City of Davis

Public Finally Gets Hearing on Eleven Million Dollar Water Tank

Last week the Vanguard reported that the Davis City Council had quietly slipped approval of a nearly eleven million dollar water tank project past the residents of the city of Davis.

On July 15, 2008, on the consent calendar, the Davis City Council adopted a resolution authorizing the City Manager to executive a consultant agreement with West Yost Associates for East Davis Water Tank.  The fiscal impact for those consultant fees was expected not to exceed 600,000 dollars.

Developer Trying To Drive Discussion On Covell Development

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Last year the Vanguard foiled a plan by the Covell Village developers to rig a community meeting by the Housing Element Steering Committee (HESC) that sought input from the community about its proposed sites for development by 2013.  At that time, the group that brought us Covell Village and the 60% defeat of Measure X in 2005, sent out talking points with explicit instructions on how to fill out the community feedback forms to move Covell Village from a site not being considered for development by 2013 to a priority.

However, the Vanguard with the help of concerned community members intercepted the email and the plot was largely foiled.

Are City Budget Assumptions Too Optimistic?

citycatThis week begins the long process of looking at the city budget where the City Council along with City Staff must deal with the short-term budget deficit and hopefully deal with the longer term structural issues dealing with employee compensation.

This article will simply look at the overview presented this week and wonder whether the numbers presented here are simply too optimistic.  Part of these figures are based on projected outcomes from negotiations with the bargaining units.  That process is ongoing and does not figure to be resolved prior to the budget’s passage on June 23, 2009.

Will New Target Be in Violation of Development Agreement?

TargetindavisWhen the new Target was set to be placed on the ballot, the city went to great pains to assure existing neighborhood grocery stores that Target would not be a new competitor.  Indeed Target specifically was forbidden from containing more than 20% food services in a specific effort to avoid competition either with the South Davis Nugget Market or the nearby East Manor Shopping Center which is now bare.

However, in the Sacramento Bee yesterday, the article suggests a new emphasis on food sections at the Davis Target.

Why Do Firefighters Make Substantially More Than Police Officers in Davis?

davis_firedepartment.jpgLast night at the Davis City Council meeting, the city unveiled the budget.  Because the budget itself did not get to council until late in the afternoon, the city generally spoke in generalities rather than specifics.  In the coming days and weeks, we will look at the budget itself more closely.  For now, we want to focus on one particular issue that arose during the course of council discussion.

Finance Director Paul Navazio suggested that part of the more than three million dollar budget deficit will be closed through contract negotiations.  Mr. Navazio is proposing somewhere around 860,000 dollars or so of the budget will be closed through contract negotiations.  The question then comes to where should that come from and how should the city proceed with negotiations.

How Council Quietly Approved a 10 Million Dollar Water Project

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The Davis City Council recently approved a ten million dollar water project that was on the consent agenda with no discussion of the costs of the project, its design, size, impact or alternatives.  When Councilmember Sue Greenwald pulled the item from the consent agenda, the discussion was delayed until the end of the meeting, by that point the council was so tired they refused to discuss it and simply approved it.

The genesis of this approval began on July 15, 2008 with another consent item.  The council at that time approved a consultant agreement with West Yost Associates to prepare plans, specifications and estimates for the subject project.  The consultant agreement was not to exceed $600,724.

DANG and City Council Keeping the Pressure on Westlake

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The month of May marks the third year in which the space at Westlake Plaza that used to be occupied by Rays and then Food Fair lay vacant.  In this space we have criticized the city of Davis for dragging its feet in terms of putting pressure on the owners to comply with current zoing and general plan requirements that the space be occupied by a grocery store.

That has slowly changed with the efforts of DANG (Davis Advocates for Neighborhood Groceries) and articles that have been run by the Vanguard to put pressure on the city of Davis and ownership to finally bring a store there.

City Unveils Guiding Principles for Employee Negotiations

citycatLast Tuesday, the Davis City Council passed and read these principles into the record.  One thing that has become clear is that the Davis City Council is now under a tremendous amount of pressure to appropriately deal with the ongoing labor negotiations.

For the first time, the Davis City Council really acknowledges some of the problems that it faces in long-term, not just short-term fiscal stability and addresses key issues that are facing it as it attempts to go into good-faith labor negotiations.  The first step is always to define the problem.  However, the key will be to not just acknowledge the problem, but to actually hold employee groups and city staff posing as negotiators to the fire with regards to compensation packages.

 

Townhall Meeting Responses On Public Participation

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On Wednesday evening at the Veteran’s Memorial Center, the Davis Neighborhood Coalitions and the People’s Vanguard of Davis hosted a townhall meeting on the budget.  The panel consisted of City Finance Director Paul Navazio, Budget and Finance Commission Chair Johannes Troost, and past chair of that commission and Sac State Professor Mark Siegler.

In addition to asking the panel eight preset questions, and taking questions from the audience, we also asked the audience a key question and had them submit the answers to be posted on the Vanguard today.

The De-Greening of Davis

environmental_sustainability.jpgDavis Should Implement a Ban on All Non-Recyclable Takeout Containers and Impose a Fee on Plastic Bags used at Retail Stores

By Pam Nieberg –

Introduction

We are polluting the world’s oceans with petroleum based materials that take hundreds to thousands of years to decompose.  Sixty to eighty percent of marine debris overall and up to ninety percent of floating debris is plastic.  In at least one area in the Pacific, plastic debris outweighs plankton by a factor of six. This debris is carried across the globe by ocean currents, and, as it is broken down by the sun, it joins the huge masses of plastic particles in our oceans that threaten marine wildlife.  According to the California Coastal Commission, more than 1 million sea birds, 100,000 marine mammals, including filter feeding whales, and countless fish are killed annually in the north Pacific alone from ingesting or becoming entangled in marine debris.  Furthermore, due to their chemical composition, plastic particles can accumulate toxins on their surface which then poison the animals exposed to them.

