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NO ON MEASURE A: Time to get those letters to the ER before the February 21 deadline

4 Feb

Well, I suppose you got your “Yes on A” flyer.  It’s full of the same lies Chico Area Rec Dist General Manager Ann Willmann was pumping at her “informational” sessions. Well, you may fight fire with fire, but you fight bullshit with a hose. Here’s my hose, mailed off to the Enterprise Record yesterday. 

Measure A proponents claim county property taxes do not keep up with inflation and Chico Area Recreation District needs more taxpayer funding. But, according to CARD’s budget, available at chicorec.com, RDA passthrough funding increased 15% in 2019 and property tax revenues increased 7%, even after the Camp Fire. Meanwhile CARD’s payroll increased 11%, adding to their $2.7 million-plus pension liability.

Proponents list specific projects, but Measure A revenues won’t be dedicated. While the measure says proceeds will be collected in a special account, there’s no guarantee they’ll be used for the projects listed in the measure. From the text of the measure, “The district intends to use funds collected… for those projects listed above”, but here’s the caveat – “unless the board determines in any given year that changes in state or federal funding make doing so infeasible or inadvisable.”

In fact, the General Manager admits Measure A revenues will never be enough to pay for these projects, anyway.  So, CARD proposes using the proceeds to secure a $36 million projects bond that will cost $2 million a year in debt service while only providing $1 million/year for the list of projects they propose.  The result would be millions in new debt, with very little to show for it.

Home and business owners will be on the hook for a lot more than just an $85/year tax. A tax that increases every year with inflation, never sunsets, and is still not enough to pay for the rainbow, lollipop and sunshine promises.

NO on A.

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Thanks Dave for this great printable “NO on Measure A” flyer

2 Feb

VOTE NO ON MEASURE A

CARD’s PERMANENT, PERPETUALLY INCREASING NEW TAX

Why Should You Vote No On Measure A?

• There is No Guarantee How the Money Will Be Spent
The measure contains a long list of goals and projects but no dollar amounts or completion
dates are assigned to anything. Even more of the general fund money that should already go to
these goals and projects can be made available for unsustainable pensions, benefits and raises.

• CARD Will Take on Tens of Millions of Dollars in New and EXPENSIVE Debt
The media reported that if the tax passes CARD will establish a $36 million dollar project fund
costing $2 million annually in debt service while only making $1 million annually available for
projects. THAT’S CRAZY! No wonder CARD didn’t mention the fund in the ballot measure.

• The Tax Automatically Goes Up EVERY Year
Indexed to the CPI the tax is perpetually increasing. Imagine if we have 1970’s style inflation
when the CPI went up nearly 15% in a single year! Even with relatively low inflation the
compounding effect over time will be significant. This is unfair to those on fixed incomes such
as seniors and others whose incomes do not keep pace with inflation.

• The Tax is PERMANENT Despite What CARD Says
CARD deceitfully says the tax will be in effect until “ended by voters.” Do you think CARD
will ever put a repeal on the ballot? Of course NOT! It will require professional signature
gathers to collect in excess of 12,000 signatures to get a repeal on the ballot and that will cost
thousands of dollars. Who is going to pay for that? No one! You will NEVER get a chance to
repeal this tax.

• The Tax is REGRESSIVE
All properties taxed the same regardless of value. Those least able to afford it are hurt the most.

• Benefits Specials Interests Who Have Raised Over $60,000 For Passage

• CARD’s Revenue Has Been Growing for Years – Up 43% since 2013

• So CARD Has a Spending Problem, not a Revenue Problem
Money that should have been spent for maintenance, new facilities and programs has been spent by CARD on massive unfunded liabilities made up chiefly of unrealistic pension and other post employment benefit promises. Existing funding can’t keep up with the growth of these
unsustainable liabilities hence the Measure A tax and tens of millions in new debt.

INSTEAD OF A PERMANENT, PERPETUALLY INCREASING, REGRESSIVE TAX AND TENS
OF MILLIONS OF NEW DEBT DEMAND CARD REFORM ITS UNFUNDED LIABILITIES!
HOLD CARD ACCOUNTABLE AND VOTE NO ON MEASURE A! DON’T BURDEN YOUR
CHILDREN WITH CARD’S DEBT! GO TO

http://CHICOTAXES.HOME.BLOG

TO GET THIS FLYER AND DISTRIBUTE IT TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW! THANK YOU!

