WATER BILLS--CITY SWINDLE, PART II

The swindle is known to everyone: Water Section, Utilities Department, Utilities Board of Commissioners, City Council, City Manager.  My 10 November presentation to the Board outlined the problem with the disparity between billed water usage and the improbabilities of actual water usage, with the disparity imputed to a leak.  Councilors on the Board, Tessa Abeyta and Johanna Bencomo, seemed uninterested, fiddled with papers, and avoided looking at me.  Mayor Ken Miyagishima, all Councilors, and City Manager Ifo Pili have the facts; they received my earlier blog and have received this one.

 

Afterwards, Ray Hickman, a Board member, offered to review this problem, which has persisted for years and which Water Section personnel have insisted is mine, not theirs.  He visited on 15 November, wrote me on 9 December, and discussed its findings with me on 16 December.  When he visited, he impressed me with his engineering background and his data-analytical and problem-solving approach.  I did not expect him to discover the leak in the yard or house, where Water Section personnel could not find it.  I hoped that he could trace the problem to a data-processing error in the Water Section’s new technology.

 

Hickman had the facts.  He had the text of my Board presentation, with its copy of my latest bill, which shows October-to-October monthly water usage; he had another copy which I gave him on his visit.  I say so because, in our discussion of his letter, he claimed not to have had that bill.  I reminded him of the copy which I had given him, but he gave no indication that he would pursue my problem further—to me, a sign of bad faith.

 

The explanation of my highly variable bills for water usage is a leak, but it makes no sense.  On the one hand, the leak is a small, steady one throughout the year.  When read at any time of year, the water meter shows a flow of about 1.5 gallons per hour (GPH), or about 1080 gallons per months (GPM).  Hickman writes that “A closer study of the current data for your home shows a continuous flow rate of not less than 1-2 gallons per hour at all hours of the day.”  I believe that this “closer study” was nothing more than looking at and accepting Water Section data.  Usage ranging from 720-1440 GPM ranges from one-fourth to one-half of my average water usage of 3000 GPM.  I do not want to waste water, but I do not worry about a bill including the costs of this wasted water.

 

Hickman also writes that “A constant leak of 2 GPH should generate a puddle or wet spot somewhere visible.”  “Should”: but, as he saw, it did not, in the yard or house.  He suggested shutting off the water softener, his suspected source, with tubing discharging into a drain, and reading the meter to see if it stopped showing a flow.  Instead, I ran the tubing to a bucket; after 4 hours, the bucket held only about two or three tablespoons of water.  The reality: no leak, only a meter reporting a flow which does not exist.

 

On the other hand, the leak is a large, fluctuating one for about six months of the year; it rises to and then falls from a peak up to 12,000 GPM.  By claiming not to have the bill, Hickman says nothing about a GPH reading—it should be 16.6 GMH—which would account for such a large, long-duration surge; no data support my billed amount.  Again, I do not want to waste water, but I do worry about a bill including the costs of this wasted water.

 

Without my bill, Hickman cannot write about “a puddle or wet spot somewhere visible” of the size implied by a leak of this size.  Such a “puddle” of 12,000 GPM billed less 1,080 GPM used (12,000-1,080 = 10,980) would have a volume of 1471 cu ft (1 gal = 0.134 cu ft), enough water to fill a swimming pool roughly 4 ft x 20 ft x 18.4 ft.  Leaks of February’s 11,000 GPM and March’s 12,000 GPM could have filled two swimming pools, should have been visible, or should have produced marshy ground destabilizing my house, boundary walls, driveway, or sidewalk.  The reality: no leak of this magnitude.

 

Historical patterns are relevant though, so I am told, the Water Section destroyed its records when it installed its new metering system three or four years ago.  From 2007 through 2014, my wife and I used about 2000 to 4000 GPM, depending on whether we were watering vegetation.  Since then, as a single occupant and with no watering, my usage for half the year has averaged 3000 GPM even with the new metering system, with no increase because of a leak.  This pattern suggests that there is no leak, despite a water meter indicating water flow.  Water Section personnel on several visits and Hickman on his one visit have looked for a leak in my yard and house, have found none, but have insisted on one.

 

The persistent inability of Water Section personnel or Hickman to find a leak of any size, large or small—actual water, not meter readings—or to explain huge fluctuations suggests that their hypothesis is totally fact-free and false.  They cannot urge both a small leak and a large leak because leaks do not fluctuate wildly.  Nevertheless, they repeatedly urge me to have exploratory work done in my yard and house to find a leak; they want me to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars though, if I find nothing, they bear no responsibility for my expenses.

