This is a summary of our longer Petition that can be found and signed at https://chng.it/fJWfym9Gx6
We are Yolo residents concerned about the potential adverse impacts of the Teichert Shifler Mining and Reclamation Project. On Tuesday, 11 January at 1:00 pm the Yolo Board of Supervisors will discuss and vote on the application. We urge the Supervisors to vote NO.
Here we emphasize Risk of Water Contamination, Loss of Prime Farmland, and Liability.
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From the League of Women Voters:
Dear Friends,
Welcome all to a New Year and best wishes for a healthy and peaceful 2022.
Regrettably, what first comes to our mind this month might be the remembrance of last year and the January 6th terrorist attack on our National Capital. Our Democracy survives, but the actions on that day remind us that we all need to actively protect our Republic and our voting rights. With that in mind, LWVDA leadership joins the National League of Women Voters (LWVUS) by asking our membership to urge Congress and the President to pass federal legislation protecting our right to vote and our democracy.
January 6th Day of Remembrance and Action: This Thursday Jan 6th at 5:15 pm in Davis Central Park, the Davis League will host a local vigil in remembrance of those who defended our Democracy last year and in support of the League’s 101-year position on voting rights advocacy and representative democracy. In this we join other LWV state and local leagues who will host in-person and virtual events to commemorate the remembrance. We invite you to join this show of unity at the public remembrance event. Register here: https://www.mobilize.us/mobilize/event/434619/
Take Action: As League members, we believe a January 6th remembrance also offers an opportunity for us to take action. We encourage your action this month in supporting passage of 2 federal bills currently stalled in the Senate: the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.
Please take the time this week and join your fellow League members by going to this Action Link to learn more about this legislation and take individual action. By contacting Senators Feinstein and Padilla to push for passage of this important legislation we can truly recognize the heroism of the men and women that protected the Capital and legislators of all political parties in defense of Democracy on January 6th, 2021.
…..
Happy New Year,
Mary Jo Bryan
President
LWV Davis Area
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By Charles B. Salocks, PhD
Teichert Construction is applying for a Yolo County permit to mine gravel on more than 250 acres of land in lower Cache Creek west of Woodland that is now being used for agriculture.
This proposal is problematic because the Cache Creek watershed naturally contains substantial deposits of mercury ore. It includes a US EPA Superfund site, Sulphur Bank Mercury Mine, located at the east end of Clear Lake.
According to the Environmental Impact Report (EIR), at the end of 30 years the mined property will be reclaimed: approximately two-thirds of the land area will be converted back to agricultural use and one-third will become a permanent water impoundment (or ‘pond’) and turned over to the County. The property will not be restored to its original state, at least not in the foreseeable future.
A toxic compound called methylmercury is produced by certain types of bacteria that live in water and sediment where the concentration of dissolved oxygen is very low. This condition can occur at the bottom of ponds or lakes, such as the reclaimed water impoundments in lower Cache Creek where open pit mining has already occurred.
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By Nancy Price and Don Price
Recently the Yolo County Planning Commission held two public hearings on the proposal submitted by Teichert Materials to carve a new open-pit gravel mine on the 319-acre Shifler farm, three miles west of Woodland along lower Cache Creek. If approved, the proposed gravel mine would operate six days per week for 30 years.
Climate advocates, the Yolo County Farm Bureau, neighboring residents of the Wild Wings community and others concerned about the project’s many environmental impacts spoke and submitted letters to the Planning Commissioners. After more than ten hours of discussion, the Commission voted 4-2 this month to recommend dramatically scaling back the project to protect prime farmland.
Citizens raised concerns about formation of toxic methylmercury sediment in the wet pits already lining lower Cache Creek, risk of contaminated fish, and the potential that such deep mining could puncture holes in the groundwater table and contaminate the water supply.
“This decision signals we are in a new era of planning for resilience and cannot ignore irreversible impacts to land, water and public health. Land that can be used to grow tomatoes and wheat to feed people should be used as if our lives depended on it – because they do,” observed Alessa Johns, a concerned citizen and retired UC Davis professor.
Many readers may not realize that gravel mining in Yolo Country goes way back to the 1870s. By the 1970s, concerns arose over the impact of open-pit mining in the main Cache Creek channel. It took until the mid-1990s for the county, the mining industry including Teichert, and a group of concerned citizens to restrict mining to outside of the main channel, create the Cache Creek Conservancy, and begin a program of remediation and restoration.
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A statement from the Old East Davis Neighborhood Association (OEDNA)
Residents concerned about the unique feel of Davis should be troubled by this ruling. By overturning the trial court, the appeals court implies that the City does not have to keep its own commitments as implemented in the ordinances and planning documents. The appeals court grants the City license to take any provisions agreed upon by the community to protect neighborhoods or specific resources and then interpret them in a way that best serves the interests of developers or other special interests.
When the City decided not to create a historical district for the 2001 General Plan, they opted instead for a conservation overlay district, having protections codified in the Design Guidelines and enforced in the zoning codes. Many community members and businesses, including OEDNA, worked to complete these documents, trusting that future City Councils would honor their intent.
A Mixed-Use Mass and Scale guideline states: "A building shall appear to be in scale with traditional single-family houses along the street front." And a zoning code states: "Wherever the guidelines for the DTRN conflict with the existing zoning standards including planned development, the more restrictive standard shall prevail." The Trackside Project as approved by the City clearly does not follow this directive. However, the appeals court decision ruled that the City has almost complete discretion in how it interprets and/or reinterprets its planning documents.
