Tag Archives: Ann Schwab Chico CA

“to ensure that all taxpayers are treated equally…” – oh yeah, let’s make sure EVERYBODY gets stuck!

10 May

Yesterday evening I received the city council agenda packet for next Tuesday, and wow, Lori Barker has already come up with a new version of the phone tax resolution. I’m sorry, I hadn’t even gotten around to discussing how deceitful the first version was, and she’s already re-done it.

Like I say, evil never sleeps.

She didn’t really fix it, is what I’d say right off the bat – it’s worse than the dawg she dragged in last week. 

AND, they’ve agendized it in the “2’s”, meaning, they just expect to vote on it without discussion. Either a council member or a member of the public needs to request that the item is pulled for discussion. I recommend people WRITE LETTERS NOW. To think they’d try to yank this by us without discussion – WHO DO THEY THINK THEY’RE DEALING WITH HERE? A BUNCH OF SUCKERS?! 

Here’s the ballot resolution Barker brought in last week:

“Shall the City’s current Telephone Users’ Tax be amended to reduce the tax on telecommunications users from 5% to 4.5% and to modernize the definitions of telephone communications services to keep current with changes in technology and federal and state laws. “

Please note, there is not one word in there about expanding the tax to take in our cell phones, not one f-ing word. Lori Barker is a duplicitous bitch. 

So, Sorensen and Evans and some other loud mouths, myself included, rammed and railed for her to rewrite the resolution to reflect, well, The Truth.

So, here’s what she flopped out:

“Shall an ordinance be adopted to amend the City’s Telephone Users’ Tax in order to: 1) reduce the tax from 5% to 4.5%; 2) modernize the definition of telephone communication services subject to the tax to include new technologies such as wireless and voice over internet services; 3) apply the tax to all telephone communications regardless of the technology used; 4) reflect changes to federal and state law? “

Take a good look at  #2 – “2) modernize the definition of telephone communication services subject to the tax to include new technologies such as wireless and voice over internet services”

She isn’t including the whole list of new services that are being made taxable by this resolution. Here’s what she says in her report from May 1:

“They generally capture interstate and international calls, voice over internet protocol, text messaging and paging.”

Duplicitous Bitch needs to add the above bold-faced services to the ballot resolution. Her failure to do so is obviously intended. Gee, who cares if they have to pay a tax on every text message they send? Nobody uses text messages! 

And here’s a question to ask – are they going to tax the Tweeters? Tweet Tweet my ass! 

And then we have #3, where they pit citizen against citizen:  “3) apply the tax to all telephone communications regardless of the technology used.”

She actually took the opportunity to put politics IN the resolution. She is trying to put this notion in  the voter’s head that not everybody is paying their fair share. How cute – you know their PAC is going to hammer this point for the next five months.  Cause frankly, that’s all they got. 

Well, it doesn’t belong in the resolution unless they’re going to explain that this resolution will FORCE EVERYBODY TO PAY MORE, including the pawns that pay the land line tax now. 

We need to expose Duplicitous Bitch. For one thing, I wish people would write to council now and complain about the agendizing of this issue onto the 2’s, and tell them we want it pulled for discussion. Also, I’d like to point out to them, it needs to be rewritten to include ALL the services they’re adding now, and the ones that the city finance director can choose to include in future. 

Yes, that is part of the resolution to – read it online. The finance diretor, and right now, that’s the same woman who’s driven us into this ravine, can decide which new services that come available in future can be added to this tax, without a squeak from the public. 

And finally, #3 needs to be stricken unless it explains that EVERYBODY will be paying a tax they do not currently pay.

Get mad now, it saves time later. 

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City mangler Dave Burkland recommends tax increase for city – he lives in the county!

9 May

I find it interesting how many city employees live outside the city limits. 

Your mayor owns a fine place up above the Forest Ranch Store, staring down at the little smog ball hovering over Chico. Your city manager lives halfway to Dayton in the unincorporated area surrounding Chico. How these people find the nerve to tell us actual Chicoans how to live is beyond me, but you can read Dave Burkland’s recommendation to raise our phone tax here, under the report for Item 4.1:

http://www.chico.ca.us/government/minutes_agendas/documents/5-1-12CityCouncilAgendaPacket.pdf

“I concur with the City Attorney’s recommendation,” he says. Furthermore, he reports, “If Council takes no action, the City stands to lose a significant portion of it’s general use revenue.” 

