This weekend the deadline for filing a referendum on Cannery passed quietly, as the council had passed the second reading of the ordinance on the Cannery on December 3, 2013. At one point in the late summer a referendum seemed inevitable, yet even amidst a 3-2 council vote on the Cannery, the organized opposition failed to materialize.
What lessons can we take away from this? The first one might surprise you, but it is that Measure R matters.
Depending on which side of the fence you are on, you might argue this is a negative or positive, but what is clear is that Measure R is meaningful process. Organizing a petition drive is very difficult work. It takes time, it takes money. Look at all of the work the opponents of the water project put into put that measure on the ballot.
That took a month of work, hiring paid canvassers, the ballot measure narrowly qualifying, and the city ended up rescinding it, revising the project, and putting a new water project on the ballot.
Had Cannery been outside of the city limits, it would have been subjected to an automatic vote of the people, the opponents could have waited to organize their campaign and, as we discovered with both Covell and Wildhorse Ranch, an organized opposition to a housing development makes passage problematic.
However, the ConAgra folks deserve some credit in thwarting any petition drive and movement against the project. While council still ended up voting 3-2, they ended up addressing two major points of disagreement that were tied to potential moves in a petition.
First, they agreed to the second grade-separated crossing. There are those who believed that the movement for a second crossing was a red herring, a poison pill that was designed to kill the project. From the start, we argued that this push was motivated out of true safety concerns.
We believed that the bicycle organizations were sincere in their desire for safety features, for connectivity to the rest of Davis, and they understood that this would, in fact, be a stronger project if the development were not cut off from the rest of Davis.
This was a tricky development from that standpoint. To the west were railroad tracks, to the north farmland, to the east a somewhat hostile neighbor and to the south a thoroughfare.
When ConAgra agreed to the second crossing and to put in infrastructure to produce connectivity, they eliminated one huge group from joining a potential petition drive and one huge argument against the development.
Along similar lines, Choice for Healthy Aging (CHA) finally got a big win. They had pushed ConAgra for more senior-friendly housing. They argued just prior to the agreement, that the owners of the property have not provided sufficiently “acceptable new housing at The Cannery for seniors or people with a disability.”
While ConAgra’s representative argued that they did not want a segregated or senior-only component, they ultimately agreed on a compromise.
“We wanted a multigenerational neighborhood,” he said. “I think we’ve really accomplished that with what we have done with universal design.”
What they have developed is a Livable Design program that they have done with Eskaton.
“The design of the homes themselves are going to be very friendly for aging in place,” Mr. Phillips said. “The house plans will be reviewed and verified by Eskaton as qualifying for this Livable Design.”
But, as CHA argued, that didn’t go far enough.
They argued, “Most of the homes planned for The Cannery are on mid-size to large-size lots and are two stories tall. Seniors and people with a disability, along with small families or singles, would like small, single-story, detached homes built on small lots. They’d like something simple with two or three bedrooms and a small back yard with a patio and garden.
“We would like to see ConAgra be required to designate 65 small lots for single-story homes. This would greatly increase the livability of the project for seniors and persons with disabilities and is only 65 single-story homes out of 547!,” Mary Jo Bryan, Don and Merna Villarejo argued.
Eventually, they got what they asked for, which tore down another potentially organized group of opposition.
The lesson here is that ConAgra was probably wise to hold off on concessions until the end, recognizing that a concession a few months out might simply reset the bar rather than enable them to clear the bar.
What also became clear is that the debate shifted. In the last two months before the Cannery vote, Cannery was not the big issue on the Vanguard; Mace 391 and Economic Development were. And that appears to be the line of battle rather than Cannery.
At the same time, Cannery benefited from the fact that potential opponents were already busy with the water issue. We have the lawsuit that is attempting to invalidate the water rates, among other things. There is an initiative drive to potentially put the rates on the ballot and that has consumed the time, energy, and money of potential opposition to the Cannery.
Finally, it is very clear that Covell Village and its developers wanted to play hardball. They refused to cave on the easement to Cranbrook for a bike path, they tried to leverage any power that they had toward joint planning of Cannery with Covell Village, and they pushed CHA to oppose on the issue of Senior Housing.
But at the end of the day, while it appeared they wanted not to give Cannery a free ride, they stopped short of actively attempting to kill the property proposal.
While it all worked out for Cannery in the end, one wonders if they were finally blessed with some luck. It is clear to me, anyway, that Cannery’s strategy of holding out on concessions on senior housing and connectivity helped them. They may have mobilized groups that never would have emerged had they simply designed a better project from the start.
There are still those who will question the need for this project, whether the food giant gave enough to the community as a whole, whether the project is sufficiently sustainable – but at the end of the day, they did just enough to get three votes on council and, as importantly, avoid a costly and potentially fatal ballot vote of the people.
—David M. Greenwald reporting
Here we are 14 hours since this article was published and not even a single comment.
Interesting.
It is worth noting that, although the Council has voted positively a second time and the time for the referendum has passed, there are still details of the bike connectivity question that are not settled. Specifically, the easement along the railroad to the H St tunnel has yet to be acquired.