The Chico Tea Party Patriots will be holding a symposium. The topic will be the city of Chico’s role in economic development and how Chico can grow its way out of debt. Mark Orme assistant city manager along with Sean Morgan and Mark Sorensen will be guest speakers.
The meeting starts at 7PM– at Marie Callenders 1910 East 20th Street, Chico. Doors open at 5:45 for those who want to order Dinner and visit before the meeting.
Tomorrow night city council will discuss serving a three-year notice to the fire department that they will be considering a contract with Cal Fire. You may be asking the same question I am – why did they just approve new contracts with the fire department, with a proviso that says we have to give them three years’ notice before we dump them? This is not a sincere move on the part of Scott Gruendl or Mark Sorensen, it’s election year pandering.
Look there it says, “recently completed negotiations…” meaning, weeks ago. Why did they go through with the contracts at all?
REPORT IN BRIEF: The City of Chico recently completed negotiations with its nine (9) bargaining groups. One outstanding issue, pertaining specifically to the International Association of Fire Fighters (IAFF), Local 2734, that essentially binds the City, is Section 5.7, a contracting out provision. The City Manager believes this section adversely affects the City’s ability to consider alternative service delivery options in order to evaluate the costs related to salaries and benefits. Thus, in light of the City Council’s desire to treat all bargaining units respectfully and equitably in future negotiations, the City Manager recommends that the City provide the attached notice of intent, which becomes effective April 16, 2017.
I been busy with my own business lately – and I know how EVERYBODY would love me to pay more attention to that. Unfortunately, city business becomes my business when the ordinances they pass Downtown affect my livelihood. That’s why me and a gaggle of other landlords, small and large, came down to the last Internal Affairs committee meeting to have a conversation over this new “Social Host Ordinance.”
The city attorney had written a clause into the ordinance that said the police chief could decide to assess a property owner/landlord for “response time” of cops and fire where underage drinkers were present. In other words, hold landlords responsible for the actions of their tenants.
When we hashed this all out over the Disorderly Events ordinance, they dropped the landlord clause because it was found that they could not possibly notice a landlord quickly enough to prevent a second incident, and how could the landlord be responsible for a second or even third incident if they were unaware there’d been a first incident? But now, they want to use proof of mailer, which just means, they sent a notice, to somebody. They expect to use the assessor’s roles to get the contact info. According to Butte County Assessor candidate Al Petersen, the rolls are full of mistakes – some 10,000, last year alone. Those mistakes include contact information, and I’ve had that problem – they got the wrong address for my prop tax bill, and it took me almost two years to get it corrected. At one point, it was so screwed up, they let my neighbor’s mortgage holder pay my taxes, and sent my check back, even thought the other check was in the wrong amount. So, we’re supposed to trust these idiots to get us a notice that the cops have been called to our rental?
The angry crowd that showed up at the Internal Affairs meeting had already had a private meeting with the city attorney that I was not made aware of. City attorney Roger Wilson said after meeting with those folks, who included the management for Webb apartments and other big dick swingers, he recommended dropping the “landlord responsibility clause”. Don’t you get sick of the special favors Downtown? I mean, I wanted that dropped, but I don’t like any of the ordinance. These fuckers sold out because it suited their bottom line. Thanks Randy, you egg sucker!
And speaking of errors, get a load of this draft ordinance I had to get from Debbie Presson, because she hadn’t loaded the agenda properly, and it wouldn’t cut and paste. There are so many typos in this thing – like I’ve said before, get off your dildo Debbie, and do your job. I’ve seen items pulled from agendas for less mistakes than this:
I. GENERAL PROVISIONS
A. The fees set forth herein shall be used to calculate the costs to be recovered by the City in connection with the following incidents:
l. The apprehension and arrest or citation of persons convicted of an offense involving the driving of a vehicle while under the influence of alcohol or any drug;
2. Response to accidents caused by persons who are convicted of anotTense involving the driving of a vehicle while under the influence of alcohol or any drug;ef
3.LiabilityJorthe City’s emergencyresoonsecost~ underJhe Social Host Ordinan~~ (Chico Municipal CodeChailter 9.31Lor
‘L Participationin a second response to a loud or unruly event as defined in Section
9.70.030 of the Chico Municipal Code.
B. Payment is due and payable at the City’s Finance Office within thirty days of the date the bill is mailed or payment shall be considered delinquent and subject to the collection
measures set forth in Administrative Procedure and Policy No. 15-14.
