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Category: Ethics

  • Council bamboozled at 6/6 meeting

    I-80I-80 Widening rated last for funding by Caltrans.

    By Alan Hirsch

    Preface: Just 46 hours after Davis Council was forced into a shot gun wedding with Caltrans on the Yolo80 freeway widening, the gate keeper organization on transportation projects, the California Transportation Commission (CTC) staff made public a: “do not fund”  recommendation. The next chance for making up these state matching funds is in 18 months. It would be unusual if the staff recommendations are overturned at the June 28th CTC meeting.

    * * *

    On January 6th, ignoring 21 public comments unanimously opposing it, the Davis City Council voted 3-1 to take the first step to go along with the I-80 widening project. The majority decided to listen to YoloTD Vice Chair Josh Chapman and it’s staff. This vote supports the city partnering with Caltrans to sell out our goal of zero carbon for Davis: Caltrans will get to use our “good” GHG-reducing projects to justify the additional GHG caused by the freeway widening. Caltrans’ carrot was to offer funding (amount unknown) to help developers of both the Nishi housing development and the housing proposed in downtown Davis.

    As reported in the Enterprise article 6/10, the council voted this way even though they were uncomfortable with how the widening undercuts our local climate change plan. Among the complaints made by public were calls to remember the city’s climate emergency resolution.

    Only Councilperson Bapu Vaitla remained skeptical of what was represented to council and voted no — i.e. to protect the city’s plan to go to zero carbon.

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  • Recommendation to the Davis City Council for Changes in Davis’ Affordable Housing Ordinance

    By The Sierra Club Yolano Group Management Committee

    June 27, 2023

    Introduction

    The Davis Affordable Housing Ordinance is now implemented on a temporary basis. Renewal with some modest changes is anticipated this evening.

    However, the existing Affordable Housing Ordinance has provisions which we believe do not provide social justice, equity, and fairness in terms of meeting the needs of the City’s low-income population because it is biased toward the financial benefit of developers rather than maximizing the availability of affordable income housing in Davis.

    Following please find our recommendations for immediate changes to update the City's temporary Affordable Housing Ordinance for ownership development projects. Additionally, we suggest the City embark on a concerted effort to further revise the ordinance to make it more equitable and understandable to developers and the general public for both ownership and rental development projects as more fully described below.

    Recommendation for Immediate Change

    1) Eliminate Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs) as an acceptable alternative to provide on-site Affordable Housing – Prior to the immediate renewal of the Affordable Housing Ordinance, we strongly recommend completely eliminating the provision whereby ADUs are allowed as fulfillment for up to 50% of a For Sale project’s affordable housing obligations as currently exists.

    2) Substantially increase in-lieu fees if chosen by a developer as an acceptable alternative to provide on-site or offsite Affordable Housing – We recommend that in-lieu fees be substantially increased so that it is no longer a financially preferable option for developers to pursue.  We endorse the staff recommendation to have an "in lieu fee to represent the full cost to build an actual unit."

    Recommendations for Further Changes in the Very Near Future

    3) Increase the minimum percentages of affordable housing required in most developments –

    a) For rental multifamily developments and ownership detached housing, increase the standard 15% requirement for onsite or offsite affordable housing units to 25% (15% Very Low Income and 10% Low Income).

    b) For ownership and rental mixed use and stacked-flat condominiums, increase the affordable housing requirement from 5% to 10% (5% Very Low Income and 5% Low Income) and eliminate the exemption for such units in the core area from the requirements of the Affordable Housing Ordinance.

    4) Increase the minimum parcel size for land donated to alternatively meet affordable housing requirements to 4 acres – Experts in the field of non-profit low income housing project financing have stated that land donation requirements of lesser sizes are not feasible to finance given the realities of financing requirements and available tax credits.

    We elaborate on each of these recommendations further below.

     

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  • Letter: City Council moves toward an exclusionary Davis

    What a sad Council night for Davis this past Tuesday.

    Both projects put forward by the city Tuesday night are by design planning for an exclusionary Davis.

    Both projects short us on affordable housing for the very low income and low income. They both set aside the lowest number of units ever affordable to VLI and LI units of any proposed annexation.

    When David Taormino asked me to do the affordable housing for Bretton Woods I said I would if he doubled the land required for affordable housing.

