Happy, healthy, and love filled Thanksgiving to you all. Chico has so much to be thankful for and yet we have so many challenges to complain about throughout the year. We created over 1800 new jobs in the last year-and-a-half and yet have not reached economic full employment (which is about 5.6% unemployment). We began the fiscal year absorbing a $13.1 million debt after recovering from a $4.8 million budget deficit. We have approximately $4 million in unexpected (read: conservative budgeting) revenues. The City closed the gates in Bidwell Park – an unconscionable limitation in public services, and through my negotiations with the Sheriff’s Department, we have utilized Alternative Custody Supervision (Parolees) to work in areas in the park to keep up maintenance. We have an underperforming airport with unprecedented challenges ahead and yet we have plans in place to address these deficiencies. We have a downtown vagrancy problem that has not been addressed by the Police Department until last month – and those efforts are working. We have a larger vagrancy problem throughout the City that has immediate dangers that merge with environmental concerns. Through my efforts to fix this problem the environmental community and the public safety departments have a solid and funded plan to solve this problem while at the same time saving precious water and eliminating dangerous homeless encampments. We had an underperforming golf course that was losing money and failing to attract valuable tourism dollars. I set in motion a plan to address this deficiency and the Bidwell Park Golf Course is now generating additional revenue that is being placed back into the City’s park assets and adding to Chico’s tourism efforts. Under my motion we put forward a plan to hire three additional police officers with four the following year after that and more in the subsequent two years. All of this is set in motion under a backdrop of my efforts to reform salaries and benefits to keep the City of Chico on a sustainable and fiscally solvent track – particularly with limited support from other key players. We hired a new Fire Chief who has demonstrated just how efficiently a Fire Department can be run with limited overtime with solid, tangible benefits to public safety. We are now on track to hire a new, progressive interim Police Chief who can help reform the department and bring much needed leadership to this division of the City. The Chico Heat professional baseball team - a family fantastic activity and event - is returning to the City of Chico. The past two years have been tough for the City of Chico – make no mistake about it. But they are the best kind of tough years. They are the years of growth and possibility, a death of the old mismanagement and unsustainable spending and the rebirth of efficiency and effectiveness. It is the smart growth of the City while still ensuring that Chico remains special in an effort to maintain our trees, our infrastructure, and keep traffic calming efforts to help us do more with less. We need to keep a strong focus on eliminating environmental blight and steadfast adherence to the Greenline. We need to strengthen our relationship with a stagnant University administration and public safety departments. We need to work on the solutions that have been proven (read: evidence based) to fix our vagrancy problems and rising crime concerns. I am excited to continue my work over the last two years. Together we’ve made some significant inroads to fiscal solvency and public safety. But I need your continued efforts to keep the momentum. I am asking for your support to keep things moving forward. Please contact me so that we can work together and continue the tremendous efforts over the last two years. Facebook/ElectStone , Randall@ElectStone or (530) 924-4298. If youd like to help my efforts go to rally.org/randallstone Happy Thanksgiving to you and your family. On a personal note, I am so incredibly thankful and blessed with a “power wife.” She is my guiding light and tremendously supportive partner as well as an incredible mother to our 15-month old son, Rhys. And I am so, so blessed to have a healthy, happy, loving son that I scarcely recall life without. My blessings are unquantifiable this Thanksgiving. This is my hope for you and your family and my prayer for the City of Chico. Together we can do great things. But we need to work together. So let’s resolve to continue our great successes of the past two years – no matter how painful the short term may be. I know when my son asks me in five years how this City became so great, I want to be able to tell him that you all did what was necessary to make Chico the best it has ever been. So most of all I am thankful for all of you. Because you all make this City the great City that it is. I am simply your humble servant helping to implement your vision. I am thankful for where we’ve been, where we are, and where we’re going. From my wife Krista, my son Rhys, and from me to you and your extended family, sincerely, Happy Thanksgiving. In the words of Wyatt Earp to Doc Holliday at the end of one of my favorite movies, Tombstone: “Thanks for always bein’ there.” Oh, and one last thing... Go Niners!
Posted on: Fri, 28 Nov 2014 02:18:16 +0000
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