II. COST RECOVERY FEES
A. Police and Fire Department fees as set forth below shall have a one-half hour (30 minute) minimum fee.
B. Fees shall be based on the amount of time spent by each police officer and/or fire suppression personnel responding to the incident, plus administrative processing costs,
and shall be calculated using the following fees:
Minimum Fee For Each Administrative
(for first y, hour)Additional Minute Processing Fee
PoliceDepmiment$46.50 per officer $!.55/minute/officer $34.50 per incident (this line does not make sense, what do they mean – $46.50 per officer $!.55/minute/officer $34.50 per incident? That doesn’t make sense even without the typo)
Fire Department $22.00 per fire fighter $0.73/minute/fire fighter $34.50 per incident (again, this line does not make sense)
Ill. AUTHORIZA TlON TO ANNUALLY ADJUST FEES
The City Manager is authorized to annually adjust the fees set forth above to reflect personnel compensation adjustments previously authorized and approved by the City Council without further City Council action (BP E.5.).
While the typos make it difficult to read, I think most people would see plenty to be alarmed about here. First of all, it’s up to the police chief and the city manager to decide when there’s been an offense, and how much to assess, and then turn around and put it right in their own pocket. That’s completely inappropriate conflict of interest. And second, there you see the “AUTHORIZATION TO ANNUALLY ADJUST FEES,” administratively, with no public oversight.
Wow, look at that, I just spelled administratively, twice! I wonder if they could use somebody who can spell and type down at the City of Chico?
Kelly sent me a link to State Controller John Chiang’s website regarding public salaries – it’s got the data for every county and city in California. I looked at years 2009 – 2012, and I saw something for the first time – from 2010 to 2011, when the city first started shedding employees due to the impending bankruptcy, the amount of employee “share” paid by the city of Chico went from $6.5 million to $14 million.
I had to ask Mark Sorensen, who was elected to council in 2010, how that happened.
Now, here’s something I just noticed yesterday – did you sign contracts in 2011 that raised the amount of pensions and benefits paid by the city from about $6.5 million to over $14 million? That would have been just before I started understanding all that pension time bomb stuff, I was not watching. At the same time we were getting rid of employees, our pension/benefits cost more than doubled, how did that happen? I remember you talking about this in your blog –
It looks like you were advocating paying 80 – 90 percent of employee costs, but saying we’d save money? – am I getting that right? Please explain – thanks, Juanita
I think I hit a nerve, cause it took him almost a week to get back to me. I know he’s busy, but when he wants to talk, you can get him just about any time. Now all the sudden he didn’t want to talk. And when he did answer me, he accused me of making it up.
“…contracts in 2011 that raised the amount of pensions and benefits paid by the city from about $6.5 million to over $14 million?”
I don’t know how you dream this stuff up. It just confuses an already confusing pile of information.
What’s with the defensive tone? I asked him a question, he comes back telling me I make stuff up? He accuses me of confusing the issue with too many questions – aha! Now we know who’s really behind the new rules for committee meetings – Mark Sorensen and Brian Nakamura are running the city while Scott Gruendl is out road-raging over his sister’s death. They want the public OUT! Because he knows the curtains are getting pretty thin, and pretty soon everybody is going to know what’s really going on Downtown, and who is really pulling all the strings.
And then he throws down the toothpicks with this confusing ramble – with all the different type faces and font sizes – this is what I get for asking a simple question of a man with red hands:
Pension costs alone have been at about $10-11 million per year for many years (employer contribution rates were increasing slightly, while the number of employees was decreasing). Take a look at the Calpers annual valuation reports for the city of Chico’s two pension plans. Those reports contain the exact pension cost numbers. Though, you must manually add the EPMC (employer paid member contribution), which has been around $1.8 million per year, and now rapidly going down to $0.0 per year. Other benefits costs have not changed much in recent years.
There were no new city of Chico labor contracts beginning in 2011. All were set to expire in 2012.
My blog entry that you mentioned references a modification by way of a “letter agreement” to one contract. That being with the IAFF.
The primary impact of that letter agreement was to STOP a 4% raise to the firefighters as was scheduled the 2007 contract. That contract was being modified in order to halt the 4% raise.
The history of pay and benefit increases can be found in the following document, beginning at page 7.
This year will register very significant decreases. Is it enough? No, but it is about as much as could be obtained if necessary from the California Public Employee Relations Board.
It took many years to build this financial debacle, it will take years to re calibrate it, but particularly take a good look at what occurred between 1997 and 2002.
What? So I asked him that:
I got it off Chiang’s website Mark, I didn’t dream anything up. Look for yourself – benefits paid by the city doubled from 2010 – 2011. I know CalPERS started demanding more, I guess I should ask – why weren’t the employees asked to pay it? Why did you folks continue to approve contracts that required the taxpayers to foot the bill for these outrageous pensions and benefits agreements? They’ve still continued to get raises, by the way, we’re not blind.
