Chico Taxpayers Association

Here’s a recent history lesson.

At a 2018 Chico Finance Committee discussion I attended regarding possible revenue measures, a consultant proposed a seasonal ice rink Downtown as a carrot to get the voters to pass a sales tax measure. He said he’d given a Tahoe town the same advice, they’d taken it, and their measure passed.

And so it goes. Council recently decided to spend $400,000 to install a seasonal ice rink at the Downtown Plaza. Just think what that money would look like on the street in front of your house.

The city of Chico funds Chico Chamber, and commissions the Chamber for various studies and reports. A 2018 Chamber of Commerce report recommended that city staff pursue a sales tax measure. Their recommendations for spending the revenues were $3 million to hire more cops, $90 million to fix roads, and $130 million to go toward the pension deficit. At present, council is not being forthcoming with a spending plan. They have proposed a simple majority measure, so they can spend this money any way they want.

A few years ago, the Finance Department staff, on the suggestion of another consultant, instituted a “Pension Stabilization Trust”. Funds are appropriated (embezzled) from each department based on a percentage of payroll into the PST. None of those department funds are restricted, meaning, they don’t have to be spent on sewer or streets or parks or whatever, they can be “allocated” away to pay for any whim of council. In fact, the PST is the only restricted fund the city has. Once the money is in the PST, it’s restricted for use in paying the pension deficit. Once a year the Finance Director makes a “side fund” or “extra” payment to CalPERS – the first year, about $8 million, this year $11.5 million. Staff and consultants have projected that the payment will reach $18 million by 2026. See where this is going? No matter how much they pay, given the ridiculous salaries, benefits, and employee shares – not to mention new hires – the deficit just keeps going up.

There is a faction that is trying to “defund” the police. Well, there you are folks. Make them pay their own benefits! I want good police, but I am uncomfortable with people who say they want to protect and serve as long as they are allowed to enrich themselves with mandatory overtime and an automatic “step increase” salary scale. Kasey Reynolds told me they need to offer these overly generous salaries and benefits to attract good employees, I think she’s got it upside down. Good people don’t hold a town hostage for their own enrichment. This is a racket.

Meanwhile, council has reinstituted the Shelter Crisis Designation, in order to kick children off of a public facility in favor of a tiny house village for transients who will not be served any other way. What ever happened to those days when the county opened the unused buildings at the fairgrounds during extreme hot or cold weather? Now we have a permanent homeless camp at a public property that at present constitutes one of our biggest tourist attractions? Including Andrew Coolidge’s Home and Garden shows – gee, while I’m perusing hot tubs I have to wonder who is breaking into/stealing my car? Screw that, I can buy a pretty spiffy tub online:

Keep those letters coming to the ER, and contact your council reps – remember, always cc the other six.

No, I’m not going to talk about the sales tax increase that came before Chico City Council last night. I’ve been trying to tell people for years now, Orme has been pushing this tax. To the chirping of crickets. So, when you little crickets get an idea what we should do about the sales tax measure, you just let me know.

In the meantime, I’m going to continue the discussion regarding my Halloween Book in Common, The Road, by Cormac McCarthy.

Like I said in my last post, this is a very dark book. The subject matter is familiar – the world had been destroyed by war, and a man and his child wander through the wasteland, trying to survive. For what?

“In those first years the roads were peopled with refugees shrouded up in their clothing. Wearing masks and goggles, sitting in their rags by the side of the road like ruined aviators. Their barrows heaped with shoddy. Towing wagons or carts. Their eyes bright in their skulls. Creedless shells of men, tottering down the causeways like migrants in a feverland.”

Wow, sounds like Chico, California. From Woody Guthrie: “I never see a friend I know, as I go ramblin’ round…” It’s like an insane asylum.

Years later, alone on the road most of the time, the man and boy move constantly. Driven by bitter cold and constant darkness, masked with filthy rags against the smoke and ash, they head south. They are looking for a way out of “Instant Winter” brought about by years of war and the subsequent natural disasters. I can actually relate to that, and so can most of you – on the day of the Camp Fire, a giant cloud of smoke and ash moved over Chico, choking out the sun. The temperatures dropped from nighttime lows in the 50’s to daytime temperatures in the low 30’s.

