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You can’t always count on the cops – know your neighborhood, and keep an eye on it

8 Jan

My husband takes our dog Biscuit out every morning for a walk around the neighborhood. She’s diabetic and needs the exercise to keep her blood sugar  down, and my husband is on alert ever since a car was broken into across the street last year. We both feel it’s a good idea to walk the neighborhood regularly, different times of day, keep in touch with our surroundings.

No matter what the weather, they take their morning constitutional over to the park. After she came home soaking wet a couple of times, my husband  decided to make her a raincoat from a garbage bag.

She was not thrilled about the raincoat.

She was not thrilled about the raincoat. That’s not a happy face, and the tail is all wrong.

Of course she cowered and tried to shake it off at first, but as soon as she realized it meant WALK, she was on board. Now I put it on her anytime I want to take her outside.

What a fashion maven.

Taking Fashion Maven Biscuit out to the mail box.  There’s the correct tail posture. 

Of course, Badges has to have everything Biscuit has, so we fitted him with his own little jacket.

You THE MAN! Badges.

Marshall Badges and Deputy Ding-Dong during a rare moment in between dumpers.  

Badges wasn’t too sure either, but like Biscuit, he now identifies the raincoat with WALK, and he actually holds his head up to have it pulled on. 

Don’t let the weather keep you from being active. Get out there and keep an eye on your hood. 

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Move the recycling center – city has permitted too much housing in that spot, so should help Chico Scrap Metal move to a new location

5 Jan

Yes, Debbie Presson is incompetent and should step down.  As David Little reported in this morning’s editorial, “City Attorney Vince Ewing said he hadn’t prepared his legal opinion on the matter yet [Chico Scrap Yard]. Obviously the city clerk and the mayor didn’t realize that when they set the agenda. And so 11 people got up in front of the council to ask for a decision, only to be told it would be put off for two weeks.”

Presson really jumped the gun on that – the signatures were only turned in a couple of days before the meeting, the agendas had already been sent out. She had to send an amended agenda the day of the meeting. That’s not very good noticing, but hey, look who we’re talking about here. 

This is the same woman who once told me the noticing distance for a project was only 300 feet when it was actually 500 feet. When I pointed this mistake out to her she actually giggled. Her mistake meant a neighborhood meeting had to be cancelled and rescheduled, but who cares about the inconvenience of the public at the clerk’s office?   A few months later the distance was “administerially” changed to 300 feet, meaning Presson had to notice less neighbors of impending subdivisions and other projects. I had to wonder – how long had she been noticing only at 300 feet? When it was pointed out to her the rule was changed.

She also told my neighbors and I that the 300 feet extended only along the sidewalk, from the “front door” of the project. Our project was an empty lot, but she still refused to notice any of the neighbors that lived along the back border of the project, their back fences lining the lot. She said the distance was measured along the city sidewalk, and the notice only had to include the neighbors on the facing street. What a bitch.

Frankly, I’m guessing Mayor Sean Morgan, who can be found leaning over Presson’s desk quite regularly, encouraged her to agendize the matter quickly so he wouldn’t have to listen to the little mob that has formed around this issue. While I question Karl Ory and Mark Stemen’s motives in this movement, I know Morgan likens listening to the public to listening to a set of fingernails being dragged down a chalkboard.

I honestly believe Morgan would like to run this issue under the radar, but the city attorney nailed him on it.

Little complains this issue has dragged out for 40 years. Well, in that time, the city has permitted housing right up to the boundaries of the property. Instead of protecting an industrial area by moving the old houses that were present, they permitted one low-income development after another. You realize, over the past 40 years, staff and elected officials have changed so much, the right hand hardly knows what the left hand is doing. That area is a planning disaster.

