The City Council this week is being provided a report from City Manager Bill Emlen that gives an update on the NewPath Networks Permitting Issues that nearly resulted in cell towers being placed on private residential property.
The city has now issued on a stop work notice effective November 30 and a notice of recession of encroachment permits on December 5.
City and Enterprise Compete As To Who Can Be Most Misleading – We figured that the city would try to sell the public that this was a great deal for the city. We should have figured that the Davis Enterprise would be a willing partner to this obfuscation. However, we did not count on the magnitude of these efforts.
Action Puts in Jeopardy the Homes of Affordable Housing Residents for Little Good Reason According to the notice which was filed on November 19, 2009, they have three months to pay $59,427.28 or face the sale of the property without court action. In addition, they must make other normal payments as well.
Contract Falls Well Short of Needed Savings and Allows For No Period of Public Vetting The contract includes a decrease in salary over the next three years including a 6% decrease over the REMAINDER of the current fiscal year, in July of 2010 the salaries will be reduced by 4% over the current salary and in July 2011, a 3% reduction from current salaries.
On Tuesday, the Vanguard reiterated its opposition to the renewal of the city’s half-cent sales tax that first approved back in 2004. At Tuesday night’s Davis City Council meeting, Councilmember Lamar Heystek also reitreated his opposition to the sales tax extension that the City Council is currently considering placing on the June 2010 ballot unless the city’s financial system is fundamentally overhauled.
He cited among his reasons a lack of priority that the personnel cost savings target of 1.25 million dollars has taken in city negotiations that he believes will fall well short of that type of savings and will occur so late in the fiscal year that any cost savings realized with be mitigated in impact on the budget shortfall.
During the course of the discussion of Measure J, there was a good deal of concern about whether the proposed changes by staff were really technical and non-substantive or whether they actually represented something that could undermine the basic integrity of the measure.
At issue were two sections proposed by staff to clarify provisions of Measure J.
Tonight the Davis City Council will begin to assess the potential for renewing the half-cent sales tax. Staff is hoping the council will approve placement of the tax renewal on the June 2010 ballot.
In March of 2004, the Davis voters passed a one-half cent sales tax that will sunset on December 31, 2010 unless voters reauthorize the measure. According to the city’s staff report, the tax currently generates approximately 2.9 million dollars in annual general fund revenues, representing around 8% of the city’s overall General Fund.
Back in June, the Davis City Council agreed to place Measure J on the ballot as currently written with the current ten year sunset extended to 2020. At the same time they entertained the idea at the behest of Councilmember Stephen Souza to look into a business park exemption. The idea was to have commissions such as Business and Economic Development, Open Space, and the Planning Commission consider such an exemption. However, none of the commissioners were very interested in such a change.
In September, the City Council directed staff to return with necessary administrative documents prior to the end of the year to place the renewal of Measure J on the June 2010 ballot for voter consideration. At that time, Council also directed that the language of Measure J should remain unaltered, however they did provide for “technical edits” that were in fact discussed at the time.
In June of this year, it was announced that West Davis would finally have a grocery store after three years of the Westlake Shopping Center’s store sitting vacant. At that time they were shooting for an opening around Thanksgiving, however, that date quickly got pushed back to December 19. Based on an interview with the group DANG, Davis Advocates for Neighborhood Groceries, that date has been pushed back to the second week of January.
On November 30, 2009, DeLano Retail Partners President Dennis DeLano sat down with DANG for an interview on a wide range of topic. For the full interview, please see the DANG site.
A controversy has emerged in the Davis Village Homes community as neighbors suddenly were stunned to discover that a wireless company, known as New Path Networks would begin construction of a 35 foot high cell tower within the next few days. Now the neighbors claim that neither the city nor the company, informed them about the cell tower.
City Manager Bill Emlen at this week’s city council meeting quickly apologized for dropping the ball–a situation that seems all too familiar to many observers of city government. In fact as two of the neighbors, Alan Jackson and Elaine Fingerett spoke at council, a strange dynamic unfolded that showed that the city and by extension property owners have far less control of their property than they might wish to believe.
