The blame game

Who pushed Chico city government into the fiscal swamp? Some like to blame the “free-spending liberals” on the City Council. These critics have written angry letters to the editor and stood up at council meetings to berate certain council members, saying, in effect, “It’s all your fault.”

What they conveniently fail to mention are the actual causes of the city’s financial problems: the worst recession in modern history and its resulting drop in sales-tax and property-tax revenues; the state’s disbanding of redevelopment agencies, costing the city millions of dollars in revenue; the loss of a half-million dollars in annual vehicle-license-fee funds; and the loss of nearly a million dollars a year in cellphone-tax revenues.

Of these, the council had control over only one, the phone-tax initiative on the November 2012 ballot. The council authorized the vote because, while it long had collected the tax money, it needed to update its utility-tax ordinance to explicitly include new technologies such as cellular and Internet phones.

Council conservatives knew how much money the city would lose if the measure failed, but they opposed it anyway out of sheer anti-tax stubbornness. Council liberals supported the measure but didn’t campaign for its passage or even try to help voters understand it. Council liberals can be faulted for their political passivity, but that’s about all.

Critics of the council liberals also like to blame them for the bloated wages and benefits city employees receive, ignoring the fact that, over the years, both liberal and conservative councils have approved generous employee packages. And it was a conservative-dominated council that, in the mid-1990s, dramatically reduced development-impact fees. Had it not done so, the private development fund would be in much better shape than it is now.

It’s true that City Hall didn’t respond to the recession as quickly or decisively as it could have—and should have. It was an extremely difficult time. Former City Manager Dave Burkland, a nice guy, was reluctant to lay off people he’d worked with for many years. He preferred to reduce the size of city government through attrition, and to keep it functioning by moving money among various funds and dipping into the emergency reserves.

There were, and still are, differences of opinion about those approaches. It’s notable, though, that the only objection conservative council members raised at the time was to the reduction in the size of the reserves. In response, council liberals argued that the city was facing an emergency, so using some of the reserves was appropriate.

But City Hall cried out for reorganization. There were too many departments, 11 altogether, each with its expensive director. One, Housing and Neighborhood Services, decimated by the loss of RDA funding, had only one full-time and one half-time employee under its director.

That’s why the council hired an outsider, Brian Nakamura, to replace Burkland when the latter retired in August 2012. Nakamura’s job was to take a hatchet to City Hall, to “right-size” the organization, as he put it. If that left blood on the floor, so be it. Whatever one may think of Nakamura’s style, he did what the council members, liberals and conservatives alike, asked him to do.

There’s an election coming up, and conservatives see an opportunity to regain a majority on the council by blaming liberals for the city’s problems. But it’s simply not true. Remember that as we get closer to November.