Reporter's Notebook

The May 14 Elk Grove City Council meeting began with three members and ended with four. Jim Cooper was absent and missed the hiring of a new city manager, new city clerk and initial discussions on the city's budget.
After reporting on Cooper's absence, Council Member Cooper called up the Citizen to explain his absence.
"I was at training in San Diego," Cooper said, explaining that he is now in charge of the Central Valley High Tech Crimes Task Force and needed to get updated on some of the issues in the field.
Cooper said he told Elk Grove Mayor Gary Davis of his training and that he would not be there that evening. Cooper had been present at other closed session special meetings of the council when it is believed discussions and interviews were held with potential applicants.

Elk Grove City Council Member Mike Leary has been vocal in his opposition to any sort of traffic ticket quotas in Elk Grove. Elk Grove PD Chief Robert Simmons has repeatedly said there are no quotas. The clashes between the two, and also between Leary and Davis, have brought public attention to the issue and spat.
Leary called last week and said he wanted to make sure that the public knows he supports the officers on the street 100 percent and reiterated that his focus on this issue is purely from the administrative angle.

The messy saga of the Vintara Park project and lawsuit by a local neighborhood association appeared to come to an end on May 27, when a local judge ruled in favor of many aspects of a lawsuit against the city. Supporters of the lawsuit who protested the issue of Vintara Park with the city for years showed up to enjoy their victory at the May 28 city council meeting (read about it in Ted Cox's story). The Citizen inquired with City PIO Christine Brainerd about the lawsuit but has heard no comment on the issue.

City council and planning commission agendas are often times hefty tomes weighing several pounds and consisting of hundreds of pages. The cake may have been taken Wednesday evening as the council discussed the Sterling Meadows project and its 1,600 page staff report. That is more than four times the number of pages as the city's preliminary budget.

The offices of the Elk Grove Citizen were recently vandalized again with more graffiti and spray painted messages on our outside wall. The new tagging was done by unknown people sometime in the last few weeks; and happened in the alley between the Citizen office and the Elk Grove Teen Center USA.

Jeff Forward
Editor, the Citizen