The below attached article might explain why several in local government have endorsed Ose- they must know about his successes “bringing home the bacon” to the district.

Please also Note the close connections to SACOG – which is a local government organization made up of Supervisors, Commissioners, and City Councilmembers.

Included in Ose’s record of voting for budget busting-spedning are:

$925,000 for the Please Touch Museum. (CAGW Pork in HR 4577. Labor-HHS-Education Fiscal 2001 Appropriations/Conference Report).

$176,000 for the Reindeer Herder’s Association. (CAGW Pork in HR 4578. Fiscal 2001 Interior Appropriations/Conference Report.

$800,000 for red imported fire ants. (CAGW Pork in HR 2330. Fiscal 2002 Agriculture Appropriations/Conference Report).

These must be some of what Ose meant when he told Eric Egland – “If you want to be part of the club, you have to make accommodations…”

Cityhood Suits Many Residents in Citrus Heights, Calif.
Sacramento Bee August 25, 2003, Monday
Copyright 2003 Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News
Copyright 2003 Sacramento Bee

The Traffic circle at Carmelwood and Zenith drives doesn’t look like much, just a cobblestone roundabout in a modest suburban neighborhood.But for John Taylor, the circle is an example of the way life has improved since Citrus Heights incorporated in 1997.

Taylor said the circle and others like it have slowed traffic in his 1970s-era subdivision, which sits next to Interstate 80 near the Placer County line. “We used to have people racing through our neighborhood,” he said.

Little by little, the leaders of this young city are improving the quality of life for residents. They also are tackling the daunting task of forging an identity for a chunk of aging suburbia known chiefly for its heavy traffic and strip malls.

So far, the changes have been incremental and haven’t dramatically altered the basic appearance of the community, which even its boosters concede is largely indistinguishable from the rest of suburban Sacramento County.

But city leaders are thinking big, and their attitude has won praise from residents and regional observers alike.

“I think the ingredients for converting a typical suburban community into something different exist in Citrus Heights,” said Martin Tuttle, executive director of the Sacramento Area Council of Governments, or SACOG.

In the six years since incorporation, Citrus Heights has beefed up police coverage, rehabilitated playgrounds and pools, created a new civic center, built a skateboard park and planted palm trees in empty median strips along Greenback Lane and Sunrise Boulevard, two major arteries that intersect at Sunrise Mall.

“I see physical improvements in streetscapes and signage, landscaping and an overall attitude of trying to create a little suburban village out of an area that doesn’t have any heart, any downtown, any center,” said Randy Dawson, an architect who has lived in Citrus Heights for 16 years.

The city recently launched its most ambitious task to date: coming up with a plan to remake a tired, 1.5-mile stretch of Auburn Boulevard between Interstate 80 and the Sylvan Corners intersection into a lively, pedestrian-friendly mix of apartments, offices, stores and a hotel.

Unlike the region’s other young cities - Elk Grove, Rancho Cordova and West Sacramento - Citrus Heights doesn’t have large expanses of open land for growth. It must work with what it has.

Given that, planning as usual is not an option, said Community Development Director Janet Ruggiero. “Clearly, built-out suburban communities have to do something different,” she said.

Citrus Heights Mayor Bill Hughes, a retired Roseville police lieutenant, has emerged as one of the region’s most enthusiastic converts to “smart growth,” a planning approach that advocates building denser, more urban mixtures of housing, stores and businesses on underused land in existing communities. The idea is to reduce dependence on cars and to slow suburban sprawl while injecting energy into older neighborhoods.

“Our future is going to be redevelopment; we just can’t stop and say we’re done,” Hughes said. He has educated himself by traveling around the country and reading books such as “The Geography of Nowhere,” which explores the evolution of suburbs.

Hughes currently serves as chairman of SACOG, the regional agency that divvies up federal and state transportation dollars among local governments.

Before incorporation, he said, Citrus Heights was headed downhill. Many of its modest tract homes had become rentals and were deteriorating. Wealth and population seemed headed east to newer suburbs, such as neighboring Roseville.

“People were trying to get out, and if the city hadn’t incorporated, I would have been one of them,” said Hughes, a 30-year resident. “My wife and I had already made that decision.”

But voters in the community opted for cityhood, 62.5 percent to 37.5 percent.
Some members of the first Citrus Heights City Council had experience as urban planners, and the new government set out to hire experienced staff like Ruggiero, formerly community development director of Woodland.

Ruggiero is known as “one of the dynamos in California planning,” said midtown architect David Mogavero. He was hired to work on the city’s first general plan and said he was “extremely impressed” by the nascent city’s leaders.

“The elected officials were vibrant and extremely engaged in their community and cared deeply about making it better,” Mogavero said. “It really turned me around on incorporations. I had been dead set against them.”

Citrus Heights wasn’t flush with cash. Under terms of its divorce from Sacramento County, the city’s property taxes will continue to flow to county coffers for another 18 years, said City Manager Henry Tingle. But Citrus Heights was allowed to keep the sales tax from its many retail outlets, including Sunrise Mall.

Since then, the city has been a successful player in the intense competition among local governments for “big-box” stores, which churn out millions of dollars in sales tax. Lowe’s and Sam’s Club arrived earlier this year, and Costco is coming soon.

Big-box stores aren’t exactly what most planners would label smart growth, Hughes acknowledged. He said he regrets that the city’s last significant open parcel of land, 129-acre Stock Ranch on Auburn Boulevard, will be developed with a Costco and 98 single-family homes.

“The whole planning process (for Stock Ranch) is years old now, and we just didn’t have the education,” Hughes said.

In the future, he said, the city’s planning approach will be different, despite its dependence on sales tax to finance operations.

“We want to create streetscapes that have a more urban design, that allow for pedestrian and business traffic,” he said.

But the sales tax from big-box stores and from Sunrise Mall certainly comes in handy.

The city also has proved itself adept at obtaining money from the federal government. U.S. Rep. Doug Ose, R-Sacramento, has been a powerful ally, obtaining about $ 5 million in federal funds for various projects, Tingle said. As a resident of Citrus Heights, Ose once led the community’s incorporation effort.

About $ 2 million of that federal money went toward a new police center that opened last year near City Hall on Fountain Square Drive. Ninety officers hired through a contract with the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department work out of the building, wearing uniforms and driving cars identifying them as Citrus Heights police.

“The police presence is huge, and the difference (from the county days) is fantastic,” said Taylor, president of the Northwest Neighborhood Association.

The city has set aside a reserve of $ 25 million and spends about $ 4 million a year on capital improvements such as the renovation of the pools at Rusch Park and San Juan High School and the construction of a new skate park, Tingle said. He said he relishes the challenge of running a mature, built-out community.

“You don’t judge a city by its growth; you judge a city by how well it maintains its older parts,” Tingle said. “It’s so easy to put the older parts of the city on hold when you have fancy new growth projects.”