Chico Taxpayers Association

I was raking up a mess of leaves and clutter out in front of my house the other day when I realized our neighborhood has been annexed to the city for over 20 years and we still have none of the services they promised when they nailed us. All we got out of it was Utility Tax. My street has no drainage, no sidewalks, and about once a year a transformer blows up out on the street and shuts power off for a few blocks.

No, it’s not just my neighborhood. Before he left, Mark Orme admitted that Chico internet is hit and miss. It’s true, all over town, people are paying for internet that is not supported by any infrastructure. I just went out the other day to buy a gift for a friend from a shop located in an East Avenue shopping center, and it took almost half an hour to ring up my purchases because the shop had poor internet. The woman fussed and apologized, but she finally decided to write out my bill by hand because she couldn’t get her computer to respond. It’s Christmas folks, how many hours will you spend in line waiting for the internet?

According to former city manager Orme, the city does not have the infrastructure in place. It’s true, as you drive around town, you find whole neighborhoods where people still have to make phone calls from their front yard, and their kids can’t use their computers to do school work.

So the city of Chico has decided to use hundreds of thousands in Camp Fire relief money to do another remodel of Downtown Chico. According to my council rep, “complete replacement of the sewer, power and water lines would be part of this project.” This after former manager Orme had announced the Camp Fire refugees had put undue strain on city services, not just Downtown. So why is the money being spent Downtown, on stuff like parklet for bars?

There’s more outrage to the new Downtown remodel, we’ll talk about that next time. This is just another reason to overturn Measure H, as far as I’m concerned.

Tomorrow City of Chico Internal Affairs Committee (Reynolds, Winslow and Vanoverbeek) will be discussing use of American Rescue Plan Funding to do more work Downtown. They want wider sidewalks, more street parking (isn’t that a contradiction?), parklets, and other notions, but what I’m not seeing is any plan or funding for the sewer lines.

So I’m trying a new tack – I’m sending them a note, and I’m trying to be nice. Shut up!

Hi, 

I see no mention in this report of a need for overhaul of the sewer pipes, which have been found to be leaking on at least two occasions I’m aware of. In one instance, a leak in a city irrigation line collapsed the sidewalk in front of the former Kona’s sandwich shop, and in another incident, sewage from a misconnected pipe originating at Tin Roof Bakery was found in Little Chico Creek. Kona’s, a very popular eatery and bread supplier for other sandwich shops, left Downtown. 

Kasey, I think it was you who brought it up at a past meeting.

Before you do all this work to the surface, shouldn’t you fix the sewer? Before Sacramento was able to add the stadium to their Downtown, they had to do massive work on their sewer system, it took years, and shut down whole parts of Downtown Sacramento. I know because I was a student at Sac State at the time. That’s why I came back here and finished at Chico, it was too onerous to get from my Downtown Sacto apartment to the Sac campus.  

Before you use American Rescue money on these proposed projects, I would like to see a total overhaul of Downtown sewer. I also have heard from people around town who are still waiting for sewer lines on their streets – one woman complains the streets adjacent to her block have had sewer lines for years and the city has been promising her little neighborhood hook up for as long. 

This plan has a priority problem. Your new Downtown would not look so hot when the pipes back up, as they have. You should ask staff, how many businesses Downtown have complained about the sewer backing up in their business? 

Just a thought, thanks for listening – Juanita Sumner

The meeting is tomorrow at 1 pm, I’ll let you know if I hear anything.

I don’t know who is responsible for the above sign, but I have to wonder if it has to do with Chico Enterprise Record Editor Mike Wolcott’s new letters policy. If so, this would not be the first person(s) to express dissatisfaction with the new policy, at least one person likening it to censorship.

While I was getting sick of the back and forth, ugly name-calling by people who were getting their jibes in on a fairly regular basis, I’m wary too. Wolcott has long practiced what I’d call censorship – questioning letters he didn’t agree, calling only some writers out on grammatical issues and asking them for confirmation of figures and quotes.

My husband wrote a letter about the proposed Simplicity Village – Wolcott objected to the use of the word “shed” and also my husband’s interpretation of “recycling metal”, asking for three rewrites before he was satisfied with the language and agreed to print the letter. Meanwhile, he allowed all-out assaults on Anthony Watts and Rob Berry.

Earlier this year, he questioned a piece of information I included in a letter about the Downtown Ice Rink – I had to inform him, I’d taken it from an article previously run in his newspaper. Joe Azzarito had a similar experience – Wolcott wasn’t going to run Joe’s letter, because he quoted a previous letter writer by name. Joe made no personal attack, he just disagreed with that person’s statement. The other writer, ironically, is one of the worst of the name-calling fly-baiters, but Wolcott took offense to Joe quoting him and politely disagreeing? Joe sent him a copy of the person’s letter, and Wolcott grudgingly ran Joe’s letter.

