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.
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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