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Strap yourselves in, this is complicated

22 Jun

There has been so much to talk about lately, it’s hard to know how to start.

I’ve been having a conversation with Chico Area Recreation District director Ann Willmann about rental policies for CARD facilities. CARD owns a lot of stuff, not just play fields, but buildings that are supposed to be available for public use, with a fee schedule. One such building is the CARD Center, appropriately located near the center of Chico and also near the center of the recreation district’s legal boundaries.  Besides housing CARD operations, the CARD center had been a popular place for private parties, mostly weddings, as well as public events like the “Pancakes for Peace” fundraiser held for many years by the Chico Peace and Justice Center. In fact, for many years, the center parking lot was packed for some or another event every good weather weekend from early Spring to late Fall. I had friends who got married there, it was affordable to working people.

A few years ago I noticed the center wasn’t being used as much.  I also noticed it was a meeting place for the homeless – all along Vallombrosa between Mangrove and Arbutus, every public green space was covered with a little encampment of creepy people, laying filthy and half naked with scroungy dogs, drinking, acting generally scurvy.  Yeah, at the last wedding I attended at the CARD center, there were a bunch of homeless people milling in the crowd, they were really drunk, they went down to the creek and went skinny dipping as the bride’s family tried to usher the guests back into the building.

That whole area got really bad. The post office annex closed between 10pm and 7am, citing “security concerns.”

A year or so ago, CARD board member Tom Lando made a public appeal to Chico PD to help keep the vagrants from camping, crapping and generally carousing around the CARD center.  I don’t know how far that went because quickly thereafter the board made a unanimous decision to move CARD meetings to California Park Lakeside Pavilion. California Park sits at the outermost edge of the district, and the pavilion is located deep within this bastion of private property, loud red “NO TRESPASSING” signs displayed prominently on any patch of grass not directly connected to a private home. I don’t know when exactly the board purchased the pavilion, but I would have loved to be at the meeting to hear how they rationalized the purchase. I’m going to guess somebody made a pitch about how much they could make renting the place out for fancy weddings.

Which would seem to be a breach of the district’s policy and mission, to provide affordable recreation options and facilities for everybody. They have also cited concerns about some projects in past, saying they didn’t want to compete with private businesses. How does the pavilion fit their mission?

“Fancy” just isn’t a word for Chico. Chico has long been an anti-snob town, a place where jeans and work shirts have been considered far more stylish than three piece suits and Ferragamo shirts. But we’ve got a new class of people here in town – public workers who make more than five families put together.  These people have been pushing a “class up this burg” movement. Tom Lando is one of the people behind this push – as retired city manager, he makes one of the biggest pensions that adds up to our city’s 90 million dollar plus pension deficit.

Lando has cried aloud that Chico doesn’t have a fancy sports stadium. He said he ran a survey that said taxpayers would support such a venture, but he wouldn’t publish the results for the rest of us.  Lando wants a tax of some sort to pay for this stadium. He once said, it wouldn’t add up to more than a dollar on the average lunch tab.

Wow, would somebody do that math for me? He’s saying, the tax increase would amount to a dollar on the average lunch tab? How much does he pay for lunch?

People like Lando think Chico needs to grow up and be fancy.  They want richer people to move here, to pay higher property taxes, to support their pensions, is what.

I’d say, they all need to grow up, and pay for their own retirement at age 55 on 70 – 90 percent of their highest year’s income.

Lando was also the guy who brought in the Memo Of Understanding that linked city salaries to “revenue increases but not decreases.”  Then council-member Larry Wahl told me he signed that MOU because he didn’t understand it.  Council proceeded to approve all those subdivisions that are still taking a giant crap all over our local economy. With that late 90’s building boom, Lando’s salary went from around $60,000 to over $100,000 in just a few years. But when things went bust, none of those salaries went down, due to the simple but legally binding wording in that two sentence memo. Today the city manager makes about $200,000/year, and pays only 9 percent toward his own pension.

And that’s what happened when the public  became aware of the MOU during that hot and heavy two or three years that bankruptcy was breathing down our collective neck.  Yes, it was outrageous – I wish people would pay attention more often. But, the public was lulled back to sleep with the following agreement – sure, we’d hold the line on the raises from now on, but the city would pay a whopping share of the “employee share” of pensions and benefits. For many years, it was the entire share for management and public safety workers.

