ˌō-ˌes-ˌes-ˌdē-ˈes | noun

Open State Street Derangement Syndrome

1. A condition, so far documented only in Santa Barbara, California, in which an otherwise employable adult decides that the great unfinished business of his life is the restoration of two lanes of automobile traffic to the 500 through 1100 blocks of one downtown street, and arranges the rest of his existence around that project.
2. The behavior that follows. The posting. The petitions. The six hour meetings. The serene certainty that a street with people standing around on it is a street in decline.

Diagnostic criteria: Total immunity to the city's own numbers. The ability to call a corridor dead while physically unable to walk down it in a straight line because of the crowd. Sudden, load bearing concern for seniors and the disabled from parties who have never once shown up for a curb cut. The conviction that what a place is missing is a Tahoe idling at a light.

Usage: "He hasn't voted in a school board election since Clinton, but the OSSDS has him at City Hall until midnight."

Here's the part nobody wants to say out loud, so I will. Six years ago a street in this town closed because the world was ending, and nobody planned it, nobody workshopped it, nobody paid a consultancy half a million dollars to produce a rendering of it, and it turned out to be the best thing that has happened to downtown in three decades. That's the wound. Not the traffic. The fact that the single most successful piece of urban design in the modern history of Santa Barbara was an emergency measure that a guy in the transportation department made up in a week, while every process, committee, charrette and long range vision plan of the previous forty years produced a corridor that was quietly dying with cars on it.

So people came back. They walked from the water up toward the mountains, they let their kids get twenty or thirty feet ahead of them, which is a thing you cannot do on a road, and a certain kind of person looked at all of it and felt something go sour in the back of the throat.

That's OSSDS. Open State Street Derangement Syndrome. And I want to be precise, because this is not a policy disagreement. A policy disagreement can be met halfway, horse traded, walked back over a couple of meetings. This is a devotion, and devotions do not respond to information.

Watch what happens to a fact when it enters the room. The city runs its own survey, more than five thousand people answer, 79 percent say leave it alone, and within a day the survey is rigged, the sample is captured, the respondents are all cyclists from Goleta. The council votes five to two on June 30 to keep it as it is, and the council is bought. A petition to bring the cars back gathers something like seven hundred signatures in a city of roughly 88,000 people, which is under one percent of the population, and it gets written up as a groundswell. And then the mayor of this city sits in a public meeting, holds up his telephone, and announces that a private party is standing by to match up to $700,000 to get cars back onto that pavement. Think about that for a minute. Somebody is willing to put real money on the table for the privilege of driving past the front of a building. That is the most honest thing anyone has said in six years of this and it slid past the room like it was a weather report.

Somebody in the replies is about to tell me it's about the elderly, or the disabled, or the small business owner. Accessibility is real and it is being handled disgracefully by both sides, but I have been reading these people for years andI know exactly who turns up for a curb cut, a bus frequency increase, or a signal timing change downtown, and it is not them. It has never been them. They discovered mobility justice the same week they lost the vote.

What this actually is, I think, is simpler and sadder. Some people cannot tolerate a place they no longer recognize, they want their old vibs back. The street stopped being a thing you pass through on your way to somewhere else and turned into a place you have to physically be present in, at walking speed, among strangers, and for a certain temperament that is unbearable. That's it. That's the whole diagnosis.

The final master plan comes back for adoption in the next few weeks. It passes or it doesn't. The posting continues either way, because the posting was never a means to an end. The posting is the condition.

Go stand out there around seven this week and count heads. Then come back and read the comments about how nobody goes there anymore.

Look. Nobody moves to a place like this because they wanted a bigger city. You came for the river, or you were born here and the river kept you, and either way you have opinions about what happens to it. So when the world's largest triathlon company announces it is going to drop a couple thousand people in spandex into Whiskeytown at sunrise and then run them across the Sundial Bridge, the reasonable civic instinct is suspicion. Good. Hold onto that. But then do the arithmetic, because the arithmetic is more interesting than either the boosters or the cranks are telling you.

