Spur

Will Arnold.

Said Mayor Gloria Partida: “There are definitely certain areas that would be better for duplexes or fourplexes, but saying all R-1 zoning should be removed is not the way to go.”

Likewise, Councilman Josh Chapman said, “I am not wanting to put a four-unit house or building right next to a single story, but I think there’s a way to figure that out and look at it project by project or certain neighborhoods … providing guardrails around a policy like that can go a long way.”

That said, any decision on R-1 zoning may be taken out of the city’s hands.

SB 9, a bill currently moving through the Legislature, would allow for duplexes to be automatically allowed on singlefamily-zoned lots, noted Vice Mayor Lucas Frerichs.

“I’m not really a betting person, but my guess is that is going to pass and that will be state law,” he said. “That will be an additional tool in the tool kit, one the city doesn’t have a choice on, but it could also help facilitate additional infill opportunities on single-family lots throughout the city.”

Another committee recommendation to ask voters to exempt Wildhorse Ranch and the Mace Curve properties from a Measure J/R/D vote also drew little support.

That ordinance, first approved as Measure J in 2000 and renewed in 2010 as Measure R and again last fall as Measure D, requires a vote of the people on developments proposed for open space and agricultural land. The most recent such project, the Davis Innovation and Sustainability Campus, was voted down in 2020.

“I don’t support exempting specific projects from Measure J/R/D,” said Councilman Dan Carson. “You can’t take away the right of the voters to vote on these projects because state law allows for a referendum for virtually any significant project.”

Chapman agreed, saying, Measure D “just passed with 80 percent of the vote so I think for me, on that one, if I step back and look at it, that’s hard to take that vote away from voters.”

However, both Carson and Partida expressed interest in asking voters to amend Measure J/R/D, including to make it easier to build affordable housing.

The ordinance currently contains an exemption for affordable housing that Carson said has never been used “because it’s unusable unless you can show there is not another place in the city of Davis to provide affordable housing,” something he called, “a hopeless challenge.”

Partida said she doesn’t like the idea of exempting properties from Measure D because “it’s obviously really important to the community to continue to have a say in what happens in these types of decisions.”

However, she noted that the original Measure J was put together by community members two decades ago “and since then it has sort of just been passed along and I think we’ve gotten to a point where we should think about amending it and having the current community members have a voice in what they feel is the best way to put this forward.”

Likewise, council members cited the community’s support for the existing 1 percent growth cap in voicing opposition to the Housing Element Committee’s recommendation to eliminate it.

Removing the cap is not really necessary, some council members said, as it hasn’t prevented new housing from being built in the past.

“There’s already some flexibility in our 1 percent growth cap,” noted Arnold, who added that “the council’s also really taken the housing crisis head on with a lot of projects coming forward and that growth cap is not threatened by those actions so I don’t see what the benefit necessarily would be.

“Not to mention that is something our community has supported and is longstanding.”

One place of agreement between the council and Housing Element Committee, as well as many members of the public who oppose the bulk of the committee’s recommendations, is shoring up the city’s Housing Trust Fund.

The fund, with revenue from in-lieu fees paid by developers, is used for rehabilitation, preservation and production of affordable housing.

A draft Housing Trust Fund strategy drawn up by community members including Social Services Commission member Georgina Valencia, outlines how to improve the fund by developing more robust revenue streams — including private donations — and lays out priorities for those dollars, including down-payment assistance to first-time homebuyers.

Valencia said donations have already been pledged by local residents and more community members are getting involved in the effort.

Several faith communities, including the Unitarian Universalist Church, Congregation Bet Haverim, and University Covenant Church came together earlier this year to study "The Color of Law," a book by Richard Rothstein that examines the government policies such as prohibitions on African-American home ownership in new developments that have perpetuated segregation.

Vera Sandronsky, who is working with Valencia on seeking housing solutions locally, said a number of those who participated are interested in being part of those solutions, including making housing more affordable and increasing diversity in the community.

Many want the draft Housing Trust Fund strategy included as an attachment to the Housing Element.

Council members on Tuesday were largely on board.

“(W)e desperately need more affordable housing in my opinion,” said Chapman, “and looking at how we can really tackle the Housing Trust Fund and then address those issues in an efficient way would be hugely beneficial to our community.”

