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Butte County Behavioral Health director describes process by which more homeless are attracted to Chico to provide salaries for public workers

5 Nov

I attended the Local Government Committee yesterday afternoon, and after listening to the Butte County Behavioral Health Director Dorian Kittrell talk about his departments’ efforts to administer to the homeless, I’m depressed.

I wanted to get to the bottom of this discrepancy between what I’m hearing from Chico PD about their spending hours at Enloe with “street people” and what I have been hearing from Kittrell about all the staffing and programs the county offers to administer to the same people. 

According to County Administrative Officer Paul Hahn, over half our county resources – employees and budget – go to programs to administer to the homeless and poor. 

This item was agendized by Chico council member Reanette Fillmer, who said “people” don’t think the city is doing enough to administer to the homeless, and she wanted to hear what the other various agencies were doing. 

Here’s what they’re doing – they’re bringing homeless people to Chico every day, providing millions and millions of dollars in housing and “programs” to facilitate their dysfunction. Some of these programs, according to Kittrell, are intended to house these people only for a couple of days, get these people cleaned up, sometimes “back on their meds,” and then back out into the community to go back to being a problem.  He even mentioned one program for which patients are being brought in from outside the county to fill the beds.He acted as though that was great! Yeah, it means more money for him and the rest of the hogs. 

Kittrell is even trying to enlist private landlords to house these people. This, he answered Reanette Fillmer, is “the gap” in local homeless services, we aren’t providing enough housing for these people. Even after he listed the various types of transitional, temporary, and “emergency” housing the county and other agencies offer, and the millions that go into these programs. 

You know what that means – instead of having to get a use permit and deal with public hearings, they just sneak what amounts to a group home into your neighborhood without having to even tell anybody. This is the kind of thing that makes neighbors hostile toward landlords and rentals. 

Kittrell says they actually spend about $2 million a year on employees who are supposed to be contacting local landlords, asking for housing for these people, openly described as having “mental problems” and even substance abuse problems.  Not just housing, he says, but people who care enough to babysit their tenants, make sure they pay their rent on time, mow their lawn, and take their meds. 

Excuse me for saying this, but that’s nuts.  They spend millions on buildings that only house 9, or 11, or 16 people at a time, millions more on staff to run these programs, and then turn to the public and tell us, we need to be our brother’s keeper.  We’re all qualified to provide care for mentally ill people? But Kittrell gets a package worth over $200,000? 

Kittrell and others tried to tell us, 80 percent of our “homeless population come from Chico.” What does that mean in a transplant town like this? Where do their parents live? That’s where “they come from”. Where was the last place they served time? That’s where “they come from.” For every one of these people who was born in Butte County, I’ll show you somebody that followed the Grateful Dead out here, or came here because we have a college campus, or came here because we have “good” social programs. 

What does “local” or “townie” even mean around here anymore? Nothing. Kittrell lives in Yuba City, his last job was in Sacramento. What we’re talking about, are the two kinds of people that take advantage. The first kind are creeps who have learned to live a life that doesn’t have any  rules or boundaries, just blend in with the local scene and don’t get caught red-handed. If you do get caught, your crazy, and that includes your drug problem, and you must be taken care of like a new baby.  

The other kind of take advantage types are the public workers who make a very sweet lifestyle out of administering to these creeps.  The first kind might break into your car, or sell drugs to the kids at the high school, but the second kind gets into your purse, into your bank account, attaches themselves to your property taxes.

It’s like being eaten alive from both ends.

At one point Kittrell said he wants to get to people “before they are in crisis.” Well, I’ll say, Kittrell and these others are creating crisis in our community. They’re ripping us off of money we need to pay our bills, send our kids to school, money we could  be spreading more around this community. While our streets and other public facilities are in ruin, these people manage to get a bigger budget every year, telling us they’re looking out for our interests. They’re just feathering their own nests.

Here’s why they don’t go into the park, or “under the bridges”, as Kittrell says – they’ve cut the funding for that kind of outreach in favor of paying $100,000 + salaries and $25,000 + compensation packages. They don’t have enough money for outreach workers – one man blamed it on Arnold Swarzenegger. No, it’s mismanagement. It’s managers eating all the money for themselves and leaving nothing to hire people who actually work “hands-on” with the patients. 

Why are Chico  PD spending so much time at Enloe with “street people”? Because even with all these agencies and staff who are supposed to be equipped to deal with the mentally ill, I was told, law enforcement can’t tell when a person is drunk or on drugs or has schizophrenia, so they have to take them to Enloe ER to be evaluated. Kittrell insisted that Butte County BH has plenty of staff to take these people, but I’m still told that a police officer has to be present. I’m just not getting it.

What I am getting, is that with these people in charge, we will soon be living in the most expensive mental hospital north of San Francisco. 

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Local Governments Committee to discuss “Homeless Support and Prevention Initiatives” – Wednesday (Nov 4) at 3:30, conference room 2

2 Nov

I’ve been busy – getting ready for rain, re-learning how to function in rain,  etc. But, there’s a meeting Wednesday I just can’t pass up – the Local Governments Committee, made up of members of various elected boards. This committee is supposed to meet quarterly to talk about issues that involve county, city and various local public agencies, kind of a “Hey, Left Hand, look and see what the Right Hand is doing…”

But they aren’t held that regularly, the last one I attended was in May. It’s funny to read the minutes from that meeting,  attached to Wednesday’s agenda. I remember the discussion about library funding was a lot more lively than reported here!

Click to access LGC-11-4-15-AgendaandMinutes.pdf

Sean Morgan called the library supporters “nazis” and that pissed Larry Wahl off. Mark Sorenson waded in like Daddy come home from the office to find squabbling. It was kind of tense – Maureen Kirk actually apologized for asking, she’s such a nice lady. She had wanted to know the process by which the Community Development Block Grant money was divvied out – that’s all explained in the minutes. But nothing about Sean Morgan’s behavior, or how Larry Wahl or Mark Sorensen reacted to him. Meetings, People, you got to attend the meetings.

The item that is of interest to me is the first up, “Homeless Support and Prevention Initiatives.” We will get a report from the county’s Behavioral Health Director regarding various programs he has been working on to get people “off the street,” whatever that might mean to you and me.

I have met BH Director Dorian Kittrell  via e-mail, through my supervisor, Maureen Kirk, when I made inquiries about stories the cops are passing around town. Chico Police Department Business Support Team leader Jack Van Rossum said in an interview on Alan Chamberlains’ podcast talk show that Chico PD spends so much time with street people down at Enloe Hospital that they need what amounts to –  his words – a substation.  Van Rossum said Enloe was willing to give them the space but Chico PD needs money to equip this space with phones because they can’t use their cellphones from inside the hospital. They also need, Van Rossum says, a place to go to work on reports, instead of sitting in the ER or the hallway. 

When I asked Kirk and later Kittrell about this situation neither had heard anything of the sort. Kittrell said he’d check into it, so I’ll have to ask him if he found out anything.

As you can read in the minutes from that last meeting, Behavioral Health has received grants to purchase and staff a building over near the old Community Hospital.  These staffers are supposed to be available, 24-7, to meet Chico PD at Enloe and take these people off Chico PD’s hands. The only time a cop is required  is when “patients are uncooperative…” or they’ve committed some crime.  So I wondered – why would Chico PD employees be spending so much time at Enloe? 

I keep asking myself – I know you are – why do I care about this stuff? It’s all part of the continuing conversation about crime getting worse in our town all the time. I’m not just hearing about it on the news – we’ve had a break-in within doors of our own home and all our rentals here in town. All had this in common – a window was broken out of a locked car and items were removed from the car. All happened right in front of the victims’ front doors, within ten yards of their home. They happened within sight of my windows, and other people’s windows, and one happened in the broad daylight. None have been “solved.” 

When I looked at the police log in the paper yesterday same thing – of five vehicle burglaries four involved windows broken out of locked cars. They are happening at all times of day, in all neighborhoods, most of them right out on the street. 

While Chico PD are sitting in the hallway at Enloe filling out their reports? 

Whenever we have something like this in our hood, it makes me so suspicious of every Tom, Dick and Harriet I don’t recognize anywhere near my property. There are so many transients in our town, we can’t recognize them anymore. It seems like new faces turn up next to the front door at Safeway on Mangrove every day. We hear conversations where the ones who’ve been here for a while tutor the newbies – “get a bike, it’s good to have a dog, don’t camp below One Mile,” we overheard one woman and her boyfriend telling another dirt-smeared young couple sitting on their pile of belongings next to the water machine. 

I want to know, what Behavioral Health is doing to separate out the truly helpless and needy so the cops can start enforcing the laws on the ones who are taking advantage of the situation.  I think the root problem is the camping in the park and along waterways like Lindo Channel, and I’m not convinced, aside from that high-profile and short-lived sweep of One Mile, that the police are doing everything they can to end it. They use the mental health issue as a shield, they insinuate we’re going to denigrate them if they arrest these people. I think there also might be a problem with the district attorney’s office not charging these people with anything – apparently they have to be in possession of more than $900 in stolen goods before Mike Ramsey will turn a hairy eyeball on them. Is that true? I’ll try to find out. 

That meeting is Wednesday, 3:30, at City Muni Bldg, conference room 2. 

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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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