2019–2022 · first-person political assessment
The majority drove itself toward the cliff.
The chronology below separates documented public events from Randall Stone’s firsthand recollections and retrospective political judgment.
By Stone’s account, Chico’s 5–2 progressive majority did more than lose an election. It spent 2019 and early 2020 weakening itself from within. Stone says he privately warned Scott Huber that Huber’s political naïveté and choices were empowering the political right, then admonished him publicly when the private warnings failed. Huber publicly rejected Stone’s accusation in March 2020.
Stone’s assessment of Huber: “I regarded his actions as monumentally stupid and a grotesque example of the political useful idiot. My criticism was not that he secretly wanted conservative outcomes. It was that his political naïveté and subsequent choices produced precisely the governing power structure capable of doing things he ostensibly opposed. I warned him privately to stop. Then I called it out publicly. He did not believe me.”
Stone remembers Ann Schwab’s motivation differently. He says conservative councilmembers told Schwab that if she joined them in removing him as mayor, they would make her mayor. That claimed private offer is preserved as Stone’s firsthand account, not as an independently established fact. The independently documented sequence is that Schwab brought the March 25, 2020 effort to remove Stone; the vote was 4–3; and Schwab then became mayor.
Stone’s assessment of Schwab: her political need to become mayor repeatedly overwhelmed strategic judgment. He remembers her earlier asking him to nominate her over Mary Flynn Goloff and describes her governing posture as “me, or nothing.” By contrast, Stone experienced Alex Brown as so committed to accommodation that conflict avoidance became an end in itself — “government by Kumbaya” at a moment when the opposition had no similar reluctance to fight.
The timing made the breakdown consequential. COVID-19 had arrived; Chico was still living with Camp Fire displacement, housing pressure and homelessness; and the city was entering its first district-election cycle. Stone chose not to mount a campaign in 2020. In his view, local Democrats were cannibalizing their own governing coalition and he refused to participate: he “took his ball and went home.”
After the 2020 election produced a 5–2 conservative majority, Huber resigned in 2021. The remaining council chose appointment rather than a special election and appointed retired Chico Police Chief Michael O’Brien. That governing alignment then carried into the post-2020-Census redistricting period. Stone’s retrospective judgment is that Huber’s choices were tactically damaging and helped convert a temporary political defeat into a structural loss whose consequences could last multiple election cycles.
Stone also associates this period with profound institutional and human strain around homelessness enforcement. That judgment is not presented as proof that any individual political actor directly caused a particular injury or death. The archive separately documents the policies, votes, enforcement actions and personnel involved.
