Goldstein wants the Commission to encourage climate action
by Yucheng Tang | Posted September 3, 2025
Bryce Ingersoll. Photo by Yucheng Tang.
The Chico City Council appointed recent Chico State graduate Bryce Ingersoll to the Climate Action Commission at its Sept. 2 meeting.
Ingersoll, who was nominated by Councilmember Bryce Goldstein, won unaninmous Council approval, and said he wants to work toward making the city more bike-friendly and increasing the supply of housing that doesn’t worsen urban sprawl.
“Chico has been ripe for climate solutions,” Ingersoll told ChicoSol later.
“With this position, I hope to spark new conversations with community organizations, university students and staff, and the City,” he said in a presentation to the Council.
Ingersoll recounted his experience in environment-related fields, such as his geography degree, volunteer work for Butte Environmental Council, and participation in prescribed burns with Big Chico Creek Ecological Reserve. read more
At City Plaza, information on everything environmental
by Yucheng Tang | Posted April 26, 2025
The 46th annual Endangered Species Faire was celebrated today with a downtown parade that featured axolotls, giraffes, owls and salmon puppets — and served as a call to action on climate change and species preservation.
“Animals cannot speak up for themselves, so we speak up for them,” a host on the plaza stage told about 250 attendees after the parade. The fair was organized by the Butte Environmental Council (BEC) and began at 10 a.m., with around 20 booths representing a wide range of organizations, including nonprofits, for-profits and government agencies.
A parade participant who identified herself as Amanda — she asked that her last name not be used for personal reasons — joined the event with her daughter. With a few other participants, she carried a puppet that represented the river ecosystem, and her daughter carried a Monarch butterfly puppet they had constructed. Amanda said she was from Santa Cruz, where there used to be many Monarchs, but their numbers have declined significantly.
Erik Lopez represented the Butte Fire Safe Council at a fair booth.
“We want people to use us as a resource in fire resilience, like fire defensible space efforts,” Lopez said. “We provide resources for homeowners and landowners. We do grazing programs as well, where we contract with grazers around Butte County and systematically put goats on the ground to graze the land and mitigate any fuels mitigation.
“Wildfire in any situation is a scary situation. People are, in that scenario, panicked and maybe unprepared,” Lopez added. “I’m glad people are coming up to the booth and willing to learn about what we do and how they can stay safe against wildfires.”
Fair booths provided information on waste reduction, composting, energy and water conservation, disaster preparedness and more.
“We hold this event to let people know we really have to take care of our environment, we really have to be serious about climate change, we really need to take care of our creatures,” said Susan Tchudi, a BEC board member and the fair coordinator. “One of the things that we’re emphasizing is we need to be involved in climate action, in doing things to protect ourselves, to be resilient, to try to do whatever we can to slow the change in the climate.”
Yucheng Tang is a California Local News fellow reporting for ChicoSol.
Incumbent Tandon and challenger Goldstein explain to ChicoSol contrasting views
by Yucheng Tang | Posted October 27, 2024
District 7 extends into Lower Bidwell Park on the northeast, crosses Highway 99, and is severed by District 6 west of the highway.
This is the fourth story in our City Council election series.
District 7 voters have a choice. Candidates Bryce Goldstein and Deepika Tandon both want better streets and more housing projects, but differ on other crucial issues, including homelessness, climate change and wildfire planning.
Goldstein, a transportation planner, has served as a City of Chico commissioner for the past five years, formerly on the Planning Commission and now as a Climate Action commissioner. She says on her website that she wants a community where “everybody can afford to live … where everybody can access fresh groceries without having to own a car, and where our trees, parks, and creeks are protected.”
Tandon, who runs a south Chico grocery/deli, has served on the Council representing District 7 since 2020. She immigrated to Chico from Delhi, India, in 2007. She wants to serve another term because “it’s another chance for me to give back to this community. We still have a lot of campers out on the streets. Public safety is still a concern for a lot of residents. There is still a bit more work that needs to be done.”
Homelessness
Challenger Goldstein would build managed campgrounds with social services available to campers, while incumbent Tandon opposes that step and would encourage unhoused people to take more responsibility for their plight.