It doesn’t look good that six of you are on public salaries with packages of your own to protect.
You’re accusing me of confusing this mess by asking questions? These contracts are written purposely to confuse anybody who hasn’t been to law school. Nothing you say makes sense –
(Mark said) Pension costs alone have been at about $10-11 million per year for many years (employer contribution rates were increasing slightly, while the number of employees was decreasing). Take a look at the Calpers annual valuation reports for the city of Chico’s two pension plans. Those reports contain the exact pension cost numbers. Though, you must manually add the EPMC (employer paid member contribution), which has been around $1.8 million per year, and now rapidly going down to $0.0 per year. Other benefits costs have not changed much in recent years.
What ? Why would I go through those calisthenics when I have Chiang’s numbers? You didn’t answer my question – did you sign contracts that raised the amount of EPMC from $6.5 million to $14 million? – JS
We’ll see if he answers, but I think I got an earful already.
For years now, I’ve turned my attention toward the day meetings, where there has always been a more conversational tone between council/committee members and the public. Although it was sometimes testy, it was what you call “give and take.” It was one of the few remaining factors that kept Chico’s “small town” atmosphere – the notion that elected officials were just members of the public who had been chosen by their peers to do a job, that they were never above us, and if they didn’t watch it, they might just end up under our feet.
Unfortunately, we’ve had one mayor after another who has abused their privilege as elected “official.” Yeah, that’s right – starting with Ann Schwab, I’d say, they just started getting a little too officious. Our current mayor Scott Gruendl has become a regular Pinochet, using his position and his gavel to silence criticism while he empties the city coffers into the pockets of his friends – his developer friends and city employee unions who have financed his campaigns for city council.
Gruendl’s latest abuse of power is the institution of new rules for those daytime committee meetings. And it’s not just Gruendl’s idea – Brian Nakamura is chiefly behind it. Didn’t I tell you he was up to something when he started charging that too many members of the public got “off topic” during meetings, and that it was a violation of the Brown Act?
You know, the Brown Act he says does not need to be attended to when it comes to having staffers supervise the un-elected committees, namely the Sustainability Task Force. The STF can now have meetings with anybody they choose, make recommendations to council based on what their friends tell them in secret meetings, without any oversight from the public. But you and I need to put our name and address on a card to speak, and we’re limited to three minutes per agenda item?
From this week’s Finance and Economic Development committee agendas:
NOTE: Citizens and other interested parties are encouraged to participate in the public process and will be invited to address the Committee regarding each item on the agenda. In order to maintain an accurate and complete record, the following procedural guidelines are being implemented:
1. Speaker Cards – speakers will be asked to print his/her name on a speaker card to address the Committee and provide card to the Clerk prior to the completion of the Staff Report.
2. Speak from the Podium – the Clerk will call speakers to the podium in the order the cards are received.
3. Speakers may address the Committee one time per agenda item.
4. Speakers will have three minutes to address the Committee.
I’m sorry, that is not encouraging, that is discouraging. That is how they hold us off by the forehead. They have a conversation right in front of us, they say the most outrageous stuff, and then they tell us we only get to address them, from a podium, for three minutes, cramming every observation we have on their up to one hour long conversations into three minutes.
For example, during the Internal Affairs discussion on the Social Host ordinance, a group of landlords came in to make it clear they would not tolerate being held financially responsible for tenants’ behavior, they’re landlords not babysitters. Sean Morgan, in an attempt to suck up, kept telling them, “don’t worry, the TENANTS will be held responsible…” He kept using the word “tenants.” We’d just had a long discussion about how the only person who should be held responsible, is the person(s) who provided the alcohol to the underage drinker, and hey, that might be the landlord, or it might be the tenant, or it might be the under-age person’s parents, or a guy he/she met at the liquor store. I wanted to hear the legal lingo – dealing with these fuckers Downtown is a Repo-man grab – you have to get them to SAY IT, and you have to get them to say it in legal terms. Morgan is an ass, how he got a job as a professor at a college mystifies me – he just wasn’t getting it. We wanted to hear “responsible party,” which is what city attorney Roger Wilson finally gave us. There’s legal import to terminology, just like when you accuse somebody of LIBEL! But this idiot thought he had to tell us, they’d stick it to the TENANT, he was just trying to buy us off and shut us up. We had to demand, and that doesn’t happen in a three minute puke-up from the podium, it happens in a give-and-take conversation.
