Open Government

As my longtime readers know, I have taken Thanksgiving off, really the only days most years I take completely off.

The big news this year is that on January 2, 2014, we will launch the new website – finally.  As many know, we created this site as the second Vanguard website in March 2009.  We are running it on aging software and there have been functionality problems.

Tonight will represent the culmination of months of work by at least twenty to as many as forty different people in our community.  It should be an amazing show, featuring Judge David Gottlieb presenting as the keynote speaker at the Vanguard‘s Third Annual Dinner and Awards ceremony.  Judge Gottlieb, a 2005 appointee to the bench by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, is currently the presiding judge of the Juvenile Delinquency Court for Fresno County.

He has been involved with innovative programs at the Juvenile Court, including FBHC (Family Behavioral Health Court) which provides specialized collaborative service for delinquent juveniles, CJC (Community Justice Conference), a unique predisposition restorative justice program, and he actively participates in the Juvenile Justice Commission and Fresno County Interagency.

When I started the Vanguard in the summer of 2006, it was a personal low point in my life.  What my wife and I had gone through for the previous six months changed my life permanently.  It was at that low point that the Vanguard was born.

While there were specific public policy reasons behind the creation of the Vanguard, there were also two very basic goals.  First was the belief that the community needed a news source that would not simply stop at the press release – two sources for the story and one opposing viewpoint to balance it out.

On July 30, 2006, I took one small step in creating a free blog using free blogger software.  I did so for very specific reasons that have long since been rendered irrelevant by history.  But I also did so for reasons that stay with us today – I wanted to create a news source that covered the stories that other papers and news entities were not covering, to be able to analyze stories from different perspectives and in greater detail, and to foster community discussion all in the furtherance of exposing the dark underbelly of what purported to be a progressive community.

I did so with no background in journalism whatsoever.  So it was a learning process.  One of the biggest lessons I have learned is that you cannot tell people what to think.  It sounds simple, but people are intelligent and will reach their own conclusions and so, while I started out with a hybrid of news and commentary in the same articles, over the years I have tried to separate news from opinion.

Dear Reader,

Every day the Vanguard, a local non-profit, brings you the latest news and commentary.  We do so free of charge, but, while our service to the public is free, it is not free to bring you that information.

Subscribers of newspapers pay on a monthly basis to deliver you the daily newspaper.  The cost of that newspaper varies but, in general, people will typically pay $15 to $20 per month for delivery.

By Rob White

This week is a significant week in the White household. My oldest is starting as a freshman at Chico State, and this is the week to move him in to the on-campus dorms. So tomorrow we will pack everything he needs for the year in to my car and head out.

This life event has caused me to reflect a lot this week. I’ve been thinking back to my first day at Chico, back in the late 80s, and I can vividly remember my parents pulling up to my dorm. It was a big turning point for all of us in my family. I was the first person on either side of my family to go to college, as far back as anyone knew or could remember. That’s at least five generations. My sister was sad and angry. My mom was nervous and worried. And my dad was stoic.

Just wanted to send a quick note out.  Seven years ago today, the Vanguard published its first entry. I’ve published this piece at the exact time the first publication occurred.

This was the first entry I ever wrote, on the free blogger software.  I think it was not until late September of that year when I realized people were actually reading this stuff that I had started publishing every single day.

When the Davis City Council in December 2008 declined to read the full Davis Fire Report written by investigator Bob Aaronson, they agreed to allow then City Manager Bill Emlen to summarize the report and present it to the Davis City Council in their meeting in January 2009.

As Bob Aaronson responded to a question the accuracy of Mr. Emlen’s account and the degree to which it reflected the tone and content of the report, Mr. Aaronson implied heavily that Mr. Emlen’s was not particularly faithful to the tone and content.

One of the big questions looming over the release of the fire report is of what value is it to the public four and a half years after the fact.  However, the release of the report, as shown in the recent Davis Enterprise article over the weekend, forces public officials to have to answer for their comments and their conduct.

The story on Sunday by Tom Sakash puts former Chief Rose Conroy and former Councilmembers Don Saylor and Stephen Souza on the record.

“On April 24, 2013 I was told by the City of Davis that it intended to release the 2008 confidential report on the investigation of the Fire Department, unedited, which it had hired attorney Bob Aaronson to conduct,” wrote former Davis Fire Chief Rose Conroy on June 19 in a piece that was published on June 24 on the Friends of Davis Firefighters website.  “I had never been given or even seen an unredacted copy of the report while employed as the Fire Chief; in fact, I had only seen the redacted version when it was released to the public last year. “

What the chief does not tell her readers, of course, is that that was by her own doing and that she had been offered the opportunity by the city to read the full report at the time of its release, and she declined to do so.

By Rob White

It’s the 4^th of July and our experiment in a new form of government is now 237 years old. And over two and 1/3 centuries later we are still working through how this government works through the fine points in a system of “government of the people, by the people, and for the people.”

Several days ago, I had the privilege of speaking at a lunch-time brown bag with members of the Davis Downtown Business Association. We talked about many topics at the brown bag, but Lincoln’s words (above) now resonate in my mind… like our federal government system that is constantly striving for a more perfect union, our efforts in Davis-centric economic development should be analogous. And perhaps, they should be revolutionary.

Conversations are always better when they are two-way conversations rather than one-way, and so I urged former City Councilmember Stephen Souza to follow through with his promised follow-up post from Friday or, even better yet, to submit to going on the record and face what will admittedly be tough and at times unpleasant questions about his role in the cover up of the fire report.

Stephen Souza, to whom I give credit for coming on the Vanguard at all, said, “I will in a short while speak to this scurrilous attack upon my integrity in carrying out the over site of city personnel through our only 2 directly hired personnel, the City Attorney and the City Manager.”

Read the Full Unredacted Fire Report at the bottom of the article – This week Rich Rifkin tells the tale of “When union money corrupted the Davis City Council.”  Mr. Rifkin writes that, in the seven decades since Mayor Calvin Covell’s resolution “which urged the prohibition of Japanese nationals and Japanese-American citizens,” “I know of no lower ebb for our Council than the night of Dec. 9, 2008.”

That was the meeting where the council majority voted to bury the report by Bob Aaronson.

By Rob White

Today I read an article in Government Technology e-Magazine about the newly selected cities that will join Kansas City metro area in getting the next round of Google Fiber… Provo, Utah and Austin, Texas!  (The Google Perspective: Gigabit Internet in Local Government, May 28, 2013, by Colin Wood)

Though I am not really surprised that either city was selected – each has been recognized as an emerging tech center – I was surprised that the Google representative interviewed described that one of the leading reasons for selection was that local officials in each city “wouldn’t take no for an answer.”