“We need to have a space where people can go to not be in the parks, because it’s going to take a long time — regardless of how we do it — to get people into permanent housing,” Goldstein said in an interview last month at a downtown coffee shop. “We should build them with security, bathrooms, dumpsters, connections, social services, and with the idea that we’re getting people eventually out of the managed campground space and hopefully into permanent housing.”
The managed campground plan, Goldstein explained, could include multiple locations or a “larger camp area with separate communities within it.” She would support existing services like those provided by Genesis, the pallet shelter village, and work with providers like the North State Shelter Team.
Goldstein has been a longtime Safe Space volunteer and has seen that a lot of people don’t fit in well at the existing shelters for various reasons: They might have had conflicts with people who are staying there; they might have pets that aren’t allowed; they might fear being in enclosed spaces with many people.
Goldstein notes that she has a housing-first approach. “How do you hold somebody accountable to become sober if they don’t even have a roof over their head?”
Tandon on the other hand doesn’t think opening managed campgrounds is a good solution: “I don’t think we should build anything more till we know what we need. We are just guessing that the managed campground would help and I would not support spending more taxpayers’ money on something that will not be used.”
Tandon said some in the homeless community “don’t like rules.”
“The managed campground will also have a set of rules, and I don’t think those homeless people will go to the managed campgrounds, either,” Tandon continued, noting that Genesis already offers many services.
“People who are out now are choosing this lifestyle, but that doesn’t mean that we can let our city or our public spaces be unsafe for the rest of the community,” Tandon said. “The person who is in a tough situation needs to take that first step, to accept the treatment, to accept whatever they need.”
How should the City encourage people to accept the services they need?
“I’m not an expert in that, but we have experts,” Tandon responded, mentioning in particular behavioral health staff. “Those are the people that we need to rely on.”
Housing development
Both Goldstein and Tandon support more housing projects and say they want all types of housing. However, Goldstein strongly advocates for infill development and “smart growth,” and they disagree on the planned community, Valley’s Edge, that was defeated in a referendum. Tandon supported it because “we need all kinds of housing” and Goldstein opposed the project because its “impact on climate action goals” was never fully explained to the public.
Goldstein describes smart growth on her website as an approach that encourages diverse housing and transportation options and reinvestment in existing neighborhoods. She writes that she wants to create infill developments “featuring both housing and businesses.”
“We have vacant lots in our neighborhoods that already exist,” she told ChicoSol. “We can both have a higher quality of life for people who want to live within a city and to have less expenses on cars and things. We can help improve the existing core of our city by having more people live near local businesses.”
To achieve this goal, the City would reduce the parking minimums for building and change zoning in some areas. “Smart growth rejects the status quo of sprawling single-family homes, but it’s not all high-rise apartments either,” Goldstein said.
She says she is an advocate for “missing” middle housing, which includes town homes, triplexes and housing that is between big apartment complexes and single family detached luxury houses.
Tandon also said she wants to see more housing projects and agrees with the concept of infill development. “They are very close to the resources. You already have sewer, water, electricity. Everything is there.”
But she also said: “We cannot force a developer to build on land that is expensive for them to buy. Also, every person has a different desire. I want to live in a house. I would not want to live in an apartment building, but there are not many single family houses that are in the pipeline right now.”
She noted the City Council’s accomplishments that include dissolving the Bell-Muir special planning area and approving some single family housing projects.
Climate change and fire
Tandon places more responsibility for addressing climate change on individuals and feels comfortable with what the City has done to prevent wildfires, while Goldstein argues that the Climate Action Commission should meet more often and more preparations could be made to prevent another major fire.
“I personally believe that climate action is more about (raising) awareness of the community. The City can only do a little bit,” Tandon said.
Tandon is satisfied with the occasional meeting frequency of the Climate Action Commission. “What we have decided in the chamber is that to meet as needed is good enough, because every time we meet, we actually are using more resources … we use power, we use other things,” she said.
Has enough been done with controlled burns and other measures to avoid a major fire?
“During my conversation with the fire chief, he feels confident that we don’t have any dangers as of now,” Tandon said. “I know we have goats grazing in the park. We are trying to mitigate [fire danger] with the goats. There are goats on the Lindo Channel as well. I feel pretty safe about where we are.”
