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Head over heels crazy – what will become of Chico?

6 Jul

I haven’t been blogging lately because, frankly, I can’t make heads or tails of what the hell is going on right now. Chico is a giant mess, people are just acting completely crazy. It’s a total breakdown of civilization, created by a government in mutiny.

If you think I’m over dramatizing, read a history book. Our elected officials and staff are not the first to turn on the public, abandon ship, and loot the treasury on their way out. That is what a Pension Obligation Bond does, it places the burden of the pensions on the taxpayers, forever.

Who you gonna call? Our elected officials are not interested in what we think, and when cornered, will say whatever they think we want to hear. Staff has holed behind Formal Requests For Information, transparency is over. I was just reading an article from Ted Siedle, in which he reports that California is among the worst states in financial transparency, especially of investments. And that’s exactly what I found when I asked city finance director Scott Dowell about the returns he’s been getting from the pension fund investments. He made me open an account and submit a formal request for the answer.

3Unfortunately, I haven’t had any news from Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association yet, but I sent another email today and frankly told them things are really bad in Chico right now and I would like to hear some good news! I’ll keep you posted!

In the meantime, I’m ignoring the Facebook sites, like I’d avoid public bathrooms these days.

Will HJTA’s C&D be the end of the POB? Wait and see!

25 Jun

I heard about “Pension Obligation Bonds” years ago, and the name seemed to be pretty clear – a bond that obligates the taxpayers to pay the pensions.

When I started this blog in 2012, we had just got a new city manager, Brian Nakamura. As I recall, he was the first person to mention the pension deficit – Unfunded Actuarial Liability – in front of the public. At that time, he gave two figures – one about $168 million, another about $193 million. I think the second figure included something else Nakamura brought up briefly – the benefits deficit, or “Other Post Employment Benefits”.

Nakamura didn’t stay long, he brought in his former assistant manager from Hemet CA, Mark Orme, and another co-worker from Hemet, Chris Constantin, to replace departing Finance Director Jennifer Hennessy. Nakamura was obviously setting us up for his quick departure to his next job in the town of Rancho Cordova, CA. When Nakamura left, Orme became City Manager, and promoted his friend Chris Constantin to Asst City mgr. Scott Dowell moved over from Chico Area Recreation District to take up the job of Finance Director, now called, “Administrative Services Director.”

These three immediately embarked on a plan to pay down the UAL with “allocations” from every fund in the city treasury. They brought in a consultant, Chad Wolford, who explained the process by which they could legally embezzle money from the streets, parks, sewer, and other infrastructure funds, to pay their own pensions. Allocations were institutionalized, with nothing more than a rubber stamp from council. A percentage of each department payroll is taken into the new “Pension Stabilization Trust,” from which Dowell makes investments, and then once a year, an increasing payment to CalPERS. At one point, they’d beaten the UAL down to about $138 million.

So, how has the UAL actually increased to $146 million? Plus another $140 million interest? Here’s how – Orme is not controlling employee costs. Instead he’s handing out raises, to himself and other management employees. Furthermore he’s added new management positions, three in the last year, at over $100,000 in salary.

Furthermore, management employees are only paying 9% of the cost of their own pensions. Do the math on that – 70% of their highest year’s salary at retirement, for a contribution of 9%? Meanwhile, Orme and several others have wangled themselves a special 401K fund for public employees – a 457 Fund. The city (the taxpayers) put $20,000 a year into that fund. Were you asked to rubberstamp this? Nobody was – I found it in his contract. People, you have to read stuff. I love it when the union lovers and the badge bunnies call me a liar but you ask and NO, they haven’t read shit.

Under this kind of strain, the PST is not supporting the payments. Dowell’s investments are coming in at less than 3%. Every month Dowell has to ask council to rubberstamp more allocations to meet CalPERS’ demands – look at the agendas before you call me names, okay? The annual payment gets bigger every year – this year, $11.5 million. Dowell says we’ll be paying $13 million within a few years. So, how, oh how, does that UAL figure keep getting bigger?

