City of Davis

On July 8, it was announced that a deal had been reached to bring the DeLano’s Market to the long vacant grocery store site in West Lake Shopping Center, a site that had been vacant since May of 2006.  At that time, though an agreement was in placed, the lease had not been formally signed.  And while expected to be a formality, it has taken over a month and a half for the agreement to finally be signed.

On Monday that agreement was officially signed according to Harley DeLano, the company’s CEO.

Homeowners Ivette Santaella and Rex Ramsey received good news on Aug. 11, 2009, seven days after taking debt collector Angius and Terry LLC to Contra Costa Superior Court.  The two finally won their hard fought case.  Earlier, in April, the pair succeeded in a small claims suit against the debt collector, but the collection company appealed the ruling.  That appeal was heard on August 4, 2009.  The President of the Center for California Homeowners Association Law (of which I am a board member) attended the hearing, following the testimony with great interest.

The Ballot statements for and against Measure P have been submitted to the County Clerk.  These are both of them verbatim.

Signing the ballot statement for Measure P are Jay Gerber, Business Owner/ former President Davis Chamber of Commerce; Tansey Thomas, former City Council Candidate and Community Activist; Stan Forbes Business Owner and former Davis City Councilmember; Pam Nieberg, Environmental Activist; and Ken Wagstaff, Former Mayor of Davis.

On Wednesday the Davis Enterprise reported a two-car collision around noon that knocked out the city’s fire hydrant at Fifth and E Streets and blocked traffic.

According to the report:

The business community has expressed concerns about a Fifth Street redesign that would drop the lanes on Fifth from four to two while adding bike lanes and turn pockets.  They argue that this would reduce the amount of traffic the street can carry and therefore harm the downtown.  However, as one person has expressed, why is having a four lane urban highway through town leading directly to the new Target in the best interest of downtown?

A new modeling study performed by UC Davis shows in fact many of those fears are simply unfounded.  They find capacity with a two lane road unchanged and throughput improving significantly in the westbound direction and only slightly slower in the eastbound direction–seven seconds added for the entire drive from L Street to A Street.  The results of this model also show other improvements that lend themselves well to other goals in the city.

At the January 29, 2008 City Council meeting, the council took up the issue of Wildhorse Ranch (WHR). At that time, the consensus was that the WHR proposal they were looking at was just another housing development, and it lacked a “wow factor.”  That in fact was the night that the “wow factor” phrase was coined. At that time WHR was a 259 unit development with three and four story buildings, streets and homes abutting right against the existing Wildhorse neighbors’ backyards.

The leading voice in that night’s consensus was Councilmember Stephen Souza, who dismissed the project as just not having a “wow factor.”  During the 2008 campaign in an article in the California Aggie, Councilmember Souza made “wow factor” a part of his core reelection message. In that article he outlined his four components of “wow,” saying:

During the Target campaign it was often argued that Davis’ Downtown would bare the brunt of the impact from Target.  Those opposing Target argued that people would divert their shopping from the Davis Downtown to the periphery when Target was constructed.  Those supporting Target argued on the contrary that most of the Target shoppers already go up to Woodland to shop at Target now and that all a Davis Target would do would be to transfer shoppers at the Woodland Target to Davis and keep the sales tax revenues in Davis.

This debate took place in 2006 during a very different economic time.  Nevertheless the Target Development Agreement included 100,000 dollars for “community enhancement.”  The Davis Downtown Business Association submitted a proposal to city staff for the the use of that money in order to conduct a multi-media marking campaign to help focus people on shopping in the downtown.

Previously in Part I of this 2-part series, the general wood burning problem in Davis was discussed and a summary of the latest regrettable City Council decision was presented. Additionally, a detailed chronology of events from the initial Council discussions on the matter through the inception of the recent Cahill-Staff study was presented. This Part II continues with a discussion of the objectives and results of that study and further discusses recent discussions and decisions at the Council level (see Part I).

The Davis City Council yesterday met during the morning for their annual August meeting before taking their annual August break.  Council is required to meet at least once per month.  The Council is scheduled to resume in just four weeks on September 1, 2009.  Ordinarily this meeting is ceremonial and has limited items, however this year, due to a backlog of items from last week, the council actually had items to discuss including possible funding for the Fifth Street project.

Members of the community came forward during the item to ask council to include 5th Street among the projects that they would seek money for.

Very quietly on Tuesday’s meeting, the Davis City Council voted for a consent agenda item that would allow for the delay of initiation of the work by the Senior Housing Strategy Committee.  This was the committee created at the behest of Councilmember Stephen Souza that would study the issue of senior housing that was pushed forward this spring by the lobbying efforts of the Covell Partners as they seek to bring back Covell Village.

This is another example of Councilmember Stephen Souza coming up with a clever idea during the council meeting but not having throught through the implementation of the process.  The form and structure of the committee changed drastically throughout the process, but the goal was for the committee to make a recommendation to the City Council by the end of 2009.  To do that, it was scheduled to meet nine times between July 30 and November 19.

In a long and meandering meeting that began at 5 pm with a joint discussion with Woodland City Council on water, ended just before 2 am with a 3-2 vote to deliver the Wildhorse Ranch Project for a Measure J vote in November 2009.

Councilmembers Sue Greenwald and Stephen Souza repeatedly attempted to delay this discussion, in part based on the lateness of the hour and in part based on not only the complexity of the issues but also problems that they had with the project.

On Tuesday, the Davis City Council will decide whether or not to approve the 191 unit, 25.8 acre Wildhorse Ranch project and forward it to the voters for an election per Measure J requirements.

Staff recommends full approval of the project in each of its component parts. The request is to change the land use designations for the site from agriculture, where the property currently contains a horse farm, to residential.

After a lengthy period of outreach by the developers to the Wildhorse Each Neighborhood Association and other adjacent neighborhoods as well as the community at large, and working with city staff, the neighborhood association opted to oppose the project. Nevertheless, city staff believes that “this site plan configuration is acceptable, and addresses most of staff concerns expressed about previous plans.”