Pomona City Attorney Threatens Foothill Cities

[NB: Our regular coverage of the FC, including the latest on outsourcing Pasadena news to India, continues below this post, but we thought it sufficiently important to keep this at the top of the page.]

[Also, if you click on the images, they link to a higher-resolution version of the letter, which should be legible.]


A while ago we floated some rumors circulating via email concerning certain goings on in Pomona's city hall. We figured the accusations were so far out there that they wouldn't cause any harm, and we figured we'd learn more about what was going on by asking our readers about them. We also sent emails to all the parties concerned. We eventually decided that posting the name of one of the parties in question would be unfair, so we removed the name of that city employee from our little blog. Although we were able to maintain private email correspondence with that person, the City of Pomona made sure that all our emails to city officials were sent back to us as spam.

Some time passed, and (it seems) the City Manager did comment on our blog, although he made an unintentionally amusing spelling error in the process. What became clear from some of our comments and emails was simply that there were people out there who really didn't like the City Manager, and they were either telling bald-faced lies or something close to the truth. Other than that comment, we got nothing even close to official from anyone in the city. Until yesterday.

We've decided to remove almost all the posts concerning this incident from our "web-site publication," as the city attorney called Foothill Cities in his uncharitable letter-in-a-pdf file to us yesterday. He sent it, he says, "on behalf of the city and the parties named in your recent 'blogs.'"

I don't think we've done anything wrong, and I think we would likely be fine facing the threatened "legal consequences." But, of course, such a process would be time consuming and costly—assuming the city actually carried through with it—and, frankly, considering this is a very part-time gig, and we don't exactly have the resources the city of Pomona does, we're going to let Goliath win this one. If you want to know what this whole matter stemmed from, we've kept our original post online, which you can see here.

Feel free to discuss this matter with us further via our "web-site publication." You can name us all you want in your "blogs." And keep your tips coming via email. I'll be out of town this weekend, but I'll have more to say on this matter and the recent Pasadena Now outsourcing of local news to India first thing Monday.