 episode of the City Considerers here at Davis Media Access. I'm Autumn LaBea Renault, and my guest today is recently elected city council member Dan Carson. Dan is here today. We're going to dig into the current status of the relationship between the City of Davis and the University of California at Davis, and we're going to hear from him about some things we need to know. Welcome, Dan. Well, thank you for having me. So there's a lot going on in short. What's been in the news lately is that the University released a long-range development plan, an LRDP, but we're going to try to steer away from acronyms and an environmental impact report about some of the things that were in that plan, and then the city responded. And the city's response now has the, so the city, the county, and the university are all in mediation, as I understand it, to try to work through some of these things. So I'm hoping that today, from your perspective, as someone who's on council and now dealing with this as pretty much a full-time job, you can kind of hit what some of the sticking points are and what we as community members might need to know. Great. Happy to do that. And this is a really important issue because it gets to the heart of things that affect every day of the site. It has an impact on our housing supply, on traffic, on parking, on city finances, and many other aspects of the city. And so this has always been a very important relationship between the city and UC Davis campus. This, I think, is sort of a turning point in our relationship. I'm hoping, as I had urged during my campaign for office, that we can turn this into a great way to reinvent the relationship between us, create a great two-way working relationship. But we have some work to do. So that that campus plan that was released just as recently as a couple months ago, as they had told us, results in a 24% increase in the campus population over about a 13-year period under their proposals. And that includes undergraduate students, graduate students, faculty, all the folks who drive or come to campus. And so, quite understandably, that kind of growth has a significant potential impact on our city. Our city staff has carefully reviewed the plan. We've urged, in the environmental review process that was conducted for that plan, we've urged the University of California to make more concrete assurances to our city that they will mitigate the impacts of that growth. And we've urged them to do that before they approved the plan, they did not do so. However, it's second best, but it is a step forward that the University quickly offered, as their regents had urged them to do, to start a process to negotiate with the city to try and resolve those issues after the fact. And our council embraced that. They beat us to the punch, essentially. We very much appreciate the opportunity to try to work out these issues with them. Sure. And it is a moment in time. We have a new chancellor, Gary May, relatively new, and we have a relatively new council composition. And so that does present an opportunity for moving forward. One of the biggest issues in this town is housing. That's the thing that you hear the drumbeat all the time. And we have a situation where our housing vacancy rate for rentals in this town is so low as to be functionally zero, as I understand it. And then we're looking at adding all these other students. So I imagine that one of the biggest issues is how the university will address on campus housing or near campus housing. Can you address that? That's absolutely the cornerstone of this issue. There are other issues too that relate to campus mitigation of growth. But that's where it all starts. And we've seen it in our lives. I had one of those mini-dorms, just a couple of houses away from me for many years until recently, with the parties and the noise and the parking issues and all the rest of it. I also saw the other side of it. We had a student living out of his car for a couple of months, just a couple of blocks from my house. It's just not appropriate in a city like ours for that kind of thing to be going on. And so the city has a responsibility. We exercised it last night. We approved another housing project called Davis Live across the street from the university that will provide 440 beds, predominantly for students, but there's also the opportunity for non-students to live there. The voters of the city approved the Nishi Student Apartment Project that would provide housing for 2,200 persons. So our city has understood that this is a college town. We understand the mission of the university and that there is going to be growth. But what we're turning around and saying is as this growth occurs, campus, university, you need to help us deal with the impacts of that growth on housing and parking and traffic and other areas. And so on the housing one, just because it is the cornerstone here that you mentioned, they laid out an ambitious plan that would provide 9,000 additional beds that would start to catch up on the deficiency of housing that has, it's a 0.2 percent rental vacancy rate by one measure. In other words, functionally, as you said, there are no vacancies on an ongoing basis in this town. It has an impact not only on students and making it hard for them to survive, but it has an impact on working families. It makes it harder for people who work in this town to be able to live in this town. And so we want the university to make a much more clear and binding commitment to actually carry out the growth plan for student housing that they have told us that they're willing to do. Sure, and one of those adjunct impacts is if you have fewer people who can afford to live here or find housing here, then they're commuting in which impacts the infrastructure, it impacts the traffic flow, it impacts all of that. Which kind of links to my next question. It's not just the housing, it's the impact on downtown, it's the parking, it's the impact on all the other aspects of infrastructure. So can we talk about that for now? Absolutely. So for example, their own environmental impact report documents through the traffic models and other things. They assume, for example, that all 2,000 new faculty and staff that