Davisville

The large tariffs on U.S. imports ordered by President Trump in April have created huge uncertainty and anxiety, amplified by Trump's frequent course changes and by tariffs imposed on the U.S. in retaliation. Small businesses can't wait for uncertainty to clear, however. They have to make frequent decisions in real time. Today on Davisville a few businesses downtown tell us what they think of the tariffs, how they're coping, and how their customers are responding. The results are not conclusive -- only five businesses responded to a set of questions I sent to DDBA members prior to this program -- but  they are interesting. One respondent cheers the tariffs. The other four rate the impact to be severe and negative. Even so, you'll also hear nuance. Today's guests are Brett Lee, executive director of the Davis Downtown Business Association, and Kevin Wan, president of the association this year and co-owner of Sophia's Thai Kitchen. They comment on the responses and add insights of their own. (Photo shows a downtown Davis street scene on May 22, 2025)

The Davis school district might have to close up to three public schools over the next decade for reasons that include declining birth rates, high housing costs, and changing job patterns. Adding more homes for families in Davis could blunt that trend, but Davis voters generally resist population growth. So, people in Davis need to start talking about what they want to do, while there's still time to plan for the change. Matt Best, superintendent of the Davis public school district, discusses the choice this week on Davisville. “We've got to plan for one of two scenarios. One, we see housing on the horizon and we've got a plan for a reboundary [of attendance areas] if those students arrive. The second path is, there is no new housing on the horizon, and we've got to plan to close two or three schools over the course of the next decade, and how are we going to solve that problem as a community? “The way we're looking at this challenge now is, the Board of Education is going to make a decision in the fall of '26 about what the plan is, given the conditions that we have,” Best says. “Which means that by the '27-'28 school year, we're going to have to start to actuate some change if there's no new development. … We can't have any surprises. We need time as a community to talk about these challenges. We solve our problems best as a community when they're out in the daylight.” (The photo shows North Davis Elementary, one of eight elementary schools in the Davis Joint Unified School District.)

Last year's idea for a new “civic information hub” in Yolo County has grown into Yolo Local, a budding project to create a new source for local information and news. This spring the project is surveying people throughout the county to get insights on the types of information people want to access about local civic life and events, but don't necessarily know where to find as the old ways of distributing information and news continue to fragment. Today on Davisville we hear an update about the project from Autumn Labbe-Renault, the executive director of Davis Media Access and the project's main organizer. What Yolo Local will look like, and how it will operate, is not yet decided. That will come after the survey results are released, probably in September. Meanwhile, Autumn offers two examples of existing civic information sites she likes—Lookout in Santa Cruz and The Oaklandside, in Oakland—during today's review of what's driving this project, who's involved, and how it all might come together.  

You might have seen the famous photo of a U.S. helicopter incongruously perched atop the roof of a Saigon building, with people lined up on a sloping ladder, backlit by the sky, hoping to board. The image illustrates the final hours of the evacuation of U.S. citizens, South Vietnamese allies and others from what was then South Vietnam on the day its capital, Saigon, fell to the North Vietnamese army and its allies at the end of the Vietnam War. When so many were scrambling to leave, a few Americans chose to stay. Claudia Krich, a retired teacher who lives in Davis, was among them. Her journal of the experience is the basis of her new book, Those Who Stayed / A Vietnam Diary. She went to Vietnam in 1973 to work in a medical relief program. On today's Davisville she talks about why she stayed when Saigon surrendered, her experiences in Vietnam, and what she saw that day. She'll talk about her experience at the Davis library at 6 p.m. April 30, exactly 50 years after the end of the war.