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The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) approved a $3.25 million, 5-megawatt pilot program that simplifies energy pricing for agricultural customers and provides lucrative automation incentives to adjust schedules to match grid conditions.
(From press release) Valley Clean Energy (VCE) is excited to announce that the California Public Utilities Commission has approved a $3.25 million pilot program to deploy automation systems, mainly for irrigation, that are responsive to the power grid at subsidized or no cost to farmers.
Partnering with TeMix and Polaris Energy Services, VCE will implement the 5-megawatt program starting in the summer of 2022. TeMix invented the technology that creates and transmits dynamic electricity rates that are sensitive to grid conditions, and Polaris is the leader in agricultural demand flexibility.
Building on state-funded research and development by TeMix and Polaris, the Agricultural Flexible Irrigation Technology (AgFIT) pilot program will provide VCE agricultural customers with automation systems and software to easily purchase energy at the lowest prices possible while meeting their crop and operational requirements.
The pilot tariff gives price signals through the simplified rates to incentivize farmers to shift their electricity use. Electricity is not just cheaper when renewables are plentiful; shifting the electricity load off expensive peak times reduces carbon emissions because renewables can be relied upon more heavily, rather than using more carbon-intensive electricity due to higher demand.
As seen in the previous pilot by Polaris and TeMix, growers in the program enjoy a bill savings of 10–15% for shifting energy consumption from the hours when the grid is under the greatest stress to hours when renewable electricity is plentiful. Additionally, incentives for the automation systems of their choice save approximately 30% on labor costs while improving crop quality.
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(From press release) Valley Clean Energy announces the hiring of Sierra Huffman as its new program and community engagement analyst. VCE is the local electricity provider for the cities of Winters, Woodland and Davis as well as the unincorporated portions of Yolo County.
Huffman is responsible for developing and implementing programs, maintaining stakeholder relations, opening avenues for community engagement, and using analytical methodologies to educate and inform. With nearly two years of experience with community choice aggregators such as VCE, Huffman has brought relevant skill sets to the team.
Before joining VCE, she created greenhouse gas reduction measures for Humboldt County’s Climate Action Plan and established long-term planning goals for Redwood Coast Energy Authority’s Repower+. Much of her work focused on energy prices and rates, electric vehicle adoption, rooftop solar installations, and gas appliance retrofits.
She also completed an internship with Silicon Valley Clean Energy before coming to Yolo County.
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By Matt Williams
What follows are the public comments that I submitted to the Finance and Budget Commission (FBC) this morning regarding the Economic & Planning Systems, Inc. (EPS) Fiscal Analysis of DiSC 2022. The Technical Memorandum prepared by EPS can be found here. The 27 items included are not exhaustive.
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Today at the monthly meeting of the Bicycle Transportation and Street Safe…
What?
Yes, the Staff of the City of Davis again botched the name of the "bicycling commission", formally the "Bicycling, Transportation and Street Safety Commission" in L'il Bastard Son of DISC I, also known as DISC II.
Just a simple typo? Yes, the name makes no grammatical sense. When I was on the Commission I tried to change it. No success. Anyway, hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of Staff didn't notice the repeated error in the Staff Report for DISC II.
Whatever? OK, here's the summary of DISC II in regards to transportation:
They promise:
The project is placed directly on I-80: When there's no congestion, which is still much of the time, it will take 15-20 minutes door-to-door from DISC II to much of UC Davis campus, West Sacramento, and so on. Downtown. It simply has no competition.
Certainly not from cycling! The planned residential area of DISC II is simply so far cycling-wise from everything that it should have been rejected by staff. There is no connectivity promised to South Davis, including Nugget and some nice restaurants etc around it. (Seriously, does anyone from Nugget HQ ride to South Davis Nugget by bike? Ha!!) Modifications to the Mace over-crossing of the Union Pacific ROW and I-80 to make it cycling-friendly (or better) and pedestrian-tolerant are absolutely necessary even without DISC II, and very expensive, and DISC II's leaders and Staff are planning nothing about it.
Is anyone even going to walk to Target? Perhaps kids will ride bikes to schools in East Davis, because they have no other choice aside from the parental automobile ferry.
Sure, some shuttles and so forth are promised, there's that Park & Ride, people without fare-free parking or cheap parking at their destination might take transit.
DISC II is planned to impact Roads 32A and B as a way to avoid Mace, even as right now the City and County are trying to create a safe route on 32A to the Bypass for people riding bikes.
DISC can't promise anything concrete, e.g. only a study on Mace. But then it will generate enough tax revenue many years from now? For now – and we need improvements now – the City couldn't even get the developers of the project to pay for removal and replacement of the slip lanes on Mace and Alhambra. Similar for the extended stay hotel on Mace and 2nd. And in South Davis, only the part of Chiles directly fronting the new hotel has been fully re-paved. The differential in illumination is so great that after passing the hotel one can barely see the road.
For over four years the City's had a very greasy grip on the handlebars of our collective bicycle: There's been no senior civil engineer for transportation for all of that time. During the summer the City Council finally re-authorized a new budget for this position, and finally an executive search firm will be tasked to find someone. It's unlikely they will start before spring, too late to weigh in on DISC II, five years since the last one left.
Last time DISC I came to the BTSSC I dissented on support of a list of recommendations; I was on the sub-committee that developed what turned into that. In the end I knew that e.g. "lipstick on a pig" was too weak a metaphor for the nonsense of DISC I. It's the same for DISC II.
* Caltrans doesn't know what kind of extra lane it will be.
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Davisite 