    David provided land for 150 VLI and LI apartments instead of the required 68 apartments.

    Standing at the Bretton Woods Booth at the Farmers Market every Wednesday and Saturday proved my point. His willingness to do more VLI and LI units that he needed to was the critical element in winning community approval in a Measure J election.

    I and Delta Senior Housing Communities (DSHC) are no longer doing the affordable housing at Bretton Woods but that one generous act had great impact and won community support.

    With 378 acres to build why is Village Farms skimping on an extra four acres for housing VLI and LI people.

    All that is needed is 1% (3.78 acres) more of the 378 acres.

    Due to their skimping on both projects I am opposed to them both.

    I don’t want the Davis that is being sold to us. It is a Davis with fewer doors for the poor.

    That Davis will be richer and whiter and shun the poor working people.

    Join me in demanding more from each project to build a more welcoming and inclusionary Davis.

    David J. Thompson

  • 5 City/County Climate Commissions Are Being Sidelined

    Best way to handle inconvenient truth is to not talk of it

    Image003 323

    By Alan Hirsch

    This week the well-meaning volunteers of Yolo County’s Climate Action Committee will be hosting three open houses to collect public input.

    However, I think these volunteers, like climate committee volunteers on 4 other Yolo County cities, are being distracted from the elephant in the room.

    Image001 1516

    Is the Davis CAAP just performative if freeway widening can’t be discussed in Davis by our climate committee?

    Each of the five Yolo government’s Climate Act Plans note we need a plan to dramatically reduce auto driving if we want to address our greenhouse gases (GHG), the source of 65% of Woodland  and 69% of Davis’s GHG. For example, the city of West Sacramento plan set a goal of reducing driving 40% by 2045 by a shift to transit and active modes.

    Yet, the proposed widening of the I-80 Freeway is projected by UC Davis researchers to do the opposite: encourage more driving and longer commutes forecasting 177.9 million more miles of driving each year. This means an increase in the county’s carbon footprint by 3%- larger than the entire City of Winters.

    UC Davis research also demonstrated, like all past widening, this $380 million project one won’t fix congestion for long: the freeway is 100% certain to re-congest after a few years due to more car travel the widening it itself encourages.

    Yet not one of these five climate commissions have discussed this project and its tradeoffs or have a plan to provide input to Draft Environmental Impact Report (DEIR) in July.

    It is not the volunteers on these committee’s fault: it about city and county staff who haven’t put it on their agendas.

    This is accomplished by the freeway advocates embedded in government who claim to want public input but actually discourage it by spin:

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  • Managing the mismanagement

    Should Mayor Will Arnold recuse himself tonight from an I-80 project discussion because he's Media Affairs Manager at Caltrans?

    ArnoldArnoldImage left: Councilmember Arnold's official Facebook Page & Caltrans / Image right: City of Davis

    Tonight's City Council Agenda item on the 80 Yolo Managed Project was already covered critically and nearly exhaustively last weekend in the Davis Enterprise and yesterday here in the Davisite and in the Davis Vanguard.

    It’s no secret that Mayor Will Arnold is the Media Relations Manager for Caltrans.  Should he recuse himself from the discussion for ethical reasons?  Should he be signing a letter to support a project he would then have to (continue to) work on at Caltrans? I don’t think he can recuse himself from the communications hierarchy there. Based on the linked articles above, consider how Caltrans communicates things about the project: The spin, the lack of backstory, obfuscations to the point of dishonesty… disrespect. (At a public presentation hosted by Cool Davis a couple of months ago, Autumn Bernstein of Yolo Transportation District – who is co-presenting this evening at City Council – said that her agency had convinced Caltrans to do the managed lanes variant with VMT mitigation. The linked articles tell me Caltrans had already decided to do this some time ago, and I would not be totally surprised if they try to re-include the new bike-ped crossing of the Yolo Bypass as a carrot.) 

    Arnold’s job description at LinkedIn is:  “Caltrans Headquarters Public Affairs, Office of the Director – Duties include managing media inquiries and press relations, designing and executing effective communications strategy, and writing/editing communication plans, press releases, talking points and social media content.”

