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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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Will we be forced to sue the city over the garbage tax? Ask Debbie Presson debbie.presson@chicoca.gov

26 Jan

One of the better news sources we have here in Chico/Butte County is the Butte County Fires and Accidents Facebook – better known as “bcfac”. Here’s a story I have not seen in the local news media –

https://www.facebook.com/groups/butte.county.fires.accidents.crimes/?mibextid=6NoCDW

Chico, CA Saturday 1/21/2023 7:25 PM BCFAC: A juvenile just walked up to a house asking for help, reporting unknown people robbed him of his bicycle and property in Bidwell Park.

Yeah, sometimes kids make up stuff – unfortunately this story is true. Two 26 year old adults were arrested for “strong arm robbery, willful cruelty to a child and annoying or molesting a person under 18 years of age”.

How would you feel if that was your kid? I know what I’d do, but let’s not talk about it here.

Why should I have to behave myself? Our town has become lawless, and you know Folks, when the fish stinks, it’s the head of the fish that stinks. Here in Chico, we have a many-headed fish, including 7 council members, a police chief and a city council member turned city manager.

And now, according to lawyer/activist Rob Berry, the “public safety” measure Kasey Reynolds floated onto the last ballot is completely gutless. Here’s Berry’s description of how a citizen would use Measure L to complain about a problem, like, how about – rampant crime all over town?

Measure L gives you a means to report a public nuisance on city land. It has to be particularly injurious to you. That is, if you were going to report litter at an encampment, you need to live nearby, not across town. It is one tool, not for everything. So one example that has come up is the encampment at Eaton and Cohasset. Before, the only thing available was a civil lawsuit.. Now you can simply fill out a form and the city has to respond, and if it’s valid, they should abate the nuisance. For example, restricting the use, citing for littering, illegal structures, etc. They are required to reduce the impact of the nuisance. That is how it is used.

No disrespect to Berry, but there it is – this measure is completely useless to 99.9% of the population. I read the measure – did any of you who voted YES on it actually read it first? It is very clear – the city gets to decide whose complaint is valid – gee, walked into that one with your pants down, didn’t you?

Right now the city is trying to clear Teichert Ponds. I don’t live nearby, but I know the people that live in that illegal encampment are shoplifting from nearby businesses – again, you have to check bcfac to hear these reports, the local media doesn’t pay much attention to this type of crime. In many instances, these people are followed right back to that camp. Frankly, this is just another reason NOT to shop in Chico – many of these business refuse to press charges, passing the cost of the crime onto the paying customer. At Walmart, it means you have to find an employee with a key before you can buy everyday items like socks and underwear.

It also means the customer is at risk. At Mangrove Safeway I was almost knocked down by a guy stealing a bottle of booze. The manager apologized to me but I don’t know if charges were pressed. I later saw the guy laying on the sidewalk alongside Kwando, empty bottles on the ground next to him. We used to live two blocks from that plaza and shopped there almost daily. We sold that house as we watched the crime move up our street, into our driveway. We still live in the general neighborhood but we don’t shop there anymore.

When we run errands in Chico while we’re out doing chores, one of us always has to sit in the truck while the other goes into the store so our tools won’t get stolen. I’ll never forget the transient who tried to act super drunk while he rolled his way along the bed of our truck trying to see what we had in the back. When he rolled across my passenger window my dog went nuts – it was comical to see how fast the man sobered up and walked away.

Chico used to be such a great town, it’s hard to see. But you know, it’s our own fault – we elected the people on council. We elected the people who passed a “Shelter Crisis Designation,” got us into a lawsuit, built a cardboard “homeless” camp on a children’s bicycle track, passed a sham measure designed to force us to sue if we don’t like what they’re doing, raised our sales tax, instituted an illegal garbage tax and most recently, announced a sewer tax over Christmas holiday.

Speaking of the garbage tax, no, I have not heard back from our lovely and vivacious city clerk about my request to agendize “Zolly v City of Oakland”. I have the worst feeling this is going to play out like the illegal cell phone tax the city of Chico collected for years. Measure L will not help us here – Chico taxpayers had to wait for a rich guy named Donald Sipple to sue cities all over California for collecting the tax, and then wade through a very misinformative campaign for the measure Ann Schwab put on the ballot – Measure J. In my experience trying to defeat that measure, I was shocked how many people didn’t know they were paying such a tax, and the very common response was, “what does Chico do to provide me with cell phone service?” The answer – nothing, it was just a shakedown. Like the sales tax, the garbage tax and the sewer tax.

