Friday, June 22, 2012

This Land is Your Land....


“You’ve got to exert your ownership over the place you live in, or you won’t have that place.  That’s what that song is about.” 
- Bruce Springsteen on Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” 


We may be forced into singing at next week’s Lindsay City Council meeting:  our City Manager has once again reduced our rights to participate in city council meetings with the full blessing of (but without a decision by) the Council.
It’s not the first time.  After the Feb. 14, 2012 meeting, where I’d insisted that the public had a right to ask for the removal of items from the consent calendar according to wording on the agenda, they took that wording out.  
By the March 13, 2012 meeting, they’d taken out another sentence, this one from the paragraph defining public participation on the agenda packet cover sheet: “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 to have the item placed on the agenda.”  After I’d asked for months about how to get an item on the agenda, that missing sentence was finally replaced in the June 12 packet cover sheet with this one: “If a member of the public wishes for an item to be placed on an agenda, he/she may also ask at this time (during the public comment period) but the Council will make the ultimate decision whether to place a requested item on a future agenda and is under no obligation to do so.”
On that same cover sheet I discovered the most recent disappeared/replaced sentence, which eliminates the right to speak to agenda items when they come up for discussion.  The missing sentence said:  “Those who wish to be heard on matters on the agenda should indicate their desire to speak when the item is ready for discussion.”  It had been replaced with “Members of the public are welcome to make their comments during the public comment portion of the agenda, as this is the place for public participation per the Brown Act.” This completely limits public participation in council meetings to the three minute public comment period (except during public hearings).  
Whether the Brown Act says that or not is a matter of interpretation, however.  The League of California Cities’ fine guide to the Brown Act says “Every agenda for a regular meeting must allow members of the public to speak on any item of interest, so long as the item is within the subject matter jurisdiction of the legislative body.  Further, the public must be allowed to speak on a specific item of business before or during the legislative body’s consideration of it.”
Our city’s attorneys seem to be interpreting the Brown Act’s word “before” as “way before,” like during the public comment period.  But if the League of California Cities thought that, they wouldn’t have used the word Further.
When they Nazi’s took away the Jews’ rights, they didn’t do it all at once.  They did it one small piece at a time, quietly, until it was too late for anyone to protest the dehumanizing effect of being without citizenship.  Come exert your ownership over this place we live in - let your presence be felt at Tuesday’s city council meeting.

Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Lawyers...


“How’s my favorite lawyer today?” I asked Starr Warson one evening when he came to my cash register.  “Fine!” he said brightly, then dimmed a little and added “I hope that’s good...”
Our friendship solidified in an act of human caring, not politics, and it was easy to assure him “it’s good.” I know many fine people who are lawyers who practice their craft ethically. The disparagement many people feel toward that profession is created by two things: a fear of the power they are able to wield, and experience with law professionals who wield it unethically.  Sometimes it’s the people hiring them who wield them unethically, often the powerful.  Our dislike of lawyers is actually a distaste for uneven power relations.
The other day it occurred to me that, without lawyers, there would be no law, which in our political system is the way we establish our ever-evolving ethical code and try to protect the rights of people and business.  Many of our legislators who make the laws are lawyers, and the laws are fine-tuned by litigation.  Also, without lawyers our laws would be useless: without fear of ramifications when laws are broken, our land would be ruled by lawless people.
Which brings me to Lindsay.  Last week’s article on Steven Mecum’s public records lawsuit quoted City Manager Rich Wilkinson about the financial harm this and other lawsuits could cause the city, right on the verge of its recovery from multiple disasters, including the prior administration’s “financial mess.”  He failed to mention that one of the new provisions of his employment contract (unanimously approved May 22, 2012 without one question by the council,) could be equally damaging.  It reads “In the event of involuntary separation of the City Manager, he shall be entitled to receive a lump sum payment as and for severance pay in an amount equal to eighteen (18) months salary.”  At his initial city manager salary alone ($12,000/mo.) that lump sum would be $216,000.  If you include his police chief salary as well, that puts it closer to $250,000.
Wilkinson also failed to mention that it wouldn’t have cost anything if Mecum’s  request had been treated respectfully.  Not only is there the potential $260,000 for Mecum’s attorney, Paul Boylan, there’s all the expense we’ve already paid for Nancy Jenner’s inadequate defense of the city and her firm’s bad legal advice about pursuing this course of action.
In an attempt to estimate that cost, I made a public records request to inspect all the billing statements/invoices for legal services from Oct. 2010 to May 2012, as well as a few other items.  Instead of the normal phone call from Maria Knutson advising me when the materials were ready, I received a two-page letter signed by Maria but clearly written by a lawyer.  From the language, I suspect it was Nancy Jenner herself, because the logic matched what I heard in the courtroom when she tried to make her case before Judge Reed.  After sifting through the legalese, her letter basically said it’s not in the public interest to know what they’re charging us for:  “the public interest in non-disclosure clearly outweighs the public interest in disclosure.”
What kind of person could make that statement?  Only someone with an interest in keeping the public blind.  Is it the lawyer, or the people employing the lawyer?  That’s in the public’s interest to know.

