Here’s an interesting read about developer fees, from 2013.
I don’t know if those developers ever paid anything toward the widenings of Hwy 99 or Hwy 32, both of which were necessitated by their projects. It sounds like the city used RDA money to pay CalTRANs for the work.
From Channel 7 News, in Redding:
The first thing I noticed when I looked at the picture was, this isn’t about drinks and food being thrown, because those bars wouldn’t stop it. In fact, it reminds of the scene from “Blues Brothers” where the boys play the cowboy bar, “protected” from the raucous mob of beer chucking music haters by nothing but chain link fencing. Jack in the Box employees will not be protected from flying tacos and drinks by these hokey bars.
But these bars might stop a person from jumping over the counter to attack and/or rob the employees. Well, what about law abiding customers?
Jack in the Box staff are reluctant to blame “the homeless“, but as one customer observed, “There’s the park right over there and there’s a really large homeless population here and they specifically, a lot of them sleep over there or hang out over there…”
The story concludes, “So whether it’s the park, the downtown party crowd, or even just the average Joe that’s the source of the problems, staff said they think every downtown fast food spot in any city would have these same types of altercations. “
Really? Is that why the city of Chico installed bullet-proof glass at the Finance Office last year?
Who is the problem here? Should we allow 24 hour businesses Downtown, especially when they seem to be a consistent center of criminal activity? But wait a minute – Chico PD gets paid around the clock, including generous overtime allowances – why do we have a crime problem Downtown?
The Finance Committee meeting I attended Wednesday (11/29/17) also included a discussion of “street urbanization fees.” The city of Chico supposedly requires developers to provide or pay for new curbs and gutters in existing neighborhoods whenever they build a new subdivision.
About 10 years ago the city approved a new subdivision in my neighborhood – in a former neighbor’s back yard – and despite the protests of our neighbors, gave the builder “variances” to just about everything in the city code. The result was seven houses where there was really only room for three or four. There is a constant turnover of residents and they all bring lots of cars. A few days ago we noticed a giant moving van out on the street in front of the subdivision – there is absolutely no place to park a vehicle like that on their own street. In fact, there is no place for garbage trucks to turn around, they have to back out.
This was before the city even discussed “variable rates” for developers – see how they do what they want.
But no improvements were made on our main street, which has become a “feeder” or “through” street for all these little subdivisions that sprung up in Grandma’s back yard over the course of several building booms and busts.
Builder Chris Giampoli, who does a lot of CHIP housing, does not feel he should have to make those improvements when he shoves five CHIP houses into an existing neighborhood. Well, we’re not talking about the entire street, we’re just talking about curbing and guttering the feeder street where his new street breaks in. Giampoli opined that if the feeder is already crapped out, that’s from existing residents, and developers shouldn’t have to pay for bringing the street up to “current standards.”
What Giampoli and his friend Dan Gonzalez are suggesting through their “variable rates” ploy, is that existing residents subsidize their for-profit development business. Giampoli was one of five developers, along with Tom DiGiovanni, who got the permits for Gonzalez’ project at Meriam Park, named in a lawsuit threatened by CalTrans, over subdivisions being built without fees being collected for the improvements recently made to highways 99 and 32. According to Mark Sorensen, those developers have never paid fees toward those highway widenings, which their projects necessitated. So beat it Chris, you been getting a free ride for too long there buddy. You couldn’t survive in the free market, like your dad did, cause you cut corners and build subsidized crap. Dan Gonzalez isn’t going to be able to sell Meriam Park without government hand-outs, and he knows it. These people expect the taxpayers to support them.
Let’s face it – developers bring people to our town, they use our neighborhoods – our town! – to attract buyers, they should have to invest money into our neighborhoods. We existing residents already pay for that service, it’s called “property taxes.” Our prop taxes are split 45 – 55 by the county and city, the city of Chico gets roughly half our property taxes. What they do with it? Cause they sure as hell have not been spending my property taxes on my street.
I took this picture of my street on the way home from the meeting.
So we’ve got developers paying fees, and residents paying property taxes – why do our streets look like this?
This is the “pedestrian right-of-way” down my street. Every now and then I look in that pothole, make sure there isn’t an old lady or a jogger with a stroller stuck down in there…
The entire street is becoming broken up and the asphalt has separated from the ground – you can hear it rumbling under your tires like old pottery as you pass over.
