This is a repost from November, 2015.
I sent the letter below last Saturday, I had to resend, although Dave Little excused himself – “just a lot of letters in the queue” Sure, okay, at least he printed it before this item goes to council.
There’s another Finance Committee meeting scheduled this coming week. They will pick up the conversation they left in the “workshop” I’m speaking of below. This time they will talk about how developers have got off without paying sewer fees, and how the sewer fund has been in arrears for years. From the staff report, available here:
http://www.chico.ca.us/document_library/minutes_agendas/finance_committee/12-2-15FCAgendaPacket.pdf
“For over a year, City staff have highlighted the impact of reduced revenues received from development for sewer capacity fees. As a result, the City’s general sewer operating account has picked up the significant annual loan obligations required to pay the state for the capacity expansion made to the sewer treatment plant.”
Yeah, I’ve been following this conversation – what they don’t mention is, like the Private Development Fund, the Sewer Fund has been dipped into to pay salaries, benefits and pensions for people who have never even been in the neighborhood (where property owners complain they are being eaten by flies from the poorly managed plant, staff admitting they dump raw sewage in the Sac River during heavy rainstorms…) They don’t mention the constant tug-o-war going on between the sewer operation and M&T Ranch – both suck water out of the river for operations, which has left City of Chico leach lines “on the rocks” on several occasions, leading to millions in repairs paid by taxpayers.
Our sewer plant is a disaster, but city of Chico keeps trying to hook more people up, cause they want those fees to pay – you got it – the Pension Liability. Now they are holding a carrot out to Paradise? Wow, this is just getting surreal.
So, I’m just glad Little finally decided to run my last letter, I already feel another one forming in the old Brain Pan. I wish you folks would write too. Our biggest question being – all these years you been letting the developers off, you been charging private homeowners by frontage – meaning, the length of your property that meets the street. Developers pay a flat rate – why not homeowners? Here we been subsidizing development for years, and the fund is still RED.
$taff has been embezzling. I realize, the developers have been getting a better deal than we have, but we all been taking a screwing from $taff.
My letter, run this morning:
A consultant’s report given to the city Finance Committee says homeowners pay about 130 percent of the true cost of building permits while for-profit developers pay less than the cost of services they receive from the city. But this is not the entire reason for a $9 million deficit in the private development fund.
Consultant Chad Wolford explained, while we cut our workforce heavily, we failed to cut “overhead” – that is, the management positions that take most of our budget.
Next door, the Internal Affairs committee tackled the subject of civility as I watched our mayor attack a local developer who came to the podium to question the allocation of a $6 million pension deficit on the private development fund. Mayor Mark Sorensen listed two other options – “keep moving in your direction…racking up a million dollars a year in debt…” he told Pete Giampoli. Sorensen’s other option was to take the money out of the General Fund, already empty because of such transfers.
The unspoken option is cut management positions. One recently hired finance department employee, salary over $100,000, attended the meeting for no apparent reason. He gave no report, sat in the audience, and left the building several times during the meeting.
This is why we’re in trouble – we have too many redundant positions, getting over $100,000 in salary and paying little toward their benefits. Most of our management employees are longtime CalPERS participants who pay less than 10 percent of their pension premiums.
Juanita Sumner, Chico
Chico Taxpayers Association 
The only thing we know for sure is they will take it out of the hides of the taxpayers and little people eventually, and the special interests and the bureaucrats will win yet again. A few months ago Little wrote a couple of good editorials on the raises and pensions. Since then, silence. And it looks like he’s jumping on board with the increase and new fees for Bidwell Park. No mention that none of that would be necessary if there was some sanity to city finance, especially the pension situation.
Yeah, some day people will look back on this as an era of public looting.