8 comments:

• Doug Chaney posted at 10:43 pm on Fri, Mar 8, 2013.

  Posts: 389

  I believe the three amigos on city council will be negotiating with the North SJ water district to "sell' them cheap water in which they in turn will sell for a profit or the top of the pecking order in the good old boys water district will get cheap fertilized water for their winegrapes at a low cost, maybe even free or on a government welfare program. Any profits should be returned to the lodi residential water meter users and not pay city bills and expense accounts with like our electric utility does and then pawns the highest residential rates in the nation off on its residential users to subsidize businesses that still waste in the commercial/industrial/business sector, who are also the biggest wasters and not urged to utilize solar energy technology that is now readily available.

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• Doug Chaney posted at 10:32 pm on Fri, Mar 8, 2013.

  Posts: 389

  I see councilman Hansen's name in some of the Reynolds Ranch documents, but I can't determine whether he was an investor, broker, buyer, pauper or what? I fell he should have recused himself from voting on any RR issues if he were an investor. I know you read these blogs or are told what they contain, so why not open up and blog since you've only ever answered one of my emails in ten years or so? None of you three "amigos" cares to make any statements where you are so afraid to incriminate yourselves. Why is that? Are you afraid one of us "second class citizens" will expose you for what you really are to all Lodians?

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• roy bitz posted at 9:13 pm on Fri, Mar 8, 2013.

  Posts: 479

  ---total cost and benefit of the surface water treatment plant and how it will help reduce the ground water over draft problem.
  I believe the total of all costs associated with this project to be two hundred million dollars over the life of the project.
  This plant will reduce the over draft problem by 6,000 acre feet a year or put another way---3% of the 200,000 acre feet over drafted annually. The over draft is a rural problem---not a city problem and this plant will do next to nothing to reduce over drafting. Heck put in another vineyard or two and the good will be negated all together.

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• roy bitz posted at 8:40 pm on Fri, Mar 8, 2013.

  Posts: 479

  Thank you Mr Maurer for reminding us all how some of our council members have mismanaged the ground water contamination fiasco. It is also good to be reminded of the favorable treatment some projects such as the surface water treatment plant and Reynolds Ranch, been given by three gentle councilmen---not council women.
  It would be good to hear from Johnson and especially Hansen regarding the total

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• Jackson Scott posted at 6:53 pm on Fri, Mar 8, 2013.

  Posts: 366

  Oh, you've hit my hot button with the groundwater topic. When then Phil Pennino came to my door campaigning for re-election I told him that in no way in he11 would the CoL win that lawsuit. The CC was rubber stamping the position by City Atty Hayes & Envision.

  The better questions are how & why the LNS got off so easy? Yet Guild Cleaners was in the cross hairs of Envision. The LNS dumped cleaning compounds daily down the drain in the alley behind their old location on Pine St, where the old Beckman Bros Stock Co was, now housing Della Monica & Snyder Architects. The SAME sewer line was used by both Guild & the LNS.

  The fact is that the LNS is hanging on by its last thread. It is my personal belief that once Marty gets his kids through college he will shut it down, or maybe eliminate the print/home delivery version and go completely online. He's at the age where he is ready for retirement.

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• robert maurer posted at 3:15 pm on Fri, Mar 8, 2013.

  Posts: 228

  Mr.Chaney; You have a pretty accurate picture of Lodi city council. Let me refresh the memories of some and educate others on a similar water topic: the downtown groundwater contamination case in which the council hired an unknown lawyer named randy hayes who was nothing but a fraud who cost the city millions and bilked the city out of millions more and when hayes skipped town, spent many thousands more to locate him, but he skipped out of his San Francisco office. Bob Johnson was gung-ho in hiring hayes and when the court hearings were not going in Lodi's favor and the money spent was not making a difference,former councilwoman Susan Hitchcock was the only councilmember to inform the public of the real status of the case and bob johnson tried to have her removed from her position and when that failed he censured her. Larry Hansen awoke and went to one of the hearings, only to hear the officiating judge compare hayes' representation to a Saturday Night Live Gilda Radner diatribe and hinted to Hansen that Lodi needed better representation. That was the only time any of the council members appeared in court up to that time. Up until that fiasco, my water bill was less than $8.00 per month.That was in 2004. Now Lodi still has Hansen and Johnson on the council, and Johnson again tries to get a female thrown off a board for false reasons, and then has the audacity to snap at Joanne Mounce for attempting to talk over him. One regular poster here might be on to something when she said that 25% of lodi adults are not educated,attempting to discredit me on one of my posts,however, I did not vote for the same people over and over again, who couldn't run a glee club,let alone a city.Everyboby deserves exactly what they voted for.

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• Doug Chaney posted at 11:51 am on Fri, Mar 8, 2013.

  Posts: 389

  Sentinel, why not a detailed report of the March 6 council meeting in detail like you make sure Galt gets, and on the front page even? Maybe you could question just why City Council all of a sudden this pudding work of the bids at the Reynolds Ranch parkway now that they have given the developer, Mr. Gillespie, a free pass from the filling his contract there and proceeding with work there and billing the tab to the Lodi taxpayer's since now it seems that the city of Lodi is going to make all these improvements that should be paid for by the developer and looks like the city is now in the development business? With the economy improving maybe another large tenant is interested in space there and the city will be accommodating the cost of the infrastructure rather than the developer? This sounds to me like just another game that was played with the unnecessary and unneeded water treatment plant which was to be paid for by the developers. But miraculously when this project was approved the $50,000,000 or so bond was pawned off on the taxpayers. The talk goes that the unnecessary and unneeded water treatment plant was to provide the water infrastructure for the new super Wal-Mart, ReynoldsRanch, and the two Gateway projects and the large housing boom that was supposed to accompany it. Not to mention all the controversy up surrounding the approval of the ReynoldsRanch project which seems to have had the plans drastically changed and the language rewritten concerning the percentages of commercial and residential property and the adding more commercial, more high density housing, less low density housing, and schools seem to have disappeared from the project was there from the beginning which seem to be part of the agreement. The City Council and management team of Lodi, in my opinion, work in the shadiest way possible, to keep the citizenry confused and making it hard to distinguish whether some of these decisions are either unethical, criminal, are just plain pandering. That also includes previous councils where ex councilmen Mr. Beckman was involved. Come on Lodi News-Sentinel and start informing us Lodi citizens as well as you do for those that live in Galt with a detailed reports on all council meetings, school district board meetings and school districts, planning commissions and other boards and their directors that make the decisions that seemed to keep the east side of Lodi still stuck in the fifties while pandering to the wealthy, well connected, and the good old boys group?

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• Jerry Bransom posted at 7:59 am on Fri, Mar 8, 2013.

  Posts: 361

  Missed 3 out of 8? You would be fired if you work for me. If these "councils" are so important, why are they taken so lightly by the appointees?

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