SAN MARINO NEWS
By Mitch Lehman

A series of recent columns published in the Los Angeles Times once again revealed a popular journalistic approach used against the City of San Marino, her residents, government, schools – anything or anybody: Hit and Run. Spray as much newsprint graffiti as possible on San Marino and head for the hills.
The most recent journalistic tagging came from Times' columnist Steve Lopez, who griped about the $4 weekend non-resident fee charged at Lacy Park in a December 12, 2007 ‘Points West’ column (‘In posh San Marino outsiders pay to play’). Lopez and his wife brought their daughter to ride bikes and was incensed at paying the entry fee for a facility that he claimed had received state funding for improvements and upkeep, as he ranted against in his self-described “endless crusade against municipal tomfoolery.”
Two weeks later in the December 26 edition, Lopez reported (incorrectly, as he acknowledged in yesterday’s Times) that San Marino had used federal funding to upgrade the playground in Lacy Park when in fact the city had applied for a $90,000 federal grant but “did not seek reimbursement,” according to Linda Jenkins of the Grants Planning and Reporting division of the Community Development Commission.
In an earlier article. Lopez suggested that Southern California governments impose tolls for the use of our freeways and roads, so we’re still not sure exactly where he stands on the subject of paying for the use of public facilities.
Demonstrating that he at least has a sense of humor, Lopez last week responded to a list of questions we had provided, one of which was, does he believe Southern Californians should be able to attend USC football games at the Coliseum and UCLA football games at the Rose Bowl free of charge, as both facilities have received extensive public funding.
“If USC or UCLA played at Lacy Park, I’d be happy to pay for a ticket,” he answered.
All kidding aside, haven’t we seen this tired approach before? Throw as many things against San Marino’s perceived walls and see if anything sticks.
Times columnist Sandy Banks joined the fray last month as well, when she joined an unsuccessful campaign against a reduction of homework in the San Marino Unified School District.
‘San Marino’s tough assignment: Settle homework beef,’ was the title of her December 8, 2007 article. She at least waited until the subhead to play the race card, popular with daily newspapers, who might be able to justify its inclusion by saying they are just seeking to define Southern California’s delicate cultural balance.
“A campaign to lighten students’ workload also points up an ethnic rift,” the subhead reads.
Well, of course it does. Who at a daily newspaper would ever think that achievement has something to do with work ethic, and in their world of nothing but racial stereotypes, who will work hard and who won’t?
It took Banks twelve paragraphs to mention that San Marino High School was recently ranked in the top 100 in the nation by U.S. News & World Report and she never bothers to give the SMUSD its just due as the top ranked unified school district in the state of California.
Superintendent Gary Woods told The Tribune that at the end of his interview with Banks for the column he asked if she would “focus on the many, many positive aspects of San Marino and the school district.”
Banks told Woods she would check back after the holidays.
We all remember that Sandy Banks was asked by former assistant principal Marilyn Colyar to serve as the keynote speaker at the annual SMHS Prometheans breakfast in June, 2002, an event for which Banks showed up forty-five minutes late and then began her address to the forty soon-to-be graduates and their parents by saying she “couldn’t find Huntington Drive.”
The Times has also tried the bait-and-switch.
In August, 2003, The Times’ David Pierson befriended two San Marino High School varsity football players of Asian descent under the premise of writing an article about football. By the time the story made it to print, both told this reporter they had been misquoted and that Pierson had printed parts of conversations he had said were off limits. Pierson even called this reporter and tried to extract information that would equate race with compromised performance in the Titan varsity football program.
So disheartened were the two seventeen-year-old students that they were reticent to speak in front of the city’s Channel 19 television cameras for a light-hearted football preview show.
Just a few months later, a reporter named Cindy Chang penned an exposé of San Marino High School that was published in the West Covina-based San Gabriel Valley Tribune, a sister paper of the West Covina-based "Pasadena" Star-News. According to a source closely associated with the article, Chang mischaracterized conversations from at least one SMHS student in an effort to quantify the racial mix of the school. The story resulted in threats against Chang being posted by students on a blog and taunts being leveled against young people named and quoted in the article. Chang soon bolted from the San Gabriel Valley Tribune and Star-News.
And there’s the rub: swoop in, write whatever you want and leave town – literally or figuratively. With no investment in the community comes no accountability to its members.
A similar scenario played out at a July, 2001 meeting of the San Marino City Council, where every major media outlet in Southern California swooped in to cover the weighty issue of a proposed regulation of construction and yard work on Saturdays within city limits. Some believed, astonishingly, that San Marinans were hoping to further limit the ability of minority workers to earn money by forcing them to compact their work weeks, rather than our residents' real desire for a little peace and quiet on the weekends – hence the Lacy policy as well.
At that meeting, The Tribune questioned the motivation of the larger media outlets and chellenged them all to publicize what we consider a more worthy cause: Tyler’s Team, a student-generated campus club at San Marino High School created to honor the memory of Tyler George, who passed away in February, 1999 after a lengthy battle against leukemia.
Not surprisingly, and possibly because it wasn’t controversial, or racially charged, or man-bites-dog enough to move the interest meter off the peg, there were no takers.
Rarely, if ever, do any of them acknowledge the thousands of hours of charitable work or the millions of dollars of philanthropic donations generated by the citizens of San Marino, but let someone gripe about too much homework or object to a weekend charge at Lacy Park (a fee that applies to this reporter as a resident of Altadena, I might add) and the fur will fly.
But given the massive problems that face the larger communities involved – and for Los Angeles and Pasadena, let’s just start with education – it’s surely much easier to nitpick San Marino than tackle anything of real magnitude. It sure would be nice if they made sure their own house was clean before putting the white glove to ours. If so, we won’t be hearing from you in quite some time, we guess.
But don’t go away mad.
Just go away.