Yes, Chico Scrap Metal is an important business. When my family  was buying and fixing up old houses we made trips in there several times a year, with stuff no one else would take.  But that part of town has changed. Would you like to live next to the scrap metal yard? Who would? Especially now that other recycling locations are closing and that neighborhood suffers a steady stream of garbage can miners every morning.  But the city permitted housing right up next to that site as recent as last year. 

The scrap metal yard has been sitting on the train tracks for years – hey, wake up! You should have sued the city to stop permitting housing in your armpit or to help you move to a more appropriate location when they built Ricky Court. 

I do believe the city should provide financial and staff assistance in helping Chico Scrap find a new place. 

But yeah, this just adds more to Chico’s “business hostile” reputation and chases more jobs out of town.

 

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Camping in Bidwell Park is a crime – report it!

31 Dec

Yesterday, having reported an illegal camp in Middle Bidwell Park to city of Chico officials, my husband and I walked over to the site to find that the campers seemed to be gone but had left mounds of trash behind. In fact, we encountered more trash yesterday than we’d seen the day before.

These pictures were taken yesterday morning. 

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Here’s the pile we encountered Thursday December 29, still there – notice the dismantled bikes. Somebody had added – a real estate sign? – to the pile.

We noticed new piles, clothes,  trash bags,  kipple of all kinds.

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I wonder if they steal from each other, and here’s somebody’s stuff that has been rifled and left.

 

This is located about a block or two from my home, my tenant’s home. We’ve always locked everything up – Chico was never that nice of a town that you could leave your valuables unlocked, that’s been known for some time.  

But lately we’ve been hearing about weird stuff, stuff that goes beyond home security.  One guy was caught stealing a woman’s panties off her back yard clothesline, in broad daylight. Her husband  caught him in the garage, having broken in through a back door to steal a bike.

A man on the  website Nextdoor reported someone had torn the door off a storage shed in his side yard, but said there was nothing of value, so nothing was taken. Lucky him!  I had been bothering my husband to buy one of those metal  sheds at Home Depot for our tenant’s bikes, so she wouldn’t have to keep them in her laundry room. He laughed  and told me, “that’s like telling the transients, ‘look, here’s some stuff for you…'”  He’s right, these people can just rip the door off a shed, hidden in your back  yard, you and  all your neighbors gone off to work. 

As I’ve said, Chico is not a nice little town anymore. How do we fight this? Report it, report it, report it. Demand action.  I’ll e-mail city manager Mark Orme and ask him who is responsible for cleaning up this mess and when that will be done.  I’ll cc both news editors as well as my third district supervisor Maureen Kirk. I may cc the entire council, but Reanette Fillmer is the one who has shown the most interest in this issue.

Please join me in reporting illegal campers. Follow up – if you still see the problem the next day, politely ask what has been done or why nothing has been done. Don’t be intimidated by their polite refusal to do anything – send your e-mail conversation  here, and I’ll print it verbatim. 

  • Mark Orme, city manager – mark.orme@chicoca.gov
  • Sean Morgan, mayor – sean.morgan@chicoca.gov
  • Reanette Fillmer, vice mayor – reanette.fillmer@chicoca.gov
  • Maureen Kirk, Butte County Supervisor District 3 – mkirk@buttecounty.net
  • Larry Wahl, Butte County Supervisor District 2 – lwahl@buttecounty.net
  • David Little, editor Chico Enterprise Record – dlittle@chicoer.com

NOTE: As of Sunday Jan 1 the trash is gone.  I don’t know who picked it up but will thank Orme for staff’s response. 

 

 

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Do we really want to build more low-income housing?

26 Apr

I’m certainly glad Chico will not play host to a “sexually violent predator,” but I wonder how many other violent criminals we have in Chico. How about the story in this morning’s paper – a resident caught a burglar in his Amanda Way apartment, and while he was calling the cops the guy attacked and stabbed him with a knife. 

The attacker was identified as Darin J. Petty. According to Butte Superior Court index, this man is supposed to be under conservatorship, granted by the county of Butte. What is he doing robbing somebody’s apartment? 

