail correspondence with the company, citing attorney-client privilege.

Carvalho said the city was withholding the e-mail correspondence because city litigation against Google remains a possibility if the company fails in the future to respond if the blog re-posts copies of the pay stubs.

[In other words, Carvalho will withhold the information indefinitely.]

.....

Parker and Carvalho refused to discuss whether the city argued in its correspondence with Google that the city pay stubs were copyrighted documents.

As one occasional Insider reader of a legal mind would say, "I'm ready to rule."

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Down into the rabbit hole of secrecy goes Claremont while the local ACLU chapter and all those fair weather civil libertarians on the City Council, in the Claremont League of Women Voters, in the once progressive Pilgrim Place retirement community, and the in local Democratic Club twiddle their thumbs.

Claremont Secrets

What Are They Hiding?

No, that sound of metal on stone you hear isn't the beginning of gravel mining in Northeast Claremont. It's the sound of the City Hall portcullis slamming shut as the Claremont 400 and city staff cut off all on-line access to city documents.

The city's reaction came last Friday afternoon after our Labor Day post laid out a sample of what Claremont citizens are really paying the people at City Hall.


City Cries, "THEFT!" (Wolf)

As might be expected from city staff, a cry of "Theft!" went out. But there was not theft or even leak of information. All the information we obtained was done on the up-and-up on the city's public, on-line website archive. In response, the city restricted public access to those documents:



The city posted an explanation of the on-line public access change late yesterday. The city seemed to back off its claims of theft and in their press release stated:

...recent activities have demonstrated that there has been a breach of confidential documents.

Notice no mention of hacking or theft. Just the usual vague, passive-voice bureaucratese convenient for evading specifics. No explanation of what was confidential, no proof of any breach at all.


City Attorney Acts


After stewing this past weekend over the Insider's posting of Claremont city employees' salaries and bonuses, City Attorney Sonia Carvalho sent a complaint to Google, which hosts our humble blog. We received an email from Google advising us of the complaint. Google did not forward us the actual complaint, which is also public record in California.

Oddly, Carvalho did not contact us directly, and the Google note did not say what exactly was confidential. The pay stubs, after all, were on-line, and they contained no personal identifiers - no Social Security numbers, no dates of birth, no personal bank account information. They only contained full names and payroll information.

It's important to note that the California Supreme Court ruled just last week that public employee salaries are public information. We hope the city attorney was completely truthful about the sourcing of the information in her note to Google, and we also hope that she didn't make the wild sort of false accusations of theft of information that staff was making last week.

However, out of respect for Carvalho's concerns, we reposted our Friday Labor Day note minus the pay stub images. If the City or Carvalho have any concerns about the information contained in that post, we ask that they contact us directly at claremontbuzz@yahoo.com with any specific complaints.


Daily Bulletin Coverage

Will Bigham has been on this story since last Friday, and he had a follow-up story in today's Bulletin.

The article said that city staffers were unable to confirm the fact that we here at the Insider found the payroll information on the city's website. (Guys, how hard is that? Just go on your document archive search engine and type "Jeff Parker salary" or "Jeff Parker pay.")

City Manager Parker was cited it the article as having concerns about low-level employees' salaries being posted, but as Bigham noted, all public employee salaries and compensation are public information. The public is, after all, the employer here - you pay the bill, you should know how much you're paying. The article, quoting Terry Francke at the California First Amendment Coalition, reported:

...the California Supreme Court ruled that all compensation information about all California public employees is a matter of public record, Francke said.

Councilman Corey Calaycay, who works full time as a district representative for state Sen. Bob Margett, said he "has little sympathy" for public employees who do not want information on their compensation publicly available.

Calaycay's salary is listed in the online database of the Capitol Weekly, a Sacramento newspaper that covers state politics.

On the Capitol Weekly site, you can do a search by job title, secretary, say, and find a whole list of state-employed secretaries along with their salaries, so we don't buy Parker's claimed concern about the posting of low-level employee salaries at all.

The bottom-line here is Claremont's reverting to its old ways of hiding information because of the embarrassment factor. In this, so-called liberals such as Mayor Pro-Tem Ellen Taylor and Councilmember Sam Pedroza have no qualms about rolling back the openness that Claremont has displayed in the past two years.

Expect more of the same in the future.

