Davisville

When Bapu Vaitla (pictured) joined the Davis City Council in 2022, he says today on Davisville, he was interested in pursuing policy solutions that would work for Davis and might be a model for the state or other communities. That approach ran into constraints. 

“One of my primary motivations for running for council is I thought that Davis would be an ideal community to try to model some solutions that are more widely applicable, solutions around affordable housing or climate change, perhaps mental health,” he says. An idea that worked well here might inspire the state or other communities to do the same.

“I’ve learned in the intervening time that there are a lot of constraints to that kind of theory of change,” he says, “about local government modeling innovations that then get scaled up.”

On this week's Davisville, Vaitla, who opted not to seek a second term and leaves the council in December, elaborates on the constraints — fiscal and cultural — and other experiences from his 4 years helping to lead Davis.

Davis has a City Council election this fall — sort of. There is a city election in November, with two seats open on the five-person council, but with just one candidate for each seat, the winners are already decided.

Uncontested elections are also occurring in other districts, in Yolo County and beyond. Why is this happening, does it affect governance, and what does it mean, if anything, to the candidates who take office when no one is running against them?

We talk about this today on Davisville with the two people who, barring something unexpected, will start 4-year terms on the Davis council in December after running uncontested this fall: Gloria Partida, current vice mayor, former mayor and council member since 2018, who will start her third term on the council; and Judy Ennis, who will be the district 1 council member, and is new to the council. General approval of the candidates who ran might be a factor. So might Davis' switch to district elections, and the anger aimed at public figures. There are probably other reasons too.

Whatever the causes, the outcome is that starting in December, Linda Deos will be the only Davis City Council member who faced an opponent in her latest election. She won a three-person race two years ago.

People who drive downtown will see some changes starting in September. The immediate change is the switch to paid parking in three central parking lots with about 330 spaces. The change that will take awhile to show up is the impact of approximately 340 new apartments planned along G Street, mostly without space for parking (the photo shows the demolition in progress on Aug. 5 of a former Davis Ace building, where some of the new apartments will be built). If the renters don’t bring cars, then this change should add more life to downtown without amping up the competition for a place to park. If.

Today on Davisville we talk about these changes with Brett Lee, executive director of the Davis Downtown Business Association (and a former mayor), and Trish Price, vice president of Bike Davis. As the discussion shows, these changes contain more nuance than might appear at first glance.   

Editorial cartoonist Jack Ohman is good at skewering whatever he targets in his cartoons, a talent recognized by the honors he has received, including the Pulitzer Prize a decade ago and the Herblock Prize this year.

Most people in Davis know him for the cartoons he drew for the Sacramento Bee for a decade. But Davis and longtime local journalist Bob Dunning also helped Ohman save his career, he says today on Davisville.

Three years ago McClatchy, which owns the Bee, fired Ohman and the company’s two other editorial cartoonists, saying it didn’t want to run daily editorial cartoons anymore. Ohman, then 62, joined the San Francisco Chronicle part-time as a columnist and cartoonist, and a larger recovery followed when he launched You Betcha!, a Substack home in 2024 for his cartoons and columns. He got advice from Dunning and others — Dunning, of course, launched his own Substack after the Davis Enterprise cut him loose two years ago, and quickly surpassed the salary he’d lost.

Other topics today: How Ohman works; developing a meta sense of San Francisco from regular meetings with Willie Brown; fishing; becoming a political columnist; and his project, currently idle, to write a graphic personal memoir of the Apollo 11 moon landing 57 years ago this month.