Author: Roberta Millstein

The City’s Failure to Plan for Emergencies

PG&E crew working into the night to fix a leaning power pole near Cesar Chavez Elementary

By Roberta Millstein

The recent storms have made it amply clear that the City lacks any sort of coherent plan for dealing with storms (and presumably other sorts of emergencies). Every action taken in response to the recent storm was late, and in some cases, inadequate.

Yet these storms were comparable to other big storms that Davis has experienced in past years. And even if they weren’t, the storm that occurred over New Year’s Eve and into New Year’s Day ought to have been a warm up, with lessons learned for the storms Jan 4-8, all of which were well-predicted by weather forecasters.

The City seemed to make things up as they go. To be clear, I am not faulting rank-and-file staff, who clearly were working hard under difficult circumstances. It has also been reported that the City did a good job finding shelter for people lacking housing. I am grateful for these efforts. I am faulting the City Council and the City Manager for failure to provide leadership. There should have been plans in place for these kind of events long ago.

Here are the areas that need to improve. I have broken them into short-term, medium-term, and long term, in the sense that the things in the short term can and should be fixed right away. The others will take a little longer.

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January 12, 2023
Will the (new) City Council Uphold Democracy?

This article was originally posted on July 17, 2022. The City Council, which will be composed of four members: Mayor Will Arnold, Vice Mayor Josh Chapman, and Councilmembers Gloria Partida and Bapu Vaitla, will decide this Tuesday (Jan 3) whether to go forward with an election or not. I stand by what I wrote below, calling for an election for District 3 with no interim appointment, and I urge Davisites to email members of the City Council before 3 PM on Tuesday at CityCouncilMembers@cityofdavis.org to let them know your views. You can also call 530-757-5693 to leave a public comment between 12-4 PM the day of the meeting – this is item #5 on the agenda – or give public comment in person (the item is estimated to be heard at 7:20 PM).

By Roberta Millstein

This City Council does not have a good track record on democracy. It has the opportunity to do better this time. Will it?

Newly appointed Mayor Lucas Frerichs, having served on the Council since 2012, is anticipated to step down on January 2, 2023 to become Yolo County District 2 Supervisor. That will leave a vacancy on the Council in District 3 (note that county and city district numbering is different) until the November 2024 election. The Council has a choice of two ways of filling the vacancy: 1) call a special election to fill the vacancy (see staff report for possible dates) or 2) appoint someone to fill the vacancy.

The first way is the democratic way. It’s the way that allows the voters of District 3 to select a representative who they feel listens to them and understands their concerns about their district. It’s the way that allows new voices to put themselves forward for leadership of the city, fulfilling one of the promises that district elections were supposed to bring – i.e., more localized campaigns being easier and less expensive to run.

The second way is the power-abusing way. All the other districts will have elected their representatives, but District 3 would be appointed by councilmembers who are not even in their district. There is nothing about this process that would ensure that the appointed representative would know about and care about issues particular to District 3. What this process does allow for, however, is for councilmembers to appoint someone who sees things their way or who is part of the current power structure in Davis.

Note that the Council also has the option of calling for a special election (the second way), but then appointing someone to fill the vacancy until the election. I think this option is problematic too. The person appointed for the interim period before a special election would have the advantage of incumbency in that election. The council should refrain from any appointment at all and simply call an election to fill the seat.[1]

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December 31, 2022
Letter: Support Education in Davis

A good education is a human right. It is also a societal good, given human interdependence. These are basic moral truths, yet we don't always act like they are, as two recent happenings in Davis illustrate.

As reported in the Enterprise, DJUSD teachers, backed by many supporters, have been asking for a salary increase, given the high cost of housing and the lower salaries that Davis teachers have as compared to neighboring cities. Teaching is extremely rewarding, but it is not reasonable to expect people to dedicate their hearts and souls only to find out that they cannot make ends meet. So teachers who can leave, do leave, and K-12 education is sacrificed.

During the same time period, several groups of University of California workers have been on strike (two have now settled), including graduate student teaching assistants. Ostensibly, these workers work "half time," but that is misleading. In some (perhaps many) cases, these workers end up doing far more than 20 hours per week, given grading, assisting students during office hours and appointments, holding discussion sections, answering emails, etc. In addition, these grad student workers are expected to do their own coursework and research, making the position in reality a full-time one. (They are often not permitted to take outside work, or at least strongly discouraged from doing so). That these grad student workers cannot likewise make ends meet threatens their own education as well as the education of undergraduates.

Paying these workers more is the obvious solution, but dedicated housing on DJUSD land and UCD land, respectively, should also be in the mix, as a way to buffer against the vagaries of inflation and rising housing costs.

It is a moral imperative that we do more for our DJUSD teachers and our UCD graduate student workers.

– Roberta Millstein is an Emerit Professor in the Department of Philosophy at UC Davis

December 8, 2022
Why DiSC matters for the City Council election

Some of DiSC’s proponents called it a tiny city. That suggests it is a microcosm of Davis as a whole and all of the issues it faces.