It’s easy for Burkland to talk – Dave lives well outside the city of Chico. This TAX is for those of us unfortunates who, either by choice, or in my case, ANNEXATION,  live within the confines of the city, where we are seen as a little herd of cash cows to be milked at will by our oppressors. 

Time for a little Animal Farm? Yep, I believe it is high time we stood on our hind legs and threw these people off. 

Of course, our boy Dave, rat that he is, has already made his jump from our floundering shipwreck in the making. Retiring this coming August at 60, BURKLAND WILL BE GETTING 70 percent of his $180,500 a year salary – over $126,000 A YEAR  – with  cost of living increases and medical benefits – for DOING NOTHING but picking up a check, for THE REST OF HIS LIFE. 

Damn, he looks pretty fit too! We won’t be rid of that leech for some years. 

At our Taxpayers’ Association meeting the other day, one  participant opined that Burkland and other staffers are supporting these local tax increases to feather their own nests, to pay for their pensions. Another person present tried to say that these pensions are “paid by PERS”.

Well, wake up and smell the coffee.  Read the papers lately? Like for the past two years? PERS gambled all their funds on the stock market. They lost their asses. Well, actually, they lost our asses. 

Go ahead. Google “pension time bomb” or “California on the hook for unfunded pensions” – you’ll find all kinds of articles dating from the present all the way back to 2010, telling us, we can’t afford these crazy pensions, built on crazy salaries, bloated with overtime, and then gambled on the stock market. 

As the Wall Street Journal says, in an article from April 2010, “Calpers and Calstrs are decrying the Stanford study because it has revealed exactly who is on the hook for all of this unfunded obligation—California’s taxpayers.”

Yeah, we pay for Dave’s pension and benies, and that’s exactly what he’s out to protect. And we pay them out of our General Fund. And like Dave says in his recommendation to stick us with a expanded tax on our cell phones – “The primary purpose of amending the telephone users’ tax is to protect existing revenue for the General Fund.” 

 

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At least 15,000 households eligible for UUT rebate, but only 110 apply? Why?

8 May

In his May 1 report regarding the “update to the Telephone Users’ Tax,” city mangler Dave Burkland tells us that lowering the phone tax from 5 % to 4.5 % would save the average user a whopping  twenty-five cents a month.

Mr. Burkland must think we just fell off the turnip truck. What he’s not telling us, is that while they will lower the phone tax by half a cent, they will expand it to cover your cell phone, with charges depending on your usage. Oh, great! There goes my 25 cents, and then some!

There are those of us now, in fact, who AREN’T PAYING ANY PHONE TAX, and we like it just fine, thank you very much. That’s why we dumped our land lines –  compared to the convenience and reliability of a cell phone, I need a land line like a moose needs a hat rack, Mrs. Goldfarb.  My family realized, why have the additional expense of something that only seems convenient for the people who want to sell you something at dinner time?

So we dumped our land line to save money, and now here they are, coming after our cell phones! There’s no rest for the wicked Honeybabe.

Cell phones can be very inexpensive, you can pay for your actual use instead of paying a flat rate even if you don’t have much use for it. That’s why they’re great for low-income individuals and families – it’s AFFORDABLE.

This is a “regressive” tax, meaning, it hits the lower-income people the  hardest.  During the council discussion, Scott Gruendl actually had the nerve to tell us, it’s no big deal, he’s GLAD TO PAY $2.50 a month to “help my community.” 

He’s talking about the minimum charge, the flat charge. For families it adds up. There is a charge per phone – I still have my AT&T bills – our UUT on those bills was closer to $4 a month. That comes close to $50 a year – and while that may not sound like much to a guy who yanks in over $100,000 in taxpayer money out of one of the poorest counties in California, it adds up to almost $50 a year to pay for the “privelege” of owning a phone. In addition to the $1000+ that you have to pay the phone company. 

Again, imagine life without a phone. I’ll never forget how potential employers acted when my son was looking for a job and we didn’t have a separate cell phone number for him. Having your mom answering the phone for potential employers is like some kind of rat poison. They treated him  like a deadbeat! One fellow was even rude to me! While I’m disgusted with the mentality, I realize, you can’t fight it, especially when you’re the one who needs the job. Going out looking for a job without a car and a phone is like wearing a t-shirt that says, “I don’t really want this job I’m just filling out my unemployment application…” 

So, Mr. Gruendl, living like a pimp on the taxpayers’ dime, can stuff his “community” spirit as far as I’m concerned. He’s not a member of my community, although, if you ask around Glenn County, I think you’ll find, they don’t want him either!

