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In the City of Chico, the squeaky wheel gets the slobbers

17 Mar

As I predicted, City of Chico management does not have any real plan to address residential city street repairs/maintenance, just kind of a squeaky-wheel-gets-the-grease kind of approach. Apparently, the neighborhood that complains the loudest will get their potholes fixed.

https://www.actionnewsnow.com/news/some-chico-potholes-to-be-fixed-over-the-summer-more-still-need-to-be-fixed/article_68ea2b8e-c467-11ed-85a3-9ff4450ab967.html

By Lauren Cooper, Mar 16, 2023

CHICO, Calif. – The Chico City Council has made a change to the summer road repair schedule set to fix streets such as North Cedar Street.

Other roadways, such as East Lassen Avenue, El Paso Way, E. East Avenue and Upper Park Road, are also scheduled to be fixed.

Originally the Amber Grove area was on the list as well, but was bumped after receiving more than two dozen complaints. Mayor Andrew Coolidge says that it just doesn’t look good to fix one of the better neighborhoods when there are worse areas in need.

“Yeah, it’s very noticeable. Everyone really complains about it that I talk to when I show them the street I live on,” a Chico resident said. “It’s just everyday it’s put a little bit of damage on my car especially since I don’t have a super expensive car. I really try to maintain it so the potholes have really made one of my tires kind of more flat than before on any other street I’ve lived on.”

Some told Action News Now that there are even more roads that need work.

“They should fix all the streets. I mean you can see right now. There’s a bunch of nasty roads all right, here it’s pretty turfed,” Keith Elliott said. “Also I kind of don’t want them to cause the housing is pretty cheap over here so I do kind of feel like if they fix it the price will go up.”

Action News Now reached out to Chico Public Works to see if they have any ideas for what roads will replace Amber Grove area, but they have not responded.

Amber Grove? A less than 30 year old neighborhood with houses worth over half a million? I knew it – they will ignore the older neighborhoods until all they are so crapped out they qualify for eminent domain and redevelopment under blight laws. I see that’s what they intended to do, until they got “dozens of complaints”.

And here’s what else I predicted – they will do band-aid patches – pot hole filling. That is a laugh – the older streets they’re talking about are so crapped out I don’t know if they’ll take a patch – you can hear the broken surface under your tires like old crockery. The potholes pictured in the news story aren’t even potholes – they’re voids in the street surface.

Furthermore, filling potholes in old neighborhoods is just their way of cleaning the asphalt trucks after they’ve been surfacing streets in new neighborhoods all day – getting rid of “slobbers” – leftover asphalt. Other wise it’s toxic waste, they can’t just hose the trucks out when they get back to the yard. So they scrape them out with shovels and dump them in older hoods between the yard and the jobsite. Pat-pat-pat – within hours, it will be all over the bottoms of cars.

The older streets need to be completely scraped down and resurfaced, like they just did on Mulberry Street. They only did that because they got grants, because they’re 50 years behind the Americans With Disabilities Act. Think – how’d you like to have to get around your neighborhood in a wheelchair? My neighborhood – annexed 20 years ago – doesn’t even have sidewalks or drainage.

If folks in older neighborhoods want sidewalks or drainage, they have to pay for it based on “frontage”, or the length of the street side of their property. Or wait for the city to get another grant.

And then there’s the sewer – they’ve announced they will have to tear up Downtown to replace sewer pipes over 100 years old – how about the rest of town? How does that figure in to their street repair plans?

I know, I hate being right all the time.

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UPDATE: illegal garbage tax would require a lawsuit to overturn; council rejects Sorensen’s suggestion to oppose Taxpayer Protection and Government Accountability Act

16 Mar

Well, I’ve been preoccupied with the weather lately – there’s a lot of big trees in my neighborhood, and I could sit hypnotized all day by the swaying canopy outside my apartment windows. It’s like a juke joint out there, but you can’t hear the music over the 40+ mph winds.

But I’ve also tried to keep up with various issues that are on my radar because they affect the cost of living for my family and my tenants – the garbage tax, and the Taxpayer Protection and Government Accountability Act.

