Coolidge: City ‘made a stand’ on rules and regulations
CHICO » Andrew Coolidge made his return to the Chico City Council on Tuesday night and promptly found himself in the leader’s chair — tasked with steering meetings as the tumultuous year draws to a close.
Coolidge was on the council starting in 2014, but lost the bid for reelection in 2018. This year, he focused on campaigning for a return to stability and “calm leadership” as well as more ways to enforce laws to stop needle distribution and camping in the city’s parks.
He won District 5 from incumbent and former mayor Randall Stone (with a small margin from newcomer Lauren Kohler), making clear his priorities will be on public safety and solutions for controversial issues like homelessness and banning future needle exchange programs.
While he doesn’t take the role as anything granting additional authority, he said he has a “very positive outlook” for the future of the new council, coming in alongside two other newly elected councilors (who ran on many of the same issues).
But Coolidge is going into the next two years with eyes open about the difficulties ahead due to the pandemic.
“The city definitely has some challenges ahead of us as around the whole country,” he said. “We need to work through the pandemic and trying to keep our businesses successful and safe … while following guidelines set by the (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) and the state is important as well.”
He thinks the next six months in particular will be a challenge — with a three-week lockdown in the regional stay at home order announced Wednesday — until the nation and state moves to access to vaccinations for COVID-19. That will take the whole community working together to operate safely, he said.
“We want to make sure we don’t err on one side or the other to cause havoc in our community. But Chico has proven itself pretty well over the last few months.”
The new council
Coolidge said he thought Tuesday night’s meeting — which introduced new enforcements in the city’s parks on contentious issues like camping and trash — was a “very positive direction for our community.”
“I think we made a stand that Chico will stand on its rules and regulations,” he said.
He also named his request to look at funding for Behavioral Health and requests by new Vice Mayor Kasey Reynolds to unfreeze police staffing in a future meeting and Councilor Kami Denlay to ban needle exchange programs as key issues to tackle as soon as possible.
Hiring more police officers and finding more available housing are both of great concern to Coolidge. He also has said he is prepared to make more tight budget cuts and decisions as the city faces the economic impacts of the pandemic and finding more revenue options.
“It has to be done in a way that is careful and balances the needs of all the citizens in the community,” he said.
“In terms of the council and their job, I don’t view this as a job that needs to be a megaphone in any one direction. I want to make sure the citizens in Chico are heard and we move forward in a calm intelligent way where compromise can be reached.”
That also means possibly reexamining how council meetings are run. Coolidge wants more focus on public comments, even if that means returning to one meeting a month. He also hopes to see a new technology solution for live interaction with commenters during meetings from city staff, if not next week, then in January.
He described his priority as being that council meetings should be “calm, easy” discussions and moving forward to making decisions which the majority of people can agree upon.
“So you’ll see me being less political as it were, being calmer, more fiscally responsible,” he said. “I don’t think grandstanding or the ego side should play any part in being a council member.”
After all, locally and nationwide, people want less anxiety about their government and a “calmer, more gentle path to walk down,” to conduct business, Coolidge said.
While he didn’t serve on the council during the Camp Fire, he also hopes to alleviate the “horrific challenges” like it which the county has faced.
“I do hope … we can move forward and get in a direction that makes sense for everybody.”