Nine Seats....

“Take your place on the great Mandala

as it moves through your brief moment of time...”

                                                            Noel Paul Stookey

There are nine seats open for election in Lindsay’s city government, and only three require that you live within the city limits.  Six require that you live within the boundaries of the Lindsay Local Hospital District or Lindsay Unified School District, which broadens considerably the range of people who can participate in this community’s future.

Before I began trying to understand what was going on in our town, before the big splash Scot Townsend made with his exit, I didn’t understand how intertwined this city’s government had become with the community’s hospital and school districts.  No one did except the players themselves, because hardly anyone ever attended the public meetings of the three bodies.  Partly that’s because when they did, no one could understand what they were talking about.  But we, the public in both city and countryside, are at least half-way responsible for what has happened here because we were lame as citizens.

Now we’re 100% responsible for reform.

I called the county elections office to find out what’s required (624-7300.)  First, you go to there and fill out some forms for them to verify your voter registration, address and economic interests.  You can also get copies of the candidates guide there or online at their website: www.tularecoelections.org.  The candidates guide describes the qualifications and requirements of candidacy, and is a very valuable tool.

The three city council seats require 20-30 nomination signatures that must be gathered before the filing deadline of 5 p.m. Aug. 10.  Like we learned in the recall effort, those signatures must be verified as qualified registered voters within the city limits, so the county recommends getting 30 to insure the required number of 20 valid signatures.  The hospital and school district seats do not require nomination signatures.

There are no filing fees, but there is a cost for publishing the candidates statement in the County’s sample ballot.  This statement is optional and costs around $350, which must be paid in advance at the time of filing.  If you choose not to submit a statement, there’s no cost for filing.

There may be other costs, however, depending on how you want to promote yourself as a candidate, such as yard signs and flyers.  But the Dolores Huerta Foundation has offered to hold a candidates forum, which would be a wonderful way to get your message out free of charge.  This paper will also be reporting on the elections process, and I will be glad to make public any person’s position on city matters with this column, including the incumbents’.

When no one runs, there’s no elections.  That’s also what I didn’t understand before the big splash.  Let’s get some candidates on the ballot and see what we can do in our brief moment of time.

One World....

“Write down what you just said,” an old friend suggested in a phone conversation last week.  “What I wanted when I moved here was intimacy with a place,” I’d said, “and it’s come, largely through my poverty.”  


Like many, I often feel I inhabit two different worlds with an ocean separating them.  I sense it most when I talk with friends in the Bay Area or other urban ports-of-call, where the right to travel is guaranteed by the Constitution, a passport and a bank account. Living here, where many of my neighbors have had to assert the right to travel against the Border Patrol and enormous dangers with only a wad of bills in their pockets para progresar (“in order to progress,”) my life feels invisible to those far-away friends.


But it’s not only those far away whose lives seem remote from mine.  Recently, talking with a Visalia friend about land ethics and what might be required to instill better relations to land in our culture, he confided “We’re not going to give up our good lives.”  He was speaking in general, but it shook me to think he would draw the line between his life and mine, no matter what good might be gained from whatever good had to be given up.


In a dream last week I was trying to cross an ocean between the world I now inhabit and the one my grandparents inhabited, a world where most people still raised and killed the food they eat.  Many  people around the globe still inhabit that world; many of my neighbors have just recently left it, carrying with them only their recipes and appetites for food from home.  I’m privileged to witness this phenomenon secondhand as packages of beef tongue and tripe, calves hooves and pig skins pass through my hands at the market’s checkstand where I cashier.  Though it was hard at first, my need to understand that world got me through my initial waves of culturally-derived repulsion over my neighbors’ definition of “food.”


What’s the connection between “definitions of food” and “intimacy with a place”?  Most of those recipes and appetites carried by generations of immigrants, whether from Jalisco or Hamburg, Da Nang or Bombay, were cooked and eaten from plants and animals native to those places.  Those lands determined what plants and animals grew and how much, while the people learned how to make more and better.  Food is our primary connection to land, followed by shelter and territory.  Now that our recipes and ingredients have been globalized, our connection to land is less intimate, our sense of place minimized to road maps and weather reports.  


We are still dependent on land for our food  - now we just don’t know whose land it comes from, how it’s produced, or who gets to eat (or not) from the profits. There’s only one world that we all inhabit: Americans’ “good” lives are lived off the backs of others whose lives are not so good or even horrible by comparison.  If we are going to progress as humans - para progresar - we need to reacquaint ourselves with our own land’s productivity and adjust our recipes and appetites accordingly.

Dependence Day....

While the rest of you celebrate Independence Day, we in Lindsay must be content to celebrate only our Dependence, at least for the time being. Short of a large-scale citizen revolt or another lawsuit, our real independence is something we’re going to have to exert at the ballot box in November.


Last week’s city council meeting was a perfect example of the effective downgrade Lindsay’s citizens have received at the hands of their elected representatives. Rescheduled on Monday from its regular Tuesday meeting time to Wednesday, purportedly to have a quorum, few members of the public were able to attend.  At this meeting, two public hearings were held: one on the budget for next year, including the 5-year Capital Improvement Program, the other on a proposed lot line adjustment that will likely result in two sets of tenants needing to find new homes. If public hearings were taken seriously, these would have been rescheduled for a later date to provide proper noticing.


But the really glaring evidence of our lost democracy occurred during Item 10, “Study Session on Proposed Bike Lanes” presented by Bill Zigler, City Planner. I was at the council meeting last fall when Zigler, a confessed bicycle enthusiast, presented the proposed bike lanes during another “study session.” The council actually had questions then about the proposed routes and potential impacts on the neighborhoods from reduced parking. Some also questioned the need, noting the almost complete lack of use of the bike lane on Tulare Road. Zigler assured them he would take their concerns under consideration, and of course no action would be taken without first coming before the council.


Now back before the council, in a presentation any used car salesman would admire, Zigler’s plan got its first increment approved without even taking a vote.  The result will be the elimination of diagonal parking along both sides of the newly-repaved Gale Hill Avenue, replaced by a smaller number of parallel parking slots. It also cements the core of his bike lane plan into place without so much as a questionnaire or a parents meeting.  My attempts to contribute to the discussion went unrecognized.


Two weeks ago I wrote about the reduction of rights to participate in council meetings that city manager Rich Wilkinson has engineered over the last four months. During the public comment period at this week’s council meeting, I laid the responsibility for those reductions squarely on the shoulders of the council. It’s their jurisdiction how open or closed our public meetings will be. This council wants it below the legal limit, so I also laid on their shoulders the responsibility for the huge budget overruns for legal services this year and possibly next, as citizens wrestle their rights back through the legal system.


This city continues to function as if it knows best what’s right for the people, treating us like under-age dependents. It’s called “paternalism” in civil rights language.  But these people are not our parents:  they’re our public servants.  We need to require them to do their job or get out.