u/two2under

I’ll say the quiet part first. An election is not a counting exercise. It’s an act of faith. You fill in the ovals, you seal the envelope, and you trust that strangers in a county building will treat your ballot the way you’d treat it yourself. That trust is the whole thing. Without it, the result is just a number somebody announced.

Right now that trust is thin. You know it. I know it. Half the country is primed to believe any election they lose was stolen, and the other half is exhausted from explaining why it wasn’t. This is the environment in which the Front Range Passenger Rail District mailed a tax question to roughly 800,000 people who are not allowed to vote on it.

The facts are not in dispute. Ballot Issue 7A asks for a 0.333% sales tax, $295 million a year, plus $580 million in debt, for the CoCo train. The legislature shrank the district this spring. The board put the tax on the ballot August 28. Then, by the district’s own admission, nobody gave the county clerks the new map. So 7A went out to about 275,000 people in Adams County who shouldn’t have it. Nearly 263,000 in Arapahoe. Every voter in Douglas County, around 289,000, when only 5,967 in Sterling Ranch are eligible. Another 16,217 in Erie.

The district says it had no legal duty to tell the clerks. The Secretary of State’s office says district boundaries aren’t its job. Everyone has an explanation. Nobody has ownership.

Now, the official answer. I’ll state it fairly, because it deserves that. No ballots have been counted yet. Processing can’t even start until October 19. The machines will be programmed to skip 7A on every ballot from outside the district, and in Bow Mar and Sterling Ranch, where that doesn’t work, staff will copy ballots by hand onto a version without the question. I believe them. I believe the clerks will do it carefully, and I believe the final tally will be accurate.

That isn’t the problem. An accurate count and a believed count are two different things, and only one of them holds a democracy together. What we’re being offered is hundreds of thousands of real marks on real paper, set aside by a process almost nobody will ever watch, with “trust us” as the receipt. If 7A passes, somebody says the extra votes got counted. If it fails, somebody says the confusion sank it. And the fact that nothing has been counted yet is not a reason to relax. It’s the reason to act now, while the fix is still clean.

Then there are the 2.4 million people who are supposed to vote on this. Pulling 7A takes that vote out of their hands this year, and I won’t pretend that costs nothing. But look at what they’re actually getting. A vote with an asterisk on it. A result that can be contested in court after the fact, on a tax meant to run for decades. If you want this train, you should want it to win in a way nobody can question. A delay is not a denial. A tainted yes is worth less than a clean one a year from now.

And the asterisk doesn’t stay on 7A. Aurora voters got it sitting next to three city tax questions. Douglas County voters got it beside a $54 million school funding question. Nobody can prove a tax they’ll never pay changed how they voted on the ones they will. Nobody can prove it didn’t. That is what doubt looks like.

So pull it. State law lets a governing board withdraw a ballot issue up to 25 days before a November election, which by my math is this Friday, October 9. If the board won’t act, a court should look hard at it, and the state should seriously ask whether corrected ballots can go out. Bring it back with the right map and clean ballots.

I’m not alleging fraud. Nobody stole anything. That’s exactly the point. This is how faith in elections erodes now. Not with a villain. With a shrug.

The desert doesn't lie. It just burns things down and lets you sort through the ashes, and sometimes what's underneath isn't pretty.

So here's a story that landed in my feed this week, and it has that particular flavor of American strangeness that you can't manufacture, you can only stumble into it. It starts here, in Redding, and ends about eight hours away in the Nevada desert, at three in the morning, with federal officers and volunteer rangers walking a group of missionaries out of Black Rock City. And credit where it's due, Burning Man held the line.

Let's start with the history lesson, because you can't understand the ending without it, and the history isn't flattering.

Back in 1997, a healing evangelist named Randy Clark came through Bethel Church and lit something up in a woman named Dawna De Silva. She took what she experienced and built an entire theology around it, eventually co-founding a ministry called Bethel Sozo, which does inner healing and deliverance work, the kind of thing that has drawn plenty of scrutiny from people who study these things closely. Out of that, she developed a specific concept she called Shifting Atmospheres. The idea, roughly, is that the space around you, a room, a person, a city block, carries spiritual weight, and you have the authority to invade it and change it through prayer, declaration, and worship, whether anyone in that space asked you to or not. She wrote a book about it in 2017. She built a curriculum. Bethel, true to its own culture, gave that curriculum away freely to anyone who wanted it, sent teams out, trained leaders across the globe, with very little apparent concern for what happens once the training wheels come off.

