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After two hours of discussion at Tuesday evening’s City Council Study Session, the City Council unanimously voted to file an appeal of the 2006 Draft Regional Housing Needs Assessment. The council agreed that the government’s housing allocations for Sierra Madre don’t match realistic projections of the City’s growth.

Then, for those who stayed for Public Comment, attendees witnessed a different kind of fireworks than they might have been expecting.

Sierra Madre resident Fay Angus, a frequent speaker at the City Council podium, expressed her dislike of The Sierra Madre Cumquat, a satirical online publication not unlike the popular site The Onion. (In the interest of full disclosure: Cumquat publisher Jim Snider has contributed editorial cartoons to this Website.)

Angus began her speech by assuring the council and the audience that she was familiar with what she could and couldn’t say in a public forum. (Scroll down to see a YouTube video of Angus’ speech.)

Then she described the site as “blasphemous,” “degrading,” “smut” and “sleazy.” She also gave specific examples of some of the site’s entries that she found distasteful.

She requested that Mayor John Buchanan retract his statement to reporter Molly Okeon for an article that appeared in the Pasadena Star-News on January 14. (The article is no longer available in the paper’s free online archives, but people can use their archive search to locate the article. There will be a charge to read the full text.)

During Angus’ speech, she said that Buchanan told the Star-News that he liked the site. She stated that she wanted him to retract his statement and tell Sierra Madreans that he was not aware of the site’s content when he said he liked it.

Buchanan refused to take back his comment. (Scroll down to see video of Buchanan’s remarks, which appear at the end of the Angus snippet.)

“What I’ve looked at on a Website, the context of my comments, I’m not going to go down this road of talking about whose comments are appropriate and whose are not in the community on a Website that is meant to be humorous,” Buchanan explained. “I don’t endorse any particular Website … I don’t necessarily think every piece of humor is funny even if I find some other piece of humor funny. I’m not going to go down that road.”

Angus said that she was “shocked” that the Mayor would not “condemn” the Cumquat.

Buchanan responded: “Then you’ll have to be shocked.”

Sierra Madre resident Barbara Lee followed Angus with a similar condemnation of the site. (Scroll down to see the YouTube snippet of Lee’s speech.)

Note to readers: inSierraMadre.com is offering the following videos so that readers may see the speeches for themselves and can therefore draw their own conclusions. In my opinion, this is very important in a city where the politics are often contentious. Viewing these speeches will also help readers make judgments about the veracity of news found in the local news sources.

The videos, while they appear here on inSierraMadre.com, are actually hosted on YouTube.com. For those readers new to YouTube.com, it’s important to know that part of the way that people use YouTube is to provide links to videos that others have posted there. Or, as in this case, people can paste computer code into their own sites so that users don’t have to leave the site they’re on to view a video.

In other words, inSierraMadre.com did not originally post these videos on YouTube but is providing access to them for your convenience. When I do post my own news videos on YouTube.com, I will make it clear that the videos in question are my own.

Watch Fay Angus’ speech on YouTube.com (note that Mayor Buchanan’s comments, quoted in the above article, appear at the end of this snippet):

Watch city resident Barbara Lee’s speech on YouTube.com: