Journal entry, March 11,2013
Last week, while cooking under the influence (CUI), I added a whole canned chipotle pepper to my pork sirloin/yellow bell pepper stir fry. I have been adding extra ingredients to the mixture ever since, trying to dilute the fire.
It's a little like trying to shed light on who's shaping Lindsay's future. Get too close, and it's like biting into a whole chipotle all by itself.
Take, for example, Janet Kleigl's letter to the editor in March 6th's Foothills Sun-Gazette. Pricked by my defense of the new councilmembers' attempts to introduce the concept of fiscal responsibility to the staff regarding the use of loan money to repave a parking lot, Janet took 16 column inches describing the inaccuracies that plague my writing and chastised the paper for printing them. Yet Janet was not at the council meeting where she said the 2-2 vote on that project was taken, which it was not. Danny Salinas, who was running the meeting because Mayor Padilla was absent due to the death of her sister, feared that he might have a 2-2 tie and decided to continue the vote to the following meeting rather than have the measure defeated. Because she was not there, Janet also did not hear any of the discussion of the concerns expressed by the two new council members who might have voted "No" if given the chance, and she did not address their concerns in her letter, although they had been sufficiently explained in Councilman Mecum's letter to the editor the week before. She wrote about the two new members as if they'd been insolent, unthinking children. That arrogance, unfortunately, was one of the hallmark characteristics of her administration of the school district.
In her letter, Janet accused me of not contacting her regarding the acquisition of the property on which the new high school was built. I didn't. I contacted the former owner, Mark Arredondo, who loved his lovely orange grove and modest ranch-style home nestled among the stately trees. When I spoke to him, as the trees he loved were dying because there's no point in irrigating a grove on its way to being bulldozed, he was so demoralized by the way Janet and her crew of arm benders had come to him that I feared for his health. They explained that if he didn't sell to them, they'd simply take it by eminent domain. Mark died before he ever got to occupy the new farm he bought with the money the school district finally provided - more than a year overdue - for the purchase of his property. Janet suggested that I got my information through the rumor mill, but in fact it was first-hand testimony of a primary - and unwilling - participant.
And in fact that farm was irreplaceable. Mark purchased it from Bob and "Mama Tiger" Kiersey, who had hired a friend of mine to farm their land. When my friend was investigating the grove's history to document damages from the 1990 Freeze for insurance purposes, he had discovered that much of the grove he tended had actually been planted by the original owner, G. Stockton Berry, the inventor of the steam harvester. Along with Capt. Hutchinson, Stockton Berry was a major influence in pioneering production agriculture around Lindsay, and thus responsible for the town's development. The land is (or was) deep, well-drained alluvium formed by Lewis Creek, a soil type we have in very limited quantity.
Unfortunately, I also know the inspector who did the property assessment of Mr. Arredondo's place for the school district. He didn't find the historic information my friend did, and he didn't recognize the priceless soil and so the true value of this property was undermined. Many of the trees the school district bulldozed were over 100 years old and still producing well. That fact alone is testament to the fertility of that soil. Unfortunately, during construction of the new high school the soil profile was completely destroyed and now that precious dirt is nothing more than underlayment for asphalt and concrete, buildings and playing fields.
Trying to turn my criticism of certain City staff for having trouble telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth on my head (I said they regularly misspeak,) Janet said I misspoke when the staff told the council they'd solicited public input on the park redesign. It was at the Jan. 10, 2012 meeting; I was there, she wasn't. In her sixth paragraph she even misquotes me, a somewhat shameful thing for a former teacher and school district superintendent to do. I was maintaining (in the portion she left out) that the park design was finished (Sept. 2011) before the events occurred where they say they received public input (Dec. 2011-Jan. 2012.) Janet mentions two different meetings she attended where public input was received from as many as 10 different people (that's 0.001% of the population, by the way,) but she doesn't give the date. Sorry, Janet, but that's a strike.
Which brings us to the swings. I challenged the staff's promise "there will be swings," in a column which came out the day after (and which was written several days before) the staff's first announcement that swings were on order. After promising the people from the Dolores Huerta Foundation "there will be swings," the staff had ordered playground equipment which did not include swings and declared it final. Additionally, nowhere on the plans for the park is the location for swings identified. When I asked Maria Knutson (assistant to the city manager) where the swings, now reported as "coming," would be located, she had no idea where they would be placed or what kind of swings they would be. "I hope they're not baby swings," I said. "I hope they're big enough for me." I'm hoping I don't have to drive to Cutler Park to swing once again, the only place left I know where an adult bottom can fit into the swing fixture and remember what it was like to dream.
As I've walked around talking to people about the city's plans and problems, many of you have expressed your reluctance to express yourselves before people who really don't care what you think. I know what you're talking about, because I'm constantly having that shoved in my face, even while describing what seems to me to be really important aspects of the quality of our lives in this town, and then getting torched. You could help dilute the fire by adding extra ingredients to the mixture: your opinions about the quality of our lives, and what makes living in this town peculiarly special. Add your voices to the mixture, add your sweet selves to the count, and pretty soon we'll have this fire out.
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Trudy Wischemann is a small town girl who was raised without a small town. You can write to her with your small town dreams % P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247
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