So I’ll keep you posted here, and you keep me posted – don’t just stand there with your mouth open, flies will get in. Please cc me on your email to clerk Debbie Presson debbie.presson@chicoca.gov asking for the Zolly v City of Oakland discussion to be agendized, and I’ll post it here on the blog.

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Is it legal, or not? The trash franchise needs to be discussed – please write a note to your council rep and/or clerk Debbie Presson asking that this subject be placed on an upcoming agenda

22 Jan

This morning I sent an email to City Clerk Debbie Presson (debbie.presson@chicoca.gov), asking her how to agendise a discussion regarding the city’s trash franchise/tax. A recent Supreme Court decision says the city’s “franchise” is really a tax, and needed to be run in a ballot measure.

I’d like to ask for agendization of a discussion of “Zolly v City of Oakland” at an upcoming council meeting. Do I need to fill out a special form? Please advise – thanks, Juanita Sumner

INFO: Last August the CA Supreme Court ruled with plaintiffs in the case of Zolly v. City of Oakland, and “The court’s opinion answers the question of whether the city’s franchise fees are categorically exempt from the voter approval requirements as a matter of law — and concludes they are not”. (League of CA Cities)

Here’s a link to the case text  https://casetext.com/case/zolly-v-city-of-oakland-15

According to Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association lawyer Laura Dougherty, this is all it should take – notifying them of the legal decision. But you know these guys, it would be great if a few of you pitched in and wrote a note too. It’s all there, and you can google “Zolly vs City of Oakland” for skads more information.

I’ll keep you posted as to any response I get. Yeah, it’s Sunday – I wonder if Debbie Presson is watching the John Wayne marathon on GRIT? If you’re looking for me you’ll find me in front of the boob tube with a bag of popcorn, watching “The Three Mesquiteers”

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Letter to the Editor: tell your city representative the garbage tax is illegal

19 Jan

I was surprised this morning to see my letter to the editor in the ER – I only sent it yesterday. Here’s a prediction I’ll make – Wolcott is going to be gone soon, and Tuchinsky will take over the paper. At least Tuchinsky’s a journalist, we’ll see what kind of agenda he has as time goes by.

Of course, the media was a lot of the problem with the sewer rate hike. For one thing, nobody said anything about it until the day before the hearing, and then the tv news ran a really misleading piece, saying nothing about the doubled charge, saying it would only raise the “average” sewer bill about $15, and then quoting two people who admitted they really didn’t know anything about it but guessed it was okay because the city says it’s in a heap of trouble. Wow.

So yeah, I’m feeling like a whacked mole alright. It’s hard to live in a city full of mole rats. Frankly, my husband and I tried to sell our property in Chico last year but one developer after another told us, essentially this: The city of Chico is impossible to deal with, and there’s a bunch of cheap land in Paradise.

There are big lots all over my neighborhood. That was the Chico lifestyle. Now it’s too expensive to water your lawn or keep big trees, so yeah, people want OUT. You’d think our one and two acre lots would be in huge demand. But, every time we get a new city council, we get a new philosophy of how to build. It was infill, now it’s sprawl again. They want that Valley’s Edge thing because: 1) Bill Brouhard and his partner Doug Guillon have their fists up half the asses in this town 2) it’s going to bring in a BONANZA! of builders’ fees, property taxes and new people to bring in sales taxes and other revenues.

You ever wonder where all the money goes? Do they just roll it up and smoke it? Just like the other one… Do they just eat it? Do they stuff it up their asses in some weird sex ritual? NO! They put it in the Pension Stabilization Trust and use it to pay down their bad decisions. It’s better than heroin – it’s POWER!

Well, that was my rant for the day. You should read HJTA president Jon Coupal – he’s scary! He says the government is trying to tax older folks out of their homes so cities all over California can foreclose whole older neighborhoods for redevelopment.