In contrast, as an appointed Climate Action commissioner, Goldstein is concerned about various risks brought about by climate change.
“We’re at risk of a wildfire potentially burning into Chico,” Goldstein said. “We’re at risk of air quality impacts and housing impacts from huge wildfires. We’re also at risk of drought, flooding, all kinds of other public safety issues that are made worse by climate change, but our City Council has never really wanted to address it.”
She believes the commission should meet more regularly. “We don’t have to meet every month. But it’s been at least seven months since we have met. And I’m sure there are things we could talk about. We could at least know, as a commission, if we are on track to meet our Climate Action Plan goals, and the latest things happening in the city that we should be aware of,” she said.
“I believe that the boards and commissions should be an opportunity for community members who are experts in a topic, or just want to get involved, to have a say without having to go through the whole process to become a City Council member. It helps decentralize our power, because we’re not just relying on seven people on the City Council to hold all the power and know everything.”
Goldstein’s approach to preventing another major fire would be “to do more land management or prescribed burns that would involve working with the tribe and working with local organizations that do burns,” she said. “We could be more prepared.”
Yucheng Tang is a California Local News Fellow reporting for ChicoSol. Read Yucheng’s stories on the District 1, District 3 and the District 5 races.
Given weather-related disasters, does the City focus enough on climate change?
by Natalie Hanson | Posted August 13, 2024
photo by Leslie Layton
The City’s updated Climate Action Plan.
Butte County, facing the Camp Fire, the Dixie Fire, the Park Fire and extreme heat, has been on the frontlines of climate change in recent years. But the City of Chico has not made policies reflecting the urgency of these crises, some say.
Chico’s Climate Action Commission’s role has over time been cut dramatically, and the plans staff put together over years to help plan for a future of climate change have not been properly implemented, say some Chico residents. In their view, a lack of planning for climate change is symptomatic of the City’s unwillingness to make climate change the focus of policy or even fund the work to do so.
Community Development Director Brendan Vieg disagrees with this view, pointing to progress on plans like the Urban Forest Master Plan. “Combatting climate change provides an opportunity to build a healthy, equitable and resilient community,” Vieg states on the Climate Action Plan update (CAP) website page.
Climate Action Commission chair a critic
Climate Action Commission Chair Brian Scott Kress said that he doesn’t think the City’s strategies, as they stand today, properly incorporate an understanding of how to mitigate climate change or that the City prioritizes his panel’s work. “Our policies and approach to governing should reflect the immediacy of these challenges,” Kress said.
The Commission helped craft the CAP, which was completed in 2018 and updated in 2020. It contains measures to ensure the City meets the state goal of a 40% reduction in greenhouse gasses by 2030 and eliminates them by 2045.
While the City’s master plans for managing its urban forest, wildland vegetation and heat risks acknowledge climate’s role in past wildfires, the plans don’t contain a strong connection with climate change as a cause, Kress said. He finds that alarming because Chico is required to align with state targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions to get certain kinds of state funding. Those funds cannot only help lower energy bills, improve transportation networks and electrify homes and businesses, but aid in mitigating dire climate consequences already underway in the region, Kress said.
“We should be adamant about integrating a climate lens into our actions – the consequences of inaction are already here,” Kress added. “Chico has the responsibility to become a model for resilience and proactive climate action, demonstrating effective strategies that can be replicated across the region, if not the country.”
The City Council changed the Commission from holding standing monthly meetings to meeting “as needed” in November 2023. City staff last called the Commission to meet in April with a limited agenda. Fewer meetings have limited the Commission’s ability to guide efforts to address climate change and keep the City on target to accomplish the CAP goals, he said.
Kress is a founder and principal at a Chico venture studio called Dayani that designs digital services to address climate change. He worries that many local elected officials do not discuss climate change or propose ways to address it within official strategies. The City Council has a lot of influence, as those elected leaders set the priorities and direction for staff.
“When we see local climate action, vulnerability, and scenario planning largely missing from crucial plans like our wildfire mitigation strategy, it’s clear that those plans are leaving our community members vulnerable to climate risks,” Kress said. “We need all our city leaders to be vocal, clear-eyed, and proactive about climate action.”
City official disagrees
Vieg, though, vouched for his team, noting that staff work hard to incorporate the Commission’s work — with consideration of the changing climate — into master plans.