If you go this spring to the Gibson House, a 19th century mansion-turned-museum in Woodland, you can see portraits of people who lived in Yolo County in the 19th century. There are a lot of stories in those paintings, and in the painters, all of whom worked in Yolo County. One of the six artists exhibited is Calthea Campbell Vivian, described as “one of the leading artists of the West” in her time. Another was an accomplished painter who couldn't make a living at it, which ended his marriage … and his daughter became a famous opera singer in Britain. And her daughter, his granddaughter, became the youngest baroness in England. Who are the people in the paintings? What did they want their portraits tell us? What's it like to stand in the rooms of this landmark house and look at them, looking back at us? We talk about all this today on Davisville with Sarah Bartlett, museum curator for the Yolo County Historical Collection, which is presenting “Picturing Yolo County exhibit: paintings by past local artists” through June 17. Photo shows painting of 66-year-old Mary Blowers of Woodland, 1896, by Calthea Campbell Vivian

Advances in technology, say today's guests on Davisville, make it possible to create a community microgrid in new parts of Davis that would deliver clean, resilient, solar-powered energy to its customers for less than Pacific Gas & Electric charges. To accomplish this, Davis would need to form a municipal utility, and a developer building on vacant land would need to sign on. If the community microgrid succeeds, the model could be repeated throughout the state. Ari Halberstadt and Lorenzo Kristov, who have been working on the project, explain how it all would come together, including why the microgrid would have to serve new customers who aren't already served by PG&E.

The Trump administration is hammering away at the federal government by eliminating jobs, cancelling programs, freezing spending and generally creating confusion. Today on Davisville we look at one part of the fallout in Yolo County -- the effect of the spending freeze on local nonprofits -- by talking with Jessica Hubbard, executive director of the Yolo Community Foundation. Yolo has about 200 nonprofits, not counting hundreds of small ones like school PTAs or neighborhood associations. “The biggest thing right now … is uncertainty," she said. Some local nonprofits have been hit by the spending freeze, particularly ones working in the areas of food and the environment, and “a huge number of nonprofits [worry] about the impact of the freeze, or anticipate that those freezes or potential cuts will impact them down the road.” We talk about reactions, Hubbard's advice for nonprofits and donors, the effect on nonprofit workers and volunteers, giving across the political spectrum, similarities to the turmoil caused by the pandemic, and where all this might be headed. The foundation releases its latest State of the Yolo Nonprofit Sector Report in mid-March. (Photo shows a storm over Yolo County in winter 2018)  

Several changes are pending in downtown Davis. To counter problems with public safety, the district is adding volunteer ambassadors and hopes to gain a police officer assigned to patrol the area on foot or bike; it plans a “rediscover” event for people who have concluded downtown is no longer for them; it's tracking the effects of reduced parking, new downtown housing, potential changes from a new underpass at the train station to Olive Drive, and whether the new car-free space on G Street (pictured on a recent Wednesday afternoon) delivers benefits that outweigh the disruption it has caused. Proposition 36, which Californians approved last November to permit felony charges and stiffer sentences for certain drug and theft crimes, is also a factor. We talk about all this with Brett Lee, executive director of the Davis Downtown Business Association and a third-generation resident of Davis, as well as a former mayor.

You'll hear a lot of enthusiasm from today's guest on Davisville — also love for Yolo County, curiosity for the world around her, the importance of “bringing youth perspectives to the table,” talking up civic engagement, appreciation for friendly neighbors, what she notices as she splits her days between Davis and West Sacramento, and respect for officeholders who will help you regardless of whether you voted for them or not. And that's only some of the ground we cover. Meet Jazmin Garcia, a Davis Senior High School junior who lives in West Sacramento and the host of new KDRT program NextGen Talks.

So — climate change. How do you come up with a plan that actually makes a significant difference, and that people will follow? Maybe even want to follow? For Davis and Yolo County, but really, for any city, any county. Our guest today, Richard McCann, has some ideas about this. He's a Davis energy consultant and founding partner of M.Cubed Consulting. On Feb. 9, he'll talk in Davis about “effective local climate actions” — including why plans at the levels of local government “seem to hit a pause when they need to jump into action.” The reasons include wishful thinking about how people will participate. (The photo shows an electric car about to get charged in a Davis home.)

This week on Davisville we hear from Wendy Weitzel and Bob Dunning (in photo at the new KDRT studio), colleagues who exited the Davis Enterprise in mid-2024 and recreated their work on Substack. We talk about their readership and fast success, which has held up during the intervening months and has roots in their skills as local journalists with deep knowledge of Davis. We also get an update from Brian Bolz, a Davis tech entrepreneur who helped them get started on Substack last summer. Although no longer active in their ventures, he also looked into starting a local news project he called Local Press. He has put it aside to focus on his other work, but “I still feel there is an opportunity for a sustainable business model to succeed at the local level (in addition to solo publications like Bob and Wendy's),” he wrote in an email. “Should a trusted, credible package be offered, I think paid subscribers would show up for it.” Today we get an update on Dunning and Weitzel's parts of the ongoing change in Davis media.

