Frequently Asked Questions (F.A.Q)

F. A. Q.

If Covell Village is not approved wouldn't other developments be built on our borders?
No, this is a myth and simply untrue.
1. Measure J Prohibits peripheral growth without a vote of the public.
2. The "Pass through Agreement" between Yolo County and the City of Davis prevents this scenario. In summary the agreement states that Yolo County has agreed not to unilaterally approve growth on the borders of Davis.
3. Furthermore no subdivision can be built without the City of Davis' cooperation to provide utilities and city services such as sewage treatment and water.

Hasn't Measure J prevented housing growth in Davis?
No. Measure J has never been used to deny a development project in the City of Davis. The city has not once held a Measure J vote since the time Measure J was voted into law by a majority of Davis voters. To the contrary, Measure J empowers the citizens of Davis to obtain the types of development projects that they desire.

Is it true the Covell Village developers will provide 60 Million dollars for Davis schools?
No. The truth is that the 60 million dollars figure is TAX on the residents - not a gift from the developers. The tax comes in the form of Community Facilities Districts (Mellos / Roos debt) taxes or CFDs. CFD money is limited by law to only defray school construction costs caused by the influx of new residents in the subdivision. This money cannot go to school programs, personnel salaries, maintenance or operating costs.

Doesn't Yes on X have 2500 endorsements for Davis residents?
No. As exposed in recent news coverage, many of the names on the Yes on X endorsement are people who moved out of Davis years ago. So don't count on these people voting for Covell Village. Former mayors from years ago, who live in Del Norte County or Mount Shasta can't legally vote in Davis elections. People who don't live in Davis shouldn't be able to influence Davis voters on how to vote for the city's future.

Has 'Friends of the River' endorsed Covell Village?
No. Friends of the River has clarified* that their name was used inappropriately in promotional literature for Covell Village.
* Statement to The Davis Enterprise Newspaper.

Has the Davis Food Co-op endorsed Covell Village?
No. The Davis Food Co-op states that they do not endorse Measure X, nor do they oppose it. The Coop has issued a statement to the newspapers that the Yes on X ad contains false information (click here to read).

Has the Audubon Society endorsed Covell Village?
No. The Audubon Society also issued a statement to the newspapers stating they are neutral on Covell Village. The advertisements by Yes on X have cleverly implied otherwise. See a trend here!

Would Covell Village "encourage the opening of the Mace Ranch" elementary school as the developers have stated?
No. The developers claim it will boost elementary school enrollment. The truth is that Mace Ranch has enough children. The problem with fully opening the Mace Ranch school concerns school district wide budgetary funding. Covell Village will not resolve this problem.

What would Covell Village do for students?
Nothing. The Covell Village developers removed the student apartment style from their project to lower their demands on the transportation and sewer infrastructure. They found that multi-bedroom "student apartments" have more residents and generated more trips that exacerbated the subdivisions already significant negative traffic and sewer impacts. Note: Covell Village has no amenities for student fraternal housing.

Is Covell Village Smart Growth?
Urbanizing 422 Acres of prime class 1 agriculture land and wildlife habitat is not smart growth. This subdivision would violate smart growth principles by significantly increasing pollution and building on a 100 year flood plain. It will represent a continuing pattern of sprawling low-density developments.

The literature I received claims Covell Village is an "infill" development; Is that true?
Covell Village is no infill project. The project site is not in the City of Davis, but in an unincorporated area of Yolo County. The project has not obtained Urban Infill exemptions available under the state CEQA law.

Is Covell Village another Village homes?
No. Village Homes is less than 250 housing units. Covell Village will have 1864 housing units. By comparison Village Homes is composed entirely of alleyways. Covell Village has convention streets along with alleys resulting in a much larger net landscape of asphalt where residents are dependent on the automobile.

I thought Mike Corbett was building Covell Village?
No, Mike Corbett is not a financial partner in Covell Village. He is an employee hired in a planning capacity. The Covell Village investors are building Covell Village. However well meaning his intentions, the actually implementation of the subdivisions features ultimately rest with the full partners of Covell Village Company not Mike Corbett.

Then isn't there some assurance that Covell Village would be similar to Village Home if Mike Corbett is involved?
No. In addition to Village Homes Mike Corbett helped plan a few other neighborhoods in Davis. These neighborhoods look nothing like Village Homes. The "buck stops" with a handful of Covell Village investors not Mr. Corbett. Davis voters should beware that Covell Village represents another compromise on the original Village Homes concept.

