Commission Impossible

Hi Lon,

200 acres of houses. How many cars is that? I'm curious because most of them would be "trickling" right by my driveway, at least 5 days a week, two to four times a day. We get the "trickle" on weekends, but the timing is not so rigid.

Nobody ever addresses that aspect of the Bidwell Ranch rant. People want to whine and complain about the traffic as it steadily worsens - I still laugh when I think about Dave Little's column about taking his kids to school. Nobody ever sees themselves as part of the problem. Neither does anybody seem to get the relationship between new subdivisions and traffic problems. Bidwell Ranch will exacerbate the problems we already have on Manzanita, East, 32, etc, and pour right through town, ruining dozens of quiet neighborhoods in it's wake.

You think BR residents will ride their bikes? I sat at a meeting a couple of years ago and listened as a local bicycle enthusiast recounted his adventures trying to get out of that Upper Park turnoff one busy afternoon. He said the cross traffic was so bad, he sat there on his bike for almost 15 minutes, waiting for a break.

As you know, when a cyclist makes a poor judgement or can't move quickly enough, it's usually the death penalty for her. Cycling becomes less of an option for Chicoans with every subdivision.

By the way, were you the smiling friendly man with the hat at Safeway yesterday? If so, "Hi" right back at you. I'm sorry if I'm not friendly in public anymore, Chico hasn't been that kind of town for quite some time. Something happened about 50,000 people/cars ago.

Hey Jaunita,

Wasn't me, but if I see you I will say hi. That's one of the reasons I stayed in Chico.

Those homes that didn't get built in Bidwell Ranch got built in my backyard. All snuggled up to the sacred greenline. I'm sure the traffic over at Emma Wilson won't get any worse.

And to answer your question... yes everyone in Bidwell Ranch will ride their bikes to work.

Any cyclist not smart enough to ride 3 minutes over to Vallombrosa where there's a 4-way stop deserves to get stuck in traffic. How long would he have waited? What if he starved to death trying to get across the street?

I can ride 4 miles to work and only have to navigate 3 traffic signals. I can ride 10 miles to upperpark and only have to navigate 6 or so signals/stops. This town accomodates cyclists better than most.

It doesn't accomodate the 2-3% growth that occurs annually. Which is why traffic sucks.

Yeah, everybody knows you are perfect Ron, and you live your life the way everybody should! "Anybody stupid enough..." It's always nice to have a conversation with a "small town" guy like you.

I'm sorry about the houses in your back yard - maybe you should have got off your blob and mobilized your neighbors. My neighbors at least got a compromise, and we started a conversation that resulted in a moratorium on developing flag lots. If you really give a flap about the Green Line, why haven't you done something? Pressure your buddy Bertagna to stop saying he'd move it to accomodate development. Like I said, people like you love to complain after they've done nothing. And what a hypocrite you are - when I was a kid, your neighborhood was orchards.

The 2-3 percent growth occurs because the houses are built. How else can people move here? The jobs are taken by the people who move here. Like the guy who appealed DiGiovanni's row houses - trasferred here in his job with Cal Water, who never hires locally as far as I can tell, and then moved his family right into a new Doe Mill house. A few years later, he hates his lifestyle in his dinky little house and screams foul. What can I say - these new people seem to have 20-20 hindsight, but no foresight whatsoever.

Just like you. Sure, enjoy those intersections now, Mr. Obnoxious, in a few years, you won't be able to get through them in a car. Wait until you are behind your kid on a bike - say goodbye to what's left of your hair.

Cronkite was right.

Maybe I won't say hi.

Wow, such wit and insight is tough to follow.

I think somebody needs a hug.

A good environmentalist friend of mine compared mitigation banks to the old Catholic Church "indulgences". I'd never heard of them, so I looked it up. Pretty funny parallel.

People with enough money could afford forgiveness of any sins. As long as they pay off the institution in control of their forgiveness.

Mr. Payne is right, it's just "buying redemption." I never said I was for the mitigation bank, I just brought up the point that 200 acres of housing would create a traffic flood through my neighborhood, as well as others.

