This is a new feature. Each afternoon we will have a question that we pose the Vanguard community. Sometimes it will be a local issue, sometimes a national issue, and sometimes a deeper and more philosophic questions.
Today’s question: Is MLK’s non-violent resistance possible without the Christian conception of God and the notion of redemption, Christian love, and turning the other cheek?
To err is inextricably part of the human experience. And really the key measure of errors is how they are handled after they are made.
On August 2, 2012, the City proudly announced that they had launched a new website. In a press release, the city manager’s office wrote: “As part of an overall effort to improve communications and reach out to the community, the City of Davis has launched a new website look and structure.”
Since July 30, 2006, I have been bringing this community an alternative voice on the news, and commentary on the issues that impact us all. Over that time, naturally my style and voice have evolved. Just read some of my early pieces and you will see that
In that time, there have been huge changes in my life. Read the pieces from December 8, 2009 and September 7, 2011, again realizing that newborn babies suddenly came into my home. In all of this time, I have missed only one day through unplanned illness..
To our readers: We launched our fundraising drive at the beginning of December and we have done very well so far. We set a goal of ten thousand dollars and we have raised about $7000 of it.
by the Davis Vanguard Editorial Board – Over the years when regular readers of the Vanguard happened to run into one another on the street or at the Farmers Market, asking about the day’s articles and comments in David’s Blog was frequently part of the ensuing conversation. For some the term David’s Blog was both a descriptor and a limitation. In the five years since Matt Williams first posted in July 2007 about a loophole in Measure J we’ve all seen both the Vanguard and David grow, and part of that growth has been a recurring refrain from David that “if the Vanguard is going to be truly valuable to the Davis/Yolo community, it needs to evolve into more than David’s Blog.”
Three months ago, the Vanguard took the most recent step in that evolution by creating an Editorial Board comprised of Robb Davis, Bernie Goldsmith, Tia Will, Matt Williams, Cecilia Escamilla Greenwald and David. Bernie has since had to pursue employment away from Davis, so the Editorial Board currently numbers five.
For six years, the Vanguard has believed that Davis needs to both extend and codify its open government provisions. This November, the city of Dixon, which is also a general law city, will have an ordinance on the ballot that will put sweeping changes in their open government policies into effect.
On Friday, I presented this proposal to the Davis City Council. There have been some modifications since then. Many of the provisions have been taken and often modified from the proposals in the Dixon ballot initiative. In addition, there are some additions to that ballot initiative that the Vanguard is proposing.
Few things incite or inspire more blowback than the use of anonymous sources. To be fair, this is a long debate in the journalistic community.
In March 2009, the New York Times‘ public editor wrote: “The Times has a tough policy on anonymous sources, but continues to fall down in living up to it. That’s my conclusion after scanning a sampling of articles published in all sections of the paper since the first of the year.”
Dear Readers: Earlier this week the Davis Vanguard was hacked. It seems to have impacted ability to…
One of the biggest non-policy criticisms of the city has been that their communications system was hopelessly locked in the last century (sometimes I joke that it’s using 19th century technology).
The city has not updated its modes of communication appreciably to make use of electronic mail, social networking, or a new interaction and robust website.
Yesterday there was a spirited discussion here on the Vanguard about a long-standing challenge that the Vanguard faces . . . how best to handle reader-submitted comments that are tangentially related to the published article. Tangential comments are not bad in their own right, but they often do sidetrack discussion of the article’s topic. I would like to propose a solution to that problem, and hope that readers will comment on that proposed solution here.
A simple straightforward solution to the off-topic issue is that when a reader sees an article that s/he believes is only addressing a selected portion of a larger “whole” picture, and feels that it is important to make a “tangential” point that fleshes out that whole picture, then I suggest that s/he submit an e-mail to David Greenwald containing the additional points so that he can post an article under the e-mail sender’s byline that runs side-by-side with the original story. For example, I think a very interesting parallel article for Mayor Krovoza’s thoughts on “long-term, environmentally sustainable economic cores for Davis” could have been submitted by Michael Harrington as follows:
Today is the Vanguard‘s 6th anniversary, having been founded on July 30, 2006 at the davisvanguard.blogspot.com website. In March of 2009, we launched the current davisvanguard.org site – custom built by the folks at Hathway Tech.
On Tuesday night, Mayor Joe Krovoza announced that the council had met in closed session and made a reportable action. By a 4-1 vote, the council had formally agreed to a settlement agreement with The People’s Vanguard of Davis, codifying the decision from late May to turn over a less-redacted version of the three and a half year old Davis Fire Report.
A few weeks ago, the Vanguard, through a public records act request and a subsequent lawsuit against the city of Davis, obtained a less redacted version of the Davis Fire Report that was originally presented to the public in January of 2009.
The most revealing new detail was newly released accounts of the April 2007 promotional process in which the city would promote two employees to the position of captain. The Davis Enterprise on Wednesday covered this story and was able to get former Fire Chief Rose Conroy to speak on the record on this for the first time.
On January 13, 2009, the City Manager in the city staff report gave his own analysis of the report completed by the city’s ombudsman, Robert Aaronson. For a time, this was the only available version of the report – certainly the only report available to the public until on February 9, 2009, the city released a heavily-redacted report to the Vanguard.
Wrote Mr. Emlen of the purpose of his report: “Our objective through this process was to elaborate on the issues raised and either dispel as warranted, or confirm and set the table for follow-up actions.”
However, no matter how bad the individual conduct of an individual councilmember was that evening, it is not the worst thing I have seen from our city council. That distinction falls on December 9, 2008 when the Davis City Council voted 3-2 to abdicate their duties to the citizens of Davis.
The City of Davis took a battering on the issue of DACHA (Davis Area Cooperative Housing Association) at the recent council meeting – many of those who called for further scrutiny into the city’s role have cited an often repeated figure for the city’s legal costs – 800,000 dollars.
Former Davis Mayor Anne Evans, the wife of David Thompson, one of the principals at Neighborhood Partners and Twin Pines, cited the figure in her recent letter to the city, in which she lobbied city leadership to “rise to the occasion and direct your staff accordingly. There is so much to be done on your watch, but affordable housing availability is not the least of those important items.”
The Vanguard provides the community of Davis and the County of Yolo with news and commentary, in addition to a place where local residents can discuss the issues of the day.
We have traditionally done so on a shoestring budget, but as the Vanguard has grown in the last couple of years, so too have its obligations.
by Matt WilliamsMeeting number 3 of the Water Advisory Committee is now in the books, and it was largely uneventful.
Committee Chair called the meeting to order and read a cautionary statement to all the members and alternates about the importance of not speaking in public about water/wastewater without clearly stating that any comments are personal, and not official comments of the WAC.