In Chico, as all of California, the government has been pouring the gas tax and other revenues that were supposed to be used to fix streets and roads into their pensions. At last Wednesday’s meeting, City of Chico finance mangler Scott Dowell said 15 percent of the “street and urbanization fees” collected from developers goes to “indirect costs” which he identified as “CalPERS.” At the mention of CalPERS there were audible groans around the room, including committee members and $taff. Nobody wants to talk about CalPERS costs down there.
Sean Morgan complained the explanation “didn’t help.”
City works employee Brendan Ottoboni said that if developers weren’t willing – in fact, I believe they have been threatening a lawsuit, given the little remarks made about letters being sent and meetings being had – Ottoboni says existing streets that are not “feeders” or do not have new projects built on them will be taken off the projects list. Staffer Steve said they are still working with a list of projects identified in 2009, but never funded. A specific section of Rio Lindo, which Sean Morgan opined is “one of the worst streets in town,” has been removed from the list.
At this point local builder Bill Webb asked a pertinent question – “how do I get my street on the projects list…” Staffer Steve said, “of 14 projects identified in 2009 as FUNDED, 9 have been taken off the list…” for lack of funding. “We’ve had a lot of requests for projects…” but the city only fixes streets “where there will be problems due to higher traffic” generated by new subdivisions.
So here we are on my street, where the “current level of service” is, as one woman sitting near me described, “just crap.” My street is a very heavily used through street, new houses have been built every few lots over the last 20 years, and here’s the level of service we get from the city of Chico.
Every now and then a crew comes through and fills potholes with “slobbers” – asphalt left over from jobs in newer neighborhoods. We got that from the guy who was running the crew one day.
Here’s what a patch job like that looks like within a week.
The asphalt they plopped in this old pothole took off on somebody’s tire.
The meeting ended with arguing, it was hard to hear what motion was made and passed. I believe they voted unanimously to “send the urbanization fees to council as described…” Chris Giampoli asked Brendan Ottoboni what would happen if the “urbanization fee” wasn’t approved by council, and Ottoboni answered “our road maintenance will continue to be unfunded.” He added, “new development…new growth…they use existing roads too…they don’t pay for them currently…”
To which Giampoli responded nastily, “people will continue to complain.” I’m not sure which people he’s talking about, but I’m feeling the beginnings of another lawsuit from the development community, one way or the other. We’ll see. Years ago, Bill Webb’s dad and uncle and a few other developers sued the city for $500,000 in fees that had not been used for what they’d been collected, and won.
Mark Sorensen, always politically incorrect, called the discussion a “Mexican stand-off.” So, that’s what we’ve got – a stand-off between the city and the development community, with the good citizens standing right in the crossfire.
POST SCRIPT: Here’s an item from yesterday’s paper:
Apparently we have an Americans with Disabilities Act Citizen Committee – mentioned in this report:
http://chico-ca.granicus.com/MetaViewer.php?view_id=2&clip_id=609&meta_id=49208
a year ago, which extensively details our ADA deficiencies and how far behind we are complying with a law passed in 1990.
I don’t know anything about this “committee” or how it was established, whether the Brown Act applies or what. I’ll have to snoop into it.
Larry Grooms of the Water Rates Coalition sent me this news from the city of Lancaster in Southern California.
See other news at their website here: https://www.waterratescoalition.com/updates
RESOLUTION NO. 17-58
A RESOLUTION OF THE CITY COUNCIL OF THE CITY OF LANCASTER, CALIFORNIA, IN SUPPORT OF A STATEWIDE COALITION OF COMMUNITIES, UNDER THE WORKING TITLE OF COALITION TO END WATER RATE ABUSE, CALLING FOR THE INTRODUCTION AND PASSAGE OF STATEWIDE LEGISLATION TO REFORM THE RATEMAKING PROCESS FOR INVESTOR-OWNED, FOR-PROFIT WATER UTILITIES IN CALIFORNIA
WHEREAS, the California Public Utilities Commission’s (CPUC) Water Division regulates 113 investor-owned water and sewer utilities, servicing 16% of state residents, with 95% of that number being served by 9 large water utilities, each serving 10,000 or more connections, with annual revenues of $1.4 billion; and
WHEREAS, these investor-owned, for-profit water utilities charge water customer rates that are often three to five times higher than those charged by publicly-owned utilities, often directly adjacent to privately-owned systems; and
WHEREAS, in its rate cases, the CPUC is charged with protecting both the fiscal stability of the for-profit water utilities and the interests of ratepayers; and
WHEREAS, the CPUC’s Office of Ratepayer Advocates consistently favors the interests of investor-owned utilities over the interests of California residents and ratepayers; and
WHEREAS, this institutional and systematic imbalance has resulted in excessively high water rates, annual double-digit rate increases in water bills, and financial hardship to residents and homeowners throughout the state; and
WHEREAS, over the past decade, many cities and communities, including Lancaster, have sought relief for their residents through the CPUC, legislature, and/or courts, at significant cost and with little meaningful success.
