Guilt Trip......

I’ve been walking to our city park almost daily since the “renovation” began. Some days making that trip is like pushing against a wall, because I really don’t want to witness the losses.
  
But I’m going because I’m guilty of closing my eyes when the changes really began, first with the hospital’s demolition, then construction of the aquatic center.  Those two projects should have activated me, but I ran from them instead.  So think of this pilgrimage as my guilt trip.


One day last week a neighbor stopped me to give some friendly advice.  “Lay off the city,” was her message essentially,  “you’re alienating the people you’ll need to work with in the future.”  One grievance was bringing in “someone from the outside,” meaning my attorney friend Mr. Harriman.  “They’re just ignorant,” she said of the council, meaning not intentionally harmful, although she admitted not having researched the issues or attended meetings.  “This just makes Lindsay look bad,” she ended, mentioning friends in Visalia who now want to know all the scum.


I pondered her message for hours.  I’ve heard it before, and understand the truth in it.  What she doesn’t understand, and what I didn’t understand even a year ago, is how blind we have all been to what’s really going on, blindfolded by the combination of our small town politeness and a ring of deception in the City’s center.


“You need an attorney,” a county elections officer told Yolanda Flores every time she went there for help with the recall.  I was told the same thing, and it infuriated me.  Now I think she was pointing toward an important fact we overlooked:  that the council members effectively had an attorney in Julia Lew, even though defending their political seats is not her job.  We lost ground several times simply by how the rules were interpreted.


Having an attorney at the Feb. 14 council meeting made the difference between being able to have items removed from the consent agenda, which is common practice in exotic metropolises like Exeter, or not.  So far it hasn’t made a lot of other difference, except to scare the City into subtracting the sentence “To place an item on the Council agenda, you must contact the City Clerk or City Manager’s Department before 12:00 noon on the Wednesday immediately preceding the meeting,” from the paragraph “Citizen Participation in Meetings” on the agenda packet’s cover sheet.  But I don’t think you can blame Mr. Harriman for that reduction in permissible citizen participation.


Our request to be placed on the agenda to discuss what the Brown Act requires for open government has not been answered.  The procedural defects in our city council meetings have been the cover for horrible mismanagement, badly conceived projects and fraud under Townsend’s reign.  They’re the glove for the hand of the falconer, and I think when we take that glove off we’re going to find it’s been a snake-handler instead.