The news that leaked out this morning is that Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell and Vice President Joe Biden made significant progress toward perhaps a deal that would prevent the so-called fiscal cliff.
On August 2, 2012, the City proudly announced that they had launched a new website. In a press release, the city manager’s office wrote: “As part of an overall effort to improve communications and reach out to the community, the City of Davis has launched a new website look and structure.”
We are closing the seventh calendar year of the existence of the Davis Vanguard. In some ways, our mission has changed over that period of time, but in fundamental ways, we remain the same with the idea of providing the alternative voice to the discourse provided in more mainstream publications.
The other day I got a chance to spend a few minutes with a group of about twenty young Davis residents that most people in this community do not know exist. In a few months, some of them will become close friends of my daughter.
Davis will go into the spring, for the first time in a long time, not talking about layoffs or school cuts. That is the good news, but it was a rough ride last year getting to that point.
The future of the death penalty in California could not be more murky. In November, the voters had a chance to end the death penalty in the state, but Prop. 34 was narrowly defeated, 52 percent to 48 percent. That leaves the system still alive, technically, though on life support.
The year 2012 was circled and penciled, for the Davis City Council, as the year to fix the looming fiscal crisis in the city of Davis. The process actually began back in June of 2011 when the council, facing down 150 city employees, made a 3-2 vote to reduce city employee compensation by $2.5 million.
Each year we have done something different to wrap up the previous year and move us into the new year. This year, instead of a full year in review, we decided to talk about a number of big issues from 2012 that have gone unresolved, headed in 2013.
We start with the issue that largely dominated the last month and a half of coverage, and that figures to dominate the first two months of 2013 as we move toward a March 5 election that is extremely compressed.
Clearly patience is wearing thin on the part of the President. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week that President Obama repeatedly lost patience with Speaker of the House John Boehner as negotiations faltered.
“In an Oval Office meeting last week, he told Mr. Boehner that if the sides didn’t reach agreement, he would use his inaugural address and his State of the Union speech to tell the country the Republicans were at fault,” the paper reported.
Since July 30, 2006, I have been bringing this community an alternative voice on the news, and commentary on the issues that impact us all. Over that time, naturally my style and voice have evolved. Just read some of my early pieces and you will see that
In that time, there have been huge changes in my life. Read the pieces from December 8, 2009 and September 7, 2011, again realizing that newborn babies suddenly came into my home. In all of this time, I have missed only one day through unplanned illness..
COMMENTARY: Bargaining Unit Prospers by Refusing to Negotiate in Good Faith – This week the City of Davis agreed to new contracts with three additional bargaining units.That means that, as the city’s press release put it, “The City is in the process of negotiating with other employee bargaining units, including Davis Professional Firefighters Association Local 3494 and Davis City Employees Association.”
I often believe that scientific allegories give us an insight into our culture that we may lack, because ideas presented in a more straightforward way can run into opposition. For the past week I have gone to a particular episode in the TV Series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
In a make-believe world of vampires and demons, the tolksfolk in the fictitious California town of Sunnydale were often immune and indifferent to killings. But a day when two young children were found dead, the town awoke to its problems and rose up in arms in a modern day witchhunt for the culprit – now, it turned out a demon had fabricated the situation to inflame the passions, but the main point is that the demon understood that the vehicle of child victims was a powerful tool that could awake even the most entrenched indifference.
While the city of Davis has made great progress in shoring up their fiscal standing in the last few weeks, the same cannot be said at the national level. The media deserves a lot of blame for overhyping the “fiscal cliff” into some sort of crisis that would doom the nation, if unresolved, by the end of the year.
The truth is that, if the tax cuts expire, we do not suddenly fall into the ocean. In fact, it is worth noting we had some of the longest peace time economic expansion with those tax rates in place. It is far from the ideal time to raise taxes, but if that’s where we head, the Republicans will largely have only themselves to blame for it.
On Tuesday night it was more like watching an old relic, the specter of the president of what was very recently the most powerful union in the city of Davis, caught in a lie by the mayor, and quite literally begging for a seat at the table.
There were the firefighters, in reduced numbers, getting up trying to stop inevitability. Those who perhaps saw a glimpse of the council bending and breaking were mistaken. The council could have rammed through the vote on Tuesday night – they would have had five votes to drop the boundaries and at least three, perhaps four or even five, on staffing.
To our readers: We launched our fundraising drive at the beginning of December and we have done very well so far. We set a goal of ten thousand dollars and we have raised about $7000 of it.
Eliminating Tiers Widens the Shift of Subsidization to the Low Users – The Vanguard strongly supported the council adoption of the CBFR system, but there were compromises that were needed to get this system approved on the second pass.The biggest and most obvious compromise is having approximately 20 months under the Bartles Wells Fixed Rate, with Inclining Block Rate. While mitigated somewhat by moving from a system that relied on 50% fixed costs, down to 40%, you still end up costing the low-end users – the bottom 25% – between five and ten dollars per month in the first year, and somewhat more than that in the second year.
Commentary: Mayor Calls Out Union President for Misleading the Council – The Davis City Council had already voted 4-1 to have a continued discussion on the proposed changes to fire staffing and boundary drops, as recommended by Interim Chief Scott Kenley on Tuesday night. The discussion focused on the idea of sitting the firefighters down, along with other interested parties, to further discuss these new ideas.
Following the vote, Union President Bobby Weist got up and said, “I just wanted to make sure… that we will be involved in this process… As of yet we have not been involved in any of the things that have gone on within our department. The union’s been excluded from all of that. There has not been one minute of discussion.”
The Brown administration Tuesday proposed new draft regulations that would require the oil industry to disclose where its California oil extraction operations are using hydraulic fracturing, commonly referred to as “fracking,” in advance of a new movie meant to bring public awareness to the environmental destruction caused by the practice.
While an oil industry spokesman says his industry is “resigned” to the long-awaited new regulations, environmentalists claim the out-of-state and resource tax-exempt oil companies largely ignore the state’s current regulations, despite earning record profits in recent years, and the governor’s proposal of new regulations will do little more than placate the public’s concern over fracking, a concern expected to increase along with awareness of the issue, once ‘Promise Land’ opens in California theaters December 28th.
Commentary – Last week, the Davis City Council made a mistake – whether they feared the uncertainty of the untested rate structure or the public cries of a certain newspaper columnist – the council voted not only to move away from the WAC-recommended CBFR rate structure, but to preclude them from discussing it.It is ironic that when the WAC was created, the Vanguard was not only a skeptic of the board, but an outright critic, fearing the likelihood that the body would merely rubberstamp the preferences of the members who appointed them.
By City StaffCity leaders and employees pleased with fair agreement – At their meeting on December 18th, the Davis City Council adopted three resolutions approving the employment contracts between the City of Davis and the Davis Police Officer Association (DPOA), the Program, Administrative and Support Employees Association (PASEA) and the Individual Management Employees. These agreements bring an end to negotiations that began in the spring of 2012. With the adoption of these contracts, two-thirds of the City employees will have reached agreement with the City. These employees work as Police Officers, Professionals, Administrative support staff and Management.
The Council gave direction to city negotiators to realign employee contracts to be more comparable with other agencies and more sustainable in the long-term for the City. The process has been difficult for both the employee groups and the City. The City is fortunate to have labor partners who were part of the solution. Over the term of the agreements, the City will save approximately $4.9 million as a result of structural benefit changes ensuring the City’s ability to preserve positions, programs and services.