The Garbage Tax: The “trash franchise” that was instituted in Chico back about 2013 was determined to be illegal in an August 2022 decision by the CA Supreme Court in the case of Zolly v. City of Oakland. What I finally realized the last time I studied the court’s decision (no, I’m not a lawyer, I’m just an old lady with Google) – the decision will not result in an immediate overturn of these franchises, it looks like each city, including Chico, would have to be sued by a citizen/citizen’s group to enforce the decision. Any takers?

Laura Dougherty, council for Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, suggested that we inform our city leaders of this case and hope they’ll be rational – meaning, either abandon the franchise, or put it on a ballot measure. My attempts to take this conversation to council have ended with the city clerk, who says I have to come to a meeting and tell them during Business from the Floor. I know they already know about the decision – Chico is a member of the California League of Cities, and the CLC is flying pissed about the decision, having written numerous articles in their various newsletters. The court was pretty clear – one justice used the word “collusion” to describe the deal Oakland had made with their waste hauler.

Why do I care? Because after years of the same reasonable rate from my old hauler, I was forced into a deal with another hauler that has doubled what I pay, even though I have switched to smaller bins. And they are making increasing demands – for goddsake, don’t let them find wet cardboard in your recycling bins! And this whole composting bullshit – that’s another blog post.

But that’s where it’s at – we would have to sue those shits on city council to get them to fess up – just like Measure J, the cell phone tax. I don’t have that kind of moolah, so I will just continue to bitch about it.

The Taxpayer Protection and Government Accountability Act. Yeah, what a mouthful – what does it mean? The TPGAA will be on the ballot in 2024. It would change the voter threshold for tax measures back to 2/3’s. The legislature, behind our backs, dumped the 2/3’s requirement that we approved with Prop 13 – yeah, you have to watch those fuckers, they’re up to no good around the clock in Sacramento.

And you have to watch your local leaders – our council and staff put a simple tax measure – H – on last November’s ballot, knowing it couldn’t get 2/3’s approval, and more importantly – not wanting to go with a 2/3’s measure because it would have meant the money had to be restricted to a specific purpose. They didn’t have the nerve to float a Pension Obligation Bond, even though that’s what will happen to most of the money – a simple measure goes into the General Fund, and the General Fund goes mostly toward the pensions. Don’t take my word for it, read the budget yourself.

Measure H barely made it under the wire, with less than 53% approval. Under the TPGAA, any measure passed after January 2022 without 2/3’s approval is overturned. Yep. That’s why Mark Sorensen was worried – he said we stand to lose $24 million a year in Measure H revenues if the TPGAA passes.

Well, so what. The $5-6 million he’s announced for street work is all going to superficial “slurry coatings” on non-residential streets, like the roundabout in front of the Taj Mahal fire station #5. They have admitted they will not be resurfacing any of our beat up and sub-code residential streets, even as they pay to put new streets in new subdivisions on the outer edges of town. Over the years preceeding their tax campaign, staffers said the real cost of repairing Chico streets would be in the hundreds of millions – they aren’t going to do that, they’re going to make a few superficial, highly public repairs now, and by next year H receipts will be pouring right in to the General Fund, and from there to the Pension Stabilization Trust.

But Sorensen asked council to join the California League of Cities in opposing the TPGAA, because he knows it would overturn Measure H. Luckily, the reporter from Ch 7, Muna Sadek, did a story about it, and all the sudden James Gallagher’s office is telling Kasey Reynolds to drop the opposition. Council voted unanimously last week to table their resolution to oppose the measure. The city clerk informed me that Mark Sorensen has told her he won’t be bringing it back. I wondered, what did Assyman Gallagher’s office tell them about this measure? So I emailed Gallagher’s staff and will share any information they send me.

The good news is, the TPGAA will be on the 2024 ballot and we will be able to support it. And, this measure includes a provision that overturns measures like H that were approved by a simple majority after January, 2022.

Well, that’s where it’s at for now – join me next time on This Old Lady!

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Is our city council too dependent on “staff” to make their decisions? Ask your rep if they read the Taxpayer Protection Act and if they understand it (you might want to read it yourself first… )

11 Mar

When I watched last week’s city council meeting on video, I realized, Mark Sorensen is trying to shove his resolution to oppose the Taxpayer Protection and Government Accountability Act right through, with as little transparency as possible. The Consent Agenda?

I am shocked. Years ago, when they discussed a sales tax increase with Sorensen as a council member, he and Sean Morgan both opined loudly that it should be a 2/3’s measure, with Morgan mumbling something about wanting the voters to make the decision so he wouldn’t be on the hook for it later. Sorensen stood firm for a 2/3’s measure, but it didn’t materialize on his watch.