I know they’re sensitive about this aspect of the tax Downtown because Burkland informs us that low-income people can always reclaim their money, if they’re that petty, by way of the Utility Users Tax Rebate program. Do tell Dave! 

“The refund offers a partial refund of UUT  paid on all UUT services to income-eligible participants. “

If you look at the schedule below, you see what he means by “partial” – there is a refund maximum, regardless of what the participant paid in UUT, he/she can only get so much back. And it’s kinda whacked – one person can get up to $105, but eight people can only get $198? 

Burkland ends his report with some interesting statistics regarding the Utility Tax Rebate program. “Historically, the City has refunded between $800 and $1200 in UUT-Telecom refunds to an average of 110 households per year.” 

Well,  if I actually believed for one minute that the city had set out to return this UUT money to it’s rightful and underprivileged owners, I would call that a miserable failure Dave. 

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 21.2 % of Chico’s roughly 86,000 residents live BELOW THE POVERTY LEVEL. Do the math – that’s over 18,000 people.  If you divide that by the number in the average Chico “household,” and you find there are roughly 7,613 Chico households living BELOW THE POVERTY LEVEL. This is actually more than the California average, by a quite a bit! 

But Burkland informs us, only 110 households get a UUT rebate? Well, what’s the problem Dave? 

Has anybody ever seen this program advertised beyond the city website? No, you haven’t, they don’t advertise it, they don’t even take out a notice in the paper. It is not even mentioned on the city website until the two month period during which they will give you a refund. I have had to ask the Finance Department to post it two years in a row now, and I firmly believe they would’n’t do it if I didn’t faithfully e-mail them every April and bitch about it. 

I have to ask, why isn’t the information posted all year? I mean, in order to collect the rebate, you have to keep ALL YOUR BILLS, so it would be nice if the information was out there more than a month before the collection date. 

Of course, that’s a rhetorical question, I’m just a compulsive question asker, even when I know the answer. It’s always funny to hear the answer come out of THEIR mouth. Tell the truth and shame the Devil, Flakcatcher! As if it does any good – that’s why they’re the Flakcatchers! 

I have posted all the rules and regulations for getting your UUT rebate below. Tell me they’re not onerous, and I’ll give you a wet willy. 


CITY OF CHICO
UTILITY USERS’ TAX REFUND & EXEMPTION PROGRAM
GENERAL INFORMATION
A refund or an exemption from City Utility Users’ Tax, for utility services provided may be approved when the following conditions are met:

(1) City of Chico resident files an application with the City of Chico Finance Office for a refund or an exemption.  The application is a spreadsheet on which you have to write down the amounts of UUT from each bill, twice, and add them up in different directions. Then the clerk makes you sit while he/she adds them up. Once the clerk actually found a mistake on mine – in my favor, ginchee! 

(2) The application is approved by the Finance Office as being in conformance with Section 3.56.190 and/or 3.56.200 of the Chico Municipal Code. Only one member of each household may file an application and only one application may be filed for each household.   Meaning, make sure all the bills in your household are under one name. 

(3) The combined annual income of the household in which the applicant lives for the 2011 Federal and State Personal Income Tax Year was less than the maximum annual income limits in the following schedule:  These actually seem fairly generous to me, and I can’t understand why only 110 households claim the rebate.

Household Size   Maximum Annual Income     Maximum Refund
1                                $32,900                                        $105
2                               $37,600                                        $120
3                               $42,300                                        $135
4                               $46,950                                        $150
5                               $50,750                                        $162
6                               $54,500                                        $174
7                               $58,250                                        $186
8 or more              $62,000                                       $198
(4) The applicant shall be the person in whose name the bills for utility services were rendered.  Meaning, even if you and your spouse have the same name, they will only take the application from the exact name on the bills. 

Applications for Utility Users’ Tax paid will be accepted from May 1, 2012 to June 30, 2012 for tax paid between May 1, 2011 and April 30, 2012.

The application must be accompanied by:
• Proof of household income (2011 Tax Return, Disability Statement, Social Security Letter, etc.)  You can show them your tax return, you don’t have to let them keep it. And I’d use a copy with all the SSN’s blacked out if I were you.
• Copies of the utility bills including Water bills, Gas & Electric bills and Telephone bills paid by the applicant. Here’s probably the most onerous part. If you go into the office, you can just show them your bills, they don’t have to keep copies. But if you want to mail this in, it’s going to cost you in copy money and postage – good luck! 

