The changes will threaten Commission independence and stifle innovation
by the Sierra Club Yolano Group Management Committee
A recent op-ed by Dan Carson and Elaine Roberts Musser (see here) alerted Davis residents to a concern with a new proposal before the Davis City Council that has the potential to substantially limit citizen input into environmental issues in the City of Davis.
According to the op-ed, Mayor Josh Chapman and Councilmember Bapu Vaitla recently began asking Davis City Commissioners for feedback on their proposal for “clarification of how items are placed on a commission meeting agenda.”
Carson and Roberts Musser state:
“…in a big change, proposals initiated by a commission would now be subject to review and veto — by either any relevant council subcommittee (two councilmembers) or that commission’s assigned Council liaison (typically one councilmember).The Chapman-Vaitla plan says these new rules would apply whenever the council wished to “undertake a particular task/project/discussion.” In other words, almost anything and everything a commission might ever want to do would be subject to veto by one councilmember. The Council and city staff would dictate what a commission can or cannot do, but the commission itself would have absolutely no control over its work.” (Bold emphasis added)
If enacted, we find this proposal deeply concerning and undemocratic. Historically, at least six of Davis’s volunteer citizen commissions regularly dealt with environmentally-related matters: Tree; Open Space and Habitat; Natural Resources; Bicycling, Transportation, and Street Safety; Utilities; and Recreation and Park Commission (for the latter, with topics such as the use of toxic pesticides and drought-tolerant plantings).
With the recent merge-and-purge of these citizen commissions by the Council, the environmentally-related commissions are now the Climate and Environmental Justice Commission, the Open Space and Habitat Commission, the Recreation and Park Commission, and the Transportation Commission (which also includes the former Unitrans Advisory Committee).
The recent restructuring has already made it more difficult for these commissions to give productive input by greatly increasing their workloads. But this new proposal would hobble citizen commissions even further by limiting the bottom-up approach to bringing forth new ideas historically advocated by the Commissions. Had such a proposal been in place in the past, many of the City’s best environmental initiatives might never have seen the light of day. These initiatives include:
- Ground-breaking new Building Codes that set the standard for the State including mandatory Solar PV on new residential construction.
- Establishment of the Valley’s first community choice energy joint power authority, Valley Clean Energy.
- A progressive Integrated Waste Management Plan that eliminated styrofoam take-out food packaging in restaurants and delis, and separate bin collection of all garden and food waste for both residences and businesses.
- An Integrated Pest Management Plans that eliminated use of glyphosate (Round-up) and the pollinator-killing neonicotinoids from our parks and bike paths.
- A new Urban Forest Plan and a Parking Lot Shade Ordinance requiring minimum placement of trees in new developments and in parking lots to reduce heat-island impacts.
From our first-in-the-nation curbside recycling plan to our exemplary bike path network, these were all initiatives and ideas initially brought forward by our independent Citizen Advisory Commissions or their predecessors—often while meeting extreme Staff and/or City Council resistance. But the Commissions persevered to give us the quality of life we now enjoy in Davis.
This reduction of expert citizen initiative and input will likely prevent us from meeting the many environmental challenges we are facing now and into the future…from the climate crisis to water shortages to increasingly poor air quality and more.
We believe that there are better, more inclusive and democratic alternatives for improving collaboration between the council and its expert citizen commissions and we urge the City Council to seek them out instead of their proposed changes to limit the authority and independence of the City’s long-standing and respected Citizen Advisory Commissions.
If you are similarly concerned about this roll-back of Commission autonomy, please let our Davis City Council know at CityCouncilMembers@cityofdavis.org.
Thank You
Your Sierra Club Yolano Group Management Committee
A note: the revised Parking Lot Shade Ordinance has been in process since 2017 and is still stalled without final approval and submittal from the relevant commissions. It’s now in the bailiwick of the CEJC which is the combined NRC and Tree Commission. It needs a final push across the line.
re: Parking Lot Shade: This seems to also be a transportation issue.
When the Davis Enterprise reported on the most recent meeting of the Historical Resources Management Commission, no mention was made of Roberts Musser’s comments on the most recent meetings of three other Commissions in which they pushed back hard on the Council proposal, which was on the agenda that evening. (The Enterprise also completely ignored the public comment on another agenda item — This comment was made by a former HRMC – or predecessor designation – Commissioner. Has the Enterprise reported more generally on the pushback?