Chico Taxpayers Association

There’s a tax storm afoot. According to Carl DeMaio at Reform California, “Counties, cities, and school districts have placed over 600 local measures on the November ballot statewide.”

And I’ll guess most are simple measures, since the governor and the legislature killed the Taxpayer Protection Act. But what? DeMaio says there’s new hope on the horizon – Prop 43, “Two-Thirds Vote Requirement for Local Special Tax Initiatives and Property Tax Initiative Prohibition Amendment”.

From Ballotpedia – A “yes” vote supports this amendment to require a two-thirds vote by the electorate to enact, extend, or increase local special tax initiatives and prohibit local jurisdictions and ballot initiatives from enacting ad valorem property taxes, except for voter-approved bond debt-service taxes authorized elsewhere in the state constitution.

The opposition is calling it “The Taxpayer Deception Act”. I never trust somebody when they start out taking a potshot at the opponent’s integrity, that is so cheap, it means they don’t have anything better. Their claim that the measure “LIMITS VOTERS RIGHTS, THREATENS LOCAL SERVICES” is a standard case of saying the direct opposite of the truth, and then repeating it until people believe it.

“Prop 43 makes it harder for you to fund critical services like police and fire departments, fix and repair local roads, staff our local schools or backfill federal healthcare cuts.”

First they threaten, then they attempt to shift the burden to the public, for public services. If we can’t get a cop when we need one, or our house burns down because of poor response times, if we have excessive tire damage and pedestrian deaths because of crappy roads, if our kids are behind in school – it’s because we don’t pay enough! They even threaten our healthcare, as if we had any.

Our city council, staffed by the unions, is telling us they must offer competitive salaries to recruit good employees – they keep telling us that, but we get fire fighters who demand to get paid to sleep, and cops who have inappropriate sexual relations on the clock. Just how much money does it take to get good people?

Of course those good people are taking the salaries we pay them to oppose a measure that protects our rights.

From the No on Prop 43 website – “Paid for by No on Prop 43: Stop the Local Taxpayer Deception Act, sponsored by labor organizations. Committee Top Funders: SEIU California State Council, California Professional Firefighters, NPH Action Fund”.

We need to get union influence out of our elections. This measure is a step in the right direction.

Sometimes I don’t think there’s any hope for Democracy as long as we allow the public employee unions to fund our elections. Unions contribute the largest share in elections in California, including Chico. And now California legislators, largely elected by the unions, are pushing through a bill that is, according to Dan Borstein of Bay Area News Group,  “doubling down on a mistake 27 years ago that has helped drive up taxpayer pension costs by more than eightfold.“

Borstein reports, “Affecting workers hired since 2012, Assembly Bill 1383 would raise the salary limit well-paid public employees of all professions could use to calculate their pensions and increase retirement benefits for police and firefighters.“

Yes, former Governor Brown made some modest amendments to the pension agreements – Public Employees Pension Reform Act, or PEPRA, dictated that employees hired after 2013 would pay more toward the cost of their pensions. Still not enough, but yeah, if we didn’t get that the ball would have dropped by now, and maybe that would have been a good thing. This pension deal is like the biggest, nastiest pimple you ever had, and when it pops, California will be sinking in a sea of puss and debt.

Contact your state legislator and ask them how much money they have received from public safety unions.

I spotted a rude sign in a postage stamp front yard in my neighborhood – “No Camping!“. In smaller print beneath, “Tom Van Overbeek for City Council”.

For one thing, my neighborhood is not in Van Overbeek’s district. For another thing, who needs another ugly, pointless, purely political election?

What does he even mean by “No Camping!”? What’s your plan Tom? So far, we have seen you chase them from park to park, from greenway to greenway. It’s just a merry-go-round. They are not being checked for warrants, they are not being assessed for mental health treatment, they are not being referred to programs. There are currently 60 empty beds available at Chico shelters but more people are camping on the street. The city has accepted millions in funding for signing onto the Shelter Crisis Designation – do you have a rational and practical plan to get these “service resistant” people into shelters, into mental health treatment and rehabilitation?

Van Overbeek knows people are very unhappy about the current “unhoused” situation, so he’s just squeezing that teat. Less than a year ago, he was having a cow about our city’s pension deficit, what happened to that angst?

Not too popular a subject for a guy who probably gets most of his election funding from public workers, I’ll say.

Coincidentally, there’s an assembly bill circling Uranus (AB1383) that will put the taxpayers even more on the hook, for even more generous pensions and benefits. From Dan Walters at Cal Matters:

It may be just a coincidence, but when California’s public employee pension system touted very high earnings on its investments last month, it was a political windfall for unions seeking to increase retirement benefits.

They could argue that the California Public Employees Retirement System’s report of a 14.8% gain during the 2025-26 fiscal year indicated that California could afford to boost pensions for police and firefighters with little or no impact on taxpayers.

The public unions are like blue jays. If you feed them they get bigger than all the other birds, and they get mean and greedy – Me! All Mine!

They take those salaries and mount PAC’s that spend more than anybody else in local elections. In Chico it’s cops, fire, and SEIU.

Haven’t played this one for a while. Worth a listen, Honey. But for me, California will always be the Garden, as long as you can put up with the snakes.

