Last week the Vanguard reported that the city had backtracked and had restored the supplemental fees at 12,000 dollars for the Verona Subdivision, we however missed the fine print.
It turns out that while the city is removing the middle income affordable requirement, they are keeping those units at the lower rate, 6000 dollars per unit rather than the 12,000 dollars the rest of the units are subject to.
While the City of Davis and the Davis City Council figure out what to do in wake of the collapse of McDonough, Holland and Allen, one of the largest firms in the region and the firm that the city has a contract with for City Attorney Services, one of the questions that has emerged is whether this is the appropriate time to reevaluate things.
The city council will not have a lot of time to review the City Attorney contract before the August Break, but there does seem to be some sentiment at least in the community to look into whether the city should continue to have a contract City Attorney.
Sometimes persistence pays off. City staff after criticism following the Finance and Budget Commission has reversed itself on the reduction of residential supplemental contributions for the Verona Subdivision and has decided to retain the 12,000 residential contribution that was originally approved in 2008.
The commission was concerned about the precedent for renegotiating the Development Agreement two years after the fact to more favorable terms for the developer. The original proposal would have seen the elimination of the middle income affordable requirement of 17 units per the city’s amendment policy that suspends that ordinance, the reduction of Supplemental Fees from $12,000 to $5,000 per unit, the elimination of the Parkland Dedication, the imposition of a park in-lieu fee and change in the timing of the water/ sewer connection fee.
How did the city of Davis find out about the impending closure of City Attorney Harriet Steiner’s law firm, McDonough, Holland and Allen? Apparently they found out when they read about it in the Vanguard.
That is how City Councilmember Sue Greenwald found out. None of the other councilmembers or the city manager appear to have known beforehand, either, despite the fact that this was a rather well-known possibility for several months, at least in Sacramento circles. As we reported last week, the law firm has been losing high-profile partners and attorneys for the past four months.
“We peacefully coexisted with AT&T until recently when they started work to bring U-Verse programming into West Davis,” they wrote in a letter to the city.
In July 2004, the Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB) implemented GASB 45 due to growing concern over the potential long term obligations of government employers for post-employment benefits. According to GASB 45, government employers were required to measure and report the liabilities associated with postemployement benefits which could include medical insurance and other benefits that are not associated with a pension plan.
For the city of Davis, the result of this new accounting practice showed that the city had a $40 to $60 million unfunded liability in its retirement health care benefits. As a result the city of Davis is now taking steps to insure full funding of retiree medical benefits. The process will take roughly thirty years at around a $4 million annual cost over and above the cost to fully fund the current year.
It was Tuesday night and there was yet another over-packed council agenda. There again Mayor Ruth Asmundson was trying to hasten the pace, but instead of doing this by limited the number of items on the agenda or sending the item back to staff to re-work, she simply attempted to cut off debate.
As per the usual, she applied this standard unevenly shutting down Councilmember Sue Greenwald, only to have Councilmember Lamar Heystek offer his lengthy comments which led to everyone else offering their thoughts. The irony is that by the time she tried to impose discipline, the cat was already out of the bag, the council had spent over two hours negotiating and wordsmithing and development agreement they had already approved just three months before.
Project Scope Generates Fiscal, Transportation, and Land Use Concerns – According to the release, because the Sports Park provides replacement fields for both Civic and Davis Little League the city is required to address the environmental impacts that would be associated with the fields being converted to housing. On November 5, 2009, the Davis City Council adopted an Updated Housing Element for the General Plan. Included in the Housing Element Update were designation of the Civic Center ball field and Davis Little League Complex as future infill housing sites in the General Plan.
We have been hearing for weeks about turmoil at the law firm of McDonough, Holland and Allen, where City Attorney Harriet Steiner is employed. As we have discussed in the past, the city has a contract City Attorney with an agreement with the law firm to retain the services of Harriet Steiner along with various support staff.
We have now learned that McDonough, Holland and Allen will close by September. The Sacramento Bee reported on Saturday, “The sagging economy apparently contributed to the imminent demise of a legal powerhouse in Northern California.”
As part of their contract, City of Davis employees can take their vacation time and cash it out. How much and under what circumstances that can occur depends on the employee and their contract. There are in fact substantial differences in the various contracts in terms of the restrictions and at times even encouragement to cash out vacation time.
This practice may be seen as problematic for a number of different reasons. First each contract has a line that declares, “The purpose of annual vacation leave is to enable each employee annually to return to work mentally refreshed.” This stated purpose would seem to be contradicted by the notion of being able to get cash in lieu of vacation time.
On Tuesday night, the Davis City Council unanimously passed the 2010-11 budget which while they believe is sufficient, they also acknowledged that more work lays ahead to fix the city’s overall fiscal picture and prevent or reduce future deficits.
This particular budget, closes a nearly million dollar gap in funding, and also restores the general fund reserve, that the city dipped into this fiscal year due to their inability to achieve the cost-savings from the employee bargaining agreements.
