Napa No More?

Published in shorter form August 31, 2016 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

     I have a short-handled hammer sitting on my desk, with the receipt from Lindsay’s Napa Auto Parts underneath it.  It’s holding down more than the receipt:  it’s holding the memory of all the community life I have experienced in that place of business which, unfortunately, is about to disappear.  

     I bought it last week when I went to ask Jose Godoy if the rumor the store is closing was really true.  Jose has been ordering auto parts for me for 12 years, and I could tell from his face, even before he finished helping the customers in front of me, that it was.

     “So what can I help you with, Trudy?” he asked for the hundredth and maybe last time.  I had come wishing I could help him, though I felt helpless enough to cry.  For all the times they have befriended me, he and Joe Lopez (aka “Little Joe”), and their former boss, Bob Kisling, I am clearly in their debt.  “August 31^st is our last day,” he said.

     That part of town has become pretty lifeless in a retail sense, ever since the thrift store, Keys Upholstery and the body shop moved that once inhabited the brick buildings across the street.  Then the discount goods store to the south folded up its tent, and the Stamper Motors building burned, leaving a garish scene of charred devastation for months and months.  It’s not hard to see how business on that block could take a hit.  I sadly paid for my hammer, which will remind me of them every time I see it, and went home.

           

     The next night I found myself at the Lindsay City Council meeting doing battle with the plan to develop a Dollar General store on the southeast corner of the roundabout.  When they first proposed building it on Hermosa, it was a block east, on the southwest corner of Hermosa and Mirage.  They intended to demolish the former Central California Citrus Exchange Building, and they’d hired a residential building appraiser to write a report saying the building was in such horrible condition it couldn’t be saved, hoping to ward off any protest over the loss of this historic architectural resource.  By the grace of God we were able to make the folly of that plan clear, and eventually the building was purchased and restored in four short months.  Let us just say that the City staff was engaged in serious misrepresentation of the building’s true condition in the effort to get Dollar General located on that street.

           

     The plan then shifted then to the west side of that block, proposing to demolish the former Flying A station that had been Ed’s Auto for 3 decades until he sold the business to Miguel Chavez, who operated it as M & J’s Auto Repair.  We opposed that plan in defense of Miguel’s business and also for the inadequate planning assessment, including the obvious traffic problems of cars backed up into the already hard-to-navigate roundabout and 70-foot delivery trucks blocking traffic on Hermosa.  Just as we prepared to go to court on the matter, Dollar General pulled out.  But last week, just two+ years later, after driving Miguel to move, then dismantling the historic Flying A station and demolishing the old Pepper’s Market building, they brought the same plan back.

           

     Everyone I tell about this plan says “That’s not the right place for it.” Instinctively people know what it will do to traffic, but I think they also are responding to the decentering of downtown.  This plan is an effort to make Hermosa the new main street, which has the distinct potential to cause the former downtown brick buildings to be abandoned by businesses trying to survive, hoping to catch the new wave before they drown.  It’s a perfect example of 1960’s strip mall development that emptied downtowns across the country, a planning mistake we’ve been trying to overcome for at least 3, if not 5 decades.

           

     Tuesday night at the council meeting I proposed modifications to the new/old site plan that would make the parking lot entrance a little further from the roundabout, and other changes that could make the roundabout intersection more public-friendly.  But I also reminded them of another site that supposedly was considered when Dollar General first proposed building in our town.

           

     It’s that now-empty parcel of land across from Napa’s building, the old Stamper Motors site.   The fire that demolished that building occurred Thanksgiving weekend 2014, about 6 months after Dollar General pulled out of Lindsay, avoiding our lawsuit.  Although it took many months for the site to be cleared of rubble, it has been waiting patiently for redevelopment.  And after Tuesday’s council meeting, in the middle of a good night’s sleep, I realized that’s where the placement of a Dollar General store would do the most good for reviving the downtown.

           

     I took this fresh-born idea to Jose a day later and asked “Do you think having that store across the street would help your business here?”  You should have seen his face.  Hope filled the room.  It not only would bring new customers to an old part of town that could use them, it would also eliminate the roundabout traffic jams and delivery truck issues we identified Tuesday night because the site is near the oldest, easiest truck route in town.