“We definitely need to find ways to make this a viable tool for our city,” said Partida.

“We have to put some real effort and real thought and exploration behind it and I want to thank Georgina for continuing to bang that drum and get us to have this conversation.

“For too long we’ve been expecting developers to make this trust fund a reality for us to use and sort of thinking that the developers are the goose that laid the golden egg but we won’t lay any eggs,” she said. “There’s no way to get that trust fund to grow in a way that we’ve been expecting so far.”

Tuesday’s council discussion of the Housing Element, the Housing Trust Fund and more was intended to provide further feedback to city staff as the Housing Element continues through the review process. No council votes were taken.

Public comment on the draft will be accepted through July 1.

Written comments may be submitted via email to jlynch@ cityofdavis.org or by mail to Jessica Lynch, senior planner, Department of Community Development and Sustainability, 23 Russell Blvd., Davis, CA 95616

Meanwhile, the California Department of Housing and Community Development is also reviewing the draft Housing Element. Following close of public comment and completion of review by HCD, the city will make changes required to ensure the final housing element can be adopted by the City Council.

Before that, public hearings will again be held by both the Planning Commission and the council to solicit input on the final housing element.

View the draft Housing Element at https://www.cityofdavis. org/city-hall/communitydevelopment-and-sustainability/ planning-and-zoning/housing -element-update-2021-2029. — Reach Anne TernusBellamy at aternus@davisenter prise.net. Follow her on Twitter at @ATernusBellamy.

CASES: Health officials put focus on variant

From Page A1

do worry about … those who are unvaccinated, including children under 12 who are unable to be vaccinated yet.”

Currently, she said, 45 percent of Yolo County residents remain unvaccinated.

“So I continue to strongly recommend that everyone get vaccinated, because the virus has not gone away.”

Still, the bottom line for now, according to Blumberg and Sisson, is the county is doing well overall and that should remain the case during the summer.

“Things are good,” said Blumberg. “We had a lot of COVID patients last year during the pandemic, we’ve had a lot of admissions in the pediatric area for the Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children (MIS-C) that occurs after infection, but right now there’s very few cases that are being admitted for acute COVID.

“The summer should be a good time for us,” he said.

Blumberg said vaccines may be authorized for children ages five to 12 in the fall and for children under 5 sometime next year, “but it’s really hard to predict.”

And booster shots will likely be needed for everyone

“For these kind of vaccines, immunity is likely to wane over time,” Blumberg said. “I don’t think that we’re going to eliminate COVID. It’s so widespread in the world. I’m hoping that it’s just going to be a seasonal virus like influenza and then we’ll just learn to live with it and probably get periodic boosters.

“I don’t know when those boosters are going to be needed, if it’s going to be yearly, or every two years, or every five years; if the immunity that we get from the shots protect against all the variants or if they need to be updated to include the variants. So all those things are questions that we’re still awaiting answers for.”

COVID-19, said Sisson, “is sneaky and it’s evolving. It continues to mutate.”

“Fortunately we’ve seen that the vaccines by and large are effective against the variants that we currently have but we could see variants evolving that the vaccines do not work against, and I think that’s why we have this urgency to get people vaccinated, not just in the United States, but around the world.2

“The longer we let COVID replicate in large numbers, the more opportunities it has to mutate and to create a variant that could be resistant to (vaccines).

“That worry will be out there until we have worldwide herd immunity against COVID, which may not happen,” said Sisson.

Asked about recently reported cases of heart inflammation among young people following vaccination, Blumberg said cases at UC Davis have been mild.

“I’ve seen several cases,” he said. “These typically occur more in boys than girls, in teens, and it’s two to four days following the second dose of the (Pfizer) vaccine.

“The kids are usually hospitalized for three or four days, they’re given treatment for their chest pain, we follow their cardiac enzymes. They go up, indicating inflammation of the heart, and they come down and they go home.

“Sometimes the heart function is not affected at all,” he said. “In some cases there’s mild decrease in function but not enough to really require excessive support, like ICU-level support.”

And, in fact, he said, the heart inflammation seen with acute COVID disease is far worse, typically requiring ICU care or other measures.

