City of Davis

It was a good beginning to a conversation on Tuesday night, as the first Innovation Park Community Forum featured a very engaging discussion. Six sector experts in the business and technology fields gave presentations that were followed by a smaller community discussion.

There were certainly some strengths of the meeting, as listening to the voices within our community like Meg Arnold, Mary Kimball, Bob Medearis, John Buckel, Dushyant Pathak, and Mike Rizzo was worthwhile by itself.   For those who missed this event, later today, we will (hopefully) post YouTube videos of the six presenters.

“This isn’t the Davis Way,” Carrie Shaw writes in a letter to the editor in the Enterprise.  She argues, while what David Morris and ConAgra are doing “isn’t illegal,” that “it certainly is smelly, self-serving and doesn’t uphold Davis community values.”

She writes, “The way I see it, by soliciting a $2 million pledge from ConAgra, Morris (through his Capitol Corridor Ventures ‘nonprofit’) is siphoning off, for his own focused agenda, significant funds that ConAgra should be investing into The Cannery project so that it meets Davis community standards and is an asset to the town overall.”

On Tuesday, the public is invited to attend the first Innovation Park Community Forum to discuss the findings and conclusions of the City’s Innovation Park Task Force and learn more about the options and issues the City of Davis will be considering in taking action to meet the needs of growing  technology businesses.

The meeting will begin on Tuesday at the Community Chamber at 5 pm.  There will be a 30-minute staff presentation to provide an overview of the Innovation Park Task Force findings and recommendations.  Included will be a summarization of the October 22, 2013, city council meeting and the meeting from last week of the Innovation Park Task Force, which mainly discussed process.

By Tia Will

An interesting question recently resurfaced in an opinion piece in The NYT. The best known recent fictionalization of this concept was in the form of the novel and movie The Children of Men. The central premise is how our behavior might change if there were no future for humanity. For me, this would represent the epitome of the potential for purely selfish thinking.

A Vanguard poster whose views frequently run contrary to mine put forth his ideas that we “slow growthers” are not thinking of future generations, but are considering only our own selfish interests and that those are based on our fear of change. This caused me to take a close look at my actual motivations. What I discovered is my bias and how I arrived at it. So I thought I would share my perspective on change and interests over time.

When I first learned of the revelations that ConAgra had donated a large amount of money to David Morris about six weeks ago, my first reaction is that this is going to kill the Cannery Project.  At this point, I believe that was a premature reaction and assessment.

While I think the donation for a startup fund was an interesting idea by ConAgra – and at the time may have made sense if the issue of losing the business park land potential became the leading criticism of the Cannery proposal – as I have stated numerous times this week, I find most of the explanations a bit perplexing and not fully adding up.

By Robb Davis

Editor’s note:In September this article was first published.  Based on the recent discussion, the author asked that it be republished.

Markets fail when transactions do not result in efficient outcomes from a societal point of view.  One cause of market failure concerns the problem of one partner in a transaction having more or better information than the other.  The lack of (quality) information by one party leads to power imbalances that can harm one party and inappropriately confer benefits on another that a free market transaction would not allow.

Two recent examples of information asymmetries related to land use decisions in and around Davis explain why we as citizens tend to approach such decisions in what appears to be narrow, self-interested and ultimately very conservative ways.  In both cases it is clear that one party in the transaction possesses more and better information that risks placing the City at a disadvantage in the transaction it is negotiating.

The revelation that ConAgra agreed to make a sizable charitable donation to David Morris’ non-profit Capitol Corridor Ventures raises far more questions than were answered yesterday.  I am still stuck at the same point I was originally: what exactly did ConAgra expect to gain out of the contribution and what did they think David Morris could do to advance their project?

There are several key points I think that need to be raised here.  First, let us talk about the project itself.  An easy point to be made here is that the project itself should rise and fall on its own merits.  I will drill down into this issue in a bit, but I do not see on the surface any reason why a charitable contribution should be the reason that this project succeeds or fails.

In what has been described as a “charitable contribution” from ConAgra to Capitol Corridor Ventures (CCV), the Vanguard has learned that the company, that has been working to entitle the Cannery project to put a mixed-use housing and commercial development on the site of the former tomato plant, has a $2 million deal with David Morris, the head of CCV as well as TechDavis, whereby ConAgra will make the contribution upon completion of the entitlement process.

The Vanguard, in response to an anonymous tip, conducted a nearly six-week investigation into allegations that, while vague, seem to point toward some sort of beneath-the-table deal.  This week for the first time, ConAgra consultant George Phillips and CCV’s David Morris acknowledged on the record this agreement, but downplayed the bulk of the criticism.

In his dissent last Tuesday, Mayor Joe Krovoza pushed back against a 391-acre or larger business park that some have been pushing on the Leland Ranch property east of Mace Blvd.

“I will not support the motion on the floor,” he said.  “I am completely puzzled.  For the three years I have served on this council, we’ve been considering straight up in public forums the option of a wonderful open space easement that we’ve been using our open space funds to acquire.”