Despite objections from the neighbors, the Davis City Council allowed for third story lofts among other issues that they took up on Tuesday night regarding the Willowbank development proposed along the Putah Creek channel.
There are a number of procedural issues that arose during the lengthy discussion that I will discuss in the commentary portion of this article.
City Attorney Harriet Steiner last night at the Davis City Council Meeting announced that the Bankruptcy Court, Eastern District of California had ruled in summary judgment to dismiss involuntary bankruptcy proceedings against the alleged debtor, Davis Area Cooperative Housing Association, Inc. Ms. Steiner also reported that the petitioning party, Neighborhood Partners and Twin Pines Cooperative Foundation may also be sanctioned for attorney’s fees and court costs.
Summary judgment is appropriate in cases where there is “no genuine issue as to any material fact and the moving party is entitled to judgment as a matter of law.” In this case, the key question was whether DACHA was a “moneyed, business, or commercial cooperation,” that may be an involuntary debtor under section 303(a).
As we have been discussing, the Davis City Council will now weigh in on June 29 as to whether to amendment the Development Agreement approved in July of 2008 by the Davis City Council in conjunction with the Verona Subdivision, an 83 unit single family subdivision to developed on a vacant 8.55 acre parcel located at the southwest corner of Fifth Street and Alhambra.
As we have reported, of issue in this revision to the Development Agreement is the elimination of the middle income affordable requirement of 17 units per the city’s amendment policy that suspends that ordinance, the reduction of Supplemental Fees from $12,000 to $5,000 per unit, the elimination of the Parkland Dedication, the imposition of a park in-lieu fee and change in the timing of the water/ sewer connection fee.
On April 27, we ran an article entitled, “Slow Council Campaign About to Heat Up.” Up until that point, the council election had draw a handful of stories from the Vanguard and not much attention. From April 27 until today, about a month and a half period of time, the Vanguard has published 43 articles, commentaries, and other stories about the Davis City Council election.
We extensively covered every single candidate’s forum. We have had extensive analysis of the election after the fact. That does not even include numerous analyses that we did about issues that were vital to the campaign. I do not want to harp on this point for too long, but the Davis Enterprise continues to disappoint with regards to covering local issues.
It definitely caught my eye when Bob Dunning wrote on Friday, that it was time to pity the town’s “regressives.” In some ways, I suppose one could in fact suggest that this might mark the end of progressive era in Davis. But I would argue if that were the case, then the progressives have won.
Writes Bob Dunning: “STUCK IN LEFT FIELD – it’s really time to pity the town’s regressives – first they were unable to find anyone to oppose a completely vulnerable Don Saylor for county supervisor, then in the council race they finally decided to throw their ‘weight’ behind a McCain supporter who had no problem taking campaign donations from – you’d better sit down – developers – generally, taking money from a developer will earn eternal damnation from these folks, but not this time – turns out their new enemy is not developers, but firefighters – another sure sign The End is near – “
It is in the 90s and June, therefore it must be a good time to discuss the consequences of wood burning smoke. As those who read the Vanguard a week ago already know, eastern portions of Davis had a number of complaints (see Part One of Alan Pryor’s articles and Part Two). On Tuesday we will hear the views of city staff and the council.
The city of Davis has been hearing this issue now going on two years. We know that wood smoke, a contributing source of Particulate Matter 2.5 is harmful to the health of people above certain concentrations. The Natural Resources Commission has examined the issue and believes that Federal standards are not protective enough due to the regional nature of the standard and measurements that do not capture the micro or neighborhood effect of wood smoke exposure.
One thing that he mentioned in his speech was how they did it, and the biggest surprise of all is that despite finishing first, despite spending the most money in the campaign, he did not send out a single mailer. Instead they ran a very grassroots oriented campaign, organizing around neighborhoods and having neighbors talk to neighbors.
For the third time, the Verona revisions will be on the agenda and yet again only to push it off until June 29, 2010. That will be the second to last meeting of the lame duck council between Mayor Ruth Asmundson and Councilmember Lamar Heystek are replaced by newly elected Joe Krovoza and Rochelle Swanson.
But as we see there is a good amount of last second dealing going on. From my perspective the biggest question before council on the Verona project is whether to give back to the developer more than half a million dollars in impact fees. It is greatly ironic that Verona has been pushed back so many times.
Don Saylor as expected is now County Supervisor Elect Don Saylor, in a few weeks on July 13 he will be sworn in as the new Mayor of Davis while in a few months he will resign to become County Supervisor, representing the second district in Yolo County which serves much of Central and most of West Davis.
In the coming weeks and months, it figures to be a hot-buttoned issue just how Don Saylor handles that transition. He has taken increasing criticism for his decision to wait until January to resign which would force the council to either appoint a replacement or cost a good deal of money to have an election.