Archive | Chico bankruptcy RSS feed for this section

Norman Elarth: “they will speak of uncontrollable external cost increases, rather than overcompensated and underfunded employees”

8 Aug

From the Chico Enterprise Record:

Policies help conceal false allocation of resources

Aquatic centers, solar power, new sports arenas around Sacramento, etc. Many are seeking the notoriety, above-market compensation, or even the cheap entertainment that becomes available by taxing the workingman. The question is why our politicians want to destroy our wealth by investing in entertainment and doubly expensive electricity, particularly since businessmen will not increase production and employment until workers are capable of paying down debt and increasing expenditures.

Unfortunately, while democracy and capitalism are both succumbing to government overspending, public greed, and the faulty allocation of financial resources, the problem is amplified by the leaders of government and its related entities. In order to maintain their power, they must increasingly provide a free lunch even more grandiose than the public can stomach, and hence we often find that their policies are shrouded in falsehood and deceit.

Thus, while our school board obscures the cash bonus and cumulative 9.2 percent raise given to our teachers, they completely hide the additional 4.3 percent of their salary that we will be paying into their pension fund for the years 2014 and 2015 combined. Another 4.3 percent will be added next year under Assembly Bill No. 1469. Their poorly managed total compensation for 10-months work will be about $60 per hour.

When cities and water and power companies help bankrupt our workers and the elderly with increased fees and rates, they speak of uncontrollable external cost increases, rather than overcompensated and underfunded employees.

— Norman Elarth, Chico

Tags: , ,

Presson responds

3 Aug

I posted city councilman Randall Stones efforts to get city clerk Debbie Presson to return the campaign contribution reports to the website.

https://chicotaxpayers.com/2015/07/29/thanks-to-councilman-randall-stone-for-taking-city-clerk-debbie-presson-to-task-over-her-refusal-to-post-the-campaign-reports/

Here’s the link to his Facebook page:

https://www.facebook.com/ElectStone/posts/732600713534996?comment_id=733024570159277&offset=0&total_comments=22&notif_t=feed_c

Last week Presson responded to his accusations as though he was out of line for bringing this to the attention of the public. 

From the Enterprise Record, last week:

“I think it’s very unfortunate in light of what this organization has been trying to do for the last few years, which is to rebuild public trust, to have one of the elected officials go out there and imply wrongdoing has occurred without talking to me,” Presson said.

Now,  remember, this woman is the one who is supposed to be bringing things to the attention of the public. Tsk tsk. She has not been working on rebuilding public trust, she’s used the public trust like a Depends.

Debbie Presson has created a hostile environment for the citizens Downtown, and if you complain, she tries to throw it on you. When I complained about the campaign reports disappearing from the website last year I got this response (the red ink is hers, I just cut and paste it exactly as she sent it):

https://chicotaxpayers.com/2014/10/24/yeah-debbie-presson-is-a-bitch-and-shes-not-going-to-post-the-460s-is-she-doing-it-on-purpose-or-just-incompetent/

Yes, I call names. I can’t afford to buy a mouthpiece so I have to use my own. I have to browbeat these (excuse me) assholes into doing their job. Sorry, but whatever works. You got a better idea, get your ass in there and show me up. Randall Stone isn’t getting any Brownie points for doing it without obscenities, that’s for sure. 

But, he has apparently got Ms. Presson to return some of the reports to the website. She’s only posted 2005 – 2012, with 2007 left curiously out. No reports for the 2014. In fact, they are supposed to file those reports on a regular basis between elections. Why aren’t they posted?

In that previous post, I asked, does she do this on purpose, or is she incompetent? Several folks are having a conversation on Stone’s Facebook to the effect that the city of Chico is behind in the technology. I think that’s true, and I think one man is right – Presson keeps it that way on purpose. She does everything she can to block the public from getting public information.

What’s maddening is, Presson makes no apologies for being incompetent, she uses it as an excuse. 

Tags:

New ordinance, new salaries – same old problems – how do we get Chico PD to do their job?

3 Aug
When I went to the Airport Commission meeting last week I noticed somebody had taken up residence outside the front door of City Hall.

When I went to the Airport Commission meeting last week I noticed somebody had taken up residence outside the front door of City Hall.

