Water, Infrastructure, and Labor Issues Await the New Council Next Week
On Tuesday night, the city council swore in its new membership and paused. Dan Wolk was sworn in for the second time in just over a year, once again by his mother, Senator Lois Wolk, as Mayor Pro Tem of the City of Davis.
Lucas Frerichs was then sworn in by newly reelected Judge Dan Maguire and Brett Lee by his campaign manager Dick Livingston. The council then paused for an hour after a series of comments, then got to work.
While the council got to work approving the modest consultant green economic development visioning by William McDonough, the council adjourned just after ten. Some joked this was going to be the new norm. But we know better.
The real works starts next week and it features a fully-loaded agenda that includes water and employee contracts.
The water issue has become increasingly complicated. The timeline is so tight now with a discussion of a paired-down West Sacramento option slated for Thursday’s Water Advisory Meeting.
The critical question at last night’s meeting occurred during discussion of the long-range calendar. Discussed was how to proceed on the ballot initiative language and whether to allow the council to simply move forward or await the results of the WAC discussion on Thursday night.
The WAC had previously unanimously voted that the November ballot was the goal. But as Chair of the WAC reminded the council, the WAC was simply operating on the information it had available at the time of the vote and that information has likely changed.
The fact of the matter is that no one wants to say it on the record just yet, but the vote will almost certainly not be on the November ballot. The city and the WAC simply have too tight a timeline and too much additional information to evaluate to do otherwise. That has not officially been determined, but it seems to be the emerging consensus.
At this point, that does not rule out a Woodland option. Woodland would be willing to wait for a spring vote if they had measures of assurances that Davis will go forward with the JPA project.
On the other hand, the West Sacramento paired-down project would seem the most cost-effective in the near term, however, it would require the city to make water purchases rather than having joint governance.
There are clear advantages and drawbacks to each.
At the same time, the city is going to re-examine its tree trimming policies. In the wake of the Davis City Employees Association decision by the Public Employment Relations Board, the city laid off nine employees including tree trimmers effective July 1.
Greg McPherson, a research forester with the United States Forest Service, believes the result will be a decrease in levels of service for the public.
“With an undercut staff, you can expect trees to be more prone to failure,” Mr. McPherson told the Vanguard. And higher incidences of tree failure come with more emergency response and service requests.
Such changes may result in more inefficient uses of the available services, said Mr. McPherson.
Tree failure, according to arborists, include falling or breaking limbs or blown-over treetops. Generally, such failures can be prevented by service requests or remediated by emergency responses.
One of the biggest questions, though, is not just on tree maintenance but also with maintaining the city’s connection to the public.
Greg McPherson wonders whether the remaining arborists can continue to provide sufficient training for volunteers.
The city staff maintains that Davisites are not expected to see a decline in service but rather an increase. Down time from employee vacations or illnesses would no longer be an issue since the city would rely more on services from West Coast Arborists.
“As with any urban forest, living around trees carries an inherent risk. Trees will fail from time to time due to a variety of circumstances,” according to Rob Cain, the city’s Urban Forest Manager, “Davis has not seen large scale tree failure unless it has been during a large scale weather event.
But many in the community are concerned that cutbacks are related to budgetary concerns that will adversely impact service.
The council is set to take up that issue.
The common theme with both the water and labor issues is that past councils have left these critical decisions to current leadership.
The City of Woodland had already gone through a citizens advisory process, a rate study and full public outreach on the water issue, long before the City of Davis. They are ready to go on water.
Their frustration is that Davis did not do the work needed from 2006 until 2010 when the JPA was ready to proceed. The attitude of the city council at that time was to push the water project forward, and there was never a discussion of what the rates would be, when to bring the public into the process, or when to have a rate study.
The result is that in September 2011 when the council passed its rates and moved forward on the water project, the public was not fully behind them. City officials will not say it publicly, but it is clear that the referendum and subsequent WAC process will save the city sizable amounts of money.
The same problem happened with the budget. We were warning back in 2008 that compensation, retiree health and pensions were unsustainable, but the 2009 budget only accounted for $850,000 in cuts.
That budget was not fully implemented, and the 2009-10 round of MOUs fell way short of the structural changes needed to make the city fully sustainable.
