On Sabotage

To be published in edited form in The Foothills Sun-Gazette Feb. 27, 2013

    "I used to take my grandchildren to the park to swing," said one of my customers at the market.  "But now there's no swings.  What happened to the swings?"

     "It's a long story," I told her.

     I've been telling portions of it in this column for more than a year, and it's still going on.  Last week, in letters to the editors of both the Sun-Gazette and Porterville Recorder, Mr. Kirk Ingoldsby of Lindsay criticized the very thing I was celebrating in my column:  the efforts of our two new council members to change the way this city does its business.  He called it sabotage, said the delay on the vote to approve the bids for repaving the Memorial Building parking lot was embarrassing to the city, and (in the Recorder's version) said the voters had made a big mistake.

     It was hard to read these letters.  Kirk was our nurseryman and florist most of his working life.  He delivered flowers to our doors and church altars and gravesides.  On national holidays, he and his son put up the flags on people's lawns at dawn and took them down at dusk.  We bought our lilies for Easter and poinsettias for Christmas from him.  He advised us what kinds of plants to buy for our yards.  My pink honeysuckle bush and Moonglow pear tree both came from his nursery.  He is a modest, quiet man with a dry sense of humor, and we love him.

     Kirk wasn't there at the meeting where this event he calls sabotage occurred.  His sister was, Pam Kimball.  We elected her in November, too; she came in third.  I'm assuming his interpretation of events came from her.  Unfortunately, the siblings are basing their critique on information from staff that may be incorrect.

     The money they wish to spend repaving the Memorial Building's parking lot, property which the Memorial District recently donated to the city so they could do this, is what's left over from the USDA loan to build the Wellness Center.  I think it's a stretch to use it this way, like I thought it was a stretch to use it for constructing Sierra View Extension (now re-named Ono City Parkway; together the two projects total more than half a million dollars.)  But since both will be used for parking for swim meets at the Aquatic Center, which is physically attached to the Wellness Center (even though this loan did not pay for the pool's construction,) I guess there's some logic.  But there's nothing in that loan saying it can ONLY be used to pave the parking lot, and this money has to be repaid with our over-committed tax dollars.  It doesn't matter whether it's repaid from the city's allocation or the hospital district's - they're still our tax dollars.

     And who knows when the deadline really is to use up this money?  Both Bill Zigler and Mike Camarena, who provided the "end of March" as the time limit at that council meeting, regularly misspeak about such things.  They misspoke when they said the deadline for completing the park renovation was last spring, and kept to that story even after I provided the document showing it was extended to June 2016.  They misspoke when they told citizens the money for Sierra View Extension would be coming from road funds.  They misspoke to Council when they told them they'd solicited public input on the park's design, which was created by intern Steven Ingoldsby (Kirk's son, Pam's nephew) long before they received that supposed input.  And they misspoke when they told those citizens there would be swings.

     What has been sabotaged by this city's government doing its business is the citizens' right to know and participate in its decisions.  Mecum and Sanchez are working hard to change that, and could use some support.  If we voters made any mistake last November, it wasn't electing those two.  It was keeping Pam Kimball, whose faith in the word of staff is unwarranted.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Trudy Wischemann is a writer who loves her pear tree.  You can write to her with your stories of sabotage % P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA  93247

inch X inch

   
Published in slightly edited form in the Foothills Sun-Gazette Feb. 20, 2013

     The morning after our last City Council meeting, I woke up singing "The Garden Song," which starts "Inch by inch, row by row, gonna make this garden grow..."  It's an old Peter, Paul & Mary song from their album Around the Campfire, and it's a great song for agrarian activists to know.

    But as I sang it this time I saw it graphically, as a space 1 inch square that was made for public participation in this town's business, an opening that hadn't been there before.  And we have our new councilman Steven Mecum to thank for it.

     Now, I understand that not everyone would view it that way.  If you read the Porterville Recorder article written by (but not credited to) the paper's editor, Rick Elkins, who covered the meeting, the city's business was delayed by the questions Mecum asked and the discussions that followed.  But if you read that article, you got wrong facts:  Mr. Elkins reported that two motions were defeated by tie votes, since Mayor Padilla was home with the flu, and he also reported the $3M USDA loan for the Wellness Center as a grant.  But it was his first time covering our meetings - we can cut him a little slack.

     Mecum had done his homework.  He'd found that the so-called "Citizens Committee" (the one with only one citizen to be included) had been formed improperly, not following the rules in the City Charter and Municipal Code.  Those state that members for committees formed by resolution (which was the vote before them) should be nominated by the Mayor from names submitted to him/her by council members, not staff.