The Claremont 12-Step

We've long thought Claremont and its city government (elected and appointed officials as well as paid staff) have had a co-dependent relationship. So, the following reader response to our posts the past few days regarding city salaries and benefits seemed to make a lot of sense:

Actually, Jeff Parker makes $187,000 per year in straight salary as he got a raise (on a 3-2 vote) in December 2006 which probably did not take effect until January 2007. If you readers want to get the salaries of all the Claremont employees by name and exact salary but not benefits, they can make a public records request by phone, e-mail or in writing to the city clerk's office and they will be more than happy to assist. I think you will find that Assistant City Manager Tony Ramos is making much more than you have him making.

Also, I would suggest that your readers go to the website of the California First Amendment Coalition , cfac.org , and click on their 2007 Conference being held at USC in October and fill out a form to nominate the Claremont Insider for a Beacon Award (the cfac site explains what that is) and the city of Claremont for a Darkness Award (formerly called the "Black Hole Award" which our #5 best city in the country won in 2000). The deadline for nominations is Sept. 28th. They now have another award called the Bill Farr award after a L.A. Times reporter who went to jail rather than reveal his sources. Take a look at the CFAC website and make your voices heard. Thank you to the Claremont Insider for an excellent use of public documents.

Just when you thought the City of Claremont was reforming itself and recovering from its dependence on secrecy and subterfuge, they fall off the wagon. Addictions ARE hard to overcome. Maybe there should be a Betty Ford -type clinic for this, and with the generous benefits that we seem to be giving our employees, especially the management staff, they could well afford to pay for the rehab.

Come to think of it, an intervention might do this town a lot of good.

Much Ado, Much Finger Pointing

The furor and finger pointing going on at Claremont City Hall over the salary information we posted on Friday has us scratching our heads here at the Insider. As we noted yesterday, there was no cloak-and-dagger involved. The source of the information was the city's own online document archives.

What happened was that we were working on a post about former Claremont City Manager Glenn Southard's recent raise to $300,000 per year at his current job in Indio. We were wondering how that compared to current Claremont City Manager Jeff Parker's salary, so we went onto the city's document archive and did a search for "Jeff Parker salary" or something along those lines.

What popped up were the scanned-in bi-monthly pay stubs for all city employees going back several years. This information was in PDF form for anyone connected to the Internet to see. Now, you would think that anything posted in such a way, mixed in among all the other city commission and city council minutes and agenda materials, was simply public information. Why else would the city post it?

So, it was odd to read Will Bigham's article Saturday on the whole brouhaha.

According to Saturday's Daily Bulletin:

City officials said Friday that there had been no public-records request or release related to the information on the blog, meaning that either the information was leaked by a staff member, or the city's computer system was hacked by an outside party.

But no public information request was needed. It was on the city's website! No hacking, no leaking, just going on and doing a simple search. The city must have known that the source was their own website because Friday - before the Bigham article came out - they removed access to their document archive. The Bigham article quoted Parker:

"However it got into the hands of the blog, there was a theft involved, and that concerns me greatly," Parker said. "I'm going to look into starting an investigation into the potential theft of that information."

Parker told Bigham that he had contacted Police Chief Paul Cooper regarding an investigation into the matter. He might save some time and just have someone check the public records document archives.

We just wonder how much of this the city already realizes. After all, as we have pointed out, they quickly took steps to remove access to the online archive. All of this talk about theft strikes us as a lot of smoke-blowing by an embarrassed city of Claremont trying to cover up its own foolishness. See the Foothills Cities blog for more commentary on the matter.

Claremont v. Claremont

The Inland Daily Bulletin has an article online concerning the Great Claremont Salary Leak. Reporter Will Bigham does a nice job rounding up comment. We urge you to read the whole piece, but can't resist some excerpts:

The pay stub contains private information that the city would not be required to release upon request, said City Attorney Sonia Carvalho, putting the city in a position to be sued by any staff member whose privacy was compromised. [look for the lawsuit soon: Claremont v. Claremont.]

[City Manager Jeff] Parker said late Friday that he plans to investigate how the information was leaked and said he had contacted Police Chief Paul Cooper about the possibility that the document had been stolen.

Carvalho said Friday afternoon that she had contacted the legal department at Google, which hosts the Claremont Insider blog, to request that the private information in the post be removed.

Sonia must have been busy yesterday. She really got her knickers in a knot and went tattling to teacher. But so far the Google Gods have permitted our modest effort to live on in cyber-space.

"I'm not happy because I don't think it's information that should be on any kind of Web site, or a blog in this case," [Parker] added.

Don't shoot the messenger. Matt Hawkesworth is the one keeping the records in the on-line City Document Archive, not us.