Anybody who frequents Downtown, Midtown, and Lower Bidwell Park has noticed more homeless, or “street” people than ever. They have firm encampments at City Hall, City Plaza, the Vallombrosa post office annex, and throughout Bidwell Park. They mill up and down Mangrove and Vallombrosa Avenues around the Safeway shopping center.   As you get away from the city center and the park,  you see them alone or in pairs, moving along the main corridors of town, congregating wherever they can get cash for recyclables, or be out of the sight of passing cops, like the parking lot behind Raley’s on East Avenue.

The problem being, most of us have a hard time separating the truly needy from the hardpan criminals. Having observed the little mob that congregates at the recycling facility behind East Avenue Raleys, I was shocked to hear a report that a couple of them had got in a fight in broad daylight and one man had produced some sort of blade and stabbed the other.  That got my attention – I’ve parked my car on that side of the store since I had toddlers in hand.  

We see them regularly in our old midtown neighborhood now, they seem to be following the freeway across town. Our immediate neighbors, including a large church, noticed a brief upswing in crime, with some cars broken into and reports of bicycles stolen from garages. A car was broken into across the street from our house, again in broad daylight.  One afternoon not long after that, my husband and I encountered a woman out in front of our house who had just caught a couple of men in her garage with their hands on her son’s bike. She had chased them out and then got into her car to see which direction they’d headed. She said they had one bike of their own, and both jumped on it fleeing her garage. She was unable to follow them.  

This is a pattern I recognize all over town, don’t you?  Watch the local news – people have caught daytime break-ins on their security cameras. Full faces are shown. No arrests have been made that I’ve heard of, not since they got  the kid who was breaking into schools months ago. I haven’t heard of anybody getting their stolen property back either. 

The authorities have always acted as though a car break-in is the victim’s fault, especially in the park. Sometimes valuables have been left in plain sight, sometimes cars are smashed and rifled and nothing noticeable is taken. It’s as though you are stupid to leave your car unattended anywhere, including your own driveway. 

I’ve been shopping for mosquito netting – the other day I saw a screen that is specially made for your big garage door, with zipper openings big enough to get your car in and out. Great idea – airing your garage will cool down your house. But who would leave their garage open and untended around here?

 Did you know, local policeman Peter Durfee is the president not only of the Chico Police Officers’ Association (which is also a political PAC) but also the Chico Realtors Association? Durfee is a realtor? Wow, where does he find the time?  

Durfee is the officer who occasionally gets sick of the criticism of Chico PD and goes on a tear Downtown harassing street people. Not that I mind – he’s supposed to harass people for breaking the law. Anytime he’s felt like it, he’s managed to find about a violation every six feet – the sit and lie ordinance the cops screamed for is very specific. I see violations every time I go out. 

The picture above I took last week at City Hall at about 6:30 pm Wednesday.  There’s almost always a bed  laying in this spot. It still lay there when we exited the Airport Commission meeting, so my husband  snapped a picture of it. As we were leaving the little portico, a bedraggled man came round to see what we were doing. He smiled his drunken smile and greeted us with a tinge of fear – were we going to give him a bad time?   No, that’s not our job. At least one cop and more than a half dozen staffers, including city manager Mark Orme, had passed that bedding on their way into the chamber. He had been smoking in the non-smoking area when we arrived, and was still smoking when we came out. 

I get such a kick out of City Council, I’d really like to return the favor sometime, right in the seat of Mark Sorensen’s pants. They wasted hours of $taff time and passed that stupid sit and lie ordinance despite the fact they’d passed a similar ordinance years before that wasn’t being enforced. Now we see the same with sit and lie. Council also gave the cops very generous raises in exchange for paying three percent more of their pension – 12 percent. Out of salaries in excess of $100,000, they pay 12 percent of  pensions comprising 90 percent of  their highest year’s salary, available at age 50.

I predict Durfee will retire at 50, and then I predict he will make a run for city council. I predict he will be our mayor someday.

Just about the time our town is poised to go straight  down the shitter. Good luck Pete! 

 

 

Tags: , ,

Airport consultant just looking for a meal ticket

30 Jul

I went to the Airport Commission meeting the other night to hear a couple of reports and frankly, my head is swimming so full of bullshit I have a hard time putting it into words. 