Vieg said the City followed the CAP’s recommendation to implement an Urban Forest Master Plan to maintain a healthy urban forest for the next 40 years. The plan includes work to add to the City’s forest canopy, manage open spaces and natural resources and keep a public tree inventory. He also noted that the City’s Fire Department developed a Community Wildfire Protection Plan in 2022 to “assess wildfire threats, community preparedness, defensibility, and potential hazard mitigation measures.”
The City’s 2018 Climate Change Vulnerability Assessment contains lots of information about extreme heat and increased wildfire risks, and cites Bidwell Park’s woodland and savanna ecosystems as being most at risk of suffering the effects of climate change.
“Many of these areas are biologically rich in species and can be easily be disturbed by changes in the number of extreme heat days, heat waves, and overall increased temperatures,” according to the assessment.
Stemen: Climate not a City focus
However, Chico State professor of geology and environmental studies Mark Stemen says that mentioning climate change in City plans is not as effective as making it the focus of official policy.
Stemen has spent a lot of time with City staff to craft official plans. But he told ChicoSol that he’s worried that City leaders don’t take climate change seriously enough to use those plans to proactively handle the impacts of drought and extreme heat on the city and parks.
Stemen formerly sat on the Climate Action Commission. He said that since the pandemic began, the City has not financially supported efforts to reach stated climate goals. The City also hasn’t been completing reports on efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, despite being required to do so under its CAP procedures. And the parks division does not file reports on any efforts to sequester carbon in its plans for managing public lands, he added.
Stemen said these problems point to an unwillingness to make climate change the center issue around which strategies revolve. For example, he said that Chico and Butte County officials do not name conditions arising from climate change — including hotter, longer, drier summers — as the real driver of catastrophic fires. The City hasn’t touched the Commission’s plan to handle extreme heat due to climate change, which has sat in Internal Affairs since 2021, he said.
Stemen also said the City has not made enough movement toward transitioning from fossil fuels and planning around vehicles and taking action on cutting greenhouse gas emissions.
“It’s easier to blame someone else than admit we’re the ones that are doing it,” Stemen said, referring to human-induced climate change.
Progress at the County
There’s some progress on the way, as Butte County this month announced that it will partner with a Rocklin firm to restart its own Community Choice Aggregation (CCA). The CCA is a program that allows cities, counties and other qualifying governmental entities to purchase and/or generate electricity for residents and businesses, Stemen said. (Chico hasn’t been sending its representative to the county’s CCA meetings, he said.)
That countywide effort will be crucial to stop taking a reactive approach to climate crises, and instead start learning from other cities’ work.
The City’s Climate Action Commission took notes from the city of Albany, Calif.’s work on issues like carbon sequestration, Stemen said. There’s no reason why the City can’t do as well, if not better, he added.
Although discussions locally in recent weeks have revolved around controlled burns as a method of wildfire prevention, efforts to address climate change require many types of proactive work, Stemen said. “We can’t just control burn our way out of climate change,” he added.
Natalie Hanson is a contributing editor to ChicoSol.
Sergio Arellano and Jahaira Zaragoza, representing Cal Fire’s public information office, explain the fire map at the agency’s Chico command center.
By 11:30 p.m. on July 24 – the day that some Chicoans heard that a fire had started near Upper Park’s Alligator Hole, an area that hadn’t burned in a very long time – the blaze had devoured 6,465 acres.
The next morning, Cal Fire reported that by 6:46 a.m. the scorching-hot fire, driven by south winds, covered 45,550 acres. The fire had moved at a speed so stunning that while most Chico-area residents slept, it had covered on average almost 6,000 acres an hour.
The Park Fire is one of the fastest-moving — perhaps the fastest — of the so-called catastrophic fires that have occurred in Northern California in recent years. But speed isn’t the only characteristic it shares with megafires. Like other explosive wildfires, it doesn’t sleep.
“It used to be that fires went to sleep at night, and that’s often when [firefighters] made the most gains on them,” said Mark Stemen, a Chico State University environmental studies professor. “The Park Fire’s greatest gains were between 1 a.m. and 3 a.m. on the first morning. It ran big that night.”