The December holidays are the weekend of the year, when normal routines loosen up. Today's Davisville arrives in that spirit — no civic issues today. Instead I reconnect with a friend I hadn't talked with in decades, Teresa Ozoa. She and I were two of the 13 cast members in our high school's production of 12 Angry Jurors, a play where most of the 12 believe the accused is guilty, and one juror strongly dissents. Onstage, we were putting on a show. Offstage, many of us were facing big changes and trying to figure out where we were headed. Teresa became a teacher, lawyer, and then teacher again. In the first half of today's show she talks about teaching empathy and how she adapted Google's genius hour for her high school students; in the second half we remember the play, including the pre-rehearsal exercise when we all went to dinner in character -- a dozen teenagers, acting out conflict. You'll hear some background noises in this recording, plus an inquisitive cat. The music at the end comes from "Universal Mind Decoder," later part of the song "Change is Now," by the Byrds. I annoyed friends in high school by talking up the band as much as I did. I still love their music.

Today we talk about a post-pandemic effort to figure out, seriously, what would make public transit more attractive to more Californians, so that more of us actually use it. Our guest is Kari Watkins, co-director of the Transit Research Center and associate professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of California at Davis. She's a member of a state committee you probably don't know about — the Transit Transformation Task Force, which has the job of figuring out how to seriously accelerate Californians' use of transit.

This fall's annual movie show with Derrick Bang arrives with a few extras. To note his 50 years as a movie critic, he reads — and critiques! — the first paragraph of the first movie review he wrote, in 1974 for the California Aggie at UC Davis. We also hear from a film director who worried Derrick might not like his film. Plus we get Derrick's usual take on movies to see and avoid this holiday film season, although he could only find a few, for reasons rooted in the current ambiguous state of filmmaking. Please, have a seat. We're pulling back the curtains. The photo, by Jim Mitchell, shows Derrick Bang at the California Aggie in April 1976.

This week's subject is narrow, but contains a question worth considering. It involves one of the ways that ideas emerge and ultimately shape public life in Davis. This specific path involves the Davis citizen commissions that advise the City Council on subjects including city spending, planning, police accountability, and several other areas. A commission can take up a topic for various reasons, including if the council asks it to, if city staff needs it to, and on its own volition. The third option might be changing. This year the council will decide if a commission should get prior approval from its council liaison (or a council subcommittee) before putting an item on the commission's agenda. Why make this change, what's good about it, what isn't? Today on Davisville we hear from two proponents — Mayor Josh Chapman and Vice Mayor Bapu Vaitla, who form the council's subcommittee on commissions — and Elaine Roberts Musser and Dan Carson, two of the change's leading critics.

Sahaya International, a Davis nonprofit, took shape after a chance meeting when founder Dr. Koen Van Rompay (pictured), a researcher at UC Davis, was in India for an AIDS conference. Since then Sahaya has grown into a group of friends and donors, many in Davis, who give money to help people in developing countries by relying on local knowledge, trust, and long-term connections. Sahaya celebrates its 25th anniversary at Veterans Memorial Theater on Nov. 2. Today on Davisville we talk with Van Rompay about how Sahaya began, what it does, and how it operates. Sahaya's tax return says they raised and gave away about $830,000 in 2023. “There's much that we can do if we just join hands together, especially if you find people you trust,” he said. He's just as happy if Sahaya's work inspires people to do something useful outside the charity, “close to their heart,” on their own — the ripple effect.