And I was also shocked, after he lost his last bid for council, that Sorensen drank the Kool Aid, taking the job as City Manager for Biggs. He sold his interest in his cable satellite company and took that job from his next door neighbor Pete Carr, who was leaving that position for a manager position in Orland.

Then last year, when Council gave Mark Orme the door, Mark Sorensen was waiting right behind it, taking an unprecedented salary of $211,000/yr. He pays only 9% of the cost of his pension, adding to the bottomless pit of CalPERS debt. As a former council member he knows very well the situation with CalPERS, but he doesn’t seem to be too worried about our bottom line anymore, just his.

That’s why he’s freaking out over the TPGAA – he worked hard to shove Measure H past the voters on a 50+1 vote, now it’s “in jeopardy” alright – if the TPGAA passes, Measure H is null and void and has to go back to the ballot for 2/3’s of the vote.

Here’s a question that just popped into my mind – if they start collecting on that tax on April 1, and the TPGAA passes, will they have to give back all the money collected under that tax? Here’s the answer – NO. When we rejected Measure J, they’d been illegally collecting the cell phone tax for over 20 years. The offered a refund, but required hard copies of phone bills, and only for a year back.

It’s obvious to see why Sorensen opposes the TPGAA, and I expected council to roll right in with him, so I was surprised when Kasey Reynolds offered this: “it seems like there’s a lot of conflicting information… it sounds like it could affect our measure H…” She suggested tabling it for discussion at another meeting. She seemed nervous – yeah Kasey, everybody in town knows you voted on the Warren case and then said you didn’t understand it and you wanted a do-over. Good for you.

Sean Morgan commented that information presented by “staff” conflicts with information he received from Assemblyman James Gallagher’s office, but did not elaborate. Is he accusing who of lying? He sulked, “I don’t trust the League of California Cities at all…” The League is a major opponent of the TPGAA, and also supported the legislature in gutting the voter requirements set forth in Prop 13. The city of Chico is a dues paying member. ( The League of California Cities is a publicly funded nonprofit organization, funding provided by dues paying cities like Chico CA ) It was the League who in 2013 issued a report suggesting that cities should start deferring maintenance and make larger payments to CalPERS.

From that report: “City pension costs will dramatically increase to unsustainable levels, (2) Rising pension costs will require cities to nearly double the percentage of their general fund dollars they pay to CalPERS, and (3) Cities have few options to address growing pension liabilities.“

“Change service delivery methods and levels of certain public services: Many cities have already consolidated and cut local services during the Great Recession and have not been able to restore those service levels. Often, revenue growth from the improved economy has been absorbed by pension costs. The next round of service cuts will be even harder.” 

As far as The League is concerned, the taxpayers need to pay down the pension deficit brought about by years of unrealistic employee contributions. As far as The League is concerned, Prop 13 is Enemy No 1. So, while I’m glad Mr. Morgan has a healthy distrust of that quasi-public agency, I’d suggest both he and Reynolds read the text of the actual ballot measure instead of depending on city of Chico or Gallagher’s staffers, all of whom are CalPERS members. Yes, it “threatens our Measure H…” it sure does. Read for yourself:

Click to access 21-0042A1%20(Taxes).pdf

I find it really annoying that city council members depend on staff to tell them about stuff when they could just read about it themselves. Sometimes I wonder if Reynolds is qualified to hold office.

But at least they passed a motion to table it for “another meeting” – approved 7-0. Dummies – none of them read the measure, did they? I’m a landlady, and every time I get a new tenant I ask them if they read the documents I sent them and if they have questions. I use big print and a “lease for dummies”, you know, so I can understand it. I’ll never forget the two guys who ran a local non-profit – when I asked if they’d read it, they both got big eyes, held their hands out for a copy, and walked to opposite sides of the driveway. But they damned sure read it, and I asked them specific questions before we all signed. Maybe we should ask ourselves if our council members are able to read and understand at a high school level before we vote them into office. Can they use a dictionary? How about Google? Dummies – they think running for council is a popularity contest.

Hey, want to have some fun? Read the Taxpayers Protection and Government Accountability Act ballot measure posted above and we’ll have a quiz. You can send same questions to your council rep, see how much they know about the damned thing.