NOW, THEREFORE, THE CITY COUNCIL OF THE CITY OF LANCASTER, CALIFORNIA, DOES HEREBY RESOLVE, DECLARE, DETERMINE AND ORDER AS FOLLOWS:
SECTION 1. That the Lancaster City Council supports statewide legislative reforms to the CPUC ratemaking process to achieve fair, equitable, and financially affordable rates for California customers of investor-owned, for-profit water utilities.
SECTION 2. That the Lancaster City Council supports the statewide Coalition to End Water Rate Abuse in its efforts to achieve fair and equitable protection for the rights of all ratepayers served by investor-owner, for-profit water utilities through legislative relief and/or class action litigation.
SECTION 3. That the goals of the Coalition to End Water Rate Abuse are consistent with the Lancaster City Council’s more than two-year-long effort to pursue equitable and fair relief for its residents served by the investor-owned, for-profit water utility, California Water Service Company.
PASSED, APPROVED and ADOPTED this 14 th day of November, 2017, by the following vote: Unanimous
Look at the WRC website link – State Senator Scott Wilk and Assemblyman Tom Lackey have written a letter questioning rate increases and WRAM – the “water rate adjustment mechanism” by which Cal Water punishes us for conserving too much.
We’ve been asleep here ever since Cal Water’s bid to stick us in a district with Marysville and Oroville – raising our rates to cover their long-neglected infrastructure – was overturned by protests from the cities involved. Yes, City of Chico actually raised a finger to that maneuver, although, the public was never allowed in on that conversation.
My family and our tenants have drastically cut our usage but our bills are still higher than they were two years ago.
So, it’s time to write to your state representatives and ask them to join in on this inquiry. Quote the letter from Wilk and Lackey, and add some figures from your past water bills.
Assemblyman Jim Gallagher – https://ad03.asmrc.org/
Senator Jim Nielsen – http://nielsen.cssrc.us/
I made it to Wednesday’s Finance Committee meeting and I was not disappointed. There were several items on the agenda but the two discussions that interested me were variable fees for residential development – with “incentives” for high density – and “street urbanization” fees – and that turned out to be the real eye-opener.
T-shirt printer and new urban developer Dan Gonzales and his partners have been pushing the city to offer “incentives” – in the form of deferred and lower fees – for higher density projects. It started with Tom DiGiovanni of New Urban Builders getting the city to allow him to write a “parallel code” with lower setbacks and variances for the “footprint” of a home. Under his code, the builder was allowed to take the walls of a home right to the edge of the lot, right to the edge of the public sidewalk. Some of the homes at the Doe Mill subdivision have a back wall that actually serves as the “fence” to the neighbor’s yard – they just don’t put windows on that wall, how’s that for privacy?
Dan Gonzalez kept saying we needed smaller homes for “the workforce” – I finally had to add, “We need jobs, is what we need for the workforce.” What we don’t need, are a bunch of slapped up 2 x 4’s covered in press board with bamboo flooring and “granite” countertops that end up pricing out at the top of the market. They told us Doe Mill was going to be “affordable.” It might be crap, but it’s not affordable to anybody in “the workforce,” if we even had a “workforce.”
https://www.homes.com/for-sale/chico-ca/doe-mill/
Scott Gruendl, former Chico mayor and former head of Glenn County Health and Human Services had to rent bedrooms in his Doe Mill house to make it “affordable.”
After Tom DiGiovanni built Doe Mill, he got “Meriam Park” through the permits process using his “ ” Another name for DiGiovanni’s “parallel code” would be “sub-code” – that’s what they used to call it when a builder was granted variances to everything in the standard code.
Why have a code? Ever been to an earthquake in Iran?
Well, I’m going off at the mouth – the committee heard all about why they should do this and then Mark Sorensen summed it all up with “Nice try, but take it out back and bury it…” Mayor Sean Morgan had already made many comments indicating that he was not interested in going any further with the variable rate discussion. Randall Stone, a developer by trade, said he would “love to support” a variable rate but “we aren’t there yet…” I think he meant by that, he’s stuck with a conservative majority on council and knows they won’t pass it.
