This Land is Your Land....

“You’ve got to exert your ownership over the place you live in, or you won’t have that place.  That’s what that song is about.” 
- Bruce Springsteen on Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” 


We may be forced into singing at next week’s Lindsay City Council meeting:  our City Manager has once again reduced our rights to participate in city council meetings with the full blessing of (but without a decision by) the Council.
It’s not the first time.  After the Feb. 14, 2012 meeting, where I’d insisted that the public had a right to ask for the removal of items from the consent calendar according to wording on the agenda, they took that wording out.  
By the March 13, 2012 meeting, they’d taken out another sentence, this one from the paragraph defining public participation on the agenda packet cover sheet: “To place an item on the Council agenda, you must contact the City Clerk or City Manager’s Department before 12:00 noon on the Wednesday immediately preceding the meeting to have the item placed on the agenda.”  After I’d asked for months about how to get an item on the agenda, that missing sentence was finally replaced in the June 12 packet cover sheet with this one: “If a member of the public wishes for an item to be placed on an agenda, he/she may also ask at this time (during the public comment period) but the Council will make the ultimate decision whether to place a requested item on a future agenda and is under no obligation to do so.”
On that same cover sheet I discovered the most recent disappeared/replaced sentence, which eliminates the right to speak to agenda items when they come up for discussion.  The missing sentence said:  “Those who wish to be heard on matters on the agenda should indicate their desire to speak when the item is ready for discussion.”  It had been replaced with “Members of the public are welcome to make their comments during the public comment portion of the agenda, as this is the place for public participation per the Brown Act.” This completely limits public participation in council meetings to the three minute public comment period (except during public hearings).  
Whether the Brown Act says that or not is a matter of interpretation, however.  The League of California Cities’ fine guide to the Brown Act says “Every agenda for a regular meeting must allow members of the public to speak on any item of interest, so long as the item is within the subject matter jurisdiction of the legislative body.  Further, the public must be allowed to speak on a specific item of business before or during the legislative body’s consideration of it.”
Our city’s attorneys seem to be interpreting the Brown Act’s word “before” as “way before,” like during the public comment period.  But if the League of California Cities thought that, they wouldn’t have used the word Further.
When they Nazi’s took away the Jews’ rights, they didn’t do it all at once.  They did it one small piece at a time, quietly, until it was too late for anyone to protest the dehumanizing effect of being without citizenship.  Come exert your ownership over this place we live in - let your presence be felt at Tuesday’s city council meeting.

Lawyers...

“How’s my favorite lawyer today?” I asked Starr Warson one evening when he came to my cash register.  “Fine!” he said brightly, then dimmed a little and added “I hope that’s good...”
Our friendship solidified in an act of human caring, not politics, and it was easy to assure him “it’s good.” I know many fine people who are lawyers who practice their craft ethically. The disparagement many people feel toward that profession is created by two things: a fear of the power they are able to wield, and experience with law professionals who wield it unethically.  Sometimes it’s the people hiring them who wield them unethically, often the powerful.  Our dislike of lawyers is actually a distaste for uneven power relations.
The other day it occurred to me that, without lawyers, there would be no law, which in our political system is the way we establish our ever-evolving ethical code and try to protect the rights of people and business.  Many of our legislators who make the laws are lawyers, and the laws are fine-tuned by litigation.  Also, without lawyers our laws would be useless: without fear of ramifications when laws are broken, our land would be ruled by lawless people.
Which brings me to Lindsay.  Last week’s article on Steven Mecum’s public records lawsuit quoted City Manager Rich Wilkinson about the financial harm this and other lawsuits could cause the city, right on the verge of its recovery from multiple disasters, including the prior administration’s “financial mess.”  He failed to mention that one of the new provisions of his employment contract (unanimously approved May 22, 2012 without one question by the council,) could be equally damaging.  It reads “In the event of involuntary separation of the City Manager, he shall be entitled to receive a lump sum payment as and for severance pay in an amount equal to eighteen (18) months salary.”  At his initial city manager salary alone ($12,000/mo.) that lump sum would be $216,000.  If you include his police chief salary as well, that puts it closer to $250,000.
Wilkinson also failed to mention that it wouldn’t have cost anything if Mecum’s  request had been treated respectfully.  Not only is there the potential $260,000 for Mecum’s attorney, Paul Boylan, there’s all the expense we’ve already paid for Nancy Jenner’s inadequate defense of the city and her firm’s bad legal advice about pursuing this course of action.
In an attempt to estimate that cost, I made a public records request to inspect all the billing statements/invoices for legal services from Oct. 2010 to May 2012, as well as a few other items.  Instead of the normal phone call from Maria Knutson advising me when the materials were ready, I received a two-page letter signed by Maria but clearly written by a lawyer.  From the language, I suspect it was Nancy Jenner herself, because the logic matched what I heard in the courtroom when she tried to make her case before Judge Reed.  After sifting through the legalese, her letter basically said it’s not in the public interest to know what they’re charging us for:  “the public interest in non-disclosure clearly outweighs the public interest in disclosure.”
What kind of person could make that statement?  Only someone with an interest in keeping the public blind.  Is it the lawyer, or the people employing the lawyer?  That’s in the public’s interest to know.