Here is what is happening. On Sunday, August 16, the inaugural Ironman 70.3 Northern California starts with a swim at Oak Bottom Marina in Whiskeytown, then puts athletes on a 56 mile bike course that uses and crosses multiple state highways through the region, and finishes with a half marathon along the Sacramento River Trail, over the Sundial, and into downtown. More than 100 Ironman staff will be in town, and the whole thing kicks off Friday, August 14, with a celebration at the Civic Auditorium. Athlete counts have been a moving target. Back in the spring, organizers were talking about roughly 2,500 athletes and 5,000 people overall, with more than 10 million dollars in projected economic impact and a need for 1,000 volunteers. More recent reporting puts the field at more than 1,600 athletes. That gap matters, and I will come back to it.

Now the part the flyers do not lead with. This costs money. Real money, out of a general fund that is already bleeding. City service costs for an event of this size have been estimated in the range of 250,000 to 500,000 dollars, offset in part by a lodging contribution in the neighborhood of 200,000 to 220,500 dollars per event. That is not free. And it lands in a city that was staring down a projected 5 million dollar deficit and holding three hour special council meetings about it, where administrators floated cuts to police and fire and a 350,000 dollar annual reduction in tourism contracts. Anyone who tells you the money is imaginary is selling something.

The inconvenience is real too, and I am not going to soft pedal it for you. Caltrans is telling drivers to avoid parts of Shasta County and the city that morning, with one way traffic control on Highway 299 between Oak Bottom and Rock Creek Road from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m., and Caltrans says delays up to 20-60 minutes. And out on the course, people are worried. One resident off Dry Creek on Elk Trail West said flatly that he would be trapped in his own house or forced to stay away, while Ironman says the route was built in collaboration with the city, Caltrans, and public safety partners, and that roads like Bear Mountain and Dry Creek were chosen for their condition and scenery while trying to minimize disruption. Both of those things can be true. If you live on the course, your Sunday is inconvenient, and "we consulted stakeholders" is cold comfort when you cannot get out of your driveway.

So what do you get for it. This is where the outside evidence gets genuinely persuasive, and I say that as someone constitutionally allergic to tourism bureau press releases.

Start with who these people are. A survey done for the Ironman organization found average household income among Ironman participants around 247,000 dollars, and USA Triathlon puts the average across all triathletes at about 126,000 dollars. Entry alone for an Ironman branded race averages around 500 dollars, and roughly 70 percent of triathletes spend between 500 and 1,500 dollars a year just on gear. These are not day trippers who buy a gas station coffee and leave. In St. George, athletes typically stayed about a week and trained in the area beforehand, bringing family, friends, and support crews into hotels and restaurants. In Springfield, tourism officials noted out of town competitors often book short term rentals rather than hotels because of how they eat and prepare. Every one of those bookings runs through a 10 percent transient occupancy tax plus a 2 percent tourism marketing assessment, which is to say through the same general fund that is short.

The comparable towns tell a consistent story. Panama City Beach reported roughly 1,950 athletes and about 10,000 visitors producing around 7.5 million dollars in direct spending and about 11 million dollars in total impact. Santa Rosa put its city cost for the full distance race at 140,552 dollars while third party reports pegged combined direct and indirect impact at 9.1 million dollars for the full race and another 11 million for the 70.3, with the 70.3 alone drawing 2,486 athletes and 5,971 visiting spectators. Swansea, in Wales, logged over 4.3 million pounds into the local economy in one year plus 1.7 million pounds in media value from global broadcast coverage. And on the modest end, so you have a floor and not just a ceiling, Springfield's 70.3 with about 1,400 athletes was estimated at roughly 2 million dollars.

The thing that should actually interest you is not race day. It is year four. In St. George, race weekend averaged 7 to 10 million dollars a year for the 70.3, but the annual figure climbed closer to 12 million once training visits were counted, and the local sports director called the event irreplaceable for the reputation it built. A triathlete who now writes for the sport put it plainly: hosting made St. George a training destination, and she had never heard of the place before its first race. That is the whole game. A hard, beautiful course gets a reputation, and then people come in March to ride it, and in October to ride it again, and they bring the credit card both times. We already have 200 miles of trails, two major lakes, and a river running through the middle of town. What we have never had is a reason for 2,000 strangers with money and Strava accounts to find out.

Be skeptical of the headline numbers anyway. Economic impact studies are commissioned by the people who want the event, and "indirect impact" is where a lot of optimism goes to hide. Direct spending is the number that pays your street repairs. And St. George is a cautionary tale on both ends, because Greater Zion eventually declined to renew, citing rising costs, logistical challenges, and limited benefits for some businesses along the route. Some businesses on a closed road lose a day. That is not a conspiracy, it is a fact, and it is a fact the city should be compensating for rather than papering over.