By Roberta Millstein

In a recent interview with the Davis Enterprise, Gloria Partida said that “I know that people right now are very focused on what happened with Measure H” but that being a member of Council is “not a one-issue job.”

However, Measure H represents a large number of central and key issues that future Davis City Councils will have to weigh in on. It would have been bad for Davis in variety of ways, as Davis citizens widely recognized when they rejected the project by an almost 2-1 margin.

Thus, a candidate’s stance on Measure H speaks volumes about their values and how they would govern. Gloria Partida (District 4), Dan Carson (District 1), and Bapu Vaitla (District 1) were strongly in favor of Measure H. In contrast, Kelsey Fortune (District 1) and Adam Morrill (District 4) strongly opposed Measure H.

As the No on Measure H campaign emphasized in its ballot arguments and campaign literature, each of the following issues was relevant to the proposed project. In no particular order:

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September 26, 2022
Part 6 Candidate Responses to the Sierra Club Yolano Group Questionnaire for the 2022 Davis City Council Election

Waste Management and Financial Contributors

Introduction – As has been our custom for over 20 years, the Sierra Club Yolano Group prepares a wide-ranging questionnaire and presents it to candidates in races of interest to our local membership. The questionnaire for the 2022 Davis City Council race received answers from all 5 candidates in the 2 of the 5 City Council Districts for which an election is held in November, 2022.

The candidates, listed in alphabetical order by their first name, are:

District 1 (West Davis): – Bapu Vaitla, Dan Carson, and Kelsey Fortune

District 4 (East Davis ) – Adam Morrill, Gloria Partida

Questions were asked in the following general categories :

Part 1 – Land Use and Housing Development – Peripheral Development

Part 2— Land Use and Housing Development – Downtown Core and Student Housing

Part 3 – Energy Use and Greenhouse Gas Emissions

Part 4 – Transportation Management

Part 5 – Toxics in the Environment and Other Environmental Issues

Part 6 – Waste Management and Financial Contibutors

Parts 1 through 5 in this series can be viewed by clicking on that article's title above which is linked to the earlier publication.

This is the 6th in the series of articles and focuses on Waste Management and provides candidate responses to the following questions:

Question #1 – Recyclable or Compostable Take-out & In-Restaurant Food and Drink Containers

Davis has adopted a Zero Waste Resolution striving to achieve zero waste by 2025. As part of this program, all food service industry tableware and drink containers must be reusable, recyclable or compostable including a ban on all Styrofoam containers. All waste must also be segregated by organics, recyclable, or landfill but few fast food or other restaurants are currently doing so.

What should the City do to enforce this Ordinance?

Question #2 – Proposed Commercial and Multi-Family Recycling and Food Waste Collection

The City of Davis waste management plan also now requires mandatory commercial and multi-family segregated recycling and segregated food scrap collection but this City has yet to roll-out these mandatory programs on a widespread basis?

Do you support these measures and why or why not. If yes, how should the City go about rolling them out and enforcing them?

Question #3 – Financial Contributors

How much money have you collected overall to date and from which unions, developer or real estate interests, or other entities doing business with the City of Davis? Will you accept all contributions from any of these interests?

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September 8, 2022
Learning from the anti-Semitic incident on 113 overpass

By Roberta Millstein

As most Davisites have learned by now, at least twice over the past two weekends, masked men displayed antisemitic banners from a highway overpass in Davis (see Davis Enterprise article for details).

The banners said, “Communism is Jewish” and “The Holocaust is an anti-white lie.”

Several local leaders issued responses. These responses, although all were well-meaning, miss the mark a bit. I want to try to explain why.

Chancellor Gary May said: “We are sickened that anyone would invest any time in such cowardly acts of hate and intimidation. They have no place here. We encourage our community to stand against antisemitism and racism.”

This isn’t false per se, but it’s incomplete. This isn’t just an act of hate. As I will explain further below, the banners replicate common tropes (repeatedly told stories) about Jewish people. Without calling out those tropes, many will not understand, or fully understand, what the issues are.

Chancellor May is correct that anti-Semitism and racism are connected, but he doesn’t say how. Again, more on this below.

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August 31, 2022
Explaining what shouldn’t need explaining

Spending one million dollars is a sign of a mis-managed campaign

By Roberta Millstein

In his most recent apologia for the Yes on Measure H campaign, David Greenwald suggests that it is inevitable that developers will spend “exorbitant amounts of money” to promote their projects.

But nothing forced the Yes on Measure H campaign, led by “Honorary Chair” Councilmember Dan Carson, to outspend the No on Measure H campaign by more than 14-1, as Alan Pryor reported.

In 2020, the Yes campaign spent around $323,000 to promote the DISC project. Let’s consider how the developers might have reacted to that loss. They might have talked to voters to find out what, in their eyes, would make for a project that was better for Davis and modified the project accordingly.

Instead, they polled Davisites to find out what would “sell” to voters and rushed a virtually unchanged project to voters (just cut in half) only a year and a half later. Apparently, voters like parks, greenbelts, environmental sustainability, and affordable housing, so those are the features that they poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into highlighting, even though these aspects were at best incidental to the project and at worse deceptive. The graphic of the stand-up paddleboarder was perhaps the most egregious example of this.