Excuse me – Frank Fields’ budget report was no bullshit, just straight facts. Frank was detailing the actions that led to essential bankruptcy out at the airport – the airport fund has been completely in the red the last few years, despite a million dollar infusion from the feds every year. Frank explained that the airport fund has been pilfered by way of an initiative passed by council – “cost allocation.”

“cost allocation” is the system by which you steal money from one fund to pay salaries from another department. I sat through that meeting – Chris Constantin explained that every time they have a meeting, they pay staff out of the fund they’re talking about at the meeting, get it? So if they discuss the sewer at an Internal Affairs meeting, the staffers present at that meeting get paid out of the sewer fund. And the electricity for the room, the coffee, Dani Brinkley’s foot wear, the whole nine yards, comes out of the sewer fund. That, by the way, is also how the sewer fund, and the development fund,  ended up in the red to the tune of a million dollars or so a piece.

Then Fields explained another measure passed by council – when a fund is in the red, staff now takes money out of the General Fund to cover it.  And the books are good! 

I think we missed all this. I’m guessing they were threatened with some sort of punishment if they didn’t come up with a better set of books, so here we are. They had too much red ink in their books, and you know what that looks like.  On Perry Mason it’s called embezzlement.

Despite the fact that the city gets about a million dollars a year in federal grants to keep it open for the fire fighting planes, the airport fund is still in the red every year because of the cost allocation bullshit. They haven’t been putting any money into the airport. If you listened really carefully to Tom, the $190,000 consultant from AVPorts consulting firm, you find the real reason we don’t have commercial air service is we have no terminal, and our runway is inadequate. He really slid those by, talking instead about how we need to give him a contract to attract the airlines. He didn’t want to give us too much bad news at once.  He wants us to hire him to do a job he admittedly can’t do. 

We don’t have commercial air service because we haven’t been keeping our airport up to modern standards. We’ll need a new tower, a longer runway, and a brand new fancy terminal. We’ll also need to guarantee them a certain amount of profit – or pay them an “incentive” charge of hundreds of thousands a year. 

But Tom went on and on, getting really excited toward the end of his presentation. While he admitted our chances of getting commercial service were really poor, he kept saying we have to try. 

The major obstacle being – Redding has already done all the stuff above. He expects us to steal customers from Redding, that’s the only way his scheme will work. 

I’ve got pages of notes on this guy – I’ll boil it down for you. Watch “Music Man.” 

And I’ll tell you what else – the feds are going to walk away with their million a year if we don’t make major infrastructural improvements out there. We won’t even have the fire fighting planes if $taff doesn’t quit embezzling that fund to pay their pensions off. 

Orme isn’t telling us everything. He’s sitting on a pile of trouble, I hope it goes right up his ass.

Here’s what I think – why pander after the airlines? Why not wait until they are knocking on our door? 

Tags: , ,

David Little: “worst development of all was the advent of an online reporting system for crimes…”

16 Jul
This is a stupid editorial – Little admits the cops have dropped the ball, but instead of blaming poor attitude he blames staff shortages and low pay. He seems to miss what really happened – they let our town sink into a state of disgrace – “drug deals in City Plaza” – demanding bigger salaries and more cops. They got that in January – it’s been seven months, and the crime and homeless situations aren’t getting better, they’re getting worse. There’s still a sign on the post office annex saying, “Due to security concerns…” the annex is locked up tight between 10 pm and 7 am, no getting your mail late at night. That just happened over the last year because the homeless had turned the annex into a fleabag hotel and the cops wouldn’t stop them. David Little isn’t a journalist, he’s a propagandist.

Editorial: Community policing model needs to give hope to victims

POSTED: 07/06/15, 8:25 PM PDT | UPDATED: 1 WEEK, 1 DAY AGO
0 COMMENTS

The Chico Police Department says it’s going to give “community-oriented policing” a try. Though it sounds promising, we can’t help but wonder if it’s more than just a trendy phrase.

The community policing model is all the rage, and new Police Chief Mike O’Brien is excited about giving it a whirl. He called it a “major change” last week when the department was restructuring in order to implement that community policing model.

It’s not just O’Brien’s vision. Mike Dunbaugh, the interim chief before O’Brien took over last month, was also a big proponent of the community policing model.It’s easy to see why, because it sounds so rudimentary: Police try to fix crime problems that are important to the community.O’Brien said the department will focus on crimes that have eroded the quality of life in Chico, things such as bicycle thefts, home burglaries, vehicle smash-and-grab robberies and criminal activity by transients.

