Other notable stories

Park access granted

In recent years, locked gates have blocked vehicular access to Bidwell Park on weekdays, but that changed in 2015 after members of the Chico City Council got fed up.

Some gates at One-Mile and Five-Mile recreation areas were opened only on weekends since the sweeping cuts to the city’s budget and staff in 2013. Dan Efseaff, manager of the city’s Park Division, said he kept the areas closed to vehicular traffic because park rangers weren’t available to patrol.

But after hearing from perturbed constituents, members of the council began to voice their frustration. “It drives me stark-raving nuts to ride my bike through One-Mile and see people fighting for street parking,” said Mayor Mark Sorensen during a council meeting in March.

It wasn’t until June—after nearly two years of being closed Monday through Thursday—that city staff opened the gates at One-Mile and Five-Mile seven days a week.

The fight against fracking got an early foothold in the North State, with the group Frack-Free Butte County informing locals about the oil-extraction process and its detrimental effects on the environment well before it became a national conversation. It initially looked like that early work would pay off, when the Butte County Board of Supervisors voted 4-1 to craft an ordinance banning the practice in Butte County in April 2014.

Those same supervisors had a change of heart, however, and in February of this year voted not to adopt the ordinance. They instead directed county staff to craft an alternate ordinance calling for conditional-use permits so each project can be considered on an individual basis. They also approved an ordinance prohibiting the storage of and disposal of fracking byproducts.

Anti-frackers gathered enough signatures to take the decision to local voters next November. The measure would have been on the 2014 general election ballot, but the supes’ review of the initiative delayed a public vote.

This past year saw the revitalization of a historical landmark, the Oroville Inn. Having sat in disrepair for years, the Bird Street property was finally purchased by local real estate mogul Orville “Bud” Tracy and renovation work began immediately.

The hotel, built in 1929 and turned into low-income housing in the 1980s, was condemned in 2010. Tracy’s plan is to restore it to its former glory, but transform the lodging portion into student housing and make the rest mixed-use commercial.

The Oroville Inn isn’t the only downtown Oroville building being revitalized, however. Tracy and some other history-minded folks have purchased several other landmark buildings with plans to truly bring life back to downtown. Several, including the one that now houses Miner’s Alley Brewing Co., already look and feel both historic and hip.

We’ve said a lot of goodbyes this past year, to prominent locals who died as well as longtime businesses that shuttered their doors.

In March, Rick Rees, a former Chico Unified School Board member and beloved member of the university community who had long worked in the Student Activities Office, passed away suddenly at age 63; in April, longtime and well-respected former Chico City Manager Fred Davis died at the age of 90; Joe Person, well-known and -respected civil rights activist, died in May at 85; Bill Lee, journalist and former editor of the Chico Enterprise-Record, 96, passed away the following month; youth advocate Charlie Preusser, aka “Mr. Chico” or “Chico’s oldest frat boy,” died in October at age 71; Gary Sitton, a former Chico State computer science professor and respected businessman and philanthropist, also passed away in October. He was 70 years old.

On the business front, Chico bid farewell to many longtime staples, including Paradise Post Printing, one of the biggest employers on the Ridge, which, in June, closed its doors after 35 years printing papers including the News & Review. More recently, in November, longtime home décor fabricators Woof & Poof folded (see more RIPs in Arts DEVO, page 34).

Anyone who grows pot—or smokes it, eats it, etc.—in Butte County was made painfully aware of Measure A, the ordinance limiting square footage of gardens based on acreage and allowing anonymous complaints. The law went into effect in January and the county went all in, hiring staff and doing door-to-door education campaigns (and citation sweeps).

Measure A opponents went on the offensive, too, and filed a lawsuit to block it back in February. It was promptly thrown out. As of the last status update in September, the county had issued 503 citations, with a total of $1.14 million in fines, of which only $85,090 had been paid. At that time, there were 700 open cases and 191 closed cases.

It was enough, toward the end of the year, to prompt a new group of medical marijuana advocates calling themselves the Inland Cannabis Farmers’ Association to emerge.

In 2015, Butte County moved to expand and renovate its 614-bed jail, which was constructed in 1963, long before Assembly Bill 109, or the Public Safety Realignment Act of 2011, shifted the responsibility for housing and rehabilitating certain nonviolent inmates from state prisons to county jails.

“It was never contemplated that we’d hold the kind of criminals we do now,” said Butte County Sheriff Kory Honea during a Chico City Council meeting in March.

Honea pitched the idea of a new jail as a means to better accommodate inmates with mental illnesses, provide programs to address the underlying causes of criminality and securely house inmates for longer periods of time. The project took a big step forward in August, when, with the support of local cities, the county Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to allow Honea to pursue $40 million in state funding for the ultra-modern facility.

A pair of high-profile local incidents served as evidence that intolerance is alive and well in Chico. In late January, a verbal altercation between a group of Chico High students who parked their Confederate flag-adorned SUV in front of a multiracial family’s home ended with the same symbol planted in the family’s front yard late that night. The students alleged they were assaulted by two black adults following the initial argument, and the family insisted the students planted the flag, but no arrests were made.