"However it got into the hands of the blog, there was a theft involved, and that concerns me greatly," Parker said. "I'm going to look into starting an investigation into the potential theft of that information." [Will they be getting Columbo, or Inspector Clouseau?]

Parker would not comment when asked whether he would consider legal action against the city if it's determined that a city staff member was the source of the leak.

Maybe the lawsuit will be Parker v. Parker.

(The Insider got brief mention today on the Foothill Cities blog. The link is worth your while because it raises the point, once more, that there is a real public interest in disclosing public employee compensation.)

True Source of City Salary Information, or "They Left Their Website Unattended"

Time for the ol' Insider to come clean. We didn't wake up Friday morning in the Claremont City Hall dumpster. Really. Just having a little fun with folks. Doesn't anyone read carefully anymore? What do the words, "Picture", "Imagine", and "Visualize" mean?

We've gotten a lot of inquiries as to where we really got the 2006 City salary information. Fact is--we are not fooling this time--we got it from the City website in the City Documents Archive. It was public information, put on a public website by the City, and available to anyone who took the trouble to look. It seems the City saves a document with page scans of all pay stubs and they even index it.

We'd like to say, with Casey Stengel, "you could look it up." But you can't anymore.

The City has apparently figured out that its own website was the source of the information, and in the usual Claremont spirit of open government has locked out access to the document archive. Here is a screen shot made Friday evening:


In case you have trouble reading it, the text says:

City Documents Archive...DUE TO TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES ACCESS TO CERTAIN CITY DOCUMENT ARCHIVES WILL NOT BE AVAILABLE UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. THE CURRENT COUNCIL MEETING AGENDA MATERIALS ARE STILL AVAILABLE.

We believe there is a very real public purpose served by open disclosure of the compensation paid civil servants. The California Supreme Court agreed in a decision published only last week: “Openness in government is essential to the functioning of democracy,” Chief Justice Ronald George wrote for the Court. “The public has a strong, well- established interest in the amount of salary paid to public employees.”

When you review our "Labor Day" post of Friday, especially as it is augmented, we believe you will find the amounts paid to public employees simply to be huge.

(Please see the Labor Day post below. We are adding to it at the bottom as often as time and requests permit)

Labor Day

Editor's Note: We were contacted by Google on the evening of Monday, 9/11/07, regarding the images we posted from the online Claremont City Documents Archive. The Claremont City Attorney, Sonia Carvalho, had contacted Google to complain that the post contained confidential information.

The city did not contact this blog, nor have we been told what information in the documents is confidential - there were no Social Security numbers, no dates of birth, no personal identifiers. The documents only contained name and pay information. What praytell was the top secret information that must be hidden from the public? Salary? Bonuses? But all of that is public information in the state of California.

Until all this can be sorted out, we're posting the text of our Labor Day post minus the images in question. We maintain the city claims of confidentiality for the information posted on their website are baseless.

If the city or the City Attorney has any qualms about the information posted (sans images), they are free to contact us directly at claremontbuzz@yahoo.com with their concerns, and we will consider their complaints after reviewing with our counsel.

_______________________


Picture if you will the buff and ripped form of the Insider stealthily vaulting over over the edge of the Claremont City Hall dumpster in the foggy hours of the morning. Imagine the dark-clad form valiantly rooting through the leftovers from the staff refrigerator and what appears to be drug paraphernalia (whether from the upstairs restroom as reported at a recent City Council meeting, in anticipation of the new Claremont Marijuana Dispensary, or tossed in by a passerby, we are not sure). Visualize the muscling-aside of plastic bags filled with the earthly remains of all sorts of Official City Business. It is a dirty task, but down in the corner, stuck to the inside of the container by an unrecognizable and unmentionable goo, is a sheaf of 2006 City pay stubs. We flip through. Yes, they all are there: Parker, Ramos, Desatnik, Gubman--Yao and McHenry, even Hany Hanna. Our City Hall mole has done well. We carefully replace the sheaf of stubs with a huge bundle of cash. Our mission complete, the shadowy form gracefully leaves the dumpster and swiftly melts into the morning, making a beeline for the computer to post this entry.

Here are some of the highlights of the drop, just a sampling. If you have a favorite staff member, and we have the information, just shoot us an email and we will post it here. As a class, these folks have truly figured out how to "do well by doing good."(Note that the total for earnings may include all sorts of additional pay and allowances such as "fitness", "automobile", "performance bonus", in addition to base pay. All numbers are as of 12/22/06, and are that year to date.)

