A study · second edition

The physics of Chico

One city read as a system of flows, against the laws that hold for every city.

12 chapters · 104 data series · 77 public sources · every number computed by the site’s pipeline · latest measurement 2026-11-04

Thesis

A city is a system of flows. People, water, money, votes, goods and traffic each have a stock, a rate, and a characteristic time over which they relax after a shock. The laws that hold for every city (the rank-size law, urban scaling, the entropy of a street grid, the frequency laws of earthquakes and floods) fix the expected size of each stock and rate for a city of Chico’s population. This study measures Chico’s stocks and rates from public records, computes the expectation from the laws, and reads the residual.

Chico’s aggregates sit within the ordinary scatter of California cities about those laws. Tested where a law fixes an expectation (rank-size, street scaling, the Gutenberg–Richter b, the establishment-size tail, nonprofit scaling) by Chico’s residual in units of the fit’s scatter; the table below keeps the score.
Where Chico departs, the departure dates to a specific shock: the Camp Fire of November 2018. Tested by difference against places that did not receive the shock and by placebo dates. The century-long cooling of summer afternoons is attributed to irrigation by the literature, not tested here; where no untreated comparison exists (the 1860 plat, the groundwater act, the housing statutes, district elections) the chapter says “coincident in time, not tested”.
The shocks relax on measurable time scales, from hours to decades. Each time constant is reported with its confidence range; the claim is that the range is narrower than the decade it falls in, and Part IV draws the ranges.

The test of claim 1

5 quantities have a law that fixes an expectation. For each, Chico’s residual is given in units of the scatter of the fit across places (a z-score; a residual in log₁₀ is printed in dex, and 0.1 dex is a factor of 1.26). If claim 1 holds, about a third of such residuals fall outside one standard deviation by chance and one in twenty outside two. Result: 3 of 3 within one standard deviation; none outside two. The Gutenberg–Richter b is shown but not scored: the expectation is a constant and the error is the fit’s, not a scatter across regions; b varies by about 0.1 between regions in the literature, which this study does not measure. The establishment-size tail is shown but not scored: the law is stated for firms nationally and this is county establishments, and the error is the fit’s, not a scatter across places.

Quantity	Expectation	Chico	Scatter	z
population at rank	rank-size law over the top 100, ζ = 0.70	+0.019 dex (×1.05)	0.042 dex across 100 cities	+0.46
street length for the population	scaling law, β = 0.58	−5.6 %	36.3 % across 10 cities	−0.15
the Gutenberg–Richter b	b = 1.0, the near-universal value	1.12 (0.93 above M4)	± 0.024 (Shi–Bolt, the fit’s own error)	+5.13 (not scored)
the establishment-size tail	Zipf slope −1 (Axtell 2001, for firms nationally)	-1.353	± 0.026 (the fit’s own error, 7 bins)	−13.55 (not scored)
nonprofit revenue for the population	scaling law, β = 1.56	+0.609 dex (×4.06)	0.716 dex across 289 cities	+0.85

The other chapters describe: rents, votes, the council’s divisions, the creek’s lags and the smoke have no law that fixes their expected value, so they are measured and dated, not scored.

Chico Flow is made in Chico by people who like it here. This page reports what the public record says and only that: the data and the mathematics are the argument, every figure links the rows it is drawn from, and where the record cannot support a claim the chapter says so. Method, in one line: deterministic scrapers of keyless public sources, the estimators the literature uses (least squares and Theil–Sen for trends; maximum likelihood for the Gutenberg–Richter b; difference-in-differences and synthetic controls with placebo tests for shocks; exponential fits with bootstrap ranges for relaxation times; Gumbel for floods; a shuffled null for the council’s first axis), and no model of our own.

Part I

The frame

The records exist because a law requires them, and the flows move inside rules. This table names each authority a chapter rests on, what it governs, and where it is read. It is descriptive: the study measures what the rules produce and does not grade them.

Federal

Metropolitan statistical areasOMB Bulletin No. 23-01 (2023)	Federal statistics treat Butte County as the Chico metropolitan area, so county series stand for the town wherever no city series exists.Chico among California's cities, The economy's metabolism
Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act; Cal-WARN29 U.S.C. §2101–2109; Cal. Labor Code §1400–1408	Employers above the size thresholds must give sixty days’ notice of a plant closing or mass layoff; the state posts every notice it receives.The economy's metabolism
Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act42 U.S.C. §5121 et seq.; DR-4407-CA	The federal disaster declaration of 12 November 2018 for the Camp Fire opened FEMA assistance to Butte County; it is the shock the flow chapters measure.Rent and the housing stock, Money in and money out
Community Development Block Grant — Disaster RecoveryPub. L. 116-20 (2019); 24 CFR part 570	HUD disaster-recovery grants for the 2018 fires, administered by the state’s Department of Housing and Community Development, appear in the federal-award series.Money in and money out
Federal Election Campaign Act52 U.S.C. §30101 et seq.	Itemised federal contributions are public with the giver’s ZIP code; the Federal Election Commission’s by-ZIP totals are the money chapter’s source for what leaves Chico.Money in and money out
Internal Revenue Code §501(c); the Form 99026 U.S.C. §501(c), §6033, §6104	Tax-exempt organisations file annual returns that are public record; the IRS master file lists every one by city with its latest reported revenue.Money in and money out
Clean Air Act42 U.S.C. §7401 et seq.	Requires the monitoring network the EPA files come from; Chico-East Avenue is Butte County’s regulatory fine-particle monitor.The pulse: hours to days
National Ambient Air Quality Standard, fine particles40 CFR §50.13; annual standard of 9.0 µg/m³, 89 FR 16202 (2024)	The 24-hour PM2.5 standard is 35 µg/m³; the smoke count in the pulse chapter is the number of days above it, with no exceptional-event exclusion applied.The pulse: hours to days
Exceptional events rule40 CFR §50.14	Wildfire smoke days can be excluded from regulatory attainment counts on demonstration; the study’s counts apply no such exclusion, so they are higher than the regulatory ones.The pulse: hours to days
Confidential Information Protection and Statistical Efficiency Act; Census confidentiality44 U.S.C. §3561 et seq.; 13 U.S.C. §9	Employment and establishment cells that would identify an employer are suppressed or noise-infused; the economy chapter reports how many cells were disclosed before comparing counties.The economy's metabolism
Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act; DATA ActPub. L. 109-282 (2006); Pub. L. 113-101 (2014)	Every federal award is reported to USAspending with a place of performance; coverage is uniform only from fiscal 2017, so the money chapter’s trends start there.Money in and money out
National Flood Insurance Act; FEMA flood maps42 U.S.C. §4001 et seq.; 44 CFR part 65	The one-percent-annual-chance flood defines the zones the map page shows; the pulse chapter estimates that flow for Big Chico Creek from the gauge record.The pulse: hours to days

State of California

Bradley-Burns Uniform Local Sales and Use Tax LawRev. & Tax. Code §7200 et seq.	One percent of the sales tax collected in a city is remitted to that city; the CDTFA publishes the distributions the economy chapter charts.The economy's metabolism
Transactions and Use Tax LawRev. & Tax. Code §7251 et seq.; Cal. Const. art. XIII C §2	A city may add a district tax with voter approval, by a majority for a general tax; the Statewide Database carries no city measure returns for Butte, so the economy chapter names Chico’s 2022 measure without measuring it.The economy's metabolism
Proposition 13Cal. Const. art. XIII A (1978)	Property tax is capped at one percent of assessed value with reassessment on sale, which is why cities lean on sales tax and why the assessor’s card carries a base year.
Proposition 218Cal. Const. art. XIII C and XIII D (1996)	General taxes need a majority of voters and special taxes two-thirds; water and sewer charges are limited to the cost of service.Water, by the person
Housing Element LawGov. Code §65580–65589.11; §65400	Every city must plan sites for its share of regional housing need and report each year what was entitled, permitted and completed; those reports are the housing chapter’s record.Rent and the housing stock
Regional Housing Needs AllocationGov. Code §65584	The state sets each region’s need for an eight-year cycle and the council of governments divides it among cities by income band; the housing chapter reads progress against it.Rent and the housing stock
Housing Crisis Act of 2019 (SB 330, extended by SB 8)Gov. Code §65941.1, §66300	Limits hearings on housing projects and bars changes that reduce residential capacity through 2030.Rent and the housing stock
SB 9 (2021)Gov. Code §65852.21, §66411.7	Ministerial approval of two units and of lot splits on single-family lots.Rent and the housing stock
Accessory dwelling unit lawGov. Code §66310–66342 (formerly §65852.2)	Ministerial approval of accessory units, which count toward the housing need and appear in the permit series.Rent and the housing stock
Price gouging after a declared emergencyPenal Code §396	For the emergency periods proclaimed after the Camp Fire, rent increases above ten percent were unlawful in Butte County; asking rents in the housing chapter’s shock window are censored by that cap.Rent and the housing stock
Tenant Protection Act of 2019 (AB 1482)Civ. Code §1947.12	Annual rent increases on covered units are capped at five percent plus inflation, at most ten percent, from 2020; a bound on how fast the rent series can move.Rent and the housing stock
Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing ActCiv. Code §1954.50 et seq.	Limits local rent control to older units and bars vacancy control; the 2024 ballot’s Proposition 33 proposed its repeal and appears in the electorate chapter.The electorate by district
California Environmental Quality ActPub. Res. Code §21000 et seq.	Discretionary projects require environmental review; a general-plan or zoning item on the council’s agenda usually carries a CEQA finding.
Fire Hazard Severity ZonesGov. Code §51175–51189; Pub. Res. Code §4201–4204	The state fire marshal maps the zones the hazard layer shows; building in them follows Chapter 7A of the building code.
Alquist-Priolo Earthquake Fault Zoning Act; Seismic Hazards Mapping ActPub. Res. Code §2621 et seq.; §2690 et seq.	The state geologist zones mapped active faults and liquefaction hazards and building near them is restricted; the earthquake chapter measures the regional rate of shaking, which is the other half of the hazard.The ground, shaking
Sustainable Groundwater Management ActWater Code §10720 et seq. (2014); §10727.2	Each priority basin must reach sustainability within twenty years of implementing its plan under a groundwater sustainability agency; the Vina subbasin’s plan of 2022 sets the thresholds the water-table chapter is read against, with a horizon of 2042.The water table
Making Conservation a California Way of LifeWater Code §10609–10609.38 (SB 606 and AB 1668, 2018); State Water Board regulation of 2024	Each urban supplier reports monthly and carries an annual water-use objective from 2025; the per-person figures are the reporting the law requires.Water, by the person
Ralph M. Brown ActGov. Code §54950 et seq.	Council meetings are public with agendas posted seventy-two hours ahead; the minutes and roll-call votes the council chapter reads exist because of it.The council's record
California Voting Rights ActElec. Code §14025–14032 (2001)	At-large elections that dilute a protected class’s vote are actionable; Chico adopted seven districts and first elected by district in November 2020.The electorate by district, The council's record
Council districts in charter citiesElec. Code §21620–21630	How a charter city draws and redraws its council districts after each census; Chico’s seven districts were redrawn in 2021 and are the units of the electorate chapter.The electorate by district, The council's record
Elections Code; consolidated municipal electionsElec. Code §1301, §10403; Division 15 (the canvass)	City elections consolidate with the statewide November election; the county registrar conducts them and the Statewide Database archives the precinct returns.The electorate by district
Political Reform Act of 1974Gov. Code §81000 et seq.; §85301(d); FPPC Forms 460, 470, 501	Candidates for the council file campaign statements with the City Clerk; the city publishes no data set of them, so the money chapter reads federal contributions only and says so rather than guess at council races.

City of Chico

Planning and Zoning Law; the Chico 2030 General Plan; Municipal Code Title 19Gov. Code §65300 et seq.	The general plan adopted in 2011 and the land-use code set what can be built where; the zoning layer on the map is Title 19, and the street chapter’s grids are its history.The shape of the streets
Charter of the City of ChicoCal. Const. art. XI §5; the charter as codified by Municode	Chico is a charter city: seven council members on four-year staggered terms, a mayor chosen by the council, and a city manager the council appoints; the council chapter reads the votes that body records.The council's record

Part II

The laws

Six records held against the laws that hold for every city: the expectation, and Chico’s residual.

II · 1

Chico among California's cities

Does the rank-size law predict Chico’s population from its rank alone?

#72 of 482Chico's rank among California's 482 incorporated cities and towns — the rank-size line through the hundred largest (ζ = 0.70, flatter than Zipf's 1, so the big cities run closer in size than the rule expects) predicts 98,438 people at that rank; Chico has 102,911, 5 % over the line

California’s cities by rank and size

CSV · ranksize

Butte County’s five cities

CSV · butte

The rank-size law (Zipf 1949; Gabaix 1999) says the nth largest city holds about 1/n of the largest one’s people. California’s 482 cities follow it with an exponent of 1.27 (r² 0.73; a pure Zipf line is 1.00; the top hundred give 0.70).

At Chico’s rank, #72, the line predicts 98,438 people; the 2024 estimate is 102,911, 4 % above it. Since 2020 the city has shrunk 0.4 %.

What the record cannot say

A rank-size exponent fitted across all cities is pulled by the smallest towns; the top-100 exponent is the conventional comparison.
Populations are the Census Bureau’s July 2024 estimates, not counts.

Every number this chapter computed (14)

chico pop: 102,911
chico rank: 72
n cities: 482
zeta all: 1.27
r2 all: 0.729
zeta top100: 0.698
r2 top100: 0.978
predicted at rank: 98,438
ratio: 1.05
chico change2020to2024 pct: -0.400
butte total: 141,033
butte cities: 5
largest city: Los Angeles
largest pop: 3,878,704

Every incorporated city and town in California ranked by the Census Bureau's 2024 estimate, with a straight line fitted to log population against log rank: the rank-size rule, whose slope ζ is 1 when the second city is half the size of the first, the third a third, and so on — Zipf's law. Gabaix showed that exponent follows from cities growing at the same average rate whatever their size, and it comes out near 1 for most countries; above 1 the biggest cities are larger than the rule allows, below 1 smaller. The line is fitted twice, over all 482 places (ζ = 1.27, r² = 0.73) and over the hundred largest (ζ = 0.70, r² = 0.98), where the rule holds best; the population predicted at Chico's rank is read off the top-100 line. Measured 2026-11-02.

U.S. Census Bureau, Population Estimates Program — Vintage 2024 city and town totals, California POPESTIMATE2024 for every incorporated place (SUMLEV 162, active governments) · Gabaix, X. (1999) "Zipf's law for cities: an explanation", Quarterly Journal of Economics 114(3):739

Metropolitan statistical areas JSON

II · 2

The shape of the streets

Do Chico’s streets scale with its population as the urban scaling law predicts, and how ordered is the grid?

0.22grid order of Chico's streets as a whole, where 1 is a perfect grid and 0 is every direction alike — three grids on three bearings cancel each other: Bidwell's 1860 plat (φ 0.93, turned 40° off the compass to run with Big Chico Creek), the Avenues north of the creek (φ 0.80, turned 31° the other way) and the postwar town around them (φ 0.21, laid north–south)

Across cities, infrastructure grows more slowly than population: Bettencourt (2013) puts the exponent for road length near 0.85, so a city twice the size needs about 1.8 times the road. Across these valley cities the fitted exponent is 0.58 (r² 0.77). Chico has 715 km of drivable street, 6 % less than the line predicts.

The residuals: Paradise has 73 % more street than its population warrants (its population fell after the 2018 Camp Fire while its streets did not; a reading of the residual, not a test); Davis has 44 % less.

Grid order φ (Boeing 2019) runs from 0 to 1. Chico as a whole scores 0.22 because it is three grids on three bearings that cancel: the 1860 plat scores 0.93 on a bearing of 50°, which runs with Big Chico Creek; the Avenues score 0.81 at 150°; the rest of town scores 0.21 on the compass. The plat’s bearing and the creek’s are coincident in space; why the plat was turned is a matter of record, not of this test.

What the record cannot say

Ten cities is a small sample for a scaling exponent; the fit is reported with its r² and the residuals are read one city at a time.
Street length is OpenStreetMap’s drivable network within each city’s limits, which undercounts private and unmapped roads.