Why did they direct staff to study this issue for the last two years? If you have to give developers a discount rate, they’re peddling substandard goods. The market should be the incentive. Gonzalez claimed, “Look at the trends… the number of people per household is going down…women are having fewer children…”
If that’s true, then the demand for his type of homes should be all the incentive he needs.
The room was full of developers who didn’t want the variable rate because it was going to make the three to four bedroom houses they build unaffordable.
The government doesn’t have any business toying around in the free market. Our council changes with the wind – why would we give these people the power over changing our city and our quality of life so much?
And the $taff time tied up in this discussion – they actually apologized to $taffer Brendan Ottoboni, who makes over $130,000 just in salary, to do the bidding of these idiots. But Ottoboni actually lobbied for the variable rate – saying, “I just want to do the right thing…” Who is he “doing the right thing” for? Knowing fully well that while the rate would be lower for high density units in the beginning, the property tax profits for the city would be huge and go on forever.
I’ll get back to the “urbanization and street fees” next time, on this old blog with Juanita.
You’ve heard of “toll bridges,” well this is a “troll bridge.”
I just posted that blog about Portland’s bum troubles, and then I got on the bike with my husband to do some errands. Like many people we use Middle Bidwell Park bike/pedestrian trails to commute Downtown and the Mangrove Corridor, and often use the bridge, pictured above, that spans Chico Creek there across from Immediate Care and Wells Fargo Bank.
The bridge has always been a gathering place for transients, but this morning was over the top – this old man had placed his bike and belongings well into the trail on one side, and situated himself and his backpack into the trail along the other side of the trail. I couldn’t help but think of the story of Three Billy Goats Gruff, and the troll who shouted, “I’m going to gobble you up!”
This is what I would call, “Portland Behavior.” I feel he’s taking possession of the bridge.
He muttered something at us as we passed, sounded like an opening for panhandling, but we kept moving. I wasn’t intimidated because I was on the bike, with my husband, but if I were on foot I might think about taking a different route, or giving up walking altogether. Walking in the park alone is getting to be risky business.
We have a post office box so stopped at the post office annex on Vallombrosa. There a disheveled man had scattered his crap – uh, excuse me, belongings – along the sidewalk and was pacing the sidewalk muttering at his feet.
I felt sorry for this man, he was obviously mentally ill. But I also feel sorry for the people who are trying to run a family oriented business on the other side of that doorway he’s standing in front of.
This man’s behavior was very agitated. Try being a parent with small children at hand, navigating these people at the doorways to businesses all over town.
These people are brought here by the county, which gets $550/day for housing them. They can be held 45 days without their consent, and then they are released to their own recognizance, oftentimes with prescription medications. I never know if I’m seeing insanity, or the result of prescription drugs and alcohol.
There’s no supervision after release unless these people voluntarily enroll in one or another housing program. They can fall off their meds, get back on the booze, and end up right back on the street – in their new home, Chico – get arrested again, and around she goes…
Nobody is served in this cycle, except those who receive the salaries and benefits.
Portland, the home of Portland Loo, is having a serious bum problem.
The headline says it all, but go ahead and read the article – like the bony hand of Christmas Future, Portland points out the fate of Chico.
Portland sucks, that’s why they have one of the funniest online shows around, making fun of themselves:
http://www.ifc.com/shows/portlandia
Portland is also “the hub of smart urban planning,” while at the same time “a planning nightmare.”
http://portlandtribune.com/pt/9-news/379685-266393-east-portland-planning-nightmare
Why would we imitate this town? Our council needs a Post-it note right in front of them – “Do the OPPOSITE of anything Portland tells you….”
But tomorrow, the city Finance Committee – made up of Mayor Sean Morgan, and council members Mark Sorensen and Randy Stone – will discuss giving new urban high density developers lower fees than traditional developers. $taff is trying to say, high density development has lower impacts than lower density development.
I know, what a crock – but it’s happening, look down your street.
Here’s another story of interest:
Today I was walking my dog along the street in front of my house, and as we crossed the tattered asphalt from one corner to another I found myself in a minefield of potholes. The street was wet, cars were approaching in both directions, and as I stepped on a piece of loose asphalt my ankle turned sideways – the pain was instant. I was afraid I’d sprained it, and hobbled off to my house, dog in tow.
After I’d rubbed it out, the pain was gone, but it still makes me mad – in the past 15 years, the city has allowed a lot of development and sewer hook-ups along our street without doing any maintenance to the street. Crews come around occasionally with “slobbers” – leftover asphalt from other jobs – and make patches that just end up on the tires of the first cars to come along.
