On Sunday, I received a thoughtful message from Matt Williams noting the lack of discussion in general on what people want Davis to be in five, ten or 20 years.
While it was not meant as a personal indictment, I want to address my thinking from my perspective.
First of all, I would put out that there is likely to be some sort of vision that emerges during the general plan update process. It remains to be seen what that will look like.
I know in the past, some long-time leaders like Doby Fleeman pushed really hard for a community visioning process.
I will admit, I’m a bit reluctant to engage personally in such a process for a few reasons that I will articulate here shortly.
The first problem comes from Poli Sci 1—you want to kill or slow play any popular movement, have a blue ribbon panel study it to death. I’m not going to say it is impossible to translate a vision into reality, I’m just going to say it seems like a lot of visions die well before implementation.
Starting in about 2009 or 2010, the city of Davis embarked on a long-term vision for economic development—they brought in the stakeholders, they brought in outside experts, they brought in folks from the university, they came up with DSIDE, the Innovation Park Task Force, the Studio 30 report, and the result was… once the vision needed to be actualized, it was defeated by the normal democratic process of Davis.
To its credit, Davis went pretty far in its efforts to implement that vision. It hired a Chief Innovation Officer (or Economic Development Director). It brought forward some actual proposals for projects.
But the Davis spanking machine dismissed said CIO when the political leadership changed, it ran off some of the proposed projects before they got into the development planning phase, and defeated the rest at the polls—over the next eight years. We saw Nishi with an innovation center go down in 2016, and DISC go down in 2020 and 2022.
Matt Williams would probably point out that we made mistakes in the visioning process. He would be correct. We didn’t do a great job of engaging the entire community during that critical 2010-14 process. And we failed to cultivate UC Davis as a full partner—in fact, we (collectively) alienated UC Davis to the point where they simply went to Sacramento to implement their economic development vision rather than supporting ours.
Watching this process unfold and then collapse over the last 10 to 15 years makes me very reluctant to invest my time and energy into another visioning process without agreements on guardrails.
At this point, I don’t have a positive vision for Davis—I have a negative one. One that, if we keep going as we have, we are bound to wind up with.
What does that look like?
Housing has become less and less affordable. That has forced families with children outside of Davis3some still go to our schools because the parents work at UC Davis, but even if they do, they are cut off partially from the community.
The schools which have been a strong point from the community are barely hanging financially and may not be able to continue to do so in the coming years.
Our finances, as the Measure Q campaign has pointed out, have become strained. I would argue that is due to the lack of economic development over the last fifteen years, the continued decline of the downtown, particularly on the retail side, and the overall lack of support in the community for finding ways other than taxes to produce revenue.
Moreover, as I pointed out earlier, the community and city have alienated UC Davis, and so we have a world class university that, instead of implementing tech transfer and growing our R&D base in Davis, is pushing forward in Sacramento where they get less in the way of resistance and avoid the Davis spanking machine.
In his message to me, Matt Williams suggested implementing “my own preferred vision for Davis which is that UCD and the City bury the hatchet and collaboratively put together a plan for leveraging the one asset that the community has … intellectual capital creation … to begin building the job base within the City of intellectual capital jobs, and build new housing to support those new jobs. “
Guess what? I think we might agree on that. That gives me some hope here.
However, I’m reluctant to engage in another public visioning process unless there are agreements in place that prevent the community from sabotaging or otherwise undermining the implementation phase of the vision.
That makes it a veritable waste of time. The thing that a lot of people still don’t seem to grasp is that when we talk about building more housing—that’s not optional. That’s being mandated and enforced by the state. And the state has shown it will litigate and punish communities that fail to implement their housing goals.
That timeline is going to be far different from one that might emerge during a visioning process—that doesn’t mean we can’t create a vision. As I suggested it will likely occur during the General Plan update, and it does mean we need to be more realistic about how much ability we will have in the future to continue to block housing and other projects.
A visioning process outside of a new general plan while MeAsure J is in effect is a waste of time
Having a vision is different from “having a long process to find consensus”. We will never get everyone in this city to agree, but most would agree that some kind of high-level vision is necessary. I would say any vision, even crudely conceived, and only embraced by 60% of the citizens is better than no vision at all.
I concur with Tim. We will never get to 100%. There are three really important advantages to the community adopting a vision:
(1) is that when the voters/constituents are faced with a decision about a development project (of any stripe), they will be able to judge that project in the context of the Vision with questions like, “Will this project move us forward toward what we want to be in 5 years, 10 years, 20 years?” Right now, the answer to that question in every recent Measure J election has been, “What do we want to be?” As a result the default vote for most of the voters is “No.”