The land could have been added to the park, but instead of joining those citizens who called for that, you and your friends just kept screaming "Sell it!". Larry Wahl told me he wanted it preserved as flyover space, then less than a week later he was dragging Rick Colletti into the council chambers to make a pitch to develop the hell out of it.

I'll tell you one thing I haven't been hearing lately, and that's the old catchphrase "housing crisis." Yeah, there's a different kind of "housing crisis" now, and the council doesn't want to talk about it.

I mentioned that there are "For Sale" signs all over town - "Reduced!". There's your housing crisis - people have borrowed on their houses, and now they can't pay the loans. They can't sell because their houses are 65 percent over-inflated. Watch, the foreclosures are coming, to a neighborhood near you!

Ever try to sell a 80 year old house with a new subdivision down the street? No matter that those houses are not built half as well and will not age as well as your old treasure - these new people want new looking stuff. I'll tell you something else funny - the first people to move into that new Parkwood subdivision down my street are already complaining to anybody who will listen about how crappy their $500,000+ house really is. And the first thing they did was plant an ugly straggly box hedge across their 4 foot setback from the street. Yeah, Bertagna not only permitted the concessions to build those houses, some of which are built right up to the sidewalk, but he also berated my neighbors as NIMBY's. I can't tell you how many votes he lost that night. I'm afraid Mo is going to mop the floor with him in November.

So, I'll ask one more time before I stop banging my head against your good old boy network: who's making this "pressure to develop"? No answer, just cheesy jokes and insults. You brought it up in the first place. If you're going to drag out the old Bidwell Ranch horse, at least you could try to get him all the way around the track, just once. Instead, you avoid my perfectly legitimate questions, censor my posts, and run the posts that agree with you.

Just once, I would like to have a real conversation about these issues, but as soon as I ask those questions, everybody's underwear goes right into a knot.

Where's that "wit and insight"? What ever happened to those patriot values? Yadda, yadda, yadda, talk is cheap. Excuse me while I get out my little violin - I want to serenade you and Mr. Payne while he gives you a warm fuzzy hug. You boys play nice and look both ways when you are crossing Hwy 32 at the paint ball course.

Hi Gregg,

That is a good parallel.

I'm not sure if you were offering me a hug, but I could sure use one. Blogging is such an emotional drain.

It is likely that the only "entity" who will have access to the mitigation bank credits for development will be the City of Chico.

They plan to use them to develop the west side of the airport.

So apparantly the $10million income to the mitigation bank comes from us.

We buy the land, pay a non-profit to manage it, and then pay them to allow us to use it to develop on other sensitive land that we can later lease to businesses. This seems too complicated and reminds me of a shell game. I doubt anyone in the press will ever bother to get all of the details.

This is one step beyond Catholic indulgences. In this instance the rich guy performing the sin is the city, and it's paying itself for absolution.

Jaunita,

I'm limiting your future posts to 50 words or 10 insults. Whichever comes first.

Lon

Is there some bi-polar relationship going on here or am I just not getting it...love the limits set Lon - good stuff

Still evading my questions. I'd like to point out, meine fuhrer, that my first post was pretty short and contained no insults. You seem to be able to dish it out pretty good, but are unable to take it. If you can't take the heat, stay out of Bidwell Ranch.

Jaunita,

Don’t confuse strong desire not to talk to you with a fear of your questions. It seems that anyone who does talk to you becomes the object of your ire. Throwing out a Nazi innuendo really was the icing on the cake.

Bidwell Ranch is part of Bidwell Park:
Early on the Bidwell Ranch issue was about stopping growth and saving an area that was described (incorrectly) as Bidwell Park. Bidwell Ranch was never part of Bidwell Park, and now none of it will ever be added to Bidwell Park. Some of it should have been.

Bidwell Ranch as a mitigation bank is economically neutral:
Bidwell Ranch is going to be given to a non-profit and managed as a preserve (little public access). The City bought the land for a large sum of money. The city will be the primary developer using the mitigation bank credits when it develops the West side of the airport. So the $10million income to the bank will come from taxpayers. In the end the City will own the developed airport land and can collect lease money on it, it will not own Bidwell Ranch. I question the economics of this plan; so far the expenses seem to reach ~$20,000,000 and I’ve seen no balancing income.

A mitigation bank appears to be an economic loss.

