An officer tells a homeless woman at Humboldt and Forest that she must move from the encampment.
Councilmember Addison Winslow, at the next City Council meeting, says he will push for a study of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s ordinance designed to guide cities that are struggling to manage homeless encampments.
Last week, Gov. Newsom released what he called a “model ordinance” that can be used to “address unhealthy and dangerous encampments.” The ordinance provides a framework local jurisdictions can use to remove encampments from public spaces, and permits speedier enforcement than the framework the City uses now under the Warren v. ChicoSettlement Agreement.
For example, the so-called model ordinance requires that officials or officers post a notice 48 hours before taking enforcement actions, “except in exigent circumstances involving an imminent threat to life, safety, health, or infrastructure.” In contrast, the Settlement Agreement mandates 7-day notice to Legal Services of Northern California prior to enforcement planning, 7-day notice to homeless persons who are camping on public property, and finally, a 72-hour notice prior to enforcement.read more
Chico parent Aurora Regino makes progress on appeal
By Natalie Hanson | Posted May 12, 2025
photo by Karen Laslo
CUSD offices
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has given new life to a lawsuit against Chico Unified School District that was filed in response to its policy that shaped the handling of a gender identity case.
The higher court in April said that U.S. Eastern District Court Judge John Mendez erred in dismissing a lawsuit filed by Chico parent Aurora Regino. Mendez said Regino didn’t have the legal foundation to pursue a claim opposing the district’s anti-discrimination and student privacy policy.
That policy prohibits the school from notifying parents about a student’s gender identity concerns or decisions without the student’s consent.
Regino has said she was not informed by the school of her child’s use of a new name and pronouns in 2022, and in her lawsuit asserts her parental rights over the state’s guidance related to children’s rights to non-disclosure.
Regino had discovered that her daughter had met with a school counselor at Sierra View Elementary, where the child indicated she would like to go by new pronouns. Regino’s daughter eventually told her grandmother, with the counselor’s encouragement, who told Regino.
Regino is represented by attorneys at the conservative The Center for American Liberty who have taken on similar cases around the country.
It took nearly a year for the Ninth Circuit panel to release a decision after hearing arguments in Pasadena last May. In their unanimous opinion filed in April, judges Kim McLane Wardlaw, Morgan Christen, and Mark J. Bennett overruled Mendez.
“The right of parents to make important medical decisions for their children is not unbounded,” Judge Christen wrote for the majority. However, she added, “The Supreme Court has long recognized ‘the fundamental right of parents to make decisions concerning the care, custody, and control of their children.’”
The center’s litigation director, Josh Dixon, in an interview with KRCR TV, said his team is “elated” about the ruling.
“There’s still much work to be done, it’s not an unqualified victory, the court basically just undid the dismissal and said to the district court ‘reconsider what you’ve done,’ but that’s work that we’re looking forward to doing,” Dixon said.
Chico Unified School District’s communications manager Erica Smith commented in an email to ChicoSol.
“We believe this case should not be directed at CUSD or any individual school district but instead at the governing entities responsible for developing the laws and guidance,” Smith wrote.
Regino’s briefing argued that schools have an affirmative obligation to notify parents about their children’s preferred gender identity. However, at oral arguments, she then narrowed her position by conceding that her rights do not give her the ability to invade her child’s relationship with a counselor or therapist, and that a teacher’s knowledge of a child’s transgender status does not trigger an obligation to notify the child’s parents.
At oral argument her attorney argued that her 14th Amendment rights were compromised by the “creation of an environment in which a student’s transgender identity is affirmed — e.g., where a counselor informs other faculty members to address a student using a new name or pronouns,” the appellate court notes in its ruling.
The case thus returns to Judge Mendez, who should review these “revamped arguments,” the panel said.
The Ninth Circuit judges instructed Mendez to adopt a narrow definition of the “interest at stake” and “apply existing precedent,” which recognizes a parental right to make decisions about children’s “care, custody and control.”
Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill 1955 last year, banning school districts from passing policies requiring staff to out students to their parents. “I don’t think teachers should be gender police,” Newsom said in a press conference.
