Chico Taxpayers Association

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.