| George had it right. Glory, glory, hallelujah. I have reached the promised land. Last night the City Council voted 6-1 to support the "operating agreement" The Outsiders negotiated over the last 13 months. Tom Nickell was the sole vote against the agreement. But his vote was more an expression against some of the politicking going on. He had seconded, and voted for, Larry Wahl's motion to approve the agreement as it was presented. So did Jim Walker. When that failed 3-4 other discussions ensued. Some of the councilors, reading from a last minute email sent by the Friends of Bidwell Park, tried to change major components of the agreement. Of particular concern to us was a $5,000 annual cap on studies we requested. That's a lot of money, and it's twice what we think the city should spend to monitor the plants and trees at the long course site. Andy Holcombe wanted the cap removed, and Ann Schwab expressed support for removing the cap as well. The city just spent $75,000 on bridge railings. They spent $40,000 looking at plants at Comanche Creek. They allocated $100,000 in 2007 to address legal concerns the last time opponents of disc golf went after one of their studies. We didn't have a lot of faith that being frugal with money we raise would be a top priority at the city. The cap was important, it was a deal killer. And the cap stayed. At the end of the night the agreement remained intact. The main change was that the council ensured that the "short course" would not be improved, and would be removed by 2014... no matter what. Since our plan was to remove it in September this wasn't really a problem. I do feel like a corner has been turned. I also feel like I have writer's block. And a strong desire not to discuss anything related to "city business" for the next few months... maybe longer. So I hope you'll all excuse me if my postings are less frequent, and maybe less on topic than what you're used to. I'm going to enjoy the "summer of Lon" this year, and learn to play frolf. |
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| Big Project. The Manzanita corridor expansion and improvements are taking shape on the east side of town. I thought I'd review some of the components of the project, because I know you guys love that. This information comes from the capital improvements plan (CIP) 2009-2019 (9MEG PDF). First we have to gather all the various strings together. Large projects typically make use of a number of funding sources. The various sources of money associated with fund numbers. Think of each fund as a separate bank account. This project is paid for by funds... Funds associated with the project: 307 - Gas Tax 308 - Street Facility Improvement 322 - Sewer Main Installation 352 - Merged Redevelopment 354 - Not listed 355 - 2001 TARBS Capital Improvement 357 - 2005 TABS Capital Improvement 428 - Not listed 452 - Not listed You can see that there is about $200,000 from funds not described in the CIP. That's weird. These fund numbers can probably be found in the city's list of funds, which is not included in the CIP. There are also projects listed as associated with the Manzanita corridor improvements. These other projects associated with this project include... Projects associated with this project: 10011 - West 8th Ave Reconstruction 12056 - Eaton Road Expansion 15010 - SRH32 Widening 17012 - Vallombrosa Ave Reconstruction I understand the association of the Vallombrosa work, but not the rest. It may be that all of these projects are sharing funds, like the sewer funds. From the actual money spent, about $6,000,000 this project would appear to be under budget. I believe that funds 352, 355, and 357 are all RDA funds. That being the case, this project is primarily funded by the RDA. The RDA includes a 1% allocation for public art. That public art spending is not necessarily tied to capital projects, but... if we assume that 1% of this project funds public art, that means less than $90,000 of this project's RDA funding should be spent on public art. The Manzanita bridge railings cost $75,000. No number has been given for the cost of the art "plan" purchased from an artist consultant in Mexico. I've also not seen a number for what some people are calling the "chocolate cake", or the concrete work around the park signage and at the center of the round-abouts. My guess is that the total cost of artistic embellishments (railing, planning, concrete work) is in the $300K range. That would be much higher than the 1% taken from RDA for public art. Additionally, the RDA funds are distributed by the Art Commission who has never looked at this project or its plans. Nobody on the City Council has ever seen the art plan or costs either. Isn't that strange? Hundreds of thousands spent on an art project planned by an artist living in Mexico that no unpaid official has ever seen. I think that's strange. |