As this summer closed in on the hottest July ever, night-time humidity has been low most nights, accompanied by winds that have been “stronger and steady,” said Sergio Arellano, who is working with Cal Fire’s public information office and has 18 years of experience in fire service.
“This is the trend – lower relative humidity at night with stronger gusts of wind,” Arellano said. “That’s why you’re seeing more activity at night.”
The Park Fire is a stunningly fast night stalker. “This is a rate of spread we’ve not seen before – 5,000 acres an hour,” Arellano said. “This is the fastest fire I’ve seen.”
The speed of the Park Fire has made it – in a mere six days – one of the seven largest wildfires in the state’s history.
Stemen says the conditions described by Arellano – the low humidity and the windy, hot nights – are because of climate change. For decades, Chico had an average of four days a year with temperatures over 104 F. This summer, there have so far been 29.
Cal Fire said today the Park Fire is more than 370,000 acres in size and only 12 percent contained. Five structures have been damaged and 109 destroyed in what is a mostly rural area north of Chico. Officials are describing the fire as unstable and unpredictable.
“We’ve been seeing activity day and night,” said Jahaira Zaragoza, a Cal Fire public information officer. “You wake up in the morning and it’s doubled overnight. Our fires have evolved. A few years ago, we would consider a large destructive fire to be less than 13,000 acres.”
Zaragoza, speaking early today with ChicoSol, noted that Cal Fire is concerned that the Park Fire on July 28 jumped Highway 32, and conditions for firefighting were likely to worsen after a day or two of cooler temperatures. “Smoke is clearing out and that is going to allow the wind to fuel the fire,” Zaragoza said. “They are preparing and anticipating for some battles today.
“There’s a lot of lava rock in the northern section of the fire,” Zaragoza said. “It’s very difficult terrain. We had winter storms just a few seasons ago, so those dead and dying logs that were knocked over by the wind, they’re now on the ground. There were extensive rains just a few years ago; that created a lot of fuel. There are annual grasses to full-on timber on the ground.”
Officials say Cal Fire has been successful in halting the fire on the lower and west sides.
But climate change has produced a whipsaw of weather extremes in California, Stemen says, that can make fire control difficult in some areas. This year is a dry year after two wet ones. “We have wet years that produce all this vegetation, and then dry years,” he said.
A study funded by the National Integrated Drought Information System showed that most of the increase in huge wildfires during the past 50 years “is due to human-caused climate change.” And the science journal Nature shows in a recent article that “night-time fire intensity has increased, which is linked to hotter and drier nights.”
Stemen said fires are burning faster, hotter and at night because of what’s called, in scientific terms, “vapor barrier deficit.”
“As the air gets thirstier, it sucks the moisture right out of the ground,” he said. “The air is so thirsty that it literally starts pulling moisture from the soil.”
Stemen said the man who has been accused of pushing a car into the creek ravine created a problem that exploded because of climate change. “While some yahoo drove his mom’s car into a ravine, climate change drove the fire all the way to Tehama County,” he said. (Ronnie Dean Stout II was charged with arson today in Butte County Superior Court and hasn’t entered a plea in connection with the incident.)
Retired Chico State political science professor Beau Grosscup lost his Cohasset home Friday – probably in the middle of the night, he says – and blames firstly the man accused of pushing the burning car. But he knows climate change played a part in the fire’s voracious nature.
“We’ve been affected not just by [climate change],” Grosscup said today, referring to him and his partner, “but also by the ideological challenge to science.”
There hasn’t been the “political will” by those in power to undertake the “fundamental change” needed to confront human-induced climate disaster, he said.
Cal Fire’s Zaragoza didn’t want to discuss climate change, but said one important tool for firefighting is prescribed or controlled burns – fires set deliberately to eliminate ground cover in an area that can then act as a firebreak. A fire that is kept low and slow can also help regenerate vegetation, such as ponderosa pines.
A prescribed burn can prevent a wildfire from “going up into the canopy of the trees,” she said.
But while the Park Fire inadvertently produced some “clean burn” areas, it is largely what fire officials call a “dirty burn.”
“This is a catastrophic fire,” Zaragoza said. “Catastrophic in the sense that it’s a massive wildfire that outpaced us, that outgrew us, and of course we have a lot of damage to the wildlife, forested areas, and homes as well.”
