Chico City Council Recap: March 7, 2023

“Chaotic.” That, in a word, encapsulates Tuesday night’s meeting of the Chico City Council.”

CHICO — “Chaotic.” That, in a word, encapsulates Tuesday night’s meeting of the Chico City Council.”

“…councilors preempted each other with substitute motions, at one point reaching the procedural limit of three at the same time. Colleagues chided colleagues. Speakers got personal with the vice mayor and a nominated commissioner. The former mayor on the dais consistently sought to expedite votes; multiple councilors sought to rein in proceedings by interjecting objections.”

“‘Interesting meeting we had tonight,’ Mayor Andrew Coolidge said later. ‘A little chaotic at times. Definitely some interesting conversations and alliances that had not presented themselves before. I can’t remember any time that we had votes like that.’”

As far as prose goes, I would say our intrepid reporter Evan Tuchinsky captured the atmosphere pretty well.  But he is only talking about chaos on the dais, of which he says, “Chippy moments nonetheless emerged.” You don’t hear council moments described as “chippy” very often, but I have to say, that’s a pretty good description of what followed. For example, “Morgan rebutted council newcomers Tom van Overbeek and Winslow with sarcasm.” OK, that’s pretty fun.

I presume, buttressed by my own observations, that when Coolidge refers to “alliances that had not presented themselves before,” he speaks of the growing evidence of the “closeness” of Tom Van Overbeek and Addison Winslow.  Besides sharing duck dinners, they also teamed up against Kasey on the Internal Affairs committee to unravel the deal Sean Morgan constructed to kill the “Quality of Life Commission” idea last summer. 

The minute order issued by the City Council at that time was the direction to Internal Affairs to “get it done,” but newcomer Tom, with obvious prearrangement with Addison, thought the better thing to do was just ignore that and go their own way, and kill it altogether.  Now we get a chance to see if Morgan will be “chippy” with Van Overbeek over his open defiance of Sean’s “compromise.”

While we should expect an explanation from Tom, based on the way things have been going lately, I suspect what is really going on will be as obscured as the fiasco over commission appointments Tuesday night.  Here is a little history to salt your pork.

When the 2018 election rendered newly elected Kasey Reynolds a 5-2 minority with Morgan, the first thing they did was strip Kasey of her right to appoint ANY commissioners.  Ann Schwab led the effort, endorsed by the majority, to appoint all commissioners on a majority vote. This meant that for 4 years, Kasey had no appointments at all.  Zero.  When the election turned in 2020, that majority restored the tradition of councilmember appointments with majority ratification of the entire council.

Tuesday’s process of nomination and vote turned into a performance by Abbot and Costello, “Who’s on First.”  Each council member nominated someone and submitted it to a list.  Then the list was submitted to the Council for vote and ratification. That’s when the performance really took off.

First, a motion to appoint three people, then a substitute motion with a substitution, then a third with a different list, then a fourth, but that’s not legal, so someone withdrew their motion, and then a third substitute motion identical to the original, then a discussion that resembled trying to untangle a ball of yarn after my dog Louie had chased it around the yard.  For those old enough to remember Professor Irwin Corey, the mad professor who could prove that 10+10 was 112, well it was like that.

The odd thing, but the tradition this council has firmly established, is to leave the public entirely out of the process.  It is like they were speaking a made-up language that only the “twins” understand.  Only the next day did any of us get a hint of what was going on. The nominee by Addison has a rather unsavory history when it comes to topics like the lawsuit over Bruce road expansion, other CEQA claims against a local developer in Stonegate, and involvement in the anti-Valley’s Edge referendum.  For those involved in the land-use planning process, it appears Addison invited the Wicked Witch of East to a Munchkin picnic.  I can’t wait to see how this one plays out.

But sitting in the audience or watching at home, we had no clue what was going on.  That is becoming the “business as usual” that we have been trained to expect.  We know something is going on, but we are not entitled to know what it is. After it’s all over, we find out it was a big mistake.

In everything the city does, there is an economic dimension, legal dimension, and political dimension. They are all important.  We see the legal/political dynamic playing out in Warren. The road improvement proposal is a good example of the economic/political dynamic.

Mark Sorensen developed a plan for spending $ 4 million of anticipated sales taxes on making road improvements by this summer, based on the best use of that money for the most improvement and long-term efficiency.  It turns out that if you put cheap but durable slurry on roads that are not terrible,  you save money in the long run because you get another 10 years out of those roads and they stay in the top 25% of our roads by condition.

The roads that are really crappy, like the ones in my neighborhood in the Avenues, it is 4x or even 10X more expensive per mile, and since you are tearing up the roads to rebuild them, it has to be coordinated with other projects, like sewer line replacement.

When you run that through the spreadsheet, you end up spending $ 4 million on a small neighborhood in one of the more affluent areas with pretty good roads by Chico standards. While it makes good economic sense to do so, the politics suck.  I can hear my neighbors (and Addison’s) complaining that it’s ok to keep nice neighborhoods nice, but those that have fallen into disrepair from neglect, get neglected even more.

The problem is there is no good solution here, only tradeoffs, and no one is going to be happy no matter what. So naturally, no one was happy on the council, either.  Yes, they all care about being good money managers, but they are also politicians. Even Andrew understood the “optics are terrible.”  I have no idea how this will work out, but if there was ever a time to be crazy-confused about something, Tuesday was your day!

But let me turn my attention to the audience/speakers for a moment.  I am awed at the ability of a particular political interest group to control the narratives of every conversation. If we want to talk about safety, the usual suspects come out in force to talk about homelessness. If we want to talk about quality of life, the advocates come out in force to talk about “criminalizing the homeless.” When we want to talk about the structure of commissions, and one of them happens to be a darling of the left, the Climate Action Commission, they come out in force to lecture us on climate change, and the self-induced anxiety we are creating by even talking about deemphasizing their good work and high status.  Mark Stemen’s signature was all over that stunt.

We had tears, we had sermons, we had doomsday predictions, we had admonishments for allowing the earth to die a horrid and painful death, and we got scolded for not saving the world fast enough, which makes some of the youngest speakers anxious and nervous, and that is not fair.  All of this is because the city wanted to look at the efficiency of how we use and staff commissions, compared to the work they do.  In reality, they cancel as many meetings as they hold.

This is particularly ironic given that not a single commission, including Arts, Climate, Parks, and Playgrounds, nor any others were offered up to the altar of sacrifice.  Any council member could have made a motion to terminate a commission, just as they did for the Climate Commission recently, but chickened out at the last minute.  Yet, while the existing commissions are sacred cows, a voter-demanded and Council-ordered committee to simply discuss opportunities for improving the quality of life in Chico is just too much and was killed at birth. That story is not over, but explain this to me.

Why is talking about art in a Commission just fine, even though art is only part of the “beauty” component of quality of life, but including “safety, cleanliness and economic vitality” in the discussion is just too far beyond the pale?  “Art” is not the only expression of beauty.  Just maybe, could park rehabilitation after the devastation of the Brown New Deal contributes to both “clean” and “beautiful,” and maybe contribute to “safety” (barefoot children) and “economic vitality” (having a safe place for kids to play is quite a draw for families and business)??  Asking for a friend.

I often wonder whether I’m just too dumb or blind to figure out what is going on, and then a meeting like this one comes along, raising the absurd farce to comical levels, and all I can do is walk out shaking my head.

To say we have a dysfunctional family is about the kindest way I can put it.  I could say the “left hand doesn’t know the right,” but it was more like “Hand? What’s a hand??”

In the words of our Mayor, the meeting was “a little chaotic at times.”