The City of San Bernardino is the fourth city in California that will be declaring bankruptcy. Back when Vallejo became the first, we warned it was the wave of the future. Davis has escaped the worst of the downturn, but still needs to cut more than a quarter of its general fund budget in order to pay for retiree health care obligations, pensions and a crumbling infrastructure.
Last meeting, City Manager Steve Pinkerton warned that OPEB obligations to current and future retirees will soon top more than 25% of the payroll.
That is not sustainable and it has been left to the new council to solve.
So, for one day the new council celebrated, but the hard work is about to come, and soon.
—David M. Greenwald reporting
“The city of San Bernadino is the fourth city in California that will be declaring bankruptcy.”
Vallejo, San Berdo, Stockton, what’s the fourth?
Each of these cities had housing busts unlike anything Davis has experienced. Davis has problems but they are nothing compared to the problems of these other municipalities. Ours are fixable.
I missed the public comments last night. Did anyone ask the new CC why they haven’t picked that low hanging fruit, and demanded that Fire go to a three member crew and reduce the 911 trips to what are clearly not injury accidents?
How much business development do you need to produce the taxes that would be saved if you dropped that 4th crew member? And while on this subject, how about those unnecessary and bogus water rate increases?
The point is to put money back into the pockets of the population, and even new money, and less going out for wasteful govt services, such as the Woodland Davis Water Project and JPA.
The business community turned out last night for the green business consultant contract. It would be nice to see those same members turn out to ask the CC to reduce the size of the water project and its rates, as a way of putting more money “back” into the pockets of Davis families and businesses.
Current wasted public resources: 1) Continuing to spend huge amounts of our rate money on the Woodland JPA Project (it’s dead dead dead, so move on); 2) DACHA fiasco, including over a million dollars on paying Harriot Steiner and friends to defend herself against claims arising from her legal services on DACHA over the past 10 years or so; 3) the Fire Dept 4th member of the truck crews; the Fire Dept continuing to send two trucks and 4 members to each and every accident, even when no one asks for rescure, and there are no injuries; 4) senior management in the city has simply not taken a fiscal haircut yet; 5) the budget fisaco, as well-decribed by David and Rich for years now.
On and on …
Welocme new CC!
[i]Vallejo, San Berdo, Stockton, what’s the fourth?”[/i]
I think Mammoth Lakes
[quote]While the council got to work approving the modest consultant green economic development visioning by William McDonough, the council adjourned just after ten.[/quote]
It appeared to me city staff, the business community, UCD, and the City Council were all very much in favor of the proposal to hire William McDonough for the development of a visioning process. I didn’t hear a single negative comment or anything remotely suggesting “lukewarm” interest in this idea by “city and staff” – as previously suggested by the Vanguard.
However, I just don’t know if an outsider can come in and work miracles, in a town that has a habit of squelching ideas for economic development. Everyone seems to have their own theories on what will work/not work; their own vision of what Davis economic development should look like; what Davis should be/remain.
One thing that did resonate with me was a comment by Doby Fleeman last night during public comment on the issue of hiring McDonough. Doby mentioned all the efforts that had been done with respect to visioning in terms of economic development, e.g. DSIDE, etc.; he had made a presentation to the City Council outlining such efforts; but he himself didn’t feel he had the expertise to move things forward. I think that is the sticking point – there has been effort to do visioning for economic development, but it has not resulted in anything tangible to date. I think frustrated business leaders and various members of the community want some action.
IMO it is going to take some real [i][b]leadership[/b][/i] by the City Council to push for economic development, and a mammoth effort by many to achieve community buy-in. It is the community buy-in that will be the tough part. There seems to be a resistance to any sort of peripheral development; resistance to big box retail; resistance to competition w the downtown; resistance to large, expensive parking garages; resistance to Davis growing beyond its current population; resistance to changing the character of Davis as a funky town, etc. It will be tough to overcome all these competing “visions” of what Davis should do/be and get more citizens on the same page…
But it is clear to me we need a cohesive, well planned blueprint for economic development, transparently laid out for all to see, if we are ever to achieve any kind of rational, well thought out economic development. Not everyone will be happy about it, but a few naysayers w the loudest voices should not be able to hold sway and impede progress if an overwhelming majority of citizens can come to a consensus. Up until now, however, I have not had the feeling there has been any kind of a cohesive, well planned blueprint…
[quote]On the other hand, the West Sacramento paired-down project would seem the most cost-effective in the near term, however, it would require the city to make water purchases rather than having joint governance.[/quote]
I don’t think it has been determined yet that the West Sac pared-down project “would see the most cost-effective”…
Mammoth is a completely different story.
