Dear City Council and Planning Commission,
At its November 4 hearing on the Village Farms project, I heard Davis City Councilmembers publicly declare that they wish to revisit a controversial proposal to incorporate a fourth city fire station into Village Farms. While the Council made no decision that night, Councilmembers voiced concern about the potential $3.5 million ongoing (and ever-growing) financial impact of operating an extra fire station, given the very serious financial mess our city now faces.
The Village Farms developers are comfortable with the solution I have been offering. Specifically, I recommend you strike out all of the technical project approval language and maps dedicating 2.5 acres of their project for a fourth fire station. I would substitute language and maps formally setting that land aside (as its proposed zoning already provides) for an unspecified public purpose that would be determined in the future. With some future tweaking of the zoning language and additional environmental review, that 2.5 acres could someday be used as an additional land dedication site for affordable housing that could help us meet state housing mandates. It might even become a site for more long-sought cooperative housing.
At its November meeting, Councilmembers asked city staff to provide them with more information and options on the fire station issue. Unfortunately, the newly released Village Farms city staff report that is being presented to the Council and the Planning Commission this week ignores that information request.
Instead, buried deep in the report’s 144 pages, you will find draft language for a development agreement and a “preliminary planned development” map seemingly designed to provide backdoor approval for a fourth fire station. You will find these provisions on pages 06-36, 06-8, 06-58, 06-67, and 06-137. I strongly recommend you amend them all to strike out any references to the proposed fourth fire station. You should also strike out a mysterious new provision and a related map that labels that 2.5 acres as a “Public Safety Center Parcel,” a newly fabricated term obviously intended to rule out its use for affordable housing our community sorely needs.
This new staff report is silent about the reason for these latest proposals and why it has ignored the Council’s stated desire for options and information on this subject. You should ask them to explain who wrote and inserted these new provisions and why. You should also ask city staff to explain why, in hearing after public hearing, it is making troubling and erroneous public statements about the fire station issue.
The first oft-repeated misstatement asserts that the city General Plan requires a new fourth fire station be built at Village Farms.
That’s untrue. The General Plan does reference in its narrative that a past Council, that was elected decades ago, did want to pursue planning for a fourth station. However, the policies and actions that were adopted in the 2007 General Plan actually called instead for a detailed analysis of the city’s fire facility needs, not the construction of a fourth fire station.
Below is a link to the pertinent provisions of the General Plan.
That analysis, which was finally completed 11 years later by Fitch & Associates, an independent consulting firm considered a national expert in using data analysis to plan firefighting operations, said the city could dramatically improve its fire response times by repositioning its aging fire stations so that it could continue to operate with three, not four, fire stations. As the older stations wore out, the city would cease investing in them over time and reallocate that funding to build new stations in much better locations. The city would avoid the estimated $3.5 million per year ongoing cost burden for city taxpayers for operating a fourth fire station, while response times by the Fire Department to emergency calls across the city would improve dramatically.
After the release of the Fitch & Associates report, then-Fire Chief Daryl Arbuthnot endorsed their approach and took me on a personal tour to show me exactly where those stations should be located. Current Fire Chief Joe Tenney has embraced the findings of the report when they suit his purposes. He quoted its findings that the city needed its own ladder truck (see his letter to Council at the time below) but has disregarded the part that says the city does not need a fourth fire station.
The second misstatement that has been regularly repeated by staff in public hearings is that the Fire Department or the Council itself has already made the decision to build a fourth fire station and to place that station at Village Farms.
I was there in Council chambers as a voting member of the City Council the last time our city leaders discussed how we should address our future needs for fire facilities. That night we did not authorize any new fire facilities anywhere. The minutes for that City Council meeting on October 30, 2018, provided below, plainly document the Council directed city staff to come back to the City Council for policy guidance on any proposed future action on fire facilities.
City staff fully complied with that policy direction when, several months ago, they presented the current Council with options (none of which have been adopted or funded) to rebuild the existing downtown fire station. In contrast, Council has never received a similar presentation from staff to consider building a fourth station at Village Farms or alternatives to that approach, including keeping a three-station operation. The Fire Department has no authority to make such a decision, as city staff has intimated. Only the city manager, the Davis City Council, and, in the case of Village Farms, the voters of the City of Davis, have the authority to make this important decision.