           

     So add your prayer to God’s good grace if you feel the same.  It will take something like an act of Congress to get this project to relocate – but that’s what I thought when we were trying to keep them from demolishing the Citrus Exchange Building.  That gleaming little building reminds me to not lose hope.  Maybe we can keep Napa Auto Parts after all.

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Trudy Wischemann is a community researcher and rural advocate who writes.  Thanks to new councilman Brian Watson for his interest in building standards and revamping truck routes in town.  Send your community redesign ideas to P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

True Community

Published August 24, 2016 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

     “What is your vision for Lindsay?” asked the new editor of this paper, Paul Myers, last week when I met with him and former editor Reggie Ellis, now publisher.  It was a fair question, and one that made me think, especially as I prepared to make objections to the new (same old) Dollar General site plan review that was presented to the City Council for approval at the August 23rd meeting. 

       My first words in reply were, in fact, objections to the vision of Lindsay’s past and present administrations and the forces of urbanization.  Call me crazy, but I wish we could retain something of what it means to be rural:  a local economy generated by and serving those who live here, with authentic social and political structures that encourage and teach the newcomers to this country how to be members of this place while embracing and serving those who entered long ago.  I wish we could re-envision the value of the lives of those who make their livings growing and harvesting the fruits of this land, and celebrate those things in our cultural events.   I wish we could respect the limitations of this semi-desert land we inhabit and not just mine its groundwater and the government programs offered in the spirit of equality. 

       Despite the odds, what I wish we could become is true community, with an emphasis on the “true.”  Falsehood is one of the things we have been fighting since the triple-stacked loans were discovered around 2009, those loans intended to get 50 or more low-income buyers into homes of their own that went instead to 13 city employees.  What stunned us most were the lies the city staff had told themselves justifying the stacking, staff who still hold paid positions there now.  I can’t even remember the term they used for this “creative” packaging, the self-deception was that appalling.  

       Lest you think something’s changed, let me dump a few dates on you.  On July 12, Councilman Mecum resigned.  On July 18, the application for the Dollar General site plan review was signed by property owners Serna and Llewallyn, complete with unsigned engineered drawings and maps and a categorical exemption from the CEQA process which addresses none of the concerns we raised in our lawsuit two years ago.  This past Friday, when I walked into the city clerk’s office to find out the status of the new Dollar General plan, Brian Spaunhurst, the planning assistant working under Bill Zigler, was preparing the document for this week’s council agenda.  Two years ago, after the developer pulled out of that project, we had requested that we be informed if that project was resumed, a request which obviously had been ignored. 

       Let me say that I’m not opposed to having Dollar General in town, except for the fact that the profits will be siphoned off to DG headquarters, there will be few employees with non-existent benefits, and their building designs are straight out of the 1960’s, complete with no windows.  I’m also a little concerned that it will drive its main competitor out of town, which in my mind would be Rite Aid, and that would leave us with no pharmacy. 

       I am opposed to having Dollar General at this site.  Located on the southeast corner of the roundabout, the blank backside of the building will be turned toward Hermosa, a major thoroughfare.  Located there, the increased traffic is a potential threat to foot traffic and other drivers, including the Dollar General delivery trucks, which will be making left-hand turns across Hermosa where cars are just exiting the roundabout.  I am also opposed to the way the CEQA process, which in a true community would allow us to consider these factors publicly, is being violated.  But Bill Zigler wants it there.  He’s worked hard to make this happen, and that’s what he’s going to get come hell or high water. 

       “In true community,” wrote Parker J. Palmer, that Quaker sage on community and education, “we will not choose our companions, for our choices are so often limited by self-serving motives….Community will teach us that our grip on truth is fragile and incomplete, that we need many ears to hear the fullness of God’s word for our lives.”   

       In true community, it matters what other people think, especially those who live there.  Someone hired to manage the interests of that community should work to reconcile the conflicting interests of its members, not override them – especially someone who does not live there and thus does not personally bear the consequences of his actions.  So call me crazy, but I’ll keep working for true community, thank you, despite the odds.

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Trudy Wischemann is a rural community researcher who writes.    You can send your stories of community bravery and betrayal to her c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.  Thanks to Nancy and David Vega for their friendship and feedback.

Square Minus-One

Published August 17, 2016 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

     It was a busy week in Lake Woebehere, my adopted home town.  The Lindsay City Council filled the vacancy made by Steven Mecum’s resignation with Brian Watson, assuring Councilmembers Kimball and Salinas that whatever they and the city staff want, they will have.  

