Lodi Eye
LodiEye provides additional information on trending stories / topics published by local media and shared on local social media accounts.
Water Supply and Groundwater in San Joaquin County and Lodi
Lodi and eastern San Joaquin County draw on two water systems that behave very differently. One is the Mokelumne River, delivered to Lodi through a 40-year contract with Woodbridge Irrigation District and backed by some of the oldest water rights on the river. The other is the groundwater under our feet, the Eastern San Joaquin Subbasin, a 707,000-acre aquifer the state has classified as critically overdrafted, meaning more is being pumped out than is going back in. Roughly half of Lodi's drinking water comes from each.
The near-term picture is stable. Groundwater levels in the subbasin are holding, there is no measurable land subsidence, water quality at the basin scale is within targets, and Lodi has banked more than 53,000 acre-feet of unused river water since 2003. (An acre-foot is about 326,000 gallons, roughly what two or three households use in a year.) The long-term picture is not resolved. The subbasin loses about 89,000 acre-feet of storage a year on average, and the Groundwater Authority's own model says pumping must fall by about 95,000 acre-feet a year to stop the decline. Projects now funded cover about a third of that. The rest depends on a large program to store extra Mokelumne River water underground in wet years, which is still waiting on a state water-rights decision, or on a program to limit pumping that the Authority acknowledges could limit growth.
Four statewide decisions now in motion will shape which of those paths the region takes: the Delta tunnel, the Sites reservoir, the Bay-Delta Plan's flow requirements, and the Colorado River settlement. Dan Walters laid these out in a September 11 CalMatters column, “California's future water supplies depend on the outcomes of four intertwined battles,” which argues that the next few months of decisions on those four fronts will determine how water is managed and allocated for decades, with a governor trying to settle two of them before leaving office. This report takes his statewide framing and follows it down to San Joaquin County and Lodi. Three of the four fronts touch the county directly, and the nearest is the State Water Board's October 28–29 hearing on adopting the Bay-Delta Plan update, which sets the flow rules for the Mokelumne.
The risk is not evenly shared. Groundwater-dependent farms outside the surface-water districts and rural residents on private wells carry the most exposure. City of Lodi water customers carry the least in the near term, with their exposure showing up later as rates and growth limits rather than shortages.
Lodi Finance Committee - September 16, 2026
The September 16, 2026 Lodi Finance Committee Special Meeting is a compliance-and-treasury sitting with three Regular Calendar items: approve the June 10, 2026 minutes, receive the Quarterly Investment Report for the quarter ending June 30, 2026, and review a Purchasing Policy redline that adds Federal Transit Administration (FTA) procurement language requested by a recent FTA audit of the Public Works Transit Division.
Total cash and investments at June 30, 2026 stand at $242.0 million — essentially flat year over year, but reflecting a significant rebalancing over the last four quarters into Medium Term Corporate Notes (24.57% of the portfolio, near the 30% policy cap) and out of Municipal Securities and U.S. Treasuries. The Purchasing Policy revisions would be the third Council adoption of the policy in six years and are driven directly by FTA audit findings on the Transit Division.
Lodi City Council Agenda — September 16, 2026
The September 16 meeting is a working session dominated by contract extensions and capital-project authorizations. The AMENDED packet (523 pages) adds one large minutes-approval bundle covering 22 back meetings from March 2024 through August 2026 and moves the Cal Cities voting-delegate appointment from the consent calendar to the Regular Calendar as G.3. No other staff reports were changed from the original release.
The largest fiscal actions on the consent calendar are the on-call well and pump repair authorization ($1.0 million), the after-school Bridge Program contract with Lodi Unified (up to $657,000), the DeBenedetti Park Improvements 2027 bid authorization (~$5.1 million project cost), and the Well No. 8 abandonment change orders ($320,000). The Access Center construction management extension to March 31, 2027 (Bickford Ventures) is the most politically watched consent item.
The Regular Calendar has three items. G.1 is the quarterly Access Center operations, construction, and funding update — the meeting's most substantive policy item — with a Council-feedback request on long-term financial sustainability. G.2 updates the unpermitted food-vendor task force. G.3 is the appointment of a Cal Cities voting delegate for the September 23–25 conference in Anaheim.
