Flickers of Hope....

Hope comes to me in little flickers of conversation.
“I hate what they’re doing to the park, cutting down the trees,” a customer said Sunday night.  “I live two blocks away,” said another, “and my kids ride their bikes.  I don’t want traffic through there.”  So I said “Come to the meeting Tuesday night, March 14.  Tell them what you think.”
Thursday someone had alerted me they’d started cutting the trees around the Community Center.  We’d already lost the big trees that once shaded the parking side of the pool.  I’d photographed trees growing in the path of the road construction that Thursday became sawdust.  But Thursday night, two trees were still standing, and Friday morning I went to bat for them.
They’re the trees you see driving west on Sierra View toward Parkside.  They’re landmarks, cornerstones signaling the end of pavement and the beginning of turf.  They mark the entry to nature and softness, shade and refreshment.  One is a tall, graceful evergreen, the other deciduous with spiky seed balls.  I don’t know their names, just their meaning.
So I posted signs saying those trees belong to us, and that anyone harming them will be added to the lawsuit pending.  
Someone tore down the signs later that morning, at least the ones facing Parkside.  I’d posted signs on both sides of the trees, however, and they left the ones facing the bulldozers, a flicker of recognition.  Friday night those trees were still standing.  Monday morning I put up new signs facing Parkside and added two more to the old pool.   
Built in 1948, that pool is a historic resource that was not considered in the CEQA documents for the Wellness Center and park renovation.  This pool, which produced an Olympic swimmer and thousands of ordinary ones, is still needed.  This year the city doubled the use rates for the Lindsay Skimmers, which is pricing them out of the new pool contrary to the regulations in the grant contract for the park.  Most farmworker families can’t afford Wellness Center memberships or the day-use fees for the new pool.  I think restoring the old pool would be a better use of Hospital District money than building a road that reduces our city park to a shadow of its old self.
Walking through the park early Monday morning, I heard a familiar drumming, then a bird call I recognized.  It was a flicker, a member of the woodpecker family, at the top of the dead sycamore near Parkside’s curve.  Walking toward the golf clubhouse, I saw two more in a bare tree.  Then I heard the drumming again, this time metallic:  a flicker was sitting on top of a street light, hammering valiantly on its metal surface.
It made me laugh.  Lately I’ve felt going to city council meetings was just that futile and as hard on my head.  The truth is, though, that it’s helped me feel more at home and not so helpless, and has joined me to others who feel (often silently) like I do.  
So let us be flickers of hope, and keep drumming until we get the city we need.  Come to the council meeting Tuesday at 6 and let your thoughts be known.

A Moment of Silence....

A small crack of light entered the public participation process at the Feb. 14 Lindsay City Council meeting. The opening came during a moment of silence when business as usual stopped, and a new way began.
The pry bar was the Brown Act, California’s open meeting law first enacted in 1953. I didn’t know anything about it when I started attending Lindsay’s meetings, I just sensed that our process discouraged and even prevented real public input.
Listening to Reggie Ellis talk about the differences between Exeter and Lindsay’s council meetings over the past two years, I began wanting to know the cause. When Randy Groom, Exeter’s city manager, forwarded a booklet on the Brown Act to Reggie, who forwarded it to me, I learned the answer. They follow the Brown Act. We don’t.
It took an outside attorney to bring the meaning of that message home to our council two weeks ago. Richard Harriman, an environmental attorney who has engaged in citizen-led land use battles throughout the valley for 30 years, was present to deliver our “cure & correct” letter regarding the improper vote on the road contract Jan. 30. I had asked to have three items removed from the consent agenda during the public comment period, particularly the minutes of the two meetings where that vote had occurred, which were skewed to make the contract approval look valid.
The moment of silence came when the mayor read the items on the consent agenda and then asked the council for the motion to approve. They froze. Not one could either make the motion or remove the items I’d asked for. The mayor looked to their attorney, who advised that it’s the council’s discretion. The mayor began to take the vote without it being moved and seconded. Mr. Harriman objected, pointing out that the city’s own agenda packet clearly states a citizen may ask for this small thing. Their attorney admitted he had a point, mentioning that they could change that language later if they want. But the items were removed. The minutes were corrected.  
The mayor’s response to our cure & correct letter reported in Thursday’s Recorder (2/16) suggests that he did not hear the law’s message:  that there are governmental procedures you have to follow in California. But I think the other three did.  
So let us have a moment of silence for the old ways, the good old days when we trusted our public officials to conduct our business in our interest and could carry on without a care. And then let’s move on to the future promised by our legislators sixty years ago, who built laws to protect our rights when our officials fail. 
“Open & Public IV: A Guide to the Ralph M. Brown Act,” published by the League of California  Cities (2000, 2007) is beautifully illustrated with photos of people participating in the process of government as citizens, administrators, elected officials, even (yes) lawyers. Copies can be obtained online through CityBooks at www.cacities.org/store.

