Category: Ethics
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The End of Al’s Corner
A huge explosion and fireball enveloped the Al's Corner tanker truck late Tuesday evening. The explosion was heard as far away as Esparto, Knights Landing, Allendale, Zamora, Broderick, Saxon, Batavia, and the Milk Farm.
Preliminary investigation by the combined UCD and City fire departments indicate that a flea had flown into the side of the tank, causing the explosion.
When asked how a flea could have caused such an explosion, fire chief Woody Burns said simply:
"It was a very annoying flea".
Contacted at his new residence on the east side of Pole Line Road just north of 8th Street, Al was asked about Al's Corner's iconic run in the Davis shitty-blog scene. Al responded simply:
"It's been real, and it's been fun. But it hasn't been real fun."
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Breaking news: Yolo I-80 Widening Not Funded!
Advocates who steamrolled project scramble to save it
The June 28th California Transportation Commission meeting in Suisun gave out $3.3 billion with mantra “get it built”. It was standing-room only, squeezing 15 commissioners on the dais, 20 staff and 60 local transportation agency officials from around the state in a room 2/3 the size of the Davis City Chambers. Activists should note that while the monthly meeting location moves from venue to venue around the state, the public can zoom call in. Photo by Alan Hirsch.By Alan Hirsch
The Yolo I-80 widening project was not given the missing 54% funds ($103 million) at the California Transportation Commission meeting (CTC) on Wednesday 6/28. This means the initial $87 million earmarked federal funds for the project will be lost as it will time out before it is spent. At least this was what was represented on 6/6 to Davis City Council.
At the June 6th meeting the Council wanted to delay the EIR to add transit options, but were told this was not possible, due to the fact the initial money would time out if EIR was completed and an alternative chosen by January 2025. What was not discussed with Council was the $87 million in earmarked Federal money could ONLY be used for widening, i.e. was a pre-wired choice from congress. So if an EIR instead choose a transit alternative that Davis want to add, it might have be a poison pill for the funding already lined up.
Was this knowledge behind what was going on that evening when Davis Council attempted to interrogate the EIR project alternatives, and add a new one, but was discouraged? We may never know. But it’s a new process now.
CTC Meeting is the Major Leagues
I was the only “civilian” public commentator speaking on this or any projects at the CTC meeting though there were many letters from public opposing Yolo I-80 project were received. It notable no one showed up in favor of project– or submitted late letters of support (note: some Yolo Cities had quietly written letter for support in winter and spring 2023). A number of local agencies reps and elected official from elsewhere in the state comment uniformly support on their projects, which affirm CTC staff recommendation to fund. I note even a state Assembly member called in a comment – he was monitoring the 4-hour meeting.
The CTC gave out $3.3 Billion, so funding the $103 million gap in the Yolo80 project was almost rounding error. The I-80 project itself got no CTC commissioner questions or discussion. Not surprising as it was one of 48 in the "Trade Corridor Enhancement" tranche – … item 17 on 18 item agendas just that afternoon. There were only funds for 25 of the 48 in that tranche so it was competitive, but rarely are CTC staff suggestions overruled.
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Council bamboozled at 6/6 meeting
I-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.
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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
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5 City/County Climate Commissions Are Being Sidelined
Best way to handle inconvenient truth is to not talk of it
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.
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?
Image left: Councilmember Arnold's official Facebook Page & Caltrans / Image right: City of DavisTonight'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.”
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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.
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.
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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".
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Welcome to Al’s Corner – “Pouring Gasoline on the Dumpster Fire of Davis Politics” – June 2023
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.
Davisite 
In what could be the most important hero-story in Davis' history, Walter Shwe saved the Davisite from Alan Miller's hypocrisy as found on Al's Corner. Readers should congratulate Mr. Shwe for his Davis-saving efforts in the comment section below. In his own words, combining two WS comments, one of which was written at 4:45 a.m. on July 5th, Mr. Shwe says:
" I exposed the hypocracy of Mr. Miller. He regularly slammed the Davis Vanguard for censorship, yet he did the same thing with me everytime I tried to truthfully call someone out by name. Without the the names, my comments had little value. Worse still, he swore frequently, then attempted to laugh it off. Good riddance to Al's Corner. Al's Corner turned out not to be a free speech platform. Glad I don't have to read any more of Mr. Miller's whinny comments about the Davis Vanguard! 🤣 "
Mr. Shwe TRUTHFULLY called people out by name, but was prevented doing so by Alan Miller. He also called out Mr. Miller's "swearing". Most important, he pointed out that Al's Corner did not publish all his comments in whole, PROVING that Al's Corner was not a free speech platform. He also proved that Mr. Miller was a horse.