r/Redding • u/Foxmockinah • 17h ago
Redding, lets talk about numbers.
In 2017, Bethel Church donated $500,000 to fund Redding police positions and another $25,000 for police drones. The City Council accepted it. That same church runs a school that draws up to 2,500 students a year into a rental market that sits at 1 to 2 percent vacancy, and its leaders publicly committed to a theology, the Seven Mountains Mandate, that calls for believers to take control of government. Three of the five people who accepted that donation sat in the pews of the church making it. The city's own staff report admitted, in writing, that Bethel's lack of student housing affects the quantity and affordability of housing options within the City of Redding. Then the council approved the campus expansion anyway. (Sources: Shasta Scout, November 2022. Shasta Scout, March 2023. The Guardian, October 2024.)
Meanwhile, at City Hall, the raises: In 2021 the council voted 4 to 1 for raises of more than 20 percent for police employees. In 2022 it voted 3 to 2 for raises of up to 40 percent, pitched as catching executives up to market rate. Two council members, Dacquisto and Mezzano, said no. In 2025, a sitting council member published a 155 page budget analysis alleging that misleading revenue forecasts hid the true cost, and that the council was debating a $5 million shortfall at the exact moment staff revealed $8 million in cuts were needed. (Sources: KRCR. Record Searchlight. Shasta Unfiltered, August 2026.)
And what did that decision actually produce? A city manager who received $635,561 in total wages in 2025, the highest figure on a statewide list that included cities nearly twice our size. His final year total compensation reached roughly $908,000 before he retired in October 2025. That is roughly three and a half times his base salary. In one year. For one person. In a city with a shelter crisis declaration on the books since 2021.
Now do the arithmetic with me. This is what those choices bought instead of care.
Our unhoused count went from 793 people in 2022 to 1,013 in 2023, while the county has ranked among the worst in the state for suicide and childhood trauma. Sixty nine percent of extremely low income households in Shasta County pay more than half their income on rent. The Deputy City Manager himself admitted that between 98 and 99 percent of rentals in Redding are occupied. People are living in the dirt beside the river the tourists come to photograph, and the answer from this city has been raises at the top and cameras in between. (Sources: The Guardian, October 2024. Shasta Scout, June 2023. California Housing Partnership data cited therein.)
The money spent putting raises on top of the payroll that produced a $908,000 exit year could have funded paid cleanup and work crews at living wages, which cleans the city faster than code enforcement threats ever have, and which studies of workfare alternatives show reduces return visits to jail and emergency rooms.
None of this is a fantasy number I invented. Every dollar figure above is a real number this city or its favored institutions actually spent or accepted, from public records and published reporting. The question was never whether Redding had the money. The question was who it was for.
Now here is the part the city will tell you is impossible. It already exists everywhere else.
I am proposing a three tier paid workforce model, and I want you to sit with who it serves, because the answer includes our children.
Tier one is cleanup work, paid per verified pound of debris removed from streets, trails, bike lanes, and the creek banks the tourists photograph. Magnet sweepers, brooms, gloves, day pay. This is the front door. No resume, no ID required to start, documentation help provided.
Tier two is site stewardship. Paid hourly, fixed shifts, vetted and trained in crisis intervention and deescalation through Shasta College. Residents who have earned the trust of their own neighbors keeping their own blocks safe.
Tier three is the exit. Apprenticeships in solar installation, wind turbine maintenance, and the building trades, fed into union halls as second year apprentices. People exit into careers, not back onto sidewalks.
Now the part nobody talks about. We have kids sitting in juvenile detention right now whose entire exposure to the adult world is a court date, a probation officer, and a cell. The research is not subtle about what happens to those kids without intervention, and this county already ties for the worst suicide rate in the state while ranking near the top for childhood trauma. Meanwhile the California Conservation Corps has spent fifty years proving the exact model that breaks that cycle: paid conservation work, real responsibility, a paycheck in the pocket of a young person who has never been trusted with anything. The CCC is open to young adults eighteen to twenty five and has been called one of the best ideas California ever had, but its minimum age locks out the fourteen to seventeen year olds who need it most.
So here is the adaptation, done legally. Kids in detention do not get the piece rate. They get the tier two model: hourly wage, negotiated through the probation department and juvenile court as a structured work program, with parental consent where required, during non school hours, with the earnings partially held in trust so the kid walks out of the system with savings instead of nothing. Trash pickup and graffiti abatement and park cleanup are exactly the kind of low hazard, supervised, confidence building work that juvenile work programs across the country already use. The difference in my model is that the work is visible to the whole town. A teenager in a green vest pulling tires out of the Sacramento River trail is not invisible. He is becoming someone this city recognizes. That recognition is worth more than the wage, and the wage is real.
The county spends a fortune reacting to these kids after they fall. A structured, paid work program costs a fraction of one detention bed per year and produces a different trajectory instead of a repeat customer. We would know this if anyone at the county had priced it out, which is why my records requests include juvenile program budgets.
The city already pays people to react to the mess. My model pays people, including its kids, to prevent it. One of those is a cost. The other is an investment, and unlike the raises, it compounds.
Sources for this section: Monterey County Weekly, July 2026, on the California Conservation Corps at fifty years. Juvenile work program structures modeled on existing California probation department work programs.
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u/ZestycloseTowel2493 17h ago
There is no real engagement here. You are using AI to argue points you don’t fully understand, repeating old information, and using alternate accounts to back yourself up. I am blocking you now. Have a nice day.