Requiem for a Recall.....

Monday night at the market, after the deadline for filing the recall petitions had passed, a woman leaned close to ask what I’d heard. Did we make it?

She’s beautiful, one of the many I’ve come to know since we tightened our belts and bootstrapped ourselves to take back democracy in Lindsay.  She spoke at the last council meeting for the first time in her life on how the neglect of our sidewalks has impacted the elderly.  It was impressive.

I couldn’t leave my cash register long enough to deliver the message that for many reasons the petitions were not filed.  “You’ll hear tomorrow,” was all I could say.  Her smile vanished.

It will seem depressing to many people, even people who couldn’t put their names on the line for fear of retribution - and they were many.  City employees felt their jobs were at risk if they did.  “Are you sure it’s confidential?” one man asked who supports the effort, but is doing business with the city.  “It’s supposed to be,” I told him, “but I can’t guarantee it,” so he didn’t. 

Lack of confidentiality was the major reason for not filing.  When proponents learned from the city clerk that she intended to inspect the petitions with the help of two city staff she could or would not name, caution overtook them, cinching the decision.

Information from the county elections office, where one would expect objectivity, was unreliable.  The most recent snafu was a new precinct list sent Jan. 17, supposedly a result of redistricting.  The list included new streets with 273 eligible voters, where the proponents quickly went to get signatures.  On Jan. 31, they learned the list was bad.  Many signatures had to be discounted, a waste of two weeks’ effort.  By Feb. 6 the total was barely the number needed, lacking the 200 extra the county recommended for safety’s sake.  Proponents decided not to put the signers at risk with such a small margin.

Was it a weak effort, as Pam Kimball once described it?  Maybe in her eyes it was.  But in mine it was huge and heroic.  It brought people together who never knew each other before.  It brought public scrutiny to a government with slimy practices and skeletons in the closet.  It brought people to city council meetings.  It was a crash course in democracy that taught one big lesson:  it takes work and courage to have freedom of expression, freedom from fear.

Are we free yet?  Nope.  But we’re closer than a year ago.  And there’s November, with the deadline for new candidates to file sometime this summer.  There’s the press, who have their lenses focused on Lindsay for the first time in two decades.  And there’s the law, another arm of democracy that works slower than politics, but with its own kind of power. 

We believe in this system of checks and balances even when it seems broken because we believe in equal human rights and this is what it takes to make that real. We have to keep the system working by using it.  That’s where the recall effort succeeded beyond its wildest dreams.  See you Tuesday at City Hall.

Throwing Good Money After Bad....

Last week Lew Griswold called from the Fresno Bee. He wanted information on Lindsay, particularly on the microenterprise loans. When I said that was just a minor boondoggle, I surprised us both.

I told him about the citizens’ efforts to suspend the park renovation and stop Sierra View Extension, part of what I now see as a major boondoggle. The total for the faulty micro-loans was $225K; the total for the park and road will be $1.5M, six times as much, $1M of which we have to repay. But that’s still small compared to the big picture.

The big picture emerges from documents in the "Lindsay Centennial Infill Project," prepared for the state’s Infill Infrastructure Grant program in 2009. What they show is the City’s inordinate investment in two housing projects that would not have been started otherwise - and probably won’t be finished .

"Mission Estates" was the first. Originally 98 homes on 32 acres of orange grove just north of the park, the conditions on the subdivision approved by the City Council in 2005 clearly state that Sierra View Extension was to be paid for entirely by the developer, Jim Hunter. Yet in 2006 the City applied for and received a $3M USDA loan, with $1.82M committed to build that road. In 2009, the Council committed $1.82M to the road from $6.5M in ARRA funds it hoped to receive. Last year’s audit showed a $1.225M USDA loan dedicated to Sierra View Extension. Where did those other funds go? What is the true cost of that road?