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Harm Reduction? That would be funny if it weren’t such a tragedy

31 Jan

https://www.eterritorial.com/76-local-news/yuba-sutter-news/16350-movie-star-arrested-for-residential-burglary

Shaun Weiss in booking mug, left, and as a child actor in “The Mighty Ducks,” right.  This man is now only 39 years old. 

I hate to jump on this poor guy, but wanted to show the effects that drugs, booze and a life on the street have had on this person. 

I see people like him around Chico, and I always wonder – how does this happen? Of course that is a rhetorical question – I know how it happens. It’s not a disease that you can catch innocently from a mosquito, it’s not mental illness, it’s drug and alcohol addiction.

Of course this man has made his own decisions, but there is a culture that encourages his behavior – including the North Valley Harm Reduction Coalition,  Safe Space, and other agencies that want to offer no barrier shelters and other for-transients-only services in our town. Do these “well-meaning” idiots realize that they are just enabling drug and alcohol users to continue on a self- and society- destructive life path? 

I went to the needle exchange that NVHRC holds in the park and talked to the mostly young people that are handing out the needles. They are without any medical training – oh, I suppose they’ve been taught how to administer NARCON, just like tiny school children used to be taught how to crawl under their desks in the event of a nuclear attack.

They have no clue what they are doing, they’ve been told they are doing the right thing. 

No, look at the picture above – that’s what they’re doing.

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How to write a letter to the editor

29 Jan

I’m working on my election letter to the Enterprise Record. My English 1A professor called this a “thought flow”

  • Chico Area Recreation District Measure A is a parcel tax 
  • This tax will start at $85/year, per parcel, but will increase annually with the Cost of Living Index (roughly 2% currently, this number goes up every year)
  • This tax has no sunset date
  • This tax will be administered equally between giant corporate properties and small residences. In other words, you will pay the same tax on your Chapmantown crapper that Ken Grossman pays for all that bling over on 20th Street.
  • You will also pay the same tax as giant apartment houses full of 100’s of people – renters probably won’t even notice it, but homeowners will.
  • CARD gets about $5 million a year in tax revenues, including a little over a million in “RDA passthrough” and another $3 million from county prop tax receipts, and then another $200,000 in neighborhood assessments collected from homeowners and park development funds from developer fees. 
  • what is RDA Passthrough? CARD manager Ann Willmann  tries to deny that this is tax money. The Redevelopment Act was set up in 1945, mostly to fund schools. It is funded from the annual increase in your property taxes.  From a study conducted by Sonoma County schools a few years ago – “Simply put, tax increment is the annual increase in property tax revenues in a redevelopment project area above a base year amount.”  They put that money in a fund and divvy it out to various public agencies. How can she say that’s not tax money? 
  • CARD only gets about $3.6 million from program fees and facility rentals.
  • CARD spends over $5 million on salaries and benefits. 
  • CARD spends less than $2 million on “services and supplies”. That figure includes everything from maintenance costs to supplies for office parties. 
  • CARD also makes “side payments” toward the pension deficit out of a “Pension Stabilization Trust”. The trust is funded with money from the General Fund. 
  • The 2017-18 budget shows the Capital Projects fund is $340,376 in the negative. 
  • While this parcel tax will not go into the General Fund, it will free up all the General Fund for paying the pensions. f

The above amounts to over 400 words, but yeah, it can be cut down to 250 pretty easily, I’ll work on that later. The first thing I will do is eliminate repetition, then use contractions for stuff like “it is” – that actually really cuts down a letter, saying “it’s”, etc. Then I will look for unnecessary words. 

Later we’ll have some fun with math – here’s a word problem – what percentage of CARD revenues go to salaries and benefits? Just regular payroll – I have not had time to add up all their “side fund payments” to CalPERS, but I know they’ve put over a $1 million into the Pension Stabilization Trust in just the last year. 

Feel free to use these points in your letter to the editor – you can look at the 2017-18 CARD budget for yourself here:

Click to access 2017-18+Budget+-+Version+2.pdf

POST SCRIPT: A very important point I left out:

  • CARD employees pay only 5.5 – 8% of the agency cost of their pensions – that’s next time!

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Letter to Editor: 87% of this year’s $135 million budget will go to administrative costs

19 Jan
By  |

The City of Chico has a bad case of neglect when it comes to its 300 miles of roadways.  It is estimated that 43% of Chico’s roads are in poor condition, or approximately 130 miles of dilapidated streets that feel like a washboard when driving on them, with the frequent thump of a bass drum when you hit a pothole.

