Property Rights and Community Wrongs

Published Sept. 16, 2015 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

            “Search for a congenial relation between man and land has gone on throughout recorded time, for that relation largely shapes the relation between man and man.”  Paul Schuster Taylor, 1979

 

     “What’s your book about?” people ask when I tell them I’m working on one.  I usually say “agriculture and the common good,” sometimes adding a few items lodged under that umbrella like “small farms,” “water,” and “sustainability.”  But the thread running through it all is land tenure.

     “Land tenure” is not a term most people use, although it applies to every single one of us.  It means the system that determines peoples’ access to land, which is the source of all wealth as well as subsistence, and the subcategories of relationships determined by that system.

            In this country, the system of private property determines individuals’ access to land except where government control has interceded (like school grounds or Yosemite National Park, for instance.)  The subcategories in our system are “landed,” “tenant,” and “landless” or “homeless.”  The concept of private property is so important to our entire socio-political-economic system that we take it for granted, almost god-given.  To criticize private property here, even if the intent is to help, is like burning the flag.  

            What’s good about private property (i.e., individual ownership,) particularly when we’re talking about land, however, isn’t always good for the community. One of the worst things for any given community is when some of its land (or most, or all, as in "company towns,") is owned by people who do not live within it, often referred to as “absentee ownership.”  What’s wrong about it is that decisions for the land’s use by the absentee owner are made in a vacuum of knowledge about the community’s needs and beyond the community’s ability to influence those decisions, to encourage or coerce the owner to care about the effects of those decisions on people within the community or the community as a whole.

            Last week’s paper carried a wonderful example of the importance of land tenure in a beautifully written letter to the editor by Chris and Sally Brewer regarding the closure of Exeter’s True Value Hardware.  The letter pointed to a cause the previous week’s news article had skimmed over lightly:  the landowner’s decision to raise the rent 40%, with two weeks’ notice.  It’s the kind of action landowners take when they want to remove the tenant and do not have cause to evict. 

            The Brewers then went on to suggest a motive - to get a tax write-off for having an empty building - and to flush out the implications of that for the community (lost sales tax revenues, the impacts on other businesses of having a large empty building downtown) as well as for the business owners themselves (lost source of income and community identity.)  They then went on to express the hope that “the building owner who started this self-centered and thoughtless action realizes the extent and harm his actions have caused good people and a good community.”

            That last sentence might have some impact if the current owners are local.  The Brewers’ letter did not name or identify the location of the current owners, only that the former owners (who also had owned the hardware business housed there) sold the building several years ago.  This is simply to say that I do not know if the current owners are absentee, or simply acting like it.  My experiences here in Lindsay document that local owners can be as oblivious to the community’s welfare as absentee owners can.

            But it’s a question we should ask.  Who will look out for the needs of the community when the landowners of its spaces live too far away to know or care?

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Trudy Wischemann is a community development researcher who writes.  You can send your empty building nightmares to her c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247

 

           

Studebaker Desert

Published Sept. 9, 2015 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     The other night I was scanning my bookshelves for pieces I might have left out of my collection of writings on Agriculture and the Common Good.  When my eyes lit on it, my fingers reached for Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, a book so dense with the common bad of water politics it could take a month of reading to find a few pages to excerpt.

     Published in 1986, the book was described as “a savagely witty history of America’s reckless depletion of its water resources,” in Newsday.  The Washington Post Book Review called it “a highly partisan, wonderfully researched portrayal of the damming, diverting and dirtying of western rivers.”  Publishers Weekly said “This timely and important book should be required reading for all citizens.”

     Although I think Publishers Weekly was right, I doubt the book was well read here in the Valley.  Almost 30 years later many of our citizens are still making the same kind of arguments for more dams that Reisner showed were reasonless and irrational, in massive denial of the facts of water’s availability and the costs to develop it.  The reason for making those arguments still exist - that dams can make a few people temporarily rich - but 30 years later those people are even smaller in number.  Unfortunately, they may be more powerful.

     I grew up in the 1950’s, when big water projects like the CVP here and Bonneville in the Pacific Northwest were viewed as heroic and totally positive undertakings designed to create and spread wealth among the western citizenry.  I remember watching newsreels in school about their physical construction and economic contributions, and I believed every word of it.  I chose Grand Coulee Dam as the subject of the first report I wrote in grade school.  A decade earlier that same spirit had captured Woody Guthrie, who worked for the feds for a month putting this heroism and hope into song.

