Tag Archives: Chico PD

Fiscal morons about to cut nearly $2 million deal with Chico PD

12 Mar

City management and council met in closed session a couple of weeks ago to discuss the cop contracts. Here’s the link to the latest proposal:

http://chico-ca.granicus.com/MetaViewer.php?view_id=2&event_id=100&meta_id=44013

I cut an excerpt here, in which the city manager reports, we don’t have the money to give these raises, but he is assuming our situation will get better? That’s pure speculation, and I think it’s irresponsible.

They say the cops are offering to pay (BFD) 12 percent of their pension. 12 percent of the cost of 90 percent of their highest year’s pay at 50 years of age. Oh, please!  “New hires” pay 50 percent – just watch, in future, they’ll  say that creates a conflict in the ranks, and they’ll want wage increases to cover that 50 percent.

 

Financial Capacity The City is projected to end the 2014-15 years with a negative $4.5 million general fund balance and no General Fund reserves. However, the 2013 financial measures, improvement in the economy, and operational savings allowed the city to finish 2013-14 with over $4 million to carry over into 2014-15. Preliminary information indicates that the same conditions exist for 2014-15, and the City estimates it will have additional funds to carry over into 2015-16, albeit it will not be as much as 2013-14. The City Council approved a deficit reduction plan that anticipated contributing $800,000 in 2014-15 towards the deficit. The strengthening of the City’s position allows the City to contribute about $3.3 million in 2014-15. The policy question before the City in negotiating this MOU shows a policy direction of balance. A very conservative approach would require that any and all available funds must go to pay the deficit before any additional expenditures in operations. However, this approach is not feasible due to the City’s need to continue to provide quality services as expected by our community. The conditions seen in the Police Department in terms of the attrition rate, ability to recruit, competitiveness of compensation and overall operations indicate a condition of instability. This is similar to what other cities are facing where large numbers of officers are leaving. In the City of San Jose, the lack of comparable salary and benefits has led to a staffing level that fell from almost 1,400 sworn offers to under 800 with more officers leaving than being retained. While Chico’s situation isn’t as dire, if the City does not balance the need for competitive compensation with other internal changes (which are underway), Chico will risk being under the same pressures as San Jose. This MOU will fit well into the City’s goal of turning the situation around and helping to strengthen the Department’s ability to serve the community.

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Bits and pieces – of asses and asskickers!

5 Dec

Just a few notes:

 I sent an e-mail to the Butte County supervisors recently, and got a much welcome response from my Third District Super,  Maureen Kirk. Maureen says they will be sending a letter of protest to the CPUC, it’s in the consent agenda for the December 10 meeting. I will keep an eye out for the agenda on the Butte County website to get the time specific and see if there’s any reason to pull the item. I haven’t written to the Chico Council yet, but will soon.

Take a look at Melissa Daugherty’s column in today’s News and Review – http://www.newsreview.com/chico/thin-blue-line/content?oid=12196688   Holy Cop Flap BatMom! “This whole flap is a result of the very contentious negotiations taking place between the CPOA and the city. Stone, who sits on the Police Community Advisory Board, has been the City Council’s most vocal member when it comes to pointing out that the city’s budget deficit is tied to the unsustainable pay and benefits packages that were afforded to public-safety employees when Chico was the land of milk and honey—or at least governed that way. The city can no longer afford them.”  Thanks to Daugherty for jump starting this conversation, I hope we can keep it rambling long enough to generate some citywide interest.

I will give these gals the “Asskicker of the Week” award. 

 Interesting item at Tuesday’s council meeting – Sean Morgan questioned a $6,000 raise for a $32,000 clerk who has been doing work beyond their job description, suggesting the clerk be given a promotion that entailed performance of those duties, but no pay raise. Council just gave the police department promotions with raises, what’s with that?  They gave Sergeant George Laver a promotion to Lieutenant knowing he would retire within a year, taking 90 percent of a salary for a position he held for less than a year.  The excuse? They said he was already doing work beyond his job description.