     He'd also found a provision stating that the city manager, while permitted to sit in on any committee, is not to be a voting member.  "Why waste one of the member slots when he can be there anyway?" Mecum asked.  After questioning why only one citizen has been included on a committee formed to address citizen participation, he said "Why only one member?  Why not 2, or 5?  There's no urgency on this - I'd rather do it right than fast."

     The city clerk suggested that Council members could email names of people who might be interested in serving on this committee to the mayor to expedite matters, and VOILA - suddenly the whole question of the committee was re-opened after the slam-dunk the city manager thought he had from the special meeting Jan. 30.  If you might consider serving on this committee, contact Steven at steven.mecum@yahoo.com or (559) 350-2250.

     Danny Salinas ran his first meeting as Mayor Pro-Tem very decently.  On two occasions, when he realized he might have tie votes, thus defeating the motion, he chose instead to have the items continued to the next meeting, preserving momentum while waiting for adjustments to conform to the rules.  When Councilwoman Rosaena Sanchez asked staff about fixing potholes in the streets, Danny asked them to bring a report on street repair to the next meeting.  When one citizen wished to ask a question of staff during an agenda item, he permitted it though he'd rather have kept going, and it clarified the discussion.

     So here's to progress.  Think of Lindsay as a garden project.  "Inch by inch, row by row, someone bless these seeds I sow.  Someone warm them from below till the rains come tumbling down."  Next meeting is Tuesday, Feb.26 at 6 pm - join us!
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Trudy Wischemann is a writer with songs always running through her head.  You can send her your garden reports % P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA  93247

What Happened

  Published in slightly edited form in the Foothills Sun-Gazette Feb. 6, 2013.

    "What happened at the special Lindsay City Council meeting Wednesday?" my attorney friend Richard called to ask the morning after.

     "Nothing you wouldn't expect," I said, still discouraged.

     It had been a long meeting.  I'd lost an hour and a half of work to be there at the beginning, when the public comment period occurs, in order to request that they table the agenda item regarding public participation, saving it for a regularly scheduled meeting.  During my three minutes I'd gotten into a little, friendly discussion with the new mayor, who assured me it was just going to be a discussion and who made it clear the discussion was going to occur.  I'd sat through the long-but-interesting ethics training Julia Lew conducted, only to miss most of Rich Wilkinson's explanation why he removed the language from the agenda packet last year that I've requested they restore because I had to run home and call the county courthouse number to see if I had to appear for jury duty the next day so I could let my employer know if I'd be at work the next morning or not.  It felt like a Monday.

     When I popped back into the council chambers, Rich was just finishing his explaation why he'd acted without Council authority.  Apparently he'd been in discussion with former Mayor Ed (whom he calls "Dad") Murray, and assumed that what Ed wanted was reflective of the entire council.  Considering that they almost always voted in unanimity, that probably wasn't a totally unfair assumption.  But still:  the Council was neither asked nor informed.

     Together with Rich and Julia, the Council then discussed how to proceed with deciding what kind of rules they want to establish for public participation in the council meetings and other aspects of city government.  They decided to form a committee made up of two council members and two staff.  Councilman Mecum said he'd hate to undergo such an effort without having public input, so they added one more slot for a member of the public.  "How are we going to find someone?" they wondered together, so they assigned that job to the city manager.

     Look at what's happened.  They've had a discussion between the council members and the staff about a matter of concern to the general public at a meeting few members of the public even knew was occurring, starting at 4:30 pm, a time of day when most people were still at work.  They've made several decisions:  how they're going to proceed (have a committee look at the questions and report back to the Council,) who will be on the committee (Councilwoman Kimball volunteered, followed by Councilman Mecum, with Rich Wilkinson claiming the staff slots for himself and his right-hand woman, Maria Knutson,) plus some member of the public with unspecified qualifications, then given Rich the power to decide who that will be.  They even decided to announce this decision at the next regular council meeting Feb. 12.

     As I let the meaning of it all sink in, I was filled with this horrible phrase:  we're their niggers.  Like white plantation slave owners in the South, they're proud to be in charge of this large estate we call a city, with 11,000 poor (but "important") citizens, and they boast how well they take care of us.  But the minute we ask a question, we become "uppity" and if we persist, we're labled "disruptive."  These people will never let us into "their" business.  They'll go to war before they'll welcome our presence as equal partners in this city's government.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Trudy Wischemann is a neophyte communitiy activist who's getting her nose rubbed in it.  You can send her your sympathetic stories or good advice % P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247.