Tag Archives: Scott Gruendl Chico City Council

Nakamura and friends want to sell Bidwell Ranch to pay their pension obligation – NO WAY SAN JOSE!

17 Nov

(Chico Enterprise Record) Letter writer Kathy Moran innocuously suggested we sell Bidwell Ranch. Is this just a thought that skittered across her brain, or is this the beginning of a campaign? 

Twice now I’ve heard Brian Nakamura suggest selling Bidwell Ranch. This is just another indication that Nakamura is incompetent to manage our town. He wants a quick fix – what? $20  million or so? To cover a $48 million pension deficit? $20 million is less than half the city’s operating budget for a year.  The money would be gone before the ink dried on the sale agreement. 

He also fails to mention what 1500 homes built on that constricted property would do to traffic, schools, our water system, etc.  He also fails to mention the environmental restrictions.  Scott Gruendl once opined that houses built on that property would be so expensive only the very wealthy could afford them. 

Nakamura will tell us we need the property taxes – to pay his pension and benefits. Nakamura currently pays only four percent of his pension out of his $212,000/year salary. He wants to sell off our resources to enrich himself. 

When asked if he would demand concessions from city employees during current contract talks, Nakamura professed a fear of the police and fire unions. Instead of fixing the root of the problem – over-compensated employees – he wants to empty our cookie jar to keep making the CalPERS payments. 

 We deserve better leadership. 

 Juanita Sumner, Chico Ca

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Hennessy is using city funds like walnut shells to hide and move money

29 Aug

I had a dentist appointment yesterday morning, bright and early, so I thought I’d drop in on the Finance Committee meeting.   There I watched Toby Schindelbeck try to dig a monthly finance report out of Jennifer Hennessy – and that was like pulling teeth.

I’ll tell you something about Jennifer Hennessy – she’s used to getting her way, Daddy’s little (?) girl. When Schindelbeck pressed for those reports, in a very polite and businesslike manner, she started acting like a petulant child, bickering with him about her “interpretation” of the code. She acted as though the code was written by Joseph of Arimathea.

I would recommend everybody read the Charter and Code for the City of Chico, it’s not rocket science. Get a dictionary, just for those $64,000 words. But, it’s very clear, it’s very direct:

“The finance director shall submit to the council through the city manager monthly statements of receipts, disbursements and balances in such form as to show the exact financial condition of the city. At the end of each fiscal year the finance director shall submit a complete and detailed financial statement.” (Article 9, Section 908)

What do you guys read there, any comments? I hear it loud and clear – she’s supposed to show us how much came in, how much went out, and how much is left, EVERY MONTH. She acts as though that’s an unreasonable request, even after the Station 5 fiasco.

How soon we forget? In January of this year, Hennessy had told us everything was DANDY! Then by March we were in DEFICIT.  In July we were closing a fire station that sat watch on the entire east side of town, including all the east side grasslands (meadow foam!) that this council allowed developers to squat on over the last five years. 

Schindelbeck had gone to a lot of trouble, read over reports, graphs, charts, and found figures that don’t match. He had different reports from different staffers that listed different balances in the same funds. He had reports that indicated  questionable transfers between those funds, and he had a report that showed $taff had undertaken a project with a fund that was completely inadequate to fund it.

But, our council seems to have drank Hennessy’s Kool-Aid.  With the spectre of mismanagement standing firmly behind him, Scott Gruendl defended Jennifer Hennessy’s adamant, and I’ll say, BITCHY and CHILDISH, refusal to DO HER $165,000 A YEAR JOB. 

Scott Gruendl went on to explain the practice of “deficit spending.” In his world, spending other people’s money you don’t really have is considered a high art form. In fact, did you know, council members used to get credit cards? Gruendl made such fast use of his credit card, wining and dining at little nooks and crannies all over the Bay Area, that council voted to tear up those cards. Nobody else was using them, Gruendl was partying with his, and then using excuses like, he had to go pick up the “Sister City” plaque that could easily have been shipped for a fraction of the cost of putting him up in a chic boutique in San Fran and sending him to all the  snootiest little eateries. Gruendl is a pig, and he likes to be kept nice and fat.

So, he says, there’s nothing wrong with spending in deficit on stuff like a bike path, buy some guy’s property to run a bike path across, everybody does that when they are poised on the brink of bankruptcy. It’s called an investment in the future – yeah, that property owner’s future just got a lot brighter, wouldn’t you say? 

Did you know, they spent General Fund money finishing up that Hwy 99 bike path – the privately contracted workers were in my neighborhood all one weekend.  Having freshly paved only the exact bike route through my neighborhood of otherwise shredded streets, they sent in a crew to stencil the magical protective bicycle people in the brand new oily surface.  People, not cyclists, but people who occasionally like to be seen on a bike,  seem to think those stencils are magical.  They seem to believe  they can ride right out in the street and those stencils will protect them from the congregation of the Evangelical Free Church over on Filbert! Good luck! 

Hennessy and the rest of them need these projects to attract grants to bring in revenues to pay their salaries and benefits. The grants don’t even start the job – for example, already over $1 MILLION  has been granted on that Downtown remodel, and SPENT, and you see how far it’s gotten. They’re already out of money, and the job will wait until there’s more.  They used the money not for construction – it PG&E you’ve seen hashing up the streets. Construction is really a pittance of the actual cost of these jobs – they spent most of this money on their own salaries and benefits. Ask Hennessy – the entire gas tax, which is legally supposed to be reserved for  capital projects, is spent on salaries and benefits. 

Furthermore, in order to get these grants, the city has to spend money, oftentimes matching the amount of the grant. So, every time you hear they got a grant, what they aren’t telling you is, it’s going to cost you the same amount of money to get it. And, don’t you love the way they act as though these grants just rain like manna from heaven – no, they come out of the taxes you send to the state and feds every year. 

Hennessy said that when Fred Davis ran our town, he only had 10 “funds”. Now there are over 250 funds. Know why? Cause all those “funds” act like walnuts shells – you can HIDE MONEY that way, and transfer it from one “specific” fund to another. That’s the way they will take the phone tax they expect to get out of you and use it for whatever art project or Sustainability scam they please. 

The conversation was getting pretty hot when I noticed the clock – I had to be at the dentist for a good reaming at 9am. Gruendl was telling Schindelbeck, very rudely, that his comments didn’t have anything to do with the subject at hand. I couldn’t take it anymore, so I asked to speak. I told them I agreed with Schindelbeck  – that for exactly all the reasons Miss Malfeasance listed for NOT doing her job, she needed to do it.

They are using this confusing mish-mash t0 move money around to pay their salaries and benefits, that’s what I know. We need to demand not that Hennessy DO her job, but that Hennessy LOSE her job. 

And Gruendl needs to go in 2014, let’s make note of that. 

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