Editorial: Calonne's departure a loss for Palo Alto

There perhaps is never a good time to lose a key city leader, but we wish Calonne had stayed around long enough to finish the job of increasing the openness of city government and bringing it up to date with issues raised by the Internet and the potential for electronic communications at many levels.

Over the Baker's Dozen years he has been with the city, Calonne's influence has been as strong as any city attorney the city has ever had, with the possible exception of its first attorney, the late Robert Michalski, who served from 1952 into the late 1960s. Calonne's consultative style was reminiscent of Peter Stone's, who served as city attorney in the early 1970s and who was instrumental in shaping the city's preservation policies toward its upper and lower foothills. Stone served until he was appointed a Superior Court judge.

But Calonne's length of tenure and breadth of involvement in city issues are otherwise unrivaled. His role as adviser to the City Council went beyond that of most city attorneys, in large part due to a leadership vacuum in the later years of former City Manager June Fleming's administration.

We have not always agreed with Calonne, and have occasionally been sharply critical of his views and recommendations. Yet when he was directly involved in an issue, his thinking was usually to the point and on target, and had a solid foundation in legal precedent and practical reality.

Calonne was also a leader statewide in recognizing the importance of electronic communications on how cities will conduct business in the future. So his loss to Colorado will be felt beyond the boundaries of Palo Alto.

One of Calonne's few failings, in our view, was in not being more assertive in correcting the farcical situation in which Palo Alto found itself during 2002, when e-mails from City Council members to staff and their responses were both kept secret.

This and a controversial closed meeting Oct. 30 ultimately forced the Weekly to sue the city. The main thrust of the suit was to force the city to define official e-mails as public records under the state's Public Records Act. The settlement agreement early this year resulted in e-mails now being made public as part of the council packet or distributed at a council meeting.

Even more significantly, by early next year the city is committed to implementing a system whereby such e-mails are simultaneously delivered to the recipient and posted on the city's Web site. This and related policies will create an unprecedented transparency of local government that other cities (and newspapers) statewide are following with close attention.

We wish Calonne were around to carry this matter through, as there are complex legal and political shoals that need to be navigated. The replacement the council selects should have a strong track record in this area.

A clause in Calonne's employment contract -- that forbids council members from expressing public criticism of his performance -- will be scuttled this time around. As we discovered last year, it only creates more indirectness and manipulation -- and the city has enough of that already. The public deserves to know if there are problems between elected and appointed city leaders, and if an attorney can't tolerate the proverbial "heat of the kitchen" he or she should stay in the cooler shadows of corporate law.

But now is the time to say goodbye and good luck to an attorney who has provided strong leadership, wise counsel and a cool head during difficult times. He has confronted everything from an investigation of sandbagging of the city manager's home during a flood to the ridiculously extenuated city consideration of creating an "eruv," a symbolic wall of twine around the city. He has repeatedly helped guide the council through difficult, emotionally charged and divisive issues.

Calonne should feel right at home in Boulder, a city of 100,000-plus described by a local columnist as "warmly situated between the mountains and reality," and similar to Palo Alto in many other ways -- even to an anti-panhandling ordinance in the works, echoing Palo Alto's law of several years ago.