EDITORIAL - So it’s official, the papers have been filed for a recall of Madera Mayor Andy Medellin. Next step is for the organizers to gather signatures of 3600 Madera voters who agree with them. Then, the most challenging step - convince a majority of the electorate that the Madera mayor needs to be removed from office to pay for the decisions of the entire city council. And who is going to convince the voters of this? The same group of folks that was not able to get a bond on the ballot to support the local animal shelter or to push for term limits for the Madera County Board of Supervisors?
There are questions to be asked and answered here right up front. The first of which is why this recall effort is focused on one member of the Madera City Council when the entire council is responsible for any decisions. Is it possible that the organizers of the recall do not understand what form of government the city of Madera operates under?
Yes Andy Medellin is the mayor of Madera but all that means is he is one member of the city council who is elected at large. It’s a symbolic title. The mayor in Madera has no other powers over and above those of any other city council member, with the exception of signing proclamations, presiding over the meetings and cutting ribbons at the openings of the latest sandwich shop or 99 cent store.
Perhaps they have been watching Fresno City governing and assume that Madera is arranged in the same way? The mayor of Madera and the mayor of Fresno do not have the same powers to control issues. In Fresno, the mayor is independent of the city council. He is like a governor or president. He does not even sit on the city council. Council meetings in Fresno are presided over by a council president, selected once a year by the city council like Madera used to do with their mayor eight years ago. When the city council was broken down into six district members, the mayor was elected at large by the entire city.
The recall organizer would have the voters believe that the issues are high salaries with the city’s administrative officers. That because the average income levels in Madera are sub-$50k, it “isn’t fair” the city manager or police chief who have been working in the field of city government are being paid over $250k. I guess these organizers want everyone to make the same amount regardless of experience, education or responsibility. That sounds a lot like what the little know Marx Brother Karl used to say, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”
Are the salaries in Madera’s City Hall too high? Yes, but this is also true of the Madera Government Center, and Fresno City Hall. Everywhere in the state of California local municipal salaries and Cal-PERS retirement pay outs are out of control. Madera County CAO Eric Fleming makes more that former Madera City Manager David Tooley made. Former Madera County Probation Chief Harry Nabors brings home nearly the same in retirement that he made working. Where is the outrage with the county?
Why is Madera Mayor Andy Medellin who has only been mayor for less than two years being singled out for the salary increases when four other council members and a completely different mayor also voted in favor of the raises in 2015?
Why is Madera Mayor Andy Medellin who has only been mayor for less than two years being singled out for raises in the water and sewer rates when five other council members and a completely different mayor voted for these raises in 2016?
Could it be that each of the recall organizers has a personal agenda or gripe against the Madera mayor or former police chief that has nothing to do with city water rates or administrative salaries? Maybe we should look at each individual organizer?
Originally there was a group on Facebook of ten people calling for the recall of the Madera mayor. Kay Rhodes, Vicki Sloan and Michael Pistoresi seem to be the founding members of that group which has since disappeared. It has been replaced with a Facebook fan page with twenty members and administrators. Little information on the recall is offered on the Facebook page other than a political sign designed by Kay Rhoads’s business Peck’s Printing.
Let’s look at issues these three have had with Mayor Medellin. Kay Rhoads, while not the most educated person on the workings of city government by her own account has a beef with the city council because they would not gift her non-profit organization (Friends of the Madera Animal Shelter) with a $100,000 check per year – FOREVER. The council voted 7-0 to deny the request and Ms. Rhoads along with several other members of the FMAS (Vicki Sloan, DJ Becker and Velvet Rhoads) were very upset with the council.
The city asked the organization to apply for yearly community block grants with the city to find the funding, but Rhoads who is the treasurer of the FMAS did not want to go that route. For her it was easier for the city to just write a check for an additional $100K, above what the city already provides to the county for their share of the county animal shelter. The precedents this would set for the city would have been political suicide. It would have created a line of non-profits demanding the city fund their efforts too.
Vicki Sloan is a special case. She seems to be the only one in Madera that actually wants to see former Madera Police Chief Michael Kime return to Madera. Nearly everyone at the Madera Police Department was happy to see him go. I know that my relationship as a journalist with the Madera Police Department has greatly improved since Kime “retired”. So why does Vicki Sloan desperately want Kime to return to Madera? Not even Kime’s wife wanted Kime in Madera. Well, at least she didn’t want herself here in Madera with Kime. I can understand that. He must really snore.
Sloan was a long time bartender at the Madera Valley Inn and Kime was known to frequent the bar at the MVI for long periods of time after his shift was over at the former police station next to the Madera City Hall. As Sloan put it in an email to me, “Kime’s wife was in Sacramento. Mr. Kime was new to Madera then. He spent time there visiting with the people who would stop in.”
