Archive | October, 2017

Time to mau-mau the flakcatchers – trash deal isn’t rolling out the way they promised

13 Oct

Over the last week or so I’ve noticed people have come to my blog with searches for information about the new garbage franchise deal the city of Chico cut with Waste Management. 

You know, I’ve been bitching about this deal, here and in the newspaper, since 2012. But, as I predicted, General Public – the guy who always has something better to do than pay attention – has not heard a word about it until he got a card from Waste Management about a week ago.

Friends of mine just told me, as if they were the first ones to figure it out – did I know the city had changed their waste hauler without their permission?! 

I watch the agendas, available here:

http://www.chico.ca.us/government/minutes_agendas.asp

I wish more of you would do same, instead of waiting until the bad stuff happens, and then bitching about it after it’s too late  to do anything.

I also got a card from Recology, my old carrier, with whom I have been, rentals and all, since about 2000, when I told Waste Management to stay the hell off my property.   I had never signed up for Waste Management willingly – they took my account forcibly from a guy named Tom – remember Tom’s Dispose-All? For whatever reason, the county showed Tom the door, and gave all his accounts to WM – then known as Butte County Dispose-All.

This whole story stinks of racketeering and cronyism. Ask Butte County Landfill manager Bill Mannell what trash company he ran before he got the job at Neal Road dump. 

My service from Waste Management was horrible, so I switched to Recology, and I never had a single complaint in 17 years. As soon as Waste Management took over two weeks ago, I had problems. 

I could have set my watch by  Recology – they came at almost exactly the same time every week. Especially the garbage truck – every Friday, 11:27 am. At that time I knew my recycling bin had already been emptied and I could go out and get my cans off the street. I also knew I didn’t have to leave my cans out the night before because Recology never came to my house before 7am, I had plenty of time to  take the cans out in the morning.

Why is this important? Well I found out yesterday, when I came home from the grocery store at exactly 2pm to find a  transient, at least 4 full drawstring waste bags  hanging from his shoulders, making a move on my still-full recycling bin.

He had just finished taking stuff out of my neighbor’s bin. I pulled my car alongside my can and told him to “get the fuck out of there NOW!”  He immediately put his hands up and walked.  Smart man – I had my hand on that can of Whoop-Ass, and I was about to open it on him. I’m from Glenn County, where people don’t let their mouth write a check their ass can’t cash.

About 40 minutes later, the WM truck showed up and emptied my bin. 

I had a restless night, wondering what kind of town this was getting tobe. So, this morning I wrote a note to Ryan West at Waste Management – that’s rwest1@wm.com.  I cc’d city manager Mark Orme and my just-for-now county supervisor Maureen “I’m moving to a Del Webb retirement community” Kirk:

Hi Ryan,
 

Yesterday we put our bins out by 6am as instructed by our new hauler, but when I came home from a trip to the store at exactly 2pm yesterday I found my recycling bin had not yet been picked up. And here’s just what I’ve predicted – as I pulled along the street toward my driveway a man came along with at least 4 full drawstring bags over his shoulders, went through my neighbor’s recycling bin pulling items out, and then  walked over to my bin and started to raise the lid.  I pulled my car alongside the bin and told him to “get the ‘f’ out of there!” He held his hands out and left.

The recycling truck didn’t show up until after 2:30.

I’m not a paid law enforcement officer, I shouldn’t have to encounter people like that at the end of my driveway.  My husband was worried that I confronted the guy when I told him about it. He’s afraid this person might have attacked me. My kids  and my tenant’s kids and all my neighbor’s kids play in their front yards – we should not have to worry about people like that in our neighborhood.

I never noticed this kind of brazen behavior in my neighborhood before, and I’m going to lay it on Waste Management.  Recology had both our bins picked up by noon, 1 pm at latest. I’m not willing to accept lesser service because of this deal.  We’ve been told we could expect the same service and more!

I’ll tell you one thing, I won’t be putting my recycling bins out at 6am anymore, and I’ll be cleaning anything of “value” out of them before I put them on the street. I’m going to make sure there’s not so much as a plastic water bottle in there anymore. It’s just an invitation to the bums into our neighborhoods, and then they help themselves to anything that ain’t nailed down. 

Thank you for listening to my complaint, I hope it’s the last. I included Mark and Maureen to keep them up on the bum problem, and because they both advocated for the trash franchises. 