You remember that whole conversation, don’t you? How there was the “employee share” and the “employer share”, and the “EMPC”, or, “employer-paid member contribution”. That means, we paid their share, get that? For those employees we were paying not only “our” share but theirs as well. Only the last couple of years has management and public  safety begun to pay toward their own pensions. At first, only 4 percent, now 9 percent and 12 percent, respectively.

Excuse me – big fucking deal – why aren’t they paying the 50 percent mandated of new hires?  Excuse me again – did I say 50? I say, they pay it all themselves, and if they’re real good, we start picking up a small percentage.  But this practice of getting something you didn’t pay for – ENTITLEMENT – has got to stop.

According to Ann Willmann, her friends are ENTITLED to rent publicly owned facilities under her supervision for less than the public would pay.

Bill Cosby, the comedian, used to tell long, involved stories, and then say, “I told you that story so I could tell you this one…” There is where I will have to leave you for today, I’ll try to get back asap.

 

 

Short Attention Span Theater – we have the government we deserve in Chico

18 Jun

I’ve just been having a frustrating conversation with a friend about public participation. 

Sorry if I have been rude, Friend.

Friend tried to explain to me how overwhelmed most people are in their lives, they can’t pay attention.

That just got my skivvies in a bunch. I pay attention, and let me tell you, I got stuff going on.  I won’t bore you with my epic problems of the past months, but through it all, my close friends have been annoyed with my constant complaining about what the city and county and various local agencies are doing. My husband keeps telling me the government stuff is stressing me out, I should concentrate more on what’s going on at home. At least we can do something about our private problems, he says.

I have a hard time keeping it all under my hat.  Every morning, when I give my dog her insulin shot, I have to mentally prepare – “don’t think bad thoughts, don’t think bad thoughts…” as I skewer that needle into a lump of flesh behind her collar.   She lays on the floor behind me as I read the paper, read e-mails, she can hear me grumbling about stuff. I have to be careful or she’ll slip into the bedroom and stick her head under my husband’s side of the bed. I can feel the tension in her neck, makes it hard to get loose skin, sometimes she lets out a yelp and a half.

What bugs me is how people are so quick to use any excuse to stick their head in the sand, but they still expect to be allowed to complain when something finally gets under their skin.  I won’t mention names, but I’ve watched the local gadflies make big stinks about stuff, after a few months, the stink dies down, and the problem still exists.  All that blab about volunteers for the park – the park still looks like shit. The work they did at the One Mile parking lot last year has become completely overgrown with non-native invasive plants again. An area they did earlier this year is also going back to a mess.   Whole sections of the park are sub-code – if it was your yard, you’d get a notice to clean it up or pay the city to do it. 

And this conversation about keeping public restrooms open has been going on for two years now. Meanwhile, the million dollar One Mile restroom is pretty hit and miss – here’s the conundrum – if it is open, will it be usable? 

Short Attention Span Theater.

I’m going to tell you Esplanade lovers – don’t go back to sleep! Isn’t it pretty obvious, they’ve shelved the roundabouts until after the election? I’m hoping Cheryl King and friends are quietly looking for somebody to run for council, but I’m not going to bank on it.  

I’d like to see somebody run for CARD. Why don’t I do it? I would if I had some support – I ain’t going into those meetings without a posse anymore.  If they pass their bond, it means the people of Chico are completely gone fishing.

Tony St Amant said it in this morning’s paper – we have the government we deserve.

 

 

Somebody needs to run for Tom Lando’s CARD seat in November

7 Jun

When I was a little kid, a teacher told my classmates and I that if we could convince every person in America to give us a penny, we’d never have to work again.  Even a fraction of the population, he said, could make us very rich.  All we had to do was talk them into giving it to us – simple enough?

Well, I could also form an assessment district. Like Butte County Mosquito and Vector Control, or Chico Area Recreation District. Did you know – Paradise and Oroville have cemetery districts.

When you live in an assessment district, that means these agencies can stick a fee on your property taxes. These fees require a vote, but usually, just property owners, and – get a load of this – votes are “weighted” depending on how much property is owned by the individual/company/group. That’s fair, really, since the larger property owners will pay more. 

Ballots are sent by mail, looking like junk mail, and there’s no requirement that these agencies advertise or notify anybody ahead of time.   So watch your mail box – CARD is thinking about putting a property assessment in your mail box.

I wonder how many are returned and how many end up in the trash. I wonder a lot of stuff. I wonder how many homeowners have their property taxes paid by their mortgage lender, and therefore never bother to look at the itemized bill. I wonder how many people just send the check without looking.  I wonder how many people just grit their teeth and pay it, afraid to ask any questions,  cause every question just makes their heart beat harder, their blood pressure push higher, their hair fall out faster.