Chico Unified board member Teisha Hase said she found the ruling from the Ninth Circuit concerning, particularly given Trump Administration threats to cut funding on the basis of state policy protecting student rights.
Editor: This story was corrected May 16 to state that Regino is represented by Center for American Liberty attorneys. ChicoSol regrets the initial error made in stating the name of the organization.
Natalie Hanson is a contributing editor to ChicoSol. Editor Leslie Layton contributed reporting to this story.
University administration has dozens of unauthorized flyers removed
By Leslie Layton | Posted May 6, 2025
The flyer that appeared on classroom doors last week
This story was updated at 4 p.m. today to include the university’s response.
Three hundred flyers suddenly appeared on campus doors at Chico State University last week, warning that law enforcement officers – a reference to immigration agents — would only be allowed in classrooms and other “private spaces” if they possessed judicial warrants.
“CAUTION CAUTION CAUTION” warns a flyer banner highlighted in yelllow. The flyer then notes that a classroom is a “private space” with entry restricted to faculty, staff and enrolled students. “Law enforcement may only enter with a valid judicial warrant … Everyone in the United States, regardless of immigration status, has the right to remain silent,” it continues.
The flyer provides a QR code that, if scanned, leads to a ‘Know your Rights’ Web page informing viewers of their Constitutional rights.
By the next day, April 30, the university administration had asked its staff to remove the flyers, which, it said, had not been produced and posted by the university administration. And just as quickly as the flyers appeared, they began disappearing.
Until May 1, when 80 kits mysteriously surfaced on tables around campus. The kits were stacks of more of the flyers and were left next to rolls of a gentle white masking tape. The guerrilla activists, not to be deterred by the administration, were now encouraging DIY activism.
Most of the flyers had been taken down by this week, when ChicoSol was able to locate and talk to a couple of the people involved in the flyer-posting action. (One of the two people referred to the flyer-posting as “guerrilla activism,” which can mean an uncondoned action like street art to get attention and spark dialogue.)
A few flyers still remained posted on campus doors earlier this week.
A 23-year-old student who was involved in the unauthorized flyer-posting insisted on anonymity and said he wanted to protect himself, as well as members of a group of a dozen students who were involved. Posting flyers on classroom doors – with the university wildcat logo, nonetheless – requires administration approval — even if they provide factually-accurate information.
The university’s Time, Place, Manner policy, adopted last year, says flyers posted on campus must be approved by the Student Life and Leadership Office.
Some of the students he collaborated with might be far more vulnerable than he is if agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) were to come on campus, he said. As a “white male,” the student said, he was not running the risk that some of his co-activists were running, and thus he felt obliged to participate in what was an effort to make a political and informational statement.
He worried that if he allowed ChicoSol to use his name, the administration might attempt to identify his collaborators by reviewing camera footage.
University Public Relations Director Andrew Staples responded to a ChicoSol request for comment after this story was posted, confirming that the administration didn’t authorize the notices. “We think [the flyers] were posted by someone in the campus community who was trying to be helpful,” Staples said prior to reading this story.
“You can’t just hang stuff anywhere,” Staples said, noting that there’s a “publicity protocol.”
The student, a history major, said the matter of recent deportations across the nation “doesn’t sit right with me.” He didn’t pay the issue a lot of attention prior to the March arrest of Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil. Khalil has been living in this country with legal resident status and was detained in his New York City apartment building by ICE agents who didn’t have a judicial warrant.
“If it could happen to one person it could happen to anybody,” the student said.
Under the Fourth Amendment, ICE needs a judicial warrant — that’s a warrant issued by a federal court — to enter a private space. And under Chico State policy, classrooms are private spaces.
The student said that as members of the activist group fanned out around campus to post the flyers on April 29, he probably “worried more about getting caught than I should have. But it was nice to share camaraderie with people who felt the same way I did.”
The student said that the mass deportation policy has not been discussed in any of his Chico State classes. Though some chapters of U.S. history would be relevant, the student said he can understand that his professors are focused on covering certain content and “don’t want to slot in a day for current events.”
The flyers were posted on doors at the Behavioral and Social Sciences Building, Modoc Hall, academic affairs, Holt Hall and other buildings.