     But by the 1980’s the promises showed their true colors and the costs had begun to show up.  In Reisner’s introduction, “A semidesert with a Desert Heart,” we can see why:

            “One does not really conquer a place like (California.)  One inhabits it like an occupying army and makes, at best, an uneasy truce with it.... The only way to make the region over is to irrigate it.  But there is too little water to begin with, and water in rivers is phenomenally expensive to move... The point is that despite heroic efforts and many billions of dollars, all we have managed to do in the arid West is turn a Missouri-sized section green - and that conversion has been wrought mainly with nonrenewable groundwater.  But a goal of many westerners and of their federal archangels . . . has long been to double, triple, quadruple the amount of desert that has been civilized and farmed, and now these same people say that the future of a hungry world depends on it, even if it means importing water from as far away as Alaska. 

            “What they seem not to understand,” he continues, “is how difficult it will be just to hang on to the beachhead they have made.  Such a surfeit of ambition stems, of course, from the remarkable record of success we have had in reclaiming the American desert.  But the same could have been said about any number of desert civilizations throughout history - Assyria, Carthage, Mesopotamia; the Inca, the Aztec, the Hohokam - before they collapsed.”

           

     How to live here in this place, within the limits nature provides and God or someone has allowed us to stretch well beyond, is a question this drought has provided for us to ponder.  If we respond rightly, I think we may be finding ourselves downsizing and going backward to something once more common than the Cadillac.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Trudy Wischemann is an old car lover who writes.  You can send her your more politically correct water conservation ideas c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or visit www.trudysnotesfromhome.blogspot.com and leave a comment there.
   

Keeping a Distance

Published Sept. 2, 2015 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

     For the last two weeks I’ve been studying the civil war in El Salvador during the 1980’s, learning its causes and consequences.  When a friend asked why, I jokingly said “It puts my work on the City of Lindsay in perspective.”

 

     There’s more truth to it than I thought.  While I can attend a council meeting without fear of being disappeared, tortured, raped and murdered, there’s a parallel between what happens here (or doesn’t happen) and the state of civil non-discourse that existed in El Salvador prior to that war.  The primary one is the distance the haves keep between themselves and the have-nots, and the way “having” is used to seduce the barely-haves and might-not-haves into putting their eggs in the haves’ basket.

 

     That’s what I saw clearly half-way through Tuesday night’s council meeting.  Two groups had come to register their protest over budget decisions:  the city employees furloughed last week with their union representatives, and members of the public, largely Spanish-speaking, who feel the proposed increases in sewer and garbage rates are unfair. Many of the city employees held signs that fingered missing cash reserves, the official reason given for cutting their incomes.  The members of the public delivered almost 400 signed ballots for the hearing on Prop. 218 that evening, which they had gathered in less than 5 days.

 

     Many people spoke during the public comment period, which was extended to accommodate English-Spanish translation.  Members of both groups were clear about the hardships being imposed by the city, although there was plenty of confusion about who to hold responsible.  Later in the meeting Danny Salinas blamed it on them for not attending the budget workshops this spring, as if these consequences would have been obvious during those discussions.  They would not.

 

     The concerns of both groups went unanswered, though discussion went long into the night.  Facts were hard to come by as figures flew through the air.  The SEIU union representative, who was beginning to make sense out of some of them during Tamara Lakin’s budget discussion, initially was denied the right to ask questions during that agenda item by the mayor, despite the fact that we had just cemented that right a few months ago. 

 

     In the end, in the face of both groups, three councilmembers - Danny Salinas, Pam Kimball and Mayor Padilla - first voted to raise the sewer and garbage rates.  Then they approved the pay increase negotiated for the police by Bill Zigler, despite the 10% paycut he had dealt the non-uniformed employees the week before without council’s knowledge, much less approval.

 

     By that time, many of the city employees had bought the argument that we can’t afford to subsidize the water/sewer/garbage account (essential city services) and must make it pay despite the hardships it might inflict on those people whose incomes are hanging by a dry thread in this drought.  They did not seem to find it troublesome that we still subsidize big-time both the McDermont Field House and Wellness Center from the general fund, which are non-essential services that only a portion of our population can afford to enjoy.  Apparently that lucky portion includes some of our city employees, despite their 10% paycut.

 

     Keeping a distance between ourselves and those who have to struggle to stay alive may feel safer than trying to figure out what to give up for equality’s sake, what to do to help close the distance.  But if that pledge we say at the beginning of each meeting, which ends “with liberty and justice for all” is to mean anything, we need to make decisions that don’t widen the gap.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Trudy Wischemann is a community development researcher who writes.  You can send her your distance-closing examples c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or visit www.trudysnotesfromhome.blogspot.com and leave a comment there.