Wednesday, June 6, 2012

A Land Ethic....


 “That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics.  That land yields a cultural harvest is a fact long known, but latterly often forgotten.”  Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac
For the past week I’ve been struggling to find words for what’s in my heart about land, words that will reach others’ hearts and influence their minds about the future of a particular piece of land with an exquisite history and present fertility:  Quaker Oaks Farm.  
The owners, Bill and Beth Lovett, who have operated Quaker Oaks Christmas Tree Farm there for almost 20 years, are highly aware of this land’s cultural and ecological value.  They wish to protect it from having those values stripped away when its economic value soars, tempting future owners to sell out.  There are multiple ways to do that, and a non-profit organization has been formed to help make those decisions and  steward the land in its new vocation.  But it seemed words were missing defining what’s being undertaken, so I offered my services.
I found myself pulling books down from a high shelf where they’ve been since 1993.  When my hands reached Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, I read the last chapter, “The Land Ethic.”  Found words.
This book was first published in 1949, just after Leopold (a forestry professor at the University of Wisconsin) died fighting a grass fire on a neighbor’s farm shortly after he became an advisor on conservation to the United Nations.  He was that kind of man.  He was 60.
The book was republished in paperback in 1968 and became a flagship for the environmental movement that us back-to-the-landers needed when we discovered how hard it is to live from the land alone. But what he says about the need for a land ethic is still fresh.
Writing less than a decade after the socio-ecological disaster of the Dust Bowl, Leopold announced in the book’s preface “Conservation is getting nowhere because it is incompatible with our Abrahamic concept of land.  We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us.  When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.  There is no other way for land to survive the impact of mechanized man, nor for us to reap from it the esthetic harvest it is capable...of contributing to culture.”
He ends the book with this analogy:  “By and large, our present problem is one of attitudes and implements.  We are remodeling the Alhambra with a steamshovel, and we are proud of our yardage.  We shall hardly relinquish the shovel, which after all has many good points, but we are in need of gentler and more objective criteria for its successful use.”  
In between, in 25 short pages Leopold takes us through his logic and his experience, his loves and despairs, but leaves us with no magic recipe.  What he leaves us with is the simple understanding that we’re in need of developing a land ethic before our ethic-less treatment of land leaves us hungry and homeless.

Friday, June 1, 2012

Sorry, we're closed....

 “Sorry - we’re closed” is something I get to say at the market where I work.  Sometimes I say it sympathetically, a last-minute shopper myself.  But sometimes, when I hurt from lifting groceries and customers run in the exit door after we’ve flipped the sign, it comes out mad and mean, omitting the “sorry.”
That’s how that message came out of Lindsay’s City Council last week.  I’d asked for two things, one reasonably small, one ridiculously large.  The big one was to stop building Sierra View Extension and hold up the park until more public input could shape its redesign.  This was my twelfth time making that request.  Mayor Ed had disparaged my first eleven efforts on KTIP Radio, so I explained my reason for asking. “What I’m doing is reminding all of us that not everyone likes what this city is doing and that we have right and an obligation to speak up.” 
The small thing was for one of them to remove the minutes of the last meeting from the consent agenda and correct them to show Council’s rejection of the idea to remove the 4-way stop at Homassel and Tulare Rd.  I also wanted the minutes to show Bill Zigler’s response:  that he felt directed by Council to forget the idea and simply focus his study on the Sequoia and Tulare intersection. 
Last week, however, traffic counter strips were placed on Homassel on both sides of Tulare Road for one day, suggesting that this intersection is being studied after all.   Then, after warning in last week’s column that “staff is not above squirreling around their clear directive to leave it alone,”  I was appalled to find their clear directive missing from the minutes.
The public no longer has the right to have an item removed from the consent calendar to have it discussed.  Words saying we did were removed from the agenda after the Feb. 14 meeting without action by the Council.  They’d never recognized that right in practice and did not miss the verbiage when it was gone.  But I’d hoped a council member would take that step to defend the position of the Council itself. 
After reading the items on the consent agenda, Mayor Ed asked the Council what it wished to do.  Steve Velasquez asked the city attorney “Do the minutes have to be verbatim?”  “No, they can just be a summary” she replied, “but if Council wants them clarified, they certainly have that right.”  Steve thanked her.  Ed repeated his question.  Danny moved to approve, then it was seconded and passed in a heartbeat.
“We’re CLOSED” was the clear message, mad and mean, for asking them to operate accountably.  What’s sorry is that this council doesn’t even care what they themselves think, much less what the public thinks. Their job is to keep tight ranks protecting the city’s machinations.  They serve, not as an open window, but as a locked-closed door behind which lots of things go on we’ll never know about much less influence.  And we’re paying through the nose. 
This is taxation without representation.  That’s what triggered the original teaparty in Boston Harbor, then the Revolutionary War.  Let’s not let it go that far.  Let’s open that door.