The cost of upgrading 130 miles of city streets is beyond the city’s budget. Chico has very little discretionary money because of poor stewardship of the city’s resources: public funded salaries, benefits and pensions are disproportionate with the average Chicoan’s income. 87% of this year’s $135M budget will go to administrative costs. So much for fixing them roads.

At $35 to $50 per pothole, repairing what we’ve all seen and felt will overwhelm the city’s road and maintenance budget. The $800,000 annual franchise fees from waste management was earmarked for major road repair but is that happening?

The Beatles sing, “I read the news today, oh boy, four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire’ and though the holes were rather small, they had to count them all, now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall.”

Or “I read the news today, oh boy, ten thousand potholes in Chico’s city streets, and though the holes were big and small, nobody really knows how much asphalt it will take to fill them all.”

A pothole exemplifies the erosion of a road’s foundation, and possibly the city’s as well.

— Roger Beadle, Chico

SEIU local 1021 has over $50 million in assets – see their Return of Organization Exempt from Income Tax here

18 Jan

Against my better judgement I just watched “The Irishman”. It was weird watching actors play people I remembered from real life.

Jimmy Hoffa was a fixture of my childhood. I remember thinking he was a funny little guy, always punctuating his speeches with that pointed finger. Of course I remember seeing “Have you seen Jimmy Hoffa?” with a phone number, on bumpers everywhere. Probably one out of four cars had that bumper sticker, along with “Welcome to California, now lower your expectations…”

I had already read Frank Sheeran’s story about what happened, I knew it down to the details. That stuff doesn’t really shock me anymore. I read an abridged version of “Serpico” in the Reader’s Digest when I was 13 or 14 years old. I read “The Godfather” when I was about 15. I read the newspapers since I was a tiny child. It was all right there – the world can be ugly, corrupt, and there is no Lone Ranger. 

I was not shocked at Sheeran’s allegations that management union figures got huge salaries and pensions and lived like kings. If you think that’s fiction or ancient history, you might look at the IRS forms filed by California unions.

This link takes you to the Opt-out Now website, to a page about one specific SEIU group in the Bay Area. Go to the bottom “frequently asked questions”, click on “how does the union spend my money”

SEIU 1021

You will find this page:

Click to access 205893698_201712_990O.pdf

this is the 2017 Form 990 – Return of Organization Exempt from Income Tax – oh yeah, unions are exempt from income tax. 

Scroll down to page 10 – you see the salaries paid out by this organization. You see how little they actually spend on member services – the members who receive the services are the union employees. These people are not elected by their co-workers, they are hired by the union, and paid out of the dues collected from people who actually work for a living. 

Well, some of them, anyway. 

This is why Jim Parrott of Chico Police Officers Association has signed the Argument in Favor of Measure A, the parcel tax that Chico Area Recreation District has placed on the March 2020 ballot. He’d probably tell you it’s because he’s been involved in the Chico Area Swim Association, an affiliate of CARD, but we know the real reason.  These union members network to make sure the pensions are paid. Of course he will also endorse the city of Chico’s upcoming sales tax increase for the same reason.

Don’t drink the Kool Aid. No matter what they tell you about services, the biggest service agencies like CARD provide is to their union member employees. 

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Dan Walters documents a history of promises broken by state legislators – the same applies to our local legislators

14 Jan

As we watch “the homeless” overwhelm our parks and public areas, and Chico PD arrests more and more transients for burglary and assault,  the Chico city council is actually thinking about rescinding the “sit-and-lie” ordinance soon. I watched a video of county supervisor candidate Sue Hilderbrand claiming that transients should be allowed to do anything in public places that the rest of us do in our homes. The state is considering forcing the mentally ill into treatment. Gavin Newsom wants to penalize cities that are not, in his opinion, doing enough to house the homeless.

Meanwhile, according to Dan Walters,

https://www.marinij.com/2020/01/05/dan-walters-promises-made-but-not-kept-in-push-to-fund-criminal-rehab-programs/

“billions of dollars meant to reduce repeat criminal activity by improving local jails and probation services were siphoned off for other purposes.”

You know what other purposes – “the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS) was pressuring local governments to contribute more money to offset the system’s investment losses during the Great Recession, and to pay for pension benefit increases.”

Walters reports that CalMatters published a similar article about the 1967 Lanterman-Petris-Short Act, which was meant “to depopulate the state’s mental hospitals, curb involuntary commitments and divert the mentally ill into local treatment programs. 