would have to be hired to teach those additional students that they plan to bring in is increased enrollment. Well, all live out of town. Well, I'm not sure I agree with that, that that's what will really happen. But if you take them at their word, that means that many more folks commuting. And we see what happens to Richard's Boulevard and I-80 in that area, for example, mornings and late afternoons in rush hour. You see what happens on Russell Boulevard and how much traffic and congestion there can be. There are statements in their environmental impact report about some of the ideas that they're considering. But what we don't see, and we put this all in a 19-page letter to the regents before they acted on their plan, we tried to be as specific as we possibly could on where we think there need to be stronger commitments. But mass transit, what can we do with Unitrans? What can we do with surface road improvements at those critical intersections? Those are things that we need to work together to solve. Yeah, and I read an article the other day that Unitrans actually served more than four million people, four million passenger rides in its last year of operation, and that was, you know, up from previous years. And that's a really significant number because they're serving not to students, but the community as a whole. And Unitrans has significant challenges. So the new state laws that increase the minimum wage in steps over the next few years means significant additional costs for Unitrans to pay its bus drivers, who are most all of them at the minimum wage or affected by the minimum wage. And so their own numbers suggest that Unitrans over the years is going to be in serious financial trouble. And so the university says it's counting on Unitrans to help carry some of the additional students that are coming, help deal with the faculty and maybe regional bus service. But they're pinning their hopes to a bus system that needs a lot of real financial help and we don't see the commitments there at this point from the university to to provide that help. And that's part of the issues I'm sure we'll be talking to them about in mediation. What are some of the other asks that the city is making of the university at this as part of this process? Well, one of the really big issues is the impact on our public services and on our downtown through parking. So for example, one of the ideas that the university has is will help mitigate some of the impacts of traffic by really encouraging people to do ride sharing and more like will provide preference to people who park on campus who double up or or more in in carpools. But if they some of the measures they might take to encourage that might push some of the students off campus into the community creating additional problems with cars for us. We want them to take a close look at just those kinds of issues that the mitigation impacts that they're proposing the mitigation steps that they're proposing to help cope with the growth in the campus don't inadvertently have negative impacts on their host city. There's a great path forward that we've seen in Santa Cruz and Berkeley where they had similar kinds of issues come up and those two communities reached binding and enforceable two-way working agreements that have been good for both sides to my understanding. And we're looking you know we're open to the mechanics and specifically how we solve these problems that's why you talk. But we think there are some great models for other cities with who host campuses where they've been able to reach out to each other and bridge those kinds of differences that were really important at the local level. I have every confidence that we can come up with solutions to this growth impact that will be beneficial for the city of Davis and then if you really want to have a good and effective two-way working relationship I'm a graduate of their MBA program. I want this campus to succeed and I want to know what things does the campus want that the city could do for them that could help them to succeed. We want this to be a world-class university that it's becoming. We want that to continue. Davis wouldn't be Davis without UC Davis. That's very true. I feel that as an alumni and so we want to be open and collaborative and we've been willing to to do our part. You know we voted as a council last night unanimously to approve yet another student housing project. That's not an easy vote around here you know it's a controversial thing. But we've recognized that while we want the campus to do more and provide additional housing for its own students that we have responsibilities as a city there as well and we've been living up to that responsibility we feel and so this is a really great time to try to move forward together and resolve these issues. So what's the rest of the timeline like this look like for this? Sure the mediation period will run until at least early October. My understanding is both sides could extend it if we're making progress and we're working things out you know that isn't necessarily the the end of the story if the talks fall apart then we as a city have some really big legal issues to discuss and we would have to see what we want to do at that time. All right well there are a lot of Aggies in this town myself included who yeah like you said I think we all recognize the the value of the university the community and the value of the community the university and would hope to see some good solutions moving forward so I want to thank you for number one for stepping up and being on council it's a big job so thank you for that and for making time to come in here and appear on community media. You have been on KDRT for a couple of interviews recently and if you go to kdrt.org and plug in Dan's name I bet you will get to them one was on Davisville and one was on That's Life with Lois Richter so thanks for making the time for that and to connect and please come back and and talk with us again a few months down the road. Thank you so much for having me I'd love to come back. You bet thanks so much Dan. This is The City Considerers I'm Autumn Labay-Renau tune in next month when I interview our new poet laureate James Lee Job. See you then.