 

But, when I suggest that they consider whether a new system could have any number of hardware, software, or management problems, both Water Section personnel and Hickman become defensive.  The reaction is typical of bureaucrats whose arrogance is compounded by incompetence, if not criminality.  Hickman’s pretense at investigating my problem displays the fate which befalls many who are supposed to oversee or regulate public agencies: capture by agency personnel.  In this case, Hickman sought to help Water Section personnel in a cover-up.

 

The Water Section lacks evidence that the water system is actually delivering water to my property which is leaking into my yard or house.  All it has are meter readings and office computers spinning out numbers which correspond to no reality—water—on the ground.  I am being overbilled, and I am probably not alone in being overbilled.  Maybe the Utilities Department’s billing personnel have their thumbs on the scales and their hands in the till.  The City must hope that an enterprising investigative reporter does not disclose that Las Cruces, like Deming, has been padding the water bills of city residents.

PERFORMANCE POLITICS IN LAS CRUCES

Performance politics has come to Las Cruces.  One such performance occurred in a City Council meeting on 5 December.  In the portion of the agenda allotted to Councilors’ comments, Johanna Bencomo complained about the criticism which she has received from Progressive groups like the ACLU and CAFé for not supporting a proposal for a civilian police oversight board.  Her pity-party performance was not only unbecoming, but also unpersuasive because she revealed her confusions on the issue of police reform which apparently prevent her from taking any position at all and sticking to it.

 

[Note: In exchanges with some of supporters of this proposal when it was merely an idea, not a document, I opined that it was unwise as a first, not a last, step toward police reform.  I proposed smaller, preliminary steps to build public support for larger ones.]

 

I have noted before that 2 years ago, in the City Council meeting addressing the Eight Can’t Wait proposals, Council Bencomo advocated a citizen review board until, chided by the Mayor for disloyalty to the police, she promptly caved.  In short, she was for a citizen review board until she was against it.  So much for her convictions, her courage, and her trustworthiness on the issue of police reform.

 

Later, I discovered how untrustworthy Councilor Bencomo is.  At my invitation, she zoomed my meeting with the City Manager about my complaint about phony allegations.  She heard him agree that all five were false and should be withdrawn.  She heard him say that I deserved an apology.  She heard him request a draft apology from me to be sure that he got it right in the details on which I insisted.  When she learned that he offered an apology which did nothing to which he had agreed, she did not even contact him for an explanation.  If she could not even ask him why he did not keep his word, she is unlikely to question officials about police conduct.  If she does not want answers, she is likely to suppress facts about police misconduct.  When Council considered the period for cases subject to the police auditor’s review, she pointedly approved an end date which omitted my complaint.

 

During her remarks on police reform (video 3:53-3:56), Councilor Bencomo stressed that it is one of her top priorities, all the more so because of some recent serious cases of police misconduct.  But her three substantive comments indicate how unreliable she has become in matters of police reform.

 

First, she dismissed the proposal for an oversight board, though drafted by five very smart people, including at least one lawyer, as “superficial.”  The draft which I have seen, probably not a later one which she has seen, does not seem at all superficial.

 

Second, she claims that such oversight or review boards have failed everywhere.  The claim is simply false, and she should know it.  The record is mixed; for various reasons, some have succeeded, some have failed.  The reasons for failure: police opposition is constant, official support inconstant or conduct corrosive, and public support variable.  A DOJ study indicates the issues involved and the record thus far.

 

Third, and most important, she explains that her difficulty with police reform is reconciling two entirely separate considerations: on the one hand, support for the police; on the other hand, police accountability.  She criticizes her critics for not understanding their separation.  This nonsense unwittingly reveals that she cannot relate performance to accountability in police work—a disconnect which makes police reform impossible.

 

In my experience, I have found that police officers defend their “brothers”—today, they would also defend their “sisters”—when it comes to public criticism of individual officers.  But good police officers support reform efforts which raise and enforce policing standards and enable leadership to hold all officers accountable for their conduct and to retrain or terminate bad ones.  To support police—all police, good and bad apples alike—but not police reform when it is necessary is to undermine good police by protecting bad police.

 

But such is Councilor Bencomo’s preferred position: a flimsy rationalization with which she attempts to appease and please both sides of this issue; it is a script for her political performance.  Regrettably, it displays her ignorance of the relationship between performance and accountability in police work, and suggests the same ignorance in other areas of public service.  Or is Councilor Bencomo afraid to make judgments or decisions?  Whatever the reason, her inability to hold public employees accountable for their work means that she is miscast as an elected official and unfit for elected public office with responsibilities for ensuring public service.  When the time comes, voters, especially her Progressive supporters, should hold her accountable for her pathetic performance.

