Nine Seats....

“Take your place on the great Mandala

as it moves through your brief moment of time...”

                                                            Noel Paul Stookey

There are nine seats open for election in Lindsay’s city government, and only three require that you live within the city limits.  Six require that you live within the boundaries of the Lindsay Local Hospital District or Lindsay Unified School District, which broadens considerably the range of people who can participate in this community’s future.

Before I began trying to understand what was going on in our town, before the big splash Scot Townsend made with his exit, I didn’t understand how intertwined this city’s government had become with the community’s hospital and school districts.  No one did except the players themselves, because hardly anyone ever attended the public meetings of the three bodies.  Partly that’s because when they did, no one could understand what they were talking about.  But we, the public in both city and countryside, are at least half-way responsible for what has happened here because we were lame as citizens.

Now we’re 100% responsible for reform.

I called the county elections office to find out what’s required (624-7300.)  First, you go to there and fill out some forms for them to verify your voter registration, address and economic interests.  You can also get copies of the candidates guide there or online at their website: www.tularecoelections.org.  The candidates guide describes the qualifications and requirements of candidacy, and is a very valuable tool.

The three city council seats require 20-30 nomination signatures that must be gathered before the filing deadline of 5 p.m. Aug. 10.  Like we learned in the recall effort, those signatures must be verified as qualified registered voters within the city limits, so the county recommends getting 30 to insure the required number of 20 valid signatures.  The hospital and school district seats do not require nomination signatures.

There are no filing fees, but there is a cost for publishing the candidates statement in the County’s sample ballot.  This statement is optional and costs around $350, which must be paid in advance at the time of filing.  If you choose not to submit a statement, there’s no cost for filing.

There may be other costs, however, depending on how you want to promote yourself as a candidate, such as yard signs and flyers.  But the Dolores Huerta Foundation has offered to hold a candidates forum, which would be a wonderful way to get your message out free of charge.  This paper will also be reporting on the elections process, and I will be glad to make public any person’s position on city matters with this column, including the incumbents’.

When no one runs, there’s no elections.  That’s also what I didn’t understand before the big splash.  Let’s get some candidates on the ballot and see what we can do in our brief moment of time.

One World....

“Write down what you just said,” an old friend suggested in a phone conversation last week.  “What I wanted when I moved here was intimacy with a place,” I’d said, “and it’s come, largely through my poverty.”  


Like many, I often feel I inhabit two different worlds with an ocean separating them.  I sense it most when I talk with friends in the Bay Area or other urban ports-of-call, where the right to travel is guaranteed by the Constitution, a passport and a bank account. Living here, where many of my neighbors have had to assert the right to travel against the Border Patrol and enormous dangers with only a wad of bills in their pockets para progresar (“in order to progress,”) my life feels invisible to those far-away friends.


But it’s not only those far away whose lives seem remote from mine.  Recently, talking with a Visalia friend about land ethics and what might be required to instill better relations to land in our culture, he confided “We’re not going to give up our good lives.”  He was speaking in general, but it shook me to think he would draw the line between his life and mine, no matter what good might be gained from whatever good had to be given up.


In a dream last week I was trying to cross an ocean between the world I now inhabit and the one my grandparents inhabited, a world where most people still raised and killed the food they eat.  Many  people around the globe still inhabit that world; many of my neighbors have just recently left it, carrying with them only their recipes and appetites for food from home.  I’m privileged to witness this phenomenon secondhand as packages of beef tongue and tripe, calves hooves and pig skins pass through my hands at the market’s checkstand where I cashier.  Though it was hard at first, my need to understand that world got me through my initial waves of culturally-derived repulsion over my neighbors’ definition of “food.”


What’s the connection between “definitions of food” and “intimacy with a place”?  Most of those recipes and appetites carried by generations of immigrants, whether from Jalisco or Hamburg, Da Nang or Bombay, were cooked and eaten from plants and animals native to those places.  Those lands determined what plants and animals grew and how much, while the people learned how to make more and better.  Food is our primary connection to land, followed by shelter and territory.  Now that our recipes and ingredients have been globalized, our connection to land is less intimate, our sense of place minimized to road maps and weather reports.  


We are still dependent on land for our food  - now we just don’t know whose land it comes from, how it’s produced, or who gets to eat (or not) from the profits. There’s only one world that we all inhabit: Americans’ “good” lives are lived off the backs of others whose lives are not so good or even horrible by comparison.  If we are going to progress as humans - para progresar - we need to reacquaint ourselves with our own land’s productivity and adjust our recipes and appetites accordingly.

Dependence Day....

While the rest of you celebrate Independence Day, we in Lindsay must be content to celebrate only our Dependence, at least for the time being. Short of a large-scale citizen revolt or another lawsuit, our real independence is something we’re going to have to exert at the ballot box in November.


Last week’s city council meeting was a perfect example of the effective downgrade Lindsay’s citizens have received at the hands of their elected representatives. Rescheduled on Monday from its regular Tuesday meeting time to Wednesday, purportedly to have a quorum, few members of the public were able to attend.  At this meeting, two public hearings were held: one on the budget for next year, including the 5-year Capital Improvement Program, the other on a proposed lot line adjustment that will likely result in two sets of tenants needing to find new homes. If public hearings were taken seriously, these would have been rescheduled for a later date to provide proper noticing.


But the really glaring evidence of our lost democracy occurred during Item 10, “Study Session on Proposed Bike Lanes” presented by Bill Zigler, City Planner. I was at the council meeting last fall when Zigler, a confessed bicycle enthusiast, presented the proposed bike lanes during another “study session.” The council actually had questions then about the proposed routes and potential impacts on the neighborhoods from reduced parking. Some also questioned the need, noting the almost complete lack of use of the bike lane on Tulare Road. Zigler assured them he would take their concerns under consideration, and of course no action would be taken without first coming before the council.


Now back before the council, in a presentation any used car salesman would admire, Zigler’s plan got its first increment approved without even taking a vote.  The result will be the elimination of diagonal parking along both sides of the newly-repaved Gale Hill Avenue, replaced by a smaller number of parallel parking slots. It also cements the core of his bike lane plan into place without so much as a questionnaire or a parents meeting.  My attempts to contribute to the discussion went unrecognized.


Two weeks ago I wrote about the reduction of rights to participate in council meetings that city manager Rich Wilkinson has engineered over the last four months. During the public comment period at this week’s council meeting, I laid the responsibility for those reductions squarely on the shoulders of the council. It’s their jurisdiction how open or closed our public meetings will be. This council wants it below the legal limit, so I also laid on their shoulders the responsibility for the huge budget overruns for legal services this year and possibly next, as citizens wrestle their rights back through the legal system.


This city continues to function as if it knows best what’s right for the people, treating us like under-age dependents. It’s called “paternalism” in civil rights language.  But these people are not our parents:  they’re our public servants.  We need to require them to do their job or get out.

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.