I’m glad to say, people are starting to ask questions. Staff wants to bury the whole thing, like it never happened. So, very quietly, behind closed doors (latest Finance Committee cancelled until August), Staff and council have been pushing forward with a tax measure they don’t want to put on the ballot – the Pension Obligation Bond. This bond will take front and center – the payments on this bond must be made ahead of all the city’s other obligations.

What are the city’s other obligations? Your streets, your sewer, your cops and firefighters, your park. All that has, as you can see, gone along the wayside while Staff has stuffed our money, hand over fist, into their own pockets.

Some people, including myself, believe a tax is a tax, and it needs to go to the ballot. Since this POB would be a “special” tax dedicated to the purpose of stuffing employees’ pockets (or whatever they want to call it), it’s a 2/3’s measure. When this point was brought up, Staff closed down the meetings and the planned “work shop” and went underground with it.

A local gadfly told me, “the POB is dead.” He cited the “cease and desist” order filed by the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association and the cancellation of the workshop. I’m afraid that’s not true. A quick search on “cease and desist order” told me what I already suspected. The city can ignore it, and HJTA has to SUE. The filing date is this coming Monday, June 28. If nobody challenges the POB at Butte Superior Court, it will be approved automatically, cease and desist order be damned. A cease and desist order is just a line in the dirt, if the city steps over it and HJTA doesn’t do anything, it’s done.

If I had a lawyer, I’d file it myself, but I’ll have to wait and see what HJTA will do.

Remember, the only stupid question is the one you didn’t ask. Is this vaccine effective, is it safe, and do you really need it?

23 Jun

Somebody asked me recently if I’m an “anti-vaxxer”. That’s a can of worms there.

Vaccination has always been a hot topic. Most people have accepted standard vaccines like polio, measles, mumps, rubella, diptheria, and whooping cough, because they’ve been used for years and most of us have never heard of any bad reactions. Those diseases also caused a lot of misery in recent history, so people were eager to protect their children. My dad remembered a whole family that died of diptheria, my mother-in-law was hospitalized for two years with polio as a child, and an aunt was left completely deaf after a bout with whooping cough. So as a society we’ve become pretty comfortable with the notion of letting somebody inject us with a tiny bit of a disease in the hopes that our body would learn how to handle it.

I started questioning vaccines after a bad reaction from a vaccination I had as a college student. My mom’s house had flooded and our vaccine records were lost, so Chico State made me take an MMR shot again. I got a weird rash and felt very run down for a few days, and thought that was it. But, about 5 years later, I got the same rash and got so weak I was in bed for almost three weeks, had to hold onto furniture to make it to the bathroom.

I assumed it was because I’d already had the shot. I went ahead and had my kids vaccinated – my midwife made a good point. Those diseases have been essentially eliminated in the US, but, she pointed out correctly, this area sees a lot of immigration from countries that don’t vaccinate, so those diseases can still come back. I got my kids the vaccinations I’d had as a child.

When the chickenpox vaccine came out, I resisted. When I was a child, if somebody in the neighborhood had chickenpox, you took your kids to their house to play. When my sister and I had chickenpox, my grandmother took us to a woman who wanted her 8 children exposed. She let us watch tv all day and eat Otter Pops. Both my kids had chickenpox, and I think it was good for them. Only later did they tell us – if you haven’t had a good case of chickenpox as a child, you have to live in fear of it the rest of your life because it’s much more severe in adults. If you vaccinate, it’s recommended that you have regular boosters throughout your adult life. I feel good about that decision.

We’ve also all had good cases of the flu, one year it was so bad we called it The Asskicker Flu. I feel good about that too – I believe having an illness gives your body the strength to resist. But I also saw a lot of things wrong with the flu vaccine. For one thing, the CDC admitted, there are so many different strains of the flu, they just plain GUESS which vaccine they should be doling out. According to their website, “The seasonal flu vaccine protects against the influenza viruses that research indicates will be most common during the upcoming season.” And they also admitted, they haven’t always been right, and we’ve had bad flu seasons even when people have lined up out the door at Raleys to get the shots.

Then there was the case in 2019 of flu shots that turned out to be insulin.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2019/11/08/flu-shots-insulin-oklahoma-10-hospitalized/2529395001/

Insulin will kill you if you are not a diabetic. How are we supposed to trust the medical community when they make mistakes like this? We’ve also heard a lot of contradictions during this pandemic, too many to list here.