I’ll tell you two things that are on a ballot in November – two seats up for grabs at CARD.  One of them is currently being smothered under the elitist ass of one Tom Lando.  Mr. Lando had an agenda when he took his CARD seat – appointed, because nobody else bothered to run.  Lando’s agenda was to raise taxes, using CARD’s assessment powers to bring in more revenues to pay CalPERS every increasing demands.

See, Lando is a retired public employee – former manager of the City of Chico, in  fact.  As such, he yanks in one of the biggest pensions that ever inflicted  liability on our fair city – over $135,000/year, almost $12,000/month, in pension.  

If CalPERS goes bust, Lando is out, you heard me – almost $12,000/month. So, it’s absolutely reasonable to assume that this guy would do just about anything to keep the money pouring into CalPERS. 

You’ve heard the old Yiddish proverb:  When the fish stinks, it’s the head of the fish that stinks.  Tom Lando is your stinking fish head, you need to wrap him in newspaper and put him in the bin next November.  In order to do so, we will need a viable candidate. 

 

 

So much for public safety – city of Chico doesn’t take Americans with Disabilities Act too seriously

13 May

Bureaucracy gets a deserved bad name because it sucks up a lot of money and resources without producing anything.  Here in Chico we spend 10’s of millions – I’ve lost track of our total budget – on salaries, health benefits and pensions, but our streets are broken to pieces, our park is in disgrace, and public buildings all over town are in disrepair. Former public works manager Ruben Martinez reported a few years ago that instead of having a regular schedule of maintenance for city fixtures and facilities, the department just waited  for things to break.  This he called, “Failure Maintenance.”

Think about that. Say it a few times, and think about it good.  It sounds like the City of Chico is maintaining failure.

 I was telling my friend Jim how the city of Chico has bottomed out the gas tax fund – a cash register rings Downtown every time you gas your car in the city limits – paying salaries and benefits of people who have nothing to do with fixing our streets. Jim reminded me that the gas tax is supposed to go toward repairing streets, so I was telling him about “cost allocation.” This is the legal process by which they move money from one fund to another, “allocating” funds to pay for salaries. Here’s a simple example – if they have a meeting about the sewer facility, every body at the meeting gets their salary for that hour or two out of the sewer fund, everybody from the clerk to the city manager.  They even “allocate” an amount appropriate to pay for the PG&E  in that room for the duration of the meeting.

I first heard this many years ago – remember Jennifer Hennessy? She delivered the news to the Finance Committee, which included Mayor Mark Sorensen at that time, very casually and matter of factly, as if it was okay. Since she left in a hail of insults, her replacement, Chris Constantin, and his replacement, Frank Fields, have made it administrative policy. Moving peas under walnut shells is now the official finance policy of the City of Chico, CA.  Before he was mayor, Mark Sorensen complained they’d bottomed out the Sewer and Development funds the same way. Now you don’t hear him saying much about the red ink all over the city books, cause they juggle them so fast nowadays it’s just a blur of pink.

The other official policy Downtown is, they only fix stuff if they can get grants for it. In fact, as we have seen with the plans they made up for Esplanade, they will fix stuff that doesn’t need fixing just to get the money. And here’s the real sticker – they have to match that grant money with city funds. So, as in the case of the Downtown remodel undertaken over the last five years, with all the bulbing of the sidewalks and the traffic circles, ended up costing about 4 times as much as if they’d just fixed the sidewalks and put the ADA compliant access points at the intersections like the feds told them to do.  But, oh boy! We can get all this extra money to pay down our pension deficit if we put traffic circles and switch parking from parallel to angle parking!

The Americans with Disabilities Act was passed about 1990. Intended to make our streets and public building more accessible to people with “mobility issues” like wheelchairs, the ADA is pretty simple – if a competent wheelchair jockey can’t navigate a section of sidewalk, it’s not ADA compliant. Cracks, buckling around trees, potholes in sidewalks or streets – these don’t just prove challenging for people with disabilities – try getting a stroller out there, you find out quick, there’s whole parts of town that aren’t doable.  

And then there’s the liability. There’s a section of sidewalk across the street from my house with a buckle in it. It’s not much, it’s hard to see, but when I occasionally kick that buckle with my foot, it hurts all the way up my spine to the back of my head. Think I should talk to a lawyer about that?