 

 

 

 

 

 

    

 

 

 

 

 

Hearing Voices

Published August 26, 2015 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     It’s been an unquiet week in Lake Woebehere, my adopted hometown.  With paycuts, petitions, and the usual propaganda, some of Lindsay’s many voices have been speaking outloud.  Sorting the messages has kept me busy, although I think the cacophony is a healthy sign.

     Underneath that din, there have been other voices wafting through my days.  One is my cat Dot’s, who wakes slightly earlier than I do with a bleat, not a meow.  She is old, growing more frail by the month, and deaf enough to be confused by sounds rather than guided by them.  An affectionate lick by one of the others or her own sneeze can knock her down.  When I look at her, I often see her entire life passing before my eyes.  Her time is coming to return to dust.

     When she arrived at my house as a kitten, she was just a speck.  Two girls found her and her brother in the park one evening, wandering around with their eyes glued shut by mucus.  The girls brought them here, and though I already had enough cats, I also had a tube of antibiotic eye ointment in the feline medicine cabinet.  The girls did not, so I was the kittens’ best chance.  That was June 1998.  I’ve never been sorry.  

     I’ve been sorry about the park, however.  Where the kittens were born, near the hospital bordered by the orange grove, where you could sit on the grass watching kids run around like banshees and feel like you were out in the country - that place is gone.  It’s buried under the concrete and blacktop of Ono City Parkway.  The missing orange grove is now just a paragraph in the resolution permitting the development of an up-scale housing subdivision there.  That paragraph required the developer to remove the trees section by section as building progressed.  Instead, he bulldozed the entire grove to install the underground utilities, which he never finished.  Now his plans have turned to dust along with the ground itself.

     So another voice I’m hearing is the sound of my own regret.  I hid my eyes as the City began destroying the park to build the aquatic center.  When I finally woke up, saw what was planned and realized we should try to save the part they hadn’t deranged, it was too late.  The photographs they used to get the grant from the state to renovate the park showed its terrible condition but didn’t mention that the City was the agent of that destruction.  When I called the state seeking help in delaying the renovation until public input could be included in the design, they didn’t believe me and forged ahead, turning our once pastoral place into an urbanized space.

    
     Arm-in-arm with regret are the voices of betrayal.  Sitting in the Memorial Building Thursday evening for a community meeting on the proposed rate increases for sewer and garbage, I was jolted by flashbacks of two meetings almost 4 years ago.  

     In one I heard the voice of Mike Camarena, director of city services, telling many of these same people in that same room how the park redesign would suit their needs.  When he discovered that the audience had other ideas and that they would rather see the funds used to fix their neighborhood streets, he “misspoke” about deadlines on the source of funding.  In the other flashback I heard the voice of Bill Zigler, our new interim city manager, reassuring these citizens who came to a city council meeting to request input on the park’s redesign that “There will be swings.”  Swings were at the top of their list.  There still are no swings.

     Friday, when I asked Bill and Mike why there still are no swings in the park, they responded that they have other priorities.  May they be hearing voices soon.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Trudy Wischemann is a writer trained in environmental planning who is mortified by this city’s priorities.  You can send her your list c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay, CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

False Witness

Published August 19, 2015 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

     “You’re the first person I’ve called,” said a barely familiar voice on the phone Thursday.  “The city employees are being cut 10% across the board, starting Monday.”

     My heart sank.  Take 10 % off the salaries of those at the top of the employee pile and you might be cutting into their entertainment budget, unless they’re some of those who over-imagined their importance and mortgaged big-time before 2008.  But take 10% off the wages of those at the bottom, where every penny is already stretched thin, and here comes a household crisis.

     The employee who called had been informed by his department head that the cut was needed thanks to the City Council’s dilly-dallying over the budget deficits.  Not true.  When I spoke with Tamara Lakin, head of Finance who claimed authorship of the 10% cut, she was clear that the budget is fine.  “It’s our cash flow that’s in trouble,” she said, caused solely by  “two unanticipated expenses starting in June.”  To avoid a crisis, Lakin moved in the only way she saw possible to release the needed cash into the stream she has to provide.

     The first of those two unanticipated expenses was Rich Wilkinson’s severance package.  The second is the settlement likely pending from Brian Clower’s lawsuit to claim the severance he was denied by Wilkinson, and the pain and suffering resulting from Wilkinson’s management of the Public Safety Department, which created an inhospitable working environment.  If the Council votes to settle rather than let the lawsuit go forward, those facts will die with the rest of the weekly news - which, with Wilkinson gone, may be the best place for them (until the next despot arrives.)  But the price of that silence comes due immediately.