A Land Ethic....

 “That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics.  That land yields a cultural harvest is a fact long known, but latterly often forgotten.”  Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac
For the past week I’ve been struggling to find words for what’s in my heart about land, words that will reach others’ hearts and influence their minds about the future of a particular piece of land with an exquisite history and present fertility:  Quaker Oaks Farm.  
The owners, Bill and Beth Lovett, who have operated Quaker Oaks Christmas Tree Farm there for almost 20 years, are highly aware of this land’s cultural and ecological value.  They wish to protect it from having those values stripped away when its economic value soars, tempting future owners to sell out.  There are multiple ways to do that, and a non-profit organization has been formed to help make those decisions and  steward the land in its new vocation.  But it seemed words were missing defining what’s being undertaken, so I offered my services.
I found myself pulling books down from a high shelf where they’ve been since 1993.  When my hands reached Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, I read the last chapter, “The Land Ethic.”  Found words.
This book was first published in 1949, just after Leopold (a forestry professor at the University of Wisconsin) died fighting a grass fire on a neighbor’s farm shortly after he became an advisor on conservation to the United Nations.  He was that kind of man.  He was 60.
The book was republished in paperback in 1968 and became a flagship for the environmental movement that us back-to-the-landers needed when we discovered how hard it is to live from the land alone. But what he says about the need for a land ethic is still fresh.
Writing less than a decade after the socio-ecological disaster of the Dust Bowl, Leopold announced in the book’s preface “Conservation is getting nowhere because it is incompatible with our Abrahamic concept of land.  We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us.  When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.  There is no other way for land to survive the impact of mechanized man, nor for us to reap from it the esthetic harvest it is capable...of contributing to culture.”
He ends the book with this analogy:  “By and large, our present problem is one of attitudes and implements.  We are remodeling the Alhambra with a steamshovel, and we are proud of our yardage.  We shall hardly relinquish the shovel, which after all has many good points, but we are in need of gentler and more objective criteria for its successful use.”  
In between, in 25 short pages Leopold takes us through his logic and his experience, his loves and despairs, but leaves us with no magic recipe.  What he leaves us with is the simple understanding that we’re in need of developing a land ethic before our ethic-less treatment of land leaves us hungry and homeless.

Sorry, we're closed....