This morning I sent a note to the clerk’s office, asked, when and where will the conversation continue? I’ll keep you posted. In the meantime, I wrote a letter to the editor about this situation,

On the advice of city manager and former Councilman Mark Sorensen, Chico City Council is considering a resolution opposing The Taxpayer Protection and Government Accountability Act, slated for the 2024 ballot. According to Sorensen, “The [TPGAA] would make it more difficult for voters to pass measures needed to fund local services and projects, and would put initiatives passed by voters after January 2022, such as Measure H passed by Chico voters in November 2022, in jeopardy. “

“make it more difficult for voters”? No, it will make it harder for public agencies to pass taxes without full voter approval. Since when is that a bad thing? And yes, it would jeopardize Measure H, a full cent sales tax that squeaked by with less than 53% of the vote last November.

If the TPGAA passes, it will reinstate the 2/3’s voter threshold to pass taxes, approved overwhelmingly by California voters under Prop 13, stripped later by the legislature without a ballot measure. If you think housing is unaffordable now, imagine a world without Prop 13 – home ownership becomes a privilege of the ultra rich. This measure would also reinstate rules for campaign “transparency”. Why would Sorensen want council to oppose transparency?

Sorensen’s resolution would mean the city would be added to the “No coalition” – does that involve taxpayer money? Staff time has already been used on this resolution.

I’m glad council tabled this discussion for another meeting. Contact your representative and ask them why they’d oppose a law that protects taxpayers.

Juanita Sumner, Chico CA

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Mark Sorensen asked council to stand up and declare they don’t want to protect the taxpayers, or be accountable for the taxes they pass, and council said, “wait a minute here…”

9 Mar

Welcome to Dr. Juanita’s office – see, ever since my husband and I got kicked off Cal Covered for not making enough money, we’ve had to take care of ourselves. Recently, when I started to feel like I couldn’t raise my arms, I sat down at my laptop with a heating pad and started googling “sore arms”. It seems that with all this weather and the raking, shoveling and general pick-up around my house and yard, I have “hyperextended” my arms – you all remember the milk commercial in which the old man grabs his wheelbarrow and his arms fall off… OMG! that can really happen!

Wow, I like that word – hyperextended – you could use it for a million different occasions. Chico, for example, is pretty “hyperextended” right now. At least my problem is from overwork instead of overspending.

I don’t like painkillers, cause they don’t like me. Taking an ibuprofen or even an aspirin is like shoving a whole roll of Mentos into a liter bottle of Mr. Pibb. You don’t want to be there. Chico uses band-aids – for example, grants – grants are a form of instant gratification that comes with interest.

So I did some homework – here’s the advice you get for hyperextended arms – “stop doing whatever you’re doing…” I get that, but does the city of Chico get it?

This morning I finally got a chance to watch the Tuesday (3/7) Chico City Council meeting. Wow, what a show – I could tell Debbie Presson was kind of annoyed, in her nice way, I think she wanted to put somebody over her knee. Council acts like tiny children sometimes and Ms. Presson seems to feel that is a direct reflection on her skills at keeping meetings in order. Let’s give her a taser! How about a stick?

But what I was after was the discussion about opposing the Taxpayer Protection and Government Accountability Act, item 2.2 in the Consent Agenda. I guess-tulated that was Sorensen’s Baby, I think I was right. Kasey Reynolds immediately complained that she wasn’t sure she understood the measure or the discussion and she wanted to table it for another meeting. Morgan fell right in with her. The rest of council agreed and tabled it.

I’ve watched these guys discussing the sales tax measure for about 5 years now, and they always have problems standing publicly and declaring they support any tax. In one Finance Committee meeting, former council member Mark Sorensen, along with current council member Morgan, both declared they wanted a 2/3’s tax measure because they wanted “the voters” to be responsible for the decision – they didn’t want that albatross hung around their necks, and they still don’t. They’re afraid they’ll lose their next bid for re-election, and yeah, that’s always a possibility. What has happened to change Mark Sorensen’s tune? Well, since he left City Council he has sold his private business and take a job in the public sector – first as city manager of Biggs, now he’s getting $211,000 + benefits to run the City of Chico into the ground.

