Inside UDJ by Editor K.C. Meadows

I heard today from both Jason Brenner at Ruff &Associates and Sioux Benson Messinger from Fair & Powerful Communications about my mention in the Commerce File this week of DDR’s March forums where they plan to reveal their project for the former Masonite site. (Ruff & Assoc. is one of the project’s architects and Fair & Poerful is DDR’s pr firm).
In my Commerce File item I noted that the sessions require pre-registration and a registration confirmation and concluded (as did the half dozen or so other people who called me to point it out) that it meant DDR was trying to screen the attendees with an eye to keeping the forums from turning into Smarth Growth protest sessions.
Not so, say both Jason and Sioux. They say the registration is necessary because they can only handle 30 people at a time in the sessions - that’s the number Jason believes is the maximum if they’re to have good give and take and, that it is strictly on a first-come first-served, basis.
Sioux says if the first 30 people who sign up are all from Smart Growth Ukiah, that’s fine with her.
In fact, she says she offered to hold a special session just for Smart Growth Ukiah and that her last email was returned with the message “Stop emailing us.”
I can’t see why Smart Growth wouldn’t welcome a special meeting with DDR’s project architects to see what the project looks like and what DDR is likely to bring to the county. That just sounds like, “Whatever it is, we don’t want it.”
I called Judy Pruden, who has been named the spokeperson for Smart Growth, but she doesn’t have an answering machine on her home phone so I was unable to get hold of her to get the Smart Growth reasoning here.