But weigh it honestly. Somewhere between a quarter and a half million in city cost, partially offset, against a plausible eight figures in regional spending, a bed tax that flows straight into the hole in the budget, drone footage of Whiskeytown broadcast to people in Europe who have never heard of this county, and a repeat visitor base that comes back on random weekends in the shoulder season when the hotels would otherwise be empty. Against one Sunday morning where Highway 299 is a mess until ten.

Take the morning off. Go stand on the Sundial with a sign. Volunteer, since they need about a thousand people and the volunteers are the ones who decide whether these athletes go home and tell 400 followers that Redding was extraordinary or that Redding was fine. That distinction, over ten years, is worth more than the entire city services bill.

EDIT: A lot of you will comment and are doing the same math about the thermometer, so let us address it. Yes, it will be hot. Mid August here means triple digits is the baseline expectation, and this valley has hit 113 on a bad week. Nobody is pretending otherwise. But understand what the sport this event belongs to actually considers normal. The Ironman World Championship in Kona has run for decades on a course where race day sits somewhere between 85 and 95 degrees with humidity near 80 percent, on black lava fields that radiate the heat back up at you with no shade for miles, and where the marathon starts in the hottest part of the afternoon. In 2024 it was 77 degrees at the 6 a.m. start with 84 percent humidity. That combination is worse than 100 degrees of dry Northern California air, because humidity is what stops sweat from working, and sweat is the entire cooling system. It is brutal enough that in the 2025 professional women's race, both Lucy Charles Barclay and Taylor Knibb, two of the best in the world, held lead positions and still had to drop out. The 70.3 World Championship spent three straight years in Henderson, Nevada, outside Las Vegas, in September. Cozumel athletes describe the heat and humidity as the defining difficulty of that course. St. George runs in May in the southern Utah desert and was rated the third best Ironman event on the planet. Heat is not a disqualifier in this sport. Heat is the sport's brand.

Which is not the same as saying it is trivial, and I would rather we be the town that takes it seriously than the town that gets a headline. This is a 70.3, not a full, so most of the field is finished in four to seven hours with a hard cutoff at eight and a half, meaning the bulk of the day happens before the worst of the afternoon. The swim is in a cold mountain lake at sunrise and the run is along the river, which is more shade and more water access than Kona has ever offered anyone. Aid stations, ice, medical coverage, and cutoff enforcement are the things worth asking pointed questions about at the community meetings, and if you volunteer, the ice tables are where you will do the most good. Here is the part that should interest the budget hawks, though. Heat acclimation is a real physiological process that takes roughly one to two weeks of exposure, which is exactly why serious athletes show up early instead of flying in on Friday. A hot course does not scare these people off. It makes them book longer stays. Kona has an entire cottage industry built on people arriving a month in advance to suffer on purpose. If Redding gets a reputation as the honest, hard, hot one, that is not a liability we have to apologize for. That is the hook.

The one thing I think he missed is that these will also track things like your tire pressure monitors (TPMs).

The crazy thing is that if you don't have a signal to trace, you will likely be flagged as suspicious.

Edit: Also, they will be able to track the people destroying flocks with this tech.

Incredibly sad situation all around. As someone who has dealt with these kinds of situations and has undergone de-escalation and use of force training (not as a law enforcement officer), please be respectful since you were not there.

I'll offer some advice from someone trying to decide when to call 911: sooner rather than later, and try to give everyone time and distance from the unstable (edit: and armed, because that was the situation here) person. If law enforcement doesn't see a threat to others, they can take as much time as needed to talk the person down.

[supprimé]

Here in Shasta County, red as a barn, suspicious of Sacramento, and absolutely convinced the whole electoral system has been rigged against them. For the past few years, a hard-right coalition seized control of the county board and decided the best way to fix democracy was to blow it up and start over: dump Dominion voting machines, hand-count ballots, demand photo ID, and install a true believer to run the whole show.

That true believer is Clint Curtis. No background in elections. Appointed anyway. He walked into the registrar's office like a man who just bought a motorcycle he doesn't know how to ride: loud, confident, and already accelerating toward a guardrail. He fired his deputy, Joanna Francescut, a respected professional who actually knew the job. She decided not to go quietly. She ran against him.