Sloan says she was Kime’s daycare provider for his animals and he was often at her home. She feels that during the time Kime spent at her house they were under surveillance from other members of the Madera Police Department and even said her landlord was approached by officers asking to conduct surveillance. “The property owner to the south at 501 North O Street is Mark Meyers. He’s been telling people at the Elks Lodge that Mr. Frazier asked him for a favor - to allow two of his plain clothes officers on his property to do surveillance on me and Mr. Kime. Apparently Mr. Frazier was on a mission to prove that Mr. Kime and I were having an affair.”
So there is the real reason for the hatred Ms. Sloan has for the appointment of former Madera Police Chief Steve Frazier as interim city manager or for any salary raises Steve Frazier may have received. At the end of this editorial I will include a link to a PDF file that contains the entire email Ms. Sloan sent to Big Valley News in February. It is not only entertaining to read, but in my opinion sad to read the paranoid conspiracy theories of how the police department was out to get Michael Kime and Vicki Sloan.
Now that leaves the city’s Redevelopment Developer from DMP Construction Michael Pistoresi. What more can I say about this guy that I haven’t in previous stories?
Mike Pistoresi is upset that the Redevelopment Agency no longer exists and his best friend Jim Taubert has retired from the city. Pistoresi made a lot of money from that relationship. Pistoresi is also upset that the city is holding him to state and federal requirements for a percentage of green spaces to be included in all new developments. Basically Pistoresi is an entitled little baby who is throwing a temper tantrum because he no longer can bully his way through city hall.
Now, having said that, I will probably get a text message from him telling me how my father was a fall down drunk or my mother an embezzling criminal. Neither of them is still around to defend themselves but that is Mike Pistoresi’s way of handling things. He is basically your old-fashioned school yard bully. His father never taught him how to argue without bringing mothers into it. How someone hasn’t punched him in the nose, I do not know. The one thing I know is he will never get the respect that Dave Berry always enjoyed at city hall and around the community. Dave Berry was class, Mike Pistoresi is an ASS.
There are personal reasons for each of these recall organizer’s efforts against the mayor and none of them have to do with salaries, water and Cal-PERS. Does the city have problems with these issues? Heck yes, just like every other municipality in the Central Valley. These are common problems. The problems we have at the Madera County Government Center however may be borderline criminal.
We have a Madera County audit coming out about Red Rock, the management company operating the landfill in Fairmeed that involves over $2 million of wasted tax dollars and campaign donations to David Rogers’s supervisor and Congressional campaigns. We have a billion dollar housing project along the Highway 41 corridor that has netted thousands of dollars for the supervisor’s campaign accounts. And with all the talk about transparency, the board of supervisors just settled a $36k lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union after the board were caught violating the Ralph M Brown Open Meeting Act regarding deportation and the county jail.
This recall effort is nothing more than a big distraction so the Madera Taxpayers don’t look across the street at what is really happening at the Madera County Government Center. It was all started by a newspaper, the Madera Tribune that is on the verge of closing and is desperately trying to protect their number one advertiser, the County of Madera.
It started when the newspaper colluded with a former criminal, I mean used car salesman, I mean developer Mike Pistoresi over salaries on information provided to them buy the former head of the Madera Redevelopment Agency, Pistoresi’s best friend Jim Taubert. Pistoresi and the Tribune just forgot to mention that Taubert also received a huge raise from the city (third highest) and had a largest payday in the “other pay” column on the California Transparency Website from his sick leave while he was battling cancer.
The Tribune and Pistoresi couldn’t use Taubert’s numbers because they knew what they were from. But they mislead the public with all the other city administrators salaries knowing that the people they were trying to rile up were not educated enough on how local government operates to understand what they were protesting about. They manipulated people like Kay Rhoads and Vicki Sloan who they knew already had an axe to grind against David Tooley, Steve Frazier and Andy Medellin.
They manipulated a bunch of kids that are trying to register people to vote and mislead them on how POWERFUL the position of Madera Mayor is (which it is not) and they have a large base to carry signs and protest at the council meetings. It doesn’t matter that many of these kids don’t even know what form of government the city of Madera even operates under or who even hired the chief of police.
Donald Trump said in the last Presidential Election “I love the poorly educated.” This is exactly what is happening with this recall effort. Mike Pistoresi is hoping he can get rid of all the people in Madera City Hall that are telling him NO and replace them with council members like Derek Robinson who has no clue what he is doing on that council in the first place but sure does like being invited to catered events.
Madera ….Mike Pistoresi and the Madera Tribune are trying to hoodwink you with false information and lies. Know the real reasons he is pushing this recall and don’t fall for it.
