By Tom Owczarzak
OK, think a few people will get this one right about this time.
I went to see my niece graduate last night. And not just graduate – give the Valedictorian Speech.
Yeah, cuz she is a serious badass.
Graduation is a heady experience. The excitement of the students, the charge in the air, the super proud families.
Summer just minutes away.
By Colin Walsh
Davis has a tradition that at the end of every City Election, all parties involved work together to sweep up the campaign signs from all corners of the City. It is a refreshing idea that no matter how hard fought the campaigns may be, the day after the election they all work together to clean up the town and signs are returned to the campaign from whence they came.
Having taken a day off to reflect, here are some of my thoughts about the election just completed.
First and foremost, let me assure everyone that the Davisite will continue! Some have speculated that this blog was created just to promote Nishi. That was never the case and time will show that to be true. If there have been a lot of articles about Nishi, that was because many of our current authors (myself included) were very engaged in that issue. The Davisite was always intended to be a blog by and for Davisites, which means that our content will always reflect our authors.
So, now is a good time to reissue a call for authors: send us your thoughts, be they political or not, artistic or not, funny or not. You can be a regular author, or send us something from time to time, or maybe just once – long or short, it doesn't matter. (But remember that on the Internet, most people don't want to read things that are very long!). The sidebar contains our contact info and comment policy, the latter of which serves as guidelines for authors as well.
Frankly, it still boggles my mind that the Nishi developers refused to allow air quality testing at their proposed development site. They had about all the benefits you can imagine, an ideal situation in that a famous UC Davis professor with the right equipment to do air quality monitoring offered to do the testing in a fair and systematic way (you can call it "scientific") in order to determine the unique patterns of air quality at a site that is below grade, adjacent to a very busy highway and wedged in by the railroad tracks. BUT THE DEVELOPERS SAID "NO!!!!".
WOW! A big "NO!!!!" to scientific testing.
Had they asked the Yolo County Epidemiologist like I did whether or not this kind of testing was advisable from a public health perspective, here is what they would have heard (communication from Dr. Dabritz:
By B. & D. Lindeman
As if 12 years of Reisig in the D.A.'s office isn't enough of a reason for a change in leadership. (hasn't anyone ever heard of the good idea of term limits?) But it's his latest campaign flyer that I received in the mail (4th one!) that compels me to write. Instead of promoting the supposed merits of the Reisig reign, it is mostly devoted to maligning the character of the man running against him: Dean Johansson! I'd say that kind of below-the-belt tactic maligns Reisig's character. It reminds me of the tactics of someone we all know who lives in the current White House.
Thus, if I had an overly simple rhyming campaign slogan, it might be, "Reisig is mean, so vote for Dean"! (maybe "overly aggressive" would be kinder but it doesn't rhyme). Fact: (not fake news, folks): Jeff Reisig, our Yolo County DA, brings more cases to jury trial per capita than any other DA in the state! That means that Reisig's office conducts more felony trials than counties that have a much higher population than ours. Yolo cannot be that much more crime ridden! This fact alone is a co$tly (for taxpayers) and valid reason for a change in D.A. leadership.
By Carey Ann Hunt
Transformation is incredible. The way we can totally count on the fact that one thing can and will turn into something else, amazing isn't? What you see now may or may not look the way that it does for long. Change is inevitable. Thankfully, transformative change is available if we choose to participate. So it is, too, with transforming wool into felt.
By Rik Keller
Summary
Based on extensive analysis of the Nishi project I did using my long-term professional experience as an affordable housing and city planning consultant, I found that there is a lot of dishonesty in how the project is being marketed by its proponents as “affordable”. The Yes on J campaign website touts its “groundbreaking, privately-funded affordable housing program,” However, when the numbers are looked at more closely, it is just marketing lingo that is covering up for the developers proposing to charge substantially more by running the project with a bed-lease arrangement rather than a room-lease or unit-lease arrangement. Fundamentally, the way the project is structured provides a large profit margin for the developer for the provision of expensive, exclusive housing compared to existing Davis rental rates.
The bottom line is that the ‘market rate’ units–consisting of 90% of the units in the project–will be among the most expensive, if not THE most expensive rental units in town, and even the majority of the ‘affordable’ units will be more expensive than average current city rental rates.
By Cara Bradley, Thomas Cahill, Gilbert Coville, Pam Gunnell, Marilee Hanson, Michael Harrington, David Kupfer, Robert Milbrodt, Roberta Millstein, Don Price, Nancy Price, Rodney Robinson, Johannes Troost, Dean Vogel, Colin Walsh, and Michael Yackey
Two years after Davis voters rejected the Nishi project at the polls, it’s back on the ballot as Measure J with the same pollution hazards from the adjacent I-80 freeway and railroad, but without the commercial component that was supposed to deliver significant revenue to the City.
Here are seven problems with the Nishi project:
By Matt Williams
In a May 31 Vanguard article and its comments the word of the day was “Crisis.” Over the past 12 months another political hype word has been in vogue … “maxi-dorm.” What do “crisis” and “maxi-dorm” have in common? They have a resonance when used as sound bites in political hype.
The article didn’t stop with the label “crisis.” One of the verbal images used was “We had another person describe living in a house and having to share the living room for $400 per month, with a sheet partition for privacy.” The metaphor that image tries to invoke has several interesting flaws, one of which was ironically displayed in the lead image of the article, which shows a dormitory room, where the student residents are sharing a single room for living. The second was the remembrance is stirs in most Davis viewers of the adventure and excitement of their college days, sharing a dorm room with a roommate assigned by the university. Getting to know that random stranger, sharing war stories, but without the sheet. Those were good times … anything but a crisis. Lastly, the sheet. For me it conjured up the Colbert comedy skit shown in the picture at the beginning of this article.
Davisite 