“I hear it from every segment of this community that this is what we need to get a handle on,” O’Brien said last week.Dunbaugh said on his way out that the new structure “simplifies our operation.” It divides the city into three geographic areas — the downtown area, and then the rest of the city east and west of Highway 99.The restructured department is set up to be more focused on patrol rather than administration. As O’Brien puts it, the department will be “more responsive … to the community.”Community-oriented policing is described by the U.S. Department of Justice as a philosophy that uses community partnerships and problem-solving techniques to address conditions that facilitate crime. Citizens will welcome this new model, because many feel crime has gotten out of hand and the Police Department hasn’t done enough to combat it.

Part of the problem was a shrinking workforce as the city budget took a nosedive. As the Police Department was reduced in size, management decided to discontinue many of the things that citizens value — downtown patrols, officers on high school campuses, traffic cops and so forth.

Worse yet, things like downtown crime, bicycle thefts and drug deals in City Plaza barely got the department’s attention.

The worst development of all was the advent of an online reporting system for crimes. If somebody would get a $2,000 bicycle stolen, $5,000 in electronics, or even a gun, victims were told to fill out a form online. In most instances, there was no interaction with a detective or officer. Victims would fill out the form and never hear from the department again.

The great online reporting tool was a black hole of information.

People undoubtedly stopped reporting crimes because it was a waste of their time. The only reason to fill out the form was if you were lucky enough to have insurance.

The message was obvious: Sorry, folks, you’re on your own.

The online reporting system started Jan. 1, 2013. Sure, it saves money, but we’ve yet to see evidence this supposed database of crimes is being used to solve them.

Since a new City Council majority took over in December, the department is growing again. That’s why some of the special enforcement teams, such as downtown patrols, have come back.

What really needs to happen, however, is for citizens to regain confidence that police can help crime victims. Even if the department doesn’t get rid of online reporting, human follow-up — just a call to let victims know the report was seen, and that officers are looking — would go a long way toward mollifying a skeptical public.

Catching a few of the thieves, and then publicly celebrating that success, wouldn’t hurt either. The department needs a few victories.

Tags: , ,

Here’s the real story behind Brian Nakamura’s sudden departure from Rancho Cordova

2 Jul

The article in today’s ER didn’t really tell the whole story. Here is a recent piece from Sacramento Ch 10 and a piece from last October, KCRA Ch 3.

http://sacramento.cbslocal.com/2015/07/01/rancho-cordova-city-manager-resigns-after-negative-performance-evaluation/

http://www.kcra.com/news/rancho-cordova-faces-formal-campaign-mailer-complaint/28980752

Tags: , ,

You get what you accept – Chico, you need to raise your standards!

1 Jul

Yesterday  was the last day to turn in you Utility Tax Rebate application. I wonder how many people applied for that this year.  When I go in to collect my rebate, I feel like I’m making some attempt to hold city council and staff accountable for the mess they’ve got us in. But you can’t hold these people responsible, they just wiggle out. They’re insane – one minute they’re telling us they’re too broke to keep the library open and the next minute they’re more than doubling the city budget  to accommodate their pensions.

I’ll tell you what else is insane – Scott Gruendl has got a new job! He’s been hired as the Assistant Director of Behavioral Health Services for the County of San Mateo. There’s just no accountability for these people. Gruendl just retired from Glenn County Health and Human Services split hairs ahead of being fired for substance abuse. He just got his hat handed to him in the last Chico city election, having led the city on a drug-influenced spending binge for 12 years. 

And now, read back over the stories about his 100 mph+ speeding ticket, and look at all the lies. The guy has got a serious problem with The Truth – it doesn’t fit in his mouth!

Go ahead, have a good laugh at your own expense – this is the guy who kept insisting that Chico was his “hometown” all these years. If you look at his Twitter account here, you’ll see just how sincere that was as he talks about the spendy new homes he’s looking at in the Bay Area.

https://twitter.com/ScottGruendl

“The winner is: Candidate 1 – Upper Market/Castro Home – welcome to the new home of Scott and Nicholas Gruendl..”