I’ll tell you why they did this – because the people have gotten a little too tired and a little too wise to take any more of their illegal bullshit. People have been packing those little rooms to tell these fuckers where to stick it, and guess what – Brian Nakamure and Scott Gruendl and Mark Sorensen have got some kind of royalty complex – they think people are just supposed to do what they say without asking questions. They don’t like too many questions. And they have some kind of fatal allergy to THE TRUTH.
The people have been overthrown. Long live King Gruendl and his jesters Morgan and Sorensen.
I attended last night’s Chico City Council meeting last night, on a whim, for a short while. It’s good to make yourself physically attend one of these meetings now and then, like cod liver oil, it’s good for your constitution.
The items I was interested in had been held to the end of the agenda – the new employee contracts. The big news is, city employees are being asked to pay their full share of their pension premiums. Whoop-de-fucking-do! That’s only nine percent of the cost of pensions worth 70 – 90 percent of the highest year’s salary, available at age 50 – 60 years. Life expectancy in the United States, according to Wikipedia, is about 78 and a half. So, on average, we will pay these folks almost a full salary, for DOING NOTHING, for an average of 28 and a half years. And yeah, we pay their health benefits and their rest home insurance too.
Sure they will make new hires pay 50 percent. Another can of worms hits the floor. First of all, how would you feel toward your co-workers knowing fully well you pay 50 percent of your pension and they only pay nine? Come on – I feel that is setting up a hostile work environment, how could anybody be so stupid or insensitive to think something like this is okay? Well, I guess the same folks who think it’s okay for Todd Booth to carry a gun and represent the city of Chico, there’s your answer.
Second, this plan will only work if they fire all existing employees and hire new ones. Fat chance.
I knew I wouldn’t be able to stay for that issue, so I’d written an e-mail to council ahead, telling them they needed to make the contracts only good for year, and then we need a financial report about how much money was actually “saved.” I also wanted to thank Michael Jones for the wonderful chart he had made with friends, showing how out of whack our salaries are when compared with other, some of them very spendy, California towns. Unfortunately, I didn’t take my camera. He’d had a beautiful banner made, displaying it on the back of the council chamber. He’d also had postcards made up, already stamped and addressed to each council member. He was handing those out, asking people to sign and send them. He gave me a set, which I sent.
Here’s one of the postcards Michael Jones had made. Speaks for itself. Thanks Michael and Kelly!
When I see that kind of determination, I feel, well, you know:
Michael Jones has been active in Chico for a long time, he could give you a pretty good historical perspective on most of the business before council today. I remember stuff too, and it’s funny to listen to what they say now.
I sat through the annexation conversation, which was interesting because I happen to know a lot of the background on that conversation, I remember when it all happened. I’ve watched it because I’d owned rentals with septic tanks in parts of the county that Tom Lando systematically turned into “county islands” so he could annex them later. For example, at one point, the city just annexed Courtesy Motors, who wanted to expand onto their sewer. Wow, all the sudden, we were in a county pocket, boundaried by a car dealership? In a morning meeting, Lando crowed about the sales tax receipts he’d just stolen from the county!
And Colleen Jarvis was honest at the time – she let everybody know, they were annexing for the property taxes, and they wanted people on sewer to pay for an expansion at the sewer plant, as well as problems with river flow and accidental poop releases that they are still having today.
When I complained about annexation of my properties, they said, “Oh Juanita, you’re going to get all these city services, and you can vote in council elections!” Boy, talk about rainbow promises – here’s a funny example: We were living in a house on Palmetto, and the county had started a makeover that was supposed to be completed by the city, an agreement made over the annexing of the neighborhood. The county started the job, and everything went smoothly – they stripped and resurfaced it, it still looks great! But, on the day that the job was handed over to the city for completion, work came to a halt. Oh oh, we thought, our driveway was still suspended about a foot up in the air, and we’d been cutting across the neighbor’s side yard (with their permission) and exiting by way of their front yard, because it was lower than either driveway. There were three households off our driveway, we’d turned that one neighbor’s yard into a mud slick. It was the rainy season, so the mud went all over the place, all the way up our shared driveway, and out into the construction zone. It made for slippery driving, and forget pedestrian access. A week or so went by and the city just didn’t show up. One night our old neighbor lady had a stoke – and the ambulance could not figure out how to get into our driveway. It was a disaster, all of us were out there trying to get that ambulance across that mud slick, and they didn’t want to come. Finally they got the poor woman out of there, but she didn’t last very long afterward, and I can’t believe the ambulance delay helped her in any way. The next day I called the city, told them what happened – oh, many apologies – but they still didn’t send a crew until the next week.