The flyer says that “For More Information” university Diversity Officer Joseph Morales can be contacted. Staples said Morales had nothing to do with the flyer.
The notice in fact was modeled after a similar flyer that appeared on the Northwestern University campus in Illinois that was also posted by immigration activists.
At Chico State, in an apparent coincidence, President Steve Perez sent an email to the campus community just hours before the guerrilla activists struck.
“As a reminder, Chico State will not assist federal immigration officials engaged in enforcement activities on campus,” the email states, “including those from Immigration and Customs Enforcement or Customs and Border Protection unless they present a judicial warrant or subpoena.”
The email notes that no such actions have yet occurred at Chico State.
Editor: In our 4 p.m. update, we also explain why we used the term “guerrilla activism” in response to a reader who questioned that language.
Community members who spoke hold out hope for people who seem challenging to help
By Yucheng Tang | Posted May 3, 2025
photo by Yucheng Tang
Behavioral Health Director Scott Kennelly speaks at the first meeting of the City’s ad hoc committee on homelessness.
At the first meeting of the City’s ad hoc committee on homelessness, the discussion touched on the overlap between homelessness, substance abuse and mental health. It also raised two related questions: how to address the problem of shelter-resistant homeless individuals, and whether compelled treatment is sometimes necessary.
Scott Kennelly, the director of Butte County Behavioral Health, said homeless outreach teams have worked to convince unhoused people to take advantage of services and have tried to connect them with services, but there are always people who say, “Leave me the hell alone.”
In his view, homeless people who refuse to go to shelters can generally be divided into three groups: those severely addicted to drugs like Fentanyl and Xylazine who are solely focused on their next hit and refuse any care; those with severe mental illness who are psychotic and unaware of their condition; and those who prefer a rule-free lifestyle.
“There’s almost no one left out there who is not severely addicted to a substance, is severely mentally ill, or has (not) made a lifetime style choice,” Kennelly said.
But Charles Withuhn, president of the North State Shelter Team, said that beyond the categories Kennelly mentioned, there is also a group of people “who will be OK with accountability.” He said he talked to a man who was sleeping in the bushes the other day, and that man told him while crying, “All I need is a door that locks and a little bit of job training, and I will go to work.”
Withuhn, who advocates for smaller programs where homeless people can build and find community, said there are still some unsheltered individuals who want help. “There’s too many people having too many bad experiences in big programs, and they feel like they lose their autonomy.”
Amber Abney-Bass, CEO of the Jesus Center, shared statistics about the people who have been served at the Genesis emergency pallet shelter housing. Since April 2022, 423 people have been served. During 2024, 69% reported having a disability, 33% had a chronic health condition, and 39% reported a mental health disorder, she said. Additionally, 51% said they struggled with addiction, alcohol use or both.
Julian Zener, a community member who was attending the April 30 meeting, asked whether some of the people who seem to be shelter-resistant could be persuaded otherwise, warning against what he called “writing off all the people out there.”
“People who currently turned down offers, you related to three categories that seemed to be sort of irredeemable, and I wonder if there’s part of that fourth category, as Charles suggested, that if we could find out more of their story, and build trust, and they might turn around,” Zener said.
Michael O’Brien, one of three councilmembers on the committee, commented on his impression of the service-resistant population.
“Getting them help is really the challenge,” O’Brien said. “And when you have someone who is not thinking correctly, it’s really difficult to get [something] across to them. You just have to understand how powerful these [drugs] are that are dominating their life.”
The new ad hoc committee is chaired by Mayor Kasey Reynolds, with councilmembers Bryce Goldstein and O’Brien as the other members.
Goldstein asked Kennelly how the underlying issues that are keeping people from accessing services can be addressed.
“You have to pair the treatment and the housing at the same time,” he said.
In terms of treatment, he said he has, over time, shifted his philosophy.
“I’m at a point where I say, ‘You have the opportunity through every possible resource to get help,'” Kennelly said. “You’re not willing or you’re not able to see you need it. Now someone has to come in and help support you like a parent or a big brother or a conservator.”