“However, the promises of the 1967 Lanterman-Petris-Short act to create a network of easily accessible local mental health services were never kept. The money that had been saved from closing mental hospitals was swallowed up in state budgets approved by then-Gov. Ronald Reagan and his successors from both parties.”

And those promises continue to be ignored, you can look at the Butte County Behavioral Department website for yourself:

https://www.buttecounty.net/behavioralhealth/

For one department – one department in a county of less than 300,000 people – with nearly a $100 million budget, I’m not impressed. I don’t see any directory of mental health professionals. I do see a number you can call if you’re experiencing a crisis, but I don’t see any programs – like AA – that can help a person avoid crisis. And while they’ve promised a “street crisis team,” I have yet to see county workers walking the parks or other public areas in Chico to counsel anybody toward getting off the street.

Look here – you can see where the Behavioral Health Budget goes.

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

You see the highest paid employee in Butte County, with a salary of almost $290,000/year and a benefits package of almost $50,000, is the Behavioral Health Director. Two BCBH employees make over $200,000/year, just in salary. If you search “Behavioral Health”, you find 66 pages of salaries – including the lower paid interns and “extra help” who actually work with the patients.

The funding they “saved” by not providing hospitalization for people in mental crisis has gone to management salaries, benefits, and, the county pension deficit.

Like Walters says, “We should keep the 1967 mental health law, the Local Control Funding Formula and realignment in mind the next time the state’s politicians tell us they are enacting a transformative solution to a pressing problem.” And, the next time our city or county leaders tell us they need more revenue to solve a problem, we should say NO! and vote them all out of office.

Yeats: What rough beast, it’s hour come round at last, slouches toward Chico to be elected?

3 Jan

The other day I wrote this post

https://chicotaxpayers.com/2019/12/31/city-of-chico-double-ends-us-on-our-utilities-collecting-utility-tax-on-our-total-bill-while-adding-franchise-fees-to-our-rates/

about how the city inflates our utility bills with franchise fees and then turns around and adds 5% Utility User’s Tax to the total. The city takes over $7 million a year in UUT, from our PG&E, water and landlines, after adding a franchise fee to our PG&E rates.  They also add franchise fees to our garbage and Comcast bills. In addition to constant rate hikes, none of which the city of Chico has ever protested, we have two taxes, both fairly well hidden. 

In this way the city of Chico took advantage of people who had been through a horror story known as “The Camp Fire”.  I asked city finance manager Scott Dowell just exactly how much the city of Chico profited from the tragedy, and I was shocked with the total.

“Utility Users Tax receipts exceeded budget by $99,738 for the year ended June 30, 2019.”

That’s only seven months after the fire. $100,000 in seven months – wow. That’s about $14,000/month. I’m assuming most of the evacuees had relocated out of Chico by June, but I also believe we can assume that most of this “boost” came from those people who were still driving cars with the rear-end lights melted off. 

I didn’t live in Paradise but I saw stuff that changed my life. It changed the way I feel about Chico, a  town I’ve known since I was born, and lived in most of my adult life. I saw an ugly side of Chico – city management – and I’ll never feel the same way about this town again. 

Orme, Constantin and Dowell need to go. Schwab, Stone, Ory and Morgan are at the end of their terms, and I think it’s time to show them the door as well. But what candidates do we have to choose from? Good question.

Letter: Your tax hike went to raises, pensions

1 Jan

I saw in my stats that somebody read this old post – and I realized, it was worth a re-run. 

In 2012, Chico voters rejected Measure J, the cell phone tax proposed by council member and former mayor Ann Schwab. I didn’t take a poll, but something I heard from people when I spoke to them about it was outrage – “what does the city of Chico have to do with my cell phone service?”

Good question. Answer: NOTHING, it was just an outright grab into your wallets.  I hope people are still asking good questions, because what Joseph Neff is saying here, in a 6 year old letter, is still true. The majority of our budget goes toward salaries, benefits, and now, the employees’ pension liability.

http://www.chico.ca.us/finance/documents/2019-20CityAnnualFINALBudget.pdf

Below Joseph Neff reminds us, even well paid private sector positions do not usually include pension, but we are all forced to pay outrageous benefits to public employees.  And he offers a solution – I bold-faced the last paragraph, cut it out and send it to Chico City Council, and then you might want to send a copy to your county supervisor. 

This letter still stands, so I’m running it again. Thank you Joseph Neff, wherever you are.