I don’t think it’s stupid or foolish to ask questions. It’s supposed to be our duty to stand up when we hear or see something that is completely out of line with logic and reason. I’m very uncomfortable with how eagerly some people have given up their civil rights over this COVID panic, and even more uncomfortable with how they’ve tried to bully others into compliance.

We’ve come a long way since 1776, but we may have been moving in a circle.

CUSD Board Recall: if every parent whose family has been negatively affected by school closures would sign the petition, it would be a slam dunk

15 Jun

I would still like to remind folks to sign the recall petitions for CUSD board members Kathy Kaiser, Eileen Robinson, Caitlin Dalby and Tom Lando. Chico Parents For In-Person Learning need about 11,000 signatures, and remember, you have to sign a separate petition for each board member. Get a petition at their website here:

https://www.chicoparents.org/recall-petitions

I outlined the reasons I was supporting this recall in a recent letter to the editor. I read the agenda and reports for the May 19 board meeting at which the four in question voted to dole out $2.5 million in bonuses to district employees who never missed a paycheck during the shut down. I got my teachers’ average salary figure right from the horse’s mouth – the agenda reports. But a few local union gadflies are trying to talk me down in letters to the ER. They should really read the reports first, available here:

Here’s my response, below, sent to the ER today. I wish those of you who have already signed the petition would write to the ER and outline the reasons you are supporting the recall.

Letter writers have questioned a figure I cited in a recent letter to the editor.

I got the average pay for a CUSD teacher from the 5/19/21 Chico Unified board agenda report. The lowest fulltime Chico teacher’s salary I saw on Transparent California was over $69,000/year. Benefits packages ranged from about $10,000 to $35,000. The average also includes a wide variety of miscellaneous part-time positions paid less than $1,000/year.

Chico teachers are very well compensated. They were fully paid through the school closures, even receiving bonuses, while working parents scrambled to find child care or stayed home from work, left to navigate the unemployment system.

My main concern with the CUSD board is that four of five positions are held by union members. While I agree that school employees are entitled to fair representation, that is a lopsided. Especially when you consider that members have a paid union arbitrator to represent them before the board. In fact, at least two of the four vote on contracts that directly benefit them. That is an obvious conflict of interest.

These four have kept the schools closed – dereliction of duty, the shameful failure to fulfill one’s obligations. These people are abusing a position of trust, with no regard for the community. They’ve ignored the concerns of parents and the welfare of the children.

If every parent whose family has been negatively affected by the school closures signed the petitions, it would be a slam dunk.

Juanita Sumner, Chico CA

Butte County to use PG&E settlement funds to pay down employee pension deficit

5 Jun

I wrote to the county board of supervisors yesterday, sending them the links regarding Howard Jarvis Taxpayers litigating over the issue of Pension Obligation Bonds and their letter to the city of Chico. Meanwhile, Dave Howell got on the phone and called his district rep, Todd Kimmelshue, to get more information. Hold onto your seat, I was shocked to find out how the county plans to handle it’s pension deficit.

I spoke with Kimmelshue’s aid and was told the supervisors have decided not to pursue a POB. And apparently they made that decision not because a POB is very risky and an all around bad idea, but because they plan to dump money from the PG&E settlement into the pension UAL, so they don’t think a POB is “necessary” at this time. (They’re also going to use the money to go on a bureaucrat hiring spree but that’s another ridiculous story.)

Why should money from PG&E for the fire settlement go to the pensions? That money should go to fix the damage done by the fire and if it’s already been fixed it should go to prevent future fires or to fix the terrible roads or why not give it back to the county’s taxpayers who are also PG&E rate payers? After all, WHERE do they think PG&E got the money they have to give to the county? They got it from us, the rate payers!

But they are going to throw this money down the pension rat hole, just like they do with the money for the roads and so many other necessities.

Why oh why do we have such awful politicians???

I can’t answer that, but I will say, the politicians are only as good as we demand. Whenever I tell people to write to their elected officials I worry that nothing we do matters. But we’ve seen otherwise. So sit down and write those emails, make those phone calls. This is WRONG. People were burned out of their homes, some murdered, by a corporation’s blatant incompetence and greed, and now county staffers will dance on the graves of the dead while sharing the blood money among themselves?