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| A strange object found in the park. While playing at Oak Way last Saturday I ran across a strange and unique object. At first I thought it might be a meteor, but there was no disturbed earth near where it lay. Then I thought it might be an alien spacecraft, but there were no burn marks on the lawn, and nobody in the vicinity was admitting to recent probings. I was stumped. After pondering the enigma for several hours, I began taking measurements with scientific instruments I keep in my disc golf bag. Radiation was a little high, but not dangerous. It seemed to be made of copper, a valuable metal, but not diamond which was my first guess. There was a white residue located both inside and outside what could be described as cutting surfaces. Was this some kind of giant mixer attachment? A margarita blender of the gods? I knew what I had found was something of great value and unique design. I took the artifact to a local DNA sequencing lab located behind Zots in downtown Chico's Garden Walk Mall. Their tests were conclusive. The white powder was primarily bird droppings. The pieces were starting to come together. Could this be a piece of something? Modestly expensive materials, bird fecal residue, and pieces falling off of something larger. My god, it all added up. This was public art! Knowing that, I quickly downloaded my Chico public art reference manual, the RDA 5 Year Plan. Confirmation! This piece of metal, so odd and out-of-place in the park, was the Oak Way Dangle Ball. And it is all mine. Obviously, this is an expensive piece of Chico's history. So I'm willing to sell it to someone for the right price. The Supreme Court's recent upholding of the constitutionality of "Finders Keepers, Losers Weepers" reinforces my legal ownership of this art piece. Now to set a price... The "Spirit Flags", an homage to the movie "This is Spinaltap" cost $30,000. The downtown chess tables, which also came with separating pieces went for $65,000. And the new iron railings designed to keep horses from falling off the expanded bridge off Manzinita Ave cost $75,000. I believe that the "Spiral" at Oak Way, shown above, cost in the area of $25,000. But the dangle ball really is the heart of that project. I'm going to set my starting price at $5,000. Things I'll take in trade include... 1. 500 hours of babysitting service 2. 30 miles of rickshaw rides 3. a 1964 convertible GTO 4. 200 Kleen Kanteens delivered to one Park Commissioner's house 5. changing the #3 B-Line paint job to say "Ruby Bus" 6. or... your best offer Make an offer today, because this item will be going fast. |
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| A trapped consumer. I've got one suggestion for what to advertise at this shelter if you want to reap serious sales. Play-Doh. Stott Outdoor Advertising recently installed a new bus stop where Ruby and I catch the B-Line. I hope this private / public partnership works. As a regular B-Line rider I can attest to the fact that not enough people are taking the bus to pay for the infrastructure. Companies like Stott that provide bus shelters in exchange for advertising space are at least doing me a favor. Prior to the shelter being placed we stood and waited for the bus, which usually came, on a patch of dirt. In wet weather it was a patch of mud. It was a lot like a tee-pad on the disc golf course. Now, in inclement weather we can at least duck out of the wind and avoid the full brunt of any precipitation. I take the B-Line to work at least twice a week during winter/wet months. These are the days the Ruby goes to work with me. During warmer weather I ride my bike and just tie her to the hood. Who else takes the B-Line? Without brandishing too many stereotypes, I see students and people that appear to be low income earners. A higher percentage of B-Liners smoke than I see in the broader community. I never see any floppy-hat, Subaru driving, world-saving types on the bus. Maybe they don't take the #3. But like the commercials say, the B-Line is clean, on-time, and does reach a number of convenient areas in Chico. Try it. You might like it. And thanks to Stott for stepping up and doing something that local government and BCAG had not been able to do, provide shelter from the savaging blow of Chico's tumultuous April showers. |
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| Spice Girls shoot their video comeback in Chico. Photo journalist Gregg Payne shot this video of the famous Spice Girls filming a video in Chico. In the background is the famous Beatle's Abbey Road mural, also painted by Payne. Personally, I find the behavior of these young women appalling. It's hard to fathom a greater example of the complete lack of taste on exhibition by these girls. By doing this they promote dangerous behavior out of touch with our community standards. How dare they dance in front of an image of Paul McCartney carrying a cigarette. Either intentionally or not, they are promoting smoking by doing so. Terrible. |