The second subdivision, "Sequoia Villas" built on hospital district land, also required the developer, Prairie Pacific Investments, to pay for the internal roads, curbs, gutters and sidewalks. The MOU (memorandum of understanding) between the City and developer permitted the project to proceed without first purchasing the property. The City has invested in all the infrastructure with huge cost overruns. Only two homes have been built in Sequoia Villas. Mission Estates has none.

In the Infill grant documents, Prairie Pacific is listed as having committed $1.9M to Sequoia Villas, with another $750K committed by Santa Clara Bank. Prairie Pacific originally committed $990K for building Olive Bowl Homes, 33 units on the baseball park grounds, but that project was abandoned in favor of Sequoia Villas. APEX Alarm Management of Provo, Utah, is listed as committing $12M for Mission Estates, which was converted in March, 2010 to "Village on the Park," increasing the types and number of homes to 210. Where is that money?

I think we have to look at the Wellness Center, Aquatic Center and the soon-to-be renovated City Park as investments in those two subdivisions, too. The functions now contained in the Wellness Center could have been served in the old hospital, renovated for a fraction of the cost, but the dreamers needed something more upscale. The pool in the Aquatic Center, which was promoted as a money-maker for the City by hosting international swim meets, was mistakenly built too small for the largest events. Both buildings are lovely and make a person feel more glamorous just being in them. But if you did a cost-benefit analysis, not many people would pay the price for that good feeling.

The City of Lindsay has wasted priceless public resources on two developers’ pipe dreams, "pounding money down a rat hole," as my father used to say. If they truly want to distance themselves from the mistakes of the past, they can stop throwing good money after bad and abandon construction of Sierra View Extension. If they want to take a real leap forward in this Year of the Dragon, they can start listening to their residents’ dreams for their park instead of siren songs.

Save the Park: Stop the Road...

"What’s happening to my park?" asked a man I met at a Lindsay city council meeting. He’s lived here all his life, loves that park, grew up in it, and was alarmed seeing the demolition.

I told him the plan to eliminate the interior roads so that people can no longer drive in and unload everything they need for their parties. I told him my conclusion, from months of studying their plans, is that the design is intended to make it harder for the ordinary people of this town, who need that space, to use it, making it more attractive to middle-class people who might be uncomfortable sharing open space with elderly farmworker gentlemen who meet to play cards and multi-family gatherings with 30 children, 14 teenagers, 4 sets of parents and three grandmothers. "I don’t want that to happen," he said.

Then I told him about the road. "They plan to build Sierra View Ave. right through it, cutting off the Community Center grounds from the park." Then I told him how we’re going to pay for it with our road tax dollars that should be spent fixing our long- neglected neighborhood streets. "The real purpose is to build the road for the subdivision just to the north that the developer was supposed to pay for originally. It was one of the conditions in the subdivision map approved in 2005 by four of our current city council members," I told him. That made him mad.

How we came to be the payers is a story I’m still unraveling from a stack of public records provided by Gerard Samulsky, our whistle-blowing former building inspector who watched this master plan unfold. What I can show is that the city staff were playing a shell game with the state and federal funding agencies who provided so much money for these "improvements." When you map out where that money went, it is in a box north of Tulare Road between Sequoia and Orange Street, benefiting the properties of two council members, one developer and numerous city employees.

Our council members have not been ignorant of the true purpose of these "improvements." They have served as the Redevelopment Agency until last Tuesday night, when it was dissolved in accordance with Gov. Brown’s new law. As members of the Redevelopment Agency, they have been privy to property transactions, grants and loans, conditions on those monies, and most of all, the intent of the projects. This council is in full agreement with the original purpose of the master plan: to procure large amounts of state and federal funds designated to serve our lower-income population, and spend them on projects intended to attract middle-class folks.

So this is what I told him. We can save the park and stop the road, but we have to act. Come to the council meetings. Sign the petitions floating around town. Subscribe to this newspaper for further updates - only $25/yr!

But most of all, let your caring loose. Share it with your friends and neighbors. That’s how we’re going to get this community back.

The Half-Full Glass

I had a wonderful opportunity last week to look at my community through another’s eyes. What we saw together is that Lindsay is a half-full glass.

My friend Richard Harriman, an environmental attorney, was passing through town between meetings with clients in Bakersfield and Merced. He wanted me to show him the park redevelopment I’ve been describing for months. We started there, where Mitch Brown’s equipment has been silent all week after gobbling up the park’s interior roads, then circled the block past the two unfinished subdivisions, Wellness Center and golf course.