Well, he’s right, but you won’t believe it until you’re about 60. That’s the dilemma – young people like Addison Winslow, a product of the California schools, are picnic’ing on the railroad tracks, and you just can’t convince them there’s a train coming. We’re overbuilding again, and last time we did that, the foreclosure notices were posted in yards all over Chico and Butte County. Before 2008, you never saw foreclosed homes in Chico – a quick search just now brought up 153 foreclosures for sale, in Chico, on just one website.

So, put both hands over your junk and get ready – the Chico we’ve known and loved is headed for the Glory Hole. It’s replacement – just another shithole along the freeway. I may not be able to stop that, but I can bitch about it. I’ll run my letter here, for those of you who have given up on the ER. Below that I also included a link to the post I made last year(?) about garbage rates gone up.

The city of Chico has managed to trick residents into allowing a major sewer rate change without fully informing ratepayers of their rights. Homeowners were given 45 days between Thanksgiving and New Year to prepare, with no ballot to protest the change, which also allows for yearly increases without public approval.

The same council tried to establish an illegal Pension Obligation Bond without voter approval and was threatened with a lawsuit from Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association.

So it’s not surprising that the trash franchise the city entered into years ago is also illegal. Last year the Supreme Court ruled in Zolly vs. City of Oakland that cities can’t collect franchise fees for the use of city streets.

My household trash bills have shown a 60% increase since we were forced to switch service to Waste Management. Now we’re told we must pay extra for a yard waste bin to separate food waste.

This franchise is clearly a tax that was run under the radar without public approval. The money does not go toward street repairs but is dumped into the General Fund. Last year it paid for raises for Chico PD.

According to Laura Dougherty, legal counsel for HJTA, “all a ratepayer needs to do now is send a copy of the Zolly decision to their city…”

I will certainly do so and urge other ratepayers to do same. I don’t like being treated like a cash cow – do you?

Waste Management has raised rates 19% over the past year – why isn’t that money being spent on the street in front of your house?

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Why did the city give $8 million from the sewer fund to PG&E? New thermostats for city hall? Again?

16 Jan

Tomorrow night the city of Chico will hold a hearing regarding their proposed sewer tax. Make no mistake – this is a tax, but it’s legal now because the city owns the sewer plant. One thing that really bothers me about this “rate change”, is that when they sell the plant to Cal Water – and you can check the agendas for yourself, they’ve been talking about it – Cal Water will no longer have to notice us for annual rate hikes.

Not to mention, the city is going to be charging us for water we already paid for, including water that never enters the sewer system. All because they can’t handle money Downtown. Here’s a good example I found in the 22-23 budget – out of an $11 million sewer fund, they gave PG&E “$8,487,515 to Project 50522 PG&E SST Phase 2… to reduce the costs of energy usage at City facilities and to help meet Climate Action Plan goals.”

https://chico.ca.us/sites/main/files/file-attachments/2022-23_city_annual_final_budget.pdf?1664554257

Sure, one of those facilities is the sewer plant, where PG&E made some upgrades, but new thermostats at City Hall? How does that pencil out of the sewer budget? Cause that’s how they spend money Downtown. Sure they have enough money in the sewer budget to make (more) upgrades at City Hall, or should we call it, “Taj Mahal”? But they need a sewer tax, and a sales tax, and they need the Utility Tax AND franchise fees on PG&E, Comcast and Waste Management?

As I said in my last post, those franchise fees, particularly the trash tax, are all under question as of a Supreme Court decision made about six months ago in the case of Zolly vs the City of Oakland. Laura Dougherty of Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association suggests we inform our city of that decision, hoping we won’t have to sue, as did ratepayers in Oakland. But, she gave me a list of attorneys, I’ll be keeping that in my side pocket.

Something my dad told me when my brother went in the Navy – nobody is going to stick up for you, you have to learn to stick up for yourself. I’ll give you that same advice. And I’ll borrow a quote from actor/voice artist/radio ham Harry Shearer – if you’re looking for honesty and truth in government you’re looking for apples in the cheese section.

If you haven’t turned in your sewer rate protest already please do it either today or tomorrow at the city building. Don’t forget your parcel number – I did, and now I have to go Downtown to fix it. But, like my dad told me, nobody is going to do that for me. I just hope I don’t step in bum shit or get hit by a drunk walking by Duffy’s.

Next time let’s compare Chico to the state of California – both make too many spending decisions based on ideology – their own – instead of pragmatic solutions for the tax and ratepayers.

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