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“No” to a Fourth Fire Station

By Elaine Roberts Musser

The newly released city staff report for Village Homes still includes a fourth fire station. It also adds a public safety center for police and EMS for good measure. It is estimated the fourth fire station alone would cost the city $3.5 million per year. God only knows how many more millions of dollars the addition of police and EMS at that spot would set the city back!

Where in the heck does city staff think the money for all this is going to come from? Last I looked there was no money tree in the back of City Hall. Nor do taxpayers have unlimited pockets. Many citizens are struggling just to make ends meet, as Mayor Vaitla has noted often enough, especially in light of what is going on at the federal and state level.

Additionally, City staff is trying to claim the city’s General Plan requires a fourth fire station, which is a patently false assertion. The general plan called for an analysis of fire facility needs, not construction of a 4th fire station.

The next fairy tale spun by city staff is that the Fire Department or the City Council itself already made the decision to build a 4th fire station. Where does staff get this tarradiddle from? First, the October 30, 2018 City Council minutes prove otherwise – the City Council just flat out didn’t make such a commitment. Second, the Fire Department has no authority to approve such an undertaking.

If the City Council wants this development project to pass a measure J/R/D vote, then any mention of a public safety center and 4th fire station should be completely removed. Any lame attempt to supposedly set aside a parcel for “public safety”, to disguise the real intent to build a fourth fire station, will not fool anyone.

For more complete information go to the following link: https://davisvanguard.org/2025/12/city-council-revisits-fire-station/

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Comments

One response to ““No” to a Fourth Fire Station”

  1. Eileen Samitz

    Elaine, Thanks for this update. The 1,800 unit 498-acre Village Farms project is the largest and worst planned project ever proposed in Davis. It has a 200-acre flood plain with flooding potential, carcinogenic PFAS “forever chemicals” leaking from the adjacent unlined Old City Landfill , soil toxics including carcinogenic toxaphene where the Heritage Oak Park is planned, unsafe access issues with no grade-separated crossing across Covell Blvd. which is like a freeway, unprotected vernal pools which have no conservation easement, UNaffordable housing where the cheapest market rate house would be $740,000 which mean a $6,000 house payment PER MONTH including the mortgage, property taxes, CFD fees, insurance, and other fees, which local workers and families with young kids cannot afford, so Village Farms will NOT bring 700 kids as the School District would like to believe.

    On top of all of this Village Farms would bring MASSIVE INFRASTRUCTURE COSTS including this UNNEEDED 4th fire station because 90% of the fire dept calls are medical not fire related so instead an EMS service makes much more sense and would be a fraction of the cost and could be located anywhere in East Davis due to the small footprint, and now have learned that the developer would be reimbursed 80% of the cost of BOTH multi-million dollar grade separated crossings that his Village Farms project is creating the need for! These are more “giveaways’ from the City that Davis residents would be paying for to subsidize Whitcombe’s Village Farms project. And in a time when the City cannot even afford to pave our streets?

    Plus, no emergency service should be located on Covell Blvd. because it has enormous traffic backups all the time. How is an emergency vehicle supposed to get anywhere in 5-minutes when it is a parking lot of cars on Covell Blvd. so often?

    The 2.5 acres of land for this proposed additional fire station needs to be changed to affordable housing since the developer is trying to short-change the City by dedicating less than the 18.6 acres that he is required to dedicate for affordable housing per our Davis Municipal Code. Yet, the City is allowing the developer to get away with this! Another special favor and giveaway to the developer (John Whitcombe of Tandem Properties partner which owns 13 apartment complexes in Davis.)

    Further, let’s not forget that the same developer for the Nishi project has not delivered any housing nor that projects required grade-separated crossing. It was approved 7 years ago! What make anyone think he would deliver TWO grade separated crossings? But getting verified EIR and entitlements would enormously raise the value of these sites which can then be “flipped”.

    Village Farms is too big, has too many serious impacts and would bring liability to the City due to the toxics and flooding potential and needs to go back to the drawing board to analyze the reduced footprint alternative recommended by citizens in Dec. 2023 to the City Council when the Village Farms alternatives were being chosen, but our efforts were ignored. We submitted the graphic from the Covell Village DEIR of the “environmentally superior alternative” which was included in its predecessor Covell Village Draft EIR. This was the environmentally superior alternative in that EIR because it proposed developing housing only below Channel A which significantly reduced the impacts from the 200-acre flood plan and distanced the housing from the unlined Old City Landfill and Sewage Treatment plant leaking carcinogenic toxics and having a lower number of housing units on the smaller footprint.

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