• Christopher Bradley, $103,519.72 in earnings plus $57,980.80 in benefits
  


• Jason Walters, $94,638.50 in earnings plus $51,750.75 in benefits
  


• Alison Martinez, $53,850.68 in earnings plus $26,347.51 in benefits
  
  
• Rachel Fagg, $5,191.03 in earnings plus $412.72 in benefits
  


• Sandra Baldonado, $5,370.12 in earnings plus $292.79 in benefits
  
  
• Corey Calaycay, $5,400.12 in earnings plus $294.42 in benefits
  


• Ellen Taylor, $5,370.12 in earnings plus $11,409.48 in benefits
  


• Peter Yao, $5,400.12 in earnings plus $11,270.51 in benefits
  
  
• Jaquelin McHenry, $5400.12 in earnings plus $294.42 in benefits
  
  
• Jeffrey Parker, $176,268.38 in earnings plus $75,513.17 in benefits
  
  
• Loretta Flores, $67,091.40 in earnings plus $30,135.38 in benefits
  
  
• Lynne Pahner, $102,015.33 in earnings plus $39,142.71 in benefits
  
  
• Anthony Ramos, $132,758.50 in earnings plus $42,838.41 in benefits [from pay stub]
  
  Correction: as much as $177,000 in annualized earnings and at least $48,000 in annualized benefits.
  
  (as an Alert Reader points out, Assistant City Manager Ramos certainly earned more than $132,758.50 on an annualized basis. His December two-week regular pay was $5883.26 in December 2006; this annualizes to approximately $153,000, not the $108,592 shown in the "year to date" column on the pay stub. Thus, the above earnings are shy by some $45,000 in regular pay, and the benefits appear to be shy by some $5,000 at least. We don't follow such things in detail, but assume the discrepancy comes because Ramos was not a Claremont employee for all of 2006.)
  


• Colin Tudor, $50,381.13 in earnings plus $25,504.86 in benefits
  
  
• Juanita Juster, $64,013.95 in earnings plus $30,862.06 in benefits
  


• Matthew Hawkesworth, $116,486.84 in earnings plus $39,685.32 in benefits
  


• Craig Bradshaw, $129,910.63 in earnings plus $48,520.50 in benefits
  


• Greg Gubman, $80,188.82 in earnings plus $34,842.41 in benefits
  
  
• Loretta Mustafa, $43,022.95 in earnings plus $18,630.66 in benefits
  


• Lisa Prasse, $107,019.66 in earnings plus $42,914.39 in benefits
  


• Maria Tipping, $75,451.43 in earnings plus $35,525.89 in benefits
  
  
• Roy Brown, $197,059.85 in earnings plus $95,677.73 in benefits
  


• Paul Cooper, $147,312.79 in earnings plus $90,030.74 in benefits
  
  
• Charles Farritor, $6,858.45 in earnings plus $373.84 in benefits
  
  
• Hany Hanna, $0 in earnings plus $11,412.80 in benefits
  


• Stanley Van Horn, $127,260.74 in earnings plus $79,058.51 in benefits
  


• Scott Carroll, $111,754.70 in earnings plus $38,538.41 in benefits
  


• William Pallotto, $80,827.14 in earnings plus $34,557.91 in benefits
  


• Mercedes Santoro, $90,310.77 in earnings plus $39,711.70 in benefits
  
  
• Brian Desatnik, $111,846.06 in earnings plus $43,450.38 in benefits
  


• Anthony Witt, $148,223.77 in earnings plus $51,532.43 in benefits
  
  By Request:
  
  
• Isabelle Newman, $98,399,36 in earnings plus $40,997.94 in benefits
  
  
• Shawna Urban, $86,535.59 in earnings plus $35,742.90 in benefits
  


• Duane Marks, $114,654.48 in earnings plus $46,725.96 in benefits
  
  
• Shelley Vander Veen, $102,562.15 in earnings plus $65,775.70 in benefits
  

More (Posted on Saturday)...

Jeff Porter, the latest director of Human Services who has just reorganized his shop and promoted everyone, came to Claremont in late 2006 and therefore the stubs don't reflect a full year for him. What is shown that for a two week pay period, he received $5193.94 which annualizes to approximately $135,042 in base pay. Then there is the $450 per month automobile allowance for an additional $5400. He also received physical re-imbursement and additional holiday pay. It is fair to guess that his annual earnings would have been in the $150,000 region, easy.

Porter's benefits annualize to something like $50,000 and include some $30,000 annualized to the PERS (retirement) system and $20,000, more or less, in various insurances.