Every number this chapter computed (31)

chico pop: 102,911
chico km: 715.20
chico intersections: 3,426
chico dead ends: 897
chico dead end share: 0.207
chico entropy: 3.33
chico phi: 0.218
chico phi by street: 0.169
chico bearing1: 52
chico bearing2: 141
downtown km: 26.90
downtown phi: 0.928
downtown bearing: 50
avenues km: 59.20
avenues phi: 0.805
avenues bearing: 150
rest km: 629.10
rest phi: 0.214
rest bearing: 89
km per1000: 6.95
intersections per1000: 33.30
beta length: 0.578
r2 length: 0.772
chico residual pct: -5.60
beta intersections: 0.723
r2 intersections: 0.850
chico intersection residual pct: -3.40
cities measured: 10
expected km at chico size: 758
population source: the stored cities study
skipped: —

Every drivable public street inside each city's limits from OpenStreetMap — motorway down to living street, no service roads, alleys or paths — cut into its straight pieces, each given a compass bearing and counted in both directions into 36 sectors of 10°, weighted by length so a long avenue outweighs a cul-de-sac. Boeing's grid order φ rescales the Shannon entropy of that rose so a perfect four-way grid scores 1 and streets pointing every way alike score 0 (by Boeing's own convention, one bearing per street end to end and no weighting, Chico scores 0.17; his hundred world cities ran from Chicago near 0.9 down to Charlotte and Rome near 0); intersections are nodes two or more streets share (a mid-block change of name counts as one, in every city alike), dead ends the ends only one street reaches. Street length and intersection counts are then fitted against population on log–log axes across the 10 cities measured (Y = Y0·N^β, Bettencourt's urban scaling, where infrastructure usually grows with β near 0.85), and Chico's distance above or below that line is its residual. Populations are the 2024 estimates the cities study stored. Measured 2026-09-02.

OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL), via the Overpass API every way tagged highway = motorway, trunk, primary, secondary, tertiary, residential, unclassified or living_street inside each city's administrative boundary · Boeing, G. (2019) "Urban spatial order: street network orientation, configuration, and entropy", Applied Network Science 4:67 · Bettencourt, L.M.A. (2013) "The origins of scaling in cities", Science 340:1438

Planning and Zoning Law; the Chico 2030 General Plan; Municipal Code Title 19 JSON

II · 3

The ground, shaking

How often does the ground near Chico shake, and does the Gutenberg–Richter law hold once the Geysers’ induced quakes are set aside?

every 4 yearsa magnitude-5 earthquake within 150 km of Chico — 13 since 1970 in the USGS catalogue, and the Gutenberg–Richter law fitted to the 4,294 events outside the Geysers' induced swarm (b = 1.12) puts a magnitude 6 at about one every 92 years; the last was 2026's M5.6 near Redwood Valley; the closest big one, the 1975 Oroville M5.7, 41 km away, is the textbook case of a reservoir setting off a fault

The Gutenberg–Richter law within 150 km

CSV · gr

Earthquakes per year

CSV · yearly

The largest since 1970

CSV · big

The Gutenberg–Richter law: for every ten earthquakes of one magnitude there is about one of the next magnitude up, and the slope b is near 1 almost everywhere (Gutenberg & Richter 1944; Aki 1965 for the estimator). Within 150 km of Chico, fitted to the 4,294 events outside the Geysers geothermal field (whose 3,570 induced quakes follow a steeper law), b = 1.12 ± 0.02.

The law sets the odds: a magnitude 5 every 7.0 years on the line and every 4.4 by count (13 since 1970); a magnitude 6 every 92 years on the line, none counted. Fitted to the 121 events of magnitude 4 and above alone, b = 0.93 ± 0.07; the two estimates agree within their errors, so the line is straight over the range that matters.

The nearest large event is the 1975 Oroville earthquake, magnitude 5.7, 41 km away, which followed the filling of Lake Oroville and is the reference case of reservoir-induced seismicity (Bufe et al. 1976).

What the record cannot say

A b-value from fifty-five years of catalogue extrapolated to magnitude 6 is a rate, not a forecast; the return time carries the fit’s error and the assumption that the law holds above the observed range.
Completeness below about M2.5 varies with the network; the fit starts at the estimated completeness magnitude.

Every number this chapter computed (43)

n: 7,864
since: 1970-01-01
radius km: 150
min mag: 2.50
years: 56.80
mc: 2.80
mc all: 2.80
n tectonic: 4,294
b value: 1.12
b err: 0.024
a value: 4.77
b value above4: 0.934
b err above4: 0.073
n above4: 121
b value all: 1.17
b err all: 0.018
a value all: 5.15
rate m4: 1.91
rate m5: 0.144
rate m6: 0.011
count m4: 173
count m5: 13
count m6: 0
return m5 years: 7
return m6 years: 92
counted return m5 years: 4.40
largest mag: 5.70
largest place: The 1975 Oroville, California Earthquake
largest date: 1975-08-01
largest km: 41
nearest m4 mag: 4
nearest m4 place: 11 km E of Artois, California
nearest m4 date: 1997-10-25
nearest m4 km: 24
oroville km: 41.40
oroville mag: 5.70
oroville date: 1975-08-01
within25km: 115
near geysers: 3,570
median depth km: 3
last m5 mag: 5.59
last m5 place: 11 km N of Redwood Valley, CA
last m5 date: 2026-06-24

Every earthquake of magnitude 2.5 or more within 150 km of downtown Chico since 1970 in the USGS catalogue: 7,864 events over 56.8 years. Counted by size they follow the Gutenberg–Richter relation log10 N = a − b·M — each step down in magnitude brings roughly ten times as many quakes, and b says exactly how many. b is Aki's maximum-likelihood estimate over the events at or above the completeness magnitude Mc = 2.8 (the size below which the network misses some, taken as the fullest 0.1 bin plus 0.2), with Shi and Bolt's standard error, fitted to the 4,294 events outside a 20 km circle around the Geysers; the fitted return periods are that line read at M5 and M6, an extrapolation from small quakes that assumes the past 57 years are typical. The circle takes in the Geysers geothermal field in the west (3,570 of the events, set off by water injected into hot rock), the Lake Almanor quakes of 2013 and 2023 in the north-east, and Lake Oroville, whose 1975 M5.7 is widely attributed to the filling of the reservoir — reservoir-induced seismicity, as Bufe and colleagues argued in 1976. The headline is counted, not fitted: M5 or more has come 13 times in 56.8 years, one every 4.4 years; the fitted line, made without the Geysers, puts M5 at one every 7 years and M6 at one every 92 (with the Geysers left in, b would read 1.17 and the line would run faster). Measured 2026-11-02.

USGS ANSS Comprehensive Earthquake Catalog (ComCat), FDSN event web service earthquakes of M2.5+ within 150 km of 39.7285, -121.8375 since 1970-01-01 · Aki, K. (1965) "Maximum likelihood estimate of b in the formula log N = a − bM and its confidence limits", Bulletin of the Earthquake Research Institute 43:237 · Shi, Y. & Bolt, B.A. (1982) "The standard error of the magnitude-frequency b value", Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America 72:1677 · Bufe, C.G., Lester, F.W., Lahr, K.M., Lahr, J.C., Seekins, L.C. & Hanks, T.C. (1976) "Oroville earthquakes: normal faulting in the Sierra Nevada foothills", Science 192:72

Alquist-Priolo Earthquake Fault Zoning Act; Seismic Hazards Mapping Act JSON

II · 4

Heat, frost and rain since 1906

How has a century of afternoons changed at two thermometers, and what do the model ensembles put mid-century at?

35 → 18 days100-degree days a year at the Chico University Farm station, 1911–1940 against 1971–2000, the last thirty years it reported whole — a fall the climate literature lays to the irrigation of the valley, which cools summer afternoons; at Orland, 32 km west on the same floor with a record whole to this year, the count has turned back up, 18 a year in 1991–2020 to 22 in 2001–2024, and a mid-century rise of +3.1 °F (a projection: RCP 4.5 ensemble mean for 2040–2069, Cal-Adapt) shifted onto those days would make it about 35

Days of 100 °F or more, each year

CSV · heatDays CSV · heatDaysModern

The frost-free season

CSV · frostFree CSV · frostFreeModern

Mean daily high and the model ensembles

CSV · tmax CSV · tmaxModern CSV · projection

Rain by water year at the Farm

CSV · precip

In its first thirty whole years the Farm counted 35 days of 100 °F a year; in 1971–2000 it counted 18. Orland over the same windows: 42 to 21. Bonfils and Lobell (2007) and Lobell and Bonfils (2008) attribute this twentieth-century fall in Central Valley summer maxima to irrigation, whose evaporation cools the afternoon; both stations sit in the irrigated valley, so this study inherits that attribution and does not test it.

Since 2000 the count has turned: 22 a year at Orland over 2001–2024 against 18 in 1991–2020, with the mean daily high +0.51 °F a decade since 1971 (Theil–Sen).

Cal-Adapt’s 32-model ensemble (LOCA downscaling, Pierce et al. 2014) has the mean daily high +3.1 °F by 2040–2069 under RCP 4.5 and +4.2 °F under RCP 8.5; shifting Orland’s 1991–2020 distribution by those amounts gives about 36 and 42 hundred-degree days a year, a shifted-distribution estimate rather than a model day count.

What the record cannot say

The Farm’s record thins after 2000, so the modern era is read at Orland, 32 km west; each station is compared only with itself.
The projections are ensemble means for a grid cell, not the station, and are labelled as scenarios.

Every number this chapter computed (45)

station: Chico University Farm (GHCN-Daily USC00041715)
modern station: Orland (GHCN-Daily USC00046506)
modern km: 32
first year: 1,906
last year: 2,000
last observation: 2026-10-08
complete years: 88
orland first year: 1,904
orland last year: 2,024
orland complete years: 118
heat100 1911 40: 34.90
heat100 1941 70: 24.10
heat100 1971 2000: 18.30
heat105 1971 2000: 4.10
frost free 1911 40: 229
frost free 1971 2000: 238
frost grew days: 9
mean tmax 1911 40: 76.20
mean tmax 1971 2000: 74.80
precip wy 1971 2000: 24.60
precip nov mar share: 0.790
wettest wy: 1,995
wettest wyin: 48.50
hottest day: 1972-07-15
hottest day f: 117
hottest day modern: 1905-07-08
hottest day modern f: 120
heat100 orland 1911 40: 42.10
heat100 orland 1971 2000: 21
heat100 orland 1991 2020: 18.40
heat100 orland 2001 now: 21.50
heat105 orland 2001 now: 5.80
modern window: 2001–2024
frost free orland 1971 2000: 271
frost free orland 2001 now: 289
mean tmax orland 1971 2000: 74.90
mean tmax orland 2001 now: 76.40
heat100 trend per decade: -0.300
frost free trend per decade: 8.90
tmax trend per decade: 0.510
proj rise2050 rcp45 f: 3.10
proj rise2050 rcp85 f: 4.20
proj heat100 2050 rcp45: 35.50
proj heat100 2050 rcp85: 42.30
proj base: Orland 1991–2020

Two stations, each compared only with itself. At the Chico University Farm (the century) and at Orland (the present), each calendar year with at least 300 valid daily maximums gives its count of days at or above 100 °F and 105 °F and its mean daily maximum; the same rule on minimums gives the frost-free season, the days between the last minimum at or below 32 °F in January–June and the first in July–December. Rain is the Farm's, summed by water year (October to September) for years with at least 340 valid days. Normals are means over the qualifying years of each window (the normals table says how many qualified): the Farm's 1911–1940 against 1971–2000, after which its reporting thins and, from 2019, all but stops; Orland's 1971–2000 and 1991–2020 against 2001–2024. Trends are Theil–Sen slopes at Orland over 1971 to now, per decade. The fall in hundred-degree days across the twentieth century, seen at both stations, is what Bonfils and Lobell documented across the Central Valley and attributed to irrigation, whose evaporation cools summer afternoons; the turn upward since 2000 is the regional warming they expected to overtake it. The projected rise is the change in Cal-Adapt's 32-model ensemble mean annual maximum from 1991–2020 (the historical run to 2005 joined to each scenario's own 2006–2020) to 2040–2069, in °F; the mid-century day count is a delta method — every daily maximum of Orland's 1991–2020 years is shifted by that rise and recounted — a shifted-distribution estimate, not a model's day count, and a projection under a named scenario, not a forecast. Measured 2026-11-02.

NOAA NCEI GHCN-Daily, Chico University Farm (USC00041715) daily maximum, minimum and precipitation since 8 January 1906, in °F and inches; whole years through 2000 · NOAA NCEI GHCN-Daily, Orland (USC00046506) 32 km west of Chico on the valley floor, whole years from 1904 to 2024 · Cal-Adapt (Geospatial Innovation Facility, UC Berkeley) — LOCA-downscaled CMIP5, 32-model ensemble mean of the annual mean daily maximum Pierce, Cayan & Thrasher (2014) LOCA; RCP 4.5 and 8.5 · Bonfils, C. & Lobell, D. (2007) "Empirical evidence for a recent slowdown in irrigation-induced cooling", PNAS 104:13582 the twentieth-century fall in Central Valley summer maximums, attributed to irrigation · Lobell, D.B. & Bonfils, C. (2008) "The effect of irrigation on regional temperatures: a spatial and temporal analysis of trends in California, 1934–2002", Journal of Climate 21:2063

JSON

II · 5

The water table

Is the water table under town falling, and at what rate against the 2014 act’s horizon?

−1.1 ft a yearthe water table under Chico, by the trend of the yearly median depth to water across a fixed panel of 40 monitored wells in the Vina subbasin, 2005–2025 — 16 ft deeper than in 2005 and, at this rate, 19 ft deeper again by 2042, the statute's horizon (the current trend, 0.38–1.69 ft a year by bootstrap, carried forward from the latest median: a projection, not a forecast)

Depth to water, yearly median

CSV · annual CSV · annualAll

The change in depth against the year’s rain

CSV · rainYears

The wells

CSV · wells

Chico draws every tap from the Vina subbasin. By the trend of the yearly medians the water table under town is falling at 1.09 ft a year (Theil–Sen since 2005).

The median of a fixed panel of 40 wells stood 36 ft down in 2005 and 53 ft in 2026. A panel is used because new deep wells joining the network would otherwise read as the table dropping: across every well the trend reads 1.11 ft a year.

Carried forward from the latest median at that rate (0.38–1.69 ft a year over a bootstrap of the years), the table reaches 72 ft (60–82) by 2042, the statute’s horizon of twenty years from the 2022 plan; a projection under one assumption, not a forecast. The Vina groundwater sustainability agency’s plan sets the thresholds the basin is managed to; the act’s passage in 2014 is marked on the chart as coincident in time, not tested.

The table answers rain: the change in the yearly median correlates most strongly with Orland’s water-year precipitation of the same year (r = -0.69, n = 28 years since 1990), at 0.41 ft of rise per inch above the mean.

What the record cannot say

Depth to water is read seasonally at wells of mixed depth and use; the panel controls composition but not pumping near each well.
A trend is not the basin’s water budget; the sustainability plan’s thresholds are the test the law applies.

Every number this chapter computed (38)

wells: 76
wells used: 58
readings: 77,470
readings raw: 94,334
basin: Vina subbasin (DWR 5-021.57) of the Sacramento Valley groundwater basin
wells panel: 40
trend all wells ft per year: 1.11
median depth now ft: 52.50
median depth now year: 2,026
median depth now wells: 39
median depth2005 ft: 36.30
trend ft per year: 1.09
trend ft per decade: 10.90
trend years: 2005–2025
swing since2000 ft: 39.30
wells falling over1ft per year: 3
wells with trend: 52
median well trend: 0.380
mean well trend: 0.420
projected horizon ft: 71.80
projected horizon lo: 59.70
projected horizon hi: 81.90
horizon year: 2,042
trend lo: 0.380
trend hi: 1.69
rain lag years: 0
rain correlation: -0.690
rain response ft per inch: -0.406
rain coupling n: 28
rain station: Orland
shallowest now ft: 28.30
shallowest now well: 21N02E18C003M
deepest now ft: 154
deepest now well: CWSCH07
first year: 1,959
last year: 2,026
latest reading: 2026-08-14
sustainability agency: Vina Groundwater Sustainability Agency (SGMA)

The measure is depth to water below the ground surface (DWR's gse_gwe, feet), from readings the dataset's own QA does not call questionable or missing, for the 76 Vina-subbasin wells within the box around Chico; a well counts once it has 10 good readings spanning 8 years, which 58 do. Each well's value for a year is the median of its March–May readings when it has any — spring, when the table is highest and pumping lightest — and otherwise of all its readings that year; the basin's yearly figure is the median across a fixed panel of 40 wells, those with a value in at least seven of every ten years of 2005–2025, so that the roster changing does not read as the water moving (across every qualifying well the trend would read 1.11 ft a year), for years with at least 5. The trend is the Theil–Sen slope (the median of pairwise slopes) of those yearly medians over 2005–2025; each well's own trend is the same fit over its readings since 2000. The 2042 figure carries the current rate forward from the latest median to the statute's horizon, twenty years from the 2022 plan, with the slope's 95 % bootstrap range over years — a projection under one assumption, not a forecast; the Vina GSA's sustainability plan, not this line, governs what the subbasin is managed toward. The coupling to rain is the least-squares slope of each year's change in the median on the water-year precipitation anomaly at Orland (the climate chapter's gauge), at lags of zero to three years since 1990. Measured 2026-11-02.

