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Meet Mike O’Brien running for District 1 Chico City Council

North State Public Radio | By Ken Devol

Published October 28, 2024 at 3:20 PM PDT

Mike O’Brien running for District 1 Chico City Council

Voters have until Tuesday, Nov. 5 to make their decisions for the general election. NSPR has been interviewing candidates vying for seats on the Chico City Council. In District 1, Mike O’Brien is challenging Mike Johnson. He spoke with NSPR’s Ken Devol about his background and how he would address some of the issues facing the city if elected.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Tell us more about your background and why you are running for this position?

I am a graduate of Chico State, as my wife is, and we moved down to Los Angeles. I ended up getting hired by the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Office. I worked for them for about four years and we started having children.

We knew we wanted to get back up to Chico and the North State, and [I] was fortunate to be hired by the Chico Police Department in 1992 and worked in a number of different assignments. I was appointed chief in 2015. I was chief from 2015 to 2020. I retired from the department in June 2020.

I was asked about a year or so later, to throw my hat in the ring [for Chico City Council]. There were two vacancies on our city council. I remember two people had left. I was asked to fill one of those vacancies. I went ahead and went through that process. I was selected and I filled that term for a year and a half. My experience starts with my time in Chico, which has been over 30 years I’ve served this community. I care about it and I want to see it thrive.

What do you see as the most pressing issues facing Chico?

Obviously, there are a lot of very contentious issues. People have very passionate views, particularly about the homeless situation. One thing I do bring to the table from that perspective is that, along with my time at the Chico Police Department, I was also a board chair at the Jesus Center for eight years, so I worked on a number of those issues back in the day.

I understand both sides of this. When I say both sides, there's something that most community members want, and maybe in different quantities depending on your perspective. Generally, people want to see compassion and some accountability. They want that somehow blended together. That is my perspective of balance and balance between the need to be compassionate and the need to have some accountability so that people do not feel taken advantage of.

I really learned that lesson talking to people. Every Friday, the City Manager and I would go out with others in the community, and we would knock on doors. We would hear what was going on in our neighborhoods and our business community, and I think that was invaluable because I heard things that caused me some concern. I would have neighbors who lived along a creek, and they would have individuals who were camping there and were disrupting the safety of their life. And if you're impacted by safety where you live, where you work, where we educate, where you recreate, that's a pretty significant impact to quality of life.

What does compassion look like to you?

Compassion looks like opportunity, and I’m really big on opportunity. There’s a lot of layers to that, particularly when we’re dealing with the homeless population. I’ve also had the privilege of working as the Butte Interagency Narcotics Task Force commander, so I see drug abuse in some of the most difficult forms in our county.

We can take a lot of the homeless population and get them into tiny homes and get them into CHAT and some other great organizations, like the Jesus Center and Torres Shelter, and so on and so forth. I think some of that is somewhat easier than dealing with service-resistant individuals.

Trying to find a way to get them into service is very, very challenging. I think understanding the issues of addiction and mental illness and somehow trying to get treatment for those individuals I think that's a big part of that compassion issue.

The city filed a motion in U.S. District Court seeking relief from some provisions of the Warren v. Chico case. Do you have any thoughts about that?

For that particular settlement, we needed to do something as a city. Clearly, things had gotten really bad. There was this very significant tension. We had encampments everywhere and some very large and dangerous ones. It was not a good situation.

Because the Supreme Court had not yet ruled on what ended up being the Grants Pass case, it really put us in a difficult spot, and so we had to negotiate something from a position of a lack of clarity. So that settlement was done, and many components of it, I don't think a lot of people liked.

We kind of felt like we were negotiating with a gun to our head. Really, like I said, some of the elements were not the best. And I think some of the interpretations later, I think that were not the spirit of that agreement, really came back and made it difficult for the city to provide some of the safety elements of that.

I don't think the city wants to get out of the Pallet Shelter. I think they want to provide that. We believe that it's worked well, but there's other elements of that agreement that I think were really impacting our ability to keep our community safe.
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Read/ listen to NSPR’s other Chico City Council candidate interviews

Editor’s note: District 3 candidate Dale Bennett, District 5 candidate Melissa Lopez-Mora, and District 7 candidate Deepika Tandon did not respond to multiple requests from NSPR for an interview.