THE OUTBREAK OF ANTISEMITISM: EVERYWHERE, ANYWHERE, EVEN HERE

Thanks to Kanye West (aka Ye), Nick Fuentes, and Donald Trump, antisemitism is prominently featured in national media reports and editorials.  This coverage reminds those who get out-of-town news about the attacks on Jewish synagogues east and west: The Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, PA, in October 2018, and Congregation Chabad in Poway, CA, in April 2019.  One writer calls the outbreak of antisemitic disparagement and disrespect as well as antisemitic violence a crisis for America as well as Jews.

 

The response by Very Important People in Washington is predictable.  Some respond immediately; others wait, with fingers in the wind to tell which way the wind is blowing.  All know that antisemitism must be publicly renounced, not countenanced.  All declare that “antisemitism has no place in America.”  The declaration is absurd.  Antisemitism has a place in America, in fact, in many places in America—everywhere, anywhere, even here—because most Americans are Christians and most Christians are antisemitic.  They are antisemitic because they have been raised in a faith rooted in anti-Judaism.

 

Update: Today’s White House roundtable discussion to be led by Doug Emhoff, Jewish husband of Vice President Kamala Harris, will be a bust because it will not address anti-Judaism, the precondition and precursor of Christian antisemitism.

 

The distinction between anti-Judaism and antisemitism is that between disagreement with and opposition to Judaic beliefs, principles, and values; and hatred of or action against Jews, who accept Judaism as their religious culture—respectively.  (The same distinction exists in today’s politics, in which differences of policies between Democrats and Republicans have morphed into personalities, with insults and hostilities.)

 

Anti-Judaism originates in Christian doctrines.  The radical difference between Christians and Jews are their beliefs about Jesus as the Messiah.  His Jewish Apostles at the time and Christians ever since have preached that Jesus fulfills the messianic expectations of the Prophets and fully realizes Judaism.  Christians preach that Judaism without Jesus is incomplete or imperfect.  They preach that Christianity has superseded Judaism and is superior to it.  They have failed to persuade most Jews, but they have not ceased to seek Jewish converts by force of arms if not by force of arguments.  Ascribing their failure to the nature of Jews as a proud and stiff-necked, also an ignorant and evil, people—evil specified by imputed flaws of character (e.g., greed) or conduct (e.g., loud, pushy)—, they initiate antisemitism.  They regard or resent the survival of Judaism (15 million Jews) as a reproach to the success of Christianity (2.2 billion Christians).  Anti-Judaic doctrines arising then and reinforced since enable Christian antisemitism.

 

Anti-Judaism is acquired by Christian education and reinforced by religious observance.  At home, Christians learn about Jesus’ miraculous birth at Christmas, and his miserable death at Easter—both the sum and substance of the Nicene and Apostles creeds.  In Sunday school, they learn the more detailed story of Passion Week, during which Jews allegedly instigated the crucifixion.  In church, they learn about the Day of Judgment, when Jews either accept Jesus as Christ or are damned forever.  If they read the New Testament or listen to sermons, they know the antisemitism built into the holiest books of the faith—sharply in the Gospel of Matthew; virulently in the Gospel of John.  These stories and services, acquired in childhood, reinforced thereafter, linger in memory and cannot easily or entirely be erased.  Anti-Judaism bides its time.

 

Whether from respect for religious freedom or regard for social respectability, the antisemitism of most Christian Americans is quiescent most of the time.  But quiescence does not imply non-existence or a latency from which antisemitism cannot be aroused.  For, in some Christian venues, antisemitism continues in sermons and in proselytizing.  Proselytizing efforts—Jews for Jesus is a notably offensive effort—reflect the Christian view of a competitive relationship between Christianity and Judaism.  Christians compete alone; Jews neither proselytize nor encourage converts.  In this context, pro-ecumenical talk, and talk about a Judeo-Christian tradition, are falsified by persistent anti-Judaic positions and antisemitic proselytizing efforts.

 

Ecumenical pretense is strongest in the Catholic Church, the tormentor of Jews for nearly two millennia.  Catholics cite the Second Vatican Council’s Nostra aetate (1965) as if it acknowledged Judaism as a legitimate faith.  But it does not respect Judaism or esteem Jews.  It merely commends them for their contributions to Christianity and, in doing so, demotes them to the status of useful subordinates.

 

One passage perpetuates anti-Judaic messages in its niggardly proscriptions.

 

Although the Church is the new People of God, the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God, as if this followed from the Holy Scriptures. All should see to it, then, that in catechetical work or in the preaching of the Word of God they do not teach anything that does not conform to the truth of the Gospel and the spirit of Christ.

 

There is nothing positive in this statement.  “The new People of God” demotes Jews and nudges them aside as the old people of God; proscribing their presentation as “rejected or accursed” in the “Holy Scriptures”—tacitly admitting prevailing abuses in the clergy—does not proscribe their presentation as such by other means; and the condemnations of Matthew and John are the “truth of the Gospel.”

