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 9th 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.