I don’t remember how many years ago the city was told the Esplanade was not ADA compliant, but they’ve taken that and turned it into a gazillion dollar remodel, with over sized traffic circles and other changes necessitating the removal of many huge trees.  In the drawing I saw, the traffic  circle in front of Bidwell Mansion looks as if it will send cars right through the front doors of Northern Star Mills.

Protest led council to shelve the traffic circle plans, but only until 2017, just after the upcoming election. Wow, that’s not obvious. You’ve got Cheryl King whooping up a war dance, she’s got a basket to put your head in, so you postpone your decision until after the election. Gotta hand it to Sorensen, he knows how to handle the liberals. He won the Farmer’s Market battle, and he’ll win this one, just watch. 

Meanwhile, what about the ADA? Are they going to fix Esplanade at all? There’s miles of busted up sidewalk, and other liabilities that just need to be fixed. What about complaints about speeding? The  cops have made a big deal of patrolling it – as if it’s a big effort on their part to do their jobs, we’ll see how long it lasts.

Jim sent me a picture of ADA compliance in his neighborhood.  

Speaking of ADA, they put in these handicapped access a few years ago in my neighborhood. Nobody uses them, cars block them off, and they are full of dirt and water.

Jim says, “Speaking of ADA, they put in these handicapped access a few years ago in my neighborhood. Nobody uses them, cars block them off, and they are full of dirt and water.”         

Enterprise Record running a scare campaign on behalf of Chico PD – they will endorse a safety tax, I’ll bet my bicycle on it

8 Apr

I love to read what the readers are thinking about – the search term of the day is “collective bargaining is inherintly political”  Typo included. 

Inherently – according to Google, means  existing in someone or something as a permanent and inseparable element, quality, or attribute

If you want to understand “collective bargaining,” watch “On The Waterfront“. 

Right now the city is bargaining with the police department. Their contract includes stuff like, automatic promotions with step pay increases.  They get 90 percent of their highest year’s earnings at age 50, paying only 12 percent of the premiums out of their $100,000+ salaries.  And the contract is written so that they don’t have to pay taxes on these benefits. Think about that, but don’t hurt yourself.

They even get paid to “don and doff” – shower and dress before and after their shift. Talk about Divas!  My goodness, somebody get me a wet towel. SNAP!

Chico PD are a gang of racketeers. They use intimidation to get what they want. They use their imbedded newspaper editor to spread fear – gangs? Really David Little? What would David Little know about gangs? His kids went to “charter school” (where students are picked and chosen) and had a backyard swimming pool (despite all his insincere protests about the closure of Shapiro Pool). 

Then yesterday, we see a headline story about an old idiot who leaves his bike unlocked at Walmart and it’s stolen. Because this man makes a weekly fun ride up to Salmon Hole wearing a green t-shirt printed “Park Watch” (that’s funny, I don’t believe he is watching anything but the trail in front of his tire) – we’re supposed to feel sorry for this man? If he were my husband I’d take away his driver’s license and his credit cards, and I damn sure wouldn’t leave him alone with the grandkids.

This merits a big, front page story? And how do you like the way the editor made it sound like a mugging in the park? 

All this, while the death of Merle Haggard runs across the bottom of the page like so much Hollywood trivia.

David  Little is running a scare campaign for the cops.  Good bye journalism. 

 

 

 

Efforts underway to undermine Prop 13 for both commercial and residential

14 Mar

We barely recovered from paying our property taxes (which empty out our bank account twice a year just in time for some personal emergency to manifest itself) when I found this article online. 

http://www.foxandhoundsdaily.com/2016/03/40-years-later-prop-13-to-be-a-main-attraction-on-2018-ballot/

For years I’ve been aware of the effort to undermine the protections of Proposition 13 for commercial properties, but now we have an effort to undermine the protections on people’s personal homes.

Wow, after that last BOOM!, can you imagine what your property taxes would have looked like under the old law? How many people would be forced out of their homes if we lost Prop 13? I know my elderly neighbors would be paying more in taxes than they paid for their home, and that seems very, very weird to me.  

And if they sold, they’d still have to pay tremendous income tax, regardless of the property taxes. Why don’t people see this for what it is – SHAKE DOWN!

In a perfect world, property taxes would be assessed based on projects within a certain distance of your house – your “neighborhood”.  We should pay for maintenance of the streets and other public infrastructure around our homes, that seems fair. When was the last time you saw any road work in your neighborhood, that didn’t involved hooking somebody up to sewer? Yeah, the city wants folks on the sewer, so they can pilfer the sewer fund for salaries and benefits, but you notice they don’t fix the street after they gopher their way in, they say they don’t have the money…

The streets in my neighborhood and around my rentals are a disaster, but the paychecks still roll out, and we are still on the hook to pay for pensions of 70 – 90 percent at age 50 – 55.   