California DWR — periodic groundwater level measurements (CNRA open data) discrete depth-to-water readings by DWR, the Vina GSA and Butte County; stations and measurements tables · Vina Subbasin Groundwater Sustainability Plan — Vina GSA the SGMA agency for the subbasin; its plan sets the minimum thresholds and measurable objectives

Sustainable Groundwater Management Act JSON

II · 6

Water, by the person

How much water does a Chico resident use at home, and how large is the annual swing?

106 gal/dayresidential water use per person in Chico, September 2025 to August 2026 (the latest twelve months the state board has posted) — 1.2× the state average; September uses 3.0× what March does, the 9th-largest summer swing among the 187 suppliers serving 50,000 or more

Residential gallons per person per day

CSV · monthly

The same series as a calendar

CSV · monthly

Summer-to-winter ratio, large suppliers

CSV · swing

Over the latest twelve months each resident used 106 gallons a day at home, 1.2 times the statewide mean.

The series is an oscillator: summer draws 165 gallons a day against 64 in winter, an amplitude ratio of 2.6, the 9th largest among 187 large suppliers. The reading is that the difference is outdoor irrigation in a valley with no rain from May to October; the record measures only the total.

The twelve-month mean is flat since 2016.

What the record cannot say

Residential use is the supplier’s report under the conservation statute; commercial, institutional and agricultural water are excluded.
The supplier’s service area is larger than the city.

Every number this chapter computed (22)

supplier: California Water Service Company Chico District
population served: 116,724
rgpcd12mo: 106
rgpcd summer: 165.10
rgpcd winter: 63.70
seasonal ratio: 2.59
peak month: September
trough month: March
peak to trough ratio: 3
swing rank: 9
swing rank of: 187
state rgpcd12mo: 91.40
ratio to state: 1.16
trend per year: -0.430
trend since: 2016-01
production mglatest year: 7,110
production aflatest year: 21,818
production year: 2,025
latest month: 2026-08
first month: 2014-06
rgpcd2015: 112.70
change since2015 pct: -5.90

R-gpcd is the board's residential gallons per capita per day: metered residential demand in a month over the population served, by day, from the board's per-supplier supply-and-demand table, which reports every month from June 2014 on one method. The headline is the mean of the twelve months to August 2026, the latest the dataset holds; the statewide figure is the mean over all suppliers with a positive r-gpcd under 1,000 for each of those same months, then over the twelve. The summer swing is the July–August mean over the December–February mean across the 36 months to August 2026, and the peak-to-trough ratio the highest calendar month's mean over the lowest; the ranking applies the same two-season ratio to every supplier serving 50,000 or more with at least 24 reported months. The trend is the Theil–Sen slope of the twelve-month rolling mean for windows ending 2016-01 onward, in gallons per person per day per year. Production is potable supply less water sold to other systems and agricultural deliveries, summed over the latest calendar year with all twelve months; an acre-foot is 325,851 gallons. Measured 2026-11-02.

State Water Resources Control Board — per-supplier water supply and demand (urban water use reporting) supplier "California Water Service Company Chico District"; every supplier for the statewide mean and the swing ranking

Making Conservation a California Way of Life Proposition 218 JSON

Part III

The flows

Six more records, read for their rates and their times: what moved, when, and how fast it settled.

III · 7

The economy's metabolism

What does Chico's economy do over a shock, and which parts of it are growing or shrinking?

−4,519 jobsButte County private employment against the comparator counties' path in 2020-Q1, the widest point of the Camp Fire deviation and the last quarter before the pandemic — it was still widening, so no relaxation time could be measured (placebo rank 1 of 11)

Private employment by quarter against the comparator path

CSV · employment

Deviation from the comparator path: the impulse response

CSV · employment

Location quotient by sector, 2025

CSV · sectors

Entropy of employment across supersectors, 2025

CSV · entropy

Jobs in health care and government, 2025

CSV · dependency

Establishments by size, 2023

CSV · sizes

Establishments in Butte County since 1998

CSV · estabs

Real retail taxable sales in Chico, by quarter

CSV · sales

Real retail sales, 2018-Q3 to 2019-Q3, city by city

CSV · salesShift

Bradley-Burns 1 % remitted to the city, by fiscal year

CSV · revenue

Unemployment rate, Chico metropolitan area

CSV · unemployment

WARN notices for Butte County sites, by year

CSV · warnYears

WARN notices for Butte County sites

CSV · warn

The employment, establishment, WARN and unemployment series in this chapter are Butte County's — the Chico metropolitan area is the county — so they net Paradise's losses against Chico's gains; only the taxable-sales and Bradley-Burns series are the cities'. Butte's private employment averaged 61,563 in 2026-Q1, −15.3% against the path of 7 comparator counties chosen by rule (El Dorado, Imperial, Kings, Madera, San Luis Obispo, Shasta and Yolo: California counties of 150,000–350,000 residents (Census vintage 2024) outside the Los Angeles, San Francisco–Oakland, San Jose and San Diego combined statistical areas), both in logs and indexed to 2018-Q3. After the Camp Fire (8 November 2018) that difference-in-differences deviation widened through every quarter of the window to −6.5%, −4,519 jobs against the counterfactual, in 2020-Q1, the last quarter before the pandemic, and had not begun to return, so no relaxation time is printed for the fire. Placing the shock instead at each of 10 quarters from 2015-Q1, the 2018-Q4 peak ranks 1st of 11 (permutation p = 0.09); the mean absolute deviation over the pre-fire quarters was 1.90%. Over 2014-Q1–2018-Q3 the deviation rose 0.21 ± 0.03 points a quarter (n = 19, r² = 0.68), so a difference-in-differences that carries the paths forward parallel understates the fire's deviation.

In the pandemic quarter Butte's own private employment fell 12.0% from 2020-Q1 and the comparators' mean fell 10.1%, so most of that shock was common to every county. Against the comparators, re-indexed to 2020-Q1 and read over the 6 quarters to 2021-Q3 (a window as long as the fire's), the deviation reached −2.7%, −1,746 jobs against the counterfactual, in 2021-Q3 and was still widening at the window's end, so no relaxation time is printed for the pandemic. Over the 24 quarters from 2020-Q2 to 2026-Q1 the two paths have parted at −1.52 ± 0.10 points a year (least squares on the deviation, r² = 0.92), to −15.3% in 2026-Q1. Both pulses are read at quarterly resolution, so nothing faster than a quarter can be seen. The area's unemployment rate, monthly, gives the same shock at finer grain: from a 2019 mean of 5.2% it reached 16.4% in April 2020 and the excess decayed with τ = 9.2 months, 95 % bootstrap interval 7.3–12.4 months (n = 33, r² = 0.92), half-life 4 months; the latest rate is 5.9% in September 2026, not seasonally adjusted.

Among the 14 private sectors with at least 1,000 county jobs, the location quotient against the United States private total (2025) is highest for Agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting (4.41), Health care and social assistance (1.63) and Other services (except public administration) (1.53) and lowest for Transportation and warehousing (0.35), Professional, scientific, and technical services (0.39) and Finance and insurance (0.41). Private employment went from 62,116 in 2014 to 62,412 in 2025; of those sectors Transportation and warehousing grew most (+33.9%) and Professional, scientific, and technical services least (−21.7%). The Shannon entropy of private employment across the 10 supersectors (10 disclosed) is 1.97 nats, 0.85 of the maximum ln 10, 4th of 8 among Butte and the comparators (San Luis Obispo 2.06, El Dorado 2.03, Yolo 2.00, Butte 1.97, Shasta 1.97, Madera 1.92, Kings 1.92 and Imperial 1.88); in 2014 it was 2.02. The Herfindahl index over the 19 sectors is 0.144, 1st of 8 counting from the most concentrated. Private health care with state and local government together hold 43.9% of all Butte jobs (39.6% in 2014), 1st of 8 counting from the most dependent, a place shared with Imperial. Entropy is the variety the related-variety literature (Frenken, Van Oort and Verburg 2007) associates with resilience; it is reported here as a measure and no more.

County Business Patterns counted 4,494 establishments in Butte County in 1998 and 4,677 in 2023, +0.16% a year compounded; since 2020 the count moved +0.22% a year while the county's population moved −0.23% a year (July 2020 to July 2024, Census estimates). The net change was −133 establishments in 2019, the year after the fire, and +9 in 2020. For size classes of 10 employees and up (the 1–4 class is censored), the number of establishments at or above each class's lower bound falls with the bound on log–log axes with slope −1.35 ± 0.03 (n = 7, r² = 0.998); Axtell (2001) found −1 for United States firms, and the comparison is descriptive, since these are establishments in one county and multi-site firms are cut at its line.

Retail and food-service taxable sales in the city of Chico were $429.4 million in 2026-Q2, in that quarter's dollars (CPI-U, CUUR0000SA0), $1,728.0 million over the latest four quarters. The fire quarter 2018-Q4 was +11.1% against 2017-Q4 in real terms and, seasonally adjusted with factors from 2009–2017, +9.2% against the four quarters before it; the excess peaked at +12.2% in 2019-Q2 and stood at −5.6% in 2020-Q1 without a fitted decay. Between 2018-Q3 and 2019-Q3, real retail sales changed by +$38.6 million in Chico, −$34.7 million in Paradise and +$20.0 million in Oroville, +$24.0 million together, while Butte County's changed by +$46.9 million; +$22.9 million of the county's change fell outside the three cities. The state remitted $27,284,797 of Bradley-Burns local sales tax (the 1 % share) to the city in fiscal year 2024–25; a district tax that was on the November 2022 ballot (Measure H) is not measured by this study, and the CDTFA series here is the Bradley-Burns one percent only.

Under the WARN Act, covered employers (75 or more employees in California's act) filed 52 notices for Butte County sites between 2015-07-10 and 2026-07-10, naming 5,098 positions; 56% of the notices were closures rather than layoffs, 69% named a Chico site and 12% a Paradise site. The year 2020 alone holds 11 notices and 1,632 positions, 5 of them marked temporary; without 2020 the record is 41 notices and 3,466 positions. A notice counts positions an employer announced, not separations that occurred.

What the record cannot say

Employment, sectors, establishments, WARN notices and the unemployment rate are Butte County or Chico-metropolitan-area figures (the MSA is the county), so Paradise's losses and Chico's gains net within them; only taxable sales and the Bradley-Burns distribution are the cities' own.
The difference-in-differences assumes Butte would have followed the comparators' mean path but for the shock; the comparators were chosen by a population rule, not for likeness, and each had its own events; the fire window closes at 2020-Q1 because the pandemic follows and the pandemic window is 6 quarters by the same measure, so the three-parameter fit has only the run from each peak to work with (1 quarter for the fire, 1 quarter for the pandemic), and Butte was already converging on the comparators before the fire (mean absolute deviation 1.9% over 18 quarters).
QCEW withholds a cell that would identify an employer, as the Confidential Information Protection and Statistical Efficiency Act requires (44 U.S.C. § 3561 et seq.); in 2025 0 of Butte's 10 supersector cells and 0 of its 19 sector cells are withheld, and 9 of the comparators' 70 supersector cells; a withheld cell is imputed from the private total in proportion to establishments, so the entropy and concentration are estimates and the smallest counties are affected most.
The sales base changed inside the fire window: the Wayfair rules for out-of-state sellers took effect in April 2019 (AB 147) and marketplace facilitators began collecting in October 2019, so part of any change after 2018-Q4 is the tax base, not trade; Chico's, Paradise's and Oroville's sales are compared with the county's on the same real basis but cannot say whose shoppers moved.
WARN covers employers of 75 or more and only the notices they filed, with the headcount they announced rather than separations that occurred; March–June 2020 holds pandemic furloughs marked temporary, so 2020 is shown on its own.
The Bradley-Burns distribution series moves −1.9% in fiscal year 2022–23 and −8.0% in fiscal year 2023–24, within the range of earlier years (27.6% at most), consistent with the Bradley-Burns one percent alone; a district tax that was on the November 2022 ballot (Measure H) is not measured by this study.
The County Business Patterns file for 2024 was not read this run; the establishment series has 26 years.

Every number this chapter computed (153)

unit: county
comparator rule: California counties of 150,000–350,000 residents (Census vintage 2024) outside the Los Angeles, San Francisco–Oakland, San Jose and San Diego combined statistical areas
comparators: El Dorado, Imperial, Kings, Madera, San Luis Obispo, Shasta, Yolo
comparator n: 7
butte pop2024: 208,334
butte pop2020: 210,222
emp peak jobs: -4,519
emp peak pct: -6.50
emp peak quarter: 2020-Q1
tau fire quarters: —
tau fire lo: —
tau fire hi: —
tau fire r2: —
tau fire n: 1
fire shift pct: —
fire half life quarters: —
emp fire end pct: -6.50
emp fire end quarter: 2020-Q1
fire returned: no
fire placebo rank: 1
fire placebo candidates: 11
fire placebo p: 0.091
pre period abs pct: 1.90
emp covid peak jobs: -1,746
emp covid peak pct: -2.70
emp covid peak quarter: 2021-Q3
tau covid quarters: —
tau covid lo: —
tau covid hi: —
tau covid r2: —
tau covid n: 1
covid shift pct: —
covid half life quarters: —
emp covid end pct: -2.70
emp covid end quarter: 2021-Q3
covid returned: no
covid window quarters: 6
emp covid drop butte pct: -12
emp covid drop control pct: -10.10
drift pct per year: -1.52
drift se: 0.100
drift r2: 0.915
drift from: 2020-Q2
drift to: 2026-Q1
drift n: 24
pre trend points per quarter: 0.210
pre trend se: 0.030
pre trend r2: 0.684
pre trend n: 19
pre trend to: 2018-Q3
emp private latest: 61,563
emp total latest: 78,419
emp latest vs control pct: -15.30
emp base quarter: 2018-Q3
entropy butte: 1.97
entropy butte norm: 0.855
entropy rank: 4
entropy n: 8
entropy year: 2,025
entropy cells: 10
entropy cells disclosed: 10
entropy butte2014: 2.02
hhi butte: 0.144
hhi rank: 1
hhi butte2014: 0.130
dependency butte: 0.439
dependency rank: 1
dependency butte2014: 0.396
dependency n: 8
lq top1: Agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting (4.41)
lq top2: Health care and social assistance (1.63)
lq top3: Other services (except public administration) (1.53)
lq bottom1: Transportation and warehousing (0.35)
lq bottom2: Professional, scientific, and technical services (0.39)
lq bottom3: Finance and insurance (0.41)
lq min jobs: 1,000
lq sectors ranked: 14
sector fastest growth: Transportation and warehousing (+33.9%)
sector fastest decline: Professional, scientific, and technical services (−21.7%)
private emp2014: 62,116
private emp latest year: 62,412
sectors n: 19
estabs1998: 4,494
estabs first year: 1,998
estabs latest: 4,677
estabs latest year: 2,023
estabs cagr: 0.160
estabs cagr since2020: 0.220
pop cagr: -0.230
pop cagr window: July 2020 to July 2024, Butte County
estabs change2019: -133
estabs change2020: 9
size slope: -1.35
size slope se: 0.026
size slope z: -13.55
size slope r2: 0.998
size bins: 7
size min lower: 10
size year: 2,023
warn total: 52
warn employees: 5,098
warn closure share: 55.80
warn chico share: 69.20
warn paradise share: 11.50
warn first: 2015-07-10
warn last: 2026-07-10
warn2020 notices: 11
warn2020 employees: 1,632
warn2020 temporary: 5
warn ex2020 notices: 41
warn ex2020 employees: 3,466
sales real latest: 429
sales real latest quarter: 2026-Q2
sales real4q: 1,728
sales dollars of: 2026-Q2
sales cpi series: CUUR0000SA0
sales real fire quarter pct: 9.20
sales real fire yoy pct: 11.10
sales real fire peak pct: 12.20
sales real fire peak quarter: 2019-Q2
sales real fire end pct: -5.60
tau sales quarters: —
tau sales r2: 0.965
tau sales n: 4
sales shift from: 2018-Q3
sales shift to: 2019-Q3
sales shift chico m: 38.60
sales shift paradise m: -34.70
sales shift oroville m: 20
sales shift butte m: 46.90
sales shift outside m: 22.90
revenue latest: 27,284,797
revenue latest fy: 2024–25
revenue first fy: 2012–13
revenue step fy2022 pct: -1.90
revenue step fy2023 pct: -8
revenue step reference pct: 27.60
revenue inhomogeneous: no
unemployment latest: 5.90
unemployment month: 2026-09
unemployment2019: 5.20
unemployment peak: 16.40
unemployment peak month: 2020-04
tau unemployment months: 9.20
tau unemployment lo: 7.30
tau unemployment hi: 12.40
tau unemployment r2: 0.923
tau unemployment n: 33
unemployment half life months: 4
tau unemployment window: 2020-04–2022-12
tau unemployment window rule: the peak month and the 32 months that follow (n = 33), through December 2022: a fixed three-year span from March 2020, the month the shock began, not an end the data chose
last quarter: 2026-Q1
first quarter: 2014-Q1

