Politics can be fun, but listen Honey – you got to have the do-re-mi!

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?

Unfunded pension liability up by $60 million – van Overbeek wants to “outsource” Hey, Tom, grow a pair – let’s ask the employees to pay a rational share of their own benefits!

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:

Pension boosts for California police, firefighters could spur increases for other workers

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.