Oh NO! 24 hour bathrooms being vandalized and used for shelter?
Katie Simmons says we need a new solution – Portland Loo?
$100,000 for essentially the same thing we already have.
The police chief complains resources are strained, he needs more officers. Where will they get the funding? How about Butte County Behavioral Health?
BCBH director Dorian Kittrell told me the county gets $550 a day for each person they take in off the streets into one of their “beds” – a space at the Butte County Psychiatric Hospital, which he and others call “The Puff.” They are allowed to hold these people with or without their permission for 45 days. You do the math. They could at least pay for the cop who led their cash cow into the barn.
I don’t think Chico PD should be responsible for answering these calls, I think Kittrell and Brad Montgomery (Torres Shelter) and Michael Madeiros (Stairways) should be responsible for going out to deal with people who claim they have no place to live. These three all get salaries – Kittrell gets over $100,000/year – to deal with the mentally ill and homeless, why is Chico PD wasting time going on these calls?
City of Chico park employees and public works department employees are often called on to deal with illegal campers – these people should be also be engaged by BCBH and those agencies such as Torres Shelter and Stairways.
And then we should lock Katie Simmons in a Portland Loo. In Portland.
Chico Taxpayers Association 
BCBH director Dorian Kittrell told me the county gets $550 a day for each person they take in off the streets into one of their “beds”
Geez, it’d be way cheaper to house them at the Hilton!
I think they’d get better service at the Hilton too. BCBH just seems to keep them on drugs for 45 days, I don’t know what kind of “counseling” they offer, and then the person is ejected to one or another shelters and it’s a matter of time before they end up at the psychiatric facility again.
Kittrell told me and Maureen Kirk that the money comes from “intergovernmental transfers,” meaning, wherever this person was originally arrested pays the $550 a day. So, if we haven’t got “enough beds” here, we pay for a bed in Yuba City or some other facility. So the money goes out as well as in.
The real transients are the BCBH workers – Kittrell lives in Yuba City – he said he left his job with Sacramento County to come to Butte County so he’d be closer to his home? Yuba City is almost exactly between Chico and Sacramento, I don’t get that. What I do get is that he doesn’t have to live with the consequences of his poorly done job.
They already spent $24,000 preparing the Plaza restrooms for the 24 hour a day experiment. Porta-potties would also solve the problem of people sleeping in the restroom, at a much lower cost than the Portland Loo.