     If the Council bears any responsibility in this cash flow crisis, it is in approving Wilkinson’s goodbye party.  You may (or may not) remember, however, that the three council members who were most likely NOT to approve it were sidelined by Wilkinson’s charge of conspiracy (which was dismissed last month by the DA.) 

     Aided and abetted by Mario Zamora, the city attorney, it was a stunt that worked.  Two of the three were excluded from this vote (Padilla and Mecum) while Sanchez was elected to join Salinas and Kimball to maintain a quorum, where his severance package was approved.  From their long terms on the council, Salinas and Kimball also bear responsibility for supporting Wilkinson’s appointment in the first place and negotiating his overly-powerful contract.  If you want to blame the Council for the 10% pay cut, put it squarely on them.

     Where I want to put the blame is on false witness.  You remember: it’s that thing we’re not supposed to bear against each other in the community of faith, the ninth of the Ten Commandments, the anchor of the Judeo-Christian world.  Old Testament theologian Walter Brueggemann says the Ten are the framework for another kind of world - Yahweh’s - one where “the big ones do not eat the little ones,” where instead people strive to reduce the size difference, working with kindness for the equality of all.  Not bearing false witness, he says, is particularly important in government where, if there is no truth, there can be no justice.  The big ones will have the little ones for dinner, literally, on a daily basis.  That’s what’s happening here.

     Neighbors, your words still ring in my head:  “It’s always been this way - you’re not going to change it.”  I don’t think that’s true.  What’s true is that we have a vipers’ nest of false witness in this town, and it will continue to claim our vitality as long as we turn our backs on it, feeling helpless.  But when we’re ready to call false witness on the carpet and declare zero tolerance, we’re on our way to a brave new world:  something leaning toward the Kingdom, or at least the democracy Jefferson tried to provide.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Trudy Wischemann is a neophyte Quaker/Methodist/Franciscan/Populist who writes.  You can send her your false witness sightings c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Two Tanks

Published Aug. 12, 2015 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     I hope some of you appreciated our trip up Rocky Hill last week, a little break from thinking about the City of Lindsay.  For me it helped bring things back into focus: they’ve been moving so fast, I was seeing double.
    
     Take the two tanks of gas that had to be dropped from Bill Zigler’s contract as interim city manager, for instance.  Such a modest request from such a modest person, small compensation for what will be a significant increase in his responsibilities. Who would oppose such a paltry request?
    
     Clearly Mr. Zigler had calculated the two tanks as an approximation of what his increased expenses might be for these additional responsibilities, and we can admire his conservative math.  Politically, however, it was an enormous miscalculation, because that qualitative number stuck out like a sore thumb and revealed what no one would have seen before then:  the $400/month vehicle allowance that he already gets even though he doesn’t bring his car to work a majority of the time.  He rides his bike from his home in Exeter.  How can he use his car for work if it isn’t here?
    
     Councilman Mecum was the one who spotted it, blew the whistle and dropped a red flag on that play.  He would pay for it later in the white man’s news, as he often does for taking the side of the peoples’ purse.  “What’s this ‘two tanks of gas’?” he asked, pointing to its absurdity as a budget line item.  “Two tanks for what, a Volkswagon? an F-16?” 
    
     He was discussing substituting a reasonable mileage compensation arrangement to replace the vehicle allowance when he was cut off by Councilwoman Kimball.  Pam informed Steve this wasn’t the right time to be questioning contracts.  She was wrong: the two-tank addition was a change from the contract that had been worked out in closed session the week before.  The city manager’s contract is the only one the Council gets to approve, and an open, honest discussion about how we should compensate our city employees was in the public interest.  She cut it off.
    
     Backpeddling, Zigler withdrew the two-tank request and reminded the Council this was the contract they were offering him, not the other way around (as if those two tanks were their idea.)   His guile annoyed Councilwoman Sanchez, who voted no with Councilman Mecum, tying the vote 2-2.  This delayed the approval of the contract until the following regular meeting, where it was discussed behind closed doors.  Hopefully the Council at least considered Mecum’s mileage compensation idea then for future use, because afterward Zigler’s contract was approved 4-1 with the flat $400/month vehicle allowance intact, no vehicle use or mileage accountability required.  I hope $3,600 is enough to cover Bill’s bicycle repairs over the next year.
    
     This man, Bill “Bike Lane” Zigler, is the same man who convinced Mayor Padilla two years ago to sign a resolution asking CalTrans to change the alignment of Highway 65 to correct for indelicate entrances to Country Waffles and the Super 8 Motel.  CalTrans’ response was to move the take-off point of the new route to the south of town so that it will now bypass Lindsay completely 1/2 mile to the west. 
    