Now Sorensen wants council members to stand up and declare they don’t want to protect the taxpayers, or be accountable for the taxes they pass. Boy, do they wish they could meet and make these decisions in private, like they hold most of their discussions, with staff and other “stakeholders”. But now there’s scrutiny, the COVID farce is over, people are attending meetings and paying attention.

I’ll have to hand it Reynolds – at least she admitted she didn’t understand something BEFORE she voted on it for a change. I’ll guess she and the others did a double-take because of the extra scrutiny put on this action – thank you Muna Sadek at Ch 7 for choosing to cover this story. I hope Muna will stay with us a while, she’s a real journalist.

I’m not sure what will happen to this proposed resolution, I’ll watch for it in committee agendas. I don’t know why they spend staff time on stupid stuff like resolutions, and this one is especially vexing because it’s an attack on the sunshine/transparency laws. Yes, the city of Chico is hyperextended, they need to get off their spending bender and start making some new policies that save money instead of strongarming working people to pick of the tab for overgenerous employee contracts and irrational spending policies.

Here’s the link to the meeting video –

http://chico-ca.granicus.com/player/clip/1118?view_id=2&redirect=true&h=c6d336ea1169f859fadf37c2a1e1ddbc

When you get a chance, take a look at the business from the floor segment – Robyn Engel gives a good rundown on some pretty questionable uses of Chico taxpayer money, right out of the budget. I think we’re on the verge of some sort of rumble, I just don’t know exactly where it’s going to come from.

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KRCR News: Chico City Council to vote on resolution AGAINST taxpayer protection ballot measure – this measure would overturn Measure H, the Chico sales tax increase

7 Mar

https://krcrtv.com/news/local/chico-city-council-to-vote-on-resolution-against-taxpayer-protection-ballot-measure#

by Muna Sadek Monday, Mar. 6, 2023

CHICO, Calif. — Next November, California voters will have the chance to vote on a ballot measure that aims to make it a little tougher to pass taxes.

The Taxpayer Protection and Government Accountability Act, spearheaded by the California Business Roundtable, would set new rules at both the state and local levels. It would require state legislation that imposes any new taxes or tax increases to be approved first by a majority of California voters. Secondly, proponents say it would close a loophole at the local level by requiring that special taxes only be passed with a two-thirds majority vote.

Chico city officials are set to vote on a resolution against the measure Tuesday. According to a staff report from City Manager Mark Sorensen, the recently-passed Measure H is at stake because the ballot measure is retroactive to Jan. 1, 2022. Measure H was passed with 52% voter support.

Longtime Chico resident and owner of ChicoTaxpayers.com Juanita Sumner says she felt beat down after the passage of Measure H but believes the Taxpayer Protection Act could offer local taxpayers reprieve.

“If you can’t get two-thirds of the people to support a tax, why would you put it out there?” Sumner says. “It just about divides our town between the haves and the have-nots and the have-nots could use a little pick up.”

Meanwhile, Sorensen cautions that the city stands to lose about $24 million that would otherwise be generated by the Measure H sales tax for road repair projects and other infrastructure needs. The tax is set to go into effect April 1.

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An upcoming California ballot measure would raise the voter threshold for tax measures – and overturn Measure H (think that’s why city mangler Mark Sorensen is pressing council to mount formal opposition?) (using your tax dollars?)

6 Mar

Well, you know me – I have a hard time “letting it go…” I’m still mad about the city of Chico’s simple tax measure and their dirty and underhanded – and I’ll say some of it was illegal – campaign to pass that one-cent sales tax.

Here’s a good question – why is a 2/3’s measure better than 50% +1 or “simple” measure? Here’s my simpleton theory – in Chico, the public sector outweighs the private sector at the ballot box. They have a stake in tax measures, and they are very well informed by their unions. Meanwhile, city officials, elected and hired, do everything they can to keep the rest of us out of the conversation, including a new effort by our city manager Mark Sorensen to undermine the Taxpayer Protection and Government Accountability Act.

The TPGAA would not only increase the threshold for passage of tax measures back to 2/3’s, it addresses transparency and what’s legal during the campaign. Read about it here:

Initiative to increase the vote threshold for new or increased taxes in California qualifies for the 2024 ballot

And HERE’S THE STINGER: It’s retroactive to January 2022. Yes, MEASURE H WOULD BE OVERTURNED.