It’s hard for little people like me to fight these big efforts, I spend most of my energy locally.   If we had better local watchdogs, we could make a difference. We need better people on council, who can negotiate down the pay and benefits and get more employees in the bargain. We have so many overpaid management positions, paying less than 10 percent toward their own pensions, we can’t afford anybody to actually do the work. 

Mark Sorensen and his friends are the beginning of the end for Chico. These people have taken business behind closed doors, actually cancelling this week’s meeting, saying there’s no business for the agenda.

Well, I’d sure like to know why my garbage man is telling everybody that Waste Management will get all the residential accounts east of the freeway when Mark Orme keeps telling me the deal is “still in negotiation”?  I’d like to know what the city, who was supposed to register with the CPUC as an “Intervenor” in the latest rate increase case for Cal Water, has not made any announcement of the hearing that’s been scheduled for next month.  It seems Mayor Sorensen feels it is not important to keep a rapport open with the public. It’s just too damned expensive to keep the public in the loop, isn’t it? 

Write those letters, ask those questions.  

Bits and pieces – readers’ questions lead me to some interesting reading

10 Mar

Recently somebody got so frustrated they typed in the search term “why is pge screwing us!!!!!!!!”

Yes, eight exclamation marks, I counted ’em.

Here’s an answer: it’s the pensions, it’s the pensions, it’s the pensions. I don’t know what PG&E’s pension liability is, but I’m guessing it would be more than the city of Chico.  They don’t pay into their own pensions, but they expect the same 70 percent at age 55, do the math.

Here’s another answer: cause they can.  Something happened at some point, and all the public watchdogs turned on the people, including the California Public Utilities Commission. Here’s an article from the Sac Bee on how that happened (sorry, old column from last October, but full of details):

http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article38487060.html

Eight exclamation marks, but I wonder – has this question asker written any letters, attended any hearings? 

I’ve been getting a lot of searches regarding “Chico homeless problem” and “Torres Shelter,” as well as “Brad Montgomery salary.”  I see I’m not the only one who is curious how much it costs to run that place. Montgomery came around to answer some of our questions, including, his own salary and how much that translates into day-to-day costs – see his comments here:

https://chicotaxpayers.com/2016/02/02/its-good-to-see-people-asking-questions-about-funding-torres-shelter/

https://chicotaxpayers.com/2016/01/27/torres-shelter-closing-may-be-reason-to-celebrate/

https://chicotaxpayers.com/2016/01/28/i-think-we-all-agree-we-need-some-level-of-help-for-homeless-people-but-we-need-to-be-asking-questions-about-the-expense-and-lack-of-results/

He says they don’t receive much public money – he seems to forget all the salaries that go into that place that are paid with public money. I’ve given examples in those posts. According to Butte County Administrative Officer Paul Hahn, over half the county budget goes to indigent and mental health services.

Montgomery says it costs roughly $25  a day to house each person at the Torres, asking who can beat that. Well, I can’t – I did the math on our property taxes yesterday, and that adds $26 a day to our expenses, right off the top. We also house people, and yeah, given they have to pay their own utilities (including the salaries and pensions of utility company management), buy groceries and gas in a town swimming with public salaries, and compete for everything from daycare to clothing with people who can afford anything they want, I’m pretty sure it costs them more than $25 a day per person.

And when we go to Enloe Hospital, we are on the hook for our whole bill, or we are dead beats. Not only does Enloe serve the indigents for free, they just handed $20,000 of patient’s money to the shelter, as if it came out of  Mike Wiltermood’s back pocket.

Got any more comments to make Brad? Please, step right up, don’t wait until a post is a couple of weeks old and you don’t think anybody is reading it anymore.  

I also noticed in my stats, somebody had been looking at posts I made about Tea Party presentations. We used to have a very active Tea Party, they met monthly, and had guest speakers, like Brian Nakamura, short term city assassin. They’d filmed these presentations and posted them, sending me links to post. Now those links don’t work anymore, sorry about that. When I checked into the Chico Tea Party, I see it’s pretty dead. I can’t find current information on any local Tea Party groups. Wow, talk about a tempest in a Tea Pot.

