Disappointing News

Published in the April 20th, 2016 issue of the Foothills Sun-Gazette.

    The recent report from the Tulare County Grand Jury, “Nightmare in Lindsay,” was disappointing to almost everyone.   Unfortunately, the reporting about the report by our two major newspapers (the Porterville Recorder and the Foothills Sun-Gazette) was even more disappointing.           

     True to policy, the Grand Jury report did not reveal the complaint that triggered the investigation or the events that led up to the complaint being filed, much less the identities of those making the complaint.  A reader unfamiliar with Lindsay’s recent history would have no way to unravel the Grand Jury’s findings, whose roots stem back into the Townsend administration.  Good journalists would have provided that background.           

     During several Lindsay City Council meetings last year, some citizens who claimed to have signed the complaint spoke openly about it, including Brian Watkins, Ellen Blumer, and Kirk Ingoldsby (Councilwoman Kimball’s brother.)  The general tone of their testimony was threatening, and the goal appeared to be to get the three council members who had been named in the complaint (Mayor Padilla, Rosaena Sanchez and Steven Mecum) to either step down from their elected positions or tow the party line these citizens wanted.  These citizens are largely insiders in this community, as well as supporters of the previous administrations of Townsend and Wilkinson, support which extends to the current one under Bill Zigler’s management, i.e., the old guard of Lindsay.           

     Findings #3 and #4 related to this complaint: an allegation by these citizens that the Brown Act had been violated when 2 or 3 of the named councilmembers met privately with city employees over personnel matters.  Finding #3 was that no evidence was found of Brown Act violations; Finding #4 stated that some council members were involved in discussion of union issues “outside the parameters of established procedures,” without citing which procedures were stepped on.           

     The other three findings, however, which are a much bigger part of Lindsay’s nightmare, were caused by the Council prior to Sanchez and Mecum’s election and Padilla’s appointment as mayor: #1, the detrimental effects of combining the position of city manager with the director of public safety; #2, the costly employee settlements we suffered as a result of this decision; and #5, the cost of these settlements to the city’s already difficult financial situation.             

     Current councilmembers Danny Salinas and Pam Kimball, who were not named in the complaint but who sat on the previous council, bear a great deal of responsibility for these facts of our city life, as do former council members Steve Velasquez and Mayor Ed Murray.  Ramona Padilla was a newly appointed council member at that time, and also shoulders a portion of that responsibility. 

           

     Padilla was not on the Council, however, the last time it was investigated for violations of the Brown Act in 2010.  That time the Grand Jury found that violations HAD occurred when they met in San Jose and approved the merger of the police and fire departments into the department of public safety without proper public notice.  That was the beginning of Rich Wilkinson’s eventual rise to the joint position of City Manager/Director of Public Safety.  Pam Kimball negotiated that contract, which contained the extraordinary provisions requiring 4/5 majority approval for Wilkinson’s termination and 18 months’ severance pay, a factor that led to the extraordinary employee severance settlements that caused Lindsay’s budget to somersault.           

     The real news about Lindsay’s “nightmare” is that it is longstanding and ongoing, not likely to end until those insiders in power are curbed and made accountable.  Journalists have an important role to play in helping to keep public officials accountable.  Unfortunately the journalists covering Lindsay either do not understand that role or are ignorant of our history.  I hope both lackings can be corrected in the future.

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Trudy Wischemann is a Populist who writes.  You can send her your observations of insider “trading” c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or visit www.trudysnotesfromhome.blogspot.com and leave a comment there.

           

 

Tell the People

     “What shall I tell the people this week?” I asked my sweetheart as he left for work Monday.  “Oh, I don’t know,” he mused as he put his lunch bucket in the front seat.  “Tell them as long as Easter has come again and we have water in the reservoirs, there’s always room for optimism,” he said, buckling his seatbelt before driving off as the sun lighted a bank of clouds above the Sierra. 

           

     “Room for optimism” is a fine topic, especially in this election year like no other.  Since this man came into my life I have observed his many techniques for keeping the way clear for that positive state of mind, despite the fact that he stays informed about what is happening in the world.  Staying uninformed has been one of my ways of coping with the despair that frequently emerges in me when I read or hear the news.  This is only one of the ways in which he’s a good influence on me. 

           

     But “telling the people” is my calling, not his.  Since he came into my life I’ve had a chance to examine this activity otherwise known as “writing,” an act of verbally leaving the comforts of home to go out into our mental streets and call out to others, who may be sitting in their comforts of home, or may be out wandering those same mental streets, distressed at the news.  It is an act of starting an inaudible conversation, or trying to.  It is the hope of sending a thought out into the bewilderness to find another thought to hook up with, to mate or parry, or, sometimes, to trump.

           

     One day last week over breakfast I found myself talking with him about “our people.”  Both of our fathers worked hard for small pay, feeding large families.  That makes us working class by culture even if the collars of our occupations are not now blue, even if our training has taken us a little further away from dangers on the job and the physical wear and tear on our bodies that our fathers experienced.  His people were union Democrats; mine were anti-union Republicans, with some predictable differences in fellowship, epithets and voting.  My family wore “I Like Ike” buttons and waved little flags, while his cursed Eisenhower and prayed for a change in administration we did not get for a decade.  But in other ways our people had, and still have, much in common.