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| A less expensive health plan that I currently have. I think this is a CI exclusive scoop. I haven't seen it anywhere else. I'd like to thank Dr. Evil for pointing this out to me. You know who you are... The city has received notice from its health insurance provider that this year's costs will increase by 40%. This comes at a time when they are already trying furiously to close a large deficit. I had heard that something was afoot regarding an unexpected increase in these costs, and Finance Director Jennifer Hennessy confirmed the increase. The city has formed an "insurance committee" made of of members of each of the 8 employee groups, City Councilors, and retirees, to review alternate insurance options. They are looking at a variety of plans, and the exact cost incurred by this increase will not be known for some time. Hennessy stated that a change in plans would require a "citywide" vote. I assume she was referring to a vote by all city employees. I asked a number of follow up questions, but they were not answered by press time. Press time is when I get up, make some coffee, read the local news, scratch my head, scratch other parts of me, and start writing. Since it is Saturday, press time is running a little late. The unanswered questions, that were not available by "press time" included... 1. Who is the insurance provider? 2. Did they give a reason for the increase? 3. What does a 40% increase equate to in dollars? 4. What portion of that increase comes from the General Fund? Since that information was not made available to me I'll do my best to try to answer my unanswered questions. 1. Who is the insurance provider? Who knows, but there are only a handful providers in California. These include Aetna and Blue Shield. Anthem Blue Cross of California recently increased rates by 39%, and may be the city's provider. 2. Did they give a reason for the increase? California insurance providers are required by law to spend at least 70% of their premiums on health claims. That means that 70% of every dollar increase goes to claims, the rest could go to the bureaucracy required by the government. Regardless of the reason for the increase the money would be spent primarily on medical costs incurred by policy holders. 3. What does a 40% increase equate to in dollars? The city describes it's employee health benefits like this... "At the time of this recruitment, the City provides a maximum of $921.93 towards major medical and dental benefits to all full-time employees and their dependents. Employee cost varies depending on the employee’s choice of health plan. A vision plan is also provided." I assume that they mean a maximum of $921.93 per month per full-time employee. A 40% increase would mean a maximum of ~$1,300 per full-time employee. Not all employees receive this maximum. The city lists its expenses in the General Fund as "salaries and benefits". There is no break down of salary, retirement, or health insurance costs that I could find. In 2008 the total cost of salaries and benefits was ~$39 million. The total employee salaries from the employee pay spreadsheet was $36 million. So we can estimate the benefits portion of the salary and benefits at $3 million. I don't believe that all of that would be health insurance. But let's say half of it is health insurance. That would be an unexpected cost of $600K.. Looking at it another way, if we estimate that the city has 400 full time employees, and that the cost increase of ~$360/month applied across all of them, we seen an increase of $1.728 million. So I'm going to estimate the increased health insurance cost to the city as $1.25 million. I could be totally wrong, but that's how it looks from my laptop this Saturday morning. 4. What portion of that increase comes from the General Fund? I'm going to go with 100%, but the city budget is a very complicated animal, so that could be wrong as well. Assuming it is 100%, and my estimate from #3 is in the ballpark, this represents a 2.5% increase in expenses. Summary: The projected revenue for 2010-11 is $39.7 million. The projected expenses are $46.5 million. That's a deficit of ~$6.8 million. Adding another $1.25 million to that deficit is a substantial problem. It increases the deficit by more than 20%. I believe the solution will be that the city employees have to adopt a less expensive health insurance plan with fewer benefits. It sounds like they will have to vote on whether or not to do that. The alternative would be to require the city to honor its contracts and cut employees in order to maintain the existing health insurance benefits. Update: The ER is reporting on this today. Here is their story. The estimate on the cost increase from the city is $900K. So I was in the ballpark, if a tad high. But I'll pat myself on the back for solid deductive reasoning. Update 2: I got a response from the city on the 5th. The total cost of the 40% increase is $2 million. The amount impacting the General/Park Funds is $900K. The carrier is Blue Shield. The reason for the increase was a mostly market driven, but the city had additional claims which caused their costs to increase above and beyond the market driven increases. |