Well, he was getting paid beyond his job description too, they don’t mention that. As a sergeant, Laver’s base pay was about $95,000/year, but he was able to keep it around $120,000/year with overtime. That’s more than a lieutenant’s base salary, so how could Laver have been doing work beyond $120,000 as a sergeant? Bionic Man? But I think I’ve figured it out. I used to think “spiking” meant, running up one’s salary, and therefore their pension, with overtime. Some states allow “public safety” workers to do this, but I’ve been told it’s not allowed in California. So,  Laver would have retired at 90% of $95,000.  Now I find, “spiking” can also mean, last minute promotion to a higher salary. This has been done in Chico many times, I always wondered – why would they promote some of these chiefs so close to retirement age?  Well, there it is. Now Laver will retire at 90% of about $103,000. It might sound nickel and dime, but Laver’s just a drop in the bucket – they do this every day in police departments and other “public safety” agencies every day, and we pay for it.  

But Sean Morgan will deny a $32,000 clerk a $6,000 raise, saying “public safety should come first”  Well, maybe he should give the police department his $6,000+ city council salary, along with the $8,000+ spent on his benefits package, which he receives in addition to his public salary and benefits from Chico State. 

Morgan and Laver get the “Jackass of the Week” award.

Chico PD: Yer getting a little close to our feed bucket there, Missy!

Chico PD: Yer getting a little close to our feed bucket there, Missy!

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More views on the cop flap

30 Nov

Below I have posted two more letters about Randall Stone and Chico PD.

 Chico Enterprise-Record

POSTED:   11/29/2013 12:33:30 AM PST

I find the comments attributed to Councilmember Randall Stone (Chico E-R, Nov. 21) to be an insult to not only the citizens who attend the Chico Police Community Advisory monthly meetings but to the other board members who have taken their personal time on a voluntary basis to attend those meetings. To say “It’s like lunch with the chief but it doesn’t have any value”; “most of the members miss most of the meetings”; and the most egregious comment of all, “The topics are relatively mundane.” How uninformed and arrogant he is.

Topics discussed over the last year centered on exactly what have been the most important topics that have affected our community — homelessness and its causes, the Grand Jury report on mental health, downtown anti-social behavior, Police Department staffing, etc. All meetings start with citizen/community input. The meetings last exactly one hour and in that time impart of great deal of information regarding issues facing the city and our Police Department. To call them “mundane” shows the ignorance of the man who uttered that.

Stone has struck a tone not befitting a member of the Policy Community Advisory Board but also that of a council person. He needs to be dismissed.

— Stephanie L. Taber, Chico

Frankly,  I’ve been to the PAB meetings, and the only other member of “the public” besides me was Stephanie. Kirk Trostle has never exactly invited the public into these meetings.  Just recently, I found that Trostle had stopped posting the notices for these meetings on the city’s agendas pages, and I had to ask city clerk Debbie Presson to please start posting them again.

I also agree with Stone that these meetings are like “lunch with the chief,” an inappropriate use of high-salaried officers like Lt. Linda Dye. Dye and Lt. Jennifer Gonzales  spent almost an hour total giving the assemblage of bloated trough dwellers their take on homelessness and mental illness, based on a one week course at Butte College.

The other people at the meeting I attended were on public salaries, including Chico Chamber of Commerce director Katie Simmons, whose salary is heavily subsidized with Community Block Grant Funding from the city. These meetings are just chatter-babble intended to make them look like they’re “doing something about it.”

Chico Enterprise-Record

POSTED:   11/29/2013 12:33:30 AM PST

The Nov. 21 front-page article concerning the controversy over the racist photo illustration allegedly posted by police officer Todd Boothe on the Internet reminded me of the adage that when you point a finger at a problem, there are those who will study the finger ad infinitum. It seems to me that the primary fact here is that a member of the Chico Police Department may be guilty of a racist posting and that any investigation ought to focus on that accusation. Investigating Councilman Randall Stone’s behavior in this matter looks like nothing more than a smokescreen to shift the focus away from the main issue.

I applaud Stone for bringing the matter to public attention. What we need in government, whether it’s the police department or the finance office, is transparency.