And now I live on Filbert – we are proud of our potholes, we call them, “vernal pools.” (sarcasm alert) There’s a chronic pot hole near the corner of Filbert and Downing – about 12 years ago, it voided the warranty on my tires – excessive road hazard. They annexed our neighborhood here over five years ago, and you can still look out there and see that same pothole – I call it, “Mooooby Dick! Ye dam-ned whale!”
Oh, but you say, I can vote in city elections! Yeah, that was tasty two years ago, when we kicked the shit out of Measure J, but, over the long run, it’s been a total downer. I voted for Scott Gruendl, Mary Flynn, Tom Nickell, Mark Sorensen, Sean Morgan, Mitt Romney (?!) and some others my brain is protecting me from by forgetting. The only votes I feel good about today are the ones I threw away on Nader – thanks for that Ralph. I am starting to hate voting, I may quit altogether. That carrot has gone sour.
So, this controversy over the annexation of much of Chapmantown, one of the oldest contiguous sections of the city of Chico, has many biting heads. No, I don’t feel any better about being annexed myself. When I lived in the county, I had the sheriff and Station 42. The sheriff’s employees we encountered were great. We also got alot of support from CHP in those days – they came to help a couple of my old neighbors shut down a party house, that was a-may-zing. CHP did that, because we were in the county, now we can’t get them, they tell us to call the Chico PD. Hah!
The fine volunteers of Station 42 put out two fires in my neighborhood within minutes, saved both houses, one of was already burning on the roof. The other fire involved a car parked right next to the house, which left a huge scorch mark but never “engaged” the house. Because Station 42 is there within five minutes, we timed them. When I had an experience with the city, it was more like 10 minutes, and the house was fully engaged and ended up being a total loss. I believe if it hadn’t been for the fast actions of my neighbors, I would have lost my garage that day.
So, when Scott Gruendl protests that he has received “a lot” of comments from Chapmantown residents that they don’t want to be annexed, I say, “who could blame them.” Well, I have to think again.
I owned a house just this side of the city limit in Chapmantown. I had great sewer, great drainage, high curbs, etc. My house was protected. Blocks over, the houses sit in swamps, no sidewalks – one lady came to a meeting to describe the system of planks she has to lay out during rainy weather to get from her front door to her driveway. This also means, raw sewage floating up out of old long untended septic tanks. I’m sure, some of the septic tanks in that part of town are sub-code. And, it’s been documented – the water pipes are leaking toxins into the groundwater over there, and toxins are getting into the drinking water. This I know because friends of mine living on 20th Street received notice that drycleaning fluids had contaminated the city water, and they shouldn’t even shower in it until further notice. Last I heard, the city is making some progress on this issue – but they are waiting for lawsuits against the old businesses to play out, or for grants and funds from the feds and state. In the meantime, they’ve been deferring developer fees, that fund being bottomed out. That’s who is supposed to pay for the sewers and the plumbing for development, the developers. Instead, the city has been giving them a free ride for years, and now they want the taxpayers to foot the bill for clean-up required by poor infrastructural management.
So, yes, in this case – one of the oldest urban areas of town, not an almond orchard dotted neighborhood five miles north of town – I’m for annexation. And I think most of the residents would say so too, given the proper background info and an election to make it respectable. Instead, we get vague reports from Scott Gruendl about residents he’s talked to that don’t want to be annexed. These nameless residents who can’t seem to put comments in writing with a signature, these shadow-puppets, are saying, they like their rural charm! But no names, no phone numbers, no evidence. Just Scott Gruendl’s word. Like they’ll tell you if you try to report something – anecdotal evidence is not acceptable, let’s hear some names, let’s see some e-mails or phone memos Scott.
And excuse the ramble, but then there’s Sorensen. He says we can’t afford to annex Chapmantown? Oh, but we can annex all over North Chico, they’re just chomping at the bit to get out there where the properties are bigger and generate more taxes, but everybody is on a new septic tank, and their houses are not close enough together to warrant sidewalks, so this would be pure profit for the city. They’d be taking in all those expensive properties (prop tax and utility tax) but they wouldn’t have to offer any services. They certainly wouldn’t have to clean up the mess they’ve allowed Chapmantown to become over all these years.
Dan Nguyen-tan was one who told me my services would get better after annexation. Within a couple of years, Nguyen-tan was complaining that the annexed areas had become a drain on Chico, and – GET ALOAD OF THIS! – he and Gruendl and Dave Burkland tried to blame our burgeoning fiscal problems on the annexations! And at the meeting the other night, Ruben Martinez reminded us, our short-lived City Mangler Greg $190,000/year Jones (who retired at 70 percent of that salary having paid only 4 percent toward the pension premiums) tried to tell us that we’d annexed these areas “without any visible means of support.”
