Conspiracy Theory

Published June 3, 2015 in slightly edited form in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


    Off work late, I walked in to last Tuesday’s Lindsay City Council meeting and did not find an empty seat.  I was impressed until I realized it was the same old crowd:  friends and family of city staff and Councilmen Kimball and Salinas who are rallied whenever there is an apparent threat to the status quo.

    

    I missed the fireworks, but they’d come to berate the three council members, including Mayor Padilla, for their parts in the alleged conspiracy against Chief Wilkinson.  Some demanded their resignations.  The mayor handled the challenges with grace and dignity, despite the hostility of some of the comments.

    
     Where the protestors got the information to support their positions is worth asking.  I doubt that it was from reading the deposition, where the so-called conspiracy was said to have been discovered. Frankly, I doubt if many even read the news articles reporting this issue, which show some of the complexity involved.  I think most people got their opinions straight from the horse’s mouth. 
    
     If they’d read the deposition, they might have been singing a different tune.  I finally got my hands on a copy.  There are a few sentences toward the end that could lead a sane person to wonder if there might have been some cooperative effort on the part of the three.  But the only way you could find a conspiracy, in my never very humble opinion, is if you were hunting for it. 
    
     The most important parts of the deposition have been left uncovered.  The picture of the working environment under Wilkinson that emerges is one where verbal abuse reigns, where there is no consistency in personnel treatment, where rules are broken or not followed and the penalties are paid by the employees while the management goes scot-free.  This may be the rule rather than the exception in business, but in government we have rules against this.  When those rules are broken, the governing body has a responsibility to respond.
    
     Bryan Clower’s complaint may be one of the few formal ones filed against Wilkinson and his department, but informal complaints have flown around town since before he was appointed city manager.  I hear them all the time, and sometimes they give me nightmares.  Then there are actual victims:  one man’s missing finger and debilitating limp; another’s confiscated evidence; another’s 20+ months in court defending against a false charge; recently, a young man’s unexplained death in an LPD squad car, not to mention the unarmed girl shot dead in her bathroom.  I’m barely scratching the surface.
    
     And then there’s Councilman Mecum’s unwarranted arrest last year for “felony embezzlement,” a highly-trumped-up charge over a pink slip.  “This is the third time they’ve tried to get rid of me,” he said Tuesday night, quite a record for someone who’s only half-way through his third year on the council.
    
     Here’s my theory:  if there’s any conspiracy in Lindsay, it’s against the three council members who have been charged with wrongdoing in order to inhibit or stop their attempts to do right.  “Right” is changing the status quo from a city that squanders its resources and runs in the red to a community where ordinary people can look forward to a decent, if quiet, future.  In  my opinion, Wilkinson is a wolf in sheep’s clothing crying “Wolf!” and pointing to the sheep dogs, hoping to grab his $216,000 prize for “serving” the community and head for the Ozark hills.
    
     I think we need to shepherd these Council members who are taking our future seriously. Come support them in defense of our flock.   Help fill the seats at the next meeting, Tuesday June 9^th at 6:00 pm.
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Trudy Wischemann is a close reader who writes.  You can send her your public safety nightmares c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Fooled

Published in edited form April 15, 2015 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     I’m going to blame it on the orange blossoms.  I got fooled into thinking the Lindsay city manager, Rich Wilkinson, had a change of heart or at least saw the handwriting on the wall about his role in stripping the public of their rights to participate in our city council meetings.  Two weeks ago, when I wrote optimistically about the restoration of those rights, I must have been high on blossom-perfumed air.
    
     For three years I have been recommending that the language he removed regarding public participation be restored to the agenda packet cover sheet.  There was one place on the agenda itself where three words needed to be reinstated, but the major sentences he obliterated were found on the cover sheet, which says across the top “Welcome to your Lindsay City Council Meeting,” followed by this statement: 
     "Whether you are attending this meeting because of general interest or because an item of special interest to you is to be reviewed, your presence is an important means of helping ensure and informed public and responsible Municipal Government."

    

     The cover sheet goes on to describe the city council and its role, the city manager’s job, the timing of council meetings and types of actions that occur, the processes for making suggestions, inquiries and complaints to city staff as well as the rules for citizen participation in meetings.  Except for the website, it is the only place where the city communicates to the residents their rightful place and responsibilities in maintaining the community.

     When I was called down to Rich’s office, as if I were the offending party, I had noticed that the purpose of the meeting was called “the agenda.”  I assumed, wrongly, that this was just shorthand for the project of restoring our rights.  But after his vacation, when he finally communicated some of the language he proposed in response to my complaint, it became clear that not only was he not restoring language to the cover sheet, he was doing away with the cover sheet altogether.