I don’t think that’s over-dramatic.

GUESS WHAT! Howard Jarvis Taxpayers have sent a CEASE AND DESIST letter to Chico Staff, “advising against filing a validation action for a $146 million pension obligation bond…”

4 Jun

I got good news from council member Kami Denlay last night, I been too busy to post it.

Hello Juanita!
Since our previous emails we received a cease and desist style letter from HJTA. They outlined all of the same issues you have mentioned, as well as those issues I echoed at the April 26th meeting (violations of State Constitution, etc).
The City’s movement on the bonds is now temporarily halted until council is briefed on the legal letter from HJTA. I look forward to hearing how my colleagues respond now that our concerns have been further validated by this new HJTA action.
“

Talk about a gobstopper.

Ms. Denlay also sent me a screen shot of the letter, but I can’t cut and paste from it and have no link to refer to. So I’ll just give you some highlights.

“This letter advises against filing a validation action for a $146 million pension obligation bond indebting the city of Chico’s Taxpayers without their approval.” They cite a resolution “to that effect” passed in April of this year. They also cite the California Constitution, as did Denlay when she voted NO to Staff’s proposal.

“No county (city etc) shall incur any indebtedness or liability … without the assent of two-thirds of the voters…”

Please note, they don’t say “tax” or “bond”, they say “debt” and “liability”. This leads me to question the whole “Unfunded Actuarial Liability” that Staff is always telling us is the responsibility of the taxpayers. Bull shit!

Hey, you know what else – the county has been pursuing a Pension Obligation Bond as well. Excuse me while I send a copy of this letter to the Board of Supervisors.

Thank goodness for recalls, but in future, let’s be more careful who we elect in the first place

2 Jun

I didn’t use to be a recall supporter. I always felt they were not worth the expense, let’s just do it at election time. But the COVID shut down has been a giant disaster, perpetuated by people who misused their power for their own agendas. For some it was just the absolute power of being able to run other people’s lives and dictate their behaviors. I think that would be Gavin Newsom, I think he just let it all go to his giant Joker-shaped head. Others saw gain to be made, and they took it. That would be the unions. So I wrote this letter to the ER in support of the recall that is being run by Chico Parents for In Person Learning. Here’s the link to their website:

https://www.chicoparents.org/recall-petitions

And here are locations in Chico where you can sign:

Rosedale Elementary School
100 Oak Street, Chico

M-W-F from 10:00AM to 10:45AM

Hobby Lobby
1919 E 20th Street, Chico

M-W-F from 12:30PM to 2:30PM

I hope you’ll sign too, and if you get a chance, send a letter to the Enterprise Record. Here’s mine.

After I saw Chico Unified School Board members Elaine Robinson, Kathy Kaiser, Tom Lando and Kaitlyn Dalby hand out nearly $2.5 million in bonuses to Chico school employees who refused to return to the classroom, I decided to support the recall effort led by Chico Parents for In Person Learning. This board majority perpetuated the school closure without regard for our community.

Public employees are very generously compensated based on the assumption that they go above and beyond to serve the community. According to board agenda reports, the average Chico teacher makes $106,732/year, plus benefits, including health insurance for themselves and their families.

The median family income in Chico is $43,000/year. Those families can’t miss a paycheck. Suddenly finding their children locked out of school is an immediate disaster. Leave them home alone? Use up your sick days hoping for good news? Affordable daycare was hard enough to find before COVID. Quit your job and go on welfare? All this is crippling our economy.

To think that families all over town are under that kind of strain while school district employees are enjoying full pay, benefits, and now a bonus. As a friend of mine put it, this is a stab to the kidney for working parents.

All four board members are also members of public unions. That has been a problem with the school board in past years – members whose allegiance to the union overrode their judgement.

Lesson learned – in future, let’s pay more attention to who we’re electing.

Juanita Sumner, Chico CA

Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association has successfully sued at least twice to stop POBs on the grounds that they must have voter approval

29 May
This article from the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association sheds some legal doubts on the whole POB scam.

