City staff, citing the status of state legislation as well as concerns from the business community, recommended the council delay final policy direction at this time, until the results are known of the currently active state legislation for a statewide ban on the use of single-use carry-out bags.
“Thereafter, staff would return to City Council seeking final City policy direction,” the consent item’s staff report advised.
For a moment I have to hearken back to a Davis city council meeting from spring of 2010. The council was about to approve a one-time water rate increase. The increase was modest, but still generated anger and anxiety from a few dozen people.
This would be yet another incremental step of pushing forward the surface water project. The council had the votes to ram it through, but at the time, there were warning signs on the wall about which a responsible council would have taken better note.
Vanguard Finds UCD Internal Investigation Decisions Coming Back to Bite ThemWhile the open letter from the Executive Board of UC Davis Police Officers Association (UCDPOA) is mainly self-serving and indefensible, they do have one reasonable point that we have raised a number of times – the fact that, while the administration was hammered in the Kroll and Reynoso reports almost as hard as the police officers, it is only Chief Annette Spicuzza, Lt. John Pike and Officer Alexander Lee who have lost their jobs over the actions that occurred on November 18 at the UC Davis Quad.
Writes the UCDPOA, “We, the Board, agree with the Reynoso report; the KROLL Report and the Edley Robinson Report, as it relates to findings concerning Chancellor Katehi and her leadership team’s decisions surrounding the events of November 18th, 2011. There were indeed, “substantive mistakes at the administrative level.” The decisions made by Katehi’s leadership team during the days leading up to and on November 18th have caused long-term damage to the University of California and the UC Davis Police Department.”
In late July, we finally learned the fates of Lt. John Pike and Officer Alexander Lee, as the university acknowledged that they were no longer on payroll. A week later, we learned that in fact, as suspected, Chief Matt Carmichael fired Lt. Pike.
In was only due to a report in the Sacramento Bee, after the paper was leaked documents surrounding the campus’ internal investigation, that the public learned for the first time that the internal investigation, conducted for the university by two outside firms, had actually largely cleared Lt. Pike, and that a separate panel was concerned about the handling of the incident and recommended the demotion and suspension of the infamous John Pike.
If previous councils would have viewed their role as a sledgehammer or a jack hammer, this council at least in the early days looks more like a scalpel – a tool that will attempt to refine, finesse, and shape policy.
Never was that more apparent than on Tuesday night as the Davis City Council sought to smooth out language from the Water Advisory Committee’s delicate compromise recommendation – a recommendation in which even chair Elaine Roberts-Musser acknowledged the language was rough and crafted hastily and on the fly – keeping the key elements in place.
Last week the Vanguard reported on how the city came to make the decision back in 1999 to go to a four-person fire engine as a way to meet the new OSHA regulations requiring two men in and two men out in order to fight a fire.
Back in 1999, the council unanimously approved the hiring of six firefighters at the cost of 368,676 dollars. Which means at that time, total compensation for a firefighter was about 60,000 dollars a year and that figure “included the costs for turnouts, beds and lockers for the new firefighters.”
The Yolo County District Attorney’s office declined to file charges against UC Davis students Jerome Wren and Tatiana Bush, who were arrested for allegedly repeatedly resisting arrest after police responded to a call of a disturbance on May 23 at the Glacier Point Apartments in West Davis.
Ms. Bush, a recent UC Davis graduate who served as a member on Cruz Reynoso’s Task Force looking into the pepper spraying, believes that she and Mr. Wren are the victims of police brutality.
Claire Sherman is not your typical candidate for school board. She openly acknowledges that her stances on issues facing the district may make it difficult for her to be elected and that gaining election may not be her top priority, as she is not planning on raising or spending money beyond the costs of putting her ballot statement on the sample ballot.
Nevertheless, she believes that there are issues that are not be voiced in this community, that the current school board is too homogeneous and caters to the high-achieving student population.
The Davis Enterprise last week reported that the internal investigators were paid over a quarter million dollars to conduct the internal review that was leaked to the Sacramento Bee a few weeks ago.Unlike the public reviews by Kroll Associates and the Task Force led by Former Supreme Court Justice Cruz Reynoso, the internal reports largely vindicated the actions of Lt. John Pike in his use of pepper spray on seated protesters during the infamous tent clearing operation at the UC Davis Quad on November 18, 2011.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration reports that US carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are at their lowest level for the January-March period since 1992. However, the agency would attribute the decline to three factors, including: a mild winter that reduced household heating demand and therefore energy use; a decline in coal-fired electricity generation, due largely to historically low natural gas prices; and reduced gasoline demand.