There is a particular pothole at the corner of Filbert and Bryant that voided the warranty on my right front tire – excessive road hazard, according to the fellow at Big O Tires. This particular pothole is hard to miss – you’d have to go into oncoming traffic, or into the rut that passes for the “pedestrian right-of-way” – and has been repeatedly filled with slobbers, only to return. Ever since it ruined my tire I call it “Jaws,” and yeah, as long as there isn’t a southbound car in the way, I cross the center line to avoid it.
Whenever you build a new house or add any square footage to an old house you are supposed to pay fees of all kinds toward the “impacts” you are creating – to the sewer, sidewalks, streets and other infrastructure directly surrounding your project. That stuff is for everybody’s benefit, and everybody is supposed to share in the cost of maintaining it.
Unfortunately the city of Chico has not been very fair in who pays what over the last 20 or so years. If you build a house yourself, as my family did, they demand all the fees right up front or they will shut you down. But developers get “deferred” fees – they don’t have to pay their street fees, for example, until their project is fully built out. Some of these subdivisions take 20 or 30 years to build out. Look at West Side Place over on Nord Avenue, it’s been sold by the original developer, who never paid any street fees on it, and there it sits, unfinished.
Cal Trans threatened to sue the city of Chico years back, because the city had approved all these new subdivisions without dedicating any of the fees toward needed improvements of Hwy 99 and 32. Five developers were named in that lawsuit. The city rolled over and gave the money – but as of two years ago when Cal Trans began work on Hwy 32 there between 99 and Del Monte, city council member and Mayor Mark Sorensen admitted to me that none of the developers named in the lawsuit had paid any fees.
Those widenings not only cost the city millions but those of us in the surrounding older neighborhoods put up with three years of earsplitting noise running right through the night, five to six nights a week. Those highways went right into people’s back yards.
So I was very interested two or so years ago when I heard the city was talking about raising developer fees. I knew they hadn’t updated the “nexus” for years and the sewer fund was tanked from hook-ups. I also knew – existing homeowners were being charged far more for hook-ups than developers – anywhere from $10-20,000 in fees for the homeowner as compared to $3500 per house for developers.
But I also know, city management has been pilfering the development fund to pay unrelated salaries and benefits for years. Back in 2002 several local developers forced the city of Chico to return fees that had not been spent on the subdivisions for which they’d been collected.
https://www.newsreview.com/chico/developer-fee-refund-doesnt-add-up/content?oid=11788
The article leaves out the fact that one of the developers had actually installed sewer trunk lines at his own cost, and others had installed sidewalks and other infrastructure – all that is supposed to be done by the city with development fees. So the city had to give the money back. Why would the developers refund the home buyers when they paid for the stuff the fees were supposed to provide?
I believe developer fees need to be updated on a regular basis to reflect the true costs of city infrastructure – that’s labor and materials, period. Instead developer fees are being hi-jacked to reflect the cost of city management salary and benefits.
But here’s the really distressing part of the discussion – this Wednesday, staff is trying to convince members of the Finance Committee to make a recommendation to essentially force new urban development. They want to lower fees for new urban, with traditional builders picking up the difference. Staff says new urban developments – which are at much higher density levels than traditional development – create fewer impacts on roads and other infrastructure.
I hope you’re asking yourself, what kind of Kook Aide are they drinking?
Well, they’re not crazy. They know – the fees are lower at the get-go – but who cares – developer fees don’t even make a blip on the budget radar. What they are doing, is cramming in more houses, which will generate more and more and more property taxes forever.
And no, they’re not going to fix the street in front of my house.
The other day I got a mailer from the Jesus Center, their annual fundraising drive.
The Jesus Center has a long history here in town. The first location that I know of was a building situated down the street from the current location. They offered very spare meals twice a day – sometimes just a slice of American cheese between two pieces of white bread, contained in a sandwich baggie. They also offered Salvation – at times they were accused of asking clients to pray for their meals.
In the early days the center was privately run, by a local family. By the 1990’s the center had a staff, and a manager – Al Kay, who was very popular in town. He renamed the operation “Loaves and Fishes.” Kay started to ask for community support, encouraging donations of food. We had a good year in our tomato patch and I took him a 5 gallon bucket of tomatoes, for which he thanked me up and down.
But some of the neighboring businesses often complained that the center was bringing in transients, who would wander that length of street, drunk, panhandling, ranting and raving away customers.
