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.