My blog just renewed itself before I could take off the auto renew – oh well, here we are, back again.
My original purpose for this blog was to tell people what was happening Downtown. I know a lot of people don’t even know how the government works, and many more don’t care. But they like to bitch about it when it negatively impacts their lives. I’m one of those people who likes to look down the road, try to deal with stuff before it becomes a problem.
Sometimes the magic works, and sometimes it doesn’t. We’ve had some victories, stopped some tax measures, started larger conversations about subjects that the city and/or county had not really wanted to bring out in the open. That took a lot of work. Trying to get people to help – you find out, people just want to bitch about stuff. If they want to DO something, it’s usually some crazy shit like rebuild Bidwell Mansion.
I, frankly, would like to see more people do the boring work – go to those daytime meetings, read up on the issues, do some research, LISTEN for a while before you make this tiresome statement – “I moved here a year ago, and here’s what I think… ” Right now, there’s an unprecedented move by certain outsiders with money to make Downtown Chico an elitist hub.
We have a lot of problems in Chico, most of them shared with towns up and down the state.
If you look at the arrest logs, you see the same people being arrested over and over again for public inebriation, petty theft, possession of drugs, violation of parole, assault (including resisting arrest). These are crimes that affect our collective quality of life.
Our schools are a mess, but always asking for more money while turning out poorer and poorer results. They’ve turned the taxpayers into inablers.
So has the mental health and drug abuse industry. We pay more and more for programs that don’t work. We have more drugs on the streets of Chico than ever. Kratom is illegal and has finally been labeled as a dangerous and addictive drug, but you see it advertised on “smoke shops” all around town.
And then we have the police department – those people are self-absorbed junkies. I don’t know who scares me more – the street druggies or Chico Police. City Council is their enabler, handing them more money around every turn, higher salaries and huge benefits packages with no accountability for their deteriorating behavior. Most recently, “The City of Chico paid $325,000 to settle an excessive force lawsuit filed in June 2023 by Lilly Rush regarding a March 2023 traffic stop involving former Sgt. Mark Bass.”
And yup, they are the single highest contributors to our elephant-in-the-room pension deficit turd. But, they are also the single highest contributors during campaigns.
I’ll give them credit – Winslow, Goldstein and Hawley have not taken money from CPOA. They voted NO on the last cop contract, leading to a stalemate on council when Van Overbeek failed to show up (wow). We’ll see how that relationship continues under the new council, not to mention, new city management.
I remember when the biggest problem Chico had was the college and the dead head bus people. Bust a snicker.
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