The media manipulates what we see and hear by simply printing what they want us to see and hear and not printing what they don’t. Of course they manipulate the “news” as well as our right to express our opinions. Wolcott runs his paper according to his agenda. When Evan Tuchinsky takes over the paper – I’m going to guess, within the next year – he’ll run it according to his agenda.

I’d say Dave Little, gawd blass his ornery hide, was the last good, fair, as un-biased-as-a-person-could-be type of editor that paper had. Sometimes we had fierce disagreements, but he ran my letters. People asked him to stop running my letters, but he told them he couldn’t do that as long as I was sticking to the long-agreed upon rules of the letters section.

Which used to go something like this: 250 words. No libel. No cussing. Try to keep a handle on your spelling, grammar and punctuation, but if you want to appear as an idiot in the paper we’re not stopping you.

Oh here’s an anecdote – one time I used the word “crap” in a letter. I thought that was nicer that saying “bullshit“. Dave Little wrote back, he said, “we don’t print crap in our paper…” Before I could get back to him on that little statement he was back to me with “I mean, we don’t print the word “crap” in our paper…”

Council member Tom van Overbeek has agendized a discussion for this week’s Internal Affairs meeting –

Agendize a discussion about changing the references to Downtown Chico in Chico’s public
documents and signage to “Historic Downtown Chico”.
Downtown are what define a city. When you think of Chico you think of Downtown, not one of
the strip malls. When you respect and preserve the history of a town, you are preserving and
respecting its personality and character. Downtown Chico has a unique personality due in large
part to its’ rich and interesting history and our numerous historical buildings. Referring to
Downtown as Historic Downtown Chico will bring attention to the uniqueness of the Downtown
district.
Councilmember van Overbeek
District 6

https://chico.ca.us/sites/main/files/file-attachments/11-06-23_internal_affairs_agenda_packet.pdf?1699026767

I believe this will pass without argument and money will be spent to “rebrand” Downtown Chico. It’s really a desperate attempt to save Downtown Chico, which has suffered from one bad council decision after another over the last 10 or so years. And lack of decision – like, when will they make much needed repairs on the sewer lines? Is that part of the “historic” designation? Historic sewer lines that are leaking into ground water and threatening our drinking water supply? Yeah, let’s all get cholera, that’s historic!

I wish local business owners would sue the city, or better yet – sue the city run Chico Chamber of Commerce and Downtown Business Association for collecting fees from local businesses without really doing anything for them. These people are running our city right down the toilet, quite literally.

Every time I go out to do errands around town I see another homeless camp has sprung up. The problem is, the city has to notice every new camp, and then they just go somewhere that hasn’t been noticed.

Meanwhile,  “Sacramento County District Attorney Thien Ho on Tuesday filed a civil lawsuit against the city of Sacramento because it has “allowed, created and enabled a public safety crisis” by not enforcing its homelessness laws.“

https://www.capradio.org/articles/2023/09/19/county-da-sues-sacramento-claiming-city-failed-to-enforce-its-own-homelessness-laws/

Where the hell is Mike Ramsey in all this? He recently celebrated 45 years as our county District Attorney. Ramsey is the longest serving DA in California, but I don’t think we should be glad about that. Ramsey brags about being an environmental watchdog – why hasn’t he stepped in on the illegal camps?

How did Chico get caught in this legal mousetrap? In 2018 four council members, including current Mayor Andrew Coolidge, signed the “Shelter Crisis Designation,” receiving over $4 million from the state for doing so. Where did that money go? No, really, I’m asking – any idea exactly where that money went? Where are the beds? Where are the services? According to the city website, “4 days ago Torres Shelter, located at 101 Silver Dollar Way: 49 open beds. Pallet Shelter, located at 2280 Dr Martin Luther King Jr Pkwy: 18 pallet shelters available.“

67 empty beds – why are there all these tents around town? Some of them are in the public right-of-way, blocking sidewalks, accumulating the usual trash cloud. Some of them are on private property – there’s a growing encampment on MLK Parkway, on Chico Unified Property. Why isn’t Chico Unified evicting these illegal tenants? The veterinary clinic across the street closed their 24 hour emergency services for the past year, only recently reinstating that service, because they had transients setting up shop in their bathroom in the middle of the night, and refusing to leave their waiting room. Having only a couple of employees on duty was dangerous, so they just ended their overnight service. I think the closest alternative was in Anderson.

We’ve had to use their emergency services when our dog got sick in the middle of the night. We met a man who had driven his dog into town in his RV, knowing he would need a place to sleep while they treated his dog – he told my husband, “people have been rattling my door all night…” I think the vet and all their patients should sue the city and the school district, I would if I needed service in the middle of the night and was turned away because of the transients.

