Call it the politics of self interest. I think of it as NIMBYism. And in the past month, we've seen several examples of the stances taken by Not-In-My-Back-Yard types, stances that are complicated by being both valid and somewhat short-sighted.
At the March 17 Jackson Planning Commission meeting, the residents of Artesia Court came out to oppose plans for a nearby drug and alcohol recovery center. Services like these are rare enough in the county, and opening a community facility where substance abusers and their families can get help for their addictions should be supported.
Vocational training and child care would also be among the services offered at the Jackson Rancheria-sponsored project, which would be housed in an old converted church in the 900 block of Broadway. But neighbors of the proposed facility worried about deteriorating property values and attracting an undesirable element.
"We recognize the need for this," said Don Gagnon, a retired police officer and member of Concerned Citizens of South Jackson, a 10-member ad hoc committee planning to appeal the commission's 3-2 vote. "This is just a terrible location."
In light of the comments made last week by Bethany Renfree, a single mother of five and recovering alcoholic who looked forward to visiting the facility, those concerns seem comparatively minor. Renfree was right when she told commissioners addiction wasn't a problem that could be ignored. That's especially true if you consider the results of a recent United Way study, which showed higher levels of alcohol and drug use among local students compared to the rest of the state in 2005 and 2006.
But Gagnon's concerns about placing a recovery center in a primarily residential area carry some merit. "It's not like there's a shortage of vacant buildings" in the city that would be more appropriate, he points out.
Location was also an issue at the March 11 board of supervisors meeting, where the residents of Ione, Buena Vista and an unsmudged Jackson Valley mounted a successful underdog campaign that convinced two supervisors to block a controversial casino agreement. It should have registered as grassroots civic involvement at its finest. Ordinary ranchers, homeowners, bus drivers and their neighbors poured out their hearts to effect political change. Only their efforts were tainted by the actions of a fear-mongering minority who went too far by threatening supervisors and getting ugly with staff.
The effort to move the proposed site of the casino has also undercut the valid arguments against constructing a second Indian gaming facility on 17 acres of rolling tribal land bounded by agricultural lands to the north and private wooded property in the south. It's not that the current location is particularly suitable - it isn't - but the implications of reservation shopping are troubling. Supervisors don't want it in their districts, Jackson Valley residents don't want it in their backyards and Ione Miwoks don't want it near their burial grounds, all of which is understandable.
Jerry Cassesi, chairman of the Ione citizens group Friends of Amador County, told the Ledger Dispatch he could see himself reluctantly accepting a casino out on Carbondale Road and Highway 16. His preference, however, is that casinos should be in "metropolitan areas with the infrastructure to handle them." Moving it, he said, "should've been the county's driving force."
But being OK with something as long as it's someone else's problem is not an act of responsible governance.
This whole casino ordeal has been a divisive issue to be sure, with normally level-headed allies pitted against each other and longtime antagonists making for strange bedfellows. I, too, have felt the undertow pull me into a sea of bubbling rhetoric. Now that a five-member tribe has given the county a third chance at an agreement that will likely come as close as we can to mitigating the innumerable negative impacts of another casino, I'm going to give supervisors a chance to get their house in order. Who knows? Maybe they've been right all along. I certainly haven't.
Impassioned rhetoric also factored into a March 5 school board meeting, at which band students and their parents successfully lobbied trustees not to make cuts to a music program that would have resulted in the dismissal of a popular teacher and gutted the program. It was an impressive show of solidarity, but one that didn't extend to other aspects of local education. After cheering their victory, the majority of attendees filed out as reductions were made to other services. They had won their battle. Let the school nurses and librarians fend for themselves. But district officials still have the hard task of cutting more than $2 million from an already impacted budget, and those cuts will have to come from somewhere.
In Amador County and elsewhere, you're only as strong as your causes celibre. But the personal and the public aren't mutually exclusive. A substance abuse recovery facility in the county and honest dialogues about what we can do about casinos and schools is in everyone's self interest.
| Raheem Hosseini |