That just doesn’t add up to me. Oh sure, you annex millions in property taxes, millions more in sales tax, but the annexed neighborhoods are still looking like third world countries 10 years later? Drive that neighborhood along the freeway, behind East Avenue McDonalds. Go in the daytime, they’ve had strong-arm robberies there during the day. Look at the streets, look at the filth, and ask yourself – “am I in America?” Yeah you are, you’re in the City of Chico. Alabama? Nope, California. Tom Lando’s California. Dave Guzzetti’s California. Jane Dolan’s California.
I mention Lando because he was the puppeteer, but I also mention Guzzetti and Dolan because they’ve been the official face of efforts to stop the annexation of Chapmantown. Dolan even threatened to sue at one point. Schwab and Gruendl both brought her up, but for some reason, refused to mention her name. She was the “county supervisor from that district…”, even though, both Schwab and Gruendl, by his own admission to me, have had dinner many times with Jane and husband Bob in their home.
Oh well, enough of this. This is a ramble. I went to a meeting, so I felt the need to talk about it. Go to a meeting and tell me what you saw.
Did I say going to one of these meetings is good for your constitution? Well, it is. As soon as you get home you are going to want to take a big dump. Works better than poke berries.
It’s good to see other places and how they do things. I just visited a town that declared bankruptcy a few years ago when sued for millions by a developer in a breach of agreement over a land deal. I was surprised to find, they are still standing, but things aren’t exactly good for the little town of Mammoth Lakes.
As I recall, a major factor in that lawsuit was lack of snow for the last few years running. The town depends on tourism, mainly snow tourists, and when they don’t have snow, they don’t get tourists. Most of the people who ski Mammoth can just as easily head for Utah. Tuesday I heard a report on the local news that occupancy, over a period considered Winter vacation by rich people, was only 20 percent, down from 28 percent the same weekend a year ago. Well, I could tell you, from looking, the snow is down about 80 percent, no brainer.
So, they got a perfect lack of storm. Right in the middle of a dry spell, while they held their collective breath trying to stay within a $19 million annual budget, a disgruntled developer decided to sue. I myself would have waited til it started snowing again. Developer lost, and the town was able to divert their bankruptcy proceedings. But, they’re hardly out of the woods, and the workers I saw all acted as though they have a perpetual sword hanging over their heads. They tried to be friendly, but you could tell, it was an effort to put on a smile, not much to smile about when you can’t afford to pay your heating bill. There’s no snow, but it was still in the 30’s during the day. In a place like that, you can’t afford to have a poorly paying job.
All over California, cities and towns are suffering the effects of the Pension Storm. Hey, I been through droughts – back in the 70’s, we said, “Shower with a Friend!” This is a different kind of drought. The public workers have cleaned out the kitty with their outrageous pensions, and here we sit, being told we need to pay more taxes and accept less service in return. All for their outrageous salaries, benefits and pensions. Especially the pensions. That’s the cherry on top for me. When I realize, these people actually believe we owe them a perpetual living, I have a compulsive episode of Archie Bunker behavior. I want to say, “You are a meathead, dead from the neck up, meat… head…”
As usual, Council and Staff are holding the contract talks behind closed doors because they don’t want us to see what a pack of meatheads they are. We see the proposals but we don’t hear the conversations full of threats and rainbow promises. Let’s face it, our council members are afraid of public safety “workers”. In every election, Chico Police Officers’ Association spends the most money. Sometimes they give it directly to the candidate that mouths their line, like that idiot Sean Morgan. Other times they wage an ad campaign threatening to cut off services if they don’t get their contract demands – “The gangs are hiring…” Oh bullshit, you little pussies. I checked into that, and the gangs are not offering don and doff pay, free gym membership, fully-paid health insurance, or pension plans paid 50-100% by the taxpayers. They don’t even have a clubhouse where you can take a shower and send the bill for your hot water to the city of Chico taxpayers. Chico PD is the biggest, best paid, most ridiculously pandered to and most threatening gang in our town, and they’re a lot more exclusive than the little kids they lord over.
Then there’s the fire department. Ask a cop about that – Kirk Trostle said it – they get paid to watch tv, play video games and sleep. We pay 50-100% of their pensions, and most of their health benefits. We even pay for them to be kept in a rest home later, when their kids get sick of them.