As for Peter Durfee, the Chico Police Officers Association spokesperson, I would suggest that if he is sincere about wanting to improve relations between the citizens of Chico and its Police Department, then he should first tone down the abusive in-your-face rhetoric and stop making ridiculous charges about due process and such. I am convinced that Chief Kirk Trostle is quite capable of handling this matter and will reach a conclusion satisfactory to all parties involved.

— Charles W. Bird, Chico

I do agree with Charles Bird, but I’m tired of talking about the Facebook page. I wish people would focus on the real matter at hand here – the contract talks. That’s why I wrote this letter, which ran today.

 

I hope Chico voters will not be distracted by the “flap” between Councilor Randall Stone and the Chico Police Department. The real issue here is not free speech or racism, it’s the “employee share” of pensions and benefits.When Stone spoke to the Chico Taxpayers Association earlier this year, he said in order for Chico to regain fiscal solvency, the various employee groups would have to agree to pay their “employee share”. Especially fire and police, who pay 4 and 0 percent, respectively.

The Police Department subsequently made an offer to pay their entire 9 percent share, but only if given a raise proportionate to the cost. According to Mark Sorensen, “The proposal would have cost the city about an extra $500,000 over the term of the contract, and gave up some management rights.”

Stone has exposed the nature of the contract talks and why so many people want to keep them behind closed doors. Now Stone is being ostracized and persecuted by the Police Department and their cronies. This is exactly the kind of behavior City Manager Brian Nakamura described at a recent tea party meeting.

Please join the Chico Taxpayers Association in asking council and staff to come up with contracts that require employees to pay at least their full “share” — only 9 percent of the total cost of their generous benefits and pension packages.

What decent person would expect taxpayers living on less than a third of their generous salaries to also pay their benefits?

— Juanita Sumner, Chico

This is the copy I cut and paste directly from the ER, and I have to ask – why did they go to the trouble to change “Tea Party” to “tea party.” They had to make an effort to do that, why in the world would a newspaper that claims to be besieged by letters lately take the time and trouble to change two upper case letters to lower case? I just don’t get that. 

I hope we can keep this conversation going, and get some results out of the council. If not we need to dump the three that are up for re-election in November 2014 and get some new faces in there. 

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Ground Hog Day predictions

5 Nov

Here we are, Second Tuesday – council meeting tonight. I keep getting the weirdest sense of Deja-vu – am I using that correctly? I mean, I feel like this town just keeps circling around the same carcass – “Sit and Lie”.

Everybody loved that movie with Bill Murray, Ground Hog Day, where he wakes up every day, stuck in time, doomed to repeat the same day over and over again. You thought that was just a movie, didn’t you?

The news stories they’ve done, both print and broadcast, have been almost word for word repeats of stories run in August. The council hashed over this ordinance in a well-attended meeting and threw it out, too many problems. I thought it was weird at the time that Chief Trostle seemed kinda wishy-washy. The police department had been asking for the ordinance, but Trostle wasn’t very enthusiastic about presenting it. I realize now, he didn’t like the ordinance as written.

This newer version adds specifics regarding “sitting”, and drops the provision requiring a warning before arrest. That’s what they wanted for the Disorderly Events ordinance, permission to cite people for disturbing the peace without the usual number of complaints, without any signed complaint, and without any warning.  The cops are also pushing a “Social Host” ordinance that likewise circumvents due process, allowing cops, fire or hospitals, etc, to bill the owner of a property who didn’t even know his tenants were having a party. Now they want to be able to arrest people for sitting on any sidewalk for any reason short of a medical emergency or a parade without giving them any sort of head’s up before they start slapping the cuffs on. Hmmmm.

First of all, like Randall Stone says, why have another ordinance when you can’t enforce the laws that are on the books? I wonder if Stone read the same article I saw in the News and Review, describing the citing of a man for sitting on a sidewalk  too close to the crosswalk.  

http://worldofjuanita.com/2013/10/20/wow-headline-news-cop-does-his-job/

The city code includes very specific rules about where panhandlers are allowed to ask the public for money, as well as where anyone is allowed to sit. The “aggressive panhandling” ordinance has been on the books for almost exactly 10 years, but until now,  it’s rarely been enforced. The N&R article covered officer Peter Durfee’s recent attempts to enforce this law, and I had to wonder, “why just now?”