I recently read a letter from Mark Gailey, saying we were all overreacting to the transients, trying to tell us that Downtown Chico is perfectly safe. He’s full of shit. Every time my husband and I go Downtown, we see something weird and unsafe. On a recent unavoidable trip to the city center, my husband and I watched a disheveled wide-eyed lady, sitting on a bench on Main Street, a bedsheet full of something on her lap. As I was asking myself out loud why that woman wasn’t being served by one or another of the agencies that have sprung up to collect the Homeless Industrial Complex money, a man walked by her without so much as noticing her. Suddenly she came to life and popped up from her perch to follow along behind him. He noticed her and glanced behind nervously, walked a little faster. As she passed the motel she picked up a loose brick from a crumbling planter and started to quicken her pace behind the man. He walked faster. As he approached the intersection ahead he suddenly vaulted across the street. The woman stopped as suddenly as she had began, abruptly dropped the brick on the sidewalk, and entered the University Inn lobby. You better have your radar on when you are out and about in Chico, especially after dark.

You have never really been a victim until you’ve had a cop or other person ask you, “what the heck were you doing there (at night, strange part of town, alone, especially a woman) anyway?” That’s how I feel about Downtown Chico – not worth the risk. Not worth the humiliation of somebody asking you what the hell you were thinking, going Downtown. When it happens to Mark Gailey, let’s all make a collective promise not to say that to him.

And as of now, let’s hope somebody will challenge Ramsey for District Attorney soon.

Well, a reader called me out on my last lame post – I was asking why Chico City Council and staff want to reduce the number of “low-income” units required for Merriam Park, and this person questioned the need for more “low-income” housing.

Good for you, sharp observer – I should have made my point – developers skip past requirements like Environmental Impact Reports, even standard code requirement like street width, by agreeing to build a certain percentage of their units as “low-income”. Later on, and usually after many years and some changes in ownership of the project, the “low-income” requirements are unceremoniously dropped.

I remember reading about a subdivision Tom DiGiovanni planned for a town in Florida – Amelia Place – on a sensitive wetlands site. Public disapproval was set aside by their town council, who agreed to let DG build if he included “low-income” housing. When that council was voted/termed out a few years later, the “low-income” requirement was dropped, and a subdivision that would not have passed an EIR was built anyway. Of course, DG has long since sold the subdivision to another developer and skipped off to California to build Doe Mill.

DiGiovanni is the master of getting around public approval and code. He actually got the city to let him write a “parallel code” that allows all kinds of exceptions to alllll the rules, including street size, set-backs, even fire safety code. He planned Doe Mill and Merriam Park by the parallel code, and then sold Merriam Park to Dan Gonzales and his partners, who are now asking the city to forgive them the “low-income” units that were used to shoehorn this high-density, high-cost, high-falutin’ new “city within a city” through the permits process.

Merriam Park and Doe Mill were both classic sprawl, by the legal definition. They also would never have passed an EIR – both sit on flood land, fairy shrimp, meadow foam – remember how the liberals roasted Bernie Richter over the meadow foam? But MP and DM were okay with the liberal crowd, because they were what was considered hip at the time. Now they are being used to justify the building of Valley’s Edge, and the same people who cheered DG on are now pissed off at Brouhard. Go figure.

Valley’s Edge also has a certain percentage of “low-income” housing required in the plan. But, as you see, plans can change, long after the EIR requirement has been thrown out, and the staffers and council members that approved the plans have moved on and are no longer accountable for the resulting mess.

Wait until they roll out the new subdivision they’re planning for Barber Yard – a registered brownfield – while all the liberals are running wild with their panties in a knot over Valley’s Edge.

I put “low-income” in quotes because I honestly don’t know the latest legal definition. But no, I’m not a fan of it. I know what the results are – as our city manager Mark Sorensen pointed out to me years ago, subsidized housing generates no property taxes. So, the rest of us regular homeowners and renters are going to pay more to pick up the slack, that’s what I know. We’ll pay for their new street while the street in front of our house turns to rubble. We’ll pay peanuts to hook them up to city sewer while the price for hooking up an existing house has surpassed $20,000.

Yes, I’d like to see more infill – there are old neighborhoods with big lots sitting empty, streets and sidewalks falling into the abyss – that’s what I call “redevelopment”. What they are doing now, is creating slums and bad parts of town through neglect of older neighborhoods. While the older neighborhoods pay the increasing costs of providing infrastructure and services like police and fire to the newer subdivisions, we watch our neighborhood rot around our heads.

Look what they tried to pull with Measure H – as soon as that was passed, they announced plans for refurbishing streets in newer neighborhoods all over town. The public, like an old dog, suddenly reared up over that announcement, and Mayor Coolidge had to do a quick 2-step boogie reverse. But they are just slurry sealing, look that up yourself, it’s like putting Saran wrap over a plate of rocks. The major projects are being paid for out of state grants, while the city directs Measure H right into the General Pot Fund for use in paying their pensions and benefits.

I didn’t finish my report on that last meeting, but ER reporter Evan Tuchinsky wrote an article about the pension deficit. I’ll say, they’re crapping their pants over that, as well as the prospect of losing Measure H to the Taxpayer Protection Act.

And they’re approving new housing as fast as they can rubberstamp the plans. Not that they’re interested in providing housing for anybody, it’s the other way around – they’re providing suckers for the developers.