           

     One of the most apparent to me is that we are removed from the land.  Several in my parents’ generation kept trying to stay on or get back to the land, to make farming their livelihood, but failed.  By the mid-1980’s, when I started working with family farmers as an advocate, I calculated that I was fourth generation failed family farmer, not counting some remote cousins in Minnesota still on the land.  As I listened to the farmers talk about who failed and why, and what was needed to keep more farmers from failing and falling into the unfortunate category of working stiffs, I often sensed the insensitivity of this group to the needs of my people. 

           

     Unfortunately it echoed an equal insensitivity I’d experienced on the broad lawns, plazas and classrooms at both UC Berkeley and Davis.  “I have been defending working people since I went back to school,” I told my sweetheart over gluten-free Cheerios, amazed to be counting forty years of this relatively thankless work.

           

     In the media’s bewilderment over Donald Trump’s and Bernie Sanders’ surprising popular support, I find a huge blindness to the workings of class.  It isn’t just that these folks are tired of the Establishment:  they’re tired of being invisible.  They’re tired of being denigrated for not having “risen” to some state of enlightenment that makes a three-car garage and a lawn service seem like necessities.  They’re tired of having their lives seen as unimportant.  They’re tired of having their realities unaddressed, of being taken advantage of and made worse by the ignorance of researchers and policy-makers alike.  They’re tired of having to share an ever-smaller pool of resources with an ever-larger number of people, and seeing no hope for change in that scenario.

           

     So, to my people this week I say “look twice.  Why would you trust a skizzilionairre to understand you any better than a Harvard grad?”  And to the rest of you, I say “Let us see if we can’t re-frame our understanding of the social divide these elections represent, and find a way to unite for the real good of the country.”  Because, you see, Easter did come again and there’s water in the reservoirs.

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Trudy Wischemann is a writer who sees the glass both half-full and half-empty.  You can send her your thoughts on the primaries c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Town and Country

    
     I have a small book written for children in my weird home library called Town and Country.  It was published in the early 1950’s as a social studies/human geography text designed to show the equivalence and interdependence of two kinds of life:  life in town and life in the country. 

           

     I love it for the time it represents and the sentiment; I keep it for the contrast with today.  We no longer have a sense of equivalence between those who make their living in offices and in barns; the sense that physical labor, which rural life has plenty of, is shameful reigns whether you live in town or country.  The word “rural” now connotes a level of poverty most people gladly shun, while “living in the country” connotes a level of wealth in which physical labor is shunned.  The sense of interdependence between town and country has been lost completely. 

           

     That point was driven home to me last week when I had the opportunity to drive to San Francisco and back in one day.  My friend Andrea Morris, who is an artist with a particularly moving exhibit on the role of art in recovery from the trauma of brain damage, needed to retrieve that exhibit where it had been on display at UC San Francisco, known for its medical teaching. 

           

     I drove to Merced, where she had once been the director of the Merced County Courthouse Museum in that beautiful old courthouse that looks like a capitol building lighted at night, then we streamed across the Valley at its widest, most expansive point through Los Banos and up the face of the dam at San Luis Reservoir.  Curving down through ravines and valleys on the reservoir’s west side, we dropped into Gilroy, then headed down the Santa Clara Valley to San Jose.  Taking 280 North, we climbed into the wooded hills of the Peninsula, skirting the heavily developed flatlands along the Bay, and arrived at the northwestern quarter of San Francisco relatively unscathed.

           

  “Oh, look at all the beautiful houses,” Andrea said, “I would love to live here.”  Her master’s degree in Art History was dedicated to the American Art Deco period, during which much of that city’s architecture was created.  We watched the people tread the sidewalks, jog the streets, bike in the lanes between cars and trolleys, and remembered a time in our lives when we might have been capable of keeping up with them.  We enjoyed the hospitality of the steward of the Alumni Faculty House where the exhibit was hung, and amicably put the images in their protective sleeves and boxes, then loaded them in my pickup just in time to vacate the parking space whose use expired at 4 p.m. for the commuter bus.

           

     As we retraced our route back down the peninsula, we came to have an appreciation for the beauty of our own valley, however.  “I wonder if anyone knows how many cars there are in this place,” Andrea mused, as we kept our place in the long winding lines of autos going both directions, often moving no faster than 10 mph.  For thirty, forty, fifty miles we followed the same cars, all trying to get out of the city, their occupational town, to arrive at their homes as close to the country as they can afford to get, if not the rural reality the country represents.  The road was still choked with cars past Gilroy, when we left the Santa Clara Valley to climb back over the hills toward our own.

           

     The night sky over State Route 152 was a bowl of stars, the land below dotted with a few lights of farmsteads and dairy barns, their light glimmering off the full canals and growing alfalfa fields, the barley nearing harvest.  The ancient, authentic Courthouse gleamed pure white as we pulled into her town; the waxing moon kept me company as I skimmed Hwy 99 heading  home to my own through orchards and fields, dotted by our small, workingclass towns born along the Southern Pacific tracks. 

           

     We both irrevocably knew we were home, despite the discrepancies.  But who now senses the interdependence of these two modes of living, much less the equivalency?

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Trudy Wischemann is a rural advocate who writes from her home in Lindsay.  You can send her your town and country thoughts c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.