Last week, as I was doing some errands,  I saw officers in various parts of town rousting people who looked like transients – shopping carts, bed rolls, blue tarps and blankets.  First I encountered a team of Chico PD rounding up belongings and throwing away trash from a parking lot Downtown, right near Christian Michaels.  Then I saw a few squad cars rousting people over on the 20th Street overpass. I realized, they been camping in those bushes in the medians around the off-ramps, behind Petco.  I always wondered about that, having seen the kind of trash that indicates Hobo Camp.  Once I even saw one bold fellow camping, bright blue tarp staked out for a tent,  with his shopping cart full of bagged recyclables siting next to it, in a field laying along the west side of 99.

Camping is prohibited pretty much anywhere but registered camp grounds.  Neither the police or park employees have enforced the camping law for a year or so now.  I watched the Mangrove Plaza turn into some kind of homeless center, with the US Post Office buildings serving as a make-shift outdoor shelter area. People who live along the freeway have told me they see transients camping along the freeway at night, even with the widening going on.

But now suddenly the cops are rousting them? This is because of pressure they are feeling from the public complaints, and now the private security force that’s been hired Downtown. The cops are negotiating their contracts right now, which are up in January. They are finally realizing, their critics are starting to outweigh their supporters.

I don’t know why they need a more aggressive law to get rid of this bad case of fleas. We already have laws that allow these folks to be cited for the very offenses that citizens are complaining about.  If they fail to appear or pay the penalty, the cops can arrest them without warning and they go to jail. Sit/Lie seems like a quicker rout to incarceration, but is that really the answer? Take them off the streets and stuff them into our over-crowded jails? Wake up – it will happen here just like it happens in San Francisco, where the bum that was arrested two hours ago, swearing at your customers while seated in a puddle of his own urine, is right back in front of your store, swearing at your customers while seated in a puddle of his own urine.

At least Phil the Weatherman finds his way out of his Ground Hog Day. Here’s my prediction for Chico: Whether or not they pass Sit/Lie, this idiot council will sign the cop contracts, giving them raises as well as leaving completely untouched their fully paid benefits and pension.

And around and around she goes, where she stops, noooooobody knows!

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Nakamura announces a $50 million dollar deficit but still won’t make the cops or fire pay their own way. When will Mark Sorensen and Sean Morgan pull their “fiscally conservative” thumbs out of their asses and do something?

23 Feb

My husband and I both laughed out loud the other night when Brian Nakamura announced our city is about $50 million in deficit. Not that we thought it was funny, it was more of a nervous reaction.   I had to hear him say it a couple of times before the smile slid off my face. 

Then he offered up his puny little reorganization plan that might shave, heavy on the ‘might” – $1 million a year. He’s firing people across the board, and it’s only saving, again, “might” save, $1 million a year. According to the budget figures, that would still leave us in deficit. Has he got some other plans?

His first plan, to land himself a job at $217,000 a year, with a sweeeet benefits package, including a full year’s salary in severance pay, was a roaring success. According to a human resources “wiki” I read, it is customary to give an executive employee a severance of a month’s pay for every year served – Nakamura has not served us six months, yet has a promise of a full year’s salary if we have to let him go for any reason short of homicide or red-handed embezzlement. Thank you again,  Mark Sorensen, proxy dupe, and Tom Lando, puppet master. Boy, wouldn’t you like to get a look at Sorensen’s contract as Biggs city manager, or the contract Lando just got as interim rec manager out in O-ville?

And now these overfed blue jays are the ‘thin blue line” between the city and BANKRUPTCY. They are currently negotiating contracts with Chico Police and Fire Departments.  According to an article in the paper the other day, I was right,  the police alone take over $22 mil, or about half our $43 million a year budget. According to that article, they spend over a million a year on campus, messing with the college kids. 

