EDITORIAL - Well it is official Khalid Chaudhry and Mike Pistoresi’s efforts to recall Madera Mayor Andy Medellin were a total failure. After over nine months of questioning the integrity of our mayor and calling him corrupt and incompetent, these two men (one with a known criminal past) failed to gather more than a handful of members of the Friends of the Madera Animal Shelter and individual members of the Madera Votes group to sign the petition.
These two developers and the Madera Tribune would have had to gather 3000 plus signatures in order to hold a special election to ask the voters two questions, do they want to oust the mayor and who do they want to replace him. Despite working every weekend for the last two months gathering signatures at Citizen’s Business Bank on Howard Road, the group turned in only 67 signatures last Friday to the Madera County Elections Department. They were just a little short of the 3000 plus goal.
The Madera Tribune cannot even get 3000 people to subscribe to their newspaper. A newspaper that in the last few years has gone from printing six days a week to now only two. A newspaper that is not even printed in this county, even though this is supposed to be required in order to maintain its adjudication (ability to sell legal advertising to the government). Maybe the Tribune should spend a little more time figuring out how to regain subscribers instead of calling our mayor a crook with no facts to back it up?
You know that ‘adjudication’ the Tribune enjoys netted the newspaper over $13,000 last year from the county of Madera alone, making the Madera County Board of Supervisors the Tribune’s single biggest client. That may be the reason owner/publisher Chuck Doud turns a blind eye to the illegal activity going on at the Madera County Government Center. Don’t bite the hand that feeds you?
But who is really feeding Chuck Doud and his failing newspaper?
How much money has Khalid Chaudhry and Mike Pistoresi pumped into the newspaper to support their agenda against Andy Medellin? We may never know since private citizen’s don’t need to explain their finances to the public but anyone who attends a city council meeting or watches one being streamed on YouTube knows what DJ Becker reports on Friday usually has little to do with what actually happens at the meetings on Wednesday.
It amazes me how Chuck Doud, an old-time newspaperman with decades of experience and respect in the industry, would allow misstatements, made-up facts and flat out lies to be published in what their own late Leon Emo used to call the daily fish-wrapper. This is not the Madera Tribune that Les Hayes, Jerry Herman and Dean Lasher worked so hard to build up. I don’t even see many Associate Press stories in the paper anymore. I wonder if they can still afford to pay the AP fees. This is a newspaper filled with pictures, a few original stories, lots of press releases and DJ Becker’s slanted stories of our mayor and city.
As for DJ Becker I have known her for years. She once approached me to buy photos of accident scenes that she was also selling to the Madera Tribune. Apparently she knows someone at Pistoresi Ambulance or Cal Fire that would call her when there was a good story and she would be allowed access to the accident or fire scenes. I was worried there was a HIPAA (patient’s privacy rights) violation somewhere in this so I wasn’t interested.
My last real conversation with DJ about a story was when former Madera County Planning Director, Norman Allinder was arrested for drunk driving. She wanted to do the story so bad so I gave her Allinder’s booking photos but told her Chuck Doud would never let her run that story. She said he would and to this day, it has never appeared in the pages of the Madera Tribune. Don’t bite the hand that feeds you?
This is an interesting fact. Just two months ago I received a phone call from a coach with the Madera National Little League who claimed the Tribune’s sportswriter would not cover her team unless he was paid on the side. Did this happen? I do not know. I do know that this lady’s team did not receive the same coverage as the Madera American Little League team they faced in the Madera Little League City Championship.
I do know that this sports reporter was fired by the Tribune’s previous publisher Rocky Hayes for suspicious reasons and that he was also fired around the same time as a substitute teacher at Madera High School by Principal Ron Pisk for hitting a student. When Ron Pisk retired from Madera Unified and Chuck Doud bought the Madera Tribune, this sports reporter returned to the local high schools and the Tribune. Though some of the schools’ parents have warned their student-athletes to avoid this very creepy guy.
So what the relationship is between Khalid Chaudhry, Mike Pistoresi and the Madera Tribune we may never know. I do know that Mike Pistoresi had a sweetheart deal when the city of Madera had a redevelopment agency. I have been trying to find the exact amounts Pistoresi made as a redevelopment builder for the city with his best friend Jim Talbert as the Redevelopment Director for the city but those records no longer exist. I do know that it was in the millions.