As I recall, Tea Party patriots I knew started joining the “State of Jefferson” movement. They were having regular Sunday meetings at the library, but I don’t see those scheduled anymore. State of Jefferson, or the Pacific State, as some call it now, is still active elsewhere. 

https://www.facebook.com/StateofJeffersonParty/

At last, the unfunded pension liabilities are getting some attention.

http://www.foxandhoundsdaily.com/2016/03/doing-the-gasb-gasp/

John Moorlach actually considered a run for governor a couple of elections ago, but I’m  guessing he stared straight into the machine that is Jerry Brown and his testicles went right into his throat. At least he’s still banging his drum.  

Reading that, we must wonder, what is Butte County’s unfunded liability? City of Chico is carrying over $90 million. 

 

 

 

Join Chico Taxpayers Association – get some peace of mind by giving others a piece of your mind!

8 Mar
At the intersection of Mangrove and Vallombrosa

At the intersection of Mangrove and Vallombrosa a little circus parade entertains the drivers as they wait for the light to change.

My husband, out on errands yesterday, sitting at a red light, snapped the picture above with his cell phone. There was a woman with a similar rig in front of the car, wrangling her unruly pitbull as she trundled her household on wheels across the traffic island, walking out across the traffic lane just as the light was turning green.  My husband said the man had a pirate flag flying from the back of his trailer, but couldn’t snap the shot in time to catch it, unfurled and glorious. 

At a recent meeting city council extended an ordinance that had originally been written almost exclusively for Downtown and the Lower Park, “criminalizing” camping, littering, loitering, defecating, urinating, defacing and generally disrespecting our shared “public” areas.

This is so conflicting for me sometimes. I mean – public lands and spaces belong to the public, and that’s everybody, right? At the same time, I have to remind myself – like Harvey Two-Face, I am of two minds on many things – so I have to remind myself, that means, no one person should be able to flop themselves out and take over any given public space for more than what another member of the public would think is reasonable.

In the city of Chico, “reasonable” includes, willing to pay for it, according to a price scale made up by city staffers. I don’t have to time to look it up, it’s in the Municipal Code, and that’s your assignment for today  –  learn it, know it, live it…  Certainly everybody should know their own Municipal Code, it should be a condition of graduation from the Eighth Grade. You should know that the average person or group wanting to use, just for example, the City Plaza, would end up paying hundreds of dollars, minimum, for use of stuff like the public bathroom that’s supposed to be open all the time anyway, and may very well be vandalized or pooped beyond use and locked up good and tight when you arrive with your party. But, here’s the funny thing – if you have a city councilor friend who is willing to “sponsor” your event, in any of the city’s facilities, including City Chambers, you get it free. Probably get the toilet cleaned up and running for you and everything!  Isn’t that the way we scratch each other’s backs here in Hazard County?

No, I don’t like the way the city of Chico manages our “public spaces.” They been selling public sidewalk to various Downtown restaurants – at one meeting a few years back, it was an annual payment of $15,000, per parking space of street frontage. That sounds like a shakedown  to me, but these big restaurants are willing to pay it to increase their square footage, get more bodies inside to pour down their marked-up liquor and crap food. $$$$$$$$!

Ever been Downtown on a warm evening? The smell of garbage will knock you over. But people are willing to pay to sit out on these patios in 105 degrees and smell that swamp odor, go figure.

Meanwhile, pedestrians are relegated to a tiny strip of sidewalk barely wide enough to walk single file, facing moving cars with their strollers and dogs and the parcels they’d ideally be carrying from the shops they’ve supposedly patronized. Uh-huh.

But, here in my retail neighborhood, I’m tired of seeing something that wouldn’t be tolerated Downtown – bodies plopped out under trees and across shady sidewalks  all around long-time businesses like Rite Aid and Safeway and the Vallombrosa post office. Transient parades stopping cars crossing the streets on red lights, or simply running or riding bikes out in front of cars, oftentimes dog running loose, between intersections.  I keep hearing other shoppers or postal patrons around me ask why transients are allowed to have shopping carts, obviously stolen property.

 I don’t like leaving my car in the parking lot at Mangrove Plaza, because I’ve seen transients meandering among the cars, obviously checking for unlocked doors and easy grabs inside. Having seen them run out of Payless Shoes with stolen merchandise, I wonder how long before they get bold enough to smash car windows out in the no-man’s-land between the gas station and the store fronts. 

