(From press release) Koen Van Rompay of Sahaya International will speak at the Wednesday, Dec. 2 meeting of Soroptimist International of Davis. The event is free and guests are welcome.
Van Rompay is volunteer founder and executive director of the Davis-based nonprofit Sahaya International (www.sahaya.org). The organization does grassroots work in developing countries, including India, Uganda, Kenya and Vietnam. Programs support orphan care, healthcare, education, socio-economic development and conservation. Van Rompay, a native of Belgium, is a UC Davis veterinarian specializing infectious diseases.
The meeting is from 11:45 to 12:45 at Sacramento City College Davis Center, room DCS 114. Snacks will be provided. Guests are welcome to bring their own lunch.
[Note: the following memo was shared for posting on the Davisite]
To: Clancy McConnell, David vanRijn cc: Yolo County Planning Commission (via Jeff Anderson), Phil Pogledich From: Alan Pryor, Chair, Sierra Club Yolano Group Date: October 26, 2026 Re: A Subsequent EIR is Required for the Vulcan Mining Permit Extension instead of just an Addendum to the Previous EIR
Under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), when a project changes or new information emerges after an Environmental Impact Report (EIR) is already certified, lead agencies must use a specific legal framework to determine if further environmental review is necessary. Yolo County has determined that just an Addendum to the 1998 SEIR for the Syar-Vulcan Madison Mine is required to extend the operating permit for that mine from 2029 to 2049.
We strongly disagree with this determination believing instead that a Subsequent EIR must be prepared. This is because new information has arisen regarding a plethora of more severe adverse environmental impacts that have occurred at the Vulcan and other Cache Creek off-channel mining sites since the 1998 certification of the SEIR for the Vulcan Madison mining project. This new information requires disclosure and analysis in a Subsequent EIR subject to public circulation.
These adverse environmental impacts for which additional information has arisen include widespread unresolved methyl mercury contamination of the deep wet impoundment pits at the Madison mine and other mining sites along Cache Creek site.
Eric Jones Has Now Donated More Than $15 MILLION to his Campaign!
By F.E.C. Nerd
Late yesterday (Friday, 10/23/26) Eric Jones’ campaign filed yet another report disclosing even more donations. This was on top of new reporting the prior day (10/22/26) when Eric Jones’ campaign committee filed its required “Pre-General” report. That is the final “full” report prior to the election. It covers the period from the last “full” report (which was 7/1/26 to 9/30/26) through 10/14/2026. In addition, certain special types of reports are required within 24 hours of triggering activities — such as the one filed yesterday. What do all these reports reveal?
Eric Jones’ campaign contributions (boosted by his own $15+ Millions) have now surpassed even Hakeem Jeffries among House candidates nationwide!
And that doesn’t even include last night’s filing. Follow along to see the money trail. Looking at Eric Jones’ campaign filings since the last big report (through 9/30/26 — filed on 10/15/26) there are three. The two main ones will be reviewed below; those are the two most recent.
Woodland resident Antonio Moreida, who was hit by an ICE vehicle earlier this week, speaks at the Woodland City Council meeting Tuesday night.
(From press release) Local residents are invited to join the ICE Out Demand Justice rally and march on Oct. 27 at 4pm in Woodland. In response to the recent ICE surge in Woodland, including the hit-and-run crime committed by an ICE agent on Woodland resident Antonio Moreida, participants will march from the Yolo County district attorney’s office at 301 2nd Street, to Rep. Mike Thompson’s office and then to the Woodland Courthouse. For more information: https://yolo.chapters.dsausa.org/ICE-OUT/.
I hadn’t intended to write about this topic since Slate Mailers have become rare in this day of social media campaigning. But a friend from Woodland sent me two examples and asked: “What gives?” So, in case you have been getting multi-candidate-multi-proposition mailers, here’s how to figure out what is behind them.
History of Slate Mailers: Decades ago, slate mailers became quite prominent in California political campaigns. So prominent that the State ultimately passed legislation to regulate them. Why? Because many commercial slate mailers “impersonated” political party endorsements and led to great voter confusion. Commercial slate mailer operators would use the words “Democrat” or “Republican” in their names and/or display a Donkey or Elephant logo on the mailer. There were repeated instances where a commercial slate mailer would use a Party’s name or logo, and include multiple candidates or ballot measures that Party did endorse, but then for some local races the mailer would feature a candidate of the Opposing Party or a ballot measure position the Party did not endorse. So, a law was passed to prohibit commercial slate mailers from using a Political Party’s name or imitation of its logo.
Chapter Two: Super PAC Spending for Ads, Mail, Social Media, etc.
LESSON TWO: OTHER OUTSIDE ACTORS IN DISTRICT 4 PRIMARY
Step One: Start back at the basic FEC.gov website, scroll down as before and click on “House of Representatives candidates” and then when that page opens up, scroll to the left-hand column and enter in the “Candidate Name” box, “Jones, Eric” and click on the drop-down entry for “Jones, Eric” without any middle name. Scroll to the right into the main frame and click again on the link for “Jones, Eric.” You should now see this page:
Step Two: Scroll down in the left-hand column and click on the dark blue link “Compare to opposing candidates” and you will bring up the following screen that shows all the candidates who ran in the June Primary for California Congressional District 4 and each candidate’s fundraising totals as of June 30, 2026.