Let’s face it, it didn’t cost them $100 to arrest that pervert that’s been over there raping who knows how many young women for who knows how long. They claim to spend more than $1 million a year patrolling the college area. Why? There’s a college police department. Why not force the campus police to take over? Why do we have to pay more in taxes for a special “C Team”? Can they get Leslie Nielsen for that kind of money? 

Chico PD just wants more money, more money, more money. They can’t help themselves, they’re pigs. They demand all kinds of perks and benies out of the city – they don’t even pay to purchase or clean their own uniforms – meanwhile, they tell us, they are too short of staff to actually do the job. They don’t prevent crime, they come along afterward and make a report about it so they can ask for a bigger budget the following year. They still haven’t solved the “clown bandit” capers, or those robberies that occurred every summer, again and again the same victims, including the hair stylist over on East Avenue who had her plate glass window smashed out at least twice and her cash register stolen. 

Right now they’re replacing their vehicles – they get new vehicles every five to six years, wouldn’t you like to live like that? Well you ought to, you pay for it!  Go on, go over to Wittmeier, and when they send you into Jackie’s office, you just tell her to call Brian Nakamura, he’s got a little voucher over there for you. She will laugh that jersey girl laugh and say, “No, really Hon, how you gonna pay for this?” 

Yes, the cops get new vehicles, they get a uniform allowance, they get paid to exercise, they get paid to go to their third cousin twice-removed’s funeral. A bunch of them got paid yesterday, along with Brian Nakamura, to stand around and yak it up over a guy who was killed 75 years ago. 

Yes, Officer Carlton Bruce. I didn’t know him, I’m sure he was a wonderful man, 75 years ago. But if I were his wife, I’d still be pissed at him for walking into getting his face blown off. I think Bruce made a number of classic mistakes, and up until now, nobody thought it was worthy of an annual ceremony. Where’s the ceremony for Rod O’Hern? O’Hern was shot in the face and permanently blinded by the accomplice of a suspect back in 1995. He subsequently left the force and moved out of the area. I don’t know if his family still lives here, but at the time of the shooting, he had a six year old and a pregnant wife. These folks could probably use a little comfort for what they went through, but I guess you have to be dead to get any respect out of Chico PD.

I remember that incident, and the problems that caused it have not been solved. Just this past holiday shopping season, only a short walk from the scene of the O’Hern shooting, two women and a ten year old girl were maced and their purses stolen at the MacDonalds on East Ave.  That crime has not been solved.  Our police department continues to take without really giving us anything.  Now they want bigger salaries for their management positions, because they are so jealous and greedy they need to see $$$$ before they will do their jobs. 

Please write to your council – at dpresson@ci.chico.ca.us – and tell them the police and fire need to pay their own pension premiums. Currently the police PAY NOTHING and fire only two percent, toward  pensions representing 90 percent of their highest year’s pay available at age 50. Our city is over $50 million dollars in deficit on these crazy contracts, and we will soon be forced to pay more toward the premiums. That either means new taxes, or it means the cops and fire need to step up and do the right thing. 

Mark Sorensen and Sean Morgan ran as “fiscal conservatives.” Somebody should write them a letter and tell them, “that means, you’re supposed to be saving money!”  Somebody might ask them what they’re doing taking  salary and benefits for their council position when both of them have very nice salaries and benefits from their publicly-paid day jobs.

Write to Brian Nakamura at bnakamura@ci.chico.ca.us, and while you’re asking him to bring the cops and fire to the table, ask him to pay his own pension share as well – he currently pays only 4%. 

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Oh, let me get my little violin for the poor policeman!

11 Mar

The Chico PD and fire department are the biggest salary suckers in town. Together they take about 85 percent or more of our city pie, with the cops getting over half.

It’s not just their salaries, which were artificially raised along with all city workers by that MOU that linked pay to revenue INCREASES but NOT DECREASES. The cops and fire department are the worst because they have managed to get overtime written in to their contracts. They are guaranteed a certain amount of overtime, and given just about as much as they want beyond that. Some of them double their salaries with overtime, a practice know in the industry as “spiking.”