We had a rental in the neighborhood, when we were working on it, we bought lunch a lot of times out of the window at Duke’s Liquor – they had really good wagon-style tacos for about $1 each. I saw what the locals were complaining about – we’d always encounter at least three drunks while waiting for our food, including one woman who would walk up and try to start a fight. The others would just walk back and forth mumbling and smoking cigarettes, which they picked up from the ground.
Around the corner, there was a house full of working girls – yeah, daytime hookers – who would hang around the intersection of Park and 13th wearing the usual clothes, stand at the stoplight smoking cigarettes and engaging passersby, oftentimes running back to the apartment house to meet them in the parking lot.
That corridor has had a problem with transients as long as I can remember. Part of the problem was an old building known as the Ice House – at some point, ice was manufactured there. It had been empty since at least the 1960’s, and was a serious public nuisance. It wasn’t only an eyesore, it was a gathering and camping place for the transients, as well as a rat house.
In the 1990’s, the city and the Jesus Center had an idea that seemed to kill two rats with one stone – let’s renovate the ice house and turn it into a functional shelter, set it up with the county, get some funding, etc. The old building that had housed the JC had been burned down at some point in an arson fire – nobody was ever even blamed for it, they just moved along toward relocation.
The ice house was gutted and revamped into a kitchen and dining hall with an office and even a couple of living spaces. And renamed The Jesus Center.
I was happy about that – like a lot of people, I believed the transient problem was already there, and they needed some center to deal with it.
I don’t remember when the Torres Shelter came on the scene, sometime around 2000? The city gave them the use of the land, and donors built the shelter, and several groups have tried to run it.
Both centers started to hit the skids, in my recollection, sometime during the early 2000’s. My husband and I started to notice the JC was looking very run down, with tags on the outside of the building and trash piling up in front. At some point we noticed a broken down old motor home with a tarp pulled half-heartedly over the roof, parked in back of the building. On different occasions we saw different men staggering out of it. Whenever we’d go to Chico Locker to buy meat or sandwiches, we’d see a surly, dirty group at the picnic table provided for customers, smoking cigarettes, making inappropriate comments. The staff kept them out of the store, but couldn’t keep them off the table.
The trash started to pile up all around that corner. One day not too long ago I sat in the parking lot and watched two really drunk people repeatedly walking out in front of cars that passed through the intersection of 14th and Locust. They acted as though it was some sort of game. If they do get hit, it’s an all expenses paid stay at Enloe Hospital.
We were glad when we heard Bill Such had been sent packing and a new, no-nonsense board had taken over the JC. But things did not get better under new director, Laura Cootsoona. The JC started giving bums sleeping bags, back packs, and other camping supplies that we’d find in piles in Bidwell Park, under various bridges around town and along our creekside greenways.
I believe locating the Torres nearby was a mistake, they seem to compete for funding. And I don’t think the Torres Shelter board is led by practicality, they are led by Pollyanna fantasies. They don’t hold high enough standards for their clients. They say they have rules – the rules end at the public sidewalk in front of the shelter. The Torres board won’t be responsible for the behavior of the people they attract.
Neither entity will take responsibility for the rampant illegal camping going on in their area. Neither will patrol the park to get illegal campers to come to the shelter. They sit and collect their salaries and wait for the transients to come to them.
And North Chico has no open door services – transients are expected to find their way South. The old hotel on Esplanade and the Esplanade House accept clients through the courts, and have long-term programs. The Esplanade House is having internal problems over the current director’s insistence that they accept single drunks – he wants the money, the original founders want to protect the families living there.
So, right now, our homeless agencies are all fighting among themselves, and it looks like the Torres Shelter will be gone within a year.
I don’t know if I’ve shed any light on this situation, I’ve had a hard time remembering the timeline. But I do know, the situation is worse now than ever, and all we have is bickering among these publicly-funded agencies.
https://www.newsreview.com/chico/plan-lacks-transparency/content?oid=25360445
So when I got the annual fundraiser notice from the Jesus Center, I hucked it. I’m tired of supporting this bullshit.
From next Tuesday night’s council agenda:
http://chico-ca.granicus.com/GeneratedAgendaViewer.php?view_id=2&event_id=276
Re: Request to agendize Council Member term limits
I request to agendize a discussion regarding placing on the November 2018 ballot a
proposal to amend the City of Chico Charter limiting the number of Council Member terms to
three (3) terms in office.
Sincerely,
Mark Sorensen
Council Member
City of Chico
Not that I don’t like the idea – Hemet voters passed a similar measure in 2010, spending only about $3500.
But, I have to wonder – is he out to get Schwab, or what?
Chico Taxpayers Association 