He mentioned mental health diversion court, drug court, and Stepping Stones Perinatal Program — three programs that can compel or press people to receive treatment — and said he saw the most powerful graduation in Stepping Stones.
Behavioral Health hopes to purchase a motel or hotel in the community to house people who are facing felony charges but have been found incompetent to stand trial, where they can receive support and intensive treatment to restore competency. Such a program would typically last about 18 months, said Kennelly, adding, “At least they won’t be on the streets.”
Kennelly also mentioned that a mental health rehabilitation center will be established this year.
The committee will meet biweekly on Wednesdays from 3-4:30 p.m. until summer, when it will report its findings and recommend action to the full City Council panel. The next meeting is scheduled on May 14 in the city hall conference room.
Yucheng Tang is a California Local News fellow reporting for ChicoSol.
Senior citizens worry about losing democracy, Constitutional rights & benefits
By Leslie Layton | Posted May 1, 2025
photo by Leslie Layton
Kathy Hume
About a month ago, Kathy Hume was one of only three people standing outside the Social Security offices in Chico protesting the Trump Administration. But today she was one of several hundred protesting cuts to Social Security infrastructure, as well as the expansion of executive power.
“He’s just a tyrant,” Hume said. “We got rid of mad King George and now it’s mad King Donald. There’s nothing he does that’s not ludicrous.” Adding that she thinks Trump is a poor speaker, Hume said, “Bigly wasn’t a word before he became president.”
Some 350 protesters lined up with anti-Trump signs today on Lassen Avenue and Cohasset Road near the north Chico offices of Social Security as thousands of people poured into the streets nationwide for anti-Trump demonstrations that had been planned for May Day, also celebrated as International Workers Day.
The Chico protest – a one-hour event beginning at 11 a.m. – attracted a crowd of mostly senior citizens, many of whom hadn’t attended demonstrations in years, if ever. A protest outside Social Security in Oroville drew another 70 people.
Organizers of the “Hands off Social Security” protests said they were urging lawmakers to “reject any cuts to Social Security benefits and to protect the program’s integrity.”
Brad Johnson wasn’t carrying a sign, but showed up to protest what he calls the “big picture.”
“It’s the destruction of democracy,” Johnson said. “It starts small and picks up speed.”
Johnson, 75, added that he receives $2,200 a month in Social Security benefits that he doesn’t want jeopardized. “The common denominator here is grey hair,” he observed.
The event was organized by the newly-organized Defenders of Democracy coalition that includes the Chico Peace Alliance, the Democratic Action Club of Chico and Indivisible Chico.
A group of women of different ages, wearing bright pink t-shirts that state “re-sisters,” were part of the Chico protest. LeAnn Jenswold, the organizer, said there are about 16 women who belong to the “re-sisters.”
Jenswold said it started with a few of the women “whispering” to each other at a Chico gym they belong to. They were feeling upset about the sweeping changes underway, she said, and began meeting outside the gym to support each other. But they also began acting.
The women attend the Resistance Lab trainings on Zoom held by Washington State’s Rep. Pramila Jayapal, she said, where they get tools and training in peaceful protest.
Those participating in the Chico event today were invited to write notes of appreciation to Social Security employees inside the building. The notes were dropped in a basket that was delivered to a security guard inside.
Protester Carol Watson said she came to “thank the Social Security people for their diligence, hard work and persistance. And, we want to see [District 1 Rep. Doug] LaMalfa in Chico.”
Coalition organizers thanked the note-writers by giving them pens that had been given the Chico Peace Alliance by Ben Cohen, the co-founder of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream company. The pens had little scrolls that pull out and show U.S. military spending.
Laurel Yorks, a spokesperson for the Defenders of Democracy coalition, said she is one of many people living on the financial “edge.”
“If we lost any part of [Social Security] I could lose my house,” she said.
A handout from the coalition says that Congressional Republicans are expected to extend the 2017 Trump tax cuts that will result in “more and bigger handouts to billionaires and corporations.”
Meanwhile, Congress has discussed “major cuts or rollbacks” to federal programs like Medicaid. The handout shows that cutbacks to California’s Medicaid program — Medi-Cal — would affect 43 percent of District 1 residents.