While campaigning to keep the position he was appointed to, Curtis was busy: threatening to "throat-punch" staff, parking his campaign car outside the elections office, getting formally investigated by his own county with findings sustained, and reportedly brandishing what may or may not have been a stun gun, depending on who you believe. He called the investigation findings "complete lies." He threatened to sue the county. He kept going.

Then came Election Day, June 2. Two days later, with votes still being counted, the routine post-election reconciliation process turned up something that wasn't routine at all. Workers found discrepancies suggesting that a small number of additional ballots may have been handed out to voters before Election Day by one employee. On top of that, because reconciliation has to be completed before certain reports can be properly generated from California's Election Information Management System, those reports may not have been properly balanced before they were run. In other words: the count may have been reported before the count was actually ready to be reported.

And then it got worse. While the reconciliation team locked their working documents in a cabinet and stepped away, another employee pulled those documents out, made copies, and handed them directly to Curtis. He locked them in a separate office. The documents may have contained voter names, addresses, dates of birth, phone numbers, signatures, and the reasons voters had requested replacement ballots. When the county found out, they reported it to the California Secretary of State. Curtis got ahead of the story the only way he knew how: he forwarded a self-incriminating email to a reporter, explaining that he'd basically staged the whole thing to prevent document tampering. Whether that explanation holds up legally is very much someone else's problem now.

But let's slow down on that part for a second. Because voter data is not just paperwork. It is a map of who people are, where they live, how to reach them. In the hands of someone with a political agenda and a list of enemies, it becomes something else entirely. You don't have to reach very far back into history to find examples of what happens when governments start compiling detailed registries of citizens, sorted by belief, by identity, by affiliation. Pre-war Germany didn't start with cattle cars. It started with lists. Patient, methodical, bureaucratic lists. The people who built those lists understood something that gets forgotten in the noise of a local election scandal: data is power, and power in the wrong hands has a way of becoming something no one voted for.

And this is not the first time we've seen this playbook. Tina Peters was the county clerk of Mesa County, Colorado. A true believer, just like Curtis. She let an unauthorized person into her elections office, copied the hard drive of a Dominion voting machine, and handed that data to conspiracy theorists looking for proof of fraud that never existed. She was convicted on multiple felony counts in 2024. She went to prison.

And then she didn't stay there.

Donald Trump pressured Colorado's governor and threatened to withhold federal funding from the state until Peters was released. She walked. Just like the January 6 rioters he pardoned on his first day back in office. Just like the people he stood in front of at rallies and told, directly, "knock them out, I'll pay the legal bills." This is not a bug in the system. This is the system. Trump has made it explicit and consistent: if you are willing to break the law for him, if you are willing to reach into the machinery of democracy and pull out whatever he needs, he will protect you. The pardon is the promise. The funding threat is the muscle. And somewhere in Shasta County, Clint Curtis is watching all of this and doing the math.

What Curtis allegedly did, copying sensitive election documents and locking them away from the very staff responsible for the count, rhymes with Peters in ways that should make anyone paying attention deeply uncomfortable. These are not isolated incidents of bumbling local officials over their heads. This is a pattern. True believers get access to the machinery of elections, they treat that machinery as a weapon, and the data, the actual personal data of actual citizens, becomes collateral in a culture war they have no intention of winning through legitimate means. The means are the point. And the man at the top has made clear there will be no consequences for the willing.

Meanwhile, Measure B, the ballot initiative that would mandate voter ID, ban universal mail-in voting, and require hand-counted ballots, passed with roughly 55% of the vote. It almost certainly violates California state law. The state will almost certainly sue. And Clint Curtis? He's losing his race to the woman he fired, 58 to 42, with a few thousand ballots left to count.

This is what happens when the fever doesn't break. When the story becomes more important than the work. When every institution is a conspiracy and every opponent is an enemy. The people of Shasta County went to the polls and, by a solid margin, told the true believers: enough. Whether anyone in Sacramento was paying close enough attention to clean up the mess left behind, that's the part nobody's figured out yet.

Why do Boulder cyclists insist on riding on skinny shoulders where vehicles are traveling at 60+ mph?

Crash after crash after crash...and every time the cycling community is outraged, as if it wasn't completely avoidable.

How many serious injuries & deaths need to occur before common sense kicks in?

My mom was having a rough day, and you helped a ton!