Bidwell Ranch saves the environment:
If Bidwell Ranch was ever about saving the environment, then the mitigation bank is about allowing the destruction of the environment for financial benefit. Environmentalists would be up in arms if the beneficiary of the mitigation bank was a private developer. They are two-faced on this topic. However, if the conservatives win the council I suspect that there would be an effort to stop development at the airport.

Bidwell Ranch as a mitigation bank does not protect the environment.

Not developing Bidwell Ranch stops growth:
No candidate for City Council disputes that Chico will have a population of around 135,000 in 20 years. In order to keep the number of cars on the street at the current level we would need to convince those extra 55,000 people to ride bikes everywhere. Chico is already considered a very bike friendly town, and public transportation is well funded. We can make improvements in alternative transportation like implementing the existing bike plan. However, the 9 economic corridors in the city demand that planning must include road improvements for people to get to work, shopping, and schools. Not planning for the additional cars on our streets would be stupid.

Some proponents of not developing Bidwell Ranch will say that the 15 remaining high density infill projects, existing infill projects, and the Northwest Specific Plan (800 homes) make up for the housing lost in Bidwell Ranch. They wouldn’t make that argument unless they felt the housing supply was an issue. So not developing Bidwell Ranch has not stopped growth. It has put pressure on developing in the foothills and near the greenline, but those pressures would have come anyway as the years went by.

Not developing a portion of Bidwell Ranch has not stopped growth.

Supply and demand don’t affect the housing market:
People that believe this are wrong. The mayor has proposed that increasing the average income in our city will be more effective at creating affordable housing than building more homes. That would be true in a closed system, where only Chicoans are shopping for housing. We still have people moving to Chico who are able to leverage higher incomes and home values from other areas of the state and this area is very affordable to them.

People that believe that additional housing built over the last decade has not had an effect of decreasing the cost of homes don’t understand economics either. The cost of homes would have been much higher if supply was not increased. The biggest problem with recent home purchases is the questionable loan practices. Housing costs will stagnate or decrease in the next few years because supply has exceeded demand.

A true understanding of supply and demand would provide incentives for builders to build housing today when supply is high and demand low. That would further depress home costs, and allow more people to get into the home ownership club. But builders and banks won’t spend money, unless they stand to profit from it.

Supply and demand are the primary factors in housing costs. We may not have the capacity (land) or desire to create enough supply to depress housing costs.

Stopping growth completely and holding home costs to today’s value is an option:
A moratorium on growth would be illegal, and would require an eminent domain “take� of private property. The $17,000,000 lawsuit pending against the City of Chico is the result of one of these actions. We’ll see if that turns out to be good policy.

To keep homes at today’s value you would also have to hold back rental rates, prevent people from making large value added improvements to the homes they live in, and build a fence around Chico to keep out-of-towners with money from moving in.

Chico will continue to grow, and politicians that don't plan for it, but instead throw out "feel-good" proposals, aren't doing anyone any favors.

Bidwell Ranch was not an asset worthy of more discussion:
I can buy into the preference to protect vernal pools near Bidwell Park (versus the airport) through a mitigation bank. I can buy into a desire to add parts of Bidwell Ranch to Bidwell Park. And I can buy into the idea of building homes in Bidwell Ranch, if that money went into Chico’s park system and was a net income of at least $20,000,000.

It seems like all three of those things were possible at one time. Bidwell Ranch was worthy of more discussion. That discussion may have ended where we are today, but it should have been had.

So, Jaunita, you are welcome to your opinion. And now you have mine. And I gave it without calling anyone a Nazi.

Paul,

I'm extending you unlimited post and insult priviledges.

And while you probably don't need to take advantage of it, you'll also be added to the "Commission Impossible" free lithium medical plan.

Lon

Okay, thanks for your honesty. When you are insulting, it's "wit," I get it. Well, my 15 year old read the whole nine yards and said, "Mom, these guys are sick, get out." He feels your constant misspelling of my name is baiting. I must admit, you are the master.

Juanita,

Missplelling your name was unintentional, and I apologize for the error.

Lon

Thanks Lon - My current medical doesn't cover lithium - this is a step in the right direction. Keep up the good work - when are you running for office? You've got my vote.