Moving down the road at a speed of a mile or so a day, they scavenge what they can. Passing through abandoned towns long looted, the man manages to scavenge something, anything – discarded motor oil, dried up apples, seeds of grain from an old thresher. They don’t dare slow down, or spend too much time in the open, because the of trolling cannibal gangs. Afraid to talk to anyone, unable to trust out of fear, the man teaches the boy to hide like an animal for hours.

Frankly, I can also relate to that. Between what’s happened to Chico, along with summer after summer of unabated wildfires, and then COVID, I feel pretty anti-social myself. I’ve developed an uncomfortable distrust of strangers, I don’t make new friends, and I avoid social gatherings. I have a pair of “throwaway” shoes that I wear out and about. I don’t trust government agencies anymore. I feel the need to become more resourceful and self-reliant. Frankly, we do our eating at home or take out, we don’t even go to coffee shops anymore.

That bugs me, and it becomes increasingly uncomfortable for the boy, as he watches his father descend further into the darkness.

Next time I’d like to talk more about Cormac McCarthy and other books he’s written.

Every now and then I need to take a break and read a good book. As Halloween approaches, I try to read a scary book or story every year. This year my son handed me a book by Cormac McCarthy, a “post apocalyptic” story called “The Road”. He told me it was weirdly appropriate for the times, and he’s right.

I’ll say, this book is scary, violent, and raises images of a world way beyond civilization. Makes Mad Max look like a children’s story. Very depressing as well. But, it’s well written, well thought out, and, frankly, who would expect the Apocalypse to be like a Disney movie?

We don’t know what has happened, we don’t get names. We pick up “the man” and his child on the road, making their way through a burnt and destroyed landscape, ash and smoke from perpetual fires blocking out the sun. Scavengers, continually looking over their shoulders for “the bad guys”.

“With the first gray light he rose and left the boy sleeping and walked out to the road and squatted and studied the country to the south. Barren, silent and godless. He thought the month was October but he wasn’t sure. He hadn’t kept a calendar for years. They were moving South. There’d be no surviving another winter here.“

The first thing that struck me was the vision of perpetual fire – is he describing the California of the future? “Burnt forests for miles… fire-blackened boulders like the shapes of bears on the starkly wooded slopes…The grainy air. The taste of it never left your mouth. The barren ridgeline trees raw and black in the rain.”

And of course, they wear masks. That really made me laugh out loud. Masks are now an institution, I don’t know if Cormac saw that coming.

What a world to raise a child. Well, look around yourself. What are children learning from the perpetual state of disaster we are enduring, the hysteria over disease, and the fascist edicts coming from the state capitol and the White House?

The man repeatedly reminds his son that “we are the good guys,” and “we carry the fire“. I think he means, our culture, our civilization. Isn’t that what most parents expect to hand down to their children? The same values they were raised with, or at least, the values they consider to be important. But right now, right here in Chico, our values are being challenged, our sense of decency is being questioned, by our own government.

You have to ask yourself – how did these people get elected? They don’t represent the community as a whole. I’ll blame the voters there, people don’t follow the issues, they just follow the hyperbole. They vote based on what others are saying, instead of doing the research. That’s the problem with Democracy, you get what you vote for.

I don’t feel our state government reflects the values of our statewide community either. I don’t believe most California voters want to continue to shut down the schools and the economy with mask and vaccine mandates. I don’t think they’re happy with Newsom’s edicts or his blatant hypocrisy, based on his own science. I think most California voters are very unhappy with the state of our state.

So why did the recall fail? Because there was no unified support behind it. The California Republican party is a total disaster. They didn’t support the recall petition, they didn’t endorse any candidate, they just stood by with their thumbs up their asses and let Larry Elder pull the cork out of the whole thing.

So we are enjoying a similar post-apocalyptic scenario today. That’s why I’m declaring “The Road” our “Book In Common” for 2021. Hope you’ll join me! Here’s a link to a PDF copy. There are other sites that carry it for free.