     The Council also ratified the mistake they made when they appointed Bill Zigler to fill the city manager vacancy when Rich Wilkinson flew the coop with severance pay Pam Kimball arranged back when they used him to fill the vacancy Scot Townsend made when he flew the coop.  Bill Zigler, who once filled the position of Lindsay’s city planner, having no training or experience in planning, is now our permanent city manager with no training or experience except that which he’s received as interim, not to mention lacking the personal integrity required to make government transparency possible.

     So I guess you could say we’re back to square one, although I don’t know what date I’d put on that square.  The dreamy, smoke-and- mirror days of Scot Townsend’s regime are gone, with the hope of Lindsay’s revival stuck in the mud of reality his plans left us.  Much of the scheme remains, however, and will need to be watched if we’re not to be plunged further backward. 

     The next four months before the election will be interesting, if for no other reason than to watch Brian Watson recuse himself.  Mr. Watson lives in the house Jim Hunter bought from Signa Ellerding, the once-beautiful property on Parkside just north of the park and community center that Hunter subdivided to build three new houses which miraculously became homes to some of the city’s new employees the Townsend administration flew in from Utah to man the new McDermont facility.  Jim Hunter also obtained the land across from that house and had planned to build a large,upscale subdivision to fill the space between the redeveloped park, the Wellness Center and the new elementary school.  That subdivision, had it been completed by Mr. Hunter, at least would have provided the curbs and sidewalks to the elementary school the city eventually had to provide at taxpayer expense after 3 years of kids walking in mud.  

     Before he was appointed to Mecum’s seat, Brian Watson suggested to the Council that he had a solution to a problem of which the Council might not be aware:  the fact that few teachers in the Lindsay Unified School District actually live in our town.   Actually, they’d heard it before.  When Jim Hunter lived in town, it was proposed that the reason for this non-resident teaching cadre was the lack of decent housing for them to purchase, and that providing more decent housing would return us to our former glory days when most teachers lived in town.  I don’t know if anyone has asked the teachers why they prefer to live elsewhere; in my view, the Q:A was entirely self-serving.  But that was the plan.

     Mr. Hunter was also involved in building the townhouses just south of the new Wellness Center on former hospital district land which had to be converted to Section 8 housing which the city had to turn over to the county because Lindsay was incapable of operating it within the law.  In fact, they barely finished building it.  I mention this simply because it’s hard to remember everything that went on during that whirlwind time.

      In the meantime, nothing has been done to preserve the historic quality or economic viability of Lindsay’s downtown and much has been done to erode it.  The plan to put a Dollar General store on the southeast corner of the roundabout has returned, same developer, same beneficiaries, same lack of traffic or economic analysis to determine whether this site or business is appropriate.  That might sound like a boon to you, but that location is unlikely to stimulate customers to venture two blocks south to the main street where a handful of businesses have been gallantly trying to keep us anchored to that stretch.   

     And in the meantime, what once was Kisling’s Auto Parts and is now Napa, the last locally-owned auto parts store downtown, is going out of business.  When I went to commiserate, the young man at the counter said “It’s sad, really sad.  But Lindsay is just drying up.”  Four years ago, had the City considered my request to change the location of the proposed Dollar General store to a more central location, such as the Stamper Motors site that is now infinitely available having had the ancient brick building demolished by a Thanksgiving weekend fire in 2014, perhaps the increased business traffic could have saved Napa.  But that’s water under the bridge.  By the way, have you heard that Hanford plans to build a McDermont-like facility?  That should be fun, competing for events with a city that size.

     So that’s the news from Lake Woebehere, where the residents need to get stronger and more vigilant in monitoring city hall if we want any of our authentic community to remain.  Meet me in the council chambers at 6 p.m. on the 2^nd and 4^th Tuesdays of the month.  Maybe we can work our way back up to Square One if we try.

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Trudy Wischemann is a rural advocate who writes.  Deep thanks to Colleen Childers all these years for her support and her love of Pepper’s Market, now MIA.  Send your thoughts c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

           

Re-Membering

Published August 10, 2016 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     Thirty years ago, when I first moved to Long Island, N.Y., someone gave me baffling directions to a place in the country:  “Turn left at the fork right there where the peach farm used to be.”  Although I was in love with eastern Long Island’s rural quality, the old-timer who was trying to help clearly had experienced some loss of beloved landscape.  When he approached that fork in the road, he could still see the missing peach farm that was now invisible, at least to me.  

