Chico Taxpayers Association

There’s a tax storm afoot. According to Carl DeMaio at Reform California, “Counties, cities, and school districts have placed over 600 local measures on the November ballot statewide.”

And I’ll guess most are simple measures, since the governor and the legislature killed the Taxpayer Protection Act. But what? DeMaio says there’s new hope on the horizon – Prop 43, “Two-Thirds Vote Requirement for Local Special Tax Initiatives and Property Tax Initiative Prohibition Amendment”.

From Ballotpedia – A “yes” vote supports this amendment to require a two-thirds vote by the electorate to enact, extend, or increase local special tax initiatives and prohibit local jurisdictions and ballot initiatives from enacting ad valorem property taxes, except for voter-approved bond debt-service taxes authorized elsewhere in the state constitution.

The opposition is calling it “The Taxpayer Deception Act”. I never trust somebody when they start out taking a potshot at the opponent’s integrity, that is so cheap, it means they don’t have anything better. Their claim that the measure “LIMITS VOTERS RIGHTS, THREATENS LOCAL SERVICES” is a standard case of saying the direct opposite of the truth, and then repeating it until people believe it.

“Prop 43 makes it harder for you to fund critical services like police and fire departments, fix and repair local roads, staff our local schools or backfill federal healthcare cuts.”

First they threaten, then they attempt to shift the burden to the public, for public services. If we can’t get a cop when we need one, or our house burns down because of poor response times, if we have excessive tire damage and pedestrian deaths because of crappy roads, if our kids are behind in school – it’s because we don’t pay enough! They even threaten our healthcare, as if we had any.

Our city council, staffed by the unions, is telling us they must offer competitive salaries to recruit good employees – they keep telling us that, but we get fire fighters who demand to get paid to sleep, and cops who have inappropriate sexual relations on the clock. Just how much money does it take to get good people?

Of course those good people are taking the salaries we pay them to oppose a measure that protects our rights.

From the No on Prop 43 website – “Paid for by No on Prop 43: Stop the Local Taxpayer Deception Act, sponsored by labor organizations. Committee Top Funders: SEIU California State Council, California Professional Firefighters, NPH Action Fund”.

We need to get union influence out of our elections. This measure is a step in the right direction.

Sometimes I don’t think there’s any hope for Democracy as long as we allow the public employee unions to fund our elections. Unions contribute the largest share in elections in California, including Chico. And now California legislators, largely elected by the unions, are pushing through a bill that is, according to Dan Borstein of Bay Area News Group,  “doubling down on a mistake 27 years ago that has helped drive up taxpayer pension costs by more than eightfold.“

Borstein reports, “Affecting workers hired since 2012, Assembly Bill 1383 would raise the salary limit well-paid public employees of all professions could use to calculate their pensions and increase retirement benefits for police and firefighters.“

Yes, former Governor Brown made some modest amendments to the pension agreements – Public Employees Pension Reform Act, or PEPRA, dictated that employees hired after 2013 would pay more toward the cost of their pensions. Still not enough, but yeah, if we didn’t get that the ball would have dropped by now, and maybe that would have been a good thing. This pension deal is like the biggest, nastiest pimple you ever had, and when it pops, California will be sinking in a sea of puss and debt.

Contact your state legislator and ask them how much money they have received from public safety unions.

I spotted a rude sign in a postage stamp front yard in my neighborhood – “No Camping!“. In smaller print beneath, “Tom Van Overbeek for City Council”.

For one thing, my neighborhood is not in Van Overbeek’s district. For another thing, who needs another ugly, pointless, purely political election?

What does he even mean by “No Camping!”? What’s your plan Tom? So far, we have seen you chase them from park to park, from greenway to greenway. It’s just a merry-go-round. They are not being checked for warrants, they are not being assessed for mental health treatment, they are not being referred to programs. There are currently 60 empty beds available at Chico shelters but more people are camping on the street. The city has accepted millions in funding for signing onto the Shelter Crisis Designation – do you have a rational and practical plan to get these “service resistant” people into shelters, into mental health treatment and rehabilitation?

Van Overbeek knows people are very unhappy about the current “unhoused” situation, so he’s just squeezing that teat. Less than a year ago, he was having a cow about our city’s pension deficit, what happened to that angst?

Not too popular a subject for a guy who probably gets most of his election funding from public workers, I’ll say.

Coincidentally, there’s an assembly bill circling Uranus (AB1383) that will put the taxpayers even more on the hook, for even more generous pensions and benefits. From Dan Walters at Cal Matters:

It may be just a coincidence, but when California’s public employee pension system touted very high earnings on its investments last month, it was a political windfall for unions seeking to increase retirement benefits.

They could argue that the California Public Employees Retirement System’s report of a 14.8% gain during the 2025-26 fiscal year indicated that California could afford to boost pensions for police and firefighters with little or no impact on taxpayers.

The public unions are like blue jays. If you feed them they get bigger than all the other birds, and they get mean and greedy – Me! All Mine!

They take those salaries and mount PAC’s that spend more than anybody else in local elections. In Chico it’s cops, fire, and SEIU.

Haven’t played this one for a while. Worth a listen, Honey. But for me, California will always be the Garden, as long as you can put up with the snakes.

Here we are in the mire of the Warren vs Chico debacle – the city has had to declare an emergency, and issue a 7-day notice, to remove campers and ban fires in Lindo Channel. In August, during an 100+ heatwave, with waist-high, dead grass growing up into old trees, across a 28 foot road from a densely populated old neighborhood.

Just Lindo Channel? The staff report listed “143 confirmed unhoused related outside fire types within the City of Chico…” This is a problem all over town. Where will these campers go when they are cleared out of Lindo Channel? There’s a growing camp at Commanche Creek. A row of tents has taken up the sidewalk next to the old 7-11 Downtown.

Where’s the “humanity” in allowing illegal camping to persist? The neighbors aren’t the only people at risk – less than a mile from my house an “unhoused” couple died when their campfire burned them alive in their tent as they slept. Why don’t we ever talk about where they go to the bathroom? How do they stay clean?

Has your homeowner’s insurance gone up? Insurance costs also affect rent. Ours has gone up-up-up the last few years, and the answer to our questions is always HIGH FIRE RISK. Trees growing into power lines, ramshackle camps located in dense underbrush, bonfires glowing at night – a no brainer. It’s not just the fire risk that keeps me awake worrying, it’s wondering how much longer my husband and I will be able to afford to live in Chico.

Winter will come and the issue will change from extreme heat and fire danger to flooding and extreme cold. Allowing camping to persist in extremely unsafe areas always ends up requiring public safety responses. That is an unfair burden on the “housed” population.

It’s a merry-go-round of illogic. But it should be a hot topic during the upcoming council campaign.

Boy would I like to hear Bryce Goldstein explain her ‘No’ vote.