On a tip from a reader, I found this article, originally printed in January 2020. Jon Coupal begins with statewide bond measures, but picks up with a warning about Pension Obligation Bonds. “...at the local level, taxpayers need to be aware of a recent resurgence in the use of pension obligation bonds, a risky financing method that fell out of favor during the recession but is now making a comeback.”

Coupal analogizes, “A POB is basically paying your Visa bill with your MasterCard,” adding, “Pension obligation bonds (POBs) are bonds issued to fund, in whole or in part, the unfunded portion of public pension liabilities by the creation of new debt.“

Council members Andrew Coolidge and Sean Morgan, and other proponents of POBs, are denying that a POB is new debt, they chant it like a mantra, because they think they can hypnotize us into believing it.

Coupal continues, “The use of POBs relies on an assumption that the bond proceeds, when invested with pension assets in higher-yielding assets, will be able to achieve a rate of return that is greater than the interest rate owed over the term of the bonds.“

Even Staffer Scott Dowell has used the word, “gamble“, even while he and city manager Mark Orme have pressed forward with this scheme. Council has given them permission to send this bond for judicial approval. The consultant told council and staff that this type of bond does not require voter approval. They said it would only take approval from a judge, which should only take a few months. The expect to implement this thing within the next few months.

If this seems odd to you, you’re not alone, the HJTA is on your side.

“Back in 2003, the state of California attempted to float a statewide pension obligation bond without voter approval.

The Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association sued to invalidate the bonds and prevailed in court.“

That’s not the only lawsuit HJTA has pursued against POBs. The reader who tipped me to all this sent me the story of HJTA vs the city of Simi Valley.

“The Simi Valley City Council voted 5-0 on April 6, 2020, to rescind a December 2019 resolution authorizing a $150 million pension obligation bond and future similar bonds, thanking the Ventura County Taxpayers Association for working with the City in avoiding what could have been a lengthy battle over legally questionable bonds. The rescission was part of a settlement agreement with the VCTA and the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association.“

Apparently, the city asked for validation from the Ventura County Superior Court. HJTA and the Ventura County Taxpayers Association then “answered” the suit. And the city backed down, but I’m not really sure why.

“In settling, the Simi Valley City Council recognized the constitutional concern in the VCTA/HJTA answer to the City’s lawsuit — whether the California Constitution requires two-thirds voter approval of any such bond. Agreeing to wait for legal clarity, and with each side bearing its own costs, the City agreed to dismiss its lawsuit with prejudice, and rescind the bond authorization resolution.“

“recognized the constitutional concern” ? ” Agreeing to wait for legal clarity” ? I’m not sure what has happened since then – has the court given any further ruling on these bonds? Any legal clarity? I’ll have to look into that. But I think that’s a good question for Staff at that POB forum.

DAY: Tuesday, June 8, 2021
TIME: 2:00 P.M.
PLACE: City Council Chamber – 421 Main Street

Orme and Dowell want to take the city of Chico on a Tax-stravaganza

25 May

Tomorrow the Chico Finance Committee is meeting, again, CLOSED in a room with public participation limited to Zoom, to discuss the smorgasbord of taxes and fee increases brought forward by city manager Mark Orme and Administrative Services (Finance) Director Scott Dowell. I will try to “attend” on Zoom, but in the meantime I wrote a letter to the ER.

The city of Chico is embarking on an unprecedented “tax-stravaganza”. At the 5/26/21 Finance Committee meeting, Mark Orme and Scott Dowell brought forth an incredible list of tax measures and fee increases for council’s consideration, including a sales tax increase, and new cell phone tax. Staff also suggested raising sewer fees by implementing volume charges, raising the transient occupancy tax, and increasing franchise fees on PG&E, the waste haulers, and other service providers. Mayor Coolidge has also suggested a road bond.

The common thread here is the pension deficit. Staff is desperate to pay CalPERS, to save pensions into which they have contributed less than 15% for 70-90% of their highest year’s pay.

The city has been receiving more sales tax, property tax, developer fees, and Utility Tax revenues every year as development brings more people to Chico. Instead of maintaining and improving infrastructure, Staff has poured these funds into their pension deficit, $11,500,000 this year, by 2025, $13,000,000. This money is allocated from all the department funds, at the expense of infrastructure and services.

