DCC MOU Finally Put to Rest

City Council members have a tough job. I’m sure they hear more complaints than compliments, even when they do a great job. I was so pleased with our City Council after the June 29 meeting that I emailed them individually to thank them. Concluding a contentious two-year period, the City of Davis and Davis Community Church (DCC) have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that does exactly what an MOU should do, which is not to be an edict but to identify shared principles of action—in this case, community, safety, and working together. There are a few neighbors who are surely unhappy with the decision, and I will attempt to give fair voice to their concerns in this article. The upshot is that, for the time being, the issue has finally been put to rest by a vote of 4 to 0 (with one abstention).

At the meeting, two neighbors of DCC spoke at length about the allegedly deleterious effect of homeless services on the residents of the 400 block of D Street. They were continuing a multi-year campaign to curb the concentration of homeless services in that block, specifically at Davis Community Church (I am not aware of any attempt by them to curb the services offered by other organizations on the same block).

Places of worship exist all over town, but DCC is the oldest and only home to religious services in the Core Area. Photo Courtesy of Pieter Pastoor, www.rootsap.com

For the very purpose of dispersing services, the homeless shelter created three years ago was created as the Interfaith Rotating Winter Shelter (IRWS), involving 32 religious congregations and community groups, and rotating between seven separate overnight locations. The shelter operates in the other six locations for no less than 12 of its 16 weeks each winter. Not only is it geographically dispersed throughout the city but 627 volunteers from across Davis participated last year in greeting guests, conducting behavioral evaluations, driving guests to the shelter location, keeping watch overnight, providing meals, eating together with the guests, and maintaining records. If you haven’t volunteered recently, I encourage you to do so this winter.

These neighbors of DCC claim that our City Council and/or staff made a mistake in 1996, in changing DCC’s zoning from Conditional Use to Permitted Use, thus giving DCC the power to initiate programs like the IRWS homeless shelter. A publicly available Davis Community Church Zoning History shows that the 1996 decision included “rezoning the C-RI District to Core Area Infill (C-I) which changed public and quasi-public uses from a conditional use to a permitted use.” To me, this shows a clear intention to change the zoning status.

All other religious organizations in Davis have Conditional Use zoning, so what makes DCC unique? As one of the oldest religious organizations in town, DCC was created when it was still the fashion to zone churches as Permitted Use. Historical records show that DCC had Permitted Use zoning going back at least as far as 1925. The zoning was changed in 1939, without much explanation in the historical record. At that point, the land-use label shows up in the record as “One and Two Family Residence Zone” instead of “Public and Semi-Public.” I do not claim to have any training in understanding legal terms or historical records, but “Family Residence” does not sound like an accurate description of church property to me. As such, I see more evidence of a potential error in 1939 than in 1996, if anything. Either way, in our modern litigious society, forcibly downzoning a church’s property as an explicit attempt to placate a handful of dissatisfied citizens represents a clear violation of religious freedom. We must work together creatively to find a more equitable solution to our current situation.

I am heartened by the thoughtful comments made by City Council members at the June 29 meeting. They listened carefully to everyone. It was a good example of democracy in action, although I can imagine that these neighbors of DCC would choose to disagree.

I felt somewhat disenfranchised by the neighbors’ claims about how “the majority of the neighborhood” feels, especially after the Davis Enterprise hastily published them the following day. I live one block away from the church property myself, and these neighbors have never consulted me. I strongly support what DCC is doing for the homeless, and I support this MOU. Furthermore, I know of two other households on D Street within one block of the church that do too. It does not sound like these neighbors have made an effort to accurately represent the views of everybody living within one block of the church.

When I emailed Mayor Pro Tem Don Saylor to thank him for his vote, Saylor (who is also Yolo County Supervisor-Elect) took the time to personally reply with the simple words, “Never give up.” In last night’s vote, our City Council laid a foundation for the next Council to take up the broader issues of homelessness, safety, and drug use in our community. They set important parameters for moving forward: namely that everyone gets to be heard, and that ultimately what matters is creating the best outcome for the community as a whole. What an affirmation of DCC’s support for the homeless community and contributions to the city of Davis. Thank you!