“Appropriate” means “take,” by the way.
City salaries rise and council won’t control it
City staff has done very well for itself. Meanwhile, the park looks terrible, with liability issues such as rotting tree limbs, pot-holed roads and gopher-pitted trails. Our neighborhood streets are also a liability issue.
Our city staffers are making as much as five times the median income, but complain they can’t serve us. City Manager Mark Orme takes over $200,000 in salary, pays less than 10 percent of his own pension and benefits, but complains he needs an assistant. At that kind of salary, I’d expect Superman, but Orme complains he can’t do his job. That’s become a pattern of late — he justified his salary raise saying he had a big job to do, gutted staff to save the money to give himself that raise, but now complains he needs help.
And our “fiscal conservative council” — don’t make me laugh. They approved the budget and the salary increases, now they will ask us to raise the sales tax rate to pay for these outrageous salaries and pensions. They will promise us a stadium, a new swim center, smiling cops on every corner — but all we’ll get out of it are more overfed bluejays to screech and squawk for more money, more money, more money.
— Juanita Sumner, Chico
I hate writing to the ER because they allow Topix. Topix requires membership with Facebook or Twitter or another one of the social networks, to which I do not subscribe. I can’t stand Tweeters, I’m sorry, get a life. Sounds waaaay too much like Tweaker, anyway. So, Topix users are able to say whatever they want about a letter, and I can’t respond. Here’s a comment that is just flatly insulting and uninformed.
Juanita, There is a web site that you may want to check for your research. It unfortunately doesn’t archive everything but might produce some gems for someone who is determined. The site archives the internet. You can use it as a time machine to see what was posted years ago but no longer exists.The home page of the site is https://archive.org/ and the archive for the City of Chico is https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.chico.ca.us/
Wow, very interesting website. It’s like wrapping collectibles in old newspaper – you can’t stop reading the stuff.
This website needs support, and needs to be used – I’m glad to post this, thanks David.