City of Davis

There is a growing concern about how committed staff is to the success of this project, that I will discuss at length below.

They have also added the city of Davis to their ongoing efforts to litigate against the city.  The Vanguard learned last week that Councilmember Stephen Souza attempted to put an end to conflict between DACHA and Neighborhood Partners and Twin Pines.

When these concerns were presented to council and other concerns were mentioned by a member of the public, the council made the decision to pull the item back and make some changes to it.  However, from our reading of this item it still lacks two key components.  First, there is no provision as to the timeline in which these issues would be heard by a commission.  Second, while the new item does expand the purview of required review to include the Budget and Finance Commission, a large step up, there would seem that we could fairly reliably give direction to staff when other commission should review.  More on that shortly.

For the first time, council this Tuesday will be presented with recommendations on how to do this.  This will not be a slam dunk by any means, the business community has come out against the proposal even though if anything it would vastly improve traffic flow through the core and therefore the ability of the downtown customers to get to their destination.  More on that shortly.

Judge Reed quickly ruled that he was allowing the city to now be named in the suit.  The bigger issue was whether the Judge would issue a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) against the foreclosure of the DACHA property.  He declined to rule on it on Tuesday citing that he had not had time to read all of the documents.  That hearing was scheduled to take place at 10 am on Thursday morning.  The foreclosure auction was set to occur at 12:45 on Thursday.

Although three highly paid lawyers for the city of Davis had prepared a large number of materials to argue against the City being now named in the lawsuit, Judge Reed quickly ruled that he was allowing the city to now be named in the suit.  According to one source in attendance, City Attorney Harriet Steiner attempted to object but Judge Reed told her, you’ve been named.

What we know so far is that Joseph Whitcombe, the son of developer John Whitcombe has spearheaded the drive against R apparently by himself.  He wrote the ballot arguments against it.  He challenged the title of the Measure R ballot measure itself in court, representing himself in court against City Attorney Harriet Steiner.  From the arguments he made in open court, it became very clear that it was him acting alone.