Excuse me – barf!  I just can’t stand this kind of carpet bagger.  I knew he was a fake, and there it is. And you won’t hear any of his former friends down at Democratic Headquarters making any excuses for him, they’re pissed at him too. He used to brag to me about having dinner with little Janey-bob MulDolan and her friends – I’m guessing Bob Mulholland wouldn’t admit knowing Gruendl at this point.

My question, and I don’t know where to get a straight answer on this – how does he retire from one public agency and then take a job with another? Will he collect a salary and pension simultaneously? This is a question that needs answering, I just don’t know where to get that answer.

Speaking of crime, Rose wrote a thoughtful note to the ER letters section, encouraging people to take notice of suspicious activity around them and say something to the cops. But, I don’t know how seriously the cops would take my reports.

There was the conversation I overheard at the Mangrove Safeway. We always park our bike near the entrance, where there’s oftentimes a little group of, well, I’ll say it – ne’er do wells – hanging around. I think they’ve been warned not to panhandle, but if they get your eye they’ll start a little conversation – “wow, great bike!” – and the next thing you know they’re asking you for one thing or another. We try not to make eye contact, play deaf, just smile and turn away.  The other day one guy was talking about having beaten up another man who said something he didn’t like – “that’s when I head-butted him!”. I wondered, where did this take place? Here at my grocery store? I kind of doubt it, the Safeway management keeps a tight lid on these guys. A few days later I heard about a stabbing at One Mile.  I realized suddenly how unsafe the park really is. 

Yesterday morning we were driving our car across town to get it serviced, and I noticed, at the corner of 4th and Pine, somebody had raked together a little pile of tree debris and burned it like a camp fire right in the middle of the lane, just north of the intersection. I guess they thought that would be safer than a fire in their side yard? Or maybe they don’t have a side yard? How would somebody get away with this in a town where the cops were doing their job?

When we went Downtown later yesterday afternoon, we found the usual little encampments at City Hall and The Plaza. Some creeps were jumping their BMX bikes off the stage at the plaza, right in the middle of the day. Earlier yesterday they had that “Picnic in the Plaza” nonsense – what a laugh!  That is just a fundraiser for the sales tax increase campaign the city will be running by next Spring.

When we drove by the CARD center I again saw why the CARD board decided to move most of their business sessions out to Cal  Park Pavilion – there is a regular little encampment on the back patio of the CARD center. I’m guessing that a closer inspection would find they are smoking and drinking alcohol and that’s not permitted there. 

People are allowed to gather, but they’re not allowed to loiter. The cops are supposed to have a very clear legal understanding of the difference between those two words. Frankly, all you have to do to get rid of a lot of these people is put on a uniform and talk to them regularly. It makes the creepy ones uncomfortable, you know – like shining light on a cockroach. I don’t have a uniform, or a taser, or even a can of hairspray to protect myself. I don’t get $70,000+ a year to spend my time moving creeps along. I don’t get what amounts to a hand-out for the rest of my life either. I want to see Chico PD doing their job. 

 

The problem with the online reporting mechanism is, for me, if the crime is important enough to take my time to report it’s important enough to talk to a cop. Having these people tell us, they don’t have time to take reports – that’s the essence of their job. When they tell us they don’t have time to do their job, my mind goes straight to a picture of a pig wearing a cop uniform, stuffing a doughnut into his face.  What else? I sure don’t see them racing through town  catching perps red-handed.  For every little victory you read about in the paper  – oftentimes citizen action or just plain stupidity on the part of the criminal – how many crimes go uncovered and unpunished and will happen again and again? Meanwhile they demand more and more money. 

Whenever we pick up our lunch at Chico Locker, the place is full of Chico public safety workers. They won’t make eye contact, they act nervous and suspicious, like little children whose Momma just discovered a discrepancy in the cookie jar.  It’s GUILT.

This is our fault. We don’t hold these people accountable. Lie in your dirty bed Chico, it’s the bed of your own making.

 

 

 

 

 

Tags: ,

Orme should have to hire his own assistant and pay for it out of his own salary

18 Jun

Mark Orme says he has been working without an administrative assistant and wants to hire one. 

