I spent the weekend trying to catch up on agendas for various city meetings and general gossip. By “gossip” I mean, I try to remember to check on Rob Berry every now and then. Mr. Berry is good to go to the meetings, and he rolls out a pretty colorful and, I think, accurate account of these meetings. He also thinks I disagree with him alot but he would be surprised how often we are thinking exactly the same thing.
I read his recent post about attending a city council meeting yesterday, in which he described the scene Downtown as the usual open air insane asylum and drug den. And then my husband and I went out for a quick grocery trip. Here’s the thing Mr. Berry – it’s not just Downtown.
Council has an item on tomorrow night’s agenda, another discussion of how to “move forward” with the Warren Settlement, which ends in January. That’s not soon enough for some local business owners, who want enforcement NOW. Of course they plan to start in the “city center,” meaning Downtown.
It’s already begun – we’ve seen the camps moving from city owned property into the outer limits, along the waterways again, on commercial properties, sidewalks, in areas that have been routed a thousand times over the past 10 years. Mr. Berry talked about a tent we’ve seen, snuggled right up on the city parking lot, under a large old cedar, for weeks. He remarked on the full size propane BBQ the person had set up right next to the tent about a week ago. Yeah, I get it.
But my concern is where will they go? I already know they’re under bridges all over town. These are people with serious drug and mental health problems, they can’t just check into a hotel. They are the “service resistant,” and that will be the main topic of tomorrow night’s discussion. I’m sorry, I both resent and feel deeply sorry for these people, and it’s given me plenty of mental health issues of my own. I really resent the people who have turned these troubled individuals into a commodity.
Another problem that has been festering for years, and the city acts as though it just happened yesterday. The city has been taking millions of dollars from the state for years – Chico is a bonified shareholder in the Homeless Industrial Complex.
A lot of that money has gone to fancy new buildings at the Jesus Center, very comfortable air conditioned offices for very well compensated staffers. They completed 59 apartments onsite – I don’t know who lives in them or what the qualifications are for residency, but they are hardly spartan. They’re building a treatment center on Fair Street, we’ll see how that turns out. I worry that they spend too much money on salaries and sundries, and that limits the number of people they can actually serve.
The problem also remains, that as we take people off the street, more arrive in the various camps around town, and you see more on the streets in a state that could hardly be considered “human”. Is it because we provide these services at all? Should we have some system for sorting out those who “came from somewhere else” so we can serve more of our local community?
We need to answer those questions, because it seems every trip my husband and I make out into Chico we see more and more scarier transients. Yesterday, sitting in the truck to protect our tools while my husband picked up groceries at a local store, I was startled by a man who suddenly appeared in the sideview mirror. You might laugh if you saw me sitting in our truck, all eyeballs in the rearview and sideview mirrors, surveilling the parking lot like Barney Fife, but yesterday, and many times in past, I’ve noticed other people, usually men, standing watch on the pick-up truck.
This man’s head and face were so red, peeling from the sun, as he jerked along like a string puppet, a crazy look on his face, that my dog immediately stood up on the console. A man sitting nearby in his big black work truck was perched against his steering wheel, with the same look on his face as my dog.
Our walker was a big guy, and he was ranting about life in general, when he suddenly grabbed something out of his baggy jacket and threw it at the ground – a liter size plastic bottle of pink lemonade, a big bottle, it exploded all over the place. Crank makes people violent and strong, despite their emaciated appearance. Then he looked right at me and I got ready to roll up the windows and honk the horn, but he walked forward and angrily kicked the bottle. Then he headed for the busy street and I thought we were rid of him.
At that point my husband appeared at the driver’s window. He’d seen the guy from the store, so he was in a hurry to get out of the parking lot. The man had loaded three bottles of pink lemonade into his jacket and left the store without a peep from the checker. Just when I thought he was gone the fellow turned on his heel and started back toward the store. My husband got in the truck and we drove. I couldn’t help but think, a lot of retirees shop in the center, there’s a coffee shop and one of those hobby stores.
We’d been mowing lawns all morning so we headed for our favorite taco wagon. We saw a man standing at the window as my husband headed over to order our usual – a big-ass burrito to share. When he approached the window he stopped short. The man in front of him was jabbering at the gal in the wagon, and I noticed, the owner from the nearby store was approaching the rear door of her vehicle.
The other man said something to my husband and motioned him forward, while he approached the back window. He seemed to be trying to convince the woman of something, she was standing back from the window, and the man from the store was behind her. My husband turned on his heel and came back to our truck – no burrito today – the other guy had been covered with runny sores, he was babbling nonsense at the lady in the truck, and she had called the store owner to help her get rid of him. My husband said the guy was all over the order window, and it grossed him out so bad we went home for a bowl of ramen instead.
I was reminded of the Hepatitis A outbreak in several big west coast towns, including San Diego. In that case, a group of men who had come to town to see a concert contracted the disease from an sidewalk table at a restaurant.
Chico followed Grants Pass, Oregon, onto this path. When my husband and I visited Grants Path a few months ago, our hotel in Medford having raised their rates, we found the entire town to be somewhat DEAD. Like a bomb had gone off. The camps were gone, everything had been cleaned up, but life had not returned. Is that what’s ahead for Chico?
I believe there is a human solution to this problem, but so far, it’s been all about the money, and you know money makes people weird. And I have to ask myself – where did all those people go after they were kicked out of Grant’s Pass?
Chico Taxpayers Association 