Preface & Recap on Chapter One: Contributions & Expenditures in 4th C.D.
[Note: Chapter 2 follows this short preface and recap]
By F.E.C. Nerd
Hopefully, you have taken the lessons learned from Chapter One and have done some exploration on your own. It will be helpful to have those research skills honed because new additional disclosures will be forthcoming very soon. Those will cover the period from July 1, 2026, through September 30, 2026. That’s three whole, long months of fundraising and spending. I also want to point out a couple other customizable search methods you can try.
Step One: Log into your favorite Internet browser. Then go to:
Step Two: Scroll down the page towards the bottom and click on the link for “House of Representatives Candidates.”
Step Three: So that you know how to search for any House candidate use the search box — “Candidate Name or ID” in the upper left corner. Type in: “Jones, Eric”. A drop-down list of several “Jones” candidates will appear. Select the one for “Jones, Eric H6CA04222”. That will take you to the link for Eric Jones’ campaign reporting.
Step Four: Scroll right to get into the main display and click on the “Jones, Eric” link that is active. This will take you to where we start to get to the substantive data.
Step Five: Scroll to the left and click on the dark-blue box “Compare to opposing candidates.”
This will bring up another page of data (as shown below) for the main three candidates in the June Primary. Mike Thompson finished first, but Eric Jones narrowly bested Raymond Riehle, for second place and onto November’s General Election run-off. We will return to this screen again as we do our research.
Note the data under “Cash on hand” as of 6/30/2026. Note that Eric Jones reported just $665,718.27. That is nowhere near enough to buy all the TV ad-time to run his AI-generated ads attacking his opponent. So, we can expect some large contributions to be reported when the 7/1/26 – 9/30/26 disclosures are filed later this week.
Step Six: Click on “Jones, Eric” and then once the page loads, click on the button on the right “Browse Receipts” and get the drop-down search categories in the left-hand column. We spent some time in Chapter One, Lesson Two searching these, but I wanted to point out another type of search.
Step Seven: Scroll down in the left-hand column and at “Employer” let’s insert a couple names instead of the more general terms “inc” and “llc” that we used in Lesson Two. Enter “Anthropic” and click the right > button and we find that donors affiliated with Anthropic contributed a total of $7,500 all of it on 9/1/2025 — 8 days prior to Eric Jones filing his Statement of Candidacy.
Now enter “Palantir” in the search box . (Palantir showed up in one of our previous searches of contributors as being a client of one of the venture capital firms whose personnel were donating to Eric Jones’ campaign). Click on the right > button and we see that one of Palantir’s personnel contributed the double-maximum ($7,000) to Eric Jones on 12/27/25. Palantir works with ICE.
What if you learned that he had, in a very short amount of time, flip-flopped his views on important issues such as data centers and Medicare for All? What if you found out that he had distributed two versions of the same flyer on the same block of the same street, one for Republicans and one for Democrats?
Citizens of Congressional District 4, the candidate described above is Eric Jones, recently resigned from Dragoneer Investment Group. He would represent the interests of out-of-district tech oligarchs — resisting needed protective regulations at every turn — rather than the interests of ordinary citizens, whether Republican or Democratic.
Jones has misrepresented Congressman Mike Thompson’s record, according to Lofgren
(From press release) In a letter to the editor published in the Napa Valley Register, Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren dispelled one of Eric Jones’ most common talking points as a complete falsehood. When Eric Jones attacks Congressman Thompson’s record, he uses faulty and inaccurate data that excludes nearly $7 billion dollars worth of Social Security spending in the district.
California Department of Fish and Wildlife is investigating and an open letter is gaining signatures from concerned citizens
By Shannon Hickey
The city’s last remaining vernal pools—the ones on the Measure V (for Village Farms) property that supported a local population of the federally endangered vernal pool tadpole shrimp as well as two rare plant species (alkali milkvetch and San Joaquin spearscale)—were potentially filled, disced, and graded in the week of September 13, 2026.
The attached photos were taken early Saturday morning, September 19, showing the area where the largest pool existed, now a level surface. To give a little back story, this pool was on a property that has been proposed for development since the early 2000s and actively farmed since circa the late ’60s, according to historical aerial imagery. Despite regular discing, this vernal pool continued to pond because it was protected on two sides by a railroad berm to the west and an irrigation channel berm (Channel A) to the north. The developer has known about this vernal pool and the extremely rare species in it since the last time this project went up for a vote by the citizens of Davis back in 2005. At that time, it was known as the Covell Village project and it was voted down then as well. For both the Covell Village project and the Village Farms project, the associated environmental surveys supporting the EIRs revealed that these species were present.