Another $200,000 man.


Sunday, brief update...

See the elaboration above for Assistant City Manager Tony Ramos. Apparently we had "misunderestimated" him. A tip of the Insider Beret to an Alert Reader for this.

RoboPoker

The Daily Bulletin had a piece yesterday about Claremont Jay Cordes, who recently took first prize in a robot poker contest. The robot, BuffBot 2.0 triumphed over nine other robots in a Vancouver, British Columbia, Texas hold 'em tournament.

Congrats to Cordes and his software developer Teppo Salonen, who worked together on BluffBot.

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.

Bait & Switch

The Claremont City Council and city commissions have taken their traditional August vacation, so things have been fairly quiet in town. The hiatus has given us an opportunity to take look at some older items that have come before the council this year.

One of the complaints we and others have with the powers-that-be in Claremont, at least in past years, is the arbitrary nature with which they decide matters. While they like to prattle on about things like process, when push comes to shove, they tend to set aside the rules that are supposed to govern local decision-making.

An example of this came up at the last City Council meeting on July 24th. Check here for the agenda material for the meeting.

At that meeting, the City Council heard the appeal of an Architectural Commission decision on a dispute between two neighbors on Brescia Ave. in North Claremont. The dispute began when two residents, Peter and Lisa Pruitt, received approval from the city's Planning Dept. to make some changes to their one-story home.

The Pruitts' original plans called for the addition of a clerestory, a large, raised area where the roof was opened up and lifted up, with windows to allow light in. From the exterior, it was supposed to look like a second-story but from the interior it was supposed to be a kind of high-ceilinged affair with some windows for lighting.

But looks can be deceiving. When the city plan checked the work, they found that the Pruitts' builder had put in a second-story after all. City planning staff went ahead and approved the second story, even though the builder and the Pruitts said they were going to do one thing but then built another.

With the second story came windows on the north side (not included in the original plans) that overlooked a neighbor, Betty Hiett. Hiett was extremely concerned because she said the Pruitts' new windows looked directly into a sliding glass door in her backyard, giving the Pruitts a view into Ms. Hiett's dining and living rooms. This, Hiett felt, was a violation of her privacy, and she appealed the city planners' approval of the project to the Architectural Commission.

The commission upheld Hiett's appeal on May 23 this year and called for the Pruitts to redesign their second story and to remove the offending windows. One commissioner referred to the Pruitts tactics of getting one set of plans approved, then building another thing as a "bait and switch."

The Pruitts appealed the Architectural Commission's decision to the City Council, where it was heard at the 7/24/07 meeting. After a long debate, the council voted 3-2 to uphold the commission's decision. Ellen Taylor and Sam Pedroza voted to allow the Pruitts to keep what they had built.

What struck us as odd in the matter was willingness of the Planning Dept., as well as Taylor and Pedroza, to reward the bait and switch the commissioner referred to. Why have a planning process at all if you're going to chuck it all after the rules are broken?

And worse was the willingness of Pedroza and Taylor to overturn a commission decision. Taylor talks about respecting commissions when it suits her, but when she wants to override them, she has no hesitation. If we're going to have rules, then we need to live by them. Is that really too much to ask for?

Memorial Park Happenings

Tonight is the final Monday night concert in Memorial Park. The band The Ravelers is listed on the city website as tonight's act and will be playing beginning at 7:30pm. The concert series is sponsored by the Claremont Kiwanis Club.

A Daily Bulletin article today says that tonight's act is The Answer, so there may have been a change.

The Daily Bulletin also had a plug for the Kiwanis Pancake Breakfast on Sunday, Sept. 16th, from 7am until noon. Proceeds from the breakfast go to benefit Shoes That Fit.

Tickets to the Pancake Breakfast can be purchased from any Kiwanis member, at tonight's park concert, or from the City of Claremont's Human Services Department. Human Services can be reached at (909) 399-5490


Memorial Park
840 N. Indian Hill Blvd.
Claremont, CA 91711

City Manager's Weekly Update

VILLAGE EXPANSION

Friday's Claremont City Manager's Update by Claremont CM Jeff Parker reported on the latest Village Expansion developments. Parker announced the opening of a Verizon retail store this weekend, along with a women's' clothing store called Peyton Gray.

Another opening this weekend is Bedol's What's Next, a store featuring office and home gifts. The store is owned by a local designer named Mark Bedol.

Parker also wrote that an eatery called The Pita Pit will be opening on Sept. 4th.