I support your efforts to place Village Farms on the ballot (as well as Willowgrove) in 2026. We really do need more housing. However, this project already faces a difficult uphill fight for voter approval. I cannot support a project that worsens our city’s already shaky financial condition. I am convinced a lot of other voters will feel the same way I do.
The analysis work done by another city consultant, BAE Urban Economics, makes it clear that removing the fourth fire station from Village Farms would turn it into a fiscally positive project for the City of Davis. You can help to pass this project by making the right and smart fiscal decision to remove any mention of a fourth fire station from Village Farms before you send this measure to the voters.
All the best,
Dan Carson
There is one typo here. The relevant page numbers referencing a fire station are 06-6, 06-8, 06-58, 06-67, and 06-137.
The 1,800 unit 498-acre Village Farms project is the largest and worst planned project ever proposed in Davis. It has a 200-acre flood plain with flooding potential, carcinogenic PFAS “forever chemicals” leaking from the adjacent unlined Old City Landfill , soil toxics including carcinogenic toxaphene where the Heritage Oak Park is planned, unsafe access issues with no grade-separated crossing across Covell Blvd. which is like a freeway, unprotected vernal pools which have no conservation easement, UNaffordable housing where the cheapest market rate house would be $740,000 which mean a $6,000 house payment PER MONTH including the mortgage, property taxes, CFD fees, insurance, and other fees, which local workers and families with young kids cannot afford, so Village Farms will NOT bring 700 kids as the School District would like to believe.
On top of all of this Village Farms would bring MASSIVE INFRASTRUCTURE COSTS including this UNNEEDED 4th fire station because 90% of the fire dept calls are medical not fire related so instead an EMS service makes much more sense and would be a fraction of the cost and could be located anywhere in East Davis due to the small footprint, and now have learned that the developer would be reimbursed 80% of the cost of BOTH multi-million dollar grade separated crossings that his Village Farms project is creating the need for! These are more “giveaways’ from the City that Davis residents would be paying for to subsidize Whitcombe’s Village Farms project. And in a time when the City cannot even afford to pave our streets?
Plus, no emergency service should be located on Covell Blvd. because it has enormous traffic backups all the time. How is an emergency vehicle supposed to get anywhere in 5-minutes when it is a parking lot of cars on Covell Blvd. so often?
The 2.5 acres of land for this proposed additional fire station needs to be changed to affordable housing sine the developer is trying to short-change the City by dedicating less than the 18.6 acres he is required to dedicated for affordable housing per our Davis Municipal Code. Yet the City is allowing the developer to get away with this! Another special favor and giveaway to the developer (John Whitcombe of Tandem Properties partner which owns 13 apartment complexes in Davis.)
Further, let’s not forget that the same developer for the Nishi project has not delivered any housing nor that projects required grade-separated crossing. It was approved 7 years ago! What make anyone think he would deliver TWO grade separated crossings? But getting verified EIR and entitlements would enormously raise the value of these sites which can then be “flipped”.
Village Farms is too big, has too many serious impacts and would bring liability to the City due to the toxics and flooding potential and needs to go back to the drawing board to analyze the reduced footprint alternative recommended by citizens in Dec. 2023 to the City Council when the Village Farms alternatives were being chosen, but our efforts were ignored. We submitted the graphic from the Covell Village DEIR of the “environmentally superior alternative” which was included in its predecessor Covell Village Draft EIR. This was the environmentally superior alternative in that EIR because it developed housing only below Channel A which significantly reduced the impacts from the 200-acre flood plan and distanced the housing from the unlined Old City Landfill and Sewage Treatment plant leaking carcinogenic toxics and having a lower number of housing units on the smaller footprint.
“Village Farms is too big”
How are you planning to address the state housing requirements without approving big projects?
Eliminate the state housing requirements :-|
Alan, YES!!!
The state has been continually defying federal laws so why don’t cities defy state laws.
Because they get sued
Maybe the feds should start suing California.
They are
Well there you go.
Eileen is correct on this matter–pursue the smaller footprint alternative. The developer can easily fit 1,800 houses inside 200 acres or less according to our calculations. This will also lead to reduced VMT as the houses more affordable to the workers who now have to commute into Davis and more school children of younger ages that come with younger, less wealthy families. All of this is easily possible, and the developer will earn significantly more sales revenue per acre of developed land. And we will meet our state housing requirement. What’s being offered up is not going to work and is not going to be approved by the voters. There’s still time to come forward with a viable alternative instead.