The Need for Change: Hope

Published on Oct. 31, 2012 in the Sun-Gazette

“If you’re unhappy, there’s always November,” folks told many of us who were working on the recall effort last winter. Well, here’s November. The signs are up, the fliers folded. Election day nears, with real potential here in Lindsay for improvement over the status quo.
“I don’t know,” a man said to me Sunday night “who I should vote for,” doubting there’s real hope for improvement. I gave him my reasons for hope, and will give them to you now.
On the Lindsay city council we need people who can ask hard questions, not just rubber stamp staff projects. Timothy Daubert, Steven Mecum, and Rosaena Sanchez have been asking hard questions for more than two years, fighting City Hall and winning back precious yardage that the incumbents gave away with their polite headnodding.
On the Lindsay city council we need people who understand how the public has been disenfranchised and who have ideas how to reconnect the community with its government. The incumbents are happier with no public input, and resist or even blockade efforts to give it. Daubert, Mecum and Sanchez all intend to add community oversight committees and a planning commission to bring the citizens’ voices back into Lindsay’s city government.
For example, every other city in this region has a planning commission. This gives their residents a chance to find out what is being proposed, ask questions and give input  before it goes to a vote before the council. It also gives the media - including this paper - a chance to alert their readers to the issues before they’re decided by the council. We in Lindsay have only the 72 hour period before the council meeting to discover what will be presented and decided, totally inadequate notice for real public participation.
And finally, on the Lindsay city council we need people who understand how the lower 75% of us live. Many of the projects sponsored by the incumbents have been designed to appeal to the upper 25%, and their support rests largely with the group of people who can afford or appreciate gym memberships and weight training, festivals and art exhibits, the glitz of neon-lighted palm trees and marble fountains.  They see those “improvements” as benefiting everybody, ignoring the costs that have been extracted from us regardless of our incomes, costs that will continue to be extracted through taxes and higher rents for decades to come.
A year ago in this column I asked people to consider hoping for a New Lindsay.  It was after the release of the first serious audit in years, which documented the tremendous waste, fraud, and corruption flowing below the glitzy development. The public reacted, and it wasn’t just about the bad news of our finances. It was about the betrayal of public trust by the incumbents, who continued to act as if nothing was wrong and told the public they were wrong to be upset.
We weren’t wrong. So I’m asking you now to do something heroic: hope. Let that hope carry you to the voting booth. Bring your friends, make a party out of it.  Celebrate the end of disenfranchisement, no matter the outcome. We’re on our way to a New Lindsay already.
- Trudy Wischemann is an open-government advocate who writes and hopes.  You can send her your hopeful sightings - P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA  93247.
- This column is not a news article but the opinion of the writer and does not reflect the views of The Foothills Sun-Gazette newspaper.