Word To The Wise: Food For Thought

citycat.pngBy E.A. Roberts –

Item 1.  In the Sunday, May 17 Davis Enterprise appears an editorial entitled “Those at the top are easy targets”, defending recent pay raises to the wealthiest public employees.  What is interesting to note is another article “They’ll drink to that” announcing UCD’s plan for its new cutting-edge winery, along with a front page headline screaming “Budget is in hands of angry electorate”.  Apparently no one at the Davis Enterprise put two and two together.  Perhaps the electorate is angry because they see fat cats at the top levels of state government still pigging out at the public trough as per usual, while the state budget takes a nose dive into deep, dark oblivion.
In the past several weeks, the Enterprise has reported on the following:

 

Davis Shown A Way Forward on Water, but Will They Take It?

waterThe Davis City Council on Tuesday night heard a presentation from Dr. Ed Schroeder and Dr. George Tchobanoglous that has the potential to change the way we proceed on the water project, but only if the council majority will let it.  That became more clear after their presentation was over and the council proceeded to approve by a 3-2 vote a resolution authorizing the City Manager to Execute Consultant Agreement with West Yost Associates for Wastewater Reclamation Alternative Analysis as a SOLE SOURCE AGREEMENT.

This means they are essentially allowing West Yost to have non-competitive bids for conducting Wastewater Reclamation Alternative Analysis.  What is left up in the air now is how much this changes what seemed to be a very promising development earlier in the evening when Drs. Schroeder and Tchobanoglous made their presentation following the April 14 release of their consultant study.

Council Stalls on 5th Street Redesign

by Steve Tracy –

This is a follow-up to the May 5th City Council hearing on 5th Street.

Once again an opportunity has been missed to move forward with the redesign that is in the adopted General Plan.  Replacing the 4 lane street we now have with the two lane plus left turn lane and bike lane configuration will finally provide some safety for the numerous bicyclists and pedestrians using the corridor, and has no negative impacts on vehicle flow.  The two most recent traffic models, one funded by the City and one from the UC Davis School of Engineering show that the redesigned street will actually improve traffic flow and travel times.

Group Pushes For Westlake and East Manor To be Added to the Redevelopment Agency

As we have been reporting for months, Westlake Plaza has remained without a grocery store anchor that is required by the city’s general plan, since May of 2006. Earlier this year it looked like the group and the owner of the property had reached a deal with the Delanos, owners of a small Bay Area chain of stores to bring a roughly 11,000 square foot grocery store to the vacant store.  However, that deal fell through when the owner apparently pulled an offer for down payment on the funding.

When Food Fair left in 2006, the owners caused considerable damage to the site, filling in the cargo bay and stripping out all of the infrastructure within the store (see photos taken in early April).

Chief Black Responds to Former Chief’s Disparaging Comments of DPD

landy_blackChief Landy Black’s first inclination was to let the past be the past in response to comments by Former Davis Police Chief and current Antioch Police Jim Hyde in the magazine 110°.

The Vanguard quoted extensively from these comments on Wednesday.  Among other things, Chief Hyde accused the Davis police department of fabricating crime statistics and compared the department and personnel to that of the fictional comedic buffoons of Reno 911.

Davis Goes on a Low Carb Diet, But Others Are Losing Weight Much Faster

The Vanguard will have an ongoing series on the browning of Davis which will argue that Davis has fallen behind other communities in terms of environmental policies, notably with regards to climate change.  Before the series has even begun, this notion has generated a considerable amount of debate and discussion from people in somewhat surprising quarters arguing that Davis is doing far more than a lot of other communities with regards to climate change.

By way of example the city of Davis presented last week a short presentation to a county climate action group on their Low Carbon Diet program.

Former Chief Offers Insulting Depiction of DPD

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Former Davis Police Chief Jim Hyde is back in the news, this time as a feature story in a May edition of a local Contra Costa County indy magazine, 110°.  110° Magazine is self-described as a publication that personalizes the community by focusing upon the people, places, and businesses of Contra Costa.

The article on Jim Hyde is bound by a picture of him aiming his weapon towards the reader with a caption that reads:

TOWNHALL MEETING ON THE BUDGET

Join the Davis Vanguard and Davis Neighborhood Coalition for a Town Hall meeting on Davis’s impending budget crisis.

The meeting will take place Wednesday, May 20, from 7 to 9 p.m. in the Veteran’s Memorial Center Multipurpose Room, 203 E. 14th Street in Davis.

The meeting features a panel of speakers consisting of City of Davis Finance Director, Paul Navazio; City of Davis Budget and Financing Commission chair, Johannes Troost; and CSUS Professor of Economics and Department Chair, Mark Seigler.

Soothing the Public with His Words on Water

Mayor Pro Tem Saylor Talks the Angry Public Down on Water –

Don Saylor spoke to the public following a rather heated public session where angry residents weighed in on their complaints about a possible new rate structure.

It is instructive to see how the Mayor Pro Tem attempts to quell public dissent using his moderate tone.  The difference between watching the comments and reading them is instructive.