Letter: Your tax hike went to raises, pensions

Chico Enterprise-Record

POSTED:   12/06/2013 10:41:12 PM PST

Conservative voters realized that Gov. Jerry Brown’s sales tax increases would not be used to benefit taxpayers but to provide lawmakers a raise and to protect the golden pensions of public employees.

As a 45-year career employee with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in engineering and an MBA, my two private-sector pensions are $15,000 yearly. Only two of six career employers had pensions during the past 50 years of plant closures from union strikes, global competition and company moves to right to work, more business friendly states.

None of my wife’s 30-year employers, including 11 as a teacher and 20 as either a degreed hospital medical records administrator, or as an advanced degreed nuclear medicine technologist supervisor, had pensions. Only one had a 401(k) plan. That is typical of the private sector for degreed private sector employees since the 1950s.

Public employee pensions should be halved to civilian levels, delayed to age 65, never adjusted for inflation, and based only on the first $50,000 of pre-retirement income. A $25,000 maximum annual public employee pension would be fair since savings and Social Security will provide the needed additional two-thirds of retirement spending.

— Joseph J. Neff, Corning

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City of Chico double ends us on our utilities, collecting Utility Tax on our total bill while adding franchise fees to our rates

31 Dec

If you watch the government steadily over time like I have the last 50 or so years, you see the contradictions and the outright lies. My favorite of late was Obama’s promise that we would not lose our health care providers under Obamacare.

So when Chico City management started repeating their Big Lie about the Camp Fire evacuees all landing on Chico  like a plague of locusts, I knew it was really all about pushing for the sales tax increase. In fact, at a Finance Committee presentation of the proposed measure, Ass City Mangler Chris Constantin actually said we should put it on the March ballot so we could “take advantage of the population influx.” He not only acknowledged then that the evacuees would be temporary, he also predicted that the economy would tank soon. That’s another blog.

But CARD got their parcel tax (Measure A) on the March ballot before the city could decide what to do with theirs, and knowing they would be stupid to have two tax measures on one ballot, the city decided to wait until November. That gives them more time to campaign anyway, since they can’t campaign for the measure once it has  been submitted and accepted for the ballot by the county clerk.

Brian Nakamura made the mistake of using taxpayer money to produce and distribute flyers promoting the city of Rancho Cordova’s tax measure, and that got him the can, so his former cronies will not make the same mistake.

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

So staff has to be creative, they need to create financial problems and then convince the taxpayers that they need to pay more money to solve them. They don’t want us to find out the real truth about city finances – whole funds are in arrears because they’ve been siphoning off money to pay down the pension liability. Look at the budget here,

Click to access 2019-20CityAnnualFINALBudget.pdf

and push “Control F” on your keyboard. Then type in the words, “pension” or “pension liability”, look at it for yourself if you don’t want to take my word for it. Then type in “gas tax” and be further outraged. 

I think you will see stuff that inspires you to write your own letter to the editor, here’s mine.

NOTE: Here’s a further irony I was not able to address in 250 words – they add a franchise fee that increases your rates, and then they use that total to figure the 5% Utility Tax. Sock it to me BABEE!

After a year of Chico staffers complaining that the Camp Fire evacuees were “straining” our services, we find a $20,000,000 “boost” in city coffers. Where did that come from?

Staff reports sales and bed tax were up, way up, during those months after the fire. Staff didn’t mention Utility Tax or the franchise fees that are tacked onto our utility bills. The city adds a 5% Utility Tax to your PG&E, Cal Water/sewer, and landline bills, taking $7,051,581 last year. With rate increases and new development, that goes up about $50,000/year. Think what a temporary population influx meant.

 A letter writer mentioned the trash tax or “franchise fee”.  The city also collects franchise fees from PG&E and Comcast. Last year the city added $1,102,674 to our trash bills and expects to collect about $1,600,000 in 2019-20. They tacked another $757,192 onto our PG&E bills and $899,942 to our cable tv bills. 

Shouldn’t these funds be used for street maintenance?  Last year staff used almost $400,000 in Comcast fees to remodel council chambers. These hidden taxes go into the General Fund, where they are available for any whim of council.

Council created the ordinances by which these taxes are added to our utility rates, and council can lower or eliminate them.  Ironically, they also created a “no price gouging” ordinance, but proceeded to make profit from the tragedy.  Let them know how you feel about that by claiming your annual Utility Tax Rebate, available from May 1 to June 30. Email the clerk at debbie.presson@chicoca.gov for details.

Juanita Sumner, Chico CA

 

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