Juanita Sumner

But it doesn’t end there! This morning when  my husband took our dog for the usual walk in the park, he found bins all along the street leading to the park that had been put out for pick-up yesterday morning, but were still full. At exactly 2:38 this afternoon, I heard the trucks picking them up. So, those recycling cans were out there for two days, for the convenience of the little army of the night.

When I heard the trucks, I took out my cell phone (because I was outside doing chores in my tenant’s yard) and I wrote them another note.

Furthermore,  trash and recycling bins left out [in my neighborhood] for collection yesterday morning where still full this morning and I just saw the WM truck coming through to get the recycling bins 5 minutes ago at 2:38. 
 
This is not acceptable. 
Juanita Sumner
 

I’m sorry – am I a harpy? Well that’s what it takes. 

Our public employees have taken our fair market system and played it like a fiddle for their own personal gain. Management promised us they’d use the franchise money to fix the streets, but you saw how quickly city manager Mark Orme tried to talk council into using the money to pay down the pension deficit.  Listen – that didn’t happen because many of you squealed about it, and there’s an election coming next year. 

They promised us we’d get all kinds of new services – according to the WM website, all that extra stuff also costs extra.

They threaten us with fines if our can lids are “propped open” – you mean, left open by bums rifling through for valuables while our cans sit in the street for 12 – 48 hours, waiting for pick-up?

They say we have to pay for damaged cans – given the way the trucks handle the bins, and then leave them standing halfway out in the street? 

They say we are responsible for graffiti on the cans, when we are expected to leave them out before 6 am without any assurance they’ll be picked up quickly?

So, yeah, we’re allowed to complain, please do so. 

 

 

 

Tags:

Please stop feeding our bums

8 Oct
thumbnail_1005171400

Chico has a wild life problem

My husband and I went over to the Vallombrosa post office the other day and found the above-pictured mess behind the annex building. There in the background you can see the back of Mangrove Avenue Safeway, where they keep their dumpsters. Look at that mess!

thumbnail_1005171359

Donut party?

I’m assuming the donuts were taken from the dumpsters behind Safeway, the only place for blocks and blocks that sells donuts in this quantity. I wonder how much they throw away per day. I wonder how much of it would be welcome at various homeless shelters and food closets. I also wonder – why aren’t their dumpsters secured, why is it possible for somebody to get in there and take out trash and strew it all over the place?

The door to the post office annex was also broken. 

It reminded me of the two years my son spent at Mammoth Lakes California, attending their little community college, Cerro Coso. Mammoth Lakes is high in the Sierra, there are constant reminders of the bears that prowl the town.

dont-feed-our-bears

My son received a sticker like this from the college he attended at Mammoth Lakes California, they gave them to all the students.

Visitors are warned not to leave food in their cars at all. A boy at the college dorms left a half-eaten burrito in his car and came out the next morning to find the car window smashed and the interior of the car torn up.

These incidents are bad for tourism, and bad for the bears, which are an inseparable part of the town’s identity.

The stickers are the brain child of Mammoth Lakes “bear whisperer” Steve Searles. From the Mammoth Lakes Sheet –

“Not only is the message clear and to the point, it’s personal. Don’t feed OUR bears puts the onus on the community, which is always happy to step up to the plate and do what needs to be done to co-exist with bears. It makes people responsible for being part of the solution.“

Here in Chico, we have all kinds of wild animals – opossum, raccoon, turkeys right in my front yard, wild geese shutting down Manzanita Ave, fox in the park, cougar spotted as low as 5 Mile and a bear shot by police in the parking lot of the Enterprise Record.

But, this donut mess is not the work of Rocky Raccoon.  Neither did Rocky break the post office annex door – I saw two different locksmiths trying to fix it over a period of one week. The back door to the city municipal building was broken for weeks, I don’t know if it’s been fixed as of now. I believe those doors were broken by transients, who have free run of our town at night. 

In Chico, our wildlife problem is people who are brought into our community through programs we have for the indigent, including people freshly released from the prisons at Susanville and other incarceration facilities. They are sent here because we have programs – including a network of shelters, medical and psychiatric facilities, and other agencies that provide free services. When a person breaks completely down and is unable to fend for themselves at all, they will get a free stay at Enloe Hospital, possibly followed by a 45 day stint at the Butte County psychiatric facility at Oroville.