Private employment is the mean of the three monthly counts in each quarter's QCEW county file (own_code 5, agglvl 71). The comparators are California counties of 150,000–350,000 residents (Census vintage 2024) outside the Los Angeles, San Francisco–Oakland, San Jose and San Diego combined statistical areas: El Dorado, Imperial, Kings, Madera, San Luis Obispo, Shasta and Yolo. Each county's log employment is indexed to 2018-Q3; the control is the comparators' mean; the deviation is Butte less the control, a difference-in-differences in which the season and every common movement cancel. The Camp Fire response is that deviation from 2018-Q4 to 2020-Q1 and the pandemic response the deviation re-indexed to 2020-Q1 over the 6 quarters from 2020-Q2, a window as long as the fire's; from each peak, dev(t) = A·exp(−t/τ) + C is fitted by grid search over τ (241 values from 0.25 to 64 quarters, A and C by least squares at each), with a 200-draw residual bootstrap for the interval and the model-free half-life beside it; τ is printed only where n ≥ 5 and r² ≥ 0.5. The placebo places the shock at every quarter from 2015-Q1 whose 6-quarter window ends by 2018-Q3 and ranks the fire's peak deviation among them. The same fit gives τ in months for the unemployment rate's excess over its 2019 mean, from the peak month through December 2022 — a fixed three-year span from March 2020, the month the shock began, chosen by the calendar rather than by where the excess crosses zero (2020-04–2022-12, n = 33) — and in quarters for Chico's seasonally adjusted real retail-sales excess over the four quarters before 2018-Q4. Sectors are the NAICS sectors of the annual private rows (agglvl 74, unclassified excluded); the location quotient is the BLS's against the United States private total and is listed only for sectors of 1,000 or more; the Shannon entropy is over the ten private supersectors (agglvl 73) and the Herfindahl index over the sectors, withheld cells imputed from the private total in proportion to establishments; the dependency ratio is private NAICS 62 with state and local government (own_code 2 and 3) over the county total (agglvl 70). Establishment sizes are County Business Patterns' size classes for 2023: the count at or above each class's lower bound is regressed on the bound on log₁₀ axes for classes of 10 and up, with the slope's standard error. Sales are deflated by the quarter's mean CPI-U (CUUR0000SA0) to 2026-Q2 dollars, seasonally adjusted by ratio-to-moving-average factors estimated on 2009–2017, and compared same quarter a year apart; the conservation check sets Chico's, Paradise's and Oroville's real change between 2018-Q3 and 2019-Q3 against the county's. WARN rows are the state's fiscal-year reports (PDF, read with pdftotext) and the current-year spreadsheet, Butte County rows, duplicates across files dropped. Measured 2026-11-02.

Census Bureau Population Estimates Program — county totals, vintage 2024 (co-est2024-alldata.csv) SUMLEV 050, STATE 06: POPESTIMATE2020, POPESTIMATE2024; the comparator rule and Butte County's population · BLS Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages — county area files, Butte (06007) and 7 comparator counties quarters 2014-Q1 to 2026-Q1; agglvl 70 (county total) and 71 own 5 (private): month1..3_emplvl, qtrly_estabs, avg_wkly_wage · BLS QCEW — annual averages 2014 and 2025, Butte and the comparator counties agglvl 74 own 5 (private by NAICS sector): annual_avg_emplvl, annual_avg_estabs, lq_annual_avg_emplvl; agglvl 73 own 5 (supersectors); agglvl 71 own 2, 3, 5; agglvl 70 · Census Bureau County Business Patterns — county files 1998–2023 cbpYYco.txt: fipstate 06, fipscty 007; naics ------ for the total, NN---- for sectors; est and the size classes n<5 (n1_4 before 2017) … n1000 · BLS CPI-U all items, U.S. city average (CUUR0000SA0, 1982–84 = 100), via the public API v1 monthly, not seasonally adjusted; used only to deflate sales · BLS Local Area Unemployment Statistics — Chico, CA metropolitan area unemployment rate (LAUMT061702000000003) monthly, not seasonally adjusted; the MSA is Butte County · CDTFA open data — taxable sales by city, quarterly (Chico, Paradise, Oroville) CalendarYear, Quarter, RetailandFoodServicesTaxableTransactions, TotalAllOutletsTaxableTransactions · CDTFA open data — taxable sales by county and business group, Butte, total retail and food services (CTR) CalendarYear, Quarter, BusinessGroupCode CTR, TaxableTransactions; 2015 onward · CDTFA open data — local tax distributions by city and county, Chico FiscalYearFrom, FiscalYearTo, RevenueDistributed: the Bradley-Burns 1 % local tax remitted to the city · EDD WARN reports — fiscal years 2015–16 to 2025–26 (PDF) and the current year (xlsx) Notice Date, Received/Processed Date, Effective Date, Company, City or Address, County, No. Of Employees, Layoff/Closure; Butte County rows only

Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act; Cal-WARN Bradley-Burns Uniform Local Sales and Use Tax Law Transactions and Use Tax Law Metropolitan statistical areas Confidential Information Protection and Statistical Efficiency Act; Census confidentiality JSON

III · 8

Rent and the housing stock

What moved Chico's rents, and how fast does a rent shock decay?

+9.3 %excess rent in Chico 12 months after the Camp Fire (November 2019) — Chico's ZORI indexed to October 2018 against a synthetic Chico weighted from 25 California cities chosen by rule (Livermore (32 %), Chino (23 %), Temecula (18 %), San Ramon (13 %), Brentwood (11 %) and Merced (4 %)); the excess peaked at +10.9 % in July 2019 and relaxed with τ no longer than the index's smoothing window (three months) toward a plateau of +8.3 %; among 26 cities treated in turn Chico's peak ranks 1 (p = 0.04); in September 2026 Chico sat 0.6 % below the control

Rent indexed to October 2018: Chico, its synthetic control, the nation

CSV · rent

Chico's excess over its synthetic control, and the fit from the peak

CSV · rent

Peak excess when each donor is treated in turn

CSV · placebos

12-month-forward excess at every candidate shock month

CSV · placeboTime

Housing units permitted per 1,000 residents

CSV · permits

Units permitted by income band, from the city's progress reports

CSV · apr

Chico State fall headcount

CSV · enrollment

Rent as a share of the county's mean private paycheck

CSV · wage

Indexed to October 2018 (= 100), Chico's ZORI reached +10.9 points against its synthetic control in July 2019, 9 months after the Camp Fire of 8 November 2018; 12 months after the fire (November 2019) the excess was +9.3 points. The control is a weighted mean of the 25 donor cities that pass the rule, 6 of them carrying weight: Livermore (32 %), Chino (23 %), Temecula (18 %), San Ramon (13 %), Brentwood (11 %) and Merced (4 %). Over January 2016–October 2018, before the shock, the synthetic tracked Chico with a root-mean-square gap of 0.83 points (mean absolute gap 0.65).

Treating each donor in turn as if it had been shocked and building its synthetic from the others, Chico's peak excess over November 2018–February 2020 ranks 1 of 26 units (permutation p = 0.04); its ratio of post- to pre-period root-mean-square gap, 9.6, ranks 1 of 26. Over the 24 candidate shock months June 2016–June 2018, each re-estimated with its own pre-period, the 12-month-forward excess for November 2018 ranks 1 of 25; 8 of those candidate windows reach past the fire.

From the peak to February 2020, the month before the pandemic reached every city, the excess fits A·exp(−t/τ) + C with τ no longer than the index's smoothing window (three months) — the fitted value falls inside the window over which Zillow smooths the index and is not resolvable, so only the bound is reported, settling toward a plateau of +8.3 points (r² = 0.72, n = 8). In September 2026 the excess was −0.6 points: Chico's index stood at 139.3 against the control's 140.0, a ZORI of $1,561 a month against $1,120 in October 2018.

In 2025 the mean ZORI for Chico was $1,531 a month, 31.9 % of Butte County's average private-sector weekly wage of $1,106 taken over a month (× 52/12); in 2015 the share was 32.0 %. This sets a city asking rent against a county mean wage, which high earners pull upward; rent against median household income is the standard measure and is not computed here.

The Building Permits Survey records 225 housing units authorised in Chico in 2025, 2.2 per 1,000 residents; the mean over 2021–2025 is 4.4 per 1,000 against a peak of 25.6 in 1990. Units in buildings of five or more were 61.5 % of the units permitted over those 5 years. Permits are units authorised, not units completed. The housing statutes the frame cites (SB 330, SB 9, the ADU law) are coincident in time with the permit series and are not tested here. The city's annual progress reports to HCD list 4,057 units permitted over 2018–2025 and 4,448 completed; 28.5 % of the permitted units were for very-low- or low-income households and 7.6 % were accessory dwelling units. Against the sixth-cycle RHNA of 3,488 units for 06/15/2022 - 06/15/2030, 1,587 units (45.5 %) had been credited, 826 of the 1,608 very-low- and low-income units.

Chico State's fall headcount peaked at 17,875 in 2017 and was 15,257 in 2024, 14.6 % lower. Its bearing on rent is not separable from the fire in this record.

What the record cannot say

ZORI is Zillow's smoothed index of asking rents on the homes listed on Zillow, not the rent paid across the whole stock; past months are revised as listings arrive, so a stored result can differ from a later pull.
Penal Code §396 capped rent increases at 10 % above the pre-emergency rent for the duration of the emergency proclaimed for the fire, and AB 1482 (Civil Code §1947.12) capped annual increases statewide from January 2020, so the asking rents in the window are censored from above.
The control is a synthetic Chico built from 25 donors chosen by rule (California cities of 40–120 thousand people at least 150 km from Chico, in a county under no federal fire major-disaster declaration dated 2017–2019, with ZORI reported every month from 2016-01); 207 California cities with ZORI rows fell outside the population band, 10 were within 150 km, 68 sat in a fire-declaration county (dockets FEMA-4344-DR, FEMA-4353-DR, FEMA-4382-DR, FEMA-4407-DR) and 44 lacked full data. The design supports an excess relative to the synthetic after the shock; it does not apportion the excess among the fire, enrollment and the pandemic, and the in-space placebo rank is the measure of how unusual Chico's excess is among untreated cities.
The rent is the City of Chico's and the wage is Butte County's mean private-sector weekly wage, which high earners pull upward; rent against median household income is the standard quantity and needs a Census API key, so it is not computed here.
Permits are units authorised, not units built: a permitted unit may be completed years later or never, and the progress reports' completions are the certificates of occupancy the city reported.
The population the study stores begins with the 2020 census, so the displacement from Paradise is not measured here; permits per resident interpolate the decennial counts and the 2024 estimate.
The pre-period fit is in-sample — 25 donor weights fitted to 34 months — so the pre-period root-mean-square gap of 0.83 points understates the out-of-sample error of the synthetic.
Sources that did not answer on this run, left as gaps: no Chico row in the 1984 permits file.

Every number this chapter computed (66)

rent latest: 1,561
rent latest month: 2026-09
rent pre fire: 1,120
rent base month: 2018-10
excess peak pct: 10.90
excess peak month: 2019-07
excess12mo pct: 9.30
excess12mo month: 2019-11
tau months: 0.800
tau lo: 0.500
tau hi: 3.30
tau n: 8
tau r2: 0.720
excess plateau pct: 8.30
tau bound: smoothing window
smoothing months: 3
window end: 2020-02
pandemic month: 2020-03
excess now pct: -0.600
placebo abs pct: 0.650
pre rmspe: 0.830
post rmspe: 7.99
rmspe ratio: 9.61
placebo from: 2016-01
comparators: Antioch, Apple Valley, Brentwood, Chino, Chino Hills, Eastvale, Hemet, Lake Elsinore, Livermore, Menifee, Merced, Mountain View, Murrieta, Palm Desert, Palm Springs, Palo Alto, Pittsburg, Redlands, Redwood City, San Mateo, San Ramon, Temecula, Tracy, Upland, Walnut Creek
comparator n: 25
comparators weighted: Livermore (31.5 %), Chino (23.2 %), Temecula (17.6 %), San Ramon (13.2 %), Brentwood (10.5 %), Merced (3.9 %)
excluded population: 207
excluded distance: 10
excluded fire: 68
excluded data: 44
fire dockets: FEMA-4344-DR, FEMA-4353-DR, FEMA-4382-DR, FEMA-4407-DR
placebo rank: 1
placebo n: 26
placebo p: 0.040
rmspe rank: 1
time rank: 1
time n: 25
time p: 0.040
time overlapping: 8
rent share of wage: 31.90
wage year: 2,025
weekly wage: 1,106
permits per k5yr: 4.39
permits per kpeak year: 1,990
permits per kpeak: 25.60
fiveplus share: 61.50
permits latest year: 2,025
permits latest units: 225
apr permitted: 4,057
apr completed: 4,448
apr low share: 28.50
apr adu share: 7.60
apr first year: 2,018
apr last year: 2,025
rhna total: 3,488
rhna credited: 1,587
rhna progress pct: 45.50
rhna period: 06/15/2022 - 06/15/2030
enroll peak year: 2,017
enroll peak: 17,875
enroll latest: 15,257
enroll latest year: 2,024
enroll change pct: -14.60
first month: 2015-01
last month: 2026-09

Rent is Zillow's Observed Rent Index (smoothed asking rents, all home types, city level, monthly from January 2015). Each city's index is its ZORI divided by its October 2018 value, the last full month before the Camp Fire. The control is a synthetic control in the sense of Abadie, Diamond and Hainmueller: non-negative weights summing to one over a donor pool, fitted by projected gradient descent to minimise the squared gap to Chico's index over January 2016–October 2018; Chico's excess is its index minus the weighted donors' index, in points of the pre-fire level, the weights renormalised over the donors reporting a month. Donors are chosen by the rule "California cities of 40–120 thousand people at least 150 km from Chico, in a county under no federal fire major-disaster declaration dated 2017–2019, with ZORI reported every month from 2016-01" — populations from the cities study, distance by great circle from the Census gazetteer's interior points, fire counties from the Federal Register's FEMA notices (the declarations naming a fire, dated 2017-01-01 to 2019-12-31, and every county their amendments add) — giving 25 donors: Antioch, Apple Valley, Brentwood, Chino, Chino Hills, Eastvale, Hemet, Lake Elsinore, Livermore, Menifee, Merced, Mountain View, Murrieta, Palm Desert, Palm Springs, Palo Alto, Pittsburg, Redlands, Redwood City, San Mateo, San Ramon, Temecula, Tracy, Upland and Walnut Creek. The peak is the largest excess from November 2018 to February 2020, the month before the pandemic reached every city; the relaxation time is the least-squares fit of A·exp(−t/τ) + C over that window by a grid on τ, its interval the 2.5th and 97.5th percentiles of a 200-draw residual bootstrap, and τ is reported only with n ≥ 8 and r² ≥ 0.5. Inference is by in-space placebos — each donor treated in turn with a synthetic built from the rest, Chico's peak excess and post-to-pre RMSPE ratio ranked among all units — and a placebo in time, the estimator re-run at each candidate shock month June 2016–June 2018 with its own pre-period and the excess 12 months forward ranked. Rent as a share of the paycheck is the calendar-year mean ZORI over Butte County's mean private-sector weekly wage × 52/12 from the QCEW annual file. Permits are the Building Permits Survey's units authorised in Chico each year from 1980, per 1,000 residents on a population interpolated linearly between the decennial census counts and the 2024 estimate; the five-year figures cover the latest 5 reported years. The income-band mix sums the BP_ columns of the city's annual progress reports to HCD by year, the very-low band including the acutely- and extremely-low columns, and completions sum the CO_ columns; RHNA progress is the state's own progress report for the sixth cycle. Enrollment is IPEDS fall headcount, one total row per year; its peak year is computed from the record. Measured 2026-11-02.