Council: Mayor Ramon Yepez, Mayor Pro Tempore Mikey Hothi, Council Members Cameron Bregman, Lisa Craig-Hensley, and Alan Nakanishi. Interim City Clerk Walfred Solorzano.
Lodi Committee on Homelessness — September 10, 2026
The September 10, 2026 Lodi Committee on Homelessness (LCOH) meeting runs the standard monthly service-provider and subcommittee round — with three items that make it worth attending in person. The Community Engagement & Public Relations subcommittee is bringing an LCOH website proposal up for discussion and approval. A roundtable with Rep. Josh Harder is added under Item V, paired with a proposal to move the meeting to October 15, 2026. And a Temporary Pet Fostering Project update now appears as its own agenda item.
The packet's system-wide summary of 16 secured jobs, 21 program transitions, and 43 housing transitions in August (90 / 134 / 255 year-to-date) is labeled DRAFT-Only because HMIS client-ID de-duplication across providers is not yet complete. For August, only Lodi Access Center and Family Promise submitted client IDs — and no duplicates were found between them, the first tangible progress on the reconciliation problem the Data subcommittee has been working since July.
Underneath the routine numbers, Lodi Access Center posted its highest 20-month client volume, Hope Harbor's family shelter reported zero new family intakes because units are full, and AHLM's housing supports is not currently accepting new referrals. The City's application for CalTrans Encampment Recovery Funds — filed to help fund LAC for one year — is the funding thread most likely to resurface in the staff update.
Lodi Improvement Committee — September 8, 2026
This is the most consequential Lodi Improvement Committee meeting of 2026. Three items in a row put the committee's own existence on the table: a redlined bylaws rewrite that would dissolve the Lodi Improvement Committee and replace it with the "Lodi Community Advisory Committee on the City's Strategic Vision," a possible recommendation of that rewrite to the City Council, and a reorganization vote for a temporary Chair and Vice Chair placed at the very end of the agenda, after member comments.
The rewrite is not a housekeeping edit. It would strip the committee's crime, blight, code-enforcement and infrastructure-advocacy mandates; convert membership from seven Council-appointed residents to seven seats filled by other City bodies with the Mayor as automatic Chair; drop regular meetings from monthly to quarterly; tighten removal for absence; and eliminate the committee's own fund account and audit provision.
The meeting also carries a Lodi Committee on Homelessness presentation, catch-up approval of two sets of minutes (July 14 and the one-minute August 11 meeting that died for lack of quorum), the 2026 activities matrix, and November scheduling of the 2027-29 CDBG application overview and NOFA.
Lodi City Hall: Senior Staff Turnover, 2015–2026
This report covers senior staff turnover at Lodi City Hall from January 2015 through August 31, 2026 — an eleven-year window across the City Manager, City Attorney, Police Chief, Fire Chief, Public Works Director, Community Development Director, Electric Utility Director, Parks & Recreation Director, City Clerk, Library Services Director, Human Resources Manager, IT Manager, Deputy/Assistant City Manager, and Finance division. Where a role's history is short without pre-window context (Library, HR, City Clerk, Community Development), the report reaches back to the late 1990s to give the count meaning. Confirmed appointments taking effect after Aug 31, 2026 — David Hanham (Community Development, Sept 7), Taryn Jones (City Attorney, Sept 21), and Christina Castro (Public Works, Oct 5) — are flagged as scheduled.
Turner Road Safety Report
Turner Road has two separate safety stories. One is the resident-driven fight over crashes, speeding, and turning conflicts near California Street, Edgewood Drive, and Vintage Church. The other is the eastern interchange area at State Route 99 and Cherokee Lane, where the city and Caltrans already completed a major reconstruction project. The report also explains how Turner Road compares with other Lodi corridors, what fixes are on the table, and what Lodi would need to create a formal Neighborhood Traffic Calming Program.