On the positive side, the Coalition for Reconciliation and Community Transformation sprang up from the incident. The group aims to develop protocols for community response to acts of racial violence or prejudice.

Then, on July 2, a fire broke out at Fusion Hookah Lounge on Walnut Street, which owners Jenny and Sam Dahma believe was caused by a makeshift explosive meant to burn the business down. Jenny Dahma said the fire was only the latest act of Islamaphobia directed at the business; she hears racial slurs hurled from passing cars as often as three to four times daily.

The incident was enough to prompt the Sacramento Valley chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) to alert the FBI.

In July, a big stink was raised about the cleanliness of Sycamore Pool, the iconic concrete swimming hole at One-Mile Recreation Area, after a local blogger posted about a family member who’d reportedly contracted skin and eye infections after swimming there.

It then came to light that, for years, the pool was drained and cleaned weekly but had been on a much less regular schedule since July 2011 due to the city’s low staffing levels. The change was never clearly communicated to the public.

Dan Efseaff, manager of the city’s Park Division, explained that the city removes algae from the pool mostly to minimize the risk of slipping and increase visibility for lifeguards, not for hygienic purposes. (After all, the pool is then refilled with untreated water from Big Chico Creek.) Efseaff also maintained that regular testing of the pool’s fecal coliform levels indicated that the pool was safe for swimming, though some of those samples exceeded standards recommended by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

The opening of a new emergency department in 2015 marked the end of major construction in Enloe Medical Center’s Century Project, a $175 million reshaping and expansion of the main hospital that began in 2007. Its completion was a significant upgrade, considering the increased demand for emergency services. The ER saw around 40,000 patients in 2013, 48,000 patients last year, and this year’s final number likely will be even greater.

In addition to the new 39-bed ER, the Century Project includes, among other things, the Magnolia Tower, a five-story facility for patients that opened in 2012, as well as a parking structure that opened in 2008.

The Chico Arts Commission entered the new year breathing what appeared to be its last gasps, the result of perennial annual defunding by the city coupled with actions by City Council to decrease city staff time allotted toward the group’s meetings.

At one point, the new conservative-majority council seemed eager to put the final nails in the group’s proverbial coffin by cutting that time altogether and disbanding the panel. However, the Arts Commission made an impressive last-ditch rally at the end of March by releasing the results of a study by Washington, D.C.-based organization Americans for the Arts, which indicated that arts-driven nonprofit groups contributed $17.7 million to the city’s economy in 2014.

The council eventually agreed to allow the Arts Commission to continue to operate by changing to a more independent model, similar to that developed in nearby Orland. In September, the panel took action to make changes to the model, with a new ordinance scheduled for introduction during the first meeting of 2016.

Back in May, there was some movement on 750-acre Bidwell Ranch, the city-owned reserve adjacent to Upper Bidwell Park that developers have long wanted to purchase for construction purposes and conservationists want to remain open space. The city purchased the property 18 years earlier, with the intention of turning it into a mitigation and/or conservation bank, but those plans stalled, mainly due to the Great Recession.

With little movement over the past decade, six heavy-hitting local environmental groups—including Butte Environmental Council—decided to lobby for the habitat to be officially added to the park. They reached consensus on the issue around the time the city began inventorying its properties, just a few months after the City Council turned to a conservative majority. But some were hesitant to wash their hands of the idea to create a mitigation bank, and so the issue stalled yet again.

Then, in September, city staff suggested that the Butte County Association of Governments may be interested in purchasing the property—for millions of dollars—and turning it into a fee-based mitigation bank. That might be possible after BCAG completes its Butte Regional Conservation Plan, which is expected to happen mid-2016, so the fate of the controversial property is once again on hold.

This past year saw two high-profile homicide cases that were both surrounded by strange circumstances. The first was that of Cass Edison, a 55-year-old homeless woman who’d once had a full life as a journalist, wife and mother. Alcoholism took its toll, however, and ultimately led her to the streets. Her body was found in March on a truck bed wrapped in blanket. She’d been beaten and strangled. Police quickly arrested Christopher Swihart, who already had three felony domestic violence convictions. When he first appeared in court for the case, he purposely banged his head on the table, knocking himself out.

Then there was the tragic story of 16-year-old Melissa Esquivel-Flores, from Nord. Her body was found on July 4 in a farm worker’s shop in Orland with a gunshot wound to the head. Police arrested the person of interest in the case, Alfredo Rodriguez Ruvalcaba, the next day, but not in connection to the homicide. He’d been found unconscious in a ditch in Glenn County and was arrested on a Butte County warrant for continued sexual assault on a minor—Esquivel-Flores. He’d shown up for court in early 2013 but apparently fled to Mexico before trial.

Both Swihart and Ruvalcaba are charged with homicide and are due in court Jan. 12.