This morning’s Chico ER reports that Chico Ass City Mangler has been hired out from under us by the tiny SoCal town of San Dimas. Sorry San Dimeans, that train was not going to be stopped. When he was brought in by his crony Brian Nakamura, Chico citizens, including city employees, screamed NO!, but a “conservative” council hired him regardless.
It comes down to this – you voters have to ELECT BETTER PEOPLE.
Constantin, along with City Mangler Mark Orme, has worked hard the last couple of years to try to get us to pass various tax measures on ourselves. The Pension Obligation Bond Constantin has brought to council will most certainly be carried along by Finance Director (and future Ass City Mangler?) Scott Dowell.
Here’s another good analogy for a POB – the last nail in our collective coffin. Our biggest debt at present is the Unfunded Actuarial Liability, also known as “The Pension Deficit Bag”. If they implement this POB, we will be on the hook for millions more, all guaranteed and payable out of our General Fund. It was Chris Constantin who made it clear that if we can’t meet the payments on the POB, the bond holders can take our entire General Fund. And with the Developer Fund, the Sewer Fund, the Park Fund, and other funds in deficit, the GF is about all we got.
and here’s another thing people need to understand – any money they get out of this scheme goes exclusively to pay down the UAL, period. Furthermore, the UAL and the bond payments come before ALL SERVICES, including the cops. Which is ironic – it’s the cops who have run up the biggest UAL. So, they get paid, but they don’t do their jobs? What the hell is that? Constantly crying that they don’t have enough officers, wah, wah, wah, meeeee-owww!
When will the newly elected “conservative” majority clean the bums out of the fucking park? (excuse me, between the COVID and the recent election, I’ve come down with a bad case of toilet mouth, I’ll try to clean that up by Christmas…)
We pulled in to a local home improvement store last week and the parking lot was full of smoke. Like we haven’t had enough of that shit lately? So my husband asks one of the employees where the smoke was coming from – a fire along Hwy 99. Right near an entrenched bum camp. Great. I’m standing in a lumber yard, looking at smoke billowing out of a nearby field, and I suddenly understand – this is what it’s like to own a business in Chico.
So here’s my wish for Christmas – remember that old movie, Miracle on 34th Street? I happen to prefer the version with little Natalie Wood and Maureen O’Hara. Remember what the public did to the judge that had the nerve to put Santa on trial? Remember the reception the judge got when he went home to the wife and kids?
Well, watch it again, and then start writing those letters. Write to the paper and write to Chico City Council. And write to your county supervisor while you’re at it, because they are also considering a Pension Obligation Bond. Not to mention, the county Behavioral Health Department is bringing the transients in for the money they get from other cities and agencies around the state. So write your emails, and write some snail mails too! Let’s recreate this scene from that famous movie:
Listen folks, you have to BELIEVE you can make a difference. You have to BELIEVE that the government CAN WORK. But it is just a human machine, and any human machine can malfunction without oversight. We need to let these people know we know what they’re doing, and we don’t like it. We need to let them know we want better.
And we need to remember what my old buddy (ex city council member, ex county supervisor) Larry Wahl told me again and again – BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU ASK FOR. That means, study the issues, read agendas and reports, and if you don’t understand something, google it. Don’t just take your elected representative’s or staff’s “word for it” – DON’T BE A MUSHROOM, sitting in a dark room, eating their bullshit.
And don’t forget to teach your children well. We are raising a generation of possible mushrooms – have you noticed how accepting young people are of the mask mandate? Global warming? (Yeah Matt, Agenda 21/30!) We need to teach them to seek the sunshine. Like little Susan, we need them to believe the system can work, but only if the people will work harder.
The best way to teach, is by example.
Snail mail can be directed to the full council at 411 Main Street, Chico, CA 95928
Email – for starters,
sean.morgan@chicoca.gov
kasey.reynolds@chicoca.gov
Chico Taxpayers Association 
I’ll wager that the next Assistant City Manager will be Mark Sorensen. He was a Chico council member, former mayor, fiscal conservative, comfortable with the numbers, and currently city manager of Biggs.
He’s also the jackass that hired Nakamura and Company. Biggs practically runs itself, hardly qualifies him to run a city of 90,000+. Furthermore, Sorensen did a weak job as council member, I doubt he’d be any good for Chico management. He tried to foist a bond on us before his tenure on council was up. I don’t think he’s especially fiscally conservative. I think he’s thinking the salary for Chico is about twice what he’s making in Biggs. So, you know he’s going to push the POB.
And if he tells me to shut up one more time, he better have something to back it up, I’ll tell you that right now. I might have to bust a can of whoop-ass on that old bitch.
But glad to hear from you Rose, hope all is well with you and yours!
Regarding being fiscally responsible…old Sorensen sure talked the talk in that norcalblog…but then he became a politician. And we found out that the truth was he was blowing smoke all along. Typical politician representing the special interests.
Well, if Sorensen were hired in Chico, it would be what my husband calls a “Super Spike”. I don’t think he’s making $100,000/year in Biggs, the move to Chico would probably double his salary and of course, his pension. We’d be calling him “Spike” Sorensen.
Of course this is all speculation – have you heard anything about how they plan to replace Constantin?
On a comic side note – did anybody see the Ch 7 Redding news last night? They ran the story on Constantin, with a picture that made him look like a ghoul, reminiscent of Gary Oldham’s Dracula. Good luck Chris, I hope your wife gets every fucking penny.
Why do we need to replace Constantin with anyone? The truth is the City is over its head in debt and we can’t afford a replacement.
Besides, why should we continue to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars every year for a bureaucrat who does nothing but scheme how to raise our taxes and get us deeper in debt with things like POBs while letting our streets and everything else fall apart.
These bureaucrats are worse than useless. We would all be better off if half the people in City Hall just disappeared.
Well thanks for bringing that up – genius. The staff cuts they’ve made over the years have all been lower level wage earners. Orme bragged earlier this year about cutting 11 positions – he admitted to me they were mostly already vacant positions or hourly positions – people making less than $10,000/year.
Think how different Chico would be if they would have cut from the top instead – we’d still have a streets crew, for one thing, and park workers, for another. Here Orme recently created ANOTHER MANAGMENT POSITION in Public Works – meanwhile crying poormouth about not enough WORKERS?
I wish we could put these assholes on a chain gang.