Historian Michele Shover’s effort to tell a more nuanced story of John Bidwell, considered the founder of Chico, began in 1989 when a footnote in a book caught her by surprise.
“I found it diametrically opposed to what people thought about Bidwell,” Shover said of the passage containing the footnote.
Shover, now 83, is retired from Chico State where she served as chair of the Department of Political Science. Her research on John Bidwell and Northern California Indian-settler conflicts of the 1850s has often been cited; she published articles based on primary research on Butte County history during more than four decades.
Over 20 years, Shover gathered all the historical data that she could find about Native Americans from this area from various sources, “whether it was newspapers, academic studies, correspondence, diaries,” she said.
At the beginning, she found it difficult to understand the reports written by local Indians, even though these had been recorded in English, “because they had a different sense of narrative. They have a different sense of time.”
She described her research as comparable to putting together a puzzle and refrained from reliance on work by present-day writers. Shover to this day is proud of this approach: “In my experience, some of the modern writers had tapped into a few of these sources, but no one I found had done as broad and deep a search as mine.”
After years of research, Shover published a book, “California Standoff: Miners, Indians and Farmers at War,” in 2017.
One of the nuanced stories Shover tells is about the treaty that was known as the U.S. Treaty of 1851. People often think that Bidwell, who helped organize a treaty meeting in 1851, played an important role in advancing the contract that reserved a 227-square-mile tract for the tribes.
But Shover found a different story through her research. She said Bidwell wrote a letter to California Congressman Joseph McCorkle and U.S. Sen. William Gwin after the meeting, recommending they not ratify the treaty. “He wrote it from a perspective as if he was protecting the Indians, but he was really protecting his control (of his Indian labor force),” Shover said.
“Should the Mechoopdas move to a reservation, he would lose a great asset — his substantial, cheap, available and usually stable Indian workforce,” Shover wrote in her 2017 book.
The Mechoopda Indian Tribe website explains that the U.S. Senate secretly rejected treaties signed during the 1851-52 period.
In a 2011 speech at Chico State, Shover shared a heart-wrenching detail about the labor exploitation on Bidwell’s ranch.
During the wheat harvest on the ranch, the wheat was spread in a huge circle and was separated from the chaff by having massive herds of horses racing around on top of the wheat. “The way they stopped the horses was, they sent the Indians out in front of them,” Shover said, pausing for a few seconds with a solemn expression after sharing detail of this dangerous work.
“He did things that I really regret,” Shover told ChicoSol on an early spring afternoon in the study of her Chapmantown home where, when this reporter arrived, she had been watching television news. However, Shover also thinks it’s important to recognize the good things Bidwell did and said she considers his “larger impact more positive than negative.”
Shover agrees with many community residents who note that the Mechoopda people were not well represented in the previous Bidwell Mansion State Historic Park, and would also like to see two new memorial structures on the park property. (Read our story on the Bidwell Mansion rebuild here.)
According to her, Bidwell moved the indigenous valley village “sort of more behind” the headquarters of the ranch to protect its residents from attack by the mountain Maidu, another subgroup of local Native Americans; on one occasion he brought a doctor from Sacramento to save the life of a Mechoopda tribal member, who had been shot by mountain Maidu.
“He taught them skills. He never demanded that they stay. They could have left. But most of them stayed,” Shover noted. “When I started this (research), I was pretty skeptical about John Bidwell. The more I did it, the more I saw the complexity of the situation.”
When Shover was growing up, there was a common belief in white culture that Indians were bad and settlers were good, and when the counterculture emerged decades later, the settlers became evil and the Indians became “good,” she said.
But Shover tried to sidestep such simplifications in her work, and in her book, shows the complexity of the interplay between groups.
Her efforts were rewarded when she says she was thanked on two occasions by local Native people. In one case, a young man came up to her when she was shopping in a store downtown. The man said he was a member of the mountain Maidu group, and told Shover, “I want to thank you. You were so fair in writing this book.”
This is the third story in a three-part series on the fire that destroyed Bidwell Mansion and the role the Mansion played in our community. Read the first story here and the second here.
Yucheng Tang is a California Local News Fellow reporting for ChicoSol.