That's the thing about handing out a worldview that tells people they have divine permission to override someone else's space and someone else's consent in the name of spiritual warfare. Eventually, somebody takes that permission literally.

The phrase drifted. Gospel musician Jason Nelson had a Billboard record called Shifting the Atmosphere back in 2012, coming from a related but separate tradition, mostly harmless, mostly about a song. Small independent ministries everywhere started using the language because it sounds good, it sounds powerful, it sounds like something is actually happening when you say it out loud. Somewhere along that long, informal chain, a small band of desert missionaries picked it up too, wandering into festivals like EDC and eventually into Black Rock City itself, baptizing strangers in plastic tanks between the art cars and the dust storms, filming people without asking first, because if the atmosphere is yours to shift, apparently so is everyone standing in it.

Now here's where the history lesson ends and the news starts.

This week, Burning Man evicted that camp, calling itself Shift the Atmosphere. Middle of the night. Rangers and federal officers showed up, and the group was told to pack it in. Their leader, a guy named Calvin Hinerman, went online afterward calling it religious persecution, which is a convenient story if you've never had to sit with the idea that maybe you were just the problem. Burning Man's version was plainer and, frankly, more credible: the group had been warned repeatedly about consent and photography rules and kept doing it anyway. Radical inclusion doesn't mean radical impunity, and Burning Man, to its actual credit, didn't blink when it mattered. They gave warnings, the warnings didn't work, and they enforced their own rules instead of quietly looking the other way because someone invoked Jesus's name loud enough.

That's the part of this story I actually respect. A famously freewheeling desert gathering held a firmer, clearer line on consent than an entire theological export machine managed to instill in the people it trained and sent out into the world.

By the time that phrase reached the playa, it had traveled so far from Redding that it's basically folklore now, detached from its source, floating free like most things do out there. Nobody at that camp needs a letter of introduction from Bethel. They don't report to anyone in Redding. But the DNA is still there in the framing, the idea that showing up somewhere uninvited and calling it spiritual authority is a virtue rather than a boundary problem. Redding built that seed. It just doesn't have to answer for where it eventually got planted.

There's something almost fitting about that, if you sit with it long enough. Burning Man burns the Man and calls it catharsis, and this year it also burned a camp's welcome, and did it cleanly, on its own terms, without much apology. Redding, for its part, keeps exporting a theology that shows up uninvited in other people's spaces and calls it revival. One of those two institutions came out of this week looking like it actually knows where its own boundaries are.

Anyway. That's the view from here. Take it as you will.

Redding is running on interim leaders as top jobs sit vacant

That clip is a fair picture of where the city is right now. Interim police chief, interim fire chief, no permanent city attorney, and an interim city manager who is simultaneously the assistant city manager and the public works director. Here is the part worth acting on: the council is talking about making that last one permanent without opening the job to anyone else.

Mayor Mike Littau has publicly endorsed interim City Manager Michael Webb for the permanent role and wants it settled before the State of the City on September 22. His stated reason is time. He estimates an outside search would take three to eight months once you count interviews, hiring, and relocation, and he says the city does not have that kind of time.

This is not an argument against Webb. He may well be the best person in the building. A guy carrying three titles at once is either unusually capable or evidence that the city is running on fumes. Probably both, but that's no excuse to settle for less than the best.

It is an argument against the shortcut. Last year the council ran a national search with professional assessments and multiple rounds of interviews, and landed on Will Tarbox. He was hired in December, started in February, and died in July. That is a tragedy. It is not a failure of the process. The process did the thing it exists to do, which is force five elected people to define the job, look at the field, and defend the choice in public.

And the budget is thin enough that the council paid $300,000 for a consultant to go find where the money is leaking. When a city is that stretched, the person who runs it matters more, not less. Six months of interim leadership is inconvenient. Five years of the wrong hire is expensive.

So ask for the obvious middle path. Open the recruitment. Let Webb apply. If he is the strongest candidate, he takes the office with a mandate instead of an endorsement, and nobody in this town spends the next four years wondering whether the council just picked the nearest available person and called it a decision.

If you care, send the council a short email before they vote. Keep it polite and keep it to three sentences. Tell them to open the city manager position to outside candidates, tell them Webb is welcome to compete, and tell them a calendar date is not a hiring strategy.

Email City Council and let them know you want them to search for the best for Redding: council@cityofredding.org

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.

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