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| Powerful Excel analysis of things needing analysis . I've been curious for a while how accurate the city budget process has been over the last few years. It seems like all of the revenue estimates end up too high, and all of the expense estimates fall short. There would seem to be a few possible causes of bad financial estimates at the city level. 1. they're just not very good at estimating their income and expenses 2. the current financial turmoil is making even short term analysis difficult to accomplish 3. they do a poor job of explaining how the budget works and why estimates are expected to be off the mark By "they" I mean the city. I think we can all agree that #2 is a true statement. #3 might be true, but I don't think our current budget problems could be considered just a lack of communication. So in order to find out whether or not #1 was true, I took the last 5 city budgets and graphed the actual income and expenses along with the estimates for future income and expenses. Those graphs are above. I should also take a moment to qualify my statement that "they're just not very good" at estimates. I'm not qualified to say exactly how good they can be. Maybe it's an impossible task. But I think we can determine whether or not their estimates are historically accurate. For income we see that in 2004-6 they underestimated income. The 2006-08 biennial budget was pretty close to dead-on, and then they totally missed the decline in income caused by the economic downturn. What is interesting to me, is that if the City spent money based on their 2004-5 estimates, if they followed that trajectory, there would be no budget problems. There would probably not be a need for RDA spending. A lesson they could learn is the benefit of frugality. Not spending every dime received would have avoided most budget problems we are now facing. The credit binge, exemplified by the housing market in the private sector, and mirrored by the extensive RDA use in the public sector, caused Chico to miss an opportunity to set aside resources for the current rainy day. I think the top graph shows that the ability to estimate revenue even out to a couple of years can be off by as much as 10%. The bottom graph shows that in 2003-4 the estimated expenses were pretty close to actual expenses. Just a couple of years later the trend of accelerating expenses blew past those estimated in the 2004-5 and 2005-6 budgets. Again, the 2006-08 biennial budget was pretty much dead on. But many of the documents I looked at had the expense estimates off by as much as 10%. A worst case scenario would put income down 10% from planned estimates, and expenses up 10%. That would create a 20% error, or close to $10,000,000 deficit. We're currently at about $5,000,000, or 10%. I think the city has shown that it cannot estimate income or expenses with an accuracy of greater than +/-10%. They should budget based on that reality. |
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| Campaign posters for Dan Nguyen-Tan . Update:Photo credit - Kristin Tieche, founder of the bicycle fashion and lifestyle blog Velo Vogue. She deserves massive praise for taking some fabulous photos of our favorite ex-councilor Dan "the-man" Nguyen-Tan. Visit her web site. Do it now, dammit. http://velovogue.blogspot.com/2010/03/vv-profile-dan-nguyen-tan.html
Please note that she did not create the campaign posters. Those were done by a professional political design team out of northern Lichtenstein. I just got word from my informant on the street, Huggy Bear, that Dan Nguyen-Tan is moving back to Chico this summer. Nguyen-Tan, a former city councilor and possibly the greatest blogger ever produced by Chico's Norcal Blogs, is returning to run for council again in 2010. Somebody in the City Clerk's office emailed me a scanned copy of his campaign filings. They're not even on the city web site yet. This is no joke. You heard this here first, and it's yet another powerful scoop coming from the people at CI. Since I know Dan's campaign manager I was also able to procure some preliminary marketing material. It looks like he's going for the hip, fashionable, bike-centric vote. I think they've got the kind of ideas in that campaign that win elections. Go Dan go! |