Zillow Research — Zillow Observed Rent Index (ZORI), smoothed, all homes, by city RegionName, CountyName and the monthly columns 2015-01 to 2026-09 for Chico and every California city (StateName CA) · Zillow Research — ZORI by metro, with the United States row the "United States" row, indexed the same way · U.S. Census Bureau — 2024 Gazetteer, places, California NAME, INTPTLAT, INTPTLONG: the interior point of each place, for the distance rule · Federal Register — FEMA notices of major disaster declarations for California and their amendments docket FEMA-NNNN-DR, the declaration date, the incident clause and the counties designated as adversely affected; fire dockets dated 2017-01-01–2019-12-31: FEMA-4344-DR, FEMA-4353-DR, FEMA-4382-DR, FEMA-4407-DR · U.S. Census Bureau — Building Permits Survey, annual place files, West Region we{yyyy}a.txt for 1980–2025: state 06, county 007, place name CHICO (FIPS place 13014 from 1999); units in 1, 2, 3–4 and 5+ unit buildings; valuation not read · California HCD — Housing Element Annual Progress Report, Table A2 (data.ca.gov datastore) JURIS_NAME CHICO; BP_* units permitted and CO_* units completed by income band, UNIT_CAT for accessory dwelling units · California HCD — RHNA Progress Report, sixth cycle (data.ca.gov datastore) Jurisdiction CHICO: RHNA VLI/LI/MOD/ABOVE MOD and the units credited to each · IPEDS fall enrollment via the Urban Institute Education Data Portal unitid 110538 (California State University-Chico), enrollment_fall, the single all-students row (ftpt 99, level 99), 1990–2025 · BLS Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages — Butte County annual files own_code 5 (private), agglvl_code 71 (county total by ownership), annual_avg_wkly_wage · U.S. Census Bureau — decennial census counts for Chico city, 1980–2020 1980: 26,603, 1990: 40,079, 2000: 59,954, 2010: 86,187, 2020: 101,475; the 2024 point is the cities study's estimate · Abadie, A., Diamond, A. & Hainmueller, J. (2010) "Synthetic control methods for comparative case studies", Journal of the American Statistical Association 105(490):493

Housing Element Law Regional Housing Needs Allocation Housing Crisis Act of 2019 (SB 330, extended by SB 8)SB 9 (2021)Accessory dwelling unit law Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act Price gouging after a declared emergency Tenant Protection Act of 2019 (AB 1482)JSON

III · 9

Money in and money out

What outside money reaches Chico, from whom, and where does Chico's own political money go — in the federal record, the only one published as data?

$110.9 millionfederal awards with a place of performance in Chico in fiscal 2025 (USAspending obligations; 13.8 % grants, the Department of Education the largest awarding agency) — $1,077 per resident

Federal awards performed in Chico by fiscal year and type

CSV · federal

Awarding agencies, fiscal 2025

CSV · agenciesLatest

Recipients, fiscal 2025

CSV · recipientsLatest

Butte County awarding sub-agencies around the Camp Fire

CSV · countyFire

Transfer receipts as a share of personal income

CSV · transfers

Itemised contributions from Chico ZIP codes by cycle and party

CSV · fecByParty

Committees receiving most from Chico ZIP codes, 2024 cycle

CSV · fecCommitteesLatest

Nonprofit revenue against population, California cities of 20,000 or more

CSV · npScaling

Revenue by year, the six largest Chico nonprofits

CSV · npYearsTop

Chico nonprofit revenue by NTEE major group

CSV · npGroups

IRS rulings for Chico organisations by year

CSV · npRulingYears

In fiscal 2025 (October 2024 to September 2025) federal awards with a place of performance in Chico came to $110.9 million in USAspending's transaction obligations: grants 13.8 %, contracts 11.5 %, direct payments 73.9 %, loans 0 % and other assistance 0.8 %. The largest awarding agency was the Department of Education ($48.2 million); the largest named recipient CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY CHICO ($42.7 million), with $9.4 million in USAspending's aggregate rows for direct payments to individuals. That is $1,077 per resident on the Census Bureau's 2024 estimate of 102,911. Over the 9 closed fiscal years since 2017, when the DATA Act made reporting uniform, the total ranged from $74.2 million (fiscal 2017) to $220.9 million (fiscal 2021). Fiscal 2027, still open, stands at $952 to date.

The Camp Fire (8 November 2018) does not show at Chico's place of performance: fiscal 2019 was $97.8 million against $84.2 million in fiscal 2018 (+16 %). FEMA's county-coded obligations were $23.7 million in fiscal 2019, against $20,472 in fiscal 2018 and $7.4 million in fiscal 2020. Butte County's obligations as a whole were $1.11 billion in fiscal 2018, $1.17 billion in fiscal 2019 (+5.5 %) and $1.45 billion in fiscal 2020. The largest county line in fiscal 2019 was the Social Security Administration ($830.7 million).

Personal current transfer receipts — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, veterans' and income-support payments — were 29.75 % of Butte County's personal income in 2024, against 16.76 % for California and 20.96 % for the county in 2001; among the 8 counties the economy chapter compares by one rule — California counties of 150,000–350,000 residents outside the four coastal combined areas: Butte and El Dorado, Imperial, Kings, Madera, San Luis Obispo, Shasta and Yolo — Butte's share ranks 3rd highest (BEA CAINC4, line 47 over line 10).

Itemised contributions from Chico's five ZIP codes in the 2024 cycle came to $1.8 million in 25,330 receipts to 408 committees, leaving out the conduits' own rows (ActBlue, WinRed: $1.7 million, the same gifts on their way to those committees). 37.3 % went to committees registered with a Democratic affiliation and 22.1 % with a Republican one, 40.6 % to committees registered with none (PACs, most joint fundraisers); 84.8 % went to committees based outside California. Committees for California's 1st congressional district received $56,194 (3.2 %), for its Senate seats $39,827 (2.3 %) and for the presidency $545,430 (30.9 %). The largest recipient was HARRIS FOR PRESIDENT ($376,202). Cycles complete: 2020, 2022, 2024, 2026.

The IRS exempt-organisation master file lists 667 organisations with a Chico mailing address; 257 state a return period and a revenue above zero, $1.68 billion in all for their latest filed year, of which hospitals (NTEE E2x) are $1.08 billion (64.4 %) and higher education (B4x, B5x) $0. The largest three are ENLOE MEDICAL CENTER ($1.07 billion), VICTOR COMMUNITY SUPPORT SERVICES INC ($112.2 million) and CHICO STATE ENTERPRISES ($84.4 million). By NTEE major group, health care is $1.08 billion, education $192.2 million, human services $87.4 million and mental health $138.1 million. 195 organisations still on the file carry an IRS ruling dated in the 96 months from November 2018, the Camp Fire's month, against 120 for the 96 months before it — a comparison that overstates recent founding, since the file holds only organisations still recognised and the IRS revokes those that fail to file for three years, thinning the older cohort. The North Valley Community Foundation's revenue peaked in 2019 at $67.7 million, 6.0× its 2018 figure.

Across 289 California cities of 20,000 or more, filers' revenue by ZIP assigned to its city scales with population as Y ∝ N^β with β = 1.56 (bootstrap 95 % interval 1.29–1.79; OLS 1.57, r² = 0.36; n = 289), superlinear in the sense of Bettencourt et al. (2010). Chico's residual is +0.61 in log10 (4.1× the line; z = +0.9 against a scatter of 0.72). Without hospitals β = 1.49 (bootstrap 95 % interval 1.27–1.72; OLS 1.51, r² = 0.37; n = 289) and Chico's residual is +0.24 in log10 (1.8× the line; z = +0.4 against a scatter of 0.69). Without higher education Chico's residual is +0.63 in log10 (4.3× the line; z = +0.9 against a scatter of 0.70).

What the record cannot say

USAspending codes each award to one place of performance, so money that reaches Chico through the county, through Paradise or through a state agency does not appear under Chico, and an award coded to Chico may be spent elsewhere; coverage is uniform only from fiscal 2017 (DATA Act reporting), so fiscal 2008–2016 are flagged preDataAct in the series and left out of the range and the per-capita figure; fiscal 2027 is open and its figure is to date. A type can sum below zero in a year when de-obligations outweigh new awards, as loans do in fiscal 2015, fiscal 2016, fiscal 2020, fiscal 2023, fiscal 2024, fiscal 2026.
"MULTIPLE RECIPIENTS" and the like are USAspending's aggregates of direct payments to individuals (Social Security, Medicare, veterans' benefits); they stay in the recipient table as type 'aggregate' and the largest named recipient is the largest row that is not one.
The FEC's by-ZIP table counts itemised money — gifts from a giver whose total to that committee passes $200 in the cycle — except that the conduits itemise everything, so a small gift through ActBlue or WinRed is counted while the same gift written directly is not; a conduit gift is also on the recipient's report, which is why the cycle totals leave the conduit rows out. WinRed began in mid-2019, so the two parties' shares are comparable only from the 2020 cycle, the first here. Geography is the committee's registered address, not the giver's.
The political-money side is federal only: Chico's council campaign filings are paper Form 460s at the City Clerk and are not published as data. The FEC's public key allows forty calls an hour; cycles complete so far: 2020, 2022, 2024, 2026 (20 of 20 ZIP × cycle pulls stored, 0 calls this run); api.data.gov also caps that key at fifty calls a day per address, so the cycles fill in over runs, and a cycle flagged incomplete holds only the ZIP codes pulled so far.
Master-file revenue is each organisation's latest return on file, so the Chico total mixes filing years, and it is blank for 990-N filers (under $50,000) and for churches: 410 of the 667 Chico organisations (61.5 %) have no usable figure and are outside every sum and the fit. RULING is the IRS determination date, not a founding date, and the file holds only organisations still recognised — the IRS automatically revokes those that fail to file for three years — so older cohorts are thinned and a count of recent rulings against earlier ones overstates recent founding.
The scaling join sends each five-digit ZIP to the incorporated place holding the largest land share of its ZCTA, so post-office-box ZIPs (Chico's 95927) and ZIPs whose ZCTA lies wholly outside any city are not joined — 95.2 % of California filers' revenue reached a city with a stored population; hospitals and universities dominate the city totals, which is why the fit is repeated without NTEE E2x and without B4x/B5x.

Every number this chapter computed (111)

fed total latest fy: 110,874,861
fed fy: 2,025
fed grants share: 13.80
fed contracts share: 11.50
fed direct share: 73.90
fed top agency: Department of Education ($48.2 million)
fed top recipient: CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY CHICO ($42.7 million)
fed aggregate recipients: 9,378,394
fed per capita: 1,077
fed county latest fy: 1,489,771,707
fed chico share of county: 7.40
fed fy2018: 84,232,126
fed fy2019: 97,750,354
fed camp fire fy19: $97.8 million vs $84.2 million
fed camp fire fy19 pct: 16
fed county fy18: 1,109,163,511
fed county fy19: 1,170,208,792
fed county fy20: 1,447,358,212
fed county fema fy18: 20,472
fed county fema fy19: 23,714,240
fed county fema fy20: 7,361,179
fed county top subagency fy19: Social Security Administration ($830.7 million)
fed min fy: 2,017
fed max fy: 2,021
fed uniform from: 2,017
fed fyin progress: 2,027
fed fyin progress to date: 952
fed first fy: 2,008
transfer share butte: 29.75
transfer share ca: 16.76
transfer share year: 2,024
transfer share butte first: 20.96
transfer share cafirst: 11.60
transfer share first year: 2,001
transfer rank butte: 3
transfer rank of: 8
transfer comparators: El Dorado, Imperial, Kings, Madera, San Luis Obispo, Shasta, Yolo
fec cycle: 2,024
fec total cycle: 1,767,477
fec total cycle2024: 1,767,477
fec all rows cycle: 3,478,632
fec conduit rows: 1,711,155
fec receipts: 25,330
fec committees n: 408
fec dem share: 37.30
fec rep share: 22.10
fec none share: 40.60
fec conduit share: 49.20
fec out of state share: 84.80
fec ca01 share: 3.20
fec senate ca share: 2.30
fec president share: 30.90
fec top committee: HARRIS FOR PRESIDENT ($376,202)
fec top conduit: ACTBLUE ($1.4 million)
fec cycles: 2020, 2022, 2024, 2026
fec cycles partial: —
fec cycle complete: 1
fec cycle zips: 95926, 95927, 95928, 95929, 95973
fec pulls done: 20 of 20
fec calls this run: 0
fec unlisted: 0
np count: 667
np filers: 257
np no revenue share: 61.50
np revenue total: 1,675,132,435
np revenue hospital: 1,078,734,261
np revenue ex hospital: 596,398,174
np revenue higher ed: 0
np hospital share: 64.40
np top1: ENLOE MEDICAL CENTER ($1.07 billion)
np top2: VICTOR COMMUNITY SUPPORT SERVICES INC ($112.2 million)
np top3: CHICO STATE ENTERPRISES ($84.4 million)
np founded since2018: 195
np rulings before same: 120
np wave months: 96
np filings orgs: 25
bmf as of: 2026-10-24
bmf rows: 203,805
nvcf peak year: 2,019
nvcf peak revenue: 67,663,615
np scaling chico revenue: 1,642,025,993
np scaling chico orgs: 196
np join share: 95.20
np min city pop: 20,000
np beta: 1.56
np beta lo: 1.30
np beta hi: 1.79
np beta ols: 1.57
np r2: 0.363
np n: 289
np residual chico: 0.609
np residual chico pct: 306.30
np ratio chico: 4.06
np residual sd: 0.716
np zchico: 0.850
np beta ex hospital: 1.49
np beta ex hospital lo: 1.27
np beta ex hospital hi: 1.73
np r2 ex hospital: 0.366
np nex hospital: 289
np residual ex hospital: 0.243
np residual ex hospital pct: 75
np ratio ex hospital: 1.75
np residual sd ex hospital: 0.688
np zex hospital: 0.350
np beta ex higher ed: 1.57
np residual ex higher ed: 0.633
np residual ex higher ed pct: 329.40
np residual sd ex higher ed: 0.704
np zex higher ed: 0.900
last period: fiscal 2025 (federal), 2024 (BEA), cycle 2024 (FEC), master file of 2026-10-24 (IRS)

Federal money is every USAspending transaction with a place of performance in Chico, summed by fiscal year (October to September) from 2008, in total and under an award-type filter per group; agencies and recipients are the API's own aggregates for the same filters, and the county's total and sub-agencies come from the same query with county 007. Coverage is uniform from fiscal 2017, so the range and the per-capita figure use closed years from then. Transfer receipts are the BEA's CAINC4 line 47 over line 10 by county and for the state. Political money is the FEC's schedule A aggregate by contributor ZIP for 95926, 95927, 95928, 95929, 95973 and cycles 2020, 2022, 2024, 2026, one total and count per receiving committee; a cycle's total is the sum over committees other than the conduits (ActBlue, WinRed, Democracy Engine, by name), whose rows carry the same gifts in transit and are reported apart. Each committee's name, party, type and registered state are read from the bulk committee master of that cycle and its race from the candidate master; super PACs are committee type O or U, hybrid PACs V or W, party committees X, Y or Z, candidate committees H, S or P or designation A or P. Nonprofits are the IRS master file's Chico rows restricted, for every sum, to organisations with a stated return period and a revenue above zero: revenue by NTEE major group, the 25 largest by REVENUE_AMT (INCOME_AMT where blank) with their revenue by year from ProPublica's Form 990 extracts, and rulings by year. The scaling law is fitted over every California city of 20,000 or more: filers' revenue summed by five-digit ZIP, each ZIP sent to the incorporated place holding the largest land share of its 2020 ZCTA, joined to the population the cities chapter stored, then log10 revenue on log10 population by Theil–Sen with a 200-draw bootstrap percentile interval for β (the OLS slope and r² beside it); Chico's residual is its log10 distance from that line — Bettencourt et al.'s scale-adjusted indicator — with every organisation, without hospitals (NTEE E2x) and without higher education (B4x, B5x), each with the standard deviation of the residuals across cities and Chico's z. Measured 2026-11-04.