Oh, somebody stop me… I think I’m going to bust a gut. This is the best news I’ve heard since November 8, 2022.

But HERE’S THE QUESTION: If the TPGAA passes, will the city be reasonable and overturn the measure? No, they’re opposing the measure, formally, with City Manager Sorensen calling for that resolution to oppose this measure.

You know, I don’t really think it’s the city’s job to tell us how to vote. Of course they would oppose this measure. How many other taxes you think this measure would overturn? I think we might be able to apply it to the trash tax, and wow, maybe it would even cover the sewer tax. Ya think? Let’s find out, next time, on “This Old Lady Really Wants to Put Her Boot Up Mark Sorensen’s Ass”.

Note: Thanks Muna!

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Everybody repeat after me: when the people lead, the leaders will follow

4 Mar

My husband and I travel a lot these days, gotta keep up with the kids and the relatives. I always know I’m in Chico when I wake up to the train whistle. We have a friend who likes to take the train from her home town in SoCal up to see her kids in Portland, it goes right through Chico, about 4:30 am, without stopping. Amtrak has a bus that will take you from LA to Chico, a 12 hour hell trip that leaves you standing at the Chico Depot at 9:25 pm. $70.50, one way. Two transfers – they kick you off the first bus in Bakersfield, then again in Stockton.

Having rode Greyhound as a kid, here’s my advice – don’t move an inch from the station, just get your bag and get the hell to that next bus. If you miss that transfer you’ll be waiting for hours, in a seat that will compel you to throw away your pants. No, I don’t know if there’s a bathroom on the bus, but I sure as hell wouldn’t use the one at the station if I were you.

Here’s where you end up in Chico – “Amtrak Train Station Chico, CA has a platform only, no shelter, without Wi-Fi, with parking, with accessible platform and no wheelchair available.” Sounds cozy! But no, I wouldn’t leave my car parked in that neighborhood – at all – and since there’s no busses at that time, and you’d be an idiot to ride a bike in this town at 9:30 pm, crazy to walk, you better have a ride lined up. I’ve heard Uber is expensive, and we’ve all heard the stories about who is driving. I don’t even know if you can get a taxi in Chico anymore. Don’t call me because I’ll be asleep.

So talk of a train directly to North Sacramento, where you can catch an express bus to the Sacramento International Airport, caught my attention. It also raises some questions in my mind – first of all, how will Chico pay for a new depot? You know they will have to put tax money forward to get this deal, just like the millions in “guarantee” money they are paying to get an airline. Second, what will this mean to the Chico Airport? More money to prop up an airport that can’t get air service without millions in guarantee money, just so people will be taking the train to a much better airport with more services and flights in Sac-o-tomatoes?

None of this interests me personally because I travel with my dog. Not to mention every horrible plane and train crash I’ve ever heard of. Just think if they hadn’t stopped the Amtrak passenger train in time when the Edgar Slough trestle was set on fire a while back. People most certainly would have been injured. And I just heard a story about turbulence over Appalachia that made me renew my vow to never fly again. All that particulate vomit spraying around – and I got a good look at the food they serve – HARD NO!

For years now I’ve sat in on various conversations about funding public transportation, but most importantly, getting people to use it. See, they want the grant funding to pay salaries and benefits for agencies like BCAG – Butte County Association of Governments. In order to pay the bureaucrat salaries and benefits, they’ve hitched their wagons to grants. It’s like cocaine – grants have to be matched, and if the agency doesn’t have that money on hand, it’s a loan, and there’s interest. Think about everything you’ve tried to teach your kids about debt, and then look at your government.

They want us on public transportation so they can mainline grant money. Cars are unpopular now, especially in California. So they continue to ignore the roads, knowing people get frustrated with traffic back-ups. They think they can force us into public transportation – one ride on public transportation and most people wish they were sitting in their car in a traffic jam.

I’ll say, while my friend from SoCal enjoys the more scenic parts of her train ride (starting about Redding), she doesn’t enjoy the various bus transfers she has to endure in the south, leaving her miles from home with a late night drive. She only does it because the nearly 24 hour car drive is too onerous for one person. It’s an “either or” situation. I believe California could do better, but you know, it really matters who is in charge. And at this point, CalPERS is in charge, and the people who make the decisions are beholden to CalPERS.

It’s a “dick in a mousetrap” situation, I say, snap that sucka!

