City officials say sewer rate protest letters must follow state guidelines
Residents are organizing against the proposal but some information circulating in online forums is incorrect, city officials said. They are warning that only protest letters with the appropriate information will be accepted.
City officials said they've received a number of emails regarding the rate increase but that state law requires certain steps for official submissions.
"It needs to have a wet signature," said Evette Roldan, the city's wastewater manager, referring to a handwritten signature.
"You can't have a photocopy, can't email it in, can't be an electronic submission. That sort of thing," Roldan said. "Coming to the council meeting, just speaking at the council meeting doesn't count as a protest."
Letters notifying residents of the proposed increase were sent out April 11 under a state law known as Proposition 218 that requires jurisdictions to notify constituents. Under Prop. 218, if a jurisdiction receives protest letters from more than 50% of the impacted residents, the increase can't be enacted.
In order to qualify as an official protest, letters must include an original or "wet" signature, the property address, the property parcel number and the name of the property owner.
Protests for multiple properties owned by a single person can be included in one letter, but they must include the address and parcel number of each property.
Letters do not have to state a reason for the opposition.
Address parcel numbers can be found using the Assessor Property Search function on the Kern County Record Assessor's office website at kerncounty.com.
Because letters must be signed in-person by the property owner, letters must either be hand-delivered to the clerk's office or sent by mail. Emailed copies of protest letters, including photos of signed letters, are not acceptable, nor are electronic signatures.
Letters may be submitted to the city clerk at Bakersfield City Council meetings. Any such letters must be submitted to the city clerk before the end of the public hearing scheduled for May 28.
Bakersfield residents are looking at a more than 300% increase in their sewer rates, raising the annual fee for a single-family home from $239 to $950.
The increase is needed to cover what the city says is as much as $600 million in emergency upgrades, including a new treatment plant to replace the city's aging Plant 2 on Planz Road, originally built in 1958.
The city council voted to send Prop. 218 notices after long deliberation at their March 26 meeting. The vote was split 3-2 with two members absent.
If the city does not receive the requisite number of Prop. 218 protest letters, the proposed increase will still have to pass a vote of the city council.
"Right now, it's basically out to vote in the public," Roldan said of the protest process.
"If we receive 50% official, majority protests, it basically takes it away from the council. People (will) have spoken and they voted it down," Roldan said. "Absent the majority, it's a council vote."
Angered by such a large increase so suddenly, several residents have expressed further frustration that instructions for submitting an official protest aren't clearer.
"It doesn't say anything about whether it has to be handwritten or typed or whatnot. And the other thing is, it doesn't have a link to how to find your parcel number," said Johnny Olaguez, a resident who's trying to organize opposition to the increase.
An unsuccessful candidate for the Ward 6 council seat last year, Olaguez posted a flier to social media calling on residents to attend the council's Wednesday meeting to give public comment on the increase.
Olaguez said he plans to be there with pens and a stack of template letters to help people fill out their protests.
"To have me jump through all these hoops to have to oppose this. I'm very knowledgeable and I know computers," Olaguez said. "But when you talk about, you know, grandma who's 80 years old living on fixed income. If you're going to have to go down to Kern County get her parcel number, write a letter, sign it, drop it off. That just seems like a little bit too much work."
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Los Angeles Times
5 days ago
- Los Angeles Times
The forgotten godfather of Trump's scorched earth immigration campaign
He inveighs against illegal immigration in terms more appropriate for a vermin infestation. He wants all people without papers deported immediately, damn the cost. He thinks Los Angeles is a cesspool and that flying the Mexican flag in the United States is an act of insurrection. He uses the internet mostly to share crude videos and photos depicting Latinos as subhuman. Stephen Miller? Absolutely. But every time I hear the chief architect of Donald Trump's scorched earth immigration policies rail in uglier and uglier terms, I recall another xenophobe I hadn't thought of in awhile. For nearly 30 years, Glenn Spencer fought illegal immigration in Los Angeles and beyond with a singular obsession. The former Sherman Oaks resident kicked off his campaign, he told The Times in a 2001 profile, after seeing Latinos looting during the 1992 L.A. riots and thinking, 'Oh, my God, there are so many of them and they are so out of control.' Spencer was a key volunteer who pushed for the passage of Prop. 187, the 1994 California ballot initiative that sought to make life miserable for undocumented immigrants and was so punitive that a federal judge later ruled it unconstitutional. A multiplatform influencer before that became commonplace, Spencer hosted a local radio show, produced videos that he mailed to all members of Congress warning about an 'invasion' and turned his vitriolic newsletter into a website, American Patrol, that helped connect nativist groups across the country. American Patrol's home page was a collection of links to newspaper articles about suspected undocumented immigrants alleged to have committed crimes. While Spencer regularly trashed Muslims and other immigrants, he directed most of his bile at Mexicans. A 'Family Values' button on the website, in the colors of the Mexican flag, highlighted sex crimes allegedly committed by undocumented immigrants. Editorial cartoons featured a Mexican flag piercing a hole in California with the caption 'Sink-hole de Mayo.' Long before conservative activists recorded themselves infiltrating the conferences of political enemies, Spencer was doing it. He provoked physical fights at protests and published reams of digital nonsense against Latino politicians, once superimposing a giant sombrero on an image of Antonio Villaraigosa with the epithet, 'Viva Mexico!' On the morning Villaraigosa, the future L.A. mayor, was to be sworn in as speaker of the assembly in 1998, every seat in the legislative chamber was topped by a flier labeling him a communist and leader of the supposed Mexican takeover of California. 