“People don’t come to the city council meetings,” our editor Reggie Ellis told me years ago, point blank. “That’s what’s wrong with Lindsay. People don’t come to the council meetings, so the City can get away with anything.” At that point I’d attended only one during the whole time I’d lived here, so I felt justly accused.
Over the past four and a half years, I’ve attended most of those meetings, and I can tell you that, in general, he is right. From late 2010 to the election in 2012, when the City’s past unethical (and sometimes illegal) activities were being uncovered, a small group of community members kept watch. Public interest and attendance has waned over the past year and a half as the community gained a sense of stability and hope for progressive reforms. But with Rich Wilkinson’s departure, a new group of citizens has shown up, expressing strong interest in the selection of the new city manager.
It should be noted that these two groups have opposite interests. The earlier group was interested in changing the status quo and making the city more responsive to the majority of the people who live here. The current group has organized to help maintain the status quo, which primarily serves the financial interests of property owners.
People came to last Tuesday night’s council meeting, people from both groups. In fact, it was a standing-room-only crowd. Folks from the citizens’ group sat in the rows of chairs, no doubt relieved to hear the appointment of city planner Bill Zigler to the position of interim city manager, insuring (if only briefly) that the future will look very much like the past. Interspersed in the chairs and standing in a line blanketing the back wall of the chambers, however, were members from a neighborhood in the community who had come en masse to ask to have their street repaved.
Zigler’s appointment was not music to my ears: it was like radio static turned up full blast. Most of the projects I have fought for the past 4 years came from his desk: the demolition of the Citrus Exchange Building, the elimination of diagonal parking spaces downtown for bike lanes, the proposed roundabout at Hermosa and Westwood, the re-alignment of Highway 65 a mile west of the entrance into town - not to mention various housing projects that hit the fan after the 2008 housing market collapse. His naming to the position felt like defeat. I got up to leave.
But on my way out the door, a woman standing at the back of the room asked me in Spanish when they could speak. She showed me the petitions the neighbors had signed and delivered to the city manager’s desk asking to have Linda Vista repaved. After I realized how important it was that these citizens had gathered and come to the meeting, I asked Mayor Padilla to re-open the public comment period to allow them to voice their concerns. Mr. Zigler announced that they had received their petition, as if that was enough, but Mayor Padilla went ahead anyway, inviting people to come to the microphone. We had no translator present, so one of the bilingual neighbors spoke, then translated for the others. My feeling of defeat was transformed to triumph.
One of the reasons people haven’t come to the Lindsay City Council meetings is that they have not been welcome. There are many things we can do to make the meetings more accessible to the public, but the most important thing for the public to know is that they are welcome. I truly believe that, if we make the meetings more user-friendly to the public and responsive to their needs, people will come. Like James Earl Jones said in Kevin Costner’s movie Field of Dreams, “Oh, people will come, Ray, people will most certainly come.”
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Trudy
Wischemann is an agrarian dreamer who writers.
Send her your sightings of equality c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247
or leave a comment below.
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