No, Mike H, no one asked the council to lay off fire fighters or demand that the fire department not respond to calls.
No one talked about water or made any reference to “bogus water rates.”
Dave Thompson did ask that the new council look into waste, especially regarding DACHA. But he has a vested interest in getting that resolved.
Many people congratulated the new members, introduced themselves, and talked about looking forward to working with the new council. That was the general vibe of public comments. You can watch the meetings online, if you can’t attend.
Dear Ryan:
I do have a history of talking about city staff waste even when I had no vested interest. So my comments about waste have been consistent for over a decade.
The City would have a $6 million plus housing fund if they had acted in 2000 when I raised the issue of the City Attorney “forgetting” to place the community equity second on thed Wildhorse homes and other homes as required by Council. And why was nothing done when this was discovered?
There were improper actions going on at Greene Terrace with condos being sold to investors and then used as rentals. They were all required to be owner occupied and vetted by City staff but City staff allowed the practice to go on for years.
Through our discovery we now learn that City staff attended at least three DACHA board and membership meetings where they discussed suspending the bylaws to allow all the members to vote on borrowing $4 million dollars of public funds(because the majortiy of members were ineligible to vote due to delinquencies). So the City staff knew that the DACHA votes were illegal when they recommended that the City Council approve lending $4 million in public funds to DACHA. How is that for good government, due diligence by City staff, responsible lending, fiscal oversight, etc. Should the Citizens be paying for staff’s improper actions and then pay to cover them up. Seems like a million dollars in legal fees to pay 30 lawyers is a lot for a coverup.
Where is that money coming from?
The new Council holds a lot of promise and provides a lot of potential capacity. However, City Hall needs a clean up not continuing the cover ups. There are too many bad practices going on down there. We have too many inefficient practices that are no longer affordable. Davis is not immune to the outside world but if it acts like it is then we will put off taking proper actions.
The new Council will need backbone to achieve progress. The new Council can reverse the patterns but the question is will they?
A new day began last night and we will wait to see what the Council does.
David Thompson, Twin Pines Cooperative Foundation
Thank you, David, for the clarification.
[quote]The City would have a $6 million plus housing fund if they had acted in 2000 when I raised the issue of the City Attorney “forgetting” to place the community equity second on thed Wildhorse homes and other homes as required by Council. And why was nothing done when this was discovered? [/quote]
You should ask Mike Harrington about this. He was on the Council then.
I appreciate and completely agree with Dr. Greg Pherson’s comments and concerns regarding the loss of service if the City eliminates our City Tree Trimmer positions.
Another obvious concern is that since West Coast Arborists are located in Stockton, just how is that supposed to work for rapid response to an emergency of down trees post wind storm? What if a person is trapped? What about if a car or other property including a residential home is being crushed by a felled tree?
It would take at least an hour or more for West Coast Arborists to respond for travel time alone, no less the time it would take to contact them, and then have them communicate and dispatch staff and equipment to respond. I have not heard anything about response time regarding the new “contracting out” proposal.
[quote]What if a person is trapped? What about if a car or other property including a residential home is being crushed by a felled tree? [/quote]
Not to discount the loss of city tree-trimmer positions, but the fire department is equipped and trained to handle extractions in life-threatening situations. That’s not a tree-trimmer’s job. A crushed car? That can wait a day or two.
.
Dear Ryan:
Thanks for the question about the timeline and Michael Harrington’s role.
That requires me to be more clear.
It was about the year 2000 that most of the Wildhorse houses were sold and when the trust deed for each of the homes should have been had the City requirements in place.
It was the year 2002 when it became clear that the homes were being sold without the Council requirement being met.
When I first brought it up in 2002 the City staff prepared a memo for the Council which in essence said they had taken a look at the transactions and that all the City requirements were being met and no one had broken them. At the time the memo threw me and everyone off the scent.