Each weeknight at 9, people gather in Central Park near 4th and C streets, some to receive surplus food, some to hand it out. This is the Davis Night Market (pictured), a small-budget volunteer venture created in 2019 to feed people and reduce food waste. We talked with two of its co-founders in January 2020, and the market has since grown to five nights a week. “The food is kind of the carrot to get people in. It's more about the community,” adds Max Morgan, a volunteer since 2019. "People are in desperate need of community, as much as they need food.” “We really have only one rule: take what you can eat,” says Joanna Sodke, a volunteer for nearly a year. “Anyone can come here and take food.” (There are limits on pizza, she says, “a very hot item.”) Donors include well-known food purveyors in Davis, plus people with extra produce from their trees and gardens. The market operates with a county permit. Sometimes a volunteer will need to talk a person through a difficult moment. Today on Davisville, Joanna and Max talk about how it all works, including why they meet at night.

Today's show is for people interested in the current election but sick of the usual political noise. The guests are two highly experienced political analysts, Dan Schnur and Richard Zeiger, who will teach an Osher Lifelong Learning Institute class at the University of California Davis this fall called “An Election Like No Other.” On Davisville today we talk about why this presidential election is both different and traditional, why many elected offices are uncontested, cynicism as a turnoff and as a way to cope, and young Americans who opt to get involved in their community outside of politics. "Volunteering is noble," Schnur says, "but you can only clean up so many parks. Participating by voting or running for office or getting involved in other ways is equally important." “One of the most important lessons about politics … It leads to a democracy [and] you have to be willing to lose,” says Zeiger, who lives in Davis. "That's what the whole business is about, somebody's going to win and somebody's going to lose. And when you lose, you pull your pants back on and you go back into the fray.” In the class, Schnur says, “we come at this as analysts, not advocates … and so the way that we believe to keep these conversations productive, is not simply for people to scream and yell at each other and talk about who's right and who's wrong, but rather to analyze why the candidates are doing and saying the things that they're saying and doing, and trying to make broader sense of it."  

Emese Parker (pictured), an author and certified nurse practitioner specializing in women's health, began offering Davis Women's Circles this summer. Each has a theme -- one session focused on the perfect mom myth vs. the good-enough mother, and others include the mental load of mothering, rage and guilt, plus "some fun topics coming up this fall." The circles are for mothers, or soon-to-be mothers, of all ages and stages of life. Today on Davisville she explains how they work and why she's offering them in Davis. The U.S. Surgeon General recently warned that parenting today is too hard and stressful because parents face expectations that they should spend ever more time and money educating and enriching their children, driven partly by fears that if they don't, their kids could fail to achieve a secure, middle-class life. Today we also talk about matrescence, a play on the term adolescence, or the “massive identify shift and transformation that affects all that she is.” “If we understand that it is a becoming process," Parker says, "then we can have real conversations about what parenting and motherhood is like. We don't have to just smile and say 'oh yeah, everything is just fine.' We can actually have real conversations with each other and talk about what we're enjoying, and what parts are harder than expected."

Late summer offers a few particular attractions in Davis. The heat fades a bit, if only because the days are shorter, and evenings outdoors are mild. It's an inviting season to look at the full moon if it's up, and to think about another year passing. And swat some mosquitoes. Here on Davisville, early September is a natural time to talk with someone who has spent a lot of time outdoors: Jean Jackman of Davis. She writes the “At the Pond” column in the Davis Enterprise, has taken some serious bike rides, and a quarter-century ago recorded local people talking about Davis history ("Down Home Tales of Davis"). We talk about a variety of things today, starting with the wildlife and birds she writes about in Davis. Later we hear Jean's recording of Jane Van Sant, who lived in downtown Davis, died 18 years ago at 94, and tells us in her own voice what Davis lived through during the flu epidemic of 1917-18. The photo shows the full moon of August 2022 over north Davis.

Davis has two local tax measures on the ballot this fall and today we talk about the one for the library, Measure T. (We looked at the other one, sales tax increase Measure Q, last month.) Measure T would raise about $1.1 million a year to pay for operations at what will eventually be Davis' two public libraries — the existing one in north central Davis, and the new one in south Davis due to open in 2026. Measure T would raise an existing property tax by about $49 per house or $24.50 per apartment, to $172 or $86 respectively per year. Today on Davisville we talk with Jim Provenza, a Davis member of the county Board of Supervisors, and Katie Caceres, a student at the University of California at Davis and an intern in Provenza's office. They're both part of the campaign. We talk about what the money would buy, how the county calculated the amount needed, libraries as town squares for speech and information, and how people use libraries as print gives way to digital.

