Claremont Courier Interview / January 13,2001

By Llewellyn "LEW" Miller

Very briefly Age: 52 Spouse: Cecilia Conrad ; Children: Conrad Miller Education: Bachelor of arts, Yale University; master's in engineering-economic systems, Stanford University In Claremont since: 1995 Occupation: Investment counselor and consultant

Very briefly Age: 52 Spouse: Cecilia Conrad Children: Conrad Miller Education: Bachelor of arts, Yale University; master's in engineering-economic systems, Stanford University In Claremont since: 1995 Occupation: Investment counselor and consultant Representative experience: None Affiliations: Ways and Means Committee for Sycamore Elementary School, Chairman of Finance Committee of the Board of Directors for Village Nursing Home (in Greenwich Village, New York) Campaign manager: Claire McDonald (honorary) Favorite book: Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter Favorite movie: Crimson Tide Contact number: 626-1839

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"Last spring, I started looking for candidates to support," began Llewellyn Miller, explaining the process that led him to run for a seat on the city council. Mr. Miller sat down to discuss his campaign on January 5.

"I began attending city council meetings, the community dialogue planning committee meetings, met with other citizens [looking] to find prospective candidates to replace the current councilmembers. No one had emerged by summer; some people began suggesting I run."

Thus, Mr. Miller decided to take the next step. He circulated a petition for nominators and filed his intent to run with the city clerk. A resident in Claremont since 1995, this will be Mr. Miller's first foray into local politics, save the time he registered to run for a school board position in his native New York. He was shut down before his campaign could even begin.

In New York, Mr. Miller explained, even the lowest office is pursued with a bombastic vigor absolutely foreign to what is seen here in Claremont; one needs an attorney to even get on the ballot, he said.

The impetus for seeking to replace the current council, and to eventually run himself, centered on the city's handling of the police shooting of Irvin Landrum Jr. in January 1999, Mr. Miller explained. He is wary of being pigeonholed as a single issue candidate, but did not shy from criticizing of the current city council and its administration for being insensitive and for being out of touch when it came to understanding why people in the community were critical of the way the city acted in the aftermath.

There were two actions in particular the city approved, Mr. Miller said, that struck him as wrong and started him taking a serious look at Claremont's politics: the release of Obee Landrum's criminal record by the city manager and the awarding of the employee of the year honor to the two police officers involved in the shooting, Officers Hany Hanna and Kent Jacks.

"I began to sense there was an unhealthy lack of self-doubt on the part of the councilmembers, in the way they received the recommendations and criticism from citizens" concerning these two issues, said Mr. Miller. And he does not think this "unhealthy lack of self-doubt" is limited to the Landrum affair but shows itself in the council's other actions.

Having piqued his interest, Mr. Miller's next step was looking into the finances of the city, reviewing disclosure forms, budgets and accounting documents. In particular, he was interested in how the redevelopment agency worked--the city council serves as the board for the RDA.

"I was impressed by the lack of transparency of disclosure," explained Mr. Miller. "It was difficult to find out the track record of what those investments have been...I'm not saying there is any deceit or wrongdoing, but it makes it difficult, even for the financially savvy, to follow" how the city and its RDA are using money.

"It makes for unnecessary contention and suspicion," he said. "The level of concern is probably greater than is warranted by the facts, but because the facts aren't easy to get at, the worst is assumed.

"For example, we hear a lot about the money that was sunk into the auto center, but we have yet to see an exact accounting on what the return on the investment has been." Backing the auto center was, arguably, a successful venture, Mr. Miller continued, "but most people don't see it that way.

"An awful lot of people" don't think the city got a better return for investing in the auto center than if it had simply left it itself, he concluded.

This type of obscurity, Mr. Miller added, applies the city's other financial dealings, like Village West expansion and the recent loans made to the Candlelight Pavilion.

"It just makes the discussion for village expansion much more misdirected than it should be. People ask, `Is it going to be a fiasco like the auto center?', when the auto center deal wasn't a fiasco.