           

     I had a similar experience when I moved to Lindsay 23 years ago.  What my newcomer eyes saw was a small town still vibrating from a once vibrant small-farm economy, despite the recent loss of Lindsay Olive to the rough winds of time and the overplanting of olives on the west side.  But long-time residents told me of the losses they saw every day, and chastised me for appreciating that which now gave them pain.  “You should have seen it before,” they said, most of them unclear as to what had caused the decline.           

     The town’s downward slide continued, and now my eyes see what’s missing.  My heart has dull aches from lost landscapes and places of business where the proprietor knew my name as well as how long it had been since I’d had my lawnmower tuned up or my distributer replaced.  I miss the farms where I knew who was driving the tractor.  Like my former neighbors before me, I now find myself skirting the missing places where the memories are best, and nod quietly to those brave souls who have replaced the local entrepreneurs who took off or up and died.

           

     I don’t think this fact of life is recognized by planners and community developers, much less new business owners:  how the elimination of familiar sights and sounds can dispossess the members of a community from their attachment to a place.  But I hadn’t recognized how I’ve done it to myself, too, until I had breakfast at Lindsay’s Country Waffles last week.

           

      It used to be the Olive Tree Restaurant, once connected to the Olive Tree Inn, which is now a Super 8.  The old names doffed their hats to the source of half of Lindsay’s economy and its total claim to fame; in identifying with their location, those business names contributed to the town’s sense of place.  Not much else has changed, actually, besides the color schemes and the missing horde of farmers and businessmen who used to come for their noontime meal and jamb the reservation list during the Farm Show.  The food is just as good and some of the waitresses are still there, the ones who know how long it’s been since you ordered french fries and wonder why you didn’t make it in last Tuesday.  The ones who call you by name even after a long absence.

           

     It felt good to be home.  It felt good to slash the yolks of my over-easy eggs and let them run over the perfect hash browns.  It was delightful to slurp chopped melon from the fruit cup and watch my partner drizzle syrup over his lofty pancakes.  It was pure heaven to talk over breakfast while the coffee mugs were refilled repeatedly until we could hold no more.  And it was delicious to remember all the other times I’d sat in that booth with friends both near and from far away, the life shared in that restaurant for more than two decades.  It gave me back my sense of membership in the community.           

    

     Change isn’t easy:  dealing with it is harder than we think.  Remembering the past is important: it can make us aware of how we got here and keep us apprised of what is possible in the future.  But if we don’t watch it, remembering can cause us to dismember ourselves from the present and from our place in it.  If we’re not going to relinquish our place in time, we have to cope with change and reweave the threads of community on a daily basis.

           

     Thank you to Luanna, Gladys and Diane for continuing to set the food before us, and to those newcomers who help make it happen.  Thank you to the regulars who still eat there and keep that restaurant open.  Thanks for the memories, both past and future, as well as the food and sense of community.  And thank you, Lindsay, for helping me learn these facts of community life.

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Trudy Wischemann is a once-migrant community researcher who writes.  Thanks also to Ben Montijo for remembering what I wrote two weeks ago and telling me about it.  You can send me your stories of re-membering c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

 

A Blind Eye

Published August 3, 2016 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     Driving to work last week, I heard a snippet of Michele Obama’s DNC speech replayed on Valley Public Radio.  One sentence caught the attention of liberals and conservatives alike. 
     
     Referring to the White House, she said, “Every morning I wake up in a house that was built by slaves.” Most of us didn’t know that small but incredibly relevant fact, but when she spoke it, a more complex version of history began to emerge.  Huh. Really?  Wow….
 
     A second layer of wonder sat quietly below the first one:  that this woman with slave ancestors could hold those facts together in her mind and not flinch.  That she and her half-Black husband (whose Kenyan ancestors were not part of our American slave history but who has been treated by some as if he still wore leg chains,) have risen to the position of highest responsibility in the world.