Pete Scully, who moved to Davis from London, has been sketching scenes in Davis for most of two decades and counting. He's not sketching for a salary — his job as chief administrative officer for the Department of Statistics at UC Davis covers that requirement — but as a way of conversing with his surroundings and capturing views that he enjoys and expects might change. He draws for himself but makes his work available on his website and on Instagram, X (ex-Twitter), and Flickr. Today on Davisville we talk about why and what he draws, and where this work might eventually reside. He's creating a portrait of Davis in the first part of the 21st century. This photo from his X (ex-Twitter) account shows one of his 21 drawings (so far) of the Varsity Theatre.

If you vote in Davis, this November you'll be asked to decide Measure Q, a proposal to raise the sales tax in the city to 9.25 percent, up 1 point from now or an extra $1 for every taxable $100 you spend. The increase requires a simple majority to pass. The money would go to general city expenses, broadly defined. On today's Davisville, Davis City Council members Will Arnold and Donna Neville talk about the proposal, priorities, and other areas where the city is trying to boost economic development that would bring in more tax revenue. And this is unusual — every Yolo city this fall is asking its voters to increase their sales taxes by 1 point. Winters, the smallest city in the county, would raise $1.2 million from its increase. Woodland would receive $16.5 million, West Sacramento $20 million, and Davis, the largest city, would collect $11 million. The numbers illustrate the relative sizes of the county's retail markets.

People talk more often about housing, but the commercial side of Davis real estate is just as important. That includes the buildings we work in, hang out in, meet in — in other words, offices, stores, restaurants, industrial space, apartments, churches, and your favorite place for coffee. The kinds and amounts of commercial property available, what it costs, the condition it's in, how people use it, all of that shapes life in our town. Today we talk about Davis commercial real estate with two people who often appear on Davisville when we talk about local housing — Steve and James Boschken, father and son real estate professionals in Davis. Topics include the demand for “second-generation” restaurant space, office vacancies, rent trends, and properties ranging from the large new biotech/manufacturing building opening on Faraday to what might happen to the now fenced-off former Carl's Jr. in northeast Davis.

“Vince is always pulling splinters from his fingers, driven in when he claws at the wooden baseboard, behind the keys,” wrote Bay Area music critic Ralph Gleason, as quoted in Davis author Derrick Bang's newly revised book Vince Guaraldi at the Piano. Splinters? They came from Guaraldi's intense playing, Bang says, nearly nonstop performing, and the worn quality of the pianos he played in clubs. Guaraldi, the Bay Area jazz musician known most for his Peanuts soundtracks and the song “Cast Your Fate to the Wind,” died in 1976 but is arguably more popular than ever, Bang says. Two recent signs: This month's latest archival release of music from a Peanuts special, It Was a Short Summer, Charlie Brown, and Bang's updated book, which he will talk about 6:30 p.m. July 11 at the Avid Reader in Davis. On today's Davisville we learn more about the music, new stories Bang heard while updating his book, and the baffling review Guaraldi received from the California Aggie the last time he played in Davis.  

Several weeks have passed since the Davis Enterprise laid off its best-known writer, Bob Dunning, who quickly moved his Wary 1 column to the online blog platform Substack and more than replaced his former salary through subscriptions. Today we talk about how his new venture is doing, how he's doing, and his fast change from lifetime employment as Davis newspaper community columnist to a Davis star of Substack. “I've never traveled at the speed of light before,” he says, “but it's kind of interesting.”

Davis has just gone through a local news media earthquake. We're talking about the Davis Enterprise's decision to lay off Wary I columnist Bob Dunning (left, in photo), which shocked and/or angered thousands of people in town. In less than a week, Dunning had restarted his column and sports writing on Substack, with enough paid subscriptions to more than replace his salary at the Enterprise. Within days, Comings & Goings local business columnist Wendy Weitzel left the paper voluntarily to also move her work to Substack. The evolving Davis news and information story has many parts. Today on Davisville we talk with local small business tech entrepreneur Brian Bolz (on right in photo), who helped Dunning and Weitzel get started on Substack, where they quickly found audiences. Bolz discusses how he became involved, plus his goals, what he's doing, and how he sees the larger picture.