Time Machine: set your watch for Chico, CA, 2012…

21 Feb

How the heck did Chico get into the mess it’s in? That’s been discussed from many points of view – here’s mine. You can also read back in the archives, I chronicled as much of it here as I could, trying to make sense of it, all the way back to 2012, when I quit my old blog at the Enterprise Record. Anybody remember that?

I’ll start there. Back in 2012, the city of Chico hired a new city manager out of a tiny Southern California town called Hemet. Brian Nakamura – a man with a questionable employment record, who was already on the hot seat in Hemet for various reasons. Nakamura was hired at an unheard of new salary – $212,000/yr, plus full benefits – he paid nothing toward his pension or health benefits.

At that time the city was still reeling from years of fiscal hijinks – the most damning, a Memo of Understanding brought forward about 2006 by former city manager Tom Lando. At that time, the city was riding high from developer fees, so Lando decided everybody should get a raise. He wanted in on the money train coming from years of over development, so he suggest that we “attach salaries to revenue increases but NOT decreases”. Council approved that MOU. Over the next few years, salaries went up incredibly – 14%, 19%, 22%, per year.

Lando’s salary went from around $90,000/yr to over $150,000/yr. At that time, here’s the whammy – management paid NOTHING toward their benefits and the other employee groups paid slim to none as well. Public safety paid nothing, for pensions of 90 percent of their highest year’s salary, available at 55 years old.

And then, you might remember, The Great Bust of 2008. Like it was a surprise? Foreclosures all over town took property tax revenues into the toilet. Reeling from their own bad investments, CalPERS started to tank, and began demanding outrageous payments for all those new pensions. Trouble, right here in Bidwell City, and that’s starts with ‘T’ and that rhymes with ‘P’ and that stands for PENSIONS.

That’s where we were when Nakamura rode in, like Gene Wilder in “Blazing Saddles”. Nakamura was hired as a “corporate assassin”. We had a big payroll, and he had been hired to pare it down. Instead of negotiating better contracts with a “top heavy” management force – as had been suggested several times by consultants – Nakamura just waded in and started firing people.

All behind closed doors, without explanation, he eliminated senior staffers who didn’t agree with the new policies. He hired his friends from Hemet to replace them – Mark Orme and Chris Constantin – as his assistant manager and finance director, giving them salaries in excess of the people who’d formerly held those positions. And then Constantin started a campaign of blaming all the city’s financial woes on his predecessor Jennifer Hennessy, calling her “Loosey Goosey” in meetings and in an appearance before the Chico Tea Party. Constantin went on an regular PR campaign – sheesh, he even attended one of my Chico Taxpayer meetings, brought his wife and everything. He tried to tell us the whole thing was the fire departments’ fault. Nakamura started reporting threats from the Police and Fire Departments. But he kept doling out raises to his friends and refused to ask employee groups to pay higher shares of the CalPERS costs.

Instead, Nakamura began gutting the lower-paid workforce in all departments. This really made no sense in light of the fact that new management positions continued to be created at higher salaries. Orme went on creating new management positions right up until he left last year, while telling us we needed to pay a one-cent sales tax if we wanted our streets maintained.

Nakamura had been the one who first raised the subject of the CalPERS pension deficit, even mentioning the benefits deficit that is rarely discussed. Well, of course he needed to mention that – all the new salaries and no employee shares was rising up on the horizon like a tidal wave. I always think, “Jaws”, or “Perfect Storm”. Nakamura told us about it, but his solution was, the taxpayers should pay more. After Nakamura left and Orme and Constantin took over, the total payments to CalPERS went up drastically, millions a year siphoned quietly out of all the department funds. The city finally established the “Pension Stabilization Trust” and these payments became instituted – the PST gets a set percentage of every department budget, no matter the needs of the city.

Nakamura left as quickly as he was hired, leaving suddenly to take a job in Rancho Cordova, from which he was essentially fired for pulling some dirty tricks in a revenue measure campaign. But his legacy lives on in many ways – next time we’ll talk about the Trash Tax (cause that’s what current city manager and former city council member Mark Orme called it back in 2012).

Ever wonder what happened to Nakamura? Here he is at Texas A&M, giving us his insights on how the public needs to do more. We’ll pick this up again later as well.