           

     What I realized after hearing her utter that sentence is that she has not turned a blind eye to the complexity of her world:  she knowingly inhabits a culture and a social position dependent on the backs of other people who, in reality, have little opportunity for recognition of their contributions or to enjoy the proper fruits.  Despite the complexity, she does not blink.

           

     The same could be said about Barack’s Kansas-born Anglo mother, Ann Dunham:  she couldn’t turn a blind eye to the racism of mainland America, or even that found in polyglot Hawaii.  Barack’s mother, who loved his father and fought for her son, worked for the equitable development of rural people in foreign places until she died of untended health problems.  If we’d had Obamacare then, she might have lived to see this miracle she partly created.  No wonder our current President could not turn a blind eye on health care reform: he didn’t have one.

           

     Last week I also found a great story about how a blind eye gains its sight.  I was working to edit passages from Rick Wartzman’s incredible book about the burning of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath for my volume on Agriculture and the Common Good.  In 1939 the Associated Farmers, claiming the book was lewd, even obscene (hence the title of Wartzman’s book, Obscene in the Extreme) convinced the Kern County Board of Supervisors to pass a resolution banning the book, then staged its burning at the hands of an Okie farmworker.  The book’s real violation was not so much offensive language, however, as was its unveiling of an ungodly fact of Valley life.  It called our blind eyes on the carpet.

           

     Steinbeck started Grapes with his eyes partly shielded, hoping to retain his objectivity like he did in In Dubious Battle, a book inspired by the Cotton Strike of 1933.  He’d been shown the differences in the Dust Bowl refugees’ living conditions between ditch-bank Hoovervilles and the government labor camps, an important part of the eventual story.  His notes were copious, his files were thick; the story threatened to overwhelm him with its magnitude.  He couldn’t see how to tell the story rightly – until the rains came.

           

     In the early months of 1938, the Kings and Kaweah Rivers overflowed their banks, flooding the low places where workers lived.  He told a friend that he couldn’t just write about it, he had to do something.  He drove to Visalia and joined a small group of people rescuing families from flooded tents and cardboard shacks, bringing food and dry clothing, working sopping wet day and night without food himself to help those who were much hungrier and more desperately tired than he was.  It was that experience that ripped any remaining film of “objectivity” from his eyes and untethered his pen.  The heavy manuscript of The Grapes of Wrath went to the publisher before the year was over.

           

     “Turning a blind eye” on difficult problems is something we all do, at least temporarily.  Nationally, many of us are doing it with the facts undermining Donald Trump’s claim to fame: his bankruptcies, labor abuses, his cut-and-run approach to financial obligations, his refusal to face the community impacts of his personal business practices.  Locally, we cheer those who proclaim they can fix our water shortage by building more reservoirs, turning a blind eye to the lack of rainfall to fill them, the evidence for climate change and the lousy cost-benefit ratios.

           

     But I think we need to wake up to the reality behind the conflicting claims and simple solutions.  We need to take a good hard look at the facts nationwide and in our own region, before we find ourselves sopping wet, cold and hungry, knee-deep in the mud of truth. 

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Trudy Wischemann is a writer whose pen often champs at the bit.  You can send her your blindness confessions c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Black Sheep

Published July 27, 2016 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     “The poor will always be with us,” Jesus is said to have said, a statement of fact that has stuck in our communal minds much longer than some of his more important sayings (“Fear not,” for example.)  About six months ago I realized that the reason the poor will always be with us is because the greedy, despotic rich will always be with us, snagging the poor’s share of the earth’s resources for themselves in an unholy accumulation.  


     There’s no getting rid of them, the greedy, despotic rich.  Remove the one at the top and a new one will rise to the surface, always.  It’s in our human nature, unfortunately.  We create the poor with our hungers, keep them hungry with our satisfied wants.  No way around it, folks:  the poor will always be with us.

     The same can be said of black sheep:  we make them.  In epochs where tolerance holds little sway, we make more of them from better material, but always we make them.  We do it to maintain a sense of law and order, a necessity of the social contract.  When selfish actions threaten the community as a whole, we shove the actors to the margins, call them a few names (like “black sheep,”) marking them for further punishment down the line. The rest of the sheep, mostly white, keep to their nibbling close to the fold. 

     But when the social contract becomes contorted to give perks to a few at the cost of the many, the black sheep we make become that contract’s biggest threat.  Dissent becomes the biggest offense, punishable by (im)moral law.  Speaking your mind can get you excoriated, even excommunicated.  Look at Ted Cruz:  he’s a black sheep now for sure.


