Nishi money spills into tax measures

By Gilbert Coville

As we all know, it’s illegal to give money to an elected official in exchange for a favorable vote. However, monied interests get around this by contributing to elected officials’ pet projects if a vote goes their way.

This doesn’t happen in Davis. Or does it?

On Feb 6, our city council voted to advance the Nishi 2.0 student housing project to a Measure R vote. They were clearly not as excited about this project as they were with the previous Nishi proposal (just search on YouTube: “Davis council lukewarm”). However, they advanced the project to the ballot anyway; it is now Measure J. The Council continues to promote the project, with the mayor as the de facto spokesperson for Yes on Measure J.

The Council also is promoting two local tax measures, H and I, to help fund local park and road maintenance. Two Council members are officers of the committee promoting these measures, and Council members have been staffing its table at the Farmers Market.

As reported in the Enterprise on May 27, the Yes on Measures H & I committee received contributions from three Council members and a local county supervisor, totaling just over $1,000. There’s nothing wrong with that. However, the report also shows that most of the funding comes from just one contribution: a whopping $5,000 from John and Judy Whitcombe. John Whitcombe is a co-developer of the Nishi project and a founding partner of Tandem Properties. He and his family directly benefit from the Council’s past and continued advocacy of Measure J.

Reasons for this contribution could be innocent, but they could also be improper.

The amount of money surrounding Measure J is staggering. The Nishi Developers have spent more than a quarter-million dollars so far on Measure J, in addition to this $5,000 contribution to H&I.

I don’t support Measure J for reasons articulated in the Enterprise and elsewhere. However, I was likely to vote for H and I.

The stench of impropriety related to this contribution is sickening. I will now be voting “No” on all three measures.

[Note: I first wrote this as a letter to the editor for the Davis Enterprise and it was published online here.  Subsequent email with the editor on Friday afternoon indicated that it would not be appearing in the print edition because I am also a co-author on a forthcoming Nishi op-ed, and I was told that it was too late to take my name off the op-ed].