'I don't remember if his name was on it, but it was all his terminology,' said Villaraigosa, who recalled how Spencer helped make his college membership in the Chicano student group MEChA an issue in his 2001 mayoral loss to Jim Hahn. 'But he never had the balls to talk to me in person.' Spencer became the Johnny Appleseed of the modern-day Know Nothing movement, lecturing to groups of middle-aged gringos about his work — first across the San Fernando Valley, then in small towns where Latinos were migrating in large numbers for the first time. 'California [it] has often been said is America's future. Let me tell you about your future,' he told the Council of Conservative Citizens in Virginia in 1999. Spencer is the person most responsible for mainstreaming the lie of Reconquista, the wacko idea that Mexicans came to the U.S. not for economic reasons but because of a plot concocted by the Mexican government to take back the lands lost in the 1848 Mexican-American War. He wrote screeds like 'Is Jew-Controlled Hollywood Brainwashing Americans?' and threatened libel lawsuits against anyone — myself included — who dared point out that he was a racist. He was a favorite punching bag of the mainstream media, a slovenly suburban Ahab doomed to fail. The Times wrote in 2001 that Spencer 'foresaw millions of converts' to his anti-immigrant campaign, 'only to see his temple founder.' Moving to southern Arizona in 2002, the better to monitor the U.S.-Mexico border, Spencer spent the rest of his life trying to sell state and federal authorities on border-monitoring technology he developed that involved planes, drones and motion-detection sensors. His move inspired other conservatives to monitor the U.S.-Mexico border on their own. By the Obama era, he was isolated even from other anti-immigrant activists for extremist views like banning foreign-language media and insisting that every person who came to this country illegally was a drug smuggler. Even the rise of Trump didn't bring Spencer and his work back into the limelight. He was so forgotten that I didn't even realize he was dead until Googling his name recently, after enduring another Miller rant. Spencer's hometown Sierra Vista's Herald Review was the only publication I found that made any note of his death from cancer in 2022 at age 85, describing his life's work as bringing 'the crisis of illegal immigration to the forefront of the American public's consciousness.' That's a whitewash worthy of Tom Sawyer's picket fence. We live in Glenn Spencer's world, a place where the nastier the rhetoric against illegal immigration and the crueler the government's efforts against all migrants, the better. Every time a xenophobe makes Latinos out to be an invading force, every time someone posts a racist message on social media or Miller throws another tantrum on Fox News, Glenn Spencer gets his evil wings. 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I knew even then that ignoring hate allows it to fester, and I wanted to figure out why people like Spencer despised people like me, my family and my friends. So I regularly covered him and his allies in my early years as a reporter with an obsession that was a reverse mirror of his. Colleagues and even activists said my work was a waste of time — that people like Spencer were wheezing artifacts who would eventually disappear as the U.S. embraced Latinos and immigrants. And here we are. Spencer usually sent me legal threats whenever I wrote about his ugly ways — threats that went nowhere. That's why I was surprised at how relatively polite he was the last time we communicated, in 2019. I reached out via email asking for an interview for a Times podcast I hosted about the 25th anniversary of Prop. 187. By then, Spencer was openly criticizing Trump's planned border wall, which he found a waste of money and not nearly as efficient as his own system. Spencer initially said he would consider my request, while sending me an article he wrote that blamed Prop. 187's demise on then-California Gov. Gray Davis and Mexico's president at the time, Ernesto Zedillo. When I followed up a few months later, Spencer bragged about the legacy of his website, which he hadn't regularly updated since 2013 due to declining health. The American Patrol archives 'would convince the casual observer that The Times did what it could do [to] defeat my efforts and advance the cause of illegal immigration,' Spencer wrote. 'Do I think The Times has changed its spots? No. Will I agree to an interview? No.' Levin hadn't heard about Spencer's death until we talked. 'I thought he went into irrelevance,' he admitted with a chuckle that he quickly cut off, realizing he had forgotten about Spencer's legacy in the era of Trump. 'We ignored that cough, that speck in the X-ray,' Levin concluded, now somber. 'And now, we have cancer.'
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The Hill
10-07-2025
- The Hill
Trump administration sues California over cost of eggs
(KTLA) — The Trump administration has filed a lawsuit against California, alleging that three state laws are the reason behind rising egg prices in the Golden State. 'The State of California has contributed to the historic rise in egg prices by imposing unnecessary red tape on the production of eggs. Through a combination of voter initiatives, legislative enactments, and regulations, California has effectively prevented farmers across the country from using a number of agricultural production methods which were in widespread use — and which helped keep eggs affordable,' the lawsuit said. The suit targets three state laws, AB 1437, Proposition 2, and Proposition 12. Prop 2, a statewide ballot measure voters passed in 2008, created welfare mandates for farm animals such as egg-laying hens, and AB 1437 regulates egg quality for human consumption. The administration argues that the laws work in tandem to depress egg production and drive up prices. The suit also calls out Prop. 12, passed by voters in 2018, which requires specific minimum-space requirements for chickens and other farm animals. The administration also argues that regulating egg production falls under the federal government's domain, citing a 1970 federal law. There was no mention of the bird flu. An outbreak of the disease earlier this year hiked prices up nationwide. Gov. Gavin Newsom's (D) press office poked fun at the suit with a post on X, claiming President Donald Trump is 'back to his favorite hobby: blaming California for literally everything.' 'Next up: @CAGovernor Gavin Newsom caused the fall of Rome and sent the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs,' the post continued.
