The Vanguard was out on Saturday morning at the Davis Farmer’s Market and collected the first round of literature from both the Yes on Measure I and the No on Measure I folks.
As we noted yesterday, the literature is presented today without editorial comment. Fact Checking of the issues raised will be occurring and the Vanguard will present the findings as they become available.
Last week end, the Vanguard ran a column on the other Davis. Emerging within the comments of that column was a discussion of the loss of The Wash Mill coin-operated laundromat.
On Friday, the Vanguard ran a more detailed column on the closure of the laundromat, that leaves the city with exactly one coin-operated public laundry facility.
We are less than a month away from the ballots being sent out and less than two months from the end of the Measure I campaign. Ballots are due March 5, but it seems like we have barely begun.
While the Vanguard presents the arguments made without commentary or analysis, at a later point, we may do some fact-checking.
Earlier this week, someone asked essentially why I am so concerned with the city’s fiscal picture while I seemingly fall in line with partisan bias on the nation’s debt picture. The answer to that question is both simple and complex.
The simple answer is that the city, unlike the federal government, does not have a debt mechanism. The city has to pay its bills and if it cannot, it is forced to cut spending. If it fails to do that, it declares bankruptcy. The city has taken clear steps to avoid the fate of other cities, but as our column earlier this week demonstrates, we are far from out of the woods and past councils have clear blame.
By Will Matthews and Rebecca McCrayA recent study from the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice (CJCJ) demonstrates that decriminalization of marijuana can actually improve our children’s futures while saving taxpayers billions of dollars.
In 2011, Senate Bill 1449 was implemented, which reduced the punishment for simple marijuana possession from a misdemeanor criminal offense to a civil infraction punishable by a fine of no more than $100. Data from the California Department of Justice’s Criminal Justice Statistics Center for 2011 reveals an impressive 20 percent decrease in overall youth arrests in the state compared to the previous year, and a 60 percent decrease in marijuana arrests. The CJCJ analysis determined that the “largest contributor to [the overall] decrease was a drop of 9,000 in youths’ low-level marijuana possession arrests” since the passage of SB 1449.
There is great irony that a laundromat that serves working class and poor constituencies is apparently being forced out to make room for a Goodwill and Goodwill Express location.
As Darrell Smith of the Sacramento Bee reports this morning, “That leaves residents in the neighborhood facing an odd irony: They will have a place to donate and buy clothes, but one fewer place to wash them.”
Veolia, one of the three main bidders for the DBO in the surface water project, has been the subject of scrutiny, because one of its subsidiaries operates a bus line through the occupied territory in Palestine, opening the agency up to concerns by Palestinian rights groups about the propriety of doing business with a company that is operating in an area where possible racism and discrimination is occurring.In addition, a review of the company by the Vanguard last fall showed a number of problems with the operations of some of its North American water plants.
It did not take long for a certain columnist to begin gloating over the demise of Zipcar. Certainly it is somewhat understandable that not everyone would support the concept of car-sharing, but at the same time, there seem to be some critical elements that even several years later have been missed in the whole deal.
The city deserves criticism for being sloppy with the contract that they approved. I would add that the council rushed through an entire agenda and failed to scrutinize it sufficiently.
When the council created and appointed the members of the Water Advisory Committee (WAC), the Vanguard was highly skeptical, to say the least.
Back in November of 2011, we wrote, “Whatever name and scope the council eventually chooses for the utility committee, the question is what value will be gleaned from such a committee?”
Despite some early missteps by the city with regard to the Zipcar contract, and heavy criticism in particular by a prominent columnist of the local newspaper, Zipcar has been a heavily successful car sharing program in the city of Davis.
Initially the city was asked to subsidize the program, paying roughly $9000 – a very small amount, given the fuss. Once the vehicle usage topped 40 percent, the fee was dropped and the service was provided to Davis at no cost.
by Dan AielloReuters reports that the draft regulations announced by the Brown administration, set forth ostensibly to improve monitoring of the oil industry’s hydraulic fracturing, or “Fracking,” method of oil extraction from the state’s depeleted oil fields, are actually intended to increase the ability of the oil industry to use fracking in oil fields throughout California.
Fracking is controversial because of its environmental impact on the land and the state’s water and groundwater supplies, turning as much as 8 barrels of potable drinking water into a toxic soup known as “produced” water for every barrel of oil rendered. Fracking’s produced water has contaminated local groundwater supplies and rendered fertile agriculture acres into barren wasteland in counties like Kern, King, and elsewhere.
Much has been made of the split on the right, not only between the Senate which voted overwhelmingly for the compromise while the majority of House Republicans voted against it, but within the House, as there was the more pragmatic John Boehner opposed by the more ideological Eric Cantor.
Despite making tremendous progress in 2012 on contracts and budget, Davis remains in substantial fiscal peril. As we have noted previously, at the same time the city of Davis is looking to fix things like fire staffing and boundary drops, the firefighters’ union, along with DCEA (Davis City Employees Association) remain holdouts for new contracts.
To err is inextricably part of the human experience. And really the key measure of errors is how they are handled after they are made.
Late last night,or technically early this morning in Washington, the Senate, after intense last minute negotiations between Vice President Joe Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, emerged with a compromise that passed a reluctant Senate by an 89-8 margin.