When California Governor Jerry Brown eliminated redevelopment agencies throughout the state, Pistoresi’s cash-cow was gone and a couple years later his buddy retired from the city. After this happened, Pistoresi got on the city salary/Transparent California kick but never bothered to mention that his best friend Talbert made out better than anyone else in the city administration. He and the Tribune also never bothered to mention that the city salaries were in-line with the salaries across the street at the Madera County Government Center where CAO Eric Fleming brings home over a quarter million dollars a year. Again I ask, don’t bite the hand that feeds you?
When the city of Madera decided they needed to raise the water rates, based on the Public Utilities Department assessment of the need to fund infrastructure improvements that have been postponed for decades, Pistoresi raised the rent on all his apartment renters by $25. This despite the fact that the raise in the water rates for the apartments by the city was less than $6 per month. So Pistoresi used a six dollar water rate increase to generate himself over $40,000 a year just from his renters at the Vista del Sol Apartments that went into his pocket. Multiply that by all the apartment complex’s and shopping centers Pistoresi owns and that $40k will be quickly be eclipsed. Then he was quoted as having singled out the mayor to blame for the rate increase when interviewed by the paper, though the increase was in reality the result of a vote by all the Madera City Council members. It must be nice to have no conscience.
And that leaves us Khalid Chaudhry. Chaudhry is a Pakistani immigrant who owns run down office buildings and strip-malls on Madera Avenue and Olive Avenue. He used to be on staff at the University of California Merced but doesn’t seem to be anymore. He at one time lived in Madera but the Internet shows that he owns a house in the Northern California town of Ripon. I tried to interview Mr. Chaudhry over the phone. This resulted in his calling me two of comedian George Carlin’s “Seven Words”, the two that rhyme and are next to each other on the list. Then he hung up the phone. Then called me back and hung up on me a second time. (“Call me again and I will taunt you a second time!”
For the last nine months Chaudhry has accused Mayor Medellin of crimes against the city and lining his own pockets. So far the only thing Chaudhry has been able to prove is that the mayor is compensated around $500 a month to be mayor and (like all the other council members) receives a health insurance package for which the city covers the cost of approximately $2000 a month. I am not sure if Chaudhry understands that this is standard practice. There are several local managing boards, for example the Madera Unified School District, who are also compensated with a small stipend and a health care package for their services.
At last week’s city council meeting Chaudhry demanded to see Mayor Medellin’s tax returns for the last five years. As though the mayor is going to have a line in his Schedule C for bribes and kickbacks? Chaudhry has been a regular at the podium for the last year making accusations against city staff, council members and of course the mayor. Despite all his accusations, Chaudhry has offered no evidence of any wrong doing. He has gone to the extent of offering a reward of $100,000 for any information that proves his accusations. To date, no one has taken him up on it.
Having said all of that, at the last meeting of the Madera City Council the mayor called for public comment. Our Mayor Andy Medellin then gave a warning to this man, who may or may not even live in our town, that he is tired of this man putting down city staff and making false accusations. The next issue of the Tribune included the headline, “Mayor Blows His Top”.
I can only speak for myself but if I had these folks with secret agendas making false accusations about me and my staff for the last nine months I would have told Chaudhry to go screw himself (I would have used a less polite term) and possibly escorted him to the parking lot to discuss the issues some more. But that’s just my opinion.
Speaking of which, in mu opinion, the way Mr. Medellin has handled Chaudhry, Pistoresi, the Tribune, DJ Becker and the rest of the 67 people that have purposefully disrupted the business of the city of Madera with their personal agendas was admirable. I believe that what the mayor said to Chaudhry was not only understandable, but now that the threat of the recall is lifted, delivered in a much more professional manner and tone than most would have been able to muster under the same circumstances.
I find it ironic that in the editorial section of this week’s Madera Tribune there is a letter from Ron Manfredi, the consultant the city of Madera hired to help them with the water rate issues and the administrative salaries, entitled “Tribune Still Needs to Get It Right”.
Don’t hold your breath!