These days, you can get all the quick takes and snap judgments you want. They seem easier to find than facts, partly because they're catnip to the algorithms and impulses that drive social media. Today's guest is doing something different with opinions — something more difficult, in my book, and more useful, especially in the long run. Since fall 2022, Claire Schad has been writing opinion columns for the California Aggie, the student newspaper and news organization at the University of California, Davis. Writing opinion columns will seem like an outdated, narrow pursuit — newspapers in any format have much less influence than they did — but a good column that hits its mark generates ideas, not just reactions. It can create room for nuance, for admitting and engaging different points of view. Writers learn about people and ideas, and how to make ideas useful. How to move them forward. Claire is graduating in June, and we talk about her experiences today on Davisville.

Long before he flew four missions on the space shuttle, Steve Robinson was the first DJ of a now-vanished Davis commercial radio station, KYLO, in the late 1970s. Decades later, he's a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at UC Davis, and director of its Center for Space Flight Research — and he will soon return to local radio as occasional fill-in host for Rod Moseanko, host of the station's Silver Nine Volt Heart. (The photo shows Steve, left, and Rod in the KDRT studio May 11.) Today on Davisville we enjoy a serious conversation about space flight, plus hear Steve's memories of KYLO — including what happened when he told listeners he was running out of records to play  — and learn what brought him to KDRT. After he returned Davis in 2012, Robinson said, “I was looking for some good radio,” and found it with Rod's show. “I thought, ‘this kind of radio is still alive. It was very exciting to me.' ”

The Capitol Corridor trains that connect Davis with the Bay Area and Sacramento are evolving as the service recovers from the pandemic. The corridor is adding passenger cars and resuming a full weekday schedule this year, experimenting with a tap-on/tap-off payment system to eventually replace tickets, and proceeding with plans to change access in Davis so that passengers board from an expanded center platform reached via an underpass (or perhaps an overpass) from the parking lot and Olive Drive. Longer term, the service plans to shift to hydrogen or possibly electric power for its trains. We talk about all this, as well as this year's ridership trends and efforts to improve their timekeeping, on Davisville with Rob Padgette, managing director of the service. Today's program updates our conversation about the corridor from early 2022. In this illustration from a city report, the Davis station is center left. The underpass to the tracks is shown in red from the station side, in blue from Olive Drive.

In Harboring Happiness: 101 Ways to be Happy, author Dan Brook says happiness is worth pursuing despite all the awful things happening across the globe. He bases this on research and on what he has learned during his decades as an instructor and sociologist (he earned master's and doctorate degrees in sociology from UC Davis in the 1990s). So how do you become happier? You probably have to work at it. His suggestions range from “getting more experiences,” and feeling gratitude, to “being around people who make you happy” and converting the fear of missing out into the joy of missing out. “I'm happy not because I ignore the problems of the world, but in spite of them,” he says. Work to fix what's wrong, but “being miserable does not help solve those problems.” He elaborates on his ideas during today's Davisville.

In winter 2023 we talked with Andy Jones and Margaret Merrill of UC Davis about ChatGPT, a new artificial-intelligence app that was setting off alarms for its advanced ability to "write" reports and articles. On today's Davisville they report that among the faculty they work with, the sense of panic present then has now eased “quite a bit.” People know more about the limits of chatbots, and are asking more about how and where to use the tools in teaching, instead of just fearing them as a plagiarism machine. We talk about handling chatbot hallucinations, resisting the biases that chatbots suck into their text databases, and hear a few examples of how UC Davis instructors are using the tools in their classrooms. Too many AI tools are arriving too quickly to keep up with them all. You have to keep up, but not with every twist and turn. “Rather than always trying to figure out what is in store for us from the next AI engine,” Jones advises, look for ways to “connect meaningfully with one another.” The human connection is essential. (This image wasn't created by a chatbot, but the caption error illustrates the hallucinations the bots can create.)