For fifteen years, the neighbors have had to deal with these high noise levels. Part of the problem that City Manager Bill Emlen used to explain the City’s apparent lack of action on this issue was that because this was a planned community, the day care center does not come with a conditional use permit. Mr. Emlen claimed that this prevented the city from having the teeth to enforce laws on the books and work with the neighbors to resolve the noise issue. However, as Mr. Emlen conceded there are a number of other tools that can be utilized.
Katherine Hess, the City’s Community Development Director, argues in the staff report that the ordinance is not covered under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA).
The purpose of Measure J was to give citizens the ultimate say any time the city expanded beyond its current boundaries or converted agricultural land into urban use. The Measure has been used exactly twice and both times the proposals were resoundingly defeated. First in 2005, the Covell Village proposal lost by a 60-40 margin. And most recently in November of this year, the Wildhorse Ranch Proposal was defeated by an even larger 75-25 margin.
While I may have seen merit in the most recent proposal, the voters had the ultimate say and they resoundingly said that now is not the time for a new peripheral development and they probably said now is not the time for more houses at all. I do not see any tweaking of this process that would have changed the result. The people spoke and Measure J may not have produced my preferred outcome, but it reflected the will of those who caste their votes in November.
Stunned is probably a good word for my reaction to reading a Sunday Op-Ed in the San Jose Mercury News from the President of the San Jose Fire Fighters, IAFF Local 230. He was responding to an op-ed that had been in the Mercury News back on November 4, 2009.
The discussion mirrors a debate that we should be having in Davis in light of the our current labor negotiations that have occurred behind closed doors where there can be no light of public scrutiny until the point at when they are concluded. At that point we have no agreed upon parameters whereby the public and the city council can scrutinize the contracts. Apparently we are not the only city undergoing these sorts of problems. But perhaps for the first time, we have been shown the light.
What Was The Upshot?
by Kevin Wolf – I chaired Sheryl Freeman’s city council campaigns in 1996 and also in 1998 when she won. I was involved with most of the major issues she addressed while she was on the council. We both were sick of the type of growth that occurred in the 1990s in Davis. Sheryl advanced a proposal that had an earlier vote on Measure J, but the citizen committee that drafted the final Measure J language had three votes on the council to adopt theirs as they had written it. Sheryl ended up joining council members Wagstaff, Partansky and Forbes in support of that version and both of us put time into the subsequent campaign for Measure J. We believed the final language had problems but was better than the status quo, and it would be reconsidered in ten years.
Regardless of the actual intentions, this represents a serious effort to muck up the waters on what would have been clear sailing for a pure renewal of the measure that enjoys around 75% support, a similar level of support as the last project was voted down.
By E. Roberts Musser (private citizen) – However, here is the curious thing. The city’s staff report to the Davis Senior Citizens Commission states “Staff is providing project details on the proposed Carlton Senior Assisted Living Care Facility proposal for informational purposes. Staff is soliciting comments from the Commission regarding the proposed use, but is not recommending any formal action be taken by the Commission on this item. The project will be reviewed at public hearings before the Planning Commission on Dec. 16, 2009 and the City Council on Jan. 12, 2010.” Nowhere in the city staff report to the commission does it state opposition to this project. Rather it sounds as if city staff is soliciting the Senior Citizens Commission’s input for consideration before any decision is made.
It is strangely interesting that just two weeks after the city voters overwhelming voted down a highly innovative Measure J project, the council majority is pushing forward with a 27-unit project that has almost no green features. That they did not approve the project on Tuesday night only delays the inevitable. There were serious enough problems with the current proposal that they simply could not go forward.
The most controversial portion of the proposal reduced the long-established 50-foot riparian buffer zone along the Putah Creek Parkway down to 30 feet. This went against the recommendation of the Open Space and Habitat commission and was seen by the council as going too far. It also went against what the Staff Report acknowledges went against general plan requirements.
In June, the question of Senior Housing was launched onto the Davis radar with the help of a developer-created and controlled group, CHA (Choices for Healthy Aging). As a result, the issue of Senior housing has been pushed to the fore.
The Council had originally agreed to create a special committee to the develop the senior housing strategy, however this process was suspended ostensibly due to a re-evaluation by the City administration of workloads and staffing commitments. So instead, the staff is taking these proposals to the Senior Citizens and Social Services Commission.
