The Need for Change: Plain Ignorance

In less than five weeks Lindsay’s citizens will have the chance to vote for city council members for the first time in 6 years.  Three incumbents are being challenged by four community members hoping to change the direction of this city’s future. But what is the need for change?
The greatest need is for people who will represent and be responsive to the needs of the all of the residents of our community, town and country alike. Three of the challengers -  Tim Daubert, Rosaena Sanchez, and Steven Mecum - have been central in raising awareness of just how unrepresentative the current council members are. For the past two years all three have spent untold hours and energy investigating the City’s entanglements and looking for ways to open this government to its people.
Let’s go back two years to the old high school gym where, on Oct. 19, 2010, nearly 800 people gathered for a special city council meeting, hoping to speak their minds about the high-rise City salaries in a low-rent town. It was a tightly structured meeting, where the City’s supporters (who made up maybe 15% of the crowd) were given equal time to speak, seeming to outweigh the other 85%, whose basic question was “How can you justify paying these people this much in a town where half of us can’t pay our water bills?”
They received no answer. Mayor Murray picked up on the water bill half of the question, and flatly stated that they have to charge that much because that’s what it costs and the city charter says they have to. A year later, after the 2009-2010 audit was completed, they would discover that a hell of a lot of extra salaries were being paid out of the water fund in a bookkeeping nightmare so snarled it took nine months for the auditors to figure it out. Nobody apologized for the error, or for the fact that their ignorance of what was going on has put this city $36 million in debt. Two years later we are paying $70,000 (paid for by grants, of course,) for two studies of our water system to tell us if it’s in the black and if it can handle the growth Townsend was trying to generate with his development dreams.
That night in the gym, Sr. Seraphim Rivera said it best in perfectly clear Spanish. Speaking directly to the Council members, he said “I don’t think you know what it’s like to lie awake in the night not knowing how you’re going to pay your water bill.” He wasn’t complaining about the water bill so much as he was pointing to the council members’ ignorance of the life circumstances and living conditions of a great many of us. The few well-paying jobs they initially created at McDermont (and funded lavishly with City money) they gave to Murray’s kids and Townsend’s sister and her son, as well as to others from out of state. When challenged with conflict of interest claims, all we concerned citizens received was blank stares. They could not comprehend what it felt like to be on the wrong side of the privilege line.
This kind of ignorance is all too common, but Nov. 6th we get to decide how much we want to suffer from it. Please remember that your vote counts for something for the first time in a long while, and support the candidates who know who we really are.
-Trudy Wischemann is a working-class open government advocate who writes. You can send her your bill-paying nightmare stories - P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay, CA  93247.