Friday, February 12, 2010

WATER WARS START AT HOME

Avonlea and Cranston, those famous small towns, have got nothing on Valier for story material, though it can crop up unexpectedly. Last night’s town council meeting was a good example. Jackie, the town clerk, had offered me an agenda earlier in the week which I declined, saying that I didn’t really care what was on the agenda because I watch the dynamics. She looked puzzled. No doubt she has not been subjected to as many classes and workshops and theories on group dynamics as I have in the course of the last fifty years -- not counting “Anne of Green Gables.”

As every political entity knows, pressure creates heat and we are no exception. It also encourages patriotism, so the meeting began with a Boy Scout color guard presenting the colors and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. At that point there were more kids than adults in the room, though maybe thirty chairs were arranged in preparation. The evening’s work started out peacefully and continued that way until the very last item: paying the big stack of bills waiting for approval. I used to leave at that point, but then I realized that there was something about that process that evoked more real discussion than anything on the formal agenda.

Sure enough, Jerry picked up the new lawyer’s bill and found the amount offensive. I’ve served on a jury with Jerry so I know that his attention to detail and just recompense is a sign of wary intelligence, which is why he runs a successful business. Much of the town’s underground infrastructure is in his head because he’s dug it all up to fix leaks and then reburied it. (The town is full of maps in people’s heads. Not on paper.)

The lawyers were only hired at the last meeting, arriving as a pair from Choteau, Stoney Burk’s firm. Stoney is -- or was -- my lawyer because research indicated he was one of the few honest lawyers around. Besides I’ve known his brother, Dale, pretty well since the Sixties when he was writing about Montana artists. He runs Stoneydale Press. But these youngsters are a different story. Stoney had written my will when I moved back here and owned property for the first time. It temporarily made him the executor of my estate until I found my brother’s daughter. She’s found now, so I didn’t need that will and swung by the office to pick up the old one.

These young lawyers wouldn’t give it to me. I’m still incredulous. I stormed and stamped and threw threats around. Stoney wasn’t there and couldn’t be reached by phone. It was a fencing match. The young one finally gave me an imitation will to get rid of me. When Stoney was told, he mailed me the original documents. At the Town Council meeting when they were interviewed they recognized me but couldn’t remember why. I told ‘em. They were critical of Stoney. I told ‘em what I thought of that. They said blithely, “Oh, do call us if you need anything.” It’s not me who has the need.

So the reason the bill from these guys was high was that we’ve got some people in town who have not been paying their water bills. The mayor called the lawyers to see whether it was legal to shut them off. Jerry was pointing out that he’d simply called the relevant state agency for direct advice and it cost NOTHING. So this was the first evidence of what happens when a corporate business trained person from out of state (the mayor) runs athwart of a local Montana businessman used to navigating the state regulations. I’ve been expecting this.

What I didn’t predict was two other people: Rod, another powerful and well-connected business man who doesn’t like fooling around with minutia and irrelevance and who is strong enough to face down even Jerry. He’s new to the council. The other person was Jackie, who has been pushed into cross-fire because she’s the one in the office that everyone calls. She’s bank-trained, very reluctant to offend anyone, loath to being forced into bill-collecting, and unused to having the mayor actually sitting in the office at the next desk. She felt very much blamed and criticized, entirely unjustly.

The struggle -- and it was a good faith struggle, not based on bad motives -- was about (in my opinion) the welter of guidelines for this issue of shutting water off. People never keep straight in their minds that there are two main kinds of law: actual written law (felony, misdemeanor, originating in Chinese boxes of jurisdiction), regulations developed by administrators or their boards which might have fees, penalties and so on, and tort law, which means that anyone could be sued for anything anytime. These people are in general folks who operate by rules rather than principles. The question of justice and good will didn’t come up. Jackie went for the town’s ordinance book several times. She lamented that there was no procedural handbook. The town’s two other employees, who knew more about this issue than anyone else in the room, said nothing. It was going their way.

Then came fear. The mayor pointed out that she was calling the lawyers to protect the council from lawsuits and suggested they could be sued over their decisions, exposing themselves, their businesses, their homes, and so on to huge loss. Rod said if that were true, he was resigning the council immediately. And you could expect no replacement. The discussion worked its way around to the idea of the council being protected unless they stepped outside their roles in a malicious or unjustified way. (This did this last summer, pushed beyond tolerance by a messy unmown yard, an obsession.)

Finally the discussion worked its way around to fairness and equity. Four people had been actually disconnected. Three had come up with the back bill immediately. They had been charged fifty dollars for being turned off and another fifty for being turned on. The man who offended the council most was a guy who came home at 5PM on Thursday, found his water off, knew the office was closed on Friday and that the weekend was a three day holiday. So he went out and turned the water back on himself. It was suggested that this was a FELONY and he could be jailed! The other three had paid $100 as what was now being called a “fine.”

I couldn’t resist breaking in. The “fee” or “fine” or whatever was imposed at a meeting I had attended. At that time there was no charge at all. A fee was supposed to recover the cost of labor for the city employees and was not a “fine” but a discouragement for people who repeatedly called the office to ask to have their water turned on or off. But turning the water off for not paying the bill is at the town’s behest, a drastic punishment in itself. To put it dramatically, the town was in the position of requiring people to buy the rope with which to hang them.

The secret of governing a small town is not allowing this sort of thing to fester into bad feeling that will certainly bring people to the meeting in a rage. But the problem is confusion, suspicions of malice, and insistence on plain raw power in the hands that hold the water valve wrench. At one point I caught the amused eye of the local county deputy, who has been educated to the idea that strict enforcement of the letter of the law is often incendiary when a friendly nudge might solve the problem. Especially in a small town where lives are interwoven over time, as deeply connected as water pipes.

After the meeting everyone cooperated to restore the hall's furniture for the Senior Citizen's lunch the next day.

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