According to our county administrator Paul Hahn, the county of Butte spend “over half the budget” on services for the mentally ill, indigent, and drug addicted. A new 15 unit low-income apartment facility to be located near the Torres Shelter will cost about $6 million, over a million of it coming out of the Behavioral Health budget, and more from the city of Chico and other public agencies. More of our taxes spent to bring in more of these people. How many will end up standing over a homeowner with a knife in the middle of the night? 

 

Team Chico – city still spending $taff time on “economic development”

26 Mar

My husband and I are turning over a rental. We had a big load of cleaning rags to wash, so we took them over to Bubbles laundromat at Mangrove Plaza. We’ve used that laundromat for years, whenever we have an oversize load, to use their bigger, more powerful machines.  I think that was the last load we’re going to do there after the experience we had yesterday.

Over the last few years, Bubbles has been dealing with the homeless problem that moved to Mangrove Plaza with the Downtown “sit and lie” ordinance. There are almost always homeless people sitting in there when we have brought in laundry. They usually sit quietly, I assume they also have laundry to wash, so I’ve never thought anything about it. Yesterday I found out, it is a problem.

As we entered with our bag of laundry and handful of quarters, a woman came walking toward us, she looked very pissed off. She stepped right in front of us to confront a man who was sitting in a chair, staring at a row of unused machines. “If you’re not doing laundry,” she said, “you will have to move along.” She was not friendly, she had already decided the guy would be moving along. This seemed to be a situation she had dealt with before.  My husband and I skipped across their confrontation like a pair of deer avoiding a car wreck.

This man, about 30 years old, sat back in his chair and challenged the woman’s authority to kick him out, challenged the idea that he did not have laundry in one of the machines, and challenged the notion that he was not allowed inside unless he did have laundry in a machine. She asked him to show her his laundry, and the conversation got belligerent on both ends. The woman lost patience and stalked toward the office, saying she would be calling the police.

At this point, we had our machine running, and we left to walk to Safeway to get groceries.  We felt a presence behind us, it was the homeless man, grumbling his way out the door.  A little boy who had witnessed the scene was crying, and his dad took him outside to comfort him.  We watched as the ejected man lumbered out across the parking lot toward Mangrove Avenue, then we went about our business, wondering if the woman actually called the cops, and if they would actually respond.

When who should we almost run into but little Katie Simmons, Chico Chamber shill. She had a bundle of papers, and seemed to be standing there in front of that new sandwich place, waiting for somebody. I saw a couple of young, office-dressed men join her, and then an older, casually dressed man – Team Chico.

Team Chico is our “economic development” policy. They go out and walk around whatever retail area, checking in with businesses, letting them know the chamber and the city are there to help them with whatever. Whatever. You mean, like these homeless creeps who stand around the front door of my business, scaring away customers?

I sure wanted to ask her if she was planning to go into Bubbles, but I had business of my own to attend to.  I believe Team Chico is nothing more than a membership drive for Chico Chamber of Commerce, which has come to have way too much influence in city business. It annoys me that she has city employees in tow. When I asked former city staffer Shawn Tillman what the city was spending on Team Chico, he said, “The City put no money in it–just staff time.”   

Just staff time. 

Look how quickly idiot Tillman landed in a sweet new job! While still living in Chico!

http://www.lincolnnewsmessenger.com/article/1/13/15/tillman-says-residents-can-help-shape-city%E2%80%99s-future

There’s no accountability in government. 

 

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Dogpile on Mary!

11 Apr

Do you remember childhood? Remember being on the playground and hearing somebody scream at the top of their lungs, “DOGPILE!”  And a mob would form out of nothing and jump on some poor kid – usually, a real annoying kid.  Seen it. Done it. Gonna do it now.  It’s highly uncivil, but let me ask you – has Mary Flynn Goloff been civil?  