I’ve read the new contracts, and I’m not happy about a lot of stuff, including the five year lifetime. I think they should never give more than a year at a time – we’ve been through this so many times. When we allow them to make these longer-term contracts, they end up getting in trouble almost immediately. They never seem to have any foresight, just a big foreskin pulled neatly over their heads. Mole rats.
We need to pay extra attention this election. Please come down to the library tomorrow, 1 pm, to meet a guy who wants to be your tax assessor. Stop voting blind, Mole Rat.
At tomorrow’s city council meeting, there’s a vague item on the agenda regarding a $100,000 budget appropriation from the not-so-aptly-named “Emergency Fund” for another consultant. If you didn’t read the item you might not know, it’s about the garbage franchise zones that Brian Nakamura is trying to flop on us. He’s lied all the way through on this one, telling us alternately, it would get trucks off our streets, bring in fees to fix streets, that it would give us more control over the haulers so they couldn’t use “their old trucks” here, among other accusations, and finally, that the companies would have to perform “free” services, such as street sweeping and emptying the cans in our public parks.
On that last note, I’d like to point out, Park Staff used to empty the trash cans in the park. This involved one or two guys wearing appropriate clothing and gloves, lifting 33 gallon trash bags out of the stationery cans, picking up any errant trash, and tossing it all into the back of a city pick-up truck. Now we have a gi-normous WM truck trolling through the park. They come in on days when the gates are closed, so the driver must have a key to the gate, or a staffer who goes over and lets the truck in and out, I don’t know. The cans are off the road, so the driver can’t get them with the truck – I’ve seen him at 5 Mile. He has to park the truck and walk over to take the bag from the can. I’ve never seen a WM driver pick trash up off the ground, he’s just walked right by it on his way from can to can. I don’t blame them at what they get paid, they shouldn’t have to bend and stoop to pick up trash off the ground.
I’m guessing it’s cheaper to have WM do the parks because their drivers don’t get a fraction of the pay that our park workers got, and they only get the nominal worker’s comp, no benefits or pension. But, the trucks are literally “trashing” the park road, just like they trash streets all over town, and the smell of exhaust hangs in the air for a good 10 minutes after the truck has left.
As for Nakamura’s claim that people have complained there are too many trash trucks on the street, I’ve asked him for those letters, e-mails, transcripts of phone calls – all of which are part of the public record. He has never even answered those requests. I don’t believe he has any such complaints, because as soon as I came at him with that question, he started saying the new fees from the Franchise Agreement would go to fix the streets. Like the Castaways said, “Liar!” The city already gets about $20,000 a year in license fees from the haulers, and this money disappears into salaries and benefits, along with the receipts from the Gas Tax.
Another claim Nakamura made was that our haulers “dump” their old trucks here, bringing in old trucks from the bigger cities, where Nakamura claims the air quality restrictions are higher? Some people will feed you anything, don’t leave your mouth open too long. I wasn’t the only one to call BULLSHIT! here – Joe Matz, from Recology was pretty offended by these accusations, but kept a cool head in reminding us that ALL California has the same air quality and safety restrictions on any motor vehicle, and those accusations were just pulled right out of Brian Nakamura’s ass.
So now Nakamura is desperately trying to tell us that with a FA, he can “make” the haulers do extra chores, like street sweeping, park clean-ups, community clean-ups. No, we will all pay the haulers do that stuff, when we are already paying city staff to do that stuff. We pay for all of that in our property taxes, even those of us who don’t dump our backyard leaves in the street, even those of us who don’t leave trash in the park, even those of us who don’t throw garbage on the ground, but pick up the trash of others and dispose of it in our own garbage cans at home.
Please write letters to council and the newspapers rejecting this garbage franchise. It’s just a sneaky way of getting the ratepayers to pay more taxes to pay for Nakamura’s sweet pension.
Here sits the brain trust of Chico. Be afraid, be very, very afraid.
It was a chipper 38 degrees when I headed Downtown for the monthly Finance Committee meeting, a cold that penetrated two pairs of pants, two shirts and a heavy jacket. It is a trip that would hardly impress my hillbilly relations, but I feel pretty exhilarated when I arrive at the city building, my face stinging, eyeballs watering, my hands frozen, fumbling with the bike lock. It’s good to be awake before you wander into one of these meetings.
They have got a lot better since Chris Constantin arrived, I’ll say. It’s a lot to chew over, some of it hard to understand if you don’t have a degree in administration, but it’s all really important in explaining how our town got into the shape it’s in and why we’re not getting out in any big hurry.
