by Matt Williams
On Monday here in the Vanguard we took a look back at the 2007-2008 Housing Element Steering Committee (HESC) process, in order to see how well the Assessment Factors that the HESC adopted in April 2007 have held up in the five years since their adoption. In that article we asked the following questions:
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Now that five years have passed, how well do you think the HESC’s set of factors for evaluating potential sites for housing has held up?
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Would you add any factors to, or deemphasize any specific factors on, the HESC’s list?
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Do you think that the HESC’s list of factors helped the residents of Davis better understand the issues, considerations and trade-offs that the HESC had to wrestle with in order to come up with its final listing of potential housing sites into “Green Light” “Yellow Light” and “Red Light” categories?
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Bottom-line, if asked today, what do you consider to be the most important factors that should be considered when developing criteria for evaluating the suitability of potential sites for housing?
I believe the collective answer to those questions is that the HESC’s list of factors has 1) proved to be very robust, and 2) absolutely helped the residents of Davis understand the housing issues, considerations and tradeoffs that the HESC wrestled with on behalf of the Davis community.
Why is that important?
Because I believe the current Water Advisory Committee (WAC) process has an opportunity to replicate the success of the HESC’s important factors example, especially when (and if) Council confirms the three Check In items passed by the WAC at their 2/9 meeting, that the WAC is . . .
Tasked with making recommendations to Council regarding (1) the surface water project and any potential alternatives, (2) the design-build-operate model or possible alternatives to such a model for the surface water project, and (3) all matters related to the rates of the surface water project or for any project that the Committee recommends as a feasible alternative
Bottom-line, the WAC will be well served if it invests the time to adopt a set of water/wastewater assessment factors, so that all members of the WAC can use the same criteria when considering various identified water/ wastewater alternatives. Further, such adopted factors should be a major forward step toward A) educating the Davis community about the water/wastewater issues Davis faces, and then B) helping build a community consensus regarding what steps we need to take to best address those issues.
Where should we start?
Last fall, an ad-hoc group of Davis residents put together the following draft Goals/Objectives statement regarding water/wastewater:
The City of Davis Water/Wastewater system is facing challenges in meeting the present and future water quality and water supply needs of its customers. We believe those challenges are to:
1) Provide a reliable water supply to meet existing and forecasted future needs.
2) Improve the quality of water dispensed from the “inside” water fixtures at each customer location, including, but not limited to drinking water.
3) Improve the quality of treated wastewater effluent discharged by the City of Davis Wastewater Treatment Plant to meet the current and anticipated future requirements of any and all discharge regulations and/or operating permits, including, but not limited to requirements associated with public health and environmental responsibility.
4) Address the above three issues with a maximum of fiscal responsibility.
The Goals/Objectives contained in this draft statement can serve the WAC well as a starting point for coming up with its own version of a Working Draft of Assessment Factors. Further, those Goals/Objectives together with the WAC’s ultimate recommendations to Council will help Davis voters better understand the issues and the alternatives for addressing those issues, so that at such a time when Davis voters are asked to step into a ballot box, they will do so in an informed manner.
Each of the four goals has its own set of components. Since posters here in the Vanguard are anything but bashful, I sincerely hope you will collectively and individually weigh in with suggestions for what those components are.
I look forward to hearing your input, and will be sure to pass them on to the WAC.
Who is “Administrator”?
I am assuming the “Administrator” is Don Shor whose vigorous advocacy for the project in its current form to be completed YESTERDAY has been amply demonstrated.
dasvisite and hpierce, since I sent the Word document with this article to David’s e-mail address yesterday, I would guess that in this case David is the Administrator. I also assume that it is the website’s the default logon and password.
davisite, speaking of goals and objectives, you posted a while ago consumption numbers that indicated that your water usage per month was triple the average SFR usage for the 12,900 single family residences in the City. Did you ever determine why you and your wife were using three times as much water as the average? Did you request a free water audit from the City to determine the cause of your high consumption?
No. The person who posts the articles is listed at the top. However in the past people complained that if I posted the article and it said written by David Greenwald when it was a piece submitted by someone else that it was confusing. So to avoid that confusion I have simply submitted all pieces not written by me as administrator.
Matt & David… thank you for the clarifications… have a good weekend.
What happened to the Matt Williams article that was posted last night, and my comments on it? I put time into those posts.
Mike: [url]https://davisvanguard.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=5122:update-on-the-water-advisory-committee-brief-discussion-the-palmdale-decision&catid=58:budgetfiscal&Itemid=79[/url]
[quote]What happened to the Matt Williams article that was posted last night, and my comments on it? I put time into those posts.[/quote]
Did you look at the comments that followed yours?
I read Palmdale carefully and talked to some attorneys about it. While the decision discusses one form of distinction between classes, it does forcefully lay forth the reasoning that tiered rates are allowable but only if they do not violate the proportionate cost of providing the service. I took that to mean that tiered rates were okay because, for example, if everyone used one gallon a week, we would only have to be paying for one well, fewer staff, etc.
[b]@Michael Harrington:[/b]I also noticed that the article on Palmdale was not featured for very long.
I got it midday on Friday and I ran four stories on Saturday. I will have a feature piece on Palmdale probably on Tuesday.
In writing up the activities of Thursday night’s WAC I found that the nature of the evening’s discussions made it very difficult to write an article that covered everything. In the end I broke the long comprehensive article down into the three installments you have seen published on Friday, Saturday and today. That editing process meant that the first article didn’t get to David until (as he pointed out) mid-day Friday.
It was clear to me when I was making those editorial decisions, that Palmdale would figure prominently in the discussions of today’s installment, and would no doubt also be the topic of many articles to come over the next several weeks.
David, with the Measure C vote and the run up to the June election on the horizon, do you think it might be a good idea to have your website designer expand the “Latest from the People’s Vanguard of Davis” section from its current limit of 5 entries to a new limit of the latest 10 entries?