I’ve actually been holding back lately, but you know I’ve said it before – Mary needs to go. She needed to go from the get-go. She’s never contributed anything worthwhile to a conversation. I remember when she chaired the Economic Development Committee (yeah, it’s all coming back to you now…), I sat in on a meeting where a former Chamber CEO was making his farewell speech as he headed to another town, carpet bag in hand. Jim Goodwin told us that Chico wasn’t going to get any new jobs because our housing was too expensive. Perspective employers know they can’t pay the kind of wages it takes to own a $400,000 house, so they go elsewhere. One manufacturer, of a cool, space age, high tech jet, pulled up stakes and headed for Texas.

Why are houses so expensive here? Well, first there was Tom Lando’s attaching of salaries to “increases in revenues but not decreases.”  Staff and council started handing out building permits to raise their own salaries. By the time that hayride was over, houses had gone from less than $100,000 to $600 – 800,000, in the span of a couple of years. Tom Lando’s salary had gone up about $100,000. 

Then staff, with the blessing of council, started giving the cookie jar to their friends who helped them raise revenues. They’ve allowed developers to come in and get all kinds of cheap to free service – streets, sidewalks, sewer hook-ups. They’ve handed money to developers – the $7 million used to purchase the low-income section of Merriam Park went right into New Urban developer Tom DiGiovanni’s pocket, out of the RDA fund, meaning we’ll pay for it three times. Scott Gruendl arranged for  DiGiovanni to write a “parallel code,” so he wouldn’t have to get variances for the sub-code stuff he does. They just let him write his own code, with narrower streets, smaller setbacks, and stuff like, the wall of one house acts as the fence to the neighbor’s property – your neighbor’s kid can play basketball off the wall of your house, and you have to sue his parents to make him stop. Go look at Doe Mill – you think that’s standard code? But those yardless crappers will still run you over $250,000 each. What?

Goloff sat through that Economic Development meeting listening to Goodwin’s report, and whenever there was a break in the conversation she’d kind of look around the room and flutter her hands and say, “Well I just think Chico is a wonderful place to live.” She just kept repeating that, over and over. 

Yeah, nice if you’re a public worker, and make three, four, five, six times the median income. It’s real nice to live in a town like Chico, where people are desperate, on a big salary. You can have a maid, nanny,  landscaper, all these willing slaves to do your shit work for you.  But it sucks if you’re living on the median income or less, because the high salary assholes drive up the cost of everything from gas to hair cuts to daycare to eggs. I got my hair cut at Dimensions once. I went in and told them, Annie August sent me, so they knew she’d told me how much to pay. I used to get a nice ‘do, a little color, made me feel pretty when I was changing diapers and scrubbing rental toilets. As I sat in the chair getting my color and cut, a lady came in, announced she was visiting from “The City,” and sarcastically asked if she could she get a cut for less than $150? Oh sure! they told her. They did exactly what they did to me and charged her twice as much. I remember how those gals looked at me, “Shut Up!” I never went back. After having a woman like Annie August fussing over you, there’s just nobody else. But I saw what they did, and I never forgot it. That’s the way this town is – take advantage creeps.

And that’s what Mary Flynn Goloff is, a take-advantage creep. She never even understood what she was getting herself into with the job of councilor, she just wanted attention.  I don’t know which ones are worse – the ones who come in with agendas in place, or the ones who come in to be fawned over like some sort of Evita, and end up being used like a Fist Puppet by the ones who do have agendas. That would be little Miss Mary. 

She’s been to rehab at least twice for alcohol and prescription drug problems. She’s already had problems attending meetings – we found out later, she’d been in rehab at that time.  Nobody is going to forget her unannounced entrance at Harvest Bakery while on prescription medication. How can we help but be suspicious that she’s fallen off the wagon again? In an attempt to be civil, I will ask Goloff to buck up and finish her term, but to announce NOW that she does not intend to run again. Thank you Mary for your anticipated cooperation.

 

 

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