  • A Tale of Two Crossings: Nothin’ from nothin’ leaves nothin’

    * If Nishi can't be built, there's nothing to trade as a mitigation
    * Dedicated bike-ped crossing of the Yolo Bypass was quietly cancelled after years of promises.

    NishiPLcomparison1

     

    Tonight's City Council Agenda item on the 80 Yolo Managed Project was already covered critically and nearly exhaustively last weekend in the Davis Enterprise and yesterday here in the Davisite and in the Davis Vanguard.

     

    A Bridge That Can't Be Built…

    I arrived in town after Nishi 1.0 (retroactively supported a concept that would involve a complete redesign of the 80-Richards interchange inclusive of a parking structure and Park & Ride for regional buses which would have minimal impacts on Richards) and was against Nishi 2.0 because I don’t think that there should be housing (buildings with windows people open!) so close to the noisy and arguably otherwise-polluting interstate, but it’s not why I am suggesting that the proposed “multi-modal” mitigation is a fallacy. I agree with others that no VMT mitigations should happen with this project, and am trying to make clear that the plan of Caltrans and its erstwhile partners are also a mess from a technical point of view. (There's also the sheer ironic delight of trying to facilitate the construction of a project using these VMT credits – as it were – to make the Nishi space noisier and more polluted next to a widened interstate.)

    The 80-railway corridor is a wall for people on bikes, but so is the railway on its own.  See Pole Line over 80 at lower right in the illustration above. It’s incredibly long because it has to go very high over the railway tracks, more so than to get over 80 itself (to better understand this, picture the crossings over 113 which are much lower as they only need to accommodate trucks.) First of all, this – and all the over-crossings of 80 in town – are simply not comfortable and suitable for people on normal bicycles, especially carrying children, and especially if they can make the journey by private motor vehicle or e-bike.   The over-crossings have around a 6 to 7% grade, nearly twice as high as the Dutch standard: So to make it comfortable for hundreds of people to go from Nishi to campus it would have to be nearly twice as long. Look again at the view of 80 at Pole Line: There’s no space for this unless it’s very circuitous and indirect and lands behind the Shrem Museum or just by the entrance to Solano Park from Old Davis Rd. (The red line in the top of the image is only as long as Pole Line, and it needs to be much longer.) And that’s just for cycling. Imagine walking this at least twice a day. Motor vehicles including buses can obviously do this, but that's no one's definition of "multi-modal".

    I feel confident in saying that since a motor vehicle, bus, bicycle and walking connection is part of the agreement for Nishi, and as Union Pacific forbids an under-crossing, there’s no way to build Nishi unless it’s returned to the voters. There’s nothing to mitigate here as nothing can be built for mitigation.

    ***

    A Cancelled Crossing…

    For years a dedicated and new bicycle-pedestrian bridge across the ‘Bypass was promised in the project. In 2020 – when I was still on the Bicycling, Transportation and Street Safety Commission (BTSSC) – the notification that it was dropped some months earlier was only indirectly mentioned in a summary for a BTSSC meeting by the primary liaison for the City of Davis at the time, Brian Abbanat (former City of Davis Senior Planner; now he’s in a similar role for Yolo County and co-presenting Tuesday evening.) A couple of years later when this was mentioned to the other co-presenter, YCTD head Autumn Bernstein, she said it was not funded: I believe that the aggregate truth – to be precise as possible – is that Caltrans dropped it, never told any of the local interested groups about it (e.g. Bike Davis, Davis Bike Club) through their liaison Abbanat and that it wasn’t part of the initial, funded proposal to the Federal Government. Our City, County and State government representatives were silent about this betrayal in our so-called "USA cycling capitol".

  • Welcome to Al’s Corner – “Pouring Gasoline on the Dumpster Fire of Davis Politics” – June 2023

    image from www.sparkysonestop.com

    There MAY not have been a May version of Al's Corner.  People got by.  They posted May stuff in April.  We all lived.

    June's Al's Corner will feature ketchup and mustard on top.  Peace.  Over & Out.

  • Soroptimists award grants to two area nonprofits

    AguilarMIH

    UC Davis Guardian Scholar Evelyn Aguilar received lots of housewares in 2021 from Make It Happen in Yolo County. (Courtesy photo)

    (From press release) Soroptimist International of Davis recently awarded grants to two nonprofits, to improve the lives of women and girls in Yolo County.

