On Tuesday, Davis City Manager Steve Pinkerton will deliver his first state of the city address to the Davis Chamber of Commerce.
The Vanguard spoke with the city manager about his thoughts so far and for the upcoming year. It has been a fast start for the former city manager from Manteca. His first council meeting lasted until 3:30 in the morning, and things have not slowed down since.
Many perhaps forget, from three years ago, that the carrot for the placement of the state’s re-entry facility was a promise of jail expansion to meet the expanded needs of Yolo County into the future. When the economy collapsed, that funding source fell apart, but it has now been revived without the attachment of the re-entry facility.
The Yolo County Board of Supervisors will decide on Tuesday whether to apply for grant funding to expand the current jail capacity by up to 148 beds. The grant would require a more than $4.6 million county match with an ongoing operational cost of nearly $2.5 million annually.
Last week, the Orange County Register ran an article arguing that criticism by students over UC salaries has fueled the student protests that exploded in the late fall of 2011.
As the paper notes, “Over the past few months, the University of California has raised undergraduate tuition by 18 percent, awarded raises of as much as 23 percent to a dozen high-ranking administrators and announced a possible 81 percent tuition increase over the next three years.”
According to a letter from former California Supreme Court Justice Cruz Reynoso, the report from the independent investigation led by former LA Police Chief William Bratton, and his private company Kroll, will be completed in early January, but the task force will withhold the results from the public and only release them after they have completed their review.
In a letter from Justice Reynoso to President Yudoff, outlining a December 13 meeting, the former justice writes, “We established ground rules, procedures, and a schedule that put us on track to release a report by late January or early February.”
All across the country the headlines talk about a mild winter. Here in the valley, not only is the snow pack less than 20 percent of average, but this year has been unusually mild with temperatures hovering at or above the record highs for the date. It is not just California, it is most of the country.Sacramento set a record high on Wednesday at 66 degrees. The next day, the forecast called for not quite a record high, but a high temperature ten degrees above average for the date. Still there is no rain in sight.
This week, the Davis City Council will receive a report updating them on the activities of the Woodland-Davis Clean Water Agency.
The staff report notes: “The Davis City Council rescinded the water rates at the December 6, 2011 meeting that would support the cost of design and construction of the surface water facilities. Therefore, the WDCWA anticipates a delay in issuing the draft request for proposal for the procurement of design and construction services for the project.”
A Look at Education in Governor Brown’s Budget ProposalThe Vanguard is going to, over the next week or so, analyze several critical areas of the budget. We begin where we have been for the last several years – looking at K-12 education. No area of the budget has been hammered harder than education.
On a local level, the continuing education cuts have meant that the school district has had to implement two additional parcel tax measures in 2008 and 2011 in order to keep funding relatively stable.
You might ask, who is Tim Donnelly and why are we writing about him in an off-topic column? The answer is that he is a right-wing Republican Assemblymember from Southern California, who somehow managed to be involved in several completely unrelated news stories in which he utterly and completed failed.
It all started on Wednesday, when the freshman legislator was boarding a flight to Sacramento at the Ontario Airport when he was stopped and cited by airport police. Why? He was carrying in his bag, a .45-caliber Colt Mark IV that had four rounds in its magazine and a spare magazine with five additional rounds.
There is a nine billion dollar hole that the state is going to have to fill. How it chooses to fill it will depend more on the decision of voters than it will on the legislators.
Report by The Davis Wood Smoke Scientific Advisory Committee
The immediately preceding Part 1 of this 2-part series on wood burning in Davis reported how voluntary wood burning restrictions in Davis have proved ineffective in solving the increasing problem of wood smoke in the city (click to see “Why Voluntary Wood Burning Restrictions are Not Working in Davis“) This 2nd article in the series reports the results of the Davis Wood Smoke Scientific Advisory Committee and how they confirm the adverse health impacts that wood burning may have on downwind neighbors. It confirms the appropriateness of restricting wood burning based on projected local weather conditions as previously recommended by the Davis Natural Resources Commission instead of projected regional particulate matter concentrations as currently practiced by the local air quality management district
Dear Friends,
2011 was a banner year for the Vanguard. As we mentioned previously, readership in the fifth full year of the Vanguard was up 60% over the previous year.
Fundraising in 2011 was at an all-time high as we topped $35,000 – not bad for a publication that has been run on a shoe-string budget since its inception.
On Wednesday, the Vanguard had a brief phone interview with Mayor Joe Krovoza, talking about the coming year and what is on the horizon for Davis.
By Alan PryorI read with interest Bob Dunning’s column a week before Christmas when in the midst of his angry tirade against proposed restrictions of single-use bags he proclaimed “that virtually all Davisites are courteous and considerate and don’t burn wood on “No Burn” day“. Well, as often seems the case, Bob Dunning must inhabit an alternate Davis universe from many of the rest of us. As those of us accustomed to taking long walks on winter evenings know well, there are parts of Davis in which an acrid odor of wood smoke is almost continuously present during calm winter nights – even on those nights in which voluntary wood burning restrictions have been called.
A Pall of Wood Smoke has Been Hanging over Davis and Sacramento for Weeks
As the Vanguard reported on Wednesday, there are now questions as to whether Juror No.11 was properly dismissed on November 14 by Judge Paul Richardson from the penalty phase of Marco Topete’s trial for the murder of Sheriff’s Deputy Tony Diaz. This occured after a brief inquiry, in which he determined the request for dismissal was based on a language barrie
Juror No.11 sent the Court a hand-written note asking to be excused from further deliberation and replaced with an alternate juror. Following the brief inquiry, Judge Richardson made the decision to replace Juror No.11.
A lot of people have questioned the anger of students over fee hikes and their targeting that anger toward the chancellor, the regents and UC President Mark Yudof. After all, it can be argued – as many have – that the real culprit in the fee hikes is not the University of California but rather the state legislature.
On November 14, Judge Paul Richardson dismissed Juror No.11 from the penalty phase of Marco Topete’s trial for the murder of Sheriff’s Deputy Tony Diaz, after a brief inquiry in which he determined the request for dismissal was based on a language barrier.
Former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman said that the historically close Iowa Caucus results show that the race is still “wide open” for Republican contenders. He had better hope so, because he finished in last place in the caucuses, although he also did not actively campaign in Iowa.
Despite the close results and surge by former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, the smart money is still on Mitt Romney emerging as the ultimate challenger to Barack Obama.
I note another Op-Ed, written this time by entomology professors Walter Leal and James Carey. Their central argument that the faculty should speak for themselves and that we ought to “abide by the vote of the majority regardless of the outcome” is fine, though it comes across really as too much inside baseball, embodying some internal battle for the university.
As we reported back in December, Tracy Foster was facing 25 years to life in prison, were he to be convicted of two felony counts of receiving stolen property for allegedly taking scrap metal out of bins outside the Cooling Plant of UC Davis, and cashing them in at a Woodland recycling center.
by John Munn
The Yolo County Taxpayers Association commends the Davis City Council for recognizing the need for a pause in the rush toward higher water rates. Whether we bring in surface water or not, the primary concern of the Taxpayers Association is affordability, and we hope that the design and cost of facilities needed to meet water quality and quantity needs of both Davis and Woodland can now be re-evaluated based what we can afford.