 Why do the police need new ordinances to ticket or even arrest people for breaking laws that are already on the books? It’s always been illegal to camp in the park – in fact, it’s illegal to be “loitering” in the park more than a half hour after sunset, according to signs that have been posted in various locations in Bidwell Park since I was a kid. I’ve heard discussions Downtown specifying “loitering” to mean, not walking home, or using the park to “get somewhere“.  In other words, you better be moving.  None-the-less, the cops needed a new ordinance to kick transients out of de-facto campsites – tents with campfires! – around the park and other public parks and waterways around town, and then they need to expand that to cover the rest of town, not just the Downtown grid. 

They also lobbied council to give them a “sit-and-lie” ordinance, even though a very specific panhandling ordinance had already been on the books for 10 years, but had rarely been enforced. 

Meanwhile they’ve tweaked the “disorderly events” and “noise” ordinances so that they no longer need complaints from neighbors to wade onto private property to investigate when any officer may suspect is an illegal situation taking place. They also weakened the provision saying that landlords/property owners must be notified before they can be charged an unspecified amount in “response charges.”

All along whining and  crying that they don’t have enough cops in the department because pay and morale are low. Council has given them new hires and also instituted an administrative pay step increase plan that insures automatic promotion and pay raises, but they still want more money for stuff like new radios, license plate readers, and they’ve even  wish-listed a “substation” at Enloe Hospital.

That latter item because they say they spend so much time with transients down at Enloe, they need a private room off the beaten path where they can fill out their reports. Or do whatever they damned-well please out of the scrutiny of the inquisitive taxpayer.

Our local daily  editor David Little has acknowledged a campaign to raise sales tax, a “public safety” tax to benefit the police department. He’s berated the CARD assessment, leaving me to believe he and the paper will endorse this “public safety” tax.

Wow, I’ll tell you what – I see a public safety crisis alright – Chico PD!  A pack of purse snatchers, is what they are. They want your retirement money. They want your kids’ college money. They think you’re rich enough to pay for their outrageous lifestyles, just because you haven’t been foreclosed! They want your money, and they are going to pull out the stops in November to get it.

They’ll show you pictures like the one above, and tell you the only way you can get your beloved town back is throw more money at them. 

Get ready to pull out your bottle of these.

My mom gave me these. She used to go to a lot of these meeting too.

I hope you haven’t used yours all up with the presidential debates.

You know what else you  can do? Join Chico Taxpayers Association – we’re having a lifetime membership special – FREE! All you need is a sense of righteous indignation.

City of Chico needs to amend employee contracts to count employee benefits toward their income, make them pay their own “Cadillac Tax”

2 Mar

 

When I first heard about the “Cadillac Insurance Tax” I had to giggle – a tax on those over-generous health benefits packages we give our public employees – then I found out – they don’t pay it, WE PAY IT.

Something I haven’t got around to bitching about is the health benefits packages enjoyed by public workers. I’ve said plenty about the Pension Time Bomb – well, there’s a health benefits time bomb too, at least as big as the pension bomb. Workers are getting three and four times the benefits enjoyed by most tax payers – look at the controller’s website:

http://publicpay.ca.gov/Reports/Counties/County.aspx?entityid=4&fiscalyear=2014

Top of the list, Dorian Kittrell, County Behavioral Health Director – $48,000 in benefits. I don’t know the split there between pension and health insurance, but I know he pays less than 10 percent of the premium out of his almost $300,000 in salary.  The taxpayers pick up maybe 30 percent more, and then the rest rides on the stock market.  That is what creates the “liability” in these funds – our gracious elected officials have promised these crazy salaries, pensions, and health care packages to our elite public management, but they are paying less than 50 percent of  the cost up front.

At the city of Chico

http://publicpay.ca.gov/Reports/Cities/City.aspx?fiscalyear=2014&entityid=79

public safety “workers” take away outrageous packages – at the top of the list, a $74,229 benefits package for  one fire chief who makes more than $200,000/year in salary. 

These are the “Cadillac” plans Obama is after, to pay for his failed Obamacare, and the county of Butte and the city of Chico will be on the hook to pay 40 percent of the value of those packages. 

Why the employer? Because we give our public workers a contract stipulation that says their benefits will not be counted as part of their income. That leaves the public entity on the hook, and that means, WE PAY IT.

Here’s a good link to find information about this tax, which is set to go into effect by 2020, if not 2018.

http://www.fightthe40.com/news/

As for our local situation, the contracts are on the table right now, write to your mayor and tell him we want the benefits counted as income. Tell him we are not willing to foot the bill for these people’s outrageous lifestyle demands. 