    The club distributed $3,000 in Community Grants between the two organizations. Make it Happen for Yolo County received $1,900, and Grace in Action received $1,100.

    Make it Happen will use its Soroptimist funds to provide at least four young women in the UC Davis Guardian Scholars program with the furniture and appliances they need to furnish their apartments at the start of the school year. Guardian Scholars are students who have experienced foster care.

    Grace in Action will use its Soroptimist grant money to provide stop-gap services for very low income individuals, and those without safe shelter. It will pay for motel rooms, hearty lunches, laundry vouchers, transportation passes and haircuts.

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  • Recommendation to the Social Services Commission for Changes in Davis’ Affordable Housing Ordinance

    The following was emailed as an attachment to the Social Services Commission yesterday for their meeting this evening (7 PM, Monday May 15) where they will be taking up proposed changes to Davis's Affordable Housing Ordinance.

    by Roberta Millstein and Alan Pryor

    5/14/2023

    Introduction

    The Davis Affordable Housing Ordinance (available at https://library.qcode.us/lib/davis_ca/pub/municipal_code/item/chapter_18-article_18_05?view=all) is now implemented on a temporary basis to account for changes in state law requiring economic justification if minimum affordable housing requirements for new projects exceed 15% of total housing units.  The current temporary ordinance is scheduled to expire on June 30, 2023, with proposed changes under consideration by the Social Services Commission at its May 13, 2023 meeting.

    However, even with these proposed changes, the existing Affordable Housing Ordinance has provisions which we believe do not provide social justice, equity, and fairness in terms of meeting the needs of the City’s low-income population because it is biased toward the financial benefit of developers rather than maximizing the availability of affordable income housing in Davis.

    We recommend the following changes to the temporary ordinance if it is renewed by the sunset date of June 30, 2023 and to a revised permanent ordinance.

    1. Eliminate ADUs as an acceptable alternative to provide on-site Affordable Housing – We recommend that Accessory Dwelling Units (ADU) be completely eliminated as a way for developers to avoid constructing real Affordable Housing.
    2. Substantially increase in-lieu fees if chosen by a developer as an acceptable alternative to provide on-site Affordable Housing – We recommend that in-lieu fees be substantially increased so that it is no longer a financially preferable option for developers to pursue. 

    We elaborate on each of these recommendations further below.

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  • Will local electeds ignore UCD and buy into Caltrans’ Science Denial on VMT & GHG?

    Inconvenient truth

    Open letter to Davis BTSSC (Transportation Commission)

    To: Chair Jessica Jacobs and members, Davis BTSSC

    From: Alan ‘the Lorax’ Hirsch

    RE: Potential Endorsement of I-80 Yolo widening before Draft EIR released

    BTSSC will be asked tonight (item 6b) to endorse a letter to partner with Caltrans to endorse I-80 widening by supporting a new and untested program of mitigation that could negate local cities’ greenhouse gas reduction programs (CAAP/CAP).[i]

    You will be asked to sign before even seeing the draft Environment Study (DEIR) or the mitigation plans. This is not due out for 30 days.

    I urge caution based on the study by Professor Susan Handy’s group at UC Davis Institute of Transportation Studies. (ITS)

    The below bar chart from that UCD ITS study[ii] compares induced travel projections by Caltrans to the forecast by the National Center for Sustainable Transportation model. Caltrans’ lower forecasts in the EIRs were used to justify spending hundreds of millions of dollars on these five projects. The study shows Caltrans consistently understates the amount of travel & GHG to be mitigated. And in two projects Caltrans assumed no induced demand.

    Induced demand has been accepted science in the transportation world for over thirty years now. The science was upheld in the 1990 California case Citizens for a Better Environment vs Deukmejian, et al. [iii]  It was an inconvenient truth Caltrans has worked three decades to get around. It was not until the beginning of 2020 after the 2013 passage of Bill SB 743[iv] that EIRs had to focus on reducing Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT).

    Caltrans has been in denial of the science on traffic, which has been confirmed by hundreds of studies out of UC Davis, UC Berkeley, and the Texas Transportation Institute, among many other places worldwide.[v]

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