Is Covell Village building the subdivision's homes?
The developers of Covell Village are not building homes, but are only selling subdivided housing lots on a map. Lots that are not covered by comprehensive guidelines like the rest of Davis. As a result expect the individual lot buyers to build very large and expensive homes on small lots. The project would not have the small quaint homes of Village Homes. Critics have stated the eventual neighborhood design and character would be unknown to the lot buyers.

How come the homes in the Covell Village brochure look nice and attractive?
Covell Village Co. is not building homes, only selling lots. Expect builders to buy the lots and build the homes. The Covell Village Co. has gotten these homes legally removed from the City's Design Review and Size Restrictions. Expect the builders to build the biggest most expensive home on the lots to maximize their investment. Nothing prevents stucco, three story homes, on any of these lots. Depictions of Covell Village are similar to idealized Thomas Kinkade paintings. In fact, if Covell Village is approved, nothing prevents the investors of Covell Village Co. from selling these lots to another builder and walking away. It makes you wonder, why doesn't the City Council trust the City of Davis staff to perform the design review?

The Yes X literature suggest that if we approve Covell Village it will raise the bar for development in the region.
That certainly wasn't true with the original Village Homes. For over 20 years the project failed to inspire a second Village Homes in Davis or anywhere in the greater region.

Isn't Covell Villlage slowly phased over ten years?
No. Read your Yolo County Sample Ballot for the city attorney's impartial analysis. It clearly states in the second to last paragraph, 502 units are not phased. That right, out of 1,864 unit's one third or 502 units could be built immediately. Does that sound slow?

I thought Covell Village met the city's 1% growth rate?
It is not the rate of housing units built, it is the amount of people in each unit that really matter to planners (total population). Growth in Davis will exceed the 1% growth rate due to our current majority of fast growth city council members. This same majority of council members have created a loophole big enough to drive a truck through. They have exempt, " extraordinary infill opportunities…" from the 1% growth rate. Now we are hearing preliminary discussion from city bodies about infill growth in addition to Covell Village like the Grande Development in North Davis.

Yes, but it is only 1% ?
If you average it out. The greater sprawl of the Sacramento area is an annual 2% growth rate. 1% sounds innocent, but it is a compounding growth rate (like interest in your savings account). We will have to build a new round of Covell Village sprawl every 5 to 7 years to meet the 1% growth rate. Do you want to put Davis on that path? The good news is that this 1% rule was only recently passed by this council to allow Covell Village to be built. It is not a law of the state, county, or any regional planning body. Meeting an arbitrary growth number does not justify rezoning land for a poorly planned housing subdivision.

Why is Covell Village the wrong development at this time?
Our infrastructure is still burdened from a past decade of fast growth. Covell Village violates the city's existing general plan.
Davis is already getting hit by large subdivisions. Next year in May of 2006 UCDAVIS starts building the 224 acre West Village development that will be homes to thousands of new residents.
5 minutes North of Davis is Woodland's Spring Lake development on road 25. Spring Lake is 1,097-acre site that will house over 10,000 new residents, residents who will drive to Davis and further burden Pole Line road.
Our city staffs are overburdened. We shouldn't be dealing with the Covell Village development now. We already have West Village in the pipeline and it is being built next year. Our city council and city staff need to pay attention to the details of the West Village which are still unresolved (annexation, services, franchise, retail, traffic circulation, etc.).

What about the cumulative traffic impacts of Spring Lake on Covell Village?
Talk about poor planning. Even though Spring Lake and Covell Village share the same road, the Covell Village Co. never looked at the cumulative impacts of these 10,000 people on Pole Line road when it reaches Davis. Despite developer claims, you won't see any numbers in the EIR that represent traffic from Spring Lake. This is a violation of EIR principles and a prime example of how some member of the city council have made mistakes by pushing the project through an accelerated planning process with little time for citizen participation.

How does the Davis General plan figure into Covell Village?
The Davis General Plan designed by hundreds a residents at a cost of over 1 million dollars was put into effect in 2001. It is a slow growth general plan, designed to allow Davis to make additional investments in infrastructure so that we can recover from the last decade of accelerated growth. Now the Covell Village developers smell money to be made and have found enough votes from a majority of city council members to push their project through in and extraordinary short planning cycle (less that 18 months). The last development Davis residents voted on was the North/East Davis Wild Horse project which took 4 years to design. Stick to the plan, vote No on Measure X.