"I think there is a lot of pathological behavior going on in [the city council's] meetings," Mr. Miller said. "Cases where the council agrees to come to a unanimous decision so the audience can't take advantage of any splits in the council. They probably save some kind of time and discussion, but I think it makes the next thing they do harder to get through without causing angst."

Mr. Miller works out of his home as an investment counselor, with a particular interest in hedge funds, risk management, and strategies for "high performance investors".

He was born and raised in East Harlem, New York, living in a housing project for low income families. As a child, he said, he saw two forces at work in his community: "I saw, on the one hand, drug addicts in the street...I saw some violence--it wasn't that rare--on the playgrounds. The housing project was low income, surrounded by slums.

"The other force I saw were vehicles for upward mobility. The schools were very good then (in the 1950s). I got sent to free dental care" through a program put on by the Guggenheim Foundation. "I was in special programs in schools, involved in after school activities. I had access, mostly to government programs, that showed me there was a way up and out."

Indeed, Mr. Miller's family moved out of Harlem when he was 11 years old, into the Bronx borough. Continuing through the public school system, he eventually graduated high school and went on to study at Yale University. After earning his bachelor's degree, Mr. Miller went on to earn a master's degree in engineering-economics systems from Stanford University.

Five years ago, his wife was offered a position at Pomona College. Wanting a change from New York, where Mr. Miller had been working with several large financial institutions, like Drexel Burnham Lambert, he agreed to make the move back to California.

"I was relatively passive before the Landrum shooting," said Mr. Miller. "What I knew about Claremont was mostly folklore from college faculty members."

More than his disappointment at the city, Mr. Miller feels the Landrum shooting and its aftermath opened his eyes to the way Claremont's politics works. Presently, he believes, the city's political forces have become "a bit stale".

"Claremont's had a long history of success as a town," he began. "There is a tendency for an establishment to look more and more inward--the arrogance of the establishment here bothers me as much as anything else."

As to what he wants to do, the list is long. One of his major concerns is to make the government processes "much more transparent".

"I'd like to enable and encourage people to know how decisions are arrived at," he said. This might include televising council meetings. It also includes shaking up the "establishment's" ideas. He believes there is a segment of Claremont's politically powerful factions that "buy their own propaganda"--for instance, in describing Claremont as a child friendly community when, Mr. Miller said, the city's downtown area has almost nothing that serves school-aged people, be they in elementary school or college students.

"I'm curious what happened in the past, why [the village area] wouldn't want to capture the market for 5000 undergrads. I do not see an evil intent, but it does not strike me as particularly natural."

He is, however, full of praise for the city's land use policies, from its tree-lined streets to its foresight in bringing a train depot to the city.

On village expansion, Mr. Miller believes the city has done a good job in "laying out a skeleton" for future development, although he would like to see more housing in the area.
"We have a vital downtown [presently], but not `vibrant'."
He would like to see more resources going to children's activities, especially indoor sports like basketball and volleyball. He is critical of the opposition to a Padua Avenue sports park.

"It strikes me...that the city did a fairly good job explaining that it was going to build a park up there" including informing the real estate agents to make sure home buyers were aware of the plan. For the new residents to block park construction, he said, would be to give them "inordinate power" over the rest of the city.

And although the matter is one for the Claremont Unified School District, Mr. Miller likened this type of opposition to the neighbors of Claremont High School preventing the construction of a football stadium on the school's own property. He called the opposition "unreasonable", believing that there is a strong contingent of seniors and "empty nest babyboomers" who make up this city's establishment.

This establishment, he added, often gets the city council's ear to the exclusion of other groups.

"If the only people you pay attention to are above the age of 45 and live between First Street and halfway between Foothill Boulevard and Base Line Road, and you don't pay attention to anyone below First, or above Base Line..." you are not fully representing the community, he said.

With his indirect affiliation to the colleges, with his wife working as a faculty member at Pomona, Mr. Miller also hopes he can engender better relations between the consortium and the city government. He believes there is a schism between the two entities, one that needs to be healed for the entire community's sake.

- Gary Scott