Last week I attended the Tuesday night Tea Party meeting, and by Thursday morning I’d sent off a letter to the Enterprise Record about it. On Sunday I realized I had not received the usual response from David Little, so I resent. Little himself has told me, and other regular letter writers, to resend if I don’t get that “it’s in the cue” response directly from him, so I always do. He responded a day or two later complaining he had a lot of letters. My letter finally ran yesterday, Wednesday. Today it’s gone, fuckyouverymuch!
I also can’t help but notice – other letters that ran yesterday are still up. I hate to be a sour apple, but that’s how I feel when I get the short end of the stick. Especially from a guy who takes the sticks in his hands, measures them up, and then looks around the room and says, “you again – you get the short stick.” I’m used to that from him, but it makes him smaller and smaller every time until some day I expect him to disappear and suddenly some new, fresh-minded young person will be standing there, ready to hand over a clean new deck of cards. I can dream.
I spend time writing these dam-ned letters. In this case, I wrote to the ER instead of writing a blog about this meeting because I was short on time and figured it was important to tell other people. Fat lot of good it did to write the the Enterprise Record!
I also wrote a letter to the News and Review, about another aspect of Nakamura’s chat at the Tea Party meeting – that ran with the first send, and will appear on the website into perpetuity. Read that here:
http://www.newsreview.com/chico/letters-for-november-7-2013/content?oid=11973038
I don’t write letters to the editor to see my name in the paper, I write because I know the general public doesn’t make it to these behind-closed-doors ass-kissing sessions, isn’t privvy to this information – even though we all should be. Here’s my letter about Nakamura’s fear of Chico PD and Fire. Why are we letting this guy negotiate our employee contracts?
Brian Nakamura and Chris Constantin were featured speakers at a recent Tea Party meeting. I was shocked at what Nakamura related about dealing with the police and fire departments.
The city of Chico is currently negotiating contracts with employee unions. I asked if Nakamura, who serves as city liason, was having any luck getting city employees to pay their own benefits and pensions costs. He said he could not give us specifics of the contracts, but described the talks as “turf wars.” The police and fire unions he said, bring in “legal resources” from out of town to fight “any changes” in the contracts.
When asked if he had considered contracting Cal Fire, Nakamura warned, the council chambers would be packed with people wearing red Chico Fire shirts, and he’d be run out of town. “It happened in Hemet!” he exclaimed, and described himself as a “target” at least five times.
When asked about a sales tax hike to fund the police department, Nakamura wouldn’t support it – “you can write whatever you want into the measure to try and protect the money, but the complexities of the General Fund…” allow the money to be moved to other funds by Staff without public oversight.
Constantin agreed, adding, “I’m not going to advocate paying more when police don’t pay a dime toward their own benefits…”
Chico Fire and Police departments are apparently the biggest threat to public safety, both physical and fiscal.
Juanita Sumner, Chico
Chico Taxpayers Association 