These people either make their own way here, or, in many cases, brought by Butte County Behavioral Health, as part of a network of “beds”, meaning spots in shelters.

When I heard about the daytime robbery/murder of a man who had only that day been placed in a housing facility for the indigent, I had to wonder, what was his story? When I checked Butte County Superior Court records,  I found the dead man had an arrest  record – mostly possession of drugs. I wondered what that might have had to do with two men chasing him down a street and shooting him to death – to steal his cell phone?

It’s not that I don’t have compassion for the dead man. But what about our community? What kind of criminals and their cronies is the county bringing in when they, essentially, sell beds in facilities to other cities/counties? Who are these people – are they actually mentally ill? Helpless? Or have they learned how to play the system? To get shelter when they need it, to dodge their enemies, creditors, law enforcement?

Near San Diego, which is currently having a Hepatitis A outbreak credited to the “homeless”, people feel there is an element among the homeless who are out to take advantage.

https://iheartbums.wordpress.com/page/4/

They  believe their problem is professional pan-handlers, and local business owners say these people actually get a little threatening if passers-by don’t give them what they want. I believe this is a problem in Downtown Chico, where the atmosphere gets particularly ugly after 10pm. As people start to hit the bars, they make easier targets. College students, young and on their own for the first time, inexperienced drinkers, are especially vulnerable.

In Mammoth Lakes they are afraid a bear might injure or kill a tourist.  Here we need to be thinking not only what the transient army is doing to our quality of life, but what they will do to the reputation of the university. A riot that temporarily ended our founders’ day celebration, a stint as “Number One Party School” in Playboy Magazine, and a rash of hazing and drinking deaths were treated very seriously by our civic leaders – why not the transient problem?

As a community, we need to stop feeding the transients.  The fund transfers taken by the county for bringing in transients are just salary fodder. The programs offered by the county don’t help these people, and many of them don’t really want that kind of help anyway. They want to continue a lifestyle of roaming the state, taking advantage of these programs and services, meanwhile predating on our community. 

And worse are the public employees who get paid 6 figure salaries to bring more transients in. Worse yet are the elected leaders who keep rubber-stamping the transfers.  

But really, we continue to put up with it – we’re the “enablers” here.

In Ocean Beach they see the problem as it really is.

 

Oroville council, cops, take 10 percent salary cuts in face of bankruptcy – meanwhile, raises all around for Chico management!

6 Oct

We were just talking about Oroville’s financial problems  – here’s their action plan:

http://www.chicoer.com/general-news/20171005/oroville-city-council-takes-voluntary-10-percent-pay-cut

As you know, Chico City Council just approved sweet new raises for city management, more than enough to cover their slightly increased PERS shares. With over $180 million in unfunded pension liabilities, the city’s mandated extra “side fund” payments are now over $500,000 a year and expected to increase to $1.5 million within the next couple of years. And come on – at that  rate, we’ll never get rid of the pension bomb.  

Did you know our city council get salaries? Last I heard, their salaries are roughly the same as reported for O-ville, although, I think, a little more. In the article, it says Oroville councilors can also opt for a health benefits package – in Chico, those packages have cost anywhere between $8,000/year and $21,000/year. When I last checked, Ann Schwab and Mark Sorensen were taking the most expensive packages available. Here’s the scam – they pay 2 percent of their council salaries – less than $1,000 a year, do the math – for these packages. 

What kind of package do you have? How much do you pay for it? 

In Hemet, which was left in ashes by Brian Nakamura, Mark Orme, and Chris Constantin, the local Taxpayers Association put an ordinance on the 2010 ballot that ended health benefits for city council members. The voters passed it with over 75% of the vote. It cost the HTA about $7,000 to float two ordinances – the second, term limits for city councilors, also flew through with about 75% of the vote.

https://chicotaxpayers.com/2014/04/19/hemet-taxpayers-association-eliminated-health-benefits-for-council-members-and-instituted-term-limits/

The city shall not pay for, fund, or otherwise contribute to, the premiums, charges, fees or other costs of health benefits made available by the city to elected city officials either during their term or after their term of office.

Just something to think about, as the city of Chico plunges further into debt and continues to cut services, cut services, cut services…

 

 

Newer Entries →