“Seeing no one,” said our new mayor, Pam Kimball, last Tuesday night, “we’ll skip the rebuttal and move to the vote,” which came out 5:0, predictably approving the item.
It
was a public hearing on a tax-exempt bond issue that was barely discussed and
which I did not understand. No one spoke
in favor of, or against the idea, which caused Pam to lower her gavel. In fact, no one came to the meeting even to
ask a question about it. It was just
like old times.
There are other familiarities. It
was the last meeting of Rosaena Sanchez, who chose not to serve another
term. Despite being the elected Councilmember
to receive the highest number of popular votes in at least two decades (745 to
Pam’s 549, which made her third-place in 2012,) Ms. Sanchez had to acknowledge
herself, thanking the citizens for what she’d learned serving on the dais. Her sentiments were barely acknowledged by
the other council members, who appeared not sad to see her go.
With Rosaena’s departure, starting
Dec. 13th the Lindsay City
Council will be majority appointees:
people chosen by the Council itself to fill vacancies made by those who
left. In fact, the only two elected
Council members, Pam Kimball and Danny Salinas (who received only 385 votes in
2014), served multiple terms as appointees before actually facing an
election. We are back to having a
hand-picked Council, insiders all.
Another similarity with the
past: changing rules for public
participation. When Ed Murray was mayor,
you never knew whether you’d be able to speak, even during the public comment
period, or whether he’d decide that what you had to say was not pertinent to
the Council’s business and cut you off with the pound of his gavel. Asking a question during the meeting was
almost impossible. But when Ramona
Padilla became mayor, I began the long process of establishing rules for public
participation so that people could know what they could say when, and begin to
take their rightful place in these public meetings.
With Ramona’s departure and Pam’s elevation
to mayor, I knew we would have trouble keeping those rules in place. Having served as mayor-pro-tem under Ed’s
mayorship several times, Pam has no problem filling his shoes. In both November meetings she quickly
dispatched what little public participation could have occurred by me and my
attorney regarding the third attempt to build a Dollar General store on Art and
Leonor Serna’s lots near the Roundabout.
At the November 8th
meeting, Mayor Kimball tabled the agenda item rather than discuss it, without
even exploring what our concerns might have been. In the two weeks between that meeting and
last Tuesday’s, we received more of the supporting documents from the Dollar
General project, which only increased our concerns. We submitted these greater concerns
in writing before the Nov. 22nd meeting and prepared to discuss them
with Council and Staff.
Pam chose, however, to limit our
participation in person to either the public comment period or during the
agenda item. She then asked Assistant
City Planner Brian Spaunhurst to make the staff’s presentation of the project,
and she and the other council members smilingly followed along as he painstakingly
read each document from the Nov. 8th meeting, which took at least
half an hour. Staff presentations
normally take 5 minutes at most. When it
came our turn to speak, she limited each presentation to five minutes and asked
that we present only new information.
These changes in the rules were clearly devised to inhibit discussion of
the issues, not to flush them out.
We were there to discuss the
apparent problems with traffic safety and congestion thanks to the Roundabout,
which appear not to have been adequately considered in the project
evaluation. Yet not one council member
took the opportunity to investigate our concerns either during the meeting or
afterward. They instantly and easily
rubberstamped the Dollar General project, which elated the Sernas and their
realtor. No one was embarrassed.
“Nobody comes to the Lindsay City
Council meetings,” editor Reggie Ellis once shouted at me when I complained
about our town. Those of us who can comprehend the business of
city councils should be
embarrassed about that fact, especially after the economic antics of the
Townsend administration were discovered by a handful of concerned citizens who
stuck their necks out and started going to those meetings.
But the real culprits are the
so-called elected officials of this town, who have the responsibility of seeing
that the administration operates for the benefit of its residents, not for the
benefit of special interests, including individual property owners. Seeing no one, they think they know what this
community needs. But if they do not
operate the public meetings in such a way that public participation is
respected and encouraged, no one is exactly who they’re going to see. It’s on their heads.
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Trudy
Wischemann is a neophyte public participant who writes. You can send her your traffic concerns c/o
P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247. Thanks
to one of my favorite RN Market customers for reading this column and asking
what I think about our new mayor.
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