Political transitions can be hard or easy and ugly or nice, and at City Hall, it seems they are rarely nice or easy.

After defeating Northeast city Rep. Melina Castro in this month’s runoff, Carl Robinson was sworn in this week and then found his new office bare.

There was no paperwork and no records of projects that are in progress or that many need a push to get started.

Robinson said it wasn’t what he was hoping for, but he is jumping into the job by starting his first weekly breakfast meeting today at 7:30 a.m. at Denny’s Restaurant on Trans Mountain Road.

As far as finding the office empty, his experience is pretty common. After a hard-fought election, losing incumbents tend to offer no transitional meetings with the winner and often leave nothing behind to help their successors.

“What I can tell you is that here are no files in the filing cabinet and even the binders with information are empty,” Robinson said. “I would have liked her to have left me something.

“As far as what happened in the last four years, there is nothing in the office for me to reference.”

Mayor John Cook said the same thing has happened to him – twice.

“When I took over the Northeast district office in 1999, Stan Roberts cleaned it out and took it all home,” Cook said. “Then, when I took over the mayor’s office, everything was cleared out, too.”

Cook, who was moving on to the mayor’s office when Castro was elected, said he left everything behind for her and she threw it all out.

“Sometimes people just want to start from scratch,” he said.

City Rep. Susie Byrd recalled that when Mayor Ray Caballero lost to Joe Wardy in the bitter 2003 election, he still made sure Wardy know what projects were pending and what had been done.

“Ray was so anxious that Wardy continue the projects he started that he made a point to leave a lot of things behind, mostly because he didn’t want any of the projects to die,” said Byrd, who worked under Caballero. “We had meetings with Joe, and he asked us to meet with his staff for transition analysis.

“We were pretty busy organizing all of that as we were leaving.”

There were reports from the 10th floor of City Hall this week that Castro had not just disposed of everything but had personally shredded much of it. That, however, doesn’t appear to be true.

Castro could not be reached for comment, but her former administrative aide, Connie Magana, said she herself shredded sign-in sheets from meetings and other documents that contained people’s telephone numbers and e-mail addresses.

“It was my own stuff, and people said they didn’t that information to get out,” Magana said. “I just shredded everything.”

If Castro did any extensive shredding of documents, she said she was unaware of it. Cook and City Manager Joyce Wilson said the same thing.

Magana said she thinks some documents went to the city’s storage facility, and the city manager’s office would have copies of any outstanding constituent complaints if Robinson wants to see them.