Chico Taxpayers Association

Every time I go out to do errands around town I see another homeless camp has sprung up. The problem is, the city has to notice every new camp, and then they just go somewhere that hasn’t been noticed.

Meanwhile,  “Sacramento County District Attorney Thien Ho on Tuesday filed a civil lawsuit against the city of Sacramento because it has “allowed, created and enabled a public safety crisis” by not enforcing its homelessness laws.“

https://www.capradio.org/articles/2023/09/19/county-da-sues-sacramento-claiming-city-failed-to-enforce-its-own-homelessness-laws/

Where the hell is Mike Ramsey in all this? He recently celebrated 45 years as our county District Attorney. Ramsey is the longest serving DA in California, but I don’t think we should be glad about that. Ramsey brags about being an environmental watchdog – why hasn’t he stepped in on the illegal camps?

How did Chico get caught in this legal mousetrap? In 2018 four council members, including current Mayor Andrew Coolidge, signed the “Shelter Crisis Designation,” receiving over $4 million from the state for doing so. Where did that money go? No, really, I’m asking – any idea exactly where that money went? Where are the beds? Where are the services? According to the city website, “4 days ago Torres Shelter, located at 101 Silver Dollar Way: 49 open beds. Pallet Shelter, located at 2280 Dr Martin Luther King Jr Pkwy: 18 pallet shelters available.“

67 empty beds – why are there all these tents around town? Some of them are in the public right-of-way, blocking sidewalks, accumulating the usual trash cloud. Some of them are on private property – there’s a growing encampment on MLK Parkway, on Chico Unified Property. Why isn’t Chico Unified evicting these illegal tenants? The veterinary clinic across the street closed their 24 hour emergency services for the past year, only recently reinstating that service, because they had transients setting up shop in their bathroom in the middle of the night, and refusing to leave their waiting room. Having only a couple of employees on duty was dangerous, so they just ended their overnight service. I think the closest alternative was in Anderson.

We’ve had to use their emergency services when our dog got sick in the middle of the night. We met a man who had driven his dog into town in his RV, knowing he would need a place to sleep while they treated his dog – he told my husband, “people have been rattling my door all night…” I think the vet and all their patients should sue the city and the school district, I would if I needed service in the middle of the night and was turned away because of the transients.

I recently read a letter from Mark Gailey, saying we were all overreacting to the transients, trying to tell us that Downtown Chico is perfectly safe. He’s full of shit. Every time my husband and I go Downtown, we see something weird and unsafe. On a recent unavoidable trip to the city center, my husband and I watched a disheveled wide-eyed lady, sitting on a bench on Main Street, a bedsheet full of something on her lap. As I was asking myself out loud why that woman wasn’t being served by one or another of the agencies that have sprung up to collect the Homeless Industrial Complex money, a man walked by her without so much as noticing her. Suddenly she came to life and popped up from her perch to follow along behind him. He noticed her and glanced behind nervously, walked a little faster. As she passed the motel she picked up a loose brick from a crumbling planter and started to quicken her pace behind the man. He walked faster. As he approached the intersection ahead he suddenly vaulted across the street. The woman stopped as suddenly as she had began, abruptly dropped the brick on the sidewalk, and entered the University Inn lobby. You better have your radar on when you are out and about in Chico, especially after dark.

You have never really been a victim until you’ve had a cop or other person ask you, “what the heck were you doing there (at night, strange part of town, alone, especially a woman) anyway?” That’s how I feel about Downtown Chico – not worth the risk. Not worth the humiliation of somebody asking you what the hell you were thinking, going Downtown. When it happens to Mark Gailey, let’s all make a collective promise not to say that to him.

And as of now, let’s hope somebody will challenge Ramsey for District Attorney soon.

Well, a reader called me out on my last lame post – I was asking why Chico City Council and staff want to reduce the number of “low-income” units required for Merriam Park, and this person questioned the need for more “low-income” housing.

Good for you, sharp observer – I should have made my point – developers skip past requirements like Environmental Impact Reports, even standard code requirement like street width, by agreeing to build a certain percentage of their units as “low-income”. Later on, and usually after many years and some changes in ownership of the project, the “low-income” requirements are unceremoniously dropped.

I remember reading about a subdivision Tom DiGiovanni planned for a town in Florida – Amelia Place – on a sensitive wetlands site. Public disapproval was set aside by their town council, who agreed to let DG build if he included “low-income” housing. When that council was voted/termed out a few years later, the “low-income” requirement was dropped, and a subdivision that would not have passed an EIR was built anyway. Of course, DG has long since sold the subdivision to another developer and skipped off to California to build Doe Mill.

DiGiovanni is the master of getting around public approval and code. He actually got the city to let him write a “parallel code” that allows all kinds of exceptions to alllll the rules, including street size, set-backs, even fire safety code. He planned Doe Mill and Merriam Park by the parallel code, and then sold Merriam Park to Dan Gonzales and his partners, who are now asking the city to forgive them the “low-income” units that were used to shoehorn this high-density, high-cost, high-falutin’ new “city within a city” through the permits process.

Merriam Park and Doe Mill were both classic sprawl, by the legal definition. They also would never have passed an EIR – both sit on flood land, fairy shrimp, meadow foam – remember how the liberals roasted Bernie Richter over the meadow foam? But MP and DM were okay with the liberal crowd, because they were what was considered hip at the time. Now they are being used to justify the building of Valley’s Edge, and the same people who cheered DG on are now pissed off at Brouhard. Go figure.

Valley’s Edge also has a certain percentage of “low-income” housing required in the plan. But, as you see, plans can change, long after the EIR requirement has been thrown out, and the staffers and council members that approved the plans have moved on and are no longer accountable for the resulting mess.

Wait until they roll out the new subdivision they’re planning for Barber Yard – a registered brownfield – while all the liberals are running wild with their panties in a knot over Valley’s Edge.

I put “low-income” in quotes because I honestly don’t know the latest legal definition. But no, I’m not a fan of it. I know what the results are – as our city manager Mark Sorensen pointed out to me years ago, subsidized housing generates no property taxes. So, the rest of us regular homeowners and renters are going to pay more to pick up the slack, that’s what I know. We’ll pay for their new street while the street in front of our house turns to rubble. We’ll pay peanuts to hook them up to city sewer while the price for hooking up an existing house has surpassed $20,000.

Yes, I’d like to see more infill – there are old neighborhoods with big lots sitting empty, streets and sidewalks falling into the abyss – that’s what I call “redevelopment”. What they are doing now, is creating slums and bad parts of town through neglect of older neighborhoods. While the older neighborhoods pay the increasing costs of providing infrastructure and services like police and fire to the newer subdivisions, we watch our neighborhood rot around our heads.

Look what they tried to pull with Measure H – as soon as that was passed, they announced plans for refurbishing streets in newer neighborhoods all over town. The public, like an old dog, suddenly reared up over that announcement, and Mayor Coolidge had to do a quick 2-step boogie reverse. But they are just slurry sealing, look that up yourself, it’s like putting Saran wrap over a plate of rocks. The major projects are being paid for out of state grants, while the city directs Measure H right into the General Pot Fund for use in paying their pensions and benefits.

I didn’t finish my report on that last meeting, but ER reporter Evan Tuchinsky wrote an article about the pension deficit. I’ll say, they’re crapping their pants over that, as well as the prospect of losing Measure H to the Taxpayer Protection Act.

And they’re approving new housing as fast as they can rubberstamp the plans. Not that they’re interested in providing housing for anybody, it’s the other way around – they’re providing suckers for the developers.