Squandered Trust
Comments given to the Davis City Council by Mimi McMahon
Trust is an important element when citizens elect officials to act on their behalf. There is no room for special interests or personal gain. A promise is a contract. The City has squandered the trust of Davis citizens and those affected by the Mace Mess you and your staff have created. You have wasted millions of dollars of our hard-earned taxes.
Broken and Unfulfilled Promises
By Alan Hirsch
On Thursday Caltrans will hold a workshop on the future of the I-80 corridor, Davis’s Connection to the rest of the World. It will be in the Blanchard room of the Library at 6:30pm.
Caltrans will be considering different options to deal with transportation demand in this corridor.
Will they just address only thru traffic, i.e. Tahoe Snowbirds…or real needs of people who live in the corridor, for example transit needs that can’t be met by slow, limited stop and expensive Capitol Corridor Train service or the anemic and unreliable Yolobus service?
If you care about traffic on Mace Blvd…or how we can have accommodate economic growth in Davis — like the proposed 12,000 (!!!) trip a day Aggie business park on Mace curve — this is the meeting to go to.
Notice of Scoping Meeting and Preparation of a Draft Environmental Impact Report (EIR)
What follows is the official notice of a meeting that you can attend to give input on the Supplemental EIR on the so-called "Aggie Research Campus," formerly named "Mace Ranch Innovation Center." The project would include not only offices and R&D space, but also housing and a hotel, with ~4300 parking spaces total.
Information on the project can be found on the City of Davis's website, here.
(From press release) The city of Winters is the fourth local jurisdiction to join Valley Clean Energy, Yolo County’s not-for-profit public clean power electricity agency. The cities of Woodland and Davis as well as the unincorporated area of Yolo County are already members, having launched the agency in June 2018.
At its Oct. 15 meeting, the Winters City Council passed a resolution approving the terms of membership in VCE as well as the first reading of an ordinance authorizing implementation of the community choice aggregation program for all electricity customers in Winters. The second reading and adoption of the ordinance occurred at the Nov. 5 council meeting.
Other issues unfortunately went unaddressed
By Roberta Millstein
At Tuesday's City Council meeting, an item concerning updating the old Mace Ranch Innovation Center (MRIC) Environmental Impact Report (EIR) for the new Aggie Research Campus (ARC) proposal was pulled from the Consent Calendar, allowing for staff and Council discussion of the issue in addition to public comment.
Five commenters addressed the item, including three commenters whose prepared comments appear in a sister article to this one. Together, these comments made clear why an issue this substantive should never have been on the Consent Calendar in the first place, which is meant for uncontroversial issues that don’t require discussion.
Interestingly, in stark contrast to the last meeting where ARC was on the Consent Calendar, there were no student speakers in support of the project, corroborating the appearance that the previous speakers were coordinated and arranged.
Issues raised included:
Many concerns raised about the proposed environmental analysis, timeline, and more
At Tuesday's City Council meeting, an item concerning updating the old Mace Ranch Innovation Center (MRIC) Environmental Impact Report (EIR) for the new Aggie Research Campus (ARC) proposal was pulled from the Consent Calendar, allowing for staff and Council discussion of the issue in addition to public comment.
However, it was a very packed agenda, and so Mayor Lee limited comment time for all citizen speakers on all items to 2 minutes rather than the usual 3. What follows are the prepared comments from Roberta Millstein, Colin Walsh, and Rik Keller, which are more extensive than the actual comments that they had time to present. (The City Council's response to these comments is described in a subsequent article).
Transportation consultant believes ARC may result in new significant impacts or a substantial increase in the severity of significant impacts.
By Roberta Millstein
After the controversy over the approval of the Mace Ranch Innovation Center (MRIC) Environmental Impact Report (EIR) back in February 2017, and after having to pull the most recent son-of-MRIC item from the Consent Calendar (the project now misleadingly dubbed “Aggie Research Campus” or ARC), you would think that the City Council would have learned its lesson not to try to smuggle important items on the Consent Calendar, where items are meant to be uncontroversial and passed unanimously without any staff presentation or discussion from Council or citizens.
If you thought that, as I did, you were mistaken.
Readers may recall that the ARC is a proposal for a ~200 acre business park with housing and hotel to be built outside Mace curve on prime farmland. When the City Council approved the EIR, they knew it was very possible, even likely, that updates to the EIR would be needed in light of changes to the project or changes to relevant conditions, such as traffic. Now that the City is moving forward with evaluating the new ARC proposal, the time has come to revisit the EIR.
Staff is recommending that the Council authorize the City Manager to enter into a contract with Raney Planning & Management, Inc. to prepare a Supplemental EIR and to approve a budget for that purpose, to be paid by the applicant. However, there are at least three potential concerns with this recommendation.
The guv sounds tough — but he has no plan. And he's ignoring the only (obvious) solution to the current and future crisis.
By Tim Redmond
Gov. Gavin Newsom is sounding all harsh and tough toward PG&E as Northern California burns out of control again and the blackouts continue.
At a press event that he promoted on Twitter, Newsom said that PG&E’s “years of greed, years of mismanagement, years and years of putting shareholders over people are over.”
Watch the video: It’s classic Newsom. “We will hold them to account,” he says. “We will restructure” the company when it gets out of bankruptcy.
And then … what?
How is that “restructuring” going to work if PG&E remains a privately owned utility that sets up its own corporate structure? How are we going to “hold to account” a company when it’s already in total collapse – and Newsom has no plan to address that except to ask Warren Buffett to buy it?
(From press release) Valley Clean Energy’s board of directors has announced that the local community choice energy agency is repaying its start-up loans early, years ahead of schedule.
VCE was formed in 2016 as a joint powers agency comprising the city of Davis and the unincorporated area of Yolo County. The city of Woodland joined later, in 2017. Each agency lent VCE $500,000 to cover program implementation costs with a requirement that the loans would be repaid with interest.
“Now, after less than 1½ years in operation, we are repaying the loans — far ahead of schedule,” said Tom Stallard, a member of the Woodland City Council who chairs the VCE board of directors. “The agency’s firm financial footing allows us to do so.”
My name is David Abramson and I am running for District 4 Yolo County Supervisor on the platform of a Local Green New Deal. A Local Green New Deal lays out a plan for local infrastructure, planning, and policy that will help us address the climate crisis we are in. It also aims to transform our economic system into one that supports ecological healing and true community wealth-building.
Growing up in Davis and living here most of my life, I know that Yolo County residents care about their communities. We care about each other, we care about our families, our neighbors, our schools, about the health and well-being of our workers, our youth, and our elders. We care about the health of our planet, and about the future we want for our grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
We hear the calls from the youth saying, "We want a future! We want our political leaders to step up to the challenge, to transition from fossil fuels, and to take the challenges that humanity faces seriously and fearlessly, and to spring forward into action!"
Davisite 