USAspending API v2 — spending by category (awarding agency, awarding sub-agency, recipient) place_of_performance_locations city Chico CA and county 007; time_period per fiscal year 2008–2027; award_type_codes per group (grants 02–05, contracts A–D, loans 07–08, direct 06/10, other 09/11); transaction obligations · Bureau of Economic Analysis — CAINC4 personal income by major component, California counties CAINC4_CA_1969_2024.csv; LineCode 10 personal income, 47 personal current transfer receipts; GeoFIPS 06007 Butte, 06000 California and the comparator counties · FEC API — schedule A receipts aggregated by contributor ZIP zip 95926, 95927, 95928, 95929, 95973; cycle 2020, 2022, 2024, 2026; fields committee_id, total, count; DEMO_KEY · FEC bulk data — committee master and candidate master by cycle cm{yy}.zip (CMTE_ID, CMTE_NM, CMTE_CITY, CMTE_ST, CMTE_DSGN, CMTE_TP, CMTE_PTY_AFFILIATION, CONNECTED_ORG_NM, CAND_ID) and cn{yy}.zip (CAND_OFFICE, CAND_OFFICE_ST, CAND_OFFICE_DISTRICT) · IRS Exempt Organizations Business Master File extract — California EIN, NAME, CITY, STATE, ZIP, SUBSECTION, RULING, TAX_PERIOD, ASSET_AMT, INCOME_AMT, REVENUE_AMT, NTEE_CD; Chico rows and every ZIP for the scaling fit · Census Bureau — 2020 ZCTA to place relationship file GEOID_ZCTA5_20, GEOID_PLACE_20, NAMELSAD_PLACE_20, AREALAND_ZCTA5_20, AREALAND_PART; each ZCTA to the incorporated place with the largest land part · ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer API v2 — organisation filings filings_with_data: tax_prd_yr, totrevenue, totfuncexpns, totassetsend, for the 25 largest Chico filers by master-file revenue · Bettencourt, L. M. A., Lobo, J., Strumsky, D. & West, G. B. (2010) "Urban scaling and its deviations", PLoS ONE 5(11): e13541

Federal Election Campaign Act Internal Revenue Code §501(c); the Form 990 Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act Community Development Block Grant — Disaster Recovery Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act; DATA Act JSON

III · 10

The electorate by district

How does each council district vote, and which seats does the November 2026 ballot decide?

D+48.8 to D+10.3the two-party presidential vote across Chico's seven council districts in November 2024, District 5 to District 1; the 3 districts on the November 2026 ballot voted District 2 D+16.9, District 4 D+39.7 and District 6 D+16.6 for president

Two-party presidential vote by precinct, November 2024

CSV · precincts CSV · districtCentroids

Two-party presidential vote by council district, 2024

CSV · districts

Council winner's share and the district's presidential vote

CSV · winners

Within each contest: the winner's precinct share on the precinct's partisan share

CSV · nationalisation

Council contests, 2022 and 2024

CSV · contests

Propositions: yes share by district

CSV · props

The districts on the November 2026 ballot

CSV · seats2026

Chico has elected its council by district since November 2020; that change is coincident in time with this record and is not tested here as the cause of anything. In November 2024 the seven council districts held 57,954 registered voters at the close of registration: 43.5 % Democratic, 27.7 % Republican, 19.8 % with no party preference. 45,789 ballots were cast, 79.0 % of registrants over the 46 precincts reporting both; turnout ran from 74.1 % in District 5 to 82.7 % in District 1.

For president in 2024 the districts voted from D+48.8 in District 5 to D+10.3 in District 1, two-party; the seven together voted D+24.5 (a Democratic share of 62.2 % of the two-party vote, which leaves out the 3.9 % cast for other candidates), and for Congress D+17.2. By district: 5 D+48.8, 7 D+40.8, 4 D+39.7, 2 D+16.9, 6 D+16.6, 3 D+16.4 and 1 D+10.3.

Of the 46 precincts placed in a district, 22 cast a 2024 council ballot (districts 1, 3, 5 and 7) and 24 were placed by the 2022 precincts holding most of their area and those precincts' full-term ballots (districts 2, 4 and 6); 12 precincts with a Chico address were placed in none. The two years' ballot maps overlap by 0.2 % of the 2024 council-ballot precincts' sampled area and 2.2 % of 2022's. Against the city's stored district layer, the centroid of a 2024 council-ballot precinct fell in the district it voted in for 12 of 22 precincts and in another district for 10; the 2022 District 3 short-term contest, which filled the rest of a term begun in 2020, was cast in 7 precincts that also voted in District 2, 4 or 6, and 14 of its 15 precincts have their centroid in the stored layer's District 3, whose population fields sum to 90,224 over the seven districts.

Within each council contest the winner's share of a precinct's council vote is regressed on the precinct's two-party Democratic share in the partisan contest on the same ballot (president in 2024, governor in 2022): over the 8 contests the slope runs from -0.91 to 1.19 (median -0.56) and r² from 0.25 to 0.96 (median 0.67), on 4 to 14 precincts each; in 3 the winner's share rose with the Democratic share and in 5 it fell. The steepest: BRYCE GOLDSTEIN (District 7, 2024): slope 1.19, r² 0.76, n = 5; the flattest: TOM VAN OVERBEEK (District 6, 2022): slope -0.50, r² 0.25, n = 12.

On the Statewide Database's Chico place label, the same rule in both years, the Democratic share of the two-party presidential vote was 61.3 % in 2020 and 59.5 % in 2024, a change of −1.8 points; registration moved −0.1 points Democratic, +0.5 Republican and −1.9 no party preference over the same four years, on 70,821 and 68,770 registrants.

The council members whose terms end in November 2026 hold District 2, District 4 and District 6. For president in 2024 those districts voted District 2 D+16.9, District 4 D+39.7 and District 6 D+16.6; their registration is 40.8 % Democratic, 31.1 % Republican and 19.4 % no party preference in District 2, 48.2 % Democratic, 21.6 % Republican and 20.7 % no party preference in District 4 and 40.6 % Democratic, 32.9 % Republican and 18.4 % no party preference in District 6. In 2022 KASEY REYNOLDS won District 2 with 55.8 % of 4,427 votes, ADDISON WINSLOW won District 4 with 57.7 % of 4,043 votes and TOM VAN OVERBEEK won District 6 with 58.8 % of 5,855 votes.

What the record cannot say

The specification's placement — each precinct polygon's centroid against the city's stored district layer — disagrees with the ballot record for 10 of the 22 precincts that cast a 2024 council ballot (2215 (voted in 1, centroid in the layer's 5); 2216 (voted in 1, centroid in the layer's 4); 4203 (voted in 1, centroid in the layer's 5); 2213 (voted in 3, centroid in the layer's 2); 3212 (voted in 3, centroid in the layer's 6); 5205 (voted in 3, centroid in the layer's 2); 3216 (voted in 5, centroid in the layer's 4); 4204 (voted in 5, centroid in the layer's 7); 3217 (voted in 7, centroid in the layer's 4); 5207 (voted in 7, centroid in the layer's 6)), so the ballots place the precincts here and the layer is reported as the check; the layer's population fields sum to 90,224.
Districts 2, 4 and 6 had no 2024 council contest; their 2024 precincts are placed by the 2022 precinct polygons holding at least half of a grid sample of their area and those precincts' full-term 2022 ballots, and 2022's precincts in 1, 3, 5 and 7 the same way from 2024's; the two ballot maps overlap by 0.2 % and 2.2 % of sampled area, the polygons being census-block approximations, and 12 Chico-address precincts could not be placed and are outside every district total.
The 2022 "District 3 (2020) Short Term" contest filled the rest of a term begun under the 2020 district map: 7 of its 15 precincts also voted in District 2, 4 or 6, so it places no precinct on the current map; its result is listed with the map it was held on and left out of the current-district scatter.
Precinct ids are reused for redrawn precincts, so no value joins on an id across years: 2022 is placed by its own ballots and polygons, and 2020, which has no council-contest file, is read city-wide only on the Statewide Database's place label — the city of most of a precinct's registration addresses, which includes unincorporated addresses with a Chico post office; the seven-district total is the city as the districts define it, and the two are reported separately.
Two-party shares and margins leave out votes for other candidates (3.9 % of the 2024 presidential vote in the districts); 7 counts are suppressed in the source ('***') and are treated as missing, so every share is computed on the precincts reporting both its numerator and denominator, and a council result with a suppressed precinct is shown with its precinct count.
The district outlines are drawn from the placed precincts' own edges, read by which district lies half a metre to either side (50.1 km between districts, 99.3 km on the outside); adjacent precinct polygons trace the same lines with different vertices, so exact endpoint matching finds only 1.9 km of shared edges and is not used.
The within-contest slopes describe 8 contests of 4 to 14 precincts each with the winner's share as the outcome; they are not a model of any voter, and the Statewide Database's local files for Butte carry candidate contests only, so no city measure (Measure H of November 2022 among them) is measured here.

Every number this chapter computed (89)

district1: D+10.3
district2: D+16.9
district3: D+16.4
district4: D+39.7
district5: D+48.8
district6: D+16.6
district7: D+40.8
election: 2024-11-05
elections: 2020, 2022, 2024
precincts2024: 132
precincts assigned: 46
placed by ballot2024: 22
placed by area2022: 24
placed none: 12
precincts in map: 46
boundary segments: 2,535
boundary features: 77
boundary between districts: 852
boundary outer km: 99.30
boundary between km: 50.10
boundary exact shared km: 1.90
precincts2022: 176
placed by ballot2022: 28
placed by area2024: 33
overlap2024in2022: 0.002
overlap2022in2024: 0.022
short term dual ballot2022: 7
short term precincts2022: 15
short term in stored3: 14
short term with geom: 15
stored layer agree: 12
stored layer disagree: 10
stored layer none: 0
stored layer ballot precincts: 22
stored layer pop sum: 90,224
totreg2024: 57,954
totvote2024: 45,789
turnout2024: 0.790
turnout precincts2024: 46
reg dem share: 0.435
reg rep share: 0.277
reg npp share: 0.198
city pres2024 two party: 0.622
city pres margin2024: D+24.5
city cng margin2024: D+17.2
third party share2024: 0.039
pres margin max: 48.80
pres margin max district: 5
pres margin min: 10.30
pres margin min district: 1
turnout max: 0.827
turnout max district: 1
turnout min: 0.741
turnout min district: 5
suppressed precincts2024: 0
suppressed cells: 7
city pres2020 two party: 0.613
city pres2024 two party place: 0.595
pres shift place pts: -1.80
reg dem share2020 place: 0.418
reg rep share2020 place: 0.297
reg npp share2020 place: 0.212
reg dem shift pts: -0.100
reg rep shift pts: 0.500
reg npp shift pts: -1.90
totreg2020 place: 70,821
totreg2024 place: 68,770
turnout2020 place: 0.858
contests: 8
contests on map: 7
winner share min: 0.507
winner share max: 0.671
nat positive: 3
nat negative: 5
nat contests: 8
nat slope min: -0.910
nat slope max: 1.19
nat slope median: -0.560
nat r2 min: 0.250
nat r2 max: 0.960
nat r2 median: 0.670
nat nmin: 4
nat nmax: 14
seats up2026: 2, 4, 6
seats up2026 count: 3
term years: 3.90
measure rows: 0
props2024: 10
props2022: 7

A precinct's district is read from the ballots it cast: in the Statewide Database's local-city file a precinct with votes or a suppressed count in a full-term council contest voted in that district (1, 3, 5 and 7 in 2024; 2, 4 and 6 in 2022; the 2022 District 3 short-term contest, held on the 2020 map, places nothing). A 2024 precinct with no 2024 council contest is placed by a 24 × 24 grid sample of its polygon: the 2022 ballot precinct polygons (the shapefile, read here) holding at least half of the sampled points give its district; 2022 precincts are placed the same way from 2024's. The specification's placement — each precinct polygon's area centroid (outer rings positive, holes negative, MultiPolygon parts summed) tested by ray casting against the city's stored district layer — is computed and reported as a check. Per district the precinct counts are summed with every share on the precincts reporting both its numerator and its denominator: registration by party from the registration file at the close of registration (dcl is no party preference), turnout as TOTVOTE over TOTREG (ballots cast over the registration at the close of registration), the presidential and congressional two-party shares (the CNG columns of both congressional districts summed, since a precinct lies in one), and each proposition's yes and no; a margin is one hundred times the Democratic less the Republican two-party share, which leaves out other candidates. Council results sum each candidate's votes over the contest's precincts with no suppressed cell; the winner is the candidate with most, and a contest with a suppressed precinct is shown as n of m precincts. Within each contest the winner's share of the precinct's council vote is regressed by ordinary least squares (physics.ts ols) on the precinct's two-party Democratic share for president (2024) or governor (2022, since precinct ids do not carry across years) over counted precincts with at least 10 council votes; the cross-contest scatter carries no fitted line. 2020, which has no council-contest file and different precincts, is read on the place label. The district outlines served with the map are the placed precincts' ring edges classified by point-in-polygon half a metre to either side of each edge's midpoint — interior edges dropped, an edge between two districts kept once from the lower district's side, the rest the outer boundary — chained into polylines; the district labels sit at the area-weighted mean of each district's precinct centroids. Seats on the 2026 ballot are the council roster's members with a term ending in November 2026. Measured 2026-11-02.

California Voting Rights Act Elections Code; consolidated municipal elections Council districts in charter cities Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act JSON

III · 11

The council's record

What has the council decided, how divided is it, and what is on the next agenda?

61%of the 2,742 regular City Council motions recorded in the minutes since 2008 (consent calendars apart) had no vote against; on the 90 contested votes of the sitting council the same 3 members were the minority 34% of the time

Share of motions with no vote against, by year

CSV · byYear

Vote blocks resolved, by year

CSV · byYear

Agreement of the sitting council on its 90 contested votes

CSV · agreement

Axis 1 of the sitting council

CSV · ideal

Share of motions contested, by topic, since 2019

CSV · topics

The vote log, latest first

CSV · votes

Of the 3,116 motions with a resolved vote in 426 sets of City Council minutes from 2008 to September 1, 2026, 2,742 were regular motions and 374 adopted a consent calendar. Of the regular motions 60.6% had no vote against, 39.4% drew at least one no, and 7.0% failed (n = 2,742); of the consent motions 97.9% had no vote against (n = 374). Over all motions together the shares are 65.1%, 34.9% and 6.2% (n = 3,116).

1 of the 3,117 vote blocks found (0.0%) could not be resolved to a roster and is left out; the year that parsed worst among those with 5 or more documents was 2018, at 99.5% of 220 blocks over 25 documents.

Since December 1, 2024 the sitting council divided on 90 motions at 35 meetings on which at least 5 of its 7 members voted. The commonest minority was Goldstein, Hawley and Winslow (3 of 7), on 34% of the 90; the commonest count was 6–1, on 28%. On axis 1 of the linear factor model (7 members, 90 votes) the first dimension carries 63% of the variance against a shuffled null of 23% (95th percentile 26%), the same ayes and noes dealt at random within each roll call 1000 times; the scores, scaled to ±1 with O'Brien, the member with the most noes, negative, are Hawley +1.00, Winslow +0.90, Goldstein +0.84, van Overbeek −0.59, Reynolds −0.66, Bennett −0.70, O'Brien −0.79. With n = 90 the scores describe these votes and nothing beyond them.

The council of December 1, 2022 to November 30, 2024 divided on 123 motions at 36 meetings on which at least 5 of its 7 members voted. The commonest minority was Winslow (1 of 7), on 43% of the 123; the commonest count was 6–1, on 46%. On axis 1 of the linear factor model (7 members, 123 votes) the first dimension carries 46% of the variance against a shuffled null of 22% (95th percentile 25%), the same ayes and noes dealt at random within each roll call 1000 times; the scores, scaled to ±1 with Winslow, the member with the most noes, negative, are Morgan +0.29, Reynolds +0.21, Bennett +0.20, van Overbeek +0.15, Tandon +0.13, Coolidge +0.02, Winslow −1.00. With n = 123 the scores describe these votes and nothing beyond them.

Since 2019, among the 11 named topics with at least ten motions (n = 1,379 motions in all, 67 of them unclassified), homelessness drew a no on 60% of 67, cannabis drew a no on 60% of 47 and public safety drew a no on 50% of 99; contracts on 23% of 57. The consent calendar accounts for 166 of those 1,379 motions.

No council agenda is posted on Granicus.