Refunds will be processed as follows:
• No refund shall be made on any application filed or postmarked later than June 30, 2012.
• All applications for refund sent through mail will be paid with a check from the City of Chico.
• All applications for refund delivered by the applicant to the City of Chico Finance Office shall be processed the same day when possible. I think they have a rule, they’ll pay anything under $50 in cash, maybe $100, I can’t remember. This is the sweet payoff Babee – green money to exchange for sugary treats at Shuberts! 

Applicants for the Exemption Program shall have attained the age of 60 years prior to making the application for exemption. Eligibility for tax exemption for applicants 60 years or older shall be based on the maximum income for a two-person household as set forth above ($37,600 for 2011). Applications for exemption are accepted any time during the year and must be accompanied by:
• Proof of household income (2011 Tax Return, Disability Statement, Social Security Letter, etc)
• Age of the applicant as documented by driver’s license or birth certificate.

I feel they should give an exemption to anybody who’s successfully applied more than two years in a row, and then that household should have to re-submit their eligibility every five or so years. Once you’ve proven you’re eligible, they shouldn’t be able to take the tax off your bills anymore, but this way, they get to collect the interest on it all year. Remember, it’s not just you, they’re doing it to probably 15,000 or more households that are below the income requirements, that adds up to a few bucks in the bank. 

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“Modernization”? “Expansion”? By any other name, a tax increase still stinks!

7 May

I want to discuss the reports made by city $taff regarding the phone tax,  so get a cup of stiff java and a couple of toothpicks to prop your eyes open. I know the language in these documents is thicker than Glenn County fog, but it really helps to go over this stuff a little bit at a time and discuss it. All the sudden you gonna find yourself waking up real fast, Honey.

$taff refers to this resolution as an “update” or “modernization” of the old ordinance, by which they siphoned hundreds of thousands of dollars off us through our phone bills. The old law, apparently, only allowed the taxing of LAND LINES.  Tuesday night, Ann Schwab, Andy Holcombe, Jim Walker and Scott Gruendl  directed $taff to “modernize” the ordinance to include “interstate and international calls, voice over internet protocol, text messaging and paging. “

“Modernize“? Excuse me?

City Attorney Lori Barker says in her report, “These measures have the effect of modernizing an existing tax to ensure that all users of communication services are treated the same, regardless of the type of technology they are using or billing practices employed by their providers. ”   

Here’s where it gets deceptive, and ugly. “…all users…are treated the same…” They are trying to pit us against each other, plain and simple. They are telling the land line users that the rest of us are getting by without paying our fair share!

First the ugly stick, then the carrot: “a slight decrease in the (current utility) tax rate, for example, from 5% to 4.5%.” 

So, they’re telling the voters they will not only get the slackers to pay, but that they are LOWERING THE TAX.

Read along in the report and you see why: “Decreasing the rax rate most likely increases voter support of such measures.”

Wow, they must think we’re pretty easy – half a cent?  We all know, that half a cent dries up faster than spit on a griddle when you realize they are expanding the tax to all your mobile devices:

“Additionally, it is believed that an ordinance that includes a slight reduction in the tax rate would have a revenue neutral impact because the tax base would be somewhat expanded.”

Read that again. “would have revenue neutral impact”? “the tax base would be somewhat expanded“? Excuse me,  Folks,  the revenue impact will be VERY POSITIVE. They will make more money with this “modernized” version than they ever made off the old ordinance. And “somewhat” ? That’s a joke – the base is going to be VERY MUCH EXPANDED. They will be getting taxes on cell phones that have never been taxed, from at least two major carriers that I am aware of  — you can bet your booty this tax is being expanded.

City Manager Dave Burkland, in his report, says he is setting out to “protect the existing revenue for the General Fund” – that the city is in danger of losing about $900,000 a year if voters don’t pass this “modern”  ordinance. But  it’s obvious, they’re set to gain a heck of a lot more than that if it does get passed.

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Phone tax a GO, sales tax increase in the works – let’s talk about it tomorrow (May 6), Chico library, 11:30am

5 May

Tomorrow we will be discussing both the phone tax that council has already added to the November ballot and the sales tax increase that is slithering in that direction.

We realize 11:30 is not good for everybody, so we’ll also be discussing holding meetings at different times, and more often. We have a list of well-informed guest speakers we’re hoping to coax in as well.

