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There's No Limit On
What a Community Can Do. . . URGENT!
The Clayton Pioneer’s smear campaign against our beloved town has gone too far. As business owners and proud residents of Clayton, we must take a stand before Tamara Steiner hurts all our businesses.
It appears that Tamara Steiner has made it their mission to drag our community through the mud with fabricated stories and malicious lies that will damage our businesses.
Our take on this is that she has been doing this for several years and the residents of Clayton have complained to her over and over to no avail. She needs to start reporting the news and stop trying to make the news.
Please join me and write to Tamara and tell her to knock it off!
Sincerely,
Mark and Laurie Johnstone
Clayton Business Owner
* The attached document details the harmful rhetoric being spread without evidence or justification from the Clayton Pioneer. This misinformation appears to originate from Council Person Holly Tillman and her small group of supporters.
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Editorial: High staff turnover a sign of Clayton’s decline
By The Pioneer
Clayton City Hall.
CLAYTON, CA (Mar. 11, 2024) — Clayton City Hall is in chaos. It’s time for the Contra Costa Grand Jury to step in for a close look at City Council governance and the behavior of some individual councilmembers.
As recently as 10 years ago, Clayton enjoyed regionwide admiration and respect for its stable government. It had a city manager with an 18-year tenure, low administrative turnover, a balanced budget with hefty reserves and a council that generally ruled by consensus. In short, paradise.
Around 2016, all that changed. A tradition of reasonably civil disagreements over growth and state-mandated, high-density housing devolved into ugly anonymous hate mail and personal attacks on city staff and councilmembers viciously fought out on social media. In short, hell.
Clayton has gone from a “shining city” to rivaling Antioch for comic relief.
A small, vocal and unprincipled anti-growth/anti-change/anti-establishment army calling themselves Save Clayton and/or Clayton Watch declared war on city staff and councilmembers who opted for compliance with state law. The group put their muscle behind Jeff Wan, a current councilmember and last year’s mayor, who openly advocated a “Just Say No” policy to state-mandated, high-density housing and who took a negative view of the city’s history of governing by consensus.
By the time Wan was elected to the council in 2018, the attacks and harassment of other councilmembers and city staff had increased to the point that both the city’s development director and 18-year city manager quit, starting a revolving door of senior staffers.
In the last five years, the city has gone through eight city managers, seven finance managers and five community development directors. Most recently, highly qualified city manager Bret Prebula quit after less than a year on the job and was immediately snapped up by Suisun City.
The public watched as the council majority of Wan, Jim Diaz and, to a lesser extent, Kim Trupiano repeatedly insulted and undermined Prebula during council meetings. More than once, Wan and Diaz bypassed the city manager and issued orders directly to staff in violation of the city’s municipal code.
Fed up with the chaos, Councilmember Holly Tillman has been calling every month since October for an independent investigation of the constant turnover, current council/staff interactions, claims of harassment and charges of Brown Act violations. And every time, she is summarily dismissed.
It’s clear that either an independent investigation and/or a Grand Jury inquiry is in order.
No healthy city runs through 20 people for three senior positions in less than six years.
TAGS: CITY OF CLAYTON, CLAYTON, CLAYTON CITY COUNCIL
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Tamara and her paper are a joke! She lies about everything and is Holly’s mouthpiece.
ReplyDeleteI’ll give her six months and she’s out of business. This lady has lost complete touch with reality.
ReplyDeleteTamera and Holly both speak so hateful about the community and it’s people where they live so, why are they both still in Clayton if they hate it so much? Two hate filled and extremely rude women!
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