Page 3 - Sanger Herald 1-3-19 E-edition

Random thoughts Difficult to understand and more difficult to explain ...
By Dick Sheppard
Best wishes for a happy, healthy and prosperous New Year to you and yours from all of us at the Sanger Herald!
•••
I've never been very
good at making and keeping
New Year's resolutions and I proved it when I resolved last week not to make any more new resolutions. However, Sunday morning I saw a hate filled conversation thread someone shared on Facebook Messenger. I immediate- ly broke my resolution not to make any more resolutions and resolved to unfriend anyone on Facebook who parrots the idiotic hate pro- paganda promoted by advocacy media, on my Facebook page.
I know Democratic, Republican, religious, agnostic, atheist, gay, straight, tall, short, fat and skinny people of almost every racial and ethnic group who disagree with me about one thing or another and I still consider them to be good people and still my friends.
If you are so pitifully gullible that you have allowed yourself to be brainwashed into believing that anyone who is not like you and anyone who disagrees with you about politics or religion deserves to be hated and demon- ized – you are not my friend – on Facebook or in the real world. But I’ll still wish you a mentally healthier and happier New Year.
Since I’ve already started resolving, I decided I’d might as well have at it for at least one more year. Last year's resolutions were too vague: be more spontaneous, more imaginative and more adventurous. I'm not sure I did any of those things.
This year I’ve decided to be more specific, at least specific enough so that by the end of 2019 I might be able to figure out whether
I actually followed through, assuming I can still find my list by that time.
I resolve, in 2019, to:
• have only one bloody Mary and eat only one instead of three biscuits covered in pork sausage gravy for my Sunday breakfast;
• eat donuts at the office only on Wednesdays unless someone brings them from Sam’s Donuts on some other day;
• not leave my driveway until I know the garage door has closed, instead of wondering about it when I’m halfway to the office;
• make a list before I go grocery shopping so I won't have to make a second and maybe a third trip;
• finish what I start, which means I won’t have nearly as much time to start so many things;
• let the Fresno County Superior Court presiding judge know we have space at the Herald we are willing to rent to the grand jury so its members assigned to Sanger won't have to keep driving back and forth to Fresno all the time; and,
• try to be as good as my little dog, Sadie, seems to think I am.
•••
This evening's city council meeting should
be worth attending.
You might even play a part in selecting a
new councilmember to represent district 1 in northeast Sanger, replacing Melissa Hurtado who resigned from the council on Dec. 2 and was sworn in as a state senator on Dec. 3.
The remaining four councilmembers will try to select Hurtado's replacement from among six applicants. If you're at the 6 p.m. meeting at city hall you'll have an opportu- nity to comment on each of the applicants.
See the story on today's front page of the Herald.
Not shown on the applications but worth noting, three of the applicants, Juan J. Alvarez-Tovar, Laura Banuelos and Anthony Espitia, appear to be new to the Sanger politi- cal scene. Three others, Marci Licon Cantu, Martin Castellano and Esmeralda Hurtado, can claim at least some awareness of how things work at city hall.
Licon Cantu is married to former city councilmember Raul Cantu, Castellano was on the council from 2000-2012 and Hurtado is the sister of former councilmember, now state senator Melissa Hurtado.
Castellano, by the way, was defeated by Melissa Hurtado in the 2016 election for the district 1 seat.
•••
Hurtado, looking and acting very senato-
rial, showed up at the Dec. 20 city council meeting to hand out waytogo certificates from the state senate to the four council- members she left behind in Sanger - and inadvertently became the focus of another one of those city council flaps that are diffi- cult to understand and even more difficult to explain.
The flap involved the 3.666 personnel evaluation rating, on a scale of 1 to 5, given to city manager Tim Chapa in the closed session meeting on Dec. 20 and announced by city attorney Hilda Cantu Montoy in the following open meeting. The then mayor pro tem Eli Ontiveros did not participate in the evalua- tion process. He said from the dais that he thought something illegal was going on and he didn't want to be a part of it. (Ontiveros was later replaced as mayor pro tem, at
the usual council reorganization, by Daniel Martinez.)
What apparently was going on was that even though Hurtado had resigned from the council she, in a way, was allowed to continue to participate in Chapa's evaluation process that culminated in the closed session.
With me so far?
While I can't validate most of what I'm about to share because it took place in closed session, it sounds as reasonable as other things that I know have occurred behind closed doors at Sanger city hall.
Ontiveros declined to comment beyond what he said from the dais. However, what
I heard from others who are in a position to know, was that Hurtado apparently turned in a written evaluation of Chapa before she left the council and it was added to the mix that resulted in the final evaluation.
The evaluation process had been going on since mid October and apparently the city attorney didn't have a problem with using Hurtado's earlier written evaluation even though Hurtado had not been a member of
the council for a couple of weeks. I couldn't help wonder what the shelf life of Hurtado's written evaluation might have been. Would it still have been valid and added to the mix if a replacement for her had been selected and sworn in? Was that, maybe, why the evalua- tion process, after going on for two months, was completed one meeting before Hurtado's replacement was scheduled to be selected?
