Downstroke

Seniors don’t mix: The Chico City Council this week voted to continue consideration of a plan to build 55 single-family homes and a 36-unit condo on five acres in California Park. The project’s approval by the Planning Commission was appealed to the council by seniors already living in the area. They say the subdivision is too dense and doesn’t meet the standards of the existing homeowners association rules and have concerns that the project will adversely affect the endangered giant garter snake, a species recently discovered to live in the area.

Councilman Dan Herbert said the proposed condo was one of the ugliest buildings he’d ever seen and that it should not be built so close to the foothills. The architect later told the council that in all his years designing buildings, he’d never had one called “butt-ugly.” The project is set to come back to the council the first week in March.

Back in action: After being suspended nearly a year for its participation in the making of a hardcore porno video, the Phi Kappa Tau fraternity regained university recognition last week.

Greek life adviser Connie Huyck said in January that the fraternity was in the process of trying to regain recognition and had been abiding by a list of conditions set by the university as well as its national chapter.

Phi Kappa Tau was suspended in March of last year after Chico State officials discovered that the downtown fraternity had hired adult film company Shane’s World to film the infamous “toga party” that featured members in precarious positions with porn stars. Nick Hollingsworth, the Interfraternity Council president at the time, said Phi Kappa Tau also had low turnout at Greek events, which was also a factor in the suspension.

Horse puckey: The next time you’re partying in the streets of Chico and a mounted police officer tells you to do something, do it. And don’t bitch-slap his horse. Robert William Huff was convicted of Assault on a Police Horse Jan. 30 and sentenced to 24 hours in county jail.

District Attorney Mike Ramsey considered the offense a serious crime and asked the judge for more jail time to be added. The 24-hour sentence was not increased, but the judge did add 20 hours of community service. Ramsey hopes Huff will do his community service shoveling horse manure for the popohorses.

Resting in Peace: Butte County Sheriff’s Sergeant Derek Ralston did a good deed for someone who can’t properly thank him.

Little Ernest Tucker died in 1879 in Martinez, Calif. Somehow, though, his headstone traveled to Butte County, where it ended up in the county lost and found. Ralston’s dead-on detective work, searching through census, historical and genealogical records, led him to find Tucker’s final resting place in Contra Costa County. The headstone, which is now in three pieces, will be returned to the Alhambra Cemetery in Martinez on Feb. 9. Ralston, , who supervises the Butte County Sheriff’s Property and Evidence Section and has been trying to clean out the county evidence facility, says finding the gravesite was difficult and took nearly three years of research. Tucker, who was just shy of his fourth birthday when he died, was not on any census, city or county records.

Ralston identified and returned two other 19th century grave markers to Pennington Cemetery in Sutter County last year.