(2) is that with a clearly articulated vision, the City can be very clear with developers about what the community expects from development proposals. As it exists now the developers pretty much can propose whatever they desire. Rich Rifkin tried to address this issue in his Enterprise OpEd (see https://www.davisenterprise.com/forum/rich-rifkin-village-farms-housing-must-meet-our-needs/article_52d4e9ae-324a-11ef-9ad3-3703a4b8194a.html ) Without a vision the developers can simply ignore Rich.
(3) Newly hired Economic Development Director Katie Yancey has bee fighting an uphill battle when communication with private sector companies that would be great additions to Davis. They see Davis as a Pillsbury Doughboy … with a very negative history. Putting in the effort to put a community vision in place would make the likelihood of a Katie Yancey success much more likely.
JMO
The voters of Davis have made their vision clear. I cannot see any point in spending any city dollars on a visioning process.
Don, what vision do you think the voters have made clear? That Davis should continue being what it is … a bedroom community made up of a majority of current and retired government workers.
If that is the voters’ vision for Davis, do you think any of those voters have any sense of what the consequences are of adopting and implementing that vision?
Davis does not have a lack of vision, as we have demonstrated several times over the years. What we lack is the will to implement those visions. Calling for another visioning process is simply a call for more delay, or in other words, a call to continue doing nothing.
The only viable solution that will result in real change is for the City Council to agree upon their own plan for the future (with limited opportunities for public comment) and then to task the City Manager with implementing that plan. Even better, they might write a contract with the City Manager making his compensation dependent upon meeting the implementation goals set by the Council. As we saw with the changes to the Commissions, there will be plenty of complaints from certain quarters, but those complaints will be little more than noise as long as the Council maintains their collective will to implement the changes. If the public is not happy with the new direction, we will have an opportunity to select a new group of elected representatives.
For the most part I agree with Mark … especially the “will to implement” part. Mark is also correct that Davis has no shortage of vision, but like the first half of a Paul Harvey radio program Mark only tells part of the story. The “rest of the story” is that vision for Davis comes in many different shapes and sizes, or if you will like languages in the Tower of Babel. Unfortunately, our community leadership has done absolutely nothing over the past two decades to bring some order to that chaos. Just as importantly, no one has taken the time to show what the consequences are of each of the different visions that our community has.
For example, a vision that a lot (perhaps more than 50%) of Davis residents have is for Davis to continue being what it is … a bedroom community made up of a majority of current and retired government workers. What has never been openly discussed is what it will take to be a sustainable, resilient community with that vision, and what are the consequences that come with that vision.
That is true for the other visions as well. I believe Mark has a very clear vision in his mind, but to the best of my knowledge he has not articulated what Davis will look like in 5 years, 10 years, 20 years if we adopt that vision.
As I have previously noted it is possible that Mayor Chapman hinted at a vision at the LWV Forum on Measure Q when he said, “Davis people want to look forward and move the community in a different direction.” From a vision perspective that statement has two significant challenges/flaws. The first is that neither Mayor Chapman, nor any of his fellow City Council members have articulated what that “different direction” is. The second is that despite the rhetorical reference, the Davis people haven’t been consulted on what that different direction might be. Arguably, it is possible that Mayor Chapman couldn’t give a description of what that different direction might be, or what Davis will look like in 5 years, 10 years, 20 years if we go in that different direction.
You can add Walter and Ron and Don to the list of people who haven’t shared what their vision for Davis is. On the other hand, Tim Keller and Keith Echols are two people who have done so.
“I believe Mark has a very clear vision in his mind, but to the best of my knowledge he has not articulated what Davis will look like in 5 years, 10 years, 20 years if we adopt that vision.”
This is likely the dumbest thing that Matt has ever written. No one can describe what Davis will be like in 5, 10 or 20 years unless we follow Matt’s approach, in which case we will be the same but with 5, 10 or 20 years more degradation. My ‘vision’ here is of no value. We can choose to try and encase Davis in amber so that nothing ever changes, or we can allow Davis to evolve to meet the needs of the community. Matt apparently believes he has cornered the local market for amber.
The Council demonstrated with the Commission issue that it is capable of acting on its own initiative, without need of input from the community. They should do so again, implementing new housing and economic development options wherever those opportunities arise while generally ignoring Matt and the other naysayers. It is time for the Council to start acting, if the Community does not like the outcomes, they can elect someone else. More ‘visioning’ is just wasting time.