He can’t seem to afford a babysitter either – in all the years I’ve been attending these meetings and all the single mothers I know who work for the city, Orme is the first employee I’ve seen bring his kid to work. The wife was out of town with the other kid, he said, so he had to leave work to pick up kid Number 2 at school before he could make a Local Gov Committee meeting. The boy was perfectly well behaved, but needed his dad’s attention now and then – wouldn’t you? I think it’s inappropriate for a guy who makes that kind of money to bring a little distraction to work with him, but that’s my point of view. 

Here’s my other point of view – this guy is part of the team that fired all the lower level employees – you know, the workers? – to give himself and several other suits big, BIG raises.  He’s making almost $200,000/year in salary alone, I think he should have to be his own secretary. I mean, come on, you’d expect a guy that makes that kind of money to come with a couple of clones.  For what we pay that guy, we should really get at least 2 and a half people. The least he can do, is take his own notes, answer his own phones, pick up his own lunch.

Or, he can hire somebody out of his own salary, and pay that person himself. 

 

Tags: ,

Who is really in charge Downtown?

9 Jun

I had e-mailed my question about the Nature Center loan (essentially, why was it pulled from last Tuesday’s agenda) to city obfuscators Mark Orme, Chris Constantin and fiscal bulldog Mark Sorensen. I got a response from Constantin. 

Hello Juanita,

 The City believes that there is an opportunity to renegotiation [sic] the loan and lease agreements with the Nature Center to avoid needing to write-off the loan.  The promising development is the reason why the item was pulled, and the City decided not to entertain a write-off of the loan at that meeting.

 Chris Constantin, MPA, CIA, CFE, CICA, CLEA

Assistant City Manager

Excuse me, this is always my immediate mental response to an e-mail from Chris Constantin – “What? Can you just tell us what the hell is going on?!”  

That’s why I call them names here, like “mangler” and “obfuscator”, because they won’t just talk about this stuff straight with the taxpayers, they try to wiggle out of a direct answer. Brian Nakamura was one of the best I’ve ever seen – he would contort his way through half sentences, acting as though he was under some brutal torture, and never finish what he was saying.  And nobody in the room was rude enough to say, “spit it out Brian, what the hell are you saying?”  I know my place – I get asked to shut up when I am too curious with these people, I really have to hold back. If you ask more than one question at these meetings, even on separate topics, they treat you as though you are trying to be difficult.

I notice the Enterprise Record editorial this week is getting at the same point – they are being too coy these days Downtown. Dave Little is blaming it on staff, as if the council is getting the same treatment as the rest of us. 

Ex city manager Dave Burkland and finance director Jennifer Hennessey acted the same way. At first the press said nothing, the council said nothing, but when the financial shit finally hit the fan, they were throwing their pointy fingers  around  so fast they almost got them caught in the fan blades. 

So now we have another little melodrama – according to the ER,  staff has now gone insubordinate on Sorensen and the conservative majority. Little accuses them of hiring without council oversight – including the promotion of Constantin to Assistant City Manager. Hey, you know, judging from Mark Sorensen’s reaction to the pulling of the Nature Center loan discussion from last Tuesday’s agenda, that action was a complete surprise to him. Was it? Is staff just wheeling their own deals these days? 

And Little accuses our lawyer consultant of putting up the back of his hand to protests from citizens. Well, as a person who’s seen the back of Little’s hand, I’ll say, nya nya nya. But he’s right, at least our former legal team answered our questions, even mine. Sorensen hired this new team – or did he? 

Tags: ,

Rules change for public entities finance reports – how will unpaid Nature Center loan and pension liability affect Chico’s credit rating?

7 Jun

The Chico Creek Nature Center has still not made payments on the $180,000 (plus) loan they got from the city in 2009. They were forgiven the accumulated interest and penalties last year, but still would not pay the loan. When I sat in on the meetings for this item a year ago, I tried to ask questions about their books, trying to make a point that they weren’t running their lucrative daycare operation above boards, and Mayor Sorensen angrily told me, “that’s enough Juanita!” 

When I finally got ahold of their “finance report”, I found it to be some kind of high school style report – no actual figures! And, gee – they spend exactly what they take in, right down to the last zero, isn’t that convenient? But they just don’t seem to  take in enough to pay their bills. 

In this town? A daycare operation that’s not making enough money to pay it’s rent? In the private sector that would mean the end of business, but in the Chico public sector anything is possible. 

Now the center simply wants the loan forgiven, and for the city to fully fund their sketchy operation. 