     Naturally, I asked why.  “No other cities have a cover sheet,” replied the faithful Maria Knutson, assistant to the city manager.  I called the mayor, who did not find much merit in that reason, either.  I am still waiting for a resolution to this question.

     Are you tired enough of all this?  It seems so small on the surface, like a gnat on the windshield.  But this unaccountability, this refusal to bear responsibility to the people who pay his enormous salary, who rely on him to maintain a law-abiding staff as well as the entire department of public safety, is the tip of a big and dangerous iceberg.

     Friday the Lindsay police arrested a young man, 24, in some kind of fracas, location not identified. In the squad car, on the way to his booking, he died.  The sheriff’s department will conduct an investigation, but who are they going to ask?  That young man cannot speak for himself.  He cannot say he should have had an ambulance instead of a squad car; his family cannot know where or when a mistake was made.  And at this moment at least, the only opportunity anyone has to voice their concerns to our elected officials in public is three minutes during the public comment period, during which no one, council or staff, has to answer your questions.

     Don’t be fooled.  Help your city council members establish the need for accountability from our city manager/chief of public safety.  We will not have real public safety until we do.

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Trudy Wischemann is a wordworking realist who writes.  You can send her your stories of public endangerment c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

 

 

If I Had A Hammer

Published in edited form May 14, 2014 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette 

If I had a hammer

I'd hammer in the morning

I'd hammer in the evening

All over this land

I'd hammer out danger

I'd hammer out a warning

I'd hammer out love between

My brothers and my sisters

All over this land. 

            When I told my mother I was going to write a piece under this title, I heard her suck in her breath over the phone.  Pausing, she said cautiously “They might think...” 

            Both of my parents were raised in small towns and vowed after they left they’d never go back.  Born in different towns on different sides of the tracks, they both were still massively concerned with what people might think.  To find freedom from that, they made our homes in unincorporated settlements, rural fringes, and subdivisions of larger towns.  But they never got free of their fears about the opinions of other people.  Early childhood learning, I think. 

            I actually do have a hammer, in fact, three claw hammers (tack, medium and large) and a woman-sized sledge, if I knew where it was.  I know how to use them for hanging pictures and outside Christmas lights, re-nailing a board coming loose or pounding a stake into the ground.  With my brother’s fiberglass-handled carpenter’s hammer, I can pry nails out of boards, straighten them on a rock, and nail things back together with the best of them.  My father’s a carpenter: more early childhood learning, learning by doing. 

            His father was a blacksmith, and he hammered metal into beautiful wrought iron fences and gates; he also repaired plowshares and other farm equipment.  Both men saw their hammers as extensions of their creative, productive, useful selves.  However, both men were quick to pound their opinions down the throats of other people, so I know the hammer as both useful and dangerous.  Dad stopped throwing his hammer after it went through a stack of windows he’d saved and he had to eat a piece of humble pie.  He's only recently stopped hurling his words. 

            This beautiful song from the early folk movement started pounding through my head when I read the letter to the editor authored by Councilmembers Pam Kimball and Danny Salinas several weeks ago.  It wasn’t what the letter said about me that was so disturbing: it was their attack on the truth.  They’re not only in denial about the possibility of wrongdoing in the Lindsay PD's arrest of Councilman Mecum, but in denial about their own wrongdoing in making Rich Wilkinson joint City Manager and Director of Public Safety under a contract irresponsibly difficult and expensive to break.  They’re in denial about the staff’s role in generating the lawsuit we filed and their own role in running up their attorney's fees defending against it.  They’re in denial about their role in excluding the public from real participation in city council meetings, the detrimental CalTrans re-realignment of Highway 65, the non-promotion of voluntary water conservation measures in this city, and other leadership challenges too numerous to mention. 

          The song, written by Lee Hays and Pete Seeger, has been recorded by hundreds of people and sung at thousands of gatherings over the last 60 years.  I hear Peter Paul & Mary’s version in my head now as I type; according to Wikipedia, singing the Spanish version may have gotten Chilean activist Victor Lara assassinated after the military coup of Salvador Allende in 1973.  It's a song for The Struggle, no matter what country or miniscule jurisdiction you find yourself called to enter it.  Sing the last verse with me in your head. 

Well I’ve got a hammer and I’ve got a bell;

I’ve got a song to sing all over this land.

It’s the hammer of justice, it’s the bell of freedom

It’s the song about the love between my brothers and my sisters

All over this land. 

          Gather up your hammers, bells and songs, friends - we have work to do.

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Trudy Wischemann is an old folky who writes.  You can send your songs of love and freedom (not to mention justice) c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.