Spiking has driven our city employee costs through the roof, especially pension costs. See, cops and fire are allowed to retire at 90 PERCENT of their highest year’s salary. So, you got these people who agreed to salaries in the $50 – 80,000 range, “spiking” their pensions up to  $100,000 plus. Fire Chief John Brown retired a couple of years ago at over $206,000. I used to watch this man struggle to stay awake in meetings, just so he could give his two cents that overtime saves money over new hires. What a crock of bullshit, but council has bought this line for years, allowing the police and fire departments to suck the city dry without really providing any service.

Another problem with the fire and police departments is workman’s comp. For two years running, I’ve heard Malfeasance Director Jennifer Hennessy report that we are “again” overbudget in this fund, due to excessive injuries in the Chico police  and fire departments.

So yesterday we are treated to a front page story in the Enterprise Wreched – “Officer who suffered career-ending injury in Chico riot dies in Willows.” 

I usually try to avoid disrespect for the dead, but I’m certainly not going to try to manufacture any phony respect for a guy who saw an opportunity to rack up some overtime playing “Riot Cop” in another town when he knew damned well he had a bad knee and didn’t have any business on active duty. 

According to Greg Welters epic sob story, then-47-year-old Willows police sargeant Bill Carter injured himself during the Rancho Chico day “riots” of 1990. But as you read the story, a few things stand out.  At some point during the mayhem, Carter claimed, “Something popped in his left leg, and he knew his knee had become dislocated.”  Yes, he knew his knee had become dislocated, because it had happened before.

What was a 47 year old man with a bad knee doing at a riot in another town? 

Well, of course, he was SPIKING HIS SALARY. And, he got his cherry on top – retirement with full disability at 47 years old, with a pension based on that last years spiked salary. 

And now I’m supposed to cry for a guy who just spend the last 20 years milking a bad knee? He even went on to another job – how ironic – he went into fraud investigation work. Maybe he should have investigated himself. Read the story – at several points, he knew his knee was injured, but he made the decision to keep re-injuring himself, until he had an injury that was sure to end his “career” and set him up for life.

Cry for a 69 year old man who just died after milking the system for the last 20 plus years? I don’t think so. I think there should be a special place in Hell for people who take advantage of the public trust. And their widows, too. 

When I did some research regarding knee injuries, I found a list of specific jobs in which knee injuries are considered part of the game – three were sports, the fourth was carpet layer. Neither cops nor firefighters were on the list. Only jobs in which a repetitive action will result in a predictable type of injury were listed. For carpet layers, it’s the knee kicker that moves the carpet into place. That will also give a person a hernia. So will carrying giant rolls of carpet onto a job site without any assistance. My husband has had both of those injuries, but because he’s a contractor instead of a publicly-paid trough sucker, we had to pay the doctors out of our own pocket, and he’s not eligible for workman’s comp, so he was just unemployed. 

The next two reasons given for the average knee injury were age and obesity. I didn’t know Bill Carter, but let’s face it – 47 is old for any active job. You wouldn’t have found a 47-year-old Nolan Ryan running out to fight with drunk 20-somethings in a riot. Any adult should have better sense. I think Carter did it on purpose, but that’s my opinion.

There also ought to be a special place in hell for journalists who write this kind of crap, but it’s about what I’ve come to expect from Greg Welter. Welter never writes a story that’s NOT slanted. He’s on the cop beat – funny, he was also on the Redevelopment Agency’s “citizen’s oversight committee” a few years back. The committee that was disbanded on Scott Gruendl’s request when I and some other citizens asked that the commitee’s activities be opened up to the scrutiny of the public. I was put on their e-mail chat list, and I read over the conversations they were having among themselves. At one point, when other members balked at the (then) $40 million price tag for the new police station, Welter argued that the cops should get whatever they want. “Whatever we do, ” he cautioned, ” we (the RDA committee) don’t want to be perceived as ‘anti-police’…” 

I don’t know why he’s so worried about being perceived “anti-police”.   Maybe he should try to be perceived as an honest journalist who writes unbiased stories. But maybe that’s not why he got into journalism, I don’t know. 

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