And they dumped in almost three times the amount of the previous campaign – a campaign that had itself had spent large sums of money – in order to sell the project. That includes over $200,000 on a heavy-handed free-speech-squelching developer-funded lawsuit, which, bizarrely, Greenwald says is not a campaign expenditure issue.

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August 24, 2022
Will this City Council Uphold Democracy?

Tuesday’s Council Meeting will give us our first indication

By Roberta Millstein

This City Council does not have a good track record on democracy. It has the opportunity to do better this time. Will it?

Newly appointed Mayor Lucas Frerichs, having served on the Council since 2012, is anticipated to step down on January 2, 2023 to become Yolo County District 2 Supervisor. That will leave a vacancy on the Council in District 3 (note that county and city district numbering is different) until the November 2024 election. The Council has a choice of two ways of filling the vacancy: 1) call a special election to fill the vacancy (see staff report for possible dates) or 2) appoint someone to fill the vacancy.

The first way is the democratic way. It’s the way that allows the voters of District 3 to select a representative who they feel listens to them and understands their concerns about their district. It’s the way that allows new voices to put themselves forward for leadership of the city, fulfilling one of the promises that district elections were supposed to bring – i.e., more localized campaigns being easier and less expensive to run.

The second way is the power-abusing way. All the other districts will have elected their representatives, but District 3 would be appointed by councilmembers who are not even in their district. There is nothing about this process that would ensure that the appointed representative would know about and care about issues particular to District 3. What this process does allow for, however, is for councilmembers to appoint someone who sees things their way or who is part of the current power structure in Davis.

Note that the Council also has the option of calling for a special election (the second way), but then appointing someone to fill the vacancy until the election. I think this option is problematic too. The person appointed for the interim period before a special election would have the advantage of incumbency in that election. The council should refrain from any appointment at all and simply call an election to fill the seat.[1]

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July 17, 2022
City of Davis survey results
How are you feeling about your city?

By Roberta Millstein

Recently, the City released the results of a periodic survey it does to take the pulse of Davis's residents. The results are online here.

The survey was conducted April 12 – 19, 2022 using a a multi-modal methodology: telephone, text- and email-to-web. There were 500 interviews with an estimated margin of error ±4.37 percentage points.

The staff report highlights some "key takeaways":
- more than two-thirds of residents are optimistic about the direction of the City
- more than 75% are satisfied with City services
- affordable housing, homelessness and public safety are the top three areas of concern for residents
- social media platforms and communications from the City are gaining popularity as a source of local news
Those are indeed interesting takeaways, although as always with the term "affordable housing," one wonders if people intend the legal meaning, or if they are unhappy with the affordability of housing more generally, or both.

Below are two panels of the survey that I found interesting. In the first panel, only 23% of citizens are dissatisfied with city services but 39% are dissatisfied with the City Council. So it seems that the dissatisfaction with the City Council is over and above the dissatisfaction with the provision of city services. As for the second panel, as a longtime subscriber to the Davis Enterprise I am glad to see that it remains our top source for news. I hope that people support it with subscriptions because there really is no other comparable source in Davis.

I'm curious to hear people's thoughts and reflections about the survey, so please leave comments if you'd like to weigh in!
July 8, 2022
Happy 4th of July?

By Roberta Millstein

When I was growing up on the east coast, 4th of July was always a wonderful day. My father, a WWII vet, loved fireworks and imparted that combination of awe, excitement, and patriotism to my sister and me. We'd head to the next town over and stake out a position on the grass and wait for the amazing display from a barge on the river. It was always over way too fast, the "big finale" being the part you looked forward to the most while knowing that it signaled the end.

Of course, I want everyone to have a good day. I want children to have wonderful experiences like the one I was able to have as a child. No one wants to be a killjoy.

But.

I also want our celebration of the 4th of July to be a genuine one – that is, a celebration of freedom.

It's hard to feel free when 6 people are dead and more than 2 dozen hospitalized for the sin of attending a 4th of July parade, when mass shootings have become a daily event and our elected lawmakers fail to take action that would make a difference.

It's hard to feel free when 50% of the population has just been told that their bodies are not theirs to control, that the state can make one of the most fundamental and life-changing decisions for them.

It's hard to feel free when in the same decision, one of our Supreme Court justices threatens to eliminate the right for heterosexual couples to use contraception, the right for homosexual couples to have sex, and the right for gay people to get married.

It's hard to feel free when racially-motivated voter restriction laws have been passed across the country, preventing full participation in our democracy.

It's hard to feel free when Black Americans are incarcerated at nearly five times the rate of white Americans.

As civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer said, nobody’s free until everybody’s free.

Meanwhile, Davis's "celebration" continues as planned even with known harms of fireworks both for those who are attending and not attending, spewing toxic chemicals into the air, triggering PTSD in humans, and scaring animals into bolting.

When is Davis going to have a more appropriate celebration, one that is healthy and recognizes the liberties we have as well as the liberties we still have to fight for?

When are we going to start fighting for our liberties?

July 4, 2022