 

Another passage points to omissions with antisemitic implications.

 

Since in the course of centuries not a few quarrels and hostilities have arisen between Christians and Moslems, this sacred synod urges all to forget the past and to work sincerely for mutual understanding and to preserve as well as to promote together for the benefit of all mankind social justice and moral welfare, as well as peace and freedom.

 

Omitted is a similar statement about Christians and Jews.  Not one word acknowledges, much less apologizes for, centuries of Christian abuse of Jews.  The omission is especially notable only two decades after the Holocaust, in which the Catholic Church played no saving and possibly an assisting role.  Also omitted is one word urging Christians and Jews to work for “mutual understanding” or “social justice and moral welfare, as well as peace and freedom.”  Implied by these omissions: complacency about the horrific results of recent history and reluctance to associate with Jews in joint efforts to worthy ends.

 

Nostra aetate attempts to foist off on the world a pretense of reconciliation with Jews.  Some Jews have accepted this albeit dishonest attempt in the hope of better to follow.  But it cannot reconcile Christians and Jews.  Even so, some Catholics have believed that no such statement even pretending to reconciliation is desirable.  That was then.

 

This is now.  In a Vatican Radio broadcast at Santa Marta 50 years later (10/13/14), when one Catholic spoke only to other Catholics, Pope Francis remarked, as reported:

 

“Why were these Doctors of the Law unable to understand the signs of the times?…First of all, because they…had perfectly systemized the law…”.

 

“They failed to understand that the law they guarded and loved” was a pedagogy towards Jesus Christ. “If the law does not lead to Jesus Christ,…if it does not bring us closer to Jesus Christ, it is dead…”.

 

There is no respect in the Pope’s snide phrase “Doctors of the Law,” as if Jewish religious leaders—at the time, Sadducees and Pharisees; today, rabbis—are lawyers.  His second paragraph perpetuates the Christian doctrine of supersessionism, derogates Jewish law, and thus disparages the integrity of Judaism.  A shorter, clearer rejection of an essential feature of Judaism there probably is not.  A counter-parallel would be a rabbi declaring the Trinity hocus-pocus designed as a come-on to pagans, whose pantheon consisted of many gods.  And a clearer example of Christian competitiveness or defensiveness would be hard to find.  Otherwise, the Pope, leader of over 1.3 billion Catholics, would not find it necessary to inveigh against the faith of 15 million Jews and use insulting language to provide some measure of relief from continuing theological insecurity.

 

The New Testament is the basis for the anti-Judaism and antisemitism of the diverse array of Christians and the range of churches of a fissiparous Christianity.  Little help against anti-Judaism or antisemitism can come from either Christians or their churches until they ignore motes in others’ eyes and attend to the logs in theirs.

 

I toss out this tentative idea for addressing antisemitism by addressing anti-Judaism: If Christians believe that Jesus is the Messiah, I suggest that they believe in him as the Messiah who redeems the world and saves those who believe in him, and abandon the polemical enterprise of trying to prove by doctrine-driven interpretations of Jewish Holy Scriptures and stories of his life that he is the Messiah mistreated by his fellow Jews.

 

I render a harsh judgment on antisemitism in Christianity and Christians.  I respect both up to, but not beyond, the point at which they articulate antisemitism and act in ways which derogate, disrespect, and abuse Jews.  I publish this harsh judgment because I want Christians to avoid behaving as many did in Nazi Germany.  From the earliest years of its regime, many Christians, latently antisemitic, ignored the little antisemitic events which, in aggregate, incrementally led to the acceptance of and prepared for the Final Solution.  I want them not to demean themselves afterwards as many Germans did with shabby excuses for tolerating or supporting the Holocaust.  Later, shocked and guilt-ridden by horrendous consequences of their antisemitism, many Germans, trying to exonerate themselves by pretending to innocence, claimed that they knew nothing.  I have heard this dishonest, cowardly defense of family relatives.  Its tacit claim is that ignorance denied them the opportunity which they would otherwise have courageously taken to resist.  There is no absolution for this lie.

 

In Las Cruces, senior officials in government—council, administration, law office, police department—were complicit in or tolerant of antisemitism in my minor case, with the tacit approval of informed Christian citizens.  I remind the latter of Dr. Martin Luther King’s words in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”: “We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.”  I doubt that such silent people are good people.

 

My concerns: indifference or inaction before a major episode of antisemitism here and the sequel of conventional, hypocritical official pronouncements expressing shock and dismay when evasion or cover-up cannot serve, and of conventional, hypocritical personal statements of pious regrets by Protestants and Catholics alike.

 

 

 

For more of my blogs mainly on economics, education, politics, and religion go to firstimpressionssecondthoughts.blogspot.com/.