What the record cannot say

A consent-calendar motion adopts many items in one vote, so unanimity by motion overstates unanimity by item; the regular and consent shares are reported apart, and an item pulled from the consent calendar for its own vote counts as regular.
A member absent, recused or disqualified is not counted as agreeing or disagreeing: the agreement rate for a pair is over the contested votes both cast, and on axis 1 a member who did not vote is left at that roll call's mean.
Axis 1 is the first singular vector of a 7-by-90 matrix; it is descriptive of these votes, not a measure of any member's views, its sign is a convention, and with n this small a few votes move it — which is why its variance share is printed beside the permutation null.
Minutes from mid-2017 on are scanned images with no text layer: 222 documents were read by OCR and their names matched to the roll call within a letter or two; 1 of 3,117 vote blocks over the whole record could not be resolved and are left out, and a block that fails to parse is likelier on a long, amended, contested item than on a routine one.
The minutes record motions as the clerk wrote them; a friendly amendment folded into a motion, or a motion that died for lack of a second, leaves no vote line and is not counted.

Every number this chapter computed (60)

motions total: 3,116
motions regular: 2,742
motions consent: 374
meetings parsed: 426
documents held: 454
blocks found: 3,117
unresolved blocks: 1
unanimous share: 0.651
contested share: 0.349
failed share: 0.062
unanimous share regular: 0.606
contested share regular: 0.394
failed share regular: 0.070
unanimous share consent: 0.979
contested current: 90
current meetings: 35
current members: 7
current split mode: Goldstein, Hawley, Winslow
current split mode share: 0.344
current count mode: 6–1
current count mode share: 0.278
dim1 variance: 0.625
dim1 variance null: 0.230
dim1 variance null95: 0.257
dim1 anchor: O'Brien
contested prior: 123
prior meetings: 36
prior members: 7
prior split mode: Winslow
prior split mode share: 0.431
prior count mode: 6–1
dim1 variance prior: 0.465
dim1 variance null prior: 0.223
dim1 variance null prior95: 0.245
dim1 anchor prior: Winslow
parse fail rate: 0
worst parse year: 2,018
worst parse rate: 0.995
docs html: 221
docs pdf text: 11
docs ocr: 222
docs unread: 0
next meeting date: —
next scheduled date: —
agenda items: 0
next action items: 0
seats up: District 2, District 4 and District 6
seats up districts: 2, 4, 6
seats total: 7
candidates2026: 6
election date: 2026-11-03
meeting interval days: —
term months: 47
first year: 2,008
last date: 2026-09-01
topics since: 2,019
current since: 2024-12-01
prior since: 2022-12-01
prior until: 2024-11-30
null reps: 1,000

Every set of City Council minutes in the Granicus archive is fetched once and kept as text: HTML pages stripped of tags, PDFs through pdftotext, and scanned PDFs without a text layer (the clerk's signed copies from mid-2017 on) rendered at 200 dpi and read by tesseract. A motion is a "carried|failed by the following vote" sentence followed by AYES, NOES and any ABSENT, EXCUSED, ABSTAIN, RECUSED or DISQ lines; titles (Mayor, Vice Mayor, Councilmember) are stripped from names and each name is matched to the meeting's roll call (or, absent one, to the names on that meeting's own vote lines) exactly or within one letter (two for a name of six letters or more); a block with an unmatched name is counted as unresolved and left out, and the share resolved is reported by year. A motion that adopts the consent calendar — its text approves the "Consent Agenda", or it sits under that heading with no item number — is tagged consent; the rest are regular. Unanimous means no name under NOES; contested means at least one. The sitting council is the 7 members in council_members, on contested votes from 2024-12-01 with at least 5 of them voting; the prior council is the 7 names that voted most often on contested votes from 2022-12-01 to 2024-11-30, under the same rule. Agreement for a pair is the share of contested votes both cast on which both said aye or both said no; the minority of a vote is its smaller side (on a tie, the side that lost). Axis 1 is the linear factor model of Heckman and Snyder (1997), the first cut at the spatial model of Poole and Rosenthal (1997): the member-by-vote matrix (+1 aye, −1 no) with each roll call centred on its mean over the members who cast it and a member who did not vote left at that mean, and its first left singular vector by power iteration on M·Mᵀ, scaled so the furthest member sits at ±1 and signed so the member with the most noes is negative; the variance explained is the leading eigenvalue over the trace, and the null is the mean of the same share over 1000 shuffles of the ayes and noes among the voters within each roll call. Topics are assigned by keyword from the item title and the motion text, the first matching rule winning, from the specific (homelessness, cannabis, housing) to the general (contracts, governance). The next agenda is the first posted for a meeting on or after today, else the latest posted; action items are those whose title names an ordinance, a resolution or a hearing. Seats up are the council_members rows whose term ends 2026-11; candidates are the council_candidates rows for 2026-11-03. The meeting interval is the median gap between regular council meetings over the last three years; the term is the median span of the current members' terms. Measured 2026-10-29.

City of Chico — Granicus meeting archive (ViewPublisher, view 2) every listingRow whose name says Council: meeting date, clip_id, minutes doc_id · City of Chico — council minutes (Granicus MinutesViewer) one document per meeting, 454 held in council_minutes_raw: 221 HTML pages (1395 motions resolved, 1 not); 11 PDFs with a text layer (78 motions resolved, 0 not); 222 scanned PDFs read by OCR (1643 motions resolved, 0 not) · City of Chico — council agenda (Granicus AgendaViewer) numbered items and titles of the agenda listed above · City of Chico — City Council directory council_members: name, district, term_start, term_end (fetched by pipeline/fetch_council.py) · City of Chico — certified candidates, November 3, 2026 council_candidates: name, district, incumbent

Ralph M. Brown Act Charter of the City of Chico California Voting Rights Act Council districts in charter cities JSON

III · 12

The pulse: hours to days

How fast does Chico respond — the creek to rain, the air to smoke, the streets to the clock?

τ = 10.9 daysBig Chico Creek's recession constant after a peak, the median over 30 peaks of the daily record (days 3–20, ln Q against time); 1 storm in the last 400 days had a resolved peak at the gauge, too few yet for a lag

Big Chico Creek, hourly, last 120 days

CSV · flowRecent

Rain at the airport, hourly, last 120 days

CSV · flowRecent

Storms and the creek's answer

CSV · storms

Recession after the largest peaks

CSV · recession

Annual peaks against their return period

CSV · peaks

Flood frequency, Gumbel by moments

CSV · frequency

Days a year above 35 µg/m³ PM2.5

CSV · smokeYears

The Camp Fire fortnight

CSV · smokeCampFire

The day, from the readings

CSV · diurnal

Mean temperature by month and hour, 2023–2025

CSV · diurnalTemp

In the 400 days to 4 November 2026 the airport reported 2 storms of at least 0.5 in (runs of rain separated by 24 dry hours), 3.6 in of rain in all. 1 storm with a resolved peak in the window (a rise to at least 1.5 × the pre-storm flow); the lag is not yet measurable, which takes 3. Across the whole window the hourly rain and flow series show no resolvable lag (the largest correlation is r = 0.04).

After a peak the daily flow falls as an exponential over days 3–20 with τ = 10.9 days (median of 30 peaks, interquartile range 9.4–13.8; median r² 0.94), fitted as ln Q against time in the manner of Brutsaert & Nieber (1977) and Tallaksen (1995) on runs of strictly falling daily means — the USGS record 1930–1986 and DWR's 1997–2026. The Brutsaert–Nieber slope of log(−dQ/dt) against log Q over the same days is a median 2.16; a linear reservoir gives 1.

The 57 annual instantaneous peaks USGS published for the site (water years 1931–1997; one carries a qualification code, 0 estimated, 1 marked historic; all are used) fit a Gumbel distribution by the method of moments (Gumbel 1958) with 2-, 10-, 50- and 100-year flows of 3,875, 7,747, 11,141 and 12,576 cfs; the 100-year value's standard error is 1,370 cfs (Kite 1977). The largest recorded peak was 13,100 cfs on 1 January 1997. The curve is fitted to those 1931–1997 peaks only. DWR's hourly record at the Bidwell Park gauge is a separate record with its own rating: hourly maxima for water years 1998–2027, the largest 9,873 cfs on 4 February 2025, which would sit at about the 27-year level on that curve; water year 2027's maximum so far, 40 cfs on 23 October 2026, ranks 27 of 27 among those years.

Chico's PM2.5 monitor recorded 0 days above the 24-hour standard of 35 µg/m³ (40 CFR 50.13) in 2025, of 333 days sampled; over 1999–2025 the count runs from 0 to 33 days (2020). In the Camp Fire fortnight, 8 November 2018 to 22 November 2018, 12 of 15 sampled days were above the standard, with a maximum daily mean of 417.1 µg/m³ on 16 November 2018. Across the 4 events that peaked above 100 µg/m³ and were followed by a clean day, the daily mean fell back to 35 µg/m³ or below a median 5.5 days after the peak (interquartile range 4.3–7.0); 66 % of all exceedance days fall in June–November. No exceptional-events exclusion (40 CFR 50.14) is applied — these are the days as measured.

The half-hourly readings logged over 64 days put the bus fleet's daily maximum at 08:00, open CHP incidents' at 09:00 and the temperature's at 16:00 (Pacific time); the bus curve is the timetable, not demand. The highway frame-change index over 64 days peaks at 06:00.

At the airport over 2023–2025, the mean July day swings 25.8 °F between 06:00 and 18:00 (93 days of hourly reports), against 13.5 °F in January (93 days).

What the record cannot say

The USGS gauge drains 72.4 square miles of canyon and slope above town; the town's own runoff and the creek below the Lindo Channel and Sycamore diversions are outside it, and DWR's gauge at the head of Bidwell Park is treated as the same creek, not certified as the same cross-section.
Rain is measured at the airport on the valley floor, not in the canyon where the creek's water falls, and the foothills receive more; the runoff ratio is gauge runoff over airport rainfall and is not a runoff coefficient of the basin.
The airport reports precipitation once an hour, with hours missing from the archive (5,848 of 9,600 hours in the window reported), so storm totals are floors and the rain-to-peak lag is no finer than an hour; 1 of 2 storms had no resolved peak at the gauge (no hourly flow, or no rise to 1.5 × the pre-storm flow) and carry no lag.
The archive's precipitation is incomplete beyond its missing hours: in the 72 hours before this water year's peak flow (40 cfs on 23 October 2026) it reports 0.00 in over 51 reported hours, so the storm count and totals are floors and the lag statistics rest only on the storms it did record.
CDEC's hourly clock is read as Pacific Standard Time the year round; the USGS daily record ends in September 1986 and DWR's hourly record begins in July 1997, so the years between have no daily flow, and the recession fits and the modern maxima carry each record's own rating.
Log-Pearson III was not fitted: the Bulletin 17C frequency factors are not implemented here, so the frequency curve is Gumbel only, fitted to the 57 USGS instantaneous peaks of water years 1931–1997 and to nothing since; DWR's hourly maxima from 1998 on are a separate record at a different gauge with its own rating, hourly means that sit below the instantaneous peak, ranked only among themselves and placed on the curve for comparison, not fitted to it.
The PM2.5 record moves between monitors and methods (Chico-Manzanita Ave (filter) 1999–2012; Chico-East Avenue (filter) 2012–2026; Chico-East Avenue (continuous) 2012–2026); a year's exceedance count is a count of sampled days, and the filter years, sampled one day in three or six, undercount.
The diurnal curves rest on 64 days of readings; a bus count is the timetable, an incident count at an instant is a queue length, and the camera index is a frame-change measure over a road mask by daylight only, not a vehicle count.

Every number this chapter computed (99)

gauge: Big Chico Creek near Chico (USGS 11384000; DWR CDEC BIC, NOAA HKCC1)
drainage sq mi: 72.40
rain station: Chico Municipal Airport ASOS (CIC)
storm window days: 400
window rain in: 3.62
window hours reported: 5,848
window hours total: 9,600
storm n: 2
storm resolved n: 1
lag min n: 3
lag median hours: —
lag iqr hours: —
lag q1 hours: —
lag q3 hours: —
runoff ratio median: —
runoff ratio iqr: —
runoff ratio n: 1
xcorr lag hours: —
xcorr r: 0.040
recession n: 30
tau recession days: 10.90
tau recession iqr: 9.4–13.8
tau recession q1: 9.40
tau recession q3: 13.80
recession r2 median: 0.940
bn slope median: 2.16
daily record days: 29,337
usgs daily first: 1930-10-01
usgs daily last: 1986-09-30
dwr daily first: 1997-10-01
daily last: 2026-11-03
peak years: 57
peak first wy: 1,931
peak last wy: 1,997
peaks flagged: 1
peaks estimated: 0
peaks historic: 1
q2: 3,875
q10: 7,747
q50: 11,141
q100: 12,576
q2 se: 320
q10 se: 729
q100 se: 1,370
gumbel mean: 4,308
gumbel sd: 2,636
peak max: 13,100
peak max date: 1997-01-01
modern years: 27
modern peak max: 9,873
modern peak max date: 2025-02-04
modern peak max return period: 27.20
latest wy: 2,027
latest wypeak: 40
latest wypeak date: 2026-10-23
latest wyrank: 27
latest wypartial: 1
smoke year: 2,025
smoke days latest year: 0
smoke samples latest year: 333
smoke days55 latest year: 0
smoke ytd days: 0
smoke ytd samples: 40
smoke first year: 1,999
smoke years n: 27
smoke max year: 2,020
smoke max year days: 33
smoke min year days: 0
smoke days camp fire: 12
smoke sampled camp fire: 15
smoke max camp fire: 417.08
smoke max camp fire date: 2018-11-16
smoke events n: 5
smoke decay n: 4
smoke decay median days: 5.50
smoke decay iqr: 4.3–7.0
smoke exceed days: 155
smoke fire season share: 0.660
smoke monitors: Chico-Manzanita Ave (filter) 1999–2012; Chico-East Avenue (filter) 2012–2026; Chico-East Avenue (continuous) 2012–2026
readings rows: 71,241
readings since: 2026-09-03T01:01:00Z
diurnal days logged: 64
cam days logged: 64
cam min days: 28
bus peak hour: 8
cam peak hour: 6
chp peak hour: 9
temp peak hour: 16
diurnal temp years: 2023–2025
temp amplitude jul: 25.80
temp amplitude jul days: 93
temp max hour jul: 18
temp min hour jul: 6
temp amplitude jan: 13.50
temp amplitude jan days: 93
rain before latest peak in: 0
hours before latest peak: 51
last flow hour: 2026-11-04T09:00Z
last flow cfs: 38

Storms: the airport's hourly rain (the largest one-hour value reported in each clock hour, routine and special reports) is cut into runs separated by 24 dry hours; runs of 0.5 in or more are storms. For each, the creek's peak in the storm and the 72 hours after it (DWR's hourly flow, CDEC BIC, clock read as PST) gives the lag from the hour of heaviest rain, and gauge runoff above a constant pre-storm baseflow (the lowest flow in the six hours before the storm) over the rain volume across 72.4 sq mi gives the runoff ratio; a cross-correlation of the two hourly series over the 400-day window gives the lag of greatest correlation. Recession: on the daily record (USGS daily means to 1986, DWR's hourly means by PST day since 1997) every local maximum followed by 20 strictly falling days is a candidate; for the 30 largest, ln Q is regressed on time over days 3–20 (τ = 1/k), and log(−dQ/dt) on log Q for the Brutsaert–Nieber slope. Flood frequency: Gumbel by the method of moments on the 57 USGS annual instantaneous peaks, quantiles Q_T = x̄ + K_T s with Kite's standard error; DWR's hourly maxima by water year are listed and ranked among themselves. Smoke: one daily PM2.5 value per day from Chico's monitors, a continuous monitor's daily mean (hourly rows with at least 75 % of the day observed, else the block average) before a filter sample; days above 35 µg/m³ per year; events are runs of sampled days above 35, and for those peaking above 100 the days from the peak to the first sampled day at or below 35. The day: means by Pacific hour of every reading the fast loop has logged, published once 3 days exist (28 for the camera index); the airport's mean temperature by month and hour over 2023–2025, amplitude the curve's maximum less its minimum. Measured 2026-11-04.