I think we’re okay in our location, don’t you? The library is a great place for public meetings. It’s free, for one thing. And it’s fairly well placed, nearly in the middle of the incorporated  Chico area, easy bicycle OR car access, close to the freeway, and plenty of parking.  Plenty of seating too. So, I think we’ll leave it at the library, but try to have more meetings at various times to accommodate everybody.

Hope to see folks tomorrow, 11:30!

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“Hostile” City of Chico mismanages the airport

20 Feb

For a few years now (since 2008) an item has popped up so regularly on the city council “closed session” agendas that I have come to recognize it without knowing anything about it.

2.1. CONFERENCE WITH LEGAL COUNSEL — EXISTING LITIGATION: The City Attorney will review
the following: Danford A. Jay and Sandra R. Jay v. City of Chico, et al., Butte County Superior Court
Cases 145202 and 145203, pursuant to Government Code §54956.9(a).

It started to pique my curiosity, but I didn’t know how to find out about it. I figured, since it’s on the closed session item, they wouldn’t be exactly eager to discuss it with me, and you know, I get tired of being led a merry chase down at the City of Chico.

So, I finally stumbled onto the info, you know, casual conversation with some parent at a playground, that’s how I find out stuff around town.  I mean, it’s just amazing the people you find yourself chatting with, about what.

It seems this all relates to Chico’s abysmal reputation for being “hostile” toward business.

I’ve sat in at least two different Economic Development meetings in which the main topic of discussion was the airport. At one meeting, a couple of consultants complained that the airport does not offer consistent enough “service” for corporate types to fly to Chico to snoop out our job-ability. They didn’t explain it, they just said, these big-wigs want to be able to fly in and out at their convenience, and that’s not doable at Chico airport.

At another more recent meeting, a spokesman from Build.com said the airport needs a big commercial carrier. He seems to think we can turn our airport into the same kind of behemoth  as the Sacramento Airport, bring in TWA – wowsers! He mentioned regular flights to Disneyland as his main concern – what does Disneyland have to do with bringing job-makers into Chico?

No, no, no. It’s not lack of a commercial carrier, it’s lack of somewhere for really important people to land their own jets. I got news for Mr. Build.com – real employers don’t stand in lines to take a commercial carrier, they fly in with their own plane at 10 am and they fly out at 4pm. The don’t use giant, overrun airports, they use little executive airports unconstrained by heavy traffic and avoiding major accidents involving housing tracts. Chico Airport should be perfect for exactly this use.

Yes, it should be. Chico Airport is equipped with a special landing strip with a gated terminal, just for really important people. You might remember, Oprah landed at that gate. She was whisked away to Oroville to meet and interview a local beauty queen, and then within a couple of hours, there she went.

But, for some reason, when Governor Schwarzenegger came to town a few years ago, nobody came to open the gate to the terminal. Schwarzenegger was left outside a locked gate. This was sufficient to  make a laughingstock out of Chico Airport.  It’s happened more than once, and it’s apparently turned away big execs looking for prime employment territory.

The special terminal is owned by a local couple, Chris and Maria Rock, who have a special contract with the city of Chico to operate the terminal and an airplane fueling station. When a “special” visitor is headed for the airport, they are supposed to contact the Rocks, who are supposed to have that terminal open and functioning. Apparently the Rocks are pretty lackadaisical about their duties and more than one person has arrived to find a gate locked.

Enter Danford Jay.  Mr. Jay wants to be licensed to operate such a terminal himself. He operates a business out of the airport and his livelihood depends on the airport running efficiently. Apparently Mr. Jay is tired of watching the Rocks run business away from Chico.

But the City of Chico protects the Rocks’ contract for some reason, they won’t let Mr. Jay have a permit to operate his own terminal and fueling station. According to my source, this drives people to the airports at Redding and Oroville. My friend is himself considering moving his business and the 25 people it employs to the Redding airport.

This friend has been to meeting after meeting, in Chico, in Oroville, in Redding. He uses the word “hostile” to describe the city of Chico, and particularly, Dave Burkland.

Dave Burkland is not only our city manager, he’s the airport manager.  That’s why his salary is so  high – I’ve seen the breakdown – he gets separate salaries for all these jobs that should just be handed to different, hopefully more competent people. This is how the city “saves money.” And this is how Burkland will retire at over $120,000 a year soon.

And this is why our airport drives jobs away from Chico.

Meanwhile the city’s little protection racket racks up the bucks in court:

http://www.buttecourt.ca.gov/online_index/CMSCaseDisplay.cfm?ucn=145202&sx=1088450740381968

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