To be published Oct. 31, 2018 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette
Still working on your voting choices
for this election? I am, though the
window for sending in my ballot is slipping shut. The statewide propositions and regional
candidates have the advantage of advertising to “help” us decide, but the local
issues and candidates have little money to broadcast a preference. Local counts, though, big time.
There is only one race where I feel
I have any opinion to offer that might be of worth: the Lindsay City Council race, where two
incumbents’ seats are being challenged.
This is what I think it comes down to:
if you like what the city has accomplished so far, vote to keep the two
men in their seats. If, like me, you are
unhappy with what the city is doing, particularly the way it does not respond
to its residents, you might want to consider replacing those two men with the
two women who are asking for the chance to try their hands (again, in Rosaena
Sanchez’s case, which in my mind makes her braver than you could know if you
had not attended council meetings during the few years she served.)
The choices the Lindsay City Council
has made over the past decade and a half may have seemed good in the beginning,
but with the passage of time we’ve got results to evaluate. This weekend I drove downtown at night past
El Patio restaurant, dark again. We put
hundreds of thousands of dollars toward its renovation. Bad decision.
We put more than hundreds of thousands of dollars to turn an old lemon
packinghouse into a recreation center designed lure people from all over the
state. Bad decision. We built a swimming pool for Olympic-level
meets that fell a couple feet short of qualifying. Big mistake.
I could go on. And those are from
the past administration, so to speak, but the incumbents were overseeing those
decisions.
In recent times, we do no
better. We tore up our historic golf
course to add another 5 soccer fields to our docket, soccer fields that were
supposed to be completed at the end of June.
They still are not ready. At the
moment we are building a roundabout at the corner of an elementary school and
the entrance to our major shopping center on the major thoroughfare into downtown,
despite the submission of a petition against the plan signed by 815 Lindsay residents,
many of whom live near the project. A
Council that was truly interested in the city’s future would have insisted
those citizens’ concerns be heard and addressed, if only in the interest of increasing
citizen participation. They did not.
If you’re still reading this column
after all these years of conflict with Lindsay’s idea of progress, I’m
impressed. I’m tired of writing about
it, tired of seeing no real progress either in the planning or the inclusion of
the public’s real interest in those plans.
Our ballots are one of the places where we can express ourselves about
the future of our town, and here’s the good thing: they’re private. We don’t have to experience being ignored
there. Vote.
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Trudy
Wischemann is an advocate for the public interest who writes. You can send your thoughts on progress to her
c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a
comment below.