Probably just a coincidence.
That 3.666 evaluation, I'm sure there is no significance to the .666, means Chapa will get a 3.666 percent salary increase added to the $14,057 per month he was making the last
time I looked. Not bad in a small town where, the last time I looked, Chapa's monthly pay- check will be about 10 times the per capita monthly income.
•••
Are there any ethical or legal issues with the way that personnel evaluation played out?
It probably depends on who you ask.
That's just the interesting way things work at our city hall.
That Comments, complaints and sugges- tions may be emailed to sangerherald@gmail. com or may be made by calling 875-2511
SANGER HERALD 3A THURSDAY, JANUARY 3, 2019 EDITORIAL & OPINION
Dick Sheppard
In my OPINION
In 2019 fight against the unacceptable
even when it appears to be inevitable
By Fred Hall
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Fred Hall
has returned to its status as a world leader; we have a president whose word actually means something and the world has become a safer place over the past two years.
Contrary to those indisputable facts, the Mueller investigation has gone into another year of its controversial hunt for Russian trolls who, according to the media and Democrats, stole the election for Mr. Trump against their terribly weak candidate. As hard as it may be to believe, we fully expect Ms. Clinton to mount a drive for the nomina- tion in 2020. At this point the only people even remotely associated with that “crime” are a group of Russians who Mr. Mueller indicted but will never see the inside of an American courtroom.
This - yes I am going to use the word - witch hunt has gone so far afield that anyone who ever knew the president or had any deal- ings with him is in danger from the assem- bled team of Democrat operatives and risks having their lives ruined over past tax issues or a whole litany of problems which have no connection to the original cause for action giventheIndependentCouncil'soffice. The “well” used for funding runs extremely deep with taxpayers being the often unwilling pro- vider for the Independent Council.
The only other indictments we've seen to this point involve what is called a process crime. Thatusuallyamountstobeingcaught in a perjury trap by the council's staff of Democrat donors and has little or nothing todowithwhatwasoriginallycharged. IfI were a friend of the president, at this point,
I would be worried about whether or not my dog has the appropriate license. It seems a pretty sure bet that Mueller and his merry band are rifling through records all the way from Washington to the local courthouse.
Meanwhile, in the feverish hunt for non- existentcollusion,everyoneseemstoignore all the wrong doing which poured forth from the Clinton campaign and the Clinton foun- dation. We're talking phony dossiers which were prepared by foreign agents and used by Obama officials and a really biased layer of management at Justice and the FBI to obtain FISA warrants to spy on the Trump campaign - a sorry episode never witnessed before.
What happens when government officials cannolongerbetrustedtoadministerthe law on a basis of a blind justice? What hap- pens when election results can no longer
be trusted because illegal foreign nationals are allowed to vote in places like California? What happens when Democrats want an open border, furthering the expansion of their available voter pool?
It seems the time has come for anyone who has ever had a cognitive thought to examine the evidence of where this new wave of politics is taking this great country and fight back.
But, as always, that's only one man's opin- ion
In addition to the Sanger Herald, Publisher Fred Hall oversees two other Mid Valley Publishing newspapers - Reedley Exponent, and Dinuba Sentinel. He can be contacted by phone at (559) 638-2244 or by email at fred@ midvalleypublishing.com.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their trail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight.
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
- Dylan Thomas 1914 – 1953
For decades, left-leaning politicians, spe- cialinterestgroupsandevenourjudicial system seem to have done everything in their power to alter our Constitution with claims thatitisamalleabledocumentwhichshould be open to interpretation to modern day stan- dards. Weevenhadarecentpresidentwho served two terms running on the platform that he was going to fundamentally change America. Never mind that everything, espe- cially the economy, went to “hell in a hand basket” our mainstream media obediently andlovinglyworshippedhim. Noonecan cite anything he did to strengthen America or make life better but that seems to be beside the point.
That Dylan Thomas poem—which is open to interpretation—always reminds me that everyone should fight against the unaccept- able,evenwhenitappearsinevitable. It seems to me that we've ceded the battle to those who would weaken America for far too long. ThankHeavenwefinallyhavealeader who is willing to take on tough tasks and is willing to fight even when it's not politically correct. Perhapsthetimehascomeforus
to join our leader in the struggle to save this great republic! People need to begin to real- ize that simply hating someone doesn't mean that they are right and he's wrong.
One can't help but have ambivalent thoughts about the year of 2018 as it draws to a close. It's been one of those years which has blessed Americans with the best of eco- nomic times and, yet, has been offset by an irrational hatred on the part of about half of Americans and our institutions for the man who is helping produce and deliver the good news.
Growth in a once stagnant economy has reached numbers one hasn't seen in years; poverty is down; unemployment numbers are at all time lows for everyone including tradi- tionally underemployed minorities; America
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