USGS NWIS daily values, Big Chico Creek near Chico (11384000) parameter 00060 daily mean discharge, cfs, 1930-10-01 to 1986-09-30; the site file gives drain_area_va 72.4 · USGS NWIS peak streamflow, 11384000 peak_dt, peak_va (cfs), gage_ht, peak_cd — annual instantaneous peaks, water years 1931–1997 · California DWR CDEC station BIC, Big Chico Creek near Chico sensor 20 (flow, cfs) and 1 (stage, ft), hourly from 15-minute data since 1997-07-21; times PST · Iowa Environmental Mesonet ASOS archive, Chico Municipal Airport (CIC) tmpf, p01i (one-hour precipitation, inches; T trace, M missing), routine and special reports, America/Los_Angeles · EPA AQS pre-generated daily summary files, PM2.5 (88101 FRM/FEM and 88502 non-FRM) County Code 007, City Name Chico: Site Num, POC, Sample Duration, Observation Percent, Date Local, Arithmetic Mean · Chico Flow readings (src/pipeline/readings.ts, every half hour) kinds buses, busSpeed, chp/chpCount, temp, aqi, cam, stage, flow; ts in UTC · Brutsaert, W. & Nieber, J.L. (1977) "Regionalized drought flow hydrographs from a mature glaciated plateau", Water Resources Research 13:637 · Tallaksen, L.M. (1995) "A review of baseflow recession analysis", Journal of Hydrology 165:349 · Gumbel, E.J. (1958) Statistics of Extremes, Columbia University Press · Kite, G.W. (1977) Frequency and Risk Analyses in Hydrology, Water Resources Publications standard error of the Gumbel T-year quantile by moments · 40 CFR 50.13 — the 24-hour PM2.5 standard, 35 µg/m³ · 40 CFR 50.14 — treatment of exceptional events

National Ambient Air Quality Standard, fine particles Exceptional events rule Clean Air Act National Flood Insurance Act; FEMA flood maps JSON

Part IV

The spectrum

A city has no single speed. The creek falls back in days after a storm, the air clears of smoke in under a week, a rent shock settles within a season, unemployment within a year, the water table answers a wet winter inside the year, and the ground keeps time in decades. Set on one axis, the times are the study’s shortest summary: which of Chico’s flows are fast enough to manage week by week, and which are slow enough that a decision made now is read decades on. A bar is the estimate’s range: a bootstrap interval where the note says so, otherwise the spread across the events measured.

Every characteristic time the study measured

CSV · taus

Part V

The data

Every series behind every figure, as comma-separated values, and each chapter’s full result (facts, series, sources, method) as JSON. The pipeline recomputes the chapters on their own cadences from the sources they name; a source that fails leaves the last result standing with its date. To cite: Chico Flow, “The physics of Chico”, chicoflow.com/about/physics, measured on the date each chapter shows.

Chapter	Series	Rows	Columns
Water, by the person	monthly	147	month, rgpcd, productionMG, stateRgpcd	CSV
Water, by the person	rolling12	136	month, rgpcd	CSV
Water, by the person	swing	25	rank, supplier, ratio, population	CSV
Chico among California's cities	ranksize	482	rank, pop, name	CSV
Chico among California's cities	butte	5	name, pop, pop2020, changePct	CSV
The ground, shaking	gr	30	mag, cumN, fitN	CSV
The ground, shaking	yearly	57	year, n	CSV
The ground, shaking	big	49	date, mag, place, km, lat, lon	CSV
The shape of the streets	bearings	36	deg, km	CSV
The shape of the streets	downtownBearings	36	deg, km	CSV
The shape of the streets	avenuesBearings	36	deg, km	CSV
The shape of the streets	cities	10	name, pop, km, intersections, phi, phiByStreet, deadEndShare, residualPct	CSV
The water table	coupling	4	lag, r, n, ftPerInch	CSV
The water table	rainYears	28	year, rainIn, anomalyIn, deltaFt	CSV
The water table	annual	66	year, medianDepthFt, n	CSV
The water table	annualAll	77	year, medianDepthFt, n	CSV
The water table	wells	58	site, name, lat, lon, use, latestFt, latestDate, trendFtPerYear, readings	CSV
Heat, frost and rain since 1906	heatDays	88	year, d100, d105	CSV
Heat, frost and rain since 1906	heatDaysModern	118	year, d100, d105	CSV
Heat, frost and rain since 1906	frostFree	88	year, days	CSV
Heat, frost and rain since 1906	frostFreeModern	118	year, days	CSV
Heat, frost and rain since 1906	tmax	88	year, f	CSV
Heat, frost and rain since 1906	tmaxModern	118	year, f	CSV
Heat, frost and rain since 1906	heatResponse	25	shiftF, d100, d105	CSV
Heat, frost and rain since 1906	precip	87	wy, inches	CSV
Heat, frost and rain since 1906	precipModern	97	wy, inches	CSV
Heat, frost and rain since 1906	normals	9	station, period, heat100, heat105, frostFree, meanTmax, precipWY, yearsTemp, yearsFrost, yearsPrecip	CSV
Heat, frost and rain since 1906	projection	94	year, rcp45F, rcp85F	CSV
Heat, frost and rain since 1906	modelHistorical	56	year, f	CSV
Heat, frost and rain since 1906	hottest	10	date, f	CSV
Heat, frost and rain since 1906	hottestModern	10	date, f	CSV
The electorate by district	districts	7	district, precincts, suppressedPrecincts, totreg, dem, rep, npp, demShare, repShare, nppShare, totvote, turnout, turnoutPrecincts, presDem, presRep, presAll, presDemShare, presMargin, presMarginLabel, cngDem, cngRep, cngMargin	CSV
The electorate by district	districts2022	7	district, precincts, suppressedPrecincts, totreg, dem, rep, npp, demShare, repShare, nppShare, totvote, turnout, turnoutPrecincts, govDemShare	CSV
The electorate by district	contests	16	year, district, districtMap, contest, candidate, votes, share, won, total, precincts, precinctsCounted, suppressedPrecincts, presMargin	CSV
The electorate by district	winners	7	year, district, candidate, presMargin, share, sharePct, precinctsCounted, precincts	CSV
The electorate by district	nationalisation	8	year, district, contest, districtMap, candidate, against, slope, intercept, r2, n, precincts, suppressedPrecincts	CSV
The electorate by district	precincts	132	srprec, place, district, placedBy, areaShare, ballotDistrict, storedLayerDistrict, totreg, totvote, turnout, presDem, presRep, presDemShare, presMargin	CSV
The electorate by district	districtCentroids	7	district, lat, lon, precincts	CSV
The electorate by district	props	119	year, prop, label, law, district, yes, no, yesShare, precincts	CSV
The electorate by district	city	4	year, basis, precincts, totreg, dem, rep, npp, demShare, repShare, nppShare, totvote, turnout, presDem, presRep, presDemShare, presMargin	CSV
The electorate by district	seats2026	3	district, presMargin2024, presMarginLabel2024, presDemShare2024, turnout2024, totreg2024, demShare2024, repShare2024, nppShare2024, winner2022, winnerShare2022, runnerUp2022, runnerUpShare2022, votes2022, precincts2022, suppressedPrecincts2022	CSV
Rent and the housing stock	rent	141	month, chico, control, excess, fit, us	CSV
Rent and the housing stock	rentCities	141	month, chico, livermore, chino, temecula, san_ramon, brentwood, merced	CSV
Rent and the housing stock	donors	25	city, county, population, km, weight	CSV
Rent and the housing stock	placebos	26	city, peakExcessPct, peakMonth, preRmspe, postRmspe, ratio, treated	CSV
Rent and the housing stock	placeboTime	25	month, base, excess12	CSV
Rent and the housing stock	permits	45	year, units, units1, units5plus, perK	CSV
Rent and the housing stock	apr	8	year, permitted, completed, vlow, low, mod, above, adu	CSV
Rent and the housing stock	enrollment	35	year, headcount	CSV
Rent and the housing stock	wage	11	year, weeklyWage, rent, rentShare	CSV
The pulse: hours to days	storms	2	start, end, rainIn, wetHours, peakRainHour, peakRainIn, peakFlowHour, peakCfs, baseCfs, resolved, lagHours, runoffRatio, resolution	CSV
The pulse: hours to days	recession	30	peakDate, peakCfs, tauDays, k, r2, bnSlope, days, source	CSV
The pulse: hours to days	peaks	57	waterYear, date, cfs, stageFt, code, rank, returnPeriod	CSV
The pulse: hours to days	peaksHourly	27	waterYear, date, hour, cfs, hours, partial, rank	CSV
The pulse: hours to days	frequency	7	returnPeriod, gumbel, gumbelSe	CSV
The pulse: hours to days	flowRecent	2,874	t, cfs, stage, rainIn	CSV
The pulse: hours to days	smokeYears	27	year, days35, days55, maxDaily, maxDate, samples, continuousShare, monitor	CSV
The pulse: hours to days	smokeCampFire	15	date, pm25, monitor	CSV
The pulse: hours to days	smokeEvents	5	start, end, peakDate, peakPm, daysAbove35, decayDays	CSV
The pulse: hours to days	diurnal	24	hour, buses, busSpeed, cams, chp, temp, aqi, n	CSV
The pulse: hours to days	diurnalCams	24	hour, weekday, weekend, nWeekday, nWeekend	CSV
The pulse: hours to days	diurnalTemp	258	month, hour, temp, n	CSV
The pulse: hours to days	diurnalAmplitude	12	month, amplitude, maxHour, minHour, days	CSV
The economy's metabolism	employment	49	quarter, month, private, total, counterfactual, butteIndex, controlIndex, deviation, estabs, weeklyWage	CSV
The economy's metabolism	sectors	19	sector, naics, emp2014, empLatest, estabsLatest, lq, changePct	CSV
The economy's metabolism	entropy	8	county, name, entropy, entropyNorm, year, cells, cellsDisclosed, imputedShare	CSV
The economy's metabolism	dependency	16	county, name, year, dependency, hhi, hhiCellsDisclosed	CSV
The economy's metabolism	sizes	9	bin, lower, count, cumulative, fitted	CSV
The economy's metabolism	estabs	26	year, est, change	CSV
The economy's metabolism	sales	70	quarter, month, retail, all, retailReal, retailSa, retailYoyPct	CSV
The economy's metabolism	salesShift	4	place, q2018, q2019, delta, deltaPct	CSV
The economy's metabolism	unemployment	236	month, rate	CSV
The economy's metabolism	warn	52	date, effective, company, city, employees, type, year	CSV
The economy's metabolism	warnYears	12	year, notices, employees, closures, temporary, chico	CSV
The economy's metabolism	revenue	13	fiscalYear, fyStart, revenue	CSV
The economy's metabolism	placebo	11	quarter, peakAbsPct	CSV
Money in and money out	federal	20	fiscalYear, total, grants, contracts, loans, direct, other, county, preDataAct	CSV
Money in and money out	agencies	345	fiscalYear, agency, amount	CSV
Money in and money out	recipients	477	fiscalYear, recipient, type, amount	CSV
Money in and money out	agenciesLatest	10	agency, amount	CSV
Money in and money out	recipientsLatest	15	recipient, type, amount	CSV
Money in and money out	countyAgencies	289	fiscalYear, subagency, amount	CSV
Money in and money out	countyFire	12	subagency, fy2018, fy2019, fy2020	CSV
Money in and money out	transfers	24	year, california, butte, elDorado, imperial, kings, madera, sanLuisObispo, shasta, yolo	CSV
Money in and money out	fec	62	cycle, party, type, amount, count, zips, complete	CSV
Money in and money out	fecByParty	4	cycle, dem, rep, other, none, conduit, zips, complete	CSV
Money in and money out	fecCommittees	1,200	cycle, committee, party, type, state, race, amount, count, complete	CSV
Money in and money out	fecCommitteesLatest	25	cycle, committee, party, type, state, race, amount, count, complete	CSV
Money in and money out	nonprofits	667	ein, name, ntee, group, subsection, taxPeriod, revenue, assets, ruling, filer	CSV
Money in and money out	npGroups	25	group, name, count, filers, revenue	CSV
Money in and money out	npYears	288	ein, name, year, revenue, expenses, assets	CSV
Money in and money out	npYearsTop	13	431959837, 680058359, 680238941, 680386518, 941603784, 943302335, year	CSV
Money in and money out	npRulings	11	decade, count	CSV
Money in and money out	npRulingYears	18	year, count	CSV
Money in and money out	npScaling	289	city, population, revenue, revenueExHospital, revenueExHigherEd, organisations, mark	CSV
The council's record	byYear	19	year, documents, meetings, blocks, parsed, unresolved, parseRate, motions, unanimous, contested, failed, motionsRegular, motionsConsent, unanimousRegular, contestedRegular, failedRegular, unanimousShare, contestedShare, unanimousShareRegular, contestedShareRegular, unanimousShareConsent	CSV
The council's record	agreement	49	row, col, value, n, council	CSV
The council's record	agreementPrior	49	row, col, value, n, council	CSV
The council's record	ideal	7	member, district, score, votes, noes, inMinority, council	CSV
The council's record	idealPrior	7	member, district, score, votes, noes, inMinority, council	CSV
The council's record	topics	13	topic, motions, contested, contestedShare, since	CSV
The council's record	agenda	0		CSV
The council's record	votes	3,116	date, item, kind, outcome, ayes, noes, absent, abstain, topic, motion	CSV
The council's record	candidates	6	district, name, incumbent, status, seatHolder	CSV

wateruse.json · cities.json · quakes.json · streets.json · groundwater.json · climate.json · votes.json · housing.json · pulse.json · economy.json · money.json · council.json · precincts.geojson

How to read this

Figures are drawn in the browser from the stored rows; hover any mark for its value, drag across a time series to zoom, toggle a series by its chip. Fitted lines describe the past; the labelled projections (mid-century heat, the 2040 water table, a return period) say what follows if a trend, a scenario or a law simply continues. The laws themselves are from Bettencourt and West on urban scaling, Zipf and Gabaix on city sizes, Boeing on street orientation, Gutenberg and Richter on earthquakes, Gumbel on extremes, Brutsaert and Nieber on recession, Abadie on synthetic controls and Poole and Rosenthal on roll-call votes; each chapter links its sources. Back to the city’s numbers →

The physics of Chico

The frame

The laws

Chico among California's cities

California’s cities by rank and size

Butte County’s five cities

The shape of the streets

Where the streets point

Street length against population

Grid order by city

The ground, shaking

The Gutenberg–Richter law within 150 km

Earthquakes per year

The largest since 1970

Heat, frost and rain since 1906

Days of 100 °F or more, each year

The frost-free season

Mean daily high and the model ensembles

Rain by water year at the Farm

The water table

Depth to water, yearly median

The change in depth against the year’s rain

The wells

Water, by the person

Residential gallons per person per day

The same series as a calendar

Summer-to-winter ratio, large suppliers

The flows

The economy's metabolism

Private employment by quarter against the comparator path

Deviation from the comparator path: the impulse response

Location quotient by sector, 2025

Entropy of employment across supersectors, 2025

Jobs in health care and government, 2025

Establishments by size, 2023

Establishments in Butte County since 1998

Real retail taxable sales in Chico, by quarter

Real retail sales, 2018-Q3 to 2019-Q3, city by city

Bradley-Burns 1 % remitted to the city, by fiscal year

Unemployment rate, Chico metropolitan area

WARN notices for Butte County sites, by year

WARN notices for Butte County sites

Rent and the housing stock

Rent indexed to October 2018: Chico, its synthetic control, the nation

Chico's excess over its synthetic control, and the fit from the peak

Peak excess when each donor is treated in turn

12-month-forward excess at every candidate shock month

Housing units permitted per 1,000 residents

Units permitted by income band, from the city's progress reports

Chico State fall headcount

Rent as a share of the county's mean private paycheck

Money in and money out

Federal awards performed in Chico by fiscal year and type

Awarding agencies, fiscal 2025

Recipients, fiscal 2025

Butte County awarding sub-agencies around the Camp Fire

Transfer receipts as a share of personal income

Itemised contributions from Chico ZIP codes by cycle and party

Committees receiving most from Chico ZIP codes, 2024 cycle

Nonprofit revenue against population, California cities of 20,000 or more

Revenue by year, the six largest Chico nonprofits

Chico nonprofit revenue by NTEE major group

IRS rulings for Chico organisations by year

The electorate by district

Two-party presidential vote by precinct, November 2024

Two-party presidential vote by council district, 2024

Council winner's share and the district's presidential vote

Within each contest: the winner's precinct share on the precinct's partisan share

Council contests, 2022 and 2024

Propositions: yes share by district

The districts on the November 2026 ballot

The council's record

Share of motions with no vote against, by year

Vote blocks resolved, by year

Agreement of the sitting council on its 90 contested votes

Axis 1 of the sitting council

Share of motions contested, by topic, since 2019

The vote log, latest first

The pulse: hours to days

Big Chico Creek, hourly, last 120 days