The New York Times reports this week, however, that experts are unclear whether this marks the continuation of a trend or an anomaly.
A series of reports have shown that the number of death sentences in California have been declining, with only ten such sentences handed down in 2011.
A story in the Oakland Tribune tracks the decisions of District Attorney Nancy O’Malley, who has not sought the death penalty in any cases since she took that position back in 2010.
Saturday was a long and painful exercise in disconnect between the writer and his readers. I have to clearly take full responsibility, but I think people tend to read their own assumptions and beliefs into the material.
The strange part of yesterday’s discussion was that it focused on a portion of the commentary that was only setting the stage for the main point, rather than the main point itself.
Forty-nine agencies in California have recently adopted at least some form of local ordinance discouraging the use of plastic bags and encouraging the use of reusable bags, but if staff gets its way, Davis won’t be one of them any time in the near future.
On this week’s consent agenda, staff notes that two city commissions have weighed in on this topic: “The NRC [Natural Resources Commission], which believes that moving forward now with an ordinance is prudent for the environmental benefits; and the BDEC [Business and Economic Development Commission], which believes proceeding with caution is warranted and is concerned about possible local business impacts from such a policy.”
Despite all of the work that the WAC had done over the last eight months, critical members of that committee recognized two critical factors on Thursday night. First, that a vote on the merits of the Woodland plan would at best have been 7-3, and some think it would actually have been 5-5 or 4-6. Second, that all of the hard work would have come for naught with a split vote.
Two weeks ago the chair of the WAC reacted to the suggested need for unanimity as a threat, but two weeks later it was the stated operating principle of at least four WAC members, perhaps more.
Few things incite or inspire more blowback than the use of anonymous sources. To be fair, this is a long debate in the journalistic community.
In March 2009, the New York Times‘ public editor wrote: “The Times has a tough policy on anonymous sources, but continues to fall down in living up to it. That’s my conclusion after scanning a sampling of articles published in all sections of the paper since the first of the year.”
For much of the night, it appeared that the Water Advisory Committee was headed to a divided vote of 7-3 or 6-4 to go to the Main Woodland Option. It was also clear that a couple of the swing voters in the middle were uncomfortable with such a split.
In the end, it was a compromise move that appeared to be engineered by Bill Kopper and Frank Loge, with support from Alf Brandt, that gave both sides enough of what they could live with to produce an 8-2 vote on the compromise motion, with only Jerry Adler and Helen Thomson, who oppose even looking at a West Sacramento option, dissenting.
While cities and local government attempt to dig themselves out of self-inflicted holes, the legislature is threatening to makes matters worse by extending the statute of limitations for a presumptive death benefit claim filed on behalf of firefighters or peace officers, at a detrimental fiscal consequence for employers.
AB 2451, sponsored by Speaker John Pérez would eliminate the 4 ½ year statute of limitations on work-related death benefits for public safety employees who die of diseases presumed by law to be job-related. Opponents fear that there would be no limitation under the law “on the period of time between the employee’s exposure to and presumable death from heart disease, cancer, tuberculosis or blood borne pathogens.”
By E. Roberts Musser
In my capacity as an attorney and as a consumer advocate, I was asked by SCD members to review the new proposed bylaws. I gave my honest legal opinion the proposed changes were not in the best interests of SCD, nor its membership. Some concerned SCD members took their complaints to the Davis Senior Citizens Commission. It was there that SCD Board President John Gerlich was encouraged by Commissioners to slow down the process and obtain more member input before putting the matter to a vote.
Editor’s Note: In advance of tonight’s WAC meeting, members of the WAC submitted questions to staff. As these questions and answers are provided in the material, they provide a good basis for understanding and discussion.
1. Was the debt service line item included in the Net Present Value total?
My office sought the death penalty in dozens of cases when I was the Los Angeles County district attorney for eight years, and chief deputy district attorney for four. The cases had horrific and compelling facts; I had no problem seeking death sentences. But though I never was squeamish, I now fully support Proposition 34 to replace the death penalty with life in prison with no possibility of parole. Here’s why.
California’s death penalty is broken beyond repair, hideously expensive, and inevitably carries the risk of executing an innocent person. The hundreds of millions of dollars we throw away on this broken system would be much better spent on solving and preventing crime and investing in our kids’ schools.