Today's Davisville is a story about the new — and about getting started in Davis, as well as art, life after the pandemic, ambition, and the weird. We talk with Toni Rizzo and Harry Greer, who along with Stephanie Peel have started the Secret Spot, an arts gallery and music lounge business that opened this month in a former house at 117 D St. downtown. #ConstructiveDiscomfort #RookieRoom #ArtMania! #LockdownArt #DavisSound #ArtAsTherapy #PsychicScream #HelpingOthers The photo shows, from left, Toni, Harry and Stephanie

Finding information and news about Davis is harder than it should be. The Enterprise still prints and posts local stories, but lacks the scope and heft it had before the rise of internet technology decimated newspapers as a business. Other paid sources of news and information have also retreated, turning what used to be a town commons for communication into a series of walled gardens, with information about local events and news scattered across a variety of formats, outlets, and channels. If the information is present at all. Autumn Labbe-Renault, the executive director of Davis Media Access (the parent of KDRT), thinks DMA could work with the community to create a new source of information and news about Davis, and eventually Yolo County. The venture has the working title of civic information hub. The idea is in its very early stages, and we talk about it today on Davisville.

Measure N is the latest Davis schools parcel tax to come before voters — the latest in a string that goes back 40 years. Relatively few school districts in California have such taxes, and few levy as much as Davis does. The sample ballot for the March 5th election presents the arguments for and against Measure N, plus a list of what the $768 tax supports. For context, today's Davisville talks with John Fensterwald, an editor at large with EdSource, about how Californians pay for public schools, the pros and cons of parcel taxes, and why Davis receives less money per student from the state than most other districts receive. EdSource, a nonprofit, reports on education issues in California.

The Artery co-op/gallery/store turns 50 this year. Most of its downtown Davis neighbors from the 1970s are gone, so how has the Artery lasted? Heidi Bekebrede and Adele Shaw, two of its members, list several reasons on today's Davisville, and some might surprise you — they include the hours (most art galleries don't open daily), the variety (most don't display so many artists), members who work in the shop, turnover that brings in new artists, fresh displays, and a town with lots of people interested in the arts. The train station a block away helps too. We also talk about the store's name, how they find members, the other meaning of “cute” in Bekebrede's Cuteware, the way Putah Creek inspires Shaw's paintings, and how managing a 32-machine laundromat in San Francisco introduced Shaw to first- and second-hand stories of her neighborhood from many decades before. Bekebrede, on the left in the photo with Shaw, is also a singer and the composer of “The Davis Song.”

You've probably got a smartphone. Does it ever confuse you, or do anything you don't expect? When you have a question, where do you get answers? From friends? YouTube videos? Many of us just click different things and hope for the best. Smartphones do wonderful things, but they're also tricky, sometimes inscrutable, change frequently, and are almost essential in the modern economy. Today's guest on Davisville, Louie Toro, is teaching classes this winter and spring at Davis Adult and Community Education for people who want their smartphones to be less of a black box. We talk about common questions (“a big one is almost always downloading files”), how he teaches, and how to live more of your life outside your phone. The phone is “just a tool,” he says. “You should be the one who chooses how to use that tool.”

Housing in Davis has kept evolving since we last talked about it on Davisville in summer 2022. The supply has grown, more new housing is in the works, and the city logged just 354 home sales in 2023, when in “a really strong year, [Davis will] get upwards of close to 600 home sales,” says Davis real estate broker Steve Boschken. Rising interest rates were a cause. Today's returning guests on Davisville are Steve; Kit Boschken, manager of Boschken Properties, which she co-owns with Steve; and their son James Boschken, a real estate agent and property manager who moved back to Davis from Texas a year ago. We talk about rents, prices, the G Street downtown apartment proposals, opting to live in Woodland, and a few interesting details from the market last year — like the three UC Davis seniors who moved from Davis to Sacramento, Kit says, because they had to be in Davis only two days a week and Sacramento had “more of a nightlife.” The photo shows the 200-unit Plaza 2555 project, now being built in south Davis.