     Speaking your mind is difficult almost any time, but especially when it differs from the powers that be.  It only becomes dangerous, however, when those powers are vulnerable and what you’re saying threatens to cause them some loss.  

           

     This is the case of former Lindsay City Councilman Steven Mecum.  Last week’s front-page article on his resignation in this paper built a one-sided case for his black-sheepness, using opinions from people whose ideas he’d opposed.  It cited the lawsuit he filed and won against the City before being elected to the council as if it was a liability rather than the stroke for government accountability and transparency that it was.  It hypothesized that his frequent absences were his reason for quitting without counting the absences of the other councilmembers who stayed; it failed to consider that a council member could have a perfect attendance record without accomplishing a thing.

           

     The last third of the article missed the boat entirely.  After correctly identifying Mecum’s goal of “reigning in administrative power at City Hall,” it nailed that effort to the cross of Rich Wilkinson’s resignation and the subsequent effort by the administration’s supporters to get the Tulare Grand Jury to investigate (and hopefully remove) three of the five sitting council members including Mecum.  I called that effort “fraudulent” in last week’s column; “nefarious” and “vendetta” would also apply, as would “shameful.”

     This is what happens in epochs when tolerance does not hold sway, where social contracts have become contorted to serve only a few, and where that contortion makes those served incredibly vulnerable to the simple act of dissent.  We make black sheep out of our best material, and then cower, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

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Trudy Wischemann is a fearful person who frequently dissents anyway.  You can send her your dissenting views c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Not Missing Inaction

Published July 20, 2016 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

            I got a call from my favorite Lindsay City Councilman last week, informing me of his decision to resign.  I was sad to hear it, since now there will be no reliable voice of dissent, no one to really question the staff’s proposals or to investigate the missing information when the pieces don’t add up.  

            But I couldn’t blame him for taking his name off the roster of those responsible for our city’s future.  I finally let myself off that hook, too, the inactivity of the majority of the Council driving me mad.  I don’t miss it, and neither will he.  His family will benefit from his reduced frustration, not to mention the reduced vulnerability.  They’ve all paid the price of his involvement in multiple ways.

            But it wasn’t just frustration that drove both of us away.  It was the sense that our opposition to the conventional way of doing things was exacerbating the problem, making the staff and other council members more intransigent, not less.  It was the sense that even the most rational reasons for questioning a proposal, say, or offering another perspective on a problem would, if it came from our mouths, make the others flare into an automatically negative response.  It was sense that things got worse instead of better from our participation.

            With no hope of being heard, much less having one’s position considered and added to the solution, at some point self-preservation recommends withdrawing from the situation.  I found myself there, at least for the time being, and am glad for the release of my friend from his more strenuous trial.  I still think city hall can be changed (and that this one should be,) but that would take the emergence of a set of conditions that have not yet ripened.

            First of all, the members of the public would need to become aware of how the past and current administrations have sold them down the river.  It wouldn’t take everybody, just a few with sympathy for the range of incomes and cultural conditions of our residents, and who are also able to communicate with us.  It would take one or two people who are familiar with the ways other communities with our “changing demographics” are managing the transition from middle-class farm town to a community of people with much higher mobility and lower material wealth, with greater needs for acculturation and less native-born skills at citizenship.

            Second, it would take someone who could mobilize those people whose interests are not currently being considered, and get them talking to the council members before the meetings and then showing up for a few.  It seems to me that the inactivity of the current Lindsay City Council members is primarily a problem of being constantly confronted by those people who stand to gain from the city administration’s plans and projects, while those who stand to be hurt remain invisible.  The people behind last year’s fraudulent effort to bring the Grand Jury down on the heads of the three councilmembers who stood up to the administration appeared frequently in the council meetings, pressing their opinions and reputations, while the people whose interests the three members were defending stayed home. 

            When I worked at the market I heard many complaints from residents of our town.  Always I would encourage them to contact a council member and to attend a few meetings, but few people ever took me up on the invitation.  Personally, I’m not missing the inaction of my neighbors now, either.  When the time is ripe….

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Trudy Wischemann is a rural advocate who needs to get some other writing done.  You can send your ideas to her c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.