The headlines were conflicting this week in Chico – Black Friday shopping, Thanksgiving fun run, community meals, city setting up a “warming tent”, and a woman found dead along Lindo Channel.
Knowing how extensive our “homeless” services are here, I have to wonder – how does this happen?
The city and county continue to bumble the whole operation. We have services, plenty of them, but they are not coordinated, often compete for funding, and work toward their own instead of the public’s best interests. For example, Tom Tenorio gets a very generous salary out of the Esplanade House, even taking one of the apartments intended for housing a family to supplement his office. I’m reminded of a scene from Doctor Zhivago: “All this office, for just one fat-cat bureaucrat!“
There’s alot of competing for funds and in-fighting in the Homeless Industrial Complex. They fight over money like crows fighting over road kill. When Stairways manager Mike Madeiros made a decision not to accept a grant because it would mean allowing transgender individuals into his shelter, Tenorio went on the warpath, complaining that they would lose that grant because Madeiros had refused it. Wow, that was an eye opener about the way these “non profits” are operated – too bad so few taxpayers were paying attention.
We also have disagreements over who will be served. Madeiros was uncomfortable with allowing transgender or women in his all male shelter, worried about conflicts. Some shelters will not accept inebriated people, so CHAT (Chico Housing Action Team) has had set up “low barrier” shelters in houses around town. The city offers a warming tent, set up this weekend, that is supposed to be open to anyone who is cold. So far these tents have served less than 20 people a night, including city officials and staffers.
And now Chico Housing Action Team wants to install “elderly” transients in Tough Sheds in a field along the freeway.
All these programs are competing for money. And, as of this weekend, they are failing in their mission to get people off the street.
In Chico we have many “low-income” subsidized housing projects. I just found out a huge old apartment building around the corner from one of my rentals is owned by HUD. We have newer stuff, like Jarvis Gardens in south Chico, and 1200 Park Avenue, both built to house low-income seniors. These are public projects, paid for with tax dollars.
But again, there is a lack of coordination. The Camp Fire is a good example of how these agencies have failed – here we had truly needy people, a natural disaster, and we couldn’t house them? But we spend millions a year on programs set up for drug addicts and criminals?
CHAT proposes little sheds built on an empty lot along the freeway. These people are duplicitous. They already run low-barrier shelters in homes spread out across Chico, no noticing of the neighbors – CHAT knows they need to keep this project a secret. They have nothing to crow about – no list of names of people permanently taken off the street into stable housing. No success stories. And every year, several people die out on the street, regardless of all their feel-good fascism.
Now they want to build a project with city support – they’ve already racked up a pile of $taff Time with their demands. They want to be let out of the regular building process, sub code, no environmental review, NO FEES. And they are not being honest about how much it will cost to provide sanitary infrastructure. They first said there would be a common bathroom – now they show us plumbed sheds with toilets? Those will all have to be hooked up to sewer, which is not available on the property. There isn’t even water or electricity on the lot.
But when my family bought a crapped out old house, the city and county, the school district, CARD – they all wanted to get their thumb in our pie, with all kinds of fees and constant inspections. The code enforcement officer, without so much as a smile, told us we had to put more Dap on the toilet because we had male children. She demanded a ladder to climb up on our roof. She told us we had to tear down an old building on the property before we could get clearance on the house. And then she told us the tear down required yet another permit.
This is how taxpayers get treated.
The city of Chico is a mess. Our finances are in the red, we have constant threats of bankruptcy, although, you will only hear about these problems in Chris Constantin’s pitch for a sales tax increase. Constantin and Orme are walking a fine line – trying to tell us what a mess our city is in without taking any blame for that mess. For years they’ve mismanaged our money, putting most of it into their salaries, pensions and benefits, admittedly deferring maintenance on city infrastructure all the while. Management salaries are at an all time high, and Constantin admitted recently we spend more on cops than other California cities our size.
The transient problem is just another part of the mismanagement. They allow these bums to trash our parks and creeks, predate on our neighborhoods, and spread drugs to our kids because they are a revenue source. When the city council signed the Shelter Crisis Designation, they got an annual grant worth over $4 million. They got another $4 million for handing part of the county fairgrounds over to the Jesus Center. That’s an annual grant, and it will go up. And they don’t have to spend it on the “homeless”, it just goes right into the General Fund.
Just like the proposed sales tax increase.
So, we need to ask ourselves – why would we hand a tax increase to Mark Orme and Chris Constantin? They stand over this whole mess, it’s their recommendations that council follows, dumb and blind. The best argument against this sales tax increase is our current management, and how they have mismanaged millions already.
Chico Taxpayers Association 
Supposedly, “public servants” work for us.
But the truth is they work for themselves and we work for them via taxation. This is their fiefdom and we are their tax livestock.
And look at all the tax increases we’ve had in the last several years: the garbage tax which they call a “franchise fee” and gets passed on to us, two tax increases on our homes in the 2016 election, the mosquito abatement district tax, plus all the bonds we are still paying for plus all the other local taxes we or the utilities pay which gets passed on to us (for instance the city’s tax on Comcast). And let’s not forget the millions in new revenue the city and county get every year from the tax increase on gas, diesel and vehicle registration. That’s supposed to go for the roads yet the roads get worse.
And don’t forget nearly all these taxes are forever and your kids will be paying for these bonds long after you are dead. And this sales tax increase and the CARD tax increase are forever taxes, too, with CARD’s tax automatically increasing every year.
And to make matters even worse both CARD and the city will use the revenue from the tax increases to float bonds thus getting us hundreds of millions of dollars deeper into debt and will require even more tax increases in the future.
The tax increases keep piling up with no end in sight. (Ory wanted an additional tax increase on next year’s ballot besides the sales tax increase. You can bet he and the other council members will be pushing additional tax increases as long as they are on the council.)
What these “public servants” are doing is criminal, but they get away with it every time because the vast majority of people in this corrupt little city are nothing but apathetic ignoramuses and that’s just how these “public servants” want it.
Wow, Dave’s got a few excellent points for letters to the editor here, People! Not to mention, write to your council members. Those addresses – debbie.presson@chicoca.gov and letters@chicoer.com