Instead of pursuing new taxes that will hurt our local economy, council needs to switch from CalPERS’ defined benefit plan to a defined contribution plan, like 401Ks. Why should the taxpayers but never the employees bear the burden of the risks taken by CalPERS? The POB scheme, which Dowell admits is “gambling”, puts ALL the burden on the taxpayers, forever. Any new revenues will go to the pension obligation first.

We’re paying Staff for nothing but perpetuating their own retirement system.

Juanita Sumner, Chico

Chico Unified School District board recall has merit – all four are union members, that’s why they voted to give teachers who haven’t been teaching $2.5 million in bonuses

24 May

I’ve got a few notes lately from anxious parents and even some administrators about a recent school board decision to spend $2,463,606. on bonuses for school district staff, on the heels of a controversial decision to keep schools open only half days for the rest of the term.

I think that sucks too. Teachers refused to come back to the classroom for over a year, citing concerns about COVID, while parents all over town HAD to go to work or get no pay. Front line jobs like medical workers, grocery store workers, gas station workers, etc. You ever wonder how fast society would shut down if these people just didn’t show up for work? Meanwhile, teachers can refuse to come to work and not only be secure in their jobs, but get a bonus?

I’ll say something else here that will probably offend just about everybody – many of our schools have become nothing but daycare centers. Think about that. Many households have two working parents, many have only one parent at all. Many parents are poorly educated themselves. It is important to have some public institution where kids can go to be safe and educated while their parents are unavoidably away from home during the day.

That model of the nice lady down the street who will watch all the neighborhood kids, give them a slice of homemade bread smeared with peanut butter and jelly and a glass of Kool Aide – that never happened. I was born in 1960 and every mom on the block worked 8 hours a day. My grandma was a school teacher, and all her friends worked. I never knew any ladies like June Cleaver. School is a necessary institution.

COVID didn’t shut down Chico schools, the employee unions shut down the schools. Mostly I heard from the teacher’s union. That’s funny to me. When I was in the teaching program at Chico State, it was considered common knowledge that children carry a lot of germs, and new teachers get sick a lot the first year or two. Same with Chico State, when the new kids come into town. My son brought the flu home to our whole family his first semester at Butte College. It went around our house, picking us off, one by one. We were each sick for about a week, and when I got over it, I had to hold on to the furniture to get around the house.

But COVID shuts down the schools, ka-PUT! And now, almost $2.5 million in bonuses spread among school employees. Here’s an interesting bit of information I got from the agenda reports from that meeting

Looking at the reports for that agenda item, I see the average salaries for various school employees would probably shock a lot of people. For example, the average salary for a teacher, not including benefits, is $106,732. AVERAGE, remember what that means? And the starting salaries for CUSD teachers start at almost $60,000 these days.

Management is even more shocking, considering, they don’t really do the most important job at the school, they’re mostly desk jockeys who have nothing to do with taking care of or ensuring the education of your children. But they make an average – AVERAGE – salary of $139,723/year.

And then we have the lower-level “classified” staff – these folks do the maintenance on the grounds, cafeteria staff, office staff. You’d expect them to be on the low end of the totem pole, but even they make an average salary of $62,960.

For comparison, I’ll tell you, the “median” family income in Chico is about $43,000/year. I know, median and average are not exactly the same, but they’re close enough for this discussion.

But households like those have worked and skimped and saved to pay their bills, all the while paying the sales tax and property tax and other hidden fees that pay into the schools, supporting those salaries. Not to mention benefits packages, which I’ve noticed, for management anyway, are usually about half of salary.

So, this is why I’m signing the recall of board members Eileen Robinson, Kathleen Kaiser, Tom Lando, and Caitlin Dalby.

Contact recall proponents at https://www.chicoparents.org/

You might know, I supported Matt Tennis for the board and this is the reason – he’s the only one calling to get the schools back open full time, and he’s the only one who voted against the bonuses. The rest of the board are obviously not concerned with the welfare of the kids or their families. Dalby and Lando are CUSD teachers, Robinson retired from CUSD in 2002, and Kaiser has been a professor at Chico State for years, currently serving as the Chair of the Academic Senate. It’s not hard to see where their real interests lie.