Traffic on Interstate 80 is often frustratingly slow through Davis, and has been for years. What's the remedy? Caltrans proposes adding a fourth lane, and the options include allowing free use of the lane only to vehicles with at least three occupants — anyone else using the lane would pay a toll. That's the option the Yolo Transportation District Board unanimously endorsed a couple weeks ago. In other words, there are two big changes on the table — a bigger freeway, plus the start of tolls for some of the traffic on I-80 in Yolo County. The project is in the news this season as people respond via surveys, comments, and various events (including this Davis teach-in). On today's Davisville we talk with Autumn Bernstein, executive director of the Yolo Transportation District, and Lucas Frerichs, who chairs the county Board of Supervisors and is a former mayor of Davis, about what's proposed, and why.

Some individuals' work in Davis is so visible that they end up personifying their jobs. Today's guest is one of those folks — Bruce Gallaudet, a longtime, prolific writer about sports in Davis. A former editor and sports editor of the Davis Enterprise, he has retired from the news organization twice, and recently returned for the second time. Officially, he's now a sports correspondent for the paper. On today's Davisville our topics include why he's back, how he's working within the limits imposed by a publication that's a fraction of its former size, and what people miss when they dismiss sports stories as uninteresting. "There's a great deal of flavor in sports," he says.

Get yourself settled and turn off your phone, we're raising the curtain on our latest year-end movie show with Davis film critic Derrick Bang. We talk about the effects of this year's writers' and actors' strikes, streaming, some of the best and worst movies of 2023, and films he's looking forward to — or not — during the next several weeks. Derrick writes for the Davis Enterprise and his blog Derrick Bang on Film (the photo shows Derrick lurking behind a laptop displaying his blog).

Jake Berman, who lived in Davis when he was younger, has developed a writer's interest in something Davis has never had — subways. So he wrote The Lost Subways of North America — a Cartographic Guide to the Past, Present, and What Might Have Been, a new book about transit and how it reflects a city's personality, interests, and other attributes. He writes this about the Bay Area, for example -- that after the Freeway Revolt a half century ago, in which San Francisco turned away seven of 10 freeways planned for the city, “the Bay Area adopted a posture that any changes to the urban fabric were presumptively bad, and that exhaustive study of any such changes would be necessary.” We're living with the aftermath of the attitude, which he believes is also present in Davis and other California communities. Jake, now an attorney in New York City, will speak about his book Nov. 29 at the Avid Reader bookstore in downtown Davis, and joins us today on Davisville. (He also created the transit illustrations in the book -- this image is an excerpt from his map of San Francisco's cable cars in 1892.)

Today's Davisville involves Davis, food, the invention of new food products, and potentially good news for the environment, depending on how this idea develops. The topic is sweet proteins, a sugar alternative probably new to most of us, and Oobli, a Davis company using these proteins to create sweet teas and chocolates that just went on the market. Our guest is the company's co-founder and chief technology officer, Jason Ryder. He also teaches at UC Berkeley, where he earned a PhD in chemical engineering.

All the baffling cliches you've seen in movies — idiot plots, hobbled assailants able to chase down a healthy person trying to escape, bloated tension-killing dialogue — these are all things Derrick Bang has endured over and over during his 49 years of writing movie reviews. He recently listed several of these cinematic headscratchers in an article for the Davis Enterprise, and on today's Davisville he enjoys going over a few of them with program host Bill Buchanan (the photo shows Derrick on the right, Bill on the left). We also get Derrick's suggestions for movies for the Halloween season, and his thoughts on the Chinese government's efforts to punish filmmakers for work it finds offensive, even when the movies in question aren't shown in China. Such pressure could help explain why so many mainstream Hollywood movies are superhero stories, he says. “It's not just because they're popular. They're safe.”

At a very simple level, we're talking today about hamburgers, although the subject goes much deeper than that. Today's show concerns food, taste, the environment, commerce, questions of how to feed the world — and it's directly a Davis story, because the University of California at Davis is a national leader in this area of research, and their work is attracting food tech startups to the region. The subject is cultivated meat, or meat substitutes that barely exist beyond the lab for now, but should come eventually to a store or menu near you. Our guests today are Denneal Jamison-McClung and Kara E. Leong. Kara is the executive director of the UC Davis Cultivated Meat Consortium; Denneal is the director of the UC Davis Biotechnology Program, and co-founded the consortium. They can help us understand what's happening and why it matters. Photo: Hamburger served at a 2013 tasting in London (possibly the first cultivated meat product ever tasted). Credit Mosa Meat