Lodi City Council Agenda - September 2, 2026
This is a housekeeping meeting rather than a policy meeting, and almost all of it is about who gets to decide things at City Hall. Of the ten action items, six either hand new decision-making power to the City Manager or sign off on decisions the City Manager has already made.
Three things make the meeting notable. First, a record minutes backlog: Consent item C.1 asks Council to approve 26 sets of minutes at once, reaching back to March 6, 2024 — and it is the second such batch in seven weeks, following another 26-set catch-up approved July 15, 2026 that reached back to November 2023. The staff report offers no explanation for the delay.
Second, the City Manager's authority continues to expand. Item C.4 would delegate to the City Manager all personnel and administrative matters for the Interim City Clerk — including appointment and termination — two weeks before the ordinance transferring City Clerk appointment authority from Council to the City Manager takes effect on September 18, 2026. Item G.1 asks Council merely to ratify a Public Works Director the City Manager already selected. Item G.2 would let the City Manager award a contract up to $360,000 without returning to Council.
Third, a federal grant report with weak delivery numbers. The public hearing (F.1) is Lodi's yearly report card to the federal government on how it spent its Community Development Block Grant money — the annual federal grant the City uses for neighborhood improvements, housing, and social services. Lodi was guaranteed $655,037 for the year and spent $282,568.19 of it, and it built none of the 54 affordable-housing units it had set as its annual goal.
Council will also meet privately beforehand on five matters, four of them lawsuits — including two separate 2026 suits by former City Manager Scott Carney and one by Christopher Bennitt.
ROAD to Housing Act August Update: HUD's First Deadline-Driven Notice, and Westside "F" Moves
As of August 26, 2026, 6.6 weeks after the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act took effect, two things have moved. HUD published its first deadline-driven notice under the law on August 13 — the CDBG–Disaster Recovery allocation formula, with a comment window that closes September 14. And on August 12, the Lodi Planning Commission voted 5–0 to recommend that the City Council approve the 95.3-acre Westside "F" annexation and direct staff to file it with San Joaquin County LAFCo. That file is still awaiting Council action; it is not yet at LAFCo.
The rest of the picture is more mixed than it looked on enactment day. HUD faces 88 separate implementation actions with staffing about 27 percent below FY2025 levels and an existing rulemaking backlog, and outside analysts expect full implementation to take years. Several provisions that are effective in statute cannot be used until federal guidance lands, and Congress has appropriated no new money for the Act's new programs.
This update carries the provision-by-provision breakdown forward, resolves several open questions from the July version against the enacted statute, and adds a section on the Opportunity Zone redesignation that will change the entire §201 conversation before Treasury certifies new zones in Q4 2026. It updates The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act: What It Means for Lodi and San Joaquin County, published July 29, 2026.
The Blue Zones Project: What Lodi Was Buying, and Why It Stopped
In March 2025, assessors from Blue Zones LLC toured Lodi. It was the field portion of a readiness study San Joaquin County had announced two months earlier. No findings were presented, no report was posted, and the county did not publicly account for the outcome until a spokesperson answered a newspaper columnist seventeen months later.
That explanation — no city sponsorship, no local funding commitment — is accurate. The public record adds four things to it: a $10,000 contract signed at staff level under delegated authority, an order of magnitude below what entry assessments sell for elsewhere; a Lodi City Council that was never asked to vote; a public health plan running a $100 million reinvestment program whose board never took the matter up; and an assessor that was, during the assessment, a wholly owned subsidiary of the corporation that owns Adventist Health Lodi Memorial.
Site Plan and Architectural Review Committee - August 26, 2026
One review item — and it is the design half of the same Rogers Media electronic-sign package the Planning Commission hears at 7:00 p.m. the same night. SPARC meets at 5:15 p.m., decides placement, height, materials, and pole design for three 78 sq ft LED signs on City land, and the Commission's report is written assuming that approval already happened.
The larger story is timing and record quality. The Development Agreement Council adopted June 3 remains unexecuted and is already being reopened by the applicant. Attachment B is still the March 25 draft, with a blank effective date and a body captioned for two signs. The three site plans state three different sign heights while the report says all three are identical. Sign