CFRP has stated that Covell Village's solar claims are a token amount for marketing purposes. Why?
Solar only provides 5% of the projects energy needs:

1. Originally, the development had passive solar water heaters (like other neighborhoods in Davis). All solar water heaters were removed from the development because they didn't test well with the Covell Village Co. focus groups. In short the marketing folks paid people to sit in a room to find out what would motivate a voter. The more efficient solar water technology was out and solar electricity was in.
2. No requirement for solar panels on commercial buildings where the large roofs provide the most surface area for PV panels.
3. Covell Village Co. is only putting the smallest 1kW systems othe single family homes. Existing homes in Davis with solar power have panels that provide over three times more power.

A 1 kW solar panel is better that nothing right?
Anything is better than nothing, but 1000 Watts is the equivalent of powering four, 60 Watt light bulbs for 4 hours a day. The developers call this providing 30% of a single family homes energy needs. Does that make you want to vote for traffic jams at Grade "F", millions in red ink, and housing unaffordable to 92% of Davis workers? There exists an opportunity for a leading solar project, but it is just not found in this project.

Every housing unit in Covell Village has Solar Panels, right?
No. Mult-family housing and apartment units will not have any solar panels. This is disappointing because the people with the lowest incomes could certainly use help with their energy costs. Unfortunately, it is the large expensive homes have the solar panels. Covell Village represents a missed opportunity for solar projects, not a model opportunity like nearby Livermore Trails.

Mike Corbett states that nobody in the country is doing anything like this with solar. Is that true?
No. Some are doing more, a lot more, technically 70% more solar than Covell Village. Take a look at Livermore Trails www.livermoretrails.com. It is near our region and voters in Livermore vote on it the same day as Davis votes on Covell Village. It provides 100% solar needs of each home, not 30% like Covell Village "claims". Livermore Trails also illustrates how solar energy and ag land preservation are used by land speculators as a carrot to get voters to approve huge peripheral subdivisions. See our document section to download a comparison between Livermore Trails and Covell Village. Further proof that Davis can do much better when it comes to housing.

If we don't build it the Davis way, won't we have to build it the Sacramento way?
No. This claim is the Davis version of the Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. No matter how many times the newspaper columnists, newspaper reporters, county supervisors, or City of Davis say it isn't true, the Yes on X campaign and three politicians continue to repeat this claim.

The three politicians Helen Thomson, Don Saylor, and Steve Souza are not being honest about this claim because they fail to mention that Davis has a legal contract with Yolo County called the "Pass Through Agreement" that prevents this scenario. They also forget to mention that Davis has Measure J, so any project must pass the approval of Davis Voters. Do you think Davis voters are going to vote for Sacramento sprawl? No.

Here is what we know about this claim:

1. An email was circulated by the three politicians that looked eerily similar to the Yes on X editorial that first made this claim.
2. Yes on X omitted the fact that Councilman Don Saylor also received unwanted election support from Sacramento developer, Steve Gidaro, in 2004 to the tune of thousands of dollars.
3. County Supervisor Marko Yamada and the Davis Enterprise have stated that the Yes on X ads have misquoted the Yolo Supervisor who represents Davis. The quotes attributed to Covell Village are actually quotes about the county's Conway Ranch eminent domain suit.
4. County Supervisors have gone on record stating that the assertions by Helen Thomson, Don Saylor, and Steve Souza are misleading. Yolo Supervisor Duane Chamberlain, who doesn't even live in Davis, went so far as to pay for an ad in the Davis Enterprise stating he will never vote to force a subdivision on Davis voters. Way to go farmer Duanne!
5. Davis Mayor in 2006 Sue Greenwald and the Davis Enterprise have stated that the Yes on X ads have taken quotes from Sue Greenwald out of context.
6. Enterprise News Columnist Bob Dunning has stated that " the people who placed this ad know what they claim isn't true." And that the Yes on X folks, "…are now trying to scare us into voting "yes" by creating a boogey man" . You can read the full text by clicking here HTML.
7. A Sacramento developer getting a recall election on the ballot, to recall a majority of the Yolo Board of supervisors, is nearly impossible.
8. Once on the ballot do you think that voters would vote to recall a majority of their elected officials so a Sacramento developer can build houses? It has never and will never happen. Yes on X might as well claim Iraq was involved in the 911 terrorist attacks.
9. Finally, Yes on X has resorted to scare tactics because they have been unable to successfully respond to questions about the merits of their project.