     Mr. Zigler was excited by the prospect of opening land for commercial development along the new route.  However, even Danny Salinas, who originally had supported the CalTrans resolution, saw that it’s the kiss of death for the development we now have.  Yet they hired this man to run our town - for the interim.
    
     May they show greater judgment in choosing someone qualified for the permanent position.

(Footnote:  Since submitting this piece for publication, I have learned that I made two substantial errors which I would now like to correct.  First, Councilman Mecum said "F-150," not "F-16."  The principle is the same, but my mind took his question to a logical extreme.  Second, apparently Mr. Zigler did not know the two-tanks provision was in the contract, so he couldn't have concocted the idea.  According to Finance Director Tamara Lakin, it was a residual from Mr. Zamora's merger of the city manager contract with Mr. Zigler's contract for department head of Planning and Economic Development.  Mr. Zamora had not been approved to make such a merger, and apparently Mr. Zigler had not read the contract carefully, so I don't know who's really to blame for that faux pas.  My assumption that Mr. Zigler had devised the two-tank number may have been logical but it was unfounded.  My concern about the vehicle allowance stands, however.)

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Trudy Wischemann is a writer trained in environmental planning who is aghast.  You can send her your thoughts on public process c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or visit www.trudysnotesfromhome.blogspot.com and leave a comment there.

Heart of the Mountain

Published Aug. 5, 2015 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

     I’ve been grateful to have some extra work in Exeter this month.  It gets me out of town, which is great for anyone, but especially for community watchdogs.  Provides perspective, if you know what I mean.

     I take the backroads most of the time.  Travelling from Lindsay to Exeter, I take Parkside up to Myer, down to Spruce, crossing the canal twice.  At Spruce I either stay on Myer, going past the Sun-Pacific packinghouse with its decent rail crossings, or turn right and go north to Firebaugh, taking my chances crossing the tracks near Cosart’s Shop.  Either way, I’ve travelled through the countryside between our two towns, passing homes and businesses, fields and groves belonging to members of both communities.  It’s a way of staying in touch with the rural landscape – the people and land - that I love.

     But the highlight of the trip is going past the Source of it all.  It’s the northernmost half mile of Parkside, heading up the steep incline of Rocky Hill, staring straight into its heart.  The hill was formed by a small pluton (a polyp of magma that rose through the earth’s crust toward the surface.)  That molten rock intruded the sediments of Valley fill and cooked them to a fine-grained fare-thee-well, producing the smooth slopes surrounding the hill’s bouldered, granitic core. 

     This heart doesn’t throb.  Its stillness is part of its beauty, broken only by echoes bouncing off the rounded rock surfaces - echoes of crows calling, hawks whistling, small rocks falling, the audible signs of nature at work.  There are visible signs as well, from the microscopic breaking of mineral grains as the rocks’ surfaces weather, to the soil scarps left behind when gravity pulls another massive boulder down to a new level.  Many things grow in the cracks, from mosses and lichens to blue oaks, delighting lizards, snakes, birds and mammals of many sizes.

     It was the first landscape feature I was introduced to by Tulare-born geographer Bill Preston when he began showing me around his beloved Basin, and it has been a touchstone for me ever since.  Before I found the house I would buy in Lindsay, I dreamed I was riding my bike up Parkside to visit Rocky Hill’s heart, seeing myself below from above, as if suspended from ravens’ wings.  Since moving here I have dreamed myself floating above that slope several times.

     When my car isn’t running well, I can take a less strenuous route to work, sticking to the flats.  But I miss the holiness when I do.  On my way to Quaker Meeting one Sunday morning during a dense Tule fog, the entire hill was invisible.  Going up that last half mile of Parkside, I felt like I was leaving the earth’s surface, driving straight into nothingness.  Then the dark outline of the heart appeared like a premonition or a promise.  It took my breath away.

     I think one of the things we love about mountains is the effect of their presence on us.  I grew up in view of Mt. Ranier, a dormant volcano in Washington, which was so majestic and awe-inspiring I felt I belonged to it, despite the fact it might blow its top.  For the whole family, a good day weatherwise was described as one where “You could see the mountain today.”  When I was 17 we left it and moved to Maui, where Haleakala (which had already blown its top) sortof took its place.  But from my 20^th year until my 43^rd, I had no mountain, no centerpost to keep me grounded to the earth.

     From the end of my front sidewalk in Lindsay I have a distant view of Rocky Hill.  I’m comforted by having that peak nearby, one with an igneous heart.  One made from the earth’s blood rising to the surface, reaching for air and maybe even admiration.  Maybe love.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Trudy Wischemann is a geomorphically-inclined writer who respects forces that can’t be seen.  You can send her your mountain love letters c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.