 “Sorry - we’re closed” is something I get to say at the market where I work.  Sometimes I say it sympathetically, a last-minute shopper myself.  But sometimes, when I hurt from lifting groceries and customers run in the exit door after we’ve flipped the sign, it comes out mad and mean, omitting the “sorry.”
That’s how that message came out of Lindsay’s City Council last week.  I’d asked for two things, one reasonably small, one ridiculously large.  The big one was to stop building Sierra View Extension and hold up the park until more public input could shape its redesign.  This was my twelfth time making that request.  Mayor Ed had disparaged my first eleven efforts on KTIP Radio, so I explained my reason for asking. “What I’m doing is reminding all of us that not everyone likes what this city is doing and that we have right and an obligation to speak up.” 
The small thing was for one of them to remove the minutes of the last meeting from the consent agenda and correct them to show Council’s rejection of the idea to remove the 4-way stop at Homassel and Tulare Rd.  I also wanted the minutes to show Bill Zigler’s response:  that he felt directed by Council to forget the idea and simply focus his study on the Sequoia and Tulare intersection. 
Last week, however, traffic counter strips were placed on Homassel on both sides of Tulare Road for one day, suggesting that this intersection is being studied after all.   Then, after warning in last week’s column that “staff is not above squirreling around their clear directive to leave it alone,”  I was appalled to find their clear directive missing from the minutes.
The public no longer has the right to have an item removed from the consent calendar to have it discussed.  Words saying we did were removed from the agenda after the Feb. 14 meeting without action by the Council.  They’d never recognized that right in practice and did not miss the verbiage when it was gone.  But I’d hoped a council member would take that step to defend the position of the Council itself. 
After reading the items on the consent agenda, Mayor Ed asked the Council what it wished to do.  Steve Velasquez asked the city attorney “Do the minutes have to be verbatim?”  “No, they can just be a summary” she replied, “but if Council wants them clarified, they certainly have that right.”  Steve thanked her.  Ed repeated his question.  Danny moved to approve, then it was seconded and passed in a heartbeat.
“We’re CLOSED” was the clear message, mad and mean, for asking them to operate accountably.  What’s sorry is that this council doesn’t even care what they themselves think, much less what the public thinks. Their job is to keep tight ranks protecting the city’s machinations.  They serve, not as an open window, but as a locked-closed door behind which lots of things go on we’ll never know about much less influence.  And we’re paying through the nose. 
This is taxation without representation.  That’s what triggered the original teaparty in Boston Harbor, then the Revolutionary War.  Let’s not let it go that far.  Let’s open that door.

Scot Free......

Things had gotten kinda quiet in our town lately, peace interrupted only by the sounds of heavy equipment carving out the roadbed for the unpopular Sierra View Extension. But it’s back - the public outrage, the seething anger at Lindsay’s city government - after news that Scot Townsend is getting off scot-free.  
Thursday’s Porterville Recorder, which announced that no criminal charges will be filed against our former city manager in a front-page, top-headline article, even received some of the bile.  “I’m so mad at the paper,” said the friend who brought the news to my checkstand Thursday night, wanting to shoot the messenger.  
And maybe she’s right.  The article intertwined the news with the upcoming budget and (silently) city manager Rich Wilkinson’s contract renewal. Quoting Mayor Ed, the article ended conclusively positive: “When you think of all the things going on a year ago and now it’s all behind us....We’ve come a long ways under Rich’s leadership and how he got things done.  Everybody’s working harder, working smarter.”
Written by editor Rick Elkins after the recent departure of reporter Alex Schultz, who helped break the news on the home and microenterprise loan fiascos revealed by the 2009-2010 audit, the article was a red flag. The press is actually the fourth arm of government, keeping the public informed enough of the real issues to actually participate in civic affairs. It was daunting to think the press might go back to its old habit of publishing whatever the city wants us to hear. Those of us who know another side will have to keep the papers aware of their responsibilities for the facts.
And what are the facts?  
That this city council approved, ignorantly or knowingly, every item Scot Townsend brought before them, as it currently approves whatever Rich and his staff bring before them (with the possible exception of last meeting’s proposal to remove the four-way stop from Tulare Road and Homassel Ave. But keep your eye on that one: staff is not above squirreling around their clear directive to leave it alone.)  
That several members of this city council personally have benefited from the City’s projects, despite clear wording in both the city’s charter and municipal code that councilmembers are to avoid anything that even appears like it might be a conflict of interest. 
That this council did not want to find anything that might result in criminal charges being filed against anybody in the city, much less Scot Townsend, whose projects were designed to make members of a certain religious affiliation rich. At the expense of no one more important than the city’s quiet taxpayers and anyone who loved to have big family parties at the park or to swing under the shady canopy of an oak tree. At the expense of democracy itself.
Sorry, Ed  et. al.  It’s not all behind you. The teaparty’s just begun.

Talking Yards....