As our circle widened into the surrounding neighborhoods, then downtown, then past the Olive Bowl and out to the new west-side developments, Richard’s experienced eye saw what my gut-level reactions have been trying to verbalize: the authentic quality of Lindsay’s established residential districts is being replaced with ticky-tacky, the kind he finds in the Valley’s sprawl-based cities like Modesto. In trying to save the town, our leaders, seeing only the half-empty glass, have been killing off what makes us valuable: our real history here.

It’s not an especially pretty history. Built by Southern Pacific purely for the purpose of land speculation in a spot with no reliable water supply where not even Yokuts had villages, the best thing you can say about Lindsay’s origin is that it was unnatural. Early on we had to try stealing water from others in the Kaweah watershed who were (unfortunately for us) needy and wealthy enough to challenge that act and take it back. Then our pathetic artificial drought situation was used handily by the big boys in Kern County to get the federal government to build them the Friant-Kern Canal with its appurtenant dam, the environmental consequences of which we’ve been hearing about for three decades.

Yet with this compromised and compromising history, people managed to grow an economy here, first with wheat and cotton, then olives and oranges. The town grew as the crops stabilized; the crops stabilized as the water supply stabilized, which is why we have a chunk of drill core from the canal construction memorialized in the park. With that prosperity they built the Memorial Building, the Olive Bowl, the City Park (which Southern Pacific’s development company granted to the city in 1927 for a "free park") and the hospital.

They built businesses for themselves serving the farm community, and then they built businesses serving the town community. They built Lindsay Olive Co. and a host of packinghouses, where the community’s crops were processed and provided jobs for the townspeople. Most of our neighborhoods were developed in the agricultural prosperity of the 1940’s and 50’s, and they still reflect a kind of modest well-being and sense of optimism from that day. It’s what Richard finds attractive in our town, and it’s what drew me here.

People can find all the ticky-tacky they want elsewhere. What people are hungry for, however, is an authentic place to live. What if we built on what we have, rather than what we lack?

The Motions of Love....

Here we are, the eleventh day of Christmas. I write this on the eighth, New Year’s Day morn. Yesterday, working New Years Eve at RN I got to see my friend Nancy Diaz and briefly share the sad first anniversary of Inglatina Huerta’s death, flashing back to last year.

There was no time this year to retrieve the Gingerbread Woman from the hall closet and hang her in the kitchen window. There was no time for baking cookies, barely enough to send out a few cards. Since Thanksgiving, every spare minute went toward stopping the park demolition.

I failed. Friday, the sixth day of Christmas, Mitch Brown’s equipment neatly scooped up and removed the blacktop that had once been roads through our park. The playground equipment, the picnic tables under the covered area, the trees once shading the community pool were already gone. But Tuesday, the third day, I had asked the city council for the third time to suspend the demolition, especially of the roads, until more public input could be received. This was their answer.

Other park-destroying plans have been uncovered. Did you know the city has plans to build 33 housing units where the Olive Bowl is now? That might explain why it’s gone downhill. The outrage we felt, discovering that, is impossible to report politely. Ed/Brian Rojas, who has been organizing renovation efforts for the Bowl, was devastated. He loves that place, and he’s not alone.

Through public records requests we have found documents from 2008-2009 showing that plan neatly tucked between others appropriately called "infill" projects. The City’s prime focus, however, has been Mission Estates and Sequoia Villas, two upscale developments wedged on each side of the city park by Mormon developer Jim Hunter. Sitting on the north edge of town, Mission Estates can hardly be called "infill." Sequoia Villas, developed on hospital land, is a robbery of public space. But keeping those two developments alive is the only reason for the current park redesign and the construction of Sierra View Extension, which will cost us a million dollars’ worth of unfixed roads. The past lives on in Rich Wilkinson’s administration.

"We live in cynical times," wrote Catherine Whitmire in Plain Living, "and we have become skeptical people: openly lied to by those we elect, betrayed by those who put greed before compassion, and robbed of a healthy Earth by a lifestyle that is not sustainable."

She adds: "We are not called to conform to the ways of the world, but to the motions of love that rise in our hearts. It takes courage to align our personal lives, our work, and the way we spend our days with what we hear when we listen within."

Listen within. Think of what the City has done to our town in the name of progress, driven by greed. Listen to the motions of love that rise in your heart, and see if it isn’t time for a change. Then sign the recall petition.