This was up on Tuesday’s agenda, I couldn’t make the meeting, and now I find that item was just dropped from the agenda, no explanation. I sent a note to the city manglers and I’ll see if they reply.

In the meantime let me tell you what I suspect. Over the last three years the board membership of Chico Creek Nature Center has changed radically. Formerly run by John Merz, Dave Guzzetti and Susan Mason, the center has now been taken over by friends of Bob Linscheid, employees of Chico State and various “economic development” corps. Is that why Mark Sorensen and his minions on council are so ready to now forgive over $200,000 in loan, interest and penalties? A loan that has been hanging on the books like a big booger since July of 2009? 

Below is the excerpt from the Enterprise Record story of last week:

ER 5/31/15

The council will also be considering several options related to a loan to the Chico Creek Nature Center that is currently in default. Options include forgiving the loan with or without conditions, deferring the loan obligation until July 2016, or taking no action and proceeding with remedies in the loan agreement.

The nature center owes the city a principal balance of $181,026.95. In May 2014, the council amended the loan agreement to reset accumulated interest and penalties from July 2009 to April 2015 to zero, to adjust the interest rate from 1.8 percent to 3.42 percent annually from July 15, 2014 forward, and establish interest-only payments beginning with a payment due July 15, 2014.

However, the nature center did not agree with the terms and has not signed the agreement, which caused the loan to fall into default.

If the loan obligation is forgiven, the general fund would be required to reimburse one of the neighborhood parks funds for the current principal balance plus accumulated interest, at a cost of $205,539.71.

The staff report notes that based on the loan’s history and actions in recent years, nature center likely will never be able to repay the loan.

The nature center has requested the city either assume the loan, provide funding to the nature center for visitor services and subsidizing programs for local families, include the nature center in discussions on transient occupancy tax decisions, or become a significant funder of the center. An alternative is for the city to fund the Bidwell Park visitor information services and the center will then begin paying off the loan.

 

When I asked back in April I got this explanation  from Chris Constantin. The city has been bending over backwards for the CCNC board for over a year now. Something stinks.

 RE: CNCC loan activity

 Chris Constantin
4/19/15
To: juanita sumner Cc: Mark Sorensen, Mark Orme, Frank Fields
 
Hello Juanita,

The City is undertaking a review of leases for city-owned facilities.  As you can imagine, there are quite a few with differing terms and conditions.  We will be looking to draft a comprehensive policy to guide decisions we make with City-owned property as well as leases.

As for the CCNC, the City Council in the lead up to the 2014-15 fiscal year, reset their loan to the original principal amount and changed the payment terms.

For the last several years, the CCNC would request a waiver for paying during the year, and the result would be the City would receive no payments and the loan would accumulate additional interest.  Obviously the CCNC could not pay the principal and interest of the original loan, so even if we reset the loan, there was not a guarantee that we wouldn’t be in the same situation.

To make it easier for the CCNC and to provide some payment to the City, with the change to reset the loan amount back to the original amount in 2014, the City requested an interest only amount to be paid quarterly to at least turn a non-performing loan into some revenue.  At the time of the discussion around this topic, a CCNC representative came to finance committee and the Council meetings and while there stated that the CCNC did not want to default on its obligations.

In 2014, the City Manager proposed writing off the loan completely given that this was funding that went into improving our building, but after the CCNC rep’s statements that the CCNC did not want to default on their obligations, the new option discussed above was approved.

While the CCNC did not disagree with the new option, the chose to not sign the agreement implementing the new option.  As a result, the old, original loan is still in effect.  As of today, they are in default of their original loan, and the City, as part of their lease review will deal with non-performing agreements such as this.  I’m hoping to have something out in May regarding the CCNC.

The real problem is that this unpaid loan looks very bad for Chico’s credit rating. Well, if this looks bad for Chico’s credit rating, what do they think that $94 million pension liability is doing to our credit rating? 

According to Pensions and Investments Marc Lieberman and Mark Lasee, “For many public sector retirement plan sponsors, the Governmental Accounting Standards Board’s new pension reporting rules couldn’t have come at a worse time. The changes, effective June 15 and encapsulated in GASB Statements 67 and 68, mandate that governmental balance sheets reflect unfunded pension liabilities. This has been met with grave concern by plan sponsors.”

Tags:

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →