Who is Winner in Local Gas War?

Tulare - Tulare residents who recently bought gasoline at the Shell or Arco AM PM stations on North M Street and Cartmill Avenue got a real bargain as competition between the two drove prices down to below $2.50 a gallon.

Dennis Stanley, owner of Stanley's Food Mart, which is the Shell station at 2959 North M St., charged Arco started dropping its prices in an attempt to drive him out of business right after World Ag Expo.

By March 2, he had to drop his price to $2.49 a gallon to meet Arco's price. This was 35 cents under the market rate and was costing him more than $3,000 a day out of his own pocket, he said.

“I can't continue to do that,” he said Monday (March 5), the day he raised his price to $2.79—still below the going rate elsewhere in town but well above the $2.59 Arco was charging.

The average prices in the Tulare/Visalia area are between $2.85 and $2.99 a gallon. An Arco Station on the corner of Mooney Boulevard and Caldwell Avenue in Visalia was charging $2.51 a gallon on Monday.

“All my volume within a week's time will be gone,” Stanley said, adding that even at the higher price he is losing 6 cents per gallon.

“It's just not right,” said Jason Callison, who is with R.M. Parks in Porterville, the local distributor for Shell products. “It's definitely devastating for one of our retailers to go head to head with that kind of price supports. We understand they've done it for a lot of years.”

Stanley said he believes what Arco is doing is “absolutely price fixing” and he plans to contact an attorney whom he was told specializes in these types of cases.

If this attorney feels we have a very strong case, I'm going to go for it 100 percent,” he said.

Callison reported his company is also checking out whether Arco's actions are legal.

Gary Singh, manager for the Arco station, told the Tulare Voice on March 4, that his boss decided to lower prices after World Ag Expo because “the business wasn't doing that good.”

Singh said the move has been “working wonderful for us … even though we're not making any money on the gas, we're just breaking even.”

He said he had been out of town for awhile and had no idea whether Arco was helping his boss financially.

“That's between Arco and my boss,” he said.

The Voice was unable to reach owners of the business before deadline.

Before he raised his prices on March 5, Stanley said he called one of the Arco owners and told him “this can't go on. Neither of us is benefiting.”

The owner told him Arco was helping the station and would not let him raise his prices more than 10 cents a gallon and if he decided to do so on his own, the company would take his station away, Stanley said.

When he asked Shell to let him temporarily put lower-priced unbranded gas in his pumps to cut costs, promising he would notify consumers, the company refused to allow it.

“They told me, 'If you do that, we'll pull your signs down,” Stanley said.

Stanley and his family have been in the gas station/food mart business in Tulare for 42 years, an anniversary they marked this past weekend as the price war waged.

“We've always matched our competition and never under cut them,” Stanley said.

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Xavier, Porchia: Principals Share Special Bond

By Julie Fernandez

Tulare - When Roosevelt School Principal Barbara Xavier turns over the keys to her school to Ira Porchia in June, it will be a poignant moment for both of them.

Xavier, who will be leaving Roosevelt to become principal at Garden School, and Porchia, a Live Oak School vice principal who will take her place, have known each other since he was a 9-year-old fourth grader at Maple School and she was his track coach.

“She was a very, very caring coach,” Porchia said. “She worked us hard…but you could definitely feel there was more there than just a coach.”

In addition to preparing her young athletes for the district's annual track meet, Xavier and her husband, Dan, would pack them up in their vehicles and take them to other competitions as well, he said.

His mother was very protective of him, Porchia said, but Xavier won her over so completely that a few years later, when he was a Mulcahy Middle School student, she paid her a special visit.

“My mother liked her so much she gave her a guardianship paper that said if anything was to happen to my mother, Mrs. Xavier would take over; and we've been kin ever since,” said Porchia, who often calls his former coach “Mom.”

Xavier said she will never forget Mary Jones' words the day she came to visit: “I want to give this to you, because I know you love my son and he loves you.”

In high school, Porchia played three varsity sports, including football and track, and Xavier followed his career. “Ira's just a natural athlete,” she said.

At the end of his sophomore year, Xavier was there to comfort him when a former friend died a violent and tragic death, one of four young men they knew to die that way over an eight-month period.

Xavier said she was walking away from the grave site after services concluded, when she noticed in the distance someone sitting on her car. It was Porchia.

“I ended up sitting on the top of her car filling her shoulder with snot and tears,” he said.

Porchia continued in school, got the good grades his mother demanded he maintain to play sports and in his senior year was accepted at the University of California, Davis, where he played football.

When Porchia went away to Davis, Xavier said she kept track of his athletic and academic career through his mother, who was always eager to tell her “about our boy.”

He initially studied to become a pharmacist, but a life-changing internship working with toddlers convinced him to become a teacher, Porchia said.

He found he connected easily with children—especially with a youngster named Tyler Darrah, whose mother came to school one day looking for “a guy named Ira,” Porchia recalled.

“Oh my God, I've got to tell my husband you're real,” the woman said, explaining they thought their son had a made-up friend with whom he played basketball.

“I began to ask, 'why in the world am I going to start counting pills, when this is what I should be doing?'” Porchia said.

When he finished his college studies, he interviewed with the Tulare high school district and when he didn't get a job there, she signed a contract to teach in Watts in the Los Angeles area.

Soon afterwards he received a call from Luis Castellanoz, assistant superintendent for personnel for the Tulare City School District, who asked him why he was going to Watts. “You don't need to go to Watts, you need to come to Tulare,” Porchia recalled him saying.

So he interviewed with the district and got a job at Xavier's school—which at that time was Kohn. “The bad part was she was leaving,” Porchia said.

Even though they were across town from each other, Xavier said she saw Porchia often after he started visiting her campus to see another first-year teacher, Shantall Rayo.

He told Xavier they were just friends but “she saw right through me,” he laughed. Rayo and Porchia dated, got married and when their first child was born they talked about names.

“I told Shantall it's a no-brainer,” Porchia said. “The boy's got to be Ira. But we kept asking what in the world is his middle name going to be, because it had to be meaningful.”

That decision too came easily, he said, recalling he told his wife, “You love Barbara, I love Barbara; it's got to be Xavier—Ira Xavier Porchia.”

Porchia, 31, said he appreciates that Xavier, a 33-year veteran of the district, will be around to give him advice when he starts his new job.

“The principals are all great, but this one has a special interest—we're blood,” he said.

As for Xavier, there is no one else she would rather see replace her at Roosevelt.

“I have really dedicated nine years of my life to this school and turning it over to Ira has made it worth it,” she said.

Porchia was touched by the comment.

“You can't make a black man blush, but she just did,” he said.

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Redevelopment Plans Merger, Expansion

Tulare - Steps are under way in the Tulare Redevelopment Agency to merge the Alpine/Downtown, South K Street and West Tulare project areas and add new land.

Agency director Bob Nance got the go-ahead from his board on Feb. 26 to find a consulting firm to work on the proposed merger and expansion, which could cost between $400,000 and $500,000 when completed.

The moves are expected to increase the agency's bonding capacity, speed up residential redevelopment and present opportunities for land purchases and infrastructure improvements.

City staff members and others have suggested areas that could be added to redevelopment, if further study shows they meet the legal criteria for “blight.”

Nance said a preliminary list includes properties:
• North of Turner Drive
• Along Tulare Avenue, east of Mooney Boulevard
• On the east side of Highway 99 from north of Cross Avenue to south of Bardsley Avenue
• Along North J Street, north of Pleasant Avenue
• West of West Street off of Inyo Avenue.

“I want to be very clear this is very preliminary and if people have other areas, we're willing to consider them,” he said, adding it is important that people understand what “blight” means in terms of redevelopment.

The California Redevelopment Association's glossary of terms, defines blighted areas as “areas and/or structures of a community which constitute either physical, social, or economic liabilities requiring redevelopment in the interest of the health, safety, and general welfare of the people of the community and the state.”

The area north of Turner Drive, Nance said for example, is not “blight” in the sense “these are terrible homes or bad property owners. We have some illegal lots and locked parcels. With redevelopment we can help property owners re-subdivide.”

Likewise, redevelopment is looking at the possibility of helping property owners along Tulare Avenue, east of Mooney, with under-utilized parcels, he said. “And we are not saying every single property within an area is blighted.”

The process of merging project areas and expanding the redevelopment area is expected to take about a year.

“There will be lots of opportunities for the public to review and comment,” Nance said.

One of the early steps the agency must take is to present proposed expansion areas to the Planning Commission, he said. The commission could approve the areas as presented, reduce (but not add to) the areas or reject the plan.

The possibility of merging the three existing project areas was discussed extensively during a joint redevelopment and City Council meeting in late 2006, when consultants said the move would allow the agency to take the 20 percent of tax-increment revenues it must set aside for low-to-moderate housing projects and speed up residential improvements in west Tulare.

Tax-increment revenues are new property taxes resulting from increases in assessed valuation within a project area.

The agency currently keeps three pots of set-aside funds and can spend each only in the area that generated the revenue. This is done even in the South K Street Project Area, where the redevelopment plan calls for the elimination of housing in what has become primarily an industrial corridor.

Merging the areas would allow the agency to leverage the set-aside funds to sell between $5 million and $8 million in bonds for housing projects, Nance said. Other tax increment revenues could be used to leverage an additional $12 million to $15 million for land purchases and infrastructure improvements, he said.

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G&T Drugs' Future Includes New Neighbor

Tulare - One of the two CVS retail pharmacies that Armstrong Development is planning to build here is in the same block as G & T Drugs and what that will mean for Tulare's only privately owned, independent pharmacy is unknown.

When other big chains, such as Rite Aide and Walgreen Drug Stores, have moved into the area, they have purchased existing pharmacies.

“They (CVS) haven't approached me,” said Albert Toy, who is co-owner of G & T at 223 South West St. with his brother David, a pharmacist. “Nothing's for sure now a days; it's so hard for independents to survive.”

He and his brother have adopted a wait and see attitude about the future and have made no plans, Toy said.

The 13,225-square-foot CVS pharmacy proposed for the southwest corner of Tulare Avenue and West Street would feature a drive-through and would operate from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. seven days a week. Plans for that one and another CVS proposed for the southwest corner of Mooney Boulevard and Bardsley were scheduled to go before the Planning Commission on March 5. The Tulare Redevelopment Agency board approved them on Feb. 26.

The Toys have owned G & T Drugs since 1974.

“I was just 21 years old,” Albert Toy said.

A lot has changed in the pharmacy world in the last 32 years.

“At this point, it seems like all anybody knows is chain stores,” Toy said. “The chains themselves—they're fighting like cats and dogs.”

And then there are the insurance companies.

“The third parties are killing us,” Toy said. “Medicare Plan D [which covers drugs] really did a lot of independents in.” While the chain stores have bargaining power with insurance companies because of the volume they do, independents do not and “we're getting squeezed really tight,” he said. “We're nobody [to the insurance companies].”

Independent pharmacies in neighboring communities also are experiencing the squeeze, he said, reporting Visalia has only three left and Corcoran and Porterville have one each.

Toy is proud of the service his store provides to people.

“Our customers count on us,” he said, explaining that if regular customers are unable to come in for their medicines the store will deliver to them.

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What If? Come Find out March 29

Tulare - That “What if?” button Mayor Craig Vejvoda is sporting about town is a challenge to Tulare residents to attend the inaugural Mayor's Prayer Breakfast at 7 a.m. March 29 in the Heritage Complex at the International Agri-Center, 4500 South Laspina St.

“What if our community came together in prayer?” Vejvoda said. “What kind of difference could that make?”

He and Tulare's two Rotary Clubs, which are organizing the event with the help of several major sponsors, hope 500 people will show up to discover what can happen when a community collectively prays for its national, state and local leaders, public safety and armed forces personnel, businesses, farmers, senior citizens, youth and many others.

Mayor Alan Autry will be the guest speaker. Vejvoda said he has not given him a specific topic.

“I just thought I'd let him talk,” he said. “He's a very good public speaker. He's a Christian man and he has full latitude to speak about whatever he has on his mind.”

While Autry is Christian and organizers suspect the majority of attendees will be too, chairman Skip Barwick said the event welcomes people of all faiths who want to pray to “whoever that God might be for you.”

Autry became mayor of Fresno in 2001 and was re-elected four years later.

The Louisiana native was born Carlos Alan Autry but became Carlos Alan Brown a short time later after his parents divorced and he and his mother, Verna Brown, moved to the central San Joaquin Valley, where her family lived. Many years later he met his biological father and decided to change his last name back to Autry.

As a child he worked in the fields with his mother and step-father and the family moved around a lot. He attended Palo Verde School for a short time when he lived in the Tulare area and has publicly reminisced about what it meant to him as a child to hear about Tulare Olympic hero Bob Mathias.

Autry's family later settled in Riverdale, where he attended high school and received an athletic scholarship to the University of the Pacific in Stockton. After graduating from UOP, Autry spent three years playing for the National Football League's Green Bay Packers.

From there he began a 22-year acting career in movies and television, becoming well-known as Capt. Bubba Skinner in the popular television series Heat of the Night.

But before he knew that success, he battled drugs and alcohol for several years. He has told interviewers on The Christian Broadcasting Network's The 700 Club and elsewhere that it wasn't until he returned home to his mother for a time and accepted Jesus Christ that his life turned around.

Tickets for the Mayor's Prayer Breakfast are $20 and available by calling 688-1078. Proceeds will benefit the Tulare Boys & Girls Club and other charitable local organizations.

Major sponsors of the event as of March 3 include: B & E Ranches, Dailey Enterprises, J. D. Heiskell & Co., Reynan & Bardis and Skip Barwick Realty. Interested sponsors are also asked to call the above number.

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