Scot Free......

Things had gotten kinda quiet in our town lately, peace interrupted only by the sounds of heavy equipment carving out the roadbed for the unpopular Sierra View Extension. But it’s back - the public outrage, the seething anger at Lindsay’s city government - after news that Scot Townsend is getting off scot-free.  
Thursday’s Porterville Recorder, which announced that no criminal charges will be filed against our former city manager in a front-page, top-headline article, even received some of the bile.  “I’m so mad at the paper,” said the friend who brought the news to my checkstand Thursday night, wanting to shoot the messenger.  
And maybe she’s right.  The article intertwined the news with the upcoming budget and (silently) city manager Rich Wilkinson’s contract renewal. Quoting Mayor Ed, the article ended conclusively positive: “When you think of all the things going on a year ago and now it’s all behind us....We’ve come a long ways under Rich’s leadership and how he got things done.  Everybody’s working harder, working smarter.”
Written by editor Rick Elkins after the recent departure of reporter Alex Schultz, who helped break the news on the home and microenterprise loan fiascos revealed by the 2009-2010 audit, the article was a red flag. The press is actually the fourth arm of government, keeping the public informed enough of the real issues to actually participate in civic affairs. It was daunting to think the press might go back to its old habit of publishing whatever the city wants us to hear. Those of us who know another side will have to keep the papers aware of their responsibilities for the facts.
And what are the facts?  
That this city council approved, ignorantly or knowingly, every item Scot Townsend brought before them, as it currently approves whatever Rich and his staff bring before them (with the possible exception of last meeting’s proposal to remove the four-way stop from Tulare Road and Homassel Ave. But keep your eye on that one: staff is not above squirreling around their clear directive to leave it alone.)  
That several members of this city council personally have benefited from the City’s projects, despite clear wording in both the city’s charter and municipal code that councilmembers are to avoid anything that even appears like it might be a conflict of interest. 
That this council did not want to find anything that might result in criminal charges being filed against anybody in the city, much less Scot Townsend, whose projects were designed to make members of a certain religious affiliation rich. At the expense of no one more important than the city’s quiet taxpayers and anyone who loved to have big family parties at the park or to swing under the shady canopy of an oak tree. At the expense of democracy itself.
Sorry, Ed  et. al.  It’s not all behind you. The teaparty’s just begun.

Talking Yards....

“We’re talking YARDS” I said to my friend Richard Harriman on the phone the other day as we discussed the possible solutions to Lindsay’s - and the Valley’s - large constellation of problems.  
He thought promoting community gardens here might be one way to bring people together and reconnect them with land, the source of everything (provided you have water to irrigate with and drink.)  I like the idea of community gardens and have seen them work beautifully, especially with urban people who need to reconnect with both people and land more than they need to grow food.  
But when people are hungry, what they need more than anything is a little piece of land outside their backdoor to plant, water and harvest from, to share their surplus with neighbors and to guard from no-account garden rustlers with a polite little fence, their presence, and maybe a barking dog.  It’s the reason I’ve been afraid if we become a nation of apartment-dwellers.  He saw what I was talking about.
I was invited into just such a yard last week by the father of my friend Robert Diaz, who lives just down the street.  I learned the Spanish names for persimmons and pomegranates, smelled twigs from herbs for making menudo and calming an upset stomach, and noted the care and understanding he had for each individual plant.  The tiny strips of land he has to plant are dense with food-in-progress.  Afterward it came to me that there’s an inverse relation between care and land:  the less land you have, the more you care about it.  
One of our great national agrarians, Wendell Berry, has a name for that relationship he calls “eyes per acre.”  What he means is that there is an appropriate ratio between people and land, a proper number of people needed to care for an amount of land.  If the number of people drops or the amount of land increases beyond that ratio, everything suffers.  The industrial form and scale of agriculture here in the Tulare Lake Basin bears testimony to this idea.
Luckily for us, the readers of this paper, we have a pioneering voice for the importance of yards in Mo Montgomery, who most weeks puts together her column “Steadfast” come heck or high water like I do.  Mo has turned her passion for the lifestyle-change movement known as urban homesteading into a consciousness-raising effort that comes free with your subscription.  The words she’s putting out there are making ideas available from around the country that she’s kitchen-testing and yard-testing right here in our own climate.  Check out her website for even more exposure to this life-changing movement at www.blkcatcottage.com.
Our “Gardening Guru” column by UC Master Gardener Michelle Le Strange is also helpful with yards and their tending, frequently complementing Mo’s work to put us in touch with the truths of our lives.  
The work of  both women reminds me how important it is that we begin to realize - and soon - the tremendous value of the land we occupy and the water we claim:  that we inhabit a paradise that some would just as soon pave over to put up a parking lot.

Water and Wages....

Two items on last week’s Lindsay city council agenda took me back to the beginning of our watchdog days:  the pending studies on our water system, and the performance evaluation of our city manager, whose contract is currently being negotiated. 

Two water studies are being proposed:  one on water rates, the other on our water system.  The impetus for the rate study was generated by the public outpouring over high water bills in September, 2010 after the Porterville Recorder released a series of articles about Tulare County’s highest paid public employees and Scot Townsend placed fourth, far above Porterville’s city manager.

In general, the city and the press both missed the message between water and wages that Lindsay’s people were bringing.  “We are mostly people with such low wages that we have trouble paying our water bills - that most essential utility of all - and you’re paying them WHAT????”  It was a justice issue as well as an economic one.

The city heard only the economic side. “We can’t charge less for water because the city charter requires that the water system pays for itself,” they replied.  Then they realized they had no recent evidence to prove that our water rates reflect the true costs of running the system, so they started talking about conducting a study.  Months later when the 2009-2010 audit was released, it revealed that non-water costs had been paid out of the water fund, notably portions of salaries for staff in other departments.  Oops.

The economic justice issue raises its ugly head in another arena:  paying non-prevailing wages on City construction projects.  Being a charter city permits it, although I don’t understand how.  Normal cities are required to pay prevailing wages on public works projects “when paid for in whole or in part out of public funds” according to the CA Dept. of Industrial Relations website.  Yet the contract with 99 Pipeline for building Sierra View Extension using USDA funds is exempt.  Those workers hired by 99 Pipeline (whose motto is “Get Laid”) are getting paid less than they would in Cutler-Orosi, which is not protected by charter status.  Meanwhile, our city manager is lining up for another year of salary well above the prevailing wage for towns our size.

One very interesting website, www.smartcitiesprevail.org, presents a strong case for the community development benefits of paying prevailing wages.  Other reasons include the quality and true cost of projects.  “Absent prevailing wages,” notes Sacramento City Councilperson Sandy Sheedy, “public projects become vulnerable to fly-by-night operators who underbid responsible contractors, pay substandard wages, and produce inferior projects...that can lead to enormous costs in the long run.”  The observations of Lindsay’s many sidewalk supervisors would support that position.

One of the most important findings of my research on small towns is that more even distribution of income results in greater economic vitality and stability.  The wider the gap between the highest paid and the lowest, the worse off the town’s businesses become.  I think it would serve our community well if our staff and council members visited that idea - and then took steps to lessen, rather than increase, that spread.