On Betterment......

I woke up Sunday morning with “People for a Better Lindsay” on a banner in my mind.  At first I thought it was an organizing instinct getting the better of me.  Then I realized it was a verbal challenge:  define “better.”

For me, Lindsay would be better if the planners left it alone.  I think there are many who feel like I do, that many “improvements” made over the past 10 years have actually degraded something that was precious.  There are many, however, who welcome the changes and feel their lives improved by them.  I do not mean to disparage that, or to sit blind to the fact that some changes were needed for economic reasons.  There’s some tragedy in that these developments have made us economically weaker.

Reviewing documents from the hospital district files, I discovered a moment where the planners took over that public board.  It was in a memorandum of understanding crafted in 2001 between the newly-formed redevelopment agency and the hospital district after the hospital closed, when the district’s purpose had become hazy and thus its future.  “We’ll pool our resources and both become stronger in seeking solutions for the wellness of the Greater Lindsay community,” is the surface message of the document.  Who would have known then that the end of the park began there?  I doubt that the hospital’s board members did.

And what about the essential goal of all these improvements, which was to make Lindsay attractive to middle-class people who would then want to move here?  Even if it had worked, would it have made Lindsay better?  Perhaps it would have for the real estate developers who were in bed with the planners (as they usually are.)  But what about for those who live here?  How would increasing pressure on land values have improved the condition of farmworkers, whose life vulnerabilities have been used to score so much of the state and federal money for the improvements?

As I scan people’s groceries at RN Market, I look at the middle class people who live here now, glad to be getting to know them better.  Many are people whose parents were farmworkers who got a toe-hold on the American dream here because citrus towns offer winter work.  

The stability of near-year-round seasonal work, combined with the sweat and blood of those parents providing for their families, produced the wonderful population of my neighbors, who coach the youth of this town in their football and soccer leagues, girls basketball, Lindsay’s Skimmers.  Who run businesses that feed us and keep our appliances and plumbing running, our air conditioners serviced and our cars smogged, who sell us insurance and take our money at the bank.  Those who grew up here and stayed are living testimony to the value of immigrants and the importance of supporting their efforts to progress.

For me, a better Lindsay would be focused on growing our middle class, not importing them.

The Anaconda.....

“In your last column,” asked a respected businessman I barely know, “who is the falconer/snake handler?”
I told him what I think, implicating our former city manager, and was relieved when he said “I think so, too.” He added “He should be prosecuted,” and seem gratified when I replied “We’re still looking for a way.”
Other people stopped me to talk last week, mostly about the park. “I finally got over to look at it,” said one long-time friend “and I see what you mean.  It used to be so beautiful....” It’s past beauty was the most common remark. Of course, now it’s in the demolition phase; the park may be beautiful in some people’s eyes when they finish reshaping it.  But it will be smaller, less open and accessible, far less natural, and appropriate for a smaller range of people.
As you may have read last week, not everyone agrees with me that’s a bad thing.  “We need a middle class back in Lindsay,” many cry, as if we don’t have one. We do, and most of the people singing that song are middle class. The problem (for them) is that it is no longer the dominant class.  For those of us who share other values and have different socio-economic realities, that could be good.  But it’s hard to get that discussion on the table.
What keeps me writing and researching is the definite sense that this middle-class dream has been pursued, not only against the interests of working class folks, but also unlawfully. I see small lies in the grant applications, catch contradictory statements coming from staff, note serious misrepresentations on plans and negative declarations of environmental impact. Then there’s the closed, unresponsive city council with its defective procedures and sleights of hand.  What’s lying below, driving all this?
In conversation with one of the organizers who broke open the Bell scandal, Steven Mecum was given this analogy. “You’re digging, making public records requests, and you keep reaching in this hole and bringing up dirt that doesn’t add up to anything.  But if you keep digging, suddenly you’re going to find the anaconda.”
Steven’s lawsuit against the city originated when his public records requests were suddenly stonewalled by Rich Wilkinson right before he became permanent city manager. The requests had to do with property transactions, which is the same point where others’ requests also have been blockaded. I think the anaconda lives under the category “land.”
The falconer came from a Yeats poem I found years ago in Joan Didion’s Slouching Toward Bethlehem. It begins something like “Circling, circling in a widening gyre/the falcon can no longer hear the falconer. Things fall apart; the center cannot hold...” I sense right now this is what the City fears most: the falcon escaping, things falling apart.  
But the poem ends something like “what rough beast, its hour come round at last, now slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?” I think it’s the anaconda. I think not long after Y2K a rough beast slithered into Lindsay and took over. Whether that was our former city manager himself, or whether he was simply the snake handler, we may never know - unless we keep digging.

Guilt Trip......

I’ve been walking to our city park almost daily since the “renovation” began. Some days making that trip is like pushing against a wall, because I really don’t want to witness the losses.
  
But I’m going because I’m guilty of closing my eyes when the changes really began, first with the hospital’s demolition, then construction of the aquatic center.  Those two projects should have activated me, but I ran from them instead.  So think of this pilgrimage as my guilt trip.


One day last week a neighbor stopped me to give some friendly advice.  “Lay off the city,” was her message essentially,  “you’re alienating the people you’ll need to work with in the future.”  One grievance was bringing in “someone from the outside,” meaning my attorney friend Mr. Harriman.  “They’re just ignorant,” she said of the council, meaning not intentionally harmful, although she admitted not having researched the issues or attended meetings.  “This just makes Lindsay look bad,” she ended, mentioning friends in Visalia who now want to know all the scum.


I pondered her message for hours.  I’ve heard it before, and understand the truth in it.  What she doesn’t understand, and what I didn’t understand even a year ago, is how blind we have all been to what’s really going on, blindfolded by the combination of our small town politeness and a ring of deception in the City’s center.


“You need an attorney,” a county elections officer told Yolanda Flores every time she went there for help with the recall.  I was told the same thing, and it infuriated me.  Now I think she was pointing toward an important fact we overlooked:  that the council members effectively had an attorney in Julia Lew, even though defending their political seats is not her job.  We lost ground several times simply by how the rules were interpreted.


Having an attorney at the Feb. 14 council meeting made the difference between being able to have items removed from the consent agenda, which is common practice in exotic metropolises like Exeter, or not.  So far it hasn’t made a lot of other difference, except to scare the City into subtracting the sentence “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,” from the paragraph “Citizen Participation in Meetings” on the agenda packet’s cover sheet.  But I don’t think you can blame Mr. Harriman for that reduction in permissible citizen participation.


Our request to be placed on the agenda to discuss what the Brown Act requires for open government has not been answered.  The procedural defects in our city council meetings have been the cover for horrible mismanagement, badly conceived projects and fraud under Townsend’s reign.  They’re the glove for the hand of the falconer, and I think when we take that glove off we’re going to find it’s been a snake-handler instead.

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.