PARK DEVELOPMENTS

Parker also reported that Wheeler Park in South Claremont will have its lighting proposal come before the City Council on Tuesday, Sept. 25th. The proposal is to add four 70-foot light poles to illuminate the softball field and the basketball court.

There's also some movement on the Padua Park site in Northeast Claremont, which will be undergoing rock removal for the big rock pile, as well as any rock larger than six inches, on the south part of the site. The rock work is supposed to begin the week of Sept. 10th.

The city manager said that no rock crushing will be done on the site, and the contractors doing the work will "include air pollution (dust), sound, and vibration control mechanisms."

The city is also holding two public meetings to discuss the development of the park. The meetings will be conducted at City Hall on the following schedule:

• Wednesday, Sept. 5th, 7pm
  Human Services Commission
  
• Thursday, Sept. 13th, 7pm
  Community Services Commission

MARIJUANA DISPENSARIES

The City Council will be considering extending the existing moratorium on medical marijuana dispensaries while staff works on developing a city ordinance to regulate the dispensaries. Parker did not give a date when the issue would come before the council.


NEW BUSINESS CENTER

The city manager also announced a proposal for developing the former Chevron station land at the northeast corner of Mills Ave. and Foothill Blvd. The Festival Companies has plans for a 4,200 sq. ft. building on the site, and those plans will go before the city's Architectural Commission on Sept. 26th.

PADUA THEATER OPERATOR WANTED

On Sept. 11th, the City Council will also consider a Request for Qualifications for a manager/operator for the Padua Theater. Chantrelle's has provided the management and catering there for several years, and the CM's report did not say why the change is being made.

Southardism, Rosemead Style

Oliver Chi, Claremont's former Assistant to the City Manager, has been picked to be Rosemead's new city manager, as an article in the San Gabriel Valley Tribune reported this past week.

Chi, who is 27, was approved to fill Rosemead's vacant top city staff spot on a 3-2 vote by the Rosemead City Council.

While in Claremont, Chi, whose obsequious personality resembled the Eddie Haskell character on the old "Leave It to Beaver" show, attached himself to former Claremont City Manager Glenn Southard and cozied up to the Claremont 400, leaving a number of lingering problems in his wake when he left.

The largest of these problems with the appraisal for Johnson's Pasture which set the price of that open space land at $12 million, overvaluing the land by about $500,000, according to the state of California. This imperiled the city's chances of qualifying for a $1 million grant from the state because the granting agency wouldn't allow the grant for the city's appraised value.

Chi was the staff member we see as most responsible for the faulty appraisal, and he was the staff member who steered the city, at the behest of the Claremont 400, towards the failed first attempt at buying the land through the 2006 Parks and Pastures Assessment District, which failed 44% to 56% when voted on by Claremont property owners.

Chi worked on the Parks and Pastures campaign, which was filled with such Claremont 400 luminaries as Diann Ring, Judy Wright, Al Leiga, and a host others. In the debate over whether Claremont should go with an assessment district or a bond to fun the purchase of Johnson's Pasture, many people warned that an assessment would never get the 51% it needed to pass and that a bond, even though it needed 67 percent win, had a better chance because of the lower total cost. One suspects that to Chi it mechanism didn't matter and that the only important thing was that the 400 was pushing the assessment.

Events proved the 400 and Chi wrong and the people who favored the bond right - a few months after the assessment lost, Claremont voters passed the Measure S bond with over 71% of the vote.

Chi's biggest fault as a city staffer was his constant need to size up the political landscape and then joining in with the people he felt most powerful, in this case, the 400. In doing so, he failed to recognize the sentiments of the greater community, so it's no wonder he was so remarkably out of step with and disconnected from the needs and wishes of the majority of town.

Some might attribute Chi's miscalculations to his age and immaturity, but we think his behavior in Claremont betrayed a fundamental character flaw: a willingness to place his ambitions over the good of the community. Chi struck us as the prototypical Southard senior staffer, intelligent on the one hand, but weak and manipulative on the other.

If there is any doubt that Chi isn't plugged into the Southardian network, check out the California City Management Foundation website. That's the organization that Southard helped get started. Chi is now listed as a member of the foundation's Board of Trustees along with Southard and a number of municipal counsultants, including Bill Mathis, the city manager headhunter who helped Southard land that $300,000 a year job in Indio.

We suspect Chi's flaws have caused him problems in the past, and we guess that at some point in the future, they will catch up with him again. Claremont's gain is Rosemead's loss.