Not long after Constantin came to town, he introduced the nursery words “loosey goosey” into the official fiscal lexicon (I dare you to say that three times, fast!). He was talking about the way this city had grown accustomed to spending money, each department using their own imaginary credit card with no oversight from Jennifer Hennessy, Miss Finance Mis-director. They were just spending as they pleased and handing Hennessy the bill, and she was using her own personal accounting style to stay a hair’s breadth ahead of the bill collector. Of course many of us had imagined something like that was going on, we screamed and yelled for her to present the monthly accounting, and she said it was too much work. Dave Burkland said she didn’t have to do it. This may never have changed if Toby Schindelbeck hadn’t made issue of it during the last election. Council finally leaned on Hennessy, but she still didn’t give the kind of reports Constantin has been giving.
Hennessy liked to give power point presentations with bullet lists and cartoons. A little man standing under a raincloud with the caption, “how did we get here?” Constantin’s reports are dryer and look boring, but contain more meat. If you look at the agenda, available here:
you will see sheet after sheet of figures, monthly revenues and expenditures for each department. When I think how many times Hennessy just flat refused to produce these reports, I get a headache. At first, I was a little intimidated by these stacks of figures, but I just started reading through. Starting with the reports, I just peruse through them, writing down words I don’t understand, then google them.
In short, departments continue to spend money “loosey goosey” without oversight, and, Constantin says, “we’re still letting our costs drive our funding instead of letting our funding drive our costs…”
The problem I have with his statement is the use of the word “costs”. They don’t ever really tell us the true “cost” of anything down there, instead they mean, “price” that they assign stuff, which includes their salaries and benefits. See, this is how 1500 feet of plastic pipe and a couple of hydrants ends up costing $432,000 – they figure in the “overhead” of salaries and benefits of every employee who dotted an ‘i’ on a form having to do with that particular job.
What they talked about for about an hour yesterday was the process by which they transfer money from one fund to another, making it legal to use the money for uses it could not originally be used for. Over at Truth Matters they are discussing the use of sewer funds to fix the streets. Well, you say, they ripped up the streets to fix the sewers, isn’t it appropriate to use the sewer funds to fix them back? No, sorry. There’s a road improvements fund for that purpose, which is fed through stuff like the gas tax, and all kinds of federal and state grants, etc. Unfortunately, Jennifer Hennessy told us at one meeting years ago, that money all went to salaries and benefits, including every dime of that gas tax, which was supposed to be restricted to fixing streets.
I thought the fund raiding would end with Hennessy, but it’s still a matter of everyday business Downtown. Yesterday they discussed “overhead” – salaries and benefits. They discussed the process by which these salaries and benefits are supposed to be charged to the specific project on which an employee is working – like a subdivision. Then the charges would go to the developer who brought the plans in. Let them complain about the salaries. But no, that’s not how it’s happening, because council decided a few years back to defer developer fees until a project is built out. In other words, these developers come and go from the city building, using city staff like their own private toadies, and PAY NOTHING. That’s why the development fund is like, what, $9 million in deficit? And capital projects is another $3.4 million in the hole – I’m sure on that figure, they bounced that around a few times yesterday. So, they spend a lot of time talking yesterday about where they were supposed to get the money to pay salaries and benefits of those staffers remaining employed. They need about $36 million dollars to cover that. Anybody got any ideas?
Staff is chomping at the bit to start the Hwy 32 widening project, not because CalTRANS will sue us if we don’t – that never even comes up. No, they are desperate for grant money to pay salaries. Does Hwy 32 really need widening? No. But the city needs the money like a hype needs a needle. Ruben Martinez said it in exactly so many words – “We need to get $36 million in projects done to meet our budget.”
And Scott Gruendl asked, “How many staffers would we be able to get out of that…”
There it is folks, just what Contantin said earlier, “we’re still letting our costs drive our funding instead of letting our funding drive our costs…” And by “costs” they really mean, staff salaries and benefits.
There was more to this meeting, I’ll get back to it when I get a chance, but for now here’s how I’d describe our city government – a bunch of monkeys in suits moving peas around under walnuts shells, waiting for more peas to appear out of the clear blue sky.
Mary, Quene and Alicia over at Truth Matters have been working really hard to lay out complex issues, I really appreciate the time they are putting into the details of city operations. If you haven’t already read their post on “Remedial Funding,” take a look here:
They have explained how funds are raided, the money jumping from one fund to another faster than a barker’s fingers switching peas under walnut shells. Ah, the electronic age!
I think it’s funny that until Nakamura came along, Mark Sorensen was making big wah-wah about the sewer fund being pilfered, now he’s mum on that subject. What happened to that guy? One of my readers remarked that he never saw anybody go from private citizen to public trough dweller quite as fast as Sorensen.
Chico Taxpayers Association 