A correction was made to this story on July 30 in the paragraph on the “whipsaw of weather extremes” to correct and clarify the quote and show what Stemen calls the “increasing frequency and severity of the swings from wet years to dry years.”
Looking ahead to "flooding, melting polar ice, human migration"
by George Gold | Posted October 26, 2023
photo by George Gold
September protest at Beale Air Force Base.
In September, about a dozen members of the Chico Peace Alliance traveled to the front gate of Beale Air Force Base to deliver a message to pilots and support workers.
We wanted to share our view — not often noted by the defense establishment — about the hazards that are caused by the U.S. military industrial complex. Our view was that peace is more important than war, and that the U.S. defense infrastructure causes a huge negative environmental impact right there in Marysville and around the world.
The U.S. military budget for 2023 was $842 billion. So, let’s see, if we just cut that budget by 10%, that would mean that some $84 billion could be used to provide food to curb the shocking rise in child hunger across the United States, to alleviate the crushing debt of so many students, to solve the devastation of homelessness, to work to address the negative impact of climate change. Hmm… what a concept.
Déjà vu? In the 60s and 70s many of us were college students, trying to manage our educational challenges and yet committed to ending the war in Vietnam. Some of us were at street demonstrations every single weekend and, we succeeded! Because of us, U.S. participation in the Vietnam War ended in 1975.
In 1967, Israel was at war with Egypt and several other neighboring countries. That was over 50 years ago. What has changed? Israel is still at war. The United States is still trying to rule a world that has changed in so many ways. Yet, as a child of Holocaust survivors, my heart is torn between Israel and my desire for peace.
In September 2022, the U.S. Government Accounting Office (GAO) issued a report entitled, “The National Security Snapshot CLIMATE CHANGE RISKS TO NATIONAL SECURITY.”
What do we have to look forward to? Flooding, melting polar ice, human migration trends, rising sea levels, catastrophic storms, and the resulting disruption of U.S. military base utilities.
At Beale, we arrived just before shift change so that our signs of peace, love and “misunderstanding” could be seen as workers left the base.
Cross that white line as you approach the front gate and you can be arrested for trespassing. Where’s that white line? The military police car stationed at the gate will be glad to show you.
We decided that on this visit we would stay behind the line, and thereby we displayed several large banners along both sides of that entry/exit road with our message of peace love and understanding. And, a few of the departing workers actually flashed us the peace sign! But whether flashing a peace sign or not, everyone leaving the base saw us — our signs, our banners and thereby our message.
And we weren’t alone. Aside from a base military police officer’s car that was parked just on the public side of the white line, the entire time we were there, there were three California Highway Patrol vehicles and one county sheriff’s auto parked just about 30 yards from our main set-up location.
Beale Air Force Base’s stated mission is this: “Deliver persistent integrated reconnaissance and combat power.” But at what price?
Some of the environmental concerns associated with U.S. military operations are outlined in the Climate Change/Risk government document. For example:
Base operations: U.S. military bases, both domestically and overseas, require vast amounts of resources, including energy, water and land. The construction and maintenance of these bases can lead to habitat destruction, deforestation and ecosystem disruption.
Training: Military training exercises often involve the use of live ammunition, explosives and heavy equipment. These activities can cause soil erosion, damage to vegetation, and contamination of soil and water with hazardous materials.
Toxic chemicals: Historically, the U.S. military has used a variety of toxic chemicals, such as Agent Orange and depleted uranium, in its operations. These substances have long-lasting and devastating effects on the environment and human health.
Hazardous waste: Over time, military activities generate significant amounts of hazardous waste, including chemicals, fuels and munitions. Improper disposal and management of wastes can lead to soil and water contamination.
Air and water pollution: The operation of military vehicles, aircraft, and ships often contribute to air and water pollution through the emission of greenhouse gases, particulate matter and other pollutants.
Military bases abroad. Placement of U.S. military bases overseas often lead to tensions with local communities and governments over land use, environmental damage and contamination issues.
Climate change: The U.S. military is a significant consumer of fossil fuels, which contributes to greenhouse gas emissions and climate change.
George Gold is an occasional contributor to ChicoSol and a Chico resident.