Dr. Brian Nakamura: Faculty Spotlight
I’m working on what we call “coproduction of services” at the local government level. Essentially, coproduction of services for a local government is “how do we engage the citizens to be active and to participate within the environment in the community in which they live?” We want citizens to engage within the community beyond volunteering and participating in public meetings. We want them to engage in the production and implementation of essential public services.
For example, citizens tend to engage in Neighborhood Watch or community-oriented policing, and we want to take this one step further by having citizens truly engage, in a safe manner of course, in providing services related to economic development, social justice, and environmental protection. Let’s put the gloves on, get the shovels and trimmers out, and rid our parks and natural areas of invasive tree and plant species, as an example.

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Insubordination Downtown – whattya gonna do? Call Ghostbusters?

4 Feb

I asked all of you to contact your council representative and ask about the trash tax and so I did same. I wrote to the city clerk Debbie Presson and asked her how to agendize a discussion for an upcoming meeting. I got no response. So I waited a week or so and wrote to clerk Dani Rogers – she responded with this –

“The citizen request has to be sponsored by a Councilmember.  The Councilmember would bring the request forward.  You can email the full Council and see if one takes up the issue, or you can work with your district Councilmember to try to get them take it up. You can also address the Council from Business From the Floor and ask that they take up the item on a future agenda.”

I won’t waste my time contacting any members of council, they don’t respond. I’d rather go to the meeting and take it up from the Floor – at least then it’s on the record. But you know, that means going Downtown at night. I don’t mind admitting, I don’t go Downtown at all anymore, certainly not at night. I’ll have to think about it.

I sure miss Kelly Meagher, he used to make the meetings worth attending. I’ll never forget the night he got into an argument with Dan Herbert – back in the days when there was a real back-and-forth exchange between council members and citizens. Some people would say Kelly liked to tie one on before a meeting – who cares, he was magnificent. Dan kept coming at Kelly with the city line, and Kelly just kept coming right back at him. It got so Dan couldn’t get a word in, Kelly just kept ramming him down. Finally Kelly ran out of breath. Dan sat on the dais with a tired grin, as usual, the meeting had gone on too long. Kelly stood at the podium waiting for an answer, Dan just shook his head and laughed – Dan could be a real good natured guy sometimes. Finally he said, “Kelly, you’ve interrupted me so many times, I can’t remember what I was going to say…” Everybody laughed and the meeting went on.

Mark Sorensen, former council member and current city manager, has put an end to that type of back-and-forth conversation at meetings, he’s put an end to public input, he’s closed meetings as much as possible. He got a lawyer to tell council they don’t have to respond to their constituents anymore unless those constituents agree with them, or yeah – gave them some big bucks at election time. This is mutiny on the Bounty as far as I’m concerned, pure, willful insubordination. They think we won’t fight, maybe they’re right.

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There it is – the first letter to the editor bitching about a rate increase that could have been stopped with a piece of paper that said “NO!”

1 Feb

A friend sent me a link to a letter in the ER yesterday that goads me into saying “I told you so!” A local woman bitching about the sewer rate increase. Just now?

The entire process was legal, mostly because people haven’t been paying attention as the state legislature has changed the rules for how taxes can be administered. The writer had very good points, suggesting the use of some of the millions the city of Chico got in Camp Fire emergency funding, to bring our sewer plant and infrasture up to date. But, here’s the thing – all we had to do to to stop that sewer rate increase was write NO on a piece of paper with our address and signature and deliver it to the clerk.

In the 45 days between receiving the notice and the hearing date, I wrote two letters to the paper telling people about the process and how simply we could reject it. The local media sat on their keyboards. I contacted Howard Jarvis Association and received information how to beat it, and shared that on my blog. I spoke to friends, neighbors and strangers at the grocery store. I got many blank stares.

Meanwhile, I’ll guess over half of Chico threw their notices in the trash without even reading them.

So now the media, including the Enterprise Record, are jumping on the bandwagon to promote the rate increase, with a glowing Eric Gustafson talking about the Candy Land we’ll have now – even promising to resurface entire streets after sewer hook-ups instead of sloppy patches.

All that waits to be seen – what we will see immediately, is a continuing rise in our cost of living with a simultaneous dip in our quality of life. I also predict Gustafson will be moving on to a higher salary in another town within the next year.

What I also predict is another push to outlaw septic tanks – we’ll see, on the next installment of Tank Girl.

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