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| Rashell and Holden. I'd like to congratulate my friend Rashell Brobst for being named the new CEO of the Boys and Girls Club of The North Valley. She replaces Maureen Pierce who did an outstanding job with this premier non-profit organization. From what I understand Pierce is moving out of the area. A couple of months ago I took my daughter to Mom's to try out the new restaurant. Mom's decor is covered with pictures of women with children, who I assume are moms. I hope they are not photos of people posing as moms to get their pictures posted. The photos were solicited from local people while the restaurant was being put together. On the way out of Mom's Ruby started babbling about Holden, a friend of hers. To my surprise, out of the hundred or so framed 4"x6" photos we passed, she spotted the one above. The picture is of Rashell and her 3 year-old Holden. If you look close you can see that Rashell is wearing a Boys and Girls Club T-shirt. So even when promoting her official position as CEO of Holden, she was giving subliminal nod to the B and G club. That's dedication. Rashell will do a great job in her new role. And the Boys and Girls Club is lucky to be able to transition from one effective CEO to another. Hats off to the board of directors for making the right choice. In other boys and girls associated news, local landscape architect Tom Phelps' design for the changes to Children's Playground is on the city ftp site. I've added some of the images of the design below. Phelps also did the little garden across from Colliers, Ringell Park (don't quote me on the spelling). I wish our community would do more than just place prefabricated jungle gyms at children play areas. I don't think these stimulate the imagination to the extent that a thematic design can. I know Phelps was given direction on what to place at the site, including a price range for specific kinds of play structures. Based on that reality I think his design is well done. But imagine if it were a giant boat, or a huge pile of sand surrounded by simulated back-hoes, or an old fashioned looking fort. There's so much we could do to differentiate our parks if we quit looking at them as Habitrails for kids. Even with my nattering naybob comments, local boys and girls should rejoice as this new park designed by Mr. Phelps is built. |
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| T-shirts I'd like to wear today. My God! I went to the Bataan Death Meeting last night. The Park Commission approved hot dogs and a wave boarding event in the park. They also approved the operating agreement our group has been negotiating for about a year. I didn't think the wake boarding event had a chance. I found some commssioner's concerns over loud music and commercialization of the park to be on the wrong side of hypocrisy. I've attended marathons, half-marathons, 4th of July celebrations, plays, and faires that all sold items and had loud music. The wake board event is not particularly new in this regard. I kind of got the feeling that the problem some had with the event was that it would be a little too x-gamee. That maybe the youthful entrepreneurialism of the proposal wasn't their cup of herbal tea. It seemed touch-and-go for a minute there, but I think the Commission made the right decision, which was to give the event a chance. It's funny to watch group decision making. It's not always pretty, and I think the further the group is from doing the work related to their decisions, the worse their decisions become. I used to work (as a consultant) for a company that had a lot of meetings. It seems like they spent more time in meetings than in actually doing anything. That seems to be the life's blood of local government decision making. It's slow, inefficent, and sometimes asks really stupid questions. But I guess it's better than a dictatorship. I haven't decided if it's better than a monarchy yet. Kings are pretty cool, what with their beards, scepters, halberds and beheadings. My son, Becket, attended last night's meeting with me. He said he wanted to be there when the Park Commission approved the operating agreement. It's nice that he cared. Unfortunately, the Bataan Death Meeting probably burned that emotion from the tiny, sleep-deprived, husk that I tossed into his bed at 11PM. For me, there were two highlights of last night's meeting. First, the opponents of disc golf got up and said the same things they've been saying for the last few years, and seemed to have missed the point that the rest of us have moved on. It's important that some things in life remain constant. The second was that the Commission Chair, Jamison Watts, seemed to hit a physical wall at 10PM when he wanted to postpone parts of the meeting. He was forced to push on. As someone who has sat through so many painfully long meetings, it was devilishly nice to see the shoe on the other foot, if only briefly. I'm going to suggest that the city place Snickers bars under glass with a little hammer next to each microphone. In the future the decision makers can get a quick blood sugar boost during emergency deliberations. My thanks go out to Todd Tosterone who probably had to go to work this morning at about 3AM, Preston, Gregg, Jennifer, and Becket for keeping me company. |
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About Me: Fasten your seatbelts for an exhilarating trip through Chico's public policy; I guarantee it's marginally better than public access TV.
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