It was only later (cannot recollect the year) when I obtained a copy of the memo from Harriet Steiner to the Council that it was clear that the Council requirements were not being met. Cleverly the City staff memo had missed pointing out the transactions had not included meeting the Council requirements.
All of that would have be in closed session.
I can say however, that I took the next City screw up to Michael and to his credit he did take action against that.
I think in this case, Katherine Hess had approved the sale of one of the Marden affordables to a buyer. That buyer was the wife of a husband who had obtained one of the affordables in Wildhorse. They clearly knew how to game the system. I discoverd that the Marden house was not being lived in and the car in the driveway was actually the car of the next door neighbor left there to make the affordable house looked lived in.The Marden Mess was 8 affordables that were slated to go to friends and family of the developer. City staff (Hess) were not monitoring the process nor was CHOC a local nonprofit.
Mike did get the City to take action to get that house back which is the only home improperly obtained that was ever gotten back by the City. We appear to have a blind eye to all other debacles.
So for me Mike is one of the few Council members who actually overtly acted to uphold city housing policy when an abuse was located.
What I learned from this Ryan is that the City staff do pull the wool over Council members eyes and it takes excessive effort to whistle blow and when you do a lot of effort and public funds go into the coverup.
That is why I want to see clean ups not cover ups occur on this Council’s watch.
A lot of our surplus public dollars are going into cover ups.
David Thompson, Twin Pines Cooperative Foundation
Dear Ryan:
What I remember later was thinking how cleverly parsed the staff memo was.
When I finally knew that I had to look at each of the 52 transactions myself I was quite surprised. The only requirement that the City staff and City Attorney wrote in was that the house only need to be lived in for two year and then the house could be sold at market rate.
There as no income qualification, no first time home buyer qualification, no waiting list, no lottery.
When the details emerged it was clear that the City staff would have known what I learned. I think five or six of the homes had been sold prior to the two year designation. The City staff did not make that information known in their memo nor did the City Attorney reference that in her letter.
In 2002, when I raised the question that something was going wrong,the City staff checked the transactions and would have had to know but chose to say nothing.
At that time, the City would have been in a position to clawback the value gained as the homes had been sold before the two year limit. At the time, the City would have had full lelga rights to get the $900,000 of gain in these cases illegally obtained. But the City staff and City Attorney took no action.
City Hall needs cleaning up.
David Thompson, Twin Pines Cooperative Foundation
Did the City prosecute the couple for fraud?
It seems to me that the affordable housing program is taken advantage of by people who want to get something for nothing, i.e. get a house at a huge discount and then refinance it or sell it and make money off of it. What happened to just creating low income rentals? Or restrict the homes to people who actually work for the City or the School District like the University does? I think the DACHA model could work, if people didn’t get greedy.
By the way, I overheard that the apartment complex near Savemart (Hanover Place?) is evicting all of its section 8 tenants by Aug 1. The owner is ceasing to accept section 8 tenants and are moving all units to market rate rentals. People who have lived there for years under Section 8 are having to find alternative housing and move or sign non-subsidized rental contracts. I spoke directly with the person I overheard to confirm that I heard it correctly. He confirmed that this was the case.
I don’t believe the City took any legal action against the couple.
Actually, now that you ask, the City has not taken any legal action against the scores of allegations of improper or illegal gains in the affordable for sale programs that I have brought to their attention.
As the city admitted a few months ago, there were few of the hundreds of “affordable for sale” homes still in the program. Almost all of them had escaped any requirements.
On the other hand, while there have been some problems with the multifamily housing at least they have all stayed affordable and due to the many legal requirements will never be turned into private gain.
Dos Pinos (the other limited equity housing co-op in Davis) is the only ownership program that has succeeded 100% and remained affordable for over 25 years. In fact, Dos Pinos is more affordable over time as was intended for DACHA to be. You can see the studies at http://www.community.coop/davis/ryca
I too have heard about the Anderson units. NP offerred to help a couple of years ago but City staff blackballed us.
Talking of economic development there has been more fiscal abuse in affordable housing in Davis than possibly any other category of city operations. And nothing appears to have been done.
An independent Audit Commission is needed for citizens to have oversight of city expenditures.
