Month: April 2013

By Councilmember Rochelle Swanson

April 12, 2012 (Washington DC) – Another full day of meetings with elected officials and agencies by the Davis/Yolo Team today. It has been a very long day, but let me tell you some highlights and I will expand on them tomorrow when I am fresh.

We started the day with a legislative briefing at Nossaman, LLP, near our hotel.  From there we went to meet with Congressman John Garamendi.  Mr. Garamendi was gracious enough to give us extra time, even though he had other meetings planned very close to ours.

When the group, Friends of Davis Firefighters sent out a press release this week, announcing that a new organization has been launched to defend the Davis firefighters and claiming, “A group of prominent Davis citizens today announced the formation of a new community group, the Friends of Davis Firefighters, to educate the community about the ongoing efforts of the Davis Fire Department to ensure the safety of the City of Davis’ 69,000 residents through its emergency and preventive services,” it was not hard to figure out the origins of the group.

After all the group’s domain name was registered to Bobby Weist, the union present and the PO Box referred to the union’s PO Box.

By Councilmember Rochelle Swanson

April 11, 2013 (Washington DC) – Today the Davis/Yolo Team spent a full day meeting with representatives from elected officials’ offices, to agencies throughout the DC area.

We were delighted to find out during our meetings today that we have arrived in DC at the peak of Cherry Blossoms Season. Several staffers in our meetings gave us the story about the cherry blossom trees in DC, and that they came from Japan during the President Grant Administration.  For an interesting story about this, search “Cherry Blossom President Grant.”

Wednesday was a travel day as the Davis Team arrived in Washington, DC.  Davis CIO Rob White described the trip as “tiring” and reported, “the team spent much of their respective plane rides strategizing and discussing the objectives of the trip.”

He remarked that the team traveled from Sacramento through Denver where the temperature was a brisk 7 degrees and landed in Washington, DC where it was a sweltering 90 degrees.  “An amazing swing in temperatures as we flew across the country.”

Should the City Pursue Participatory Budgeting? – On Tuesday night, Councilmember Lucas Frerichs noted, as the council began to ponder almost overwhelming and insurmountable budget challenges, the utter lack of public participation in the process at this point.

Councilmember Frerichs noted that he was interested in pursuing participatory budgeting.  He said that he is glad that the budget process was being engaged earlier in the cycle than it was last year when the council got the budget in June and had to act quickly to pass it before the end of the month.

The PowerPoint slide said that the city’s street PCI (Pavement Condition Index) was “nearing danger level.”  City Manager Pinkerton did not shirk from that description, saying that the pavement index was “reaching crisis level.”

Neither did interim Public Works Director Bob Clarke minimize the situation, calling it “a significant challenge” and saying we need to find a “reasonable balance of pavement maintenance that we have a reasonable chance of funding.”

City to Display Commitment to Economic and High Tech Development – The City of Davis signaled that it was serious in its efforts to develop a high-tech and university research spin-off base, by partnering with techDavis to bring in Rob White as the city’s first Chief Innovation Officer.

Now the city wishes to put these assets to work this week, as representatives from the City of Davis, Davis Chamber of Commerce, techDAVIS, UC Davis, Yolo County, and the Davis business community will be spending time in Washington, DC, starting Wed, April 10 through Wed, April 17.  This trip is planned as part of the annual Sacramento Metro Chamber’s Capitol to Capitol trip that occurs each April.

When the Davis City Council delayed the decision to go forward with fire staffing changes recommended by former interim Chief Scott Kenley, several members both publicly and in private suggested that putting the fire issue into the broader budgetary context would be the way to go.

While the newly-presented budget, agendized for tonight at the city council meeting, turns up the heat, assuming the savings from both fire staffing changes as well as concessions during the collective bargaining process, the fear has been that giving the firefighters another three to four months to organize would be a huge risk.

The city faces a monumental task of figuring out how to deal with an impending road pavement crisis, within the current limitations of the budget.  In addition to a discussion of the budget this week, the council will receive a presentation, along with an action plan, on pavement management.

The current budget only calls for $2.3 million to put toward street maintenance, and $1 million of that is the money budgeted from last year that was carried over from last year.

A reader made the flippant remark that at least we’re not Stockton, and as Stockton continues to struggle with bankruptcy and getting themselves out of debt and obligations, we are quite fortunate.  But for most places this side of Stockton, the news coming out this week is not good.

Somehow, approaching the five-year mark of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the city of Davis is still churning a not-so-insignificant $2 million deficit, which represents about 4.7 percent of the budget.