Bob Dunning: My exercise regimen soon will change

FAINT PRAISE … my friend Gabe blessed my Sunday morning with a beautiful letter to the editor that began “Bob Dunning must be extremely physically fit!.” … with all due respect for exclamation points, the man has clearly never seen me in the shower … adds Gabe: “He has a unique exercise program.” … indeed I do … I simply put last night’s pizza in the microwave for 58 seconds and jog barefoot around the living room until the timer goes off … if I want another piece, I repeat the ritual … the more pizza I eat, the fitter I get … I figure for a whole pizza, I’ve run close to a 10K …

But, complimentary as he is, Gabe isn’t done with me … “Five times a week he flogs a dead horse to the point of exhaustion!,” he notes … yikes, another exclamation point … Gabe must be really passionate about horses … “Is there anything else going on in the world outside of the proposed water rates for Davis?” … sounds like a man who has clearly made up his mind and wants to move on …

Well, your honor, I plead guilty as charged and throw myself on the mercy of the court … it’s true, I have spent more column inches than I planned on this topic, mostly because the city keeps providing a moving target … I mean, first the experts told us we desperately needed 18 million gallons of water a day or all of Davis would turn to sand and blow away the next time our strong north wind blows … then suddenly, the same experts told us we needed only 12 million gallons a day … that’s quite a difference … and right up until the last second, the Water Advisory Committee and then the City Council kept changing the rate structure …

What Gabe may not realize is that for a journalist in this small valley town, a $113 million water project is like the Super Bowl … and, much like the Super Bowl, it gets written about way too much in the days leading up to the big game … I frankly didn’t care what Colin Kaepernick’s most recent tattoo looked like, but I found out nonetheless … I just wanted them to start the game already …

The good news here, for both Gabe and me, is that this will all soon be over and we can together move on to other things … fortunately for me, there will be many more topics to write about before the sun finally sets on this town … as one of the entries to my Official City Motto Contest says “Davis: the town that keeps on giving.” …

LETTER RIP … another letter to the editor, this from Michael, falsely states that “Bob Dunning and a few others argue we cannot afford a clean, sustainable source of water.” … I can’t speak for others, but I can state definitively that I do very much want a clean, sustainable source of water and I’m willing to pay my fair share to get one … and while I have neither endorsed nor rejected the current proposal to pipe Sacramento River water to Davis, I remain convinced that the convoluted rate structure the city proposes to impose on homeowners and others does not meet the standard of proportionality required by Proposition 218 … if the city would simply straighten out the rate structure to a much simpler per-gallon charge, then I could get around to actually deciding about the project itself … is the current project affordable? … depends on who you are …

PERSON ON THE STREET … I absolutely love the “What do you Think?” feature in Sunday’s paper that asked six unsuspecting Farmers Marketeers “How will you vote on Measure I?” … I especially like the answer of the young student who said yes, “Mostly because of the taste.” … wow … you’re willing to watch your water rates triple just for better taste? … do you know there are entire stores in town dedicated to selling delicious water for far less than this project will cost you? …

ASHES TO AGGIES … pleased to see that the Liturgy of the Word and the distribution of ashes will take place tomorrow, Ash Wednesday, on the second floor of the Memorial Union on campus … nice to know the First Amendment is alive and well at UC Davis …

— Reach Bob Dunning at bdunning@davisenterprise.net