“We’re talking YARDS” I said to my friend Richard Harriman on the phone the other day as we discussed the possible solutions to Lindsay’s - and the Valley’s - large constellation of problems.  
He thought promoting community gardens here might be one way to bring people together and reconnect them with land, the source of everything (provided you have water to irrigate with and drink.)  I like the idea of community gardens and have seen them work beautifully, especially with urban people who need to reconnect with both people and land more than they need to grow food.  
But when people are hungry, what they need more than anything is a little piece of land outside their backdoor to plant, water and harvest from, to share their surplus with neighbors and to guard from no-account garden rustlers with a polite little fence, their presence, and maybe a barking dog.  It’s the reason I’ve been afraid if we become a nation of apartment-dwellers.  He saw what I was talking about.
I was invited into just such a yard last week by the father of my friend Robert Diaz, who lives just down the street.  I learned the Spanish names for persimmons and pomegranates, smelled twigs from herbs for making menudo and calming an upset stomach, and noted the care and understanding he had for each individual plant.  The tiny strips of land he has to plant are dense with food-in-progress.  Afterward it came to me that there’s an inverse relation between care and land:  the less land you have, the more you care about it.  
One of our great national agrarians, Wendell Berry, has a name for that relationship he calls “eyes per acre.”  What he means is that there is an appropriate ratio between people and land, a proper number of people needed to care for an amount of land.  If the number of people drops or the amount of land increases beyond that ratio, everything suffers.  The industrial form and scale of agriculture here in the Tulare Lake Basin bears testimony to this idea.
Luckily for us, the readers of this paper, we have a pioneering voice for the importance of yards in Mo Montgomery, who most weeks puts together her column “Steadfast” come heck or high water like I do.  Mo has turned her passion for the lifestyle-change movement known as urban homesteading into a consciousness-raising effort that comes free with your subscription.  The words she’s putting out there are making ideas available from around the country that she’s kitchen-testing and yard-testing right here in our own climate.  Check out her website for even more exposure to this life-changing movement at www.blkcatcottage.com.
Our “Gardening Guru” column by UC Master Gardener Michelle Le Strange is also helpful with yards and their tending, frequently complementing Mo’s work to put us in touch with the truths of our lives.  
The work of  both women reminds me how important it is that we begin to realize - and soon - the tremendous value of the land we occupy and the water we claim:  that we inhabit a paradise that some would just as soon pave over to put up a parking lot.

Water and Wages....

Two items on last week’s Lindsay city council agenda took me back to the beginning of our watchdog days:  the pending studies on our water system, and the performance evaluation of our city manager, whose contract is currently being negotiated. 

Two water studies are being proposed:  one on water rates, the other on our water system.  The impetus for the rate study was generated by the public outpouring over high water bills in September, 2010 after the Porterville Recorder released a series of articles about Tulare County’s highest paid public employees and Scot Townsend placed fourth, far above Porterville’s city manager.

In general, the city and the press both missed the message between water and wages that Lindsay’s people were bringing.  “We are mostly people with such low wages that we have trouble paying our water bills - that most essential utility of all - and you’re paying them WHAT????”  It was a justice issue as well as an economic one.

The city heard only the economic side. “We can’t charge less for water because the city charter requires that the water system pays for itself,” they replied.  Then they realized they had no recent evidence to prove that our water rates reflect the true costs of running the system, so they started talking about conducting a study.  Months later when the 2009-2010 audit was released, it revealed that non-water costs had been paid out of the water fund, notably portions of salaries for staff in other departments.  Oops.

The economic justice issue raises its ugly head in another arena:  paying non-prevailing wages on City construction projects.  Being a charter city permits it, although I don’t understand how.  Normal cities are required to pay prevailing wages on public works projects “when paid for in whole or in part out of public funds” according to the CA Dept. of Industrial Relations website.  Yet the contract with 99 Pipeline for building Sierra View Extension using USDA funds is exempt.  Those workers hired by 99 Pipeline (whose motto is “Get Laid”) are getting paid less than they would in Cutler-Orosi, which is not protected by charter status.  Meanwhile, our city manager is lining up for another year of salary well above the prevailing wage for towns our size.

One very interesting website, www.smartcitiesprevail.org, presents a strong case for the community development benefits of paying prevailing wages.  Other reasons include the quality and true cost of projects.  “Absent prevailing wages,” notes Sacramento City Councilperson Sandy Sheedy, “public projects become vulnerable to fly-by-night operators who underbid responsible contractors, pay substandard wages, and produce inferior projects...that can lead to enormous costs in the long run.”  The observations of Lindsay’s many sidewalk supervisors would support that position.

One of the most important findings of my research on small towns is that more even distribution of income results in greater economic vitality and stability.  The wider the gap between the highest paid and the lowest, the worse off the town’s businesses become.  I think it would serve our community well if our staff and council members visited that idea - and then took steps to lessen, rather than increase, that spread.