Here we are in the mire of the Warren vs Chico debacle – the city has had to declare an emergency, and issue a 7-day notice, to remove campers and ban fires in Lindo Channel. In August, during an 100+ heatwave, with waist-high, dead grass growing up into old trees, across a 28 foot road from a densely populated old neighborhood.

Just Lindo Channel? The staff report listed “143 confirmed unhoused related outside fire types within the City of Chico…” This is a problem all over town. Where will these campers go when they are cleared out of Lindo Channel? There’s a growing camp at Commanche Creek. A row of tents has taken up the sidewalk next to the old 7-11 Downtown.

Where’s the “humanity” in allowing illegal camping to persist? The neighbors aren’t the only people at risk – less than a mile from my house an “unhoused” couple died when their campfire burned them alive in their tent as they slept. Why don’t we ever talk about where they go to the bathroom? How do they stay clean?

Has your homeowner’s insurance gone up? Insurance costs also affect rent. Ours has gone up-up-up the last few years, and the answer to our questions is always HIGH FIRE RISK. Trees growing into power lines, ramshackle camps located in dense underbrush, bonfires glowing at night – a no brainer. It’s not just the fire risk that keeps me awake worrying, it’s wondering how much longer my husband and I will be able to afford to live in Chico.

Winter will come and the issue will change from extreme heat and fire danger to flooding and extreme cold. Allowing camping to persist in extremely unsafe areas always ends up requiring public safety responses. That is an unfair burden on the “housed” population.

It’s a merry-go-round of illogic. But it should be a hot topic during the upcoming council campaign.

Boy would I like to hear Bryce Goldstein explain her ‘No’ vote.

I won’t lie – I been trying my best to ignore what’s been going on in Chico. I been doing what some people have been suggesting for years – I been minding my own fucking business. And that has been working out for me somewhat – my husband and I have got our rentals buttoned up and easier to manage, we’ve cut utility bills, we’ve even made enough room in our budget for a little tomato patch. No more $8 tomatoes, we can eat BLT’s every night if we want. I got three jars of salsa sitting in the fridge right now, I feel like the queen of England. I blew out my tomato press, and have a new one on the way.

Here’s the thing – you turn your back on a rotten apple and it just gets rottener and rottener. Oh-my-god, they hired the new city manager out of Vallejo! When I heard that news, I thought of my old cousin, bless his soul – he was on the Vallejo City Council in the 1960’s. He told me, that was when Vallejo and cities all over California made a vital mistake – they gave their city managers “executive powers”.

“A city manager serves as the chief administrative and executive officer of a municipality, operating under a council-manager form of government. Their executive powers focus entirely on managing daily operations and implementing policy, explicitly separating administrative duties from the political and legislative role of the mayor and city council.”

Yes, this reduced our city council to the position of fist puppets, essentially cheer leaders. So why bother having a city council? Because that makes “the people” feel like they are still somewhat in charge. Meanwhile, the city manager does essentially what he wants, with a rubber stamp from weak ignorant council members who think they could not possible run a city without the help of this vested, completely indemnified asshole.

What kind of crack was I smoking when I recently said I would support Kasey Reynolds? Just because I don’t like her challenger, who has made it clear she is coming to the chair with an agenda of her own? I’m starting to think we should just eliminate council and go straight to electing our city staffers.

Are the voters intelligent enough to do that? If you have an opinion on that question, chime in. I’m not interested in hearing your opinion of me or posting advertisements for your business.

It’s funny to hear the conservatives in Washington cluck about campaign improprieties in California – they blame mail-in ballots. I think that’s ignorant on their part. There’s a lot more wrong with California elections that has nothing to do with how the ballots are delivered.

It starts with voter registration. Our registration process here allows not only non-citizens to vote, but allows people to register without a real address. As one legislator pointed out on the morning news, California does not require any proof of citizenship, only a statement from the registrant that they are a legal citizen.

California also allows a person who claims to have no fixed address to register just about anywhere in the jurisdiction in which they want to vote – a street corner, a shelter, city hall. They can have their voting materials mailed to a PO Box. Without very strict oversight, these policies allow non-citizens to vote at addresses all over the state. That is fraud.

I’m sorry Pollyanna, but some people are bad and they lie. And people can also be stupid and not good at their jobs. It’s just too easy for the overseers to be crooked or incompetent, it’s a system that is set up for election fraud.

The conservatives at the federal legislature think mail-in ballots are ripe for fraud. They are accusing liberal California election officials using mail-in ballots as an excuse to hold up the count while they manufacture more ballots in their favor. Is that my fault? I mailed my ballot in and received a receipt via email on May 16. But the election office was not allowed to count it until election day.

I like mail in ballots and I think it would be easy to make sure they don’t hold up the election process. It is a fact that we have a lot of ballots here in California, it takes a long time to count millions of ballots. So we need a law that says the ballot has to be received, not just postmarked, on election day. And county clerks always complain about staff shortages. Maybe the feds could help us out with teams of official, impartial, trained ballot handlers.

The registration process should be the same whether or not a voter requests a mail-in ballot – you should have to present identification with your picture and street address when you register and sign your form with the same signature that’s on your ID. This could be done at the post office, the DMV, and other state and federal offices that serve the public. But it should be done in person, and it should be good as long as you have that valid ID. But then my mail-in ballot should be good with my signature as long as my ID is valid.

I don’t need the results overnight, I want them to be accurate. I think we need more federal oversight to achieve that.