David Thompson, Twin Pines Cooperative Foundation
Ryan: Frankly, I had followed Harriot;s conduct and advice starting in about 1998, and when I was elected in 2000, I wanted to fire her right off the bat. I did not have a third vote.
The reason I could not get it done was some in town said that her “instutional memory” and her knowledge of “where all the bodies are buried” was important, and we should not lose that. I said B.S., and to this day I regret not raising a very public sink on the dais, meeting after meeting, until we had a new City Attorney that the Wagstaff CC had picked.
What I have said to Brett is: you have to learn the power of the NO vote. Sue’s NO vote helped us immensely against Measure X in the fall of 2005, and later in the fall of 2011 with the water referendum.
Too many people let Harriot and the affordable housing staff do their thing with our housing program, and the disaster lingers today.
In 2003-4, Ruth and I caught housing professional staff giving away about $5 million in city funds to CHOC; we quickly forced them to fix it, and it was never made public.
Harriot as City Attorney was rsponsible for making sure those pro forma forms and contracts were correct, but two overworked CC members caught it.
I demanded that we immediately demand that the City Manager file the involved staff, but Ruth would not back me. Those same staff are heavily involved in DACHA.
None of this happened on the dais, in public view. The records are still around, as the attempted $5 million give-away was in a staff report with attached documents that went into the agenda packet.
Ryan: David Thompson and Luke Watkins have been right every single time they ever came to the CC with complaints and comments about affordable housing in Davis. They were always correct.
Ryan: Affordable housing staff hated David and Luke from the get go when I came on the CC. These two local professionals were always watching as to how staff implemented our programs and used precious public dollars. Staff hated them for bringing issues to the CC, around staff if necessary.
The competitor, CHOC, always seemed to be the fair haired child of staff. Suzie Boyd was the chief sponsor of CHOC, and she was the vocal one against Neighborhood Partners at every turn.
The CHOC projects never seemed to have the same quality and lower level affordability of the NP projects.
No affordable housing or legal staff member was ever disciplined for the foul up after foul up that I personally witnessed from 2000-04. The CC simply could not force good governance.
We are still in the same boat: water staff brought us completely bogus water rates and got 4 members of the CC to vote for them on Sept 6, yet NOT ONE staff member has been disciplined or let go from it. Navazio was part of it, and he cut a fat hog and got out of town to head on up to Woodland. He was obviously hired to get that water project through on the backs of the poor and middle class. I feel sorry for those residents, I really do.
The same water staff members are staffing the WAC, and it is my understanding that over and over, staff have tried to force through only the Woodland JPA project without looking at options.
This is why we, the voters, are going to establish a process the CC has to follow in the future, just like a Measure J/R vote.
Business community: if you care about your profits, you have to stop the Woodland JPA project that is pretty much the brain child of Don Saylor, who needs the contributions from the developers and builders of that plant to fund his political career. (Please, Don, tell me I am wrong, and give us your donor lists.) He successfully did it with the David Fire Fighters, and now he needs the water consultants and trades and direct beneficiaries of that hugely over designed project for massive population growth in this area.
Lack of tree trimmers? Some tree trimmers did a total hack job
on the arbor beside North Davis Elementary School last month. I mean
just hacked the flowering vines to pieces. Not a professional job at
all. Now all that’s left is the metal frame, which looks ugly as a
croquet wicket. All that money to hack ’em down could have been saved
by leaving them alone with a light trim. And the schools are supposed
to have budget problems?
[quote]”Did the City prosecute the couple for fraud?”[/quote]Someday, the people who “know where the bodies are buried” and who have been protecting the developers, city staff and others who robbed our affordable housing program year after year will be gone. Then, DavidG’s call for an outside investigation will be answered. In the meantime, we’re spending millions more carrying out a vendetta against DavidT.
If half of what Michael sez about how this fraud was carried out is true, several of the city staff should end up being prosecuted.
In spite of Sue’s strong support for affordable housing projects, her antagonistic innuendo against NP (never providing any proof of her charges), her refusal to support an independent look at the program and her last vote to rehire Harriet forever will be mysteries to me.
[quote]The CC simply could not force good governance. [/quote]Let’s see… doesn’t the CC have the power to dismiss the CM and/or City Attorney at any meeting? Mr Harrington?