At yesterday morning’s meddlers meeting, Placer County Supervisor, Jennifer Montgomery, began the meeting as she always does. As Montgomery noted, this was another slow week as far as county news was concerned. However, the supervisor did end yesterday morning’s county briefing by touching on a hot topic around this town which, of course is the homeless population. She noted that the county is receiving a lot of positive reviews from various surrounding local agencies on how Placer County has handled it’s homeless population over the last few years. Montgomery also reminded the crowd not be misled after hearing that the homeless population within county limits has grown because it enjoys a growth rate that is significantly smaller than nearly every single surrounding county including Sacramento.
Auburn Mayor, Matt Spokely, took the microphone after Montgomery and echoed a similar descriptive about the city briefing the was used for the counties briefing. Spokely mentioned and Montgomery nodded in agreement, that sometimes a slow week is greatly appreciated, especially with the holidays right around the corner. Spokely eventually got onto a topic that the crowd latched onto and that is cigarette butts. Actually, Spokely briefly touches on this topic nearly every week to at least take a quick moment to mention his gratitude for Auburn resident, Sally, who has garnered the nickname ‘the butt lady’ around town. You can find Sally walking the streets and parking lots of Auburn picking up cigarette butts. Spokely also always delivers the updated number of butts that Sally has collected and that number as of Tuesday morning was just under 950,000. Recently, Spokely has joked about what the city will do for Sally when she hits a million butts collected suggesting that maybe a statue of Sally or huge golden ash tray could be possibilities.
Flyers Gasoline owner Tom Dwelle joined in on the cigarette butt topic to display his displeasure with how the homeless rummage through his used cigarette collection bins in order to remove any remaining tobacco from them. Dweelle explained that after the person removes any left over tobacco from the used cigarette, they then are able to combine the extracted tabacoo to form a full cigarette. Dwelle is concerned that this seemingly fixable issue is attracting the wrong crowd to his stores and has, according to Dwelle, seen a recent spike in both crime and more specifically violent crime.
Lastly, a brief mention of the past weekend’s Mandarin Festival was made by Spokely. The mayor went on to say that this year’s festival had record attendance numbers and that when he and his family attended on Sunday, they had a hard time just finding a vendor who hadn’t run out of the popular local citrus fruit. According to Spokely, this was the first year that he could recall vendors actually selling out completely of their mandarin supply which sent the Spokely’s to a near by farm to grab a bag full of the delicious citrus. 