“This is a rare side effect,” Blumberg said. “We’re continuing to recommend vaccination because it is rare and it is mild and it’s clear the benefits of vaccination outweigh the side effects.”

Overall, both Sisson and Blumberg said they are cautiously optimistic about the future.

“I’m not complacent,” said Sisson. “We still have work to do in Yolo County, particularly when it comes to vaccinations.

“We still have 45 percent of residents who have not received a dose of vaccine and that means 45 percent of residents in Yolo County are still vulnerable to infection, hospitalization and death from COVID.”

“And the variants that are circulating in Yolo County are more infectious,” she noted. “They can cause more severe disease, so people who remain unvaccinated are certainly not out of the woods.”

With the reopening of the state, there may be a small increase in cases, Sisson added, “but we don’t anticipate a large surge.”

She also said individuals who are immunocompromised should continue to take precautions even after vaccination, recommending that they “behave like they are not vaccinated in the sense of continuing to wear masks, taking precautions, trying to distance. Because while you may be fully vaccinated, you many not have developed a strong immune response … and we have seen instances where people, even if they’re fully vaccinated, because they are immunocompromised, ended up with severe COVID infections.”

Thursday’s forum with Sisson and Blumberg can be viewed on the UC Davis Live Facebook page.

MASKS: Not perfect, but still a great tool to fight virus

From Page A1

these gaps by sitting volunteers in front of an instrument that counts airborne particles down to a size of half a micron. The 12 volunteers read aloud or coughed, with and without a surgical mask of the type widely used by the public, either with their mouth directly in front of the funnel of the particle counter, turned to the side or with their head lowered or raised to count particles passing directly through the mask or leaking around the sides.

The researchers found that wearing a mask while talking reduced particles directly through the mask by an average of 93%, from the bottom by 91%, the sides by 85% and the top by 47%, although with substantial variability between individuals. They

“While air escape does limit the overall efficiency of surgical masks at reducing expiratory particle emissions, such masks nonetheless provide substantial reduction,” Cappa said. “Our results confirm that mask-wearing provides a significant reduction in the probability of disease transmission via expiratory particles, especially when both infected and susceptible individuals wear masks.”

Masks also redirect the flow of air from a high-velocity plume from the talker or cougher toward anybody in front of them, Cappa said.

Additional authors on the study are Sima Asadi, Santiago Barreda, Anthony Wexler and William Ristenpart at UCD; and Nicole Bouvier, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York. (Asadi is now at MIT).

“Mask-wearing provides a significant reduction in the probability of disease transmission.”

Cristopher Cappa

UC Davis

Anne Wernikoff/CAlMAtters photo

Rising first graders work on a spelling activity during summer school at Laurel Elementary on June 11. Classes focus on academics in the morning and hands-on activities in the afternoon.

SUMMER SCHOOL:

Is it worth all the effort?

From Page A1

school pay at higher rates to encourage teachers to work through the summer. Districts also needed to hire enough staff to ensure class sizes remain small to prevent the spread of COVID-19 on campuses.

“Summer is a big lift even in a normal year. This year it’s even harder,” said Julie McCalmont, the coordinator for expanded learning programs at Oakland Unified. “We’ve had to hire more teachers and staff. It’s taken us several million dollars more in order to serve these kids.”

Oakland Unified increased its summer school budget by $2 million to $4.7 million this year and enrollment has increased to 6,690 from 4,854 last year. Even so, it has 510 students on a waitlist.

No matter how robust the offerings, parents and teachers accept the grim reality that a month or two of summer school won’t undo the damage of 15 months of school closure.

“Summer school is not gonna be a quick fix for the losses students suffered during the pandemic,” said Jenny Hontz, communications director for the parent advocacy group Speak Up, based in Los Angeles.

The pandemic’s upending of public education has presented an opportunity to rethink summer school and the traditional academic calendar.

Austin Beutner, outgoing superintendent of Los Angeles Unified, said he unsuccessfully advocated for the state to fund an extended school year to take the pressure off remedial summer school programs.

“I think more time next year would probably be more powerful than summer school this year,” said Beutner. “People do need a break.”

CELEBRATE DAD

Memories created with your father last a lifetime. Let’s celebrate dad this Father’s Day and let him know just how special he is.