That’s Mayor Mark Sorensen, mark.sorensen@Chicoca.gov

CARD to go for assessment – how about they pay their own pensions?

24 Feb

CARD has announced plans to assess property owners, not just for  their proposed aquatic center, but for all their mismanagement problems.  Like I predicted, they will throw out a “wish list” of everything from the aquatic center to new ballfields to a regular cornucopia of activities at DeGarmo Park.

Thanks Jim, for doing the research on assessments, I knew they were bad.

From a San Luis Obispo County document, this definition of “assessment.”

An assessment becomes a lien on parcels of real property to pay for “special benefits” the parcels receive from a project. The lien may be paid off by property owners in a lump sum or may be paid annually with property taxes.

This particular document pertains to a proposition to tax the citizens of San Luis Obispo County for a waste water treatment plant. Here’s a more general document regarding California Assembly Bill 218, passed by a very stupid population back in 1996.

http://www.californiataxdata.com/pdf/proposition218.pdf

This law seems to set up reasonable boundaries for setting up new taxes, but the voters should have read it more closely. Since then, just recently really, the legislature has lowered the threshold by which voters can pass these assessments to only 58 percent.

To me, that’s rule of mob. More people than that ought to have to agree on something before it is instituted in law.  This new rule sets up a giant separation of our voters. In other words – This Means WAR. Driven by the Have’s, who got theirs by ripping off the Working Class.

Read it – the more property you have, the more your vote is “weighted” in these elections. Because they pay more, you might argue, based on the value of their property – not true, that’s not usually the way this tax works.  

Remember the “Mosquito Tax”?  Here’s the break-down on that, from the Butte County Mosquito and Vectors District assessment passed in 2014:

“Homes of one acre or less pay $9.69 plus eight cents for each additional acre. Owners of vacant land will pay $2.42 per parcel. Apartment complexes are assessed $3.85 per apartment up to 20, and 97 cents after that. Farmers will pay 8 cents per acre and undeveloped rangeland is assessed 2 cents an acre.”

The rich will not pay the lion’s share of the mosquito tax – the working class will shoulder this burden. While the big property owners will say, “we pay more!” they must bow to the fact that there are more working class and poor in this town than “One Percenters.”  If you buy a home you pay the developer’s assessments, if you rent you pay the landlords’ assessments. We working class taxpayers will pay more than the developers and the landlords, even more than the rice farmers who breed mosquitoes.

The CARD assessment will likewise fall hardest on homeowners and renters.

Ever wonder what the mosquito tax pays for? Well, for starters, we get district manager Matt Ball, at over $125,000 in salary, paying just 3% of his own pension – 70 percent of his highest year’s salary, available at age 55. To do what? Sit around that Taj Majal (we also paid for) out on Otterson Drive, yakking with his $70,000/year secretary, who pays less than 3% of her package as well?

I called the district (that’s 533 – 6038) to ask a couple of questions.   At 9:05 am, the $70,000 secretary who answered the phone told me “we’re in a meeting right now,” and asked for my phone number so  could return my call. I don’t play that shit – I asked her, when can I call back and talk to Matt Ball?

“Why don’t you try back about 1:00?” she suggested, without a hint of cheer.

I said I would, thank you! I don’t know whether to believe her or not though – is management really in a meeting, or just come in when they get around to it?  So I e-mailed Mr. Ball, asking him about the pensions. I asked him which entity administered their pensions (CalPERS is not the only one) and what’s their pension liability. We’ll see if he gets back to me. Ball previously told me that district employees only pay three percent of some very generous pension and benefits programs.

Over at CARD, director Ann Willman makes about the same salary as Ball, but pays NOTHING toward her benefits. Wow. CARD’s unfunded liability, for just a handful of management types, as of June 2014, is about $1.7 million. That’s after a $400,000 “side fund payoff” made in 2012.

Ever wonder, who is responsible for these decisions? Well, your county board of supervisors and your city council are among the entities that name the members of the board that governs the mosquito district. The CARD board is elected by the voters, long term member Jan Sneed receiving over 9,000 votes in 2014. These commissions rubber stamp the compensation packages, I often wonder, do they even read them? 

Here’s the thing – it’s not their money.

But, again People – yeah, you the People over there – you are responsible for this mess. These districts have open meetings, they are ruled by the same public information laws as everybody else, all you have to do is start paying attention.  Haven’t you ever wanted to buy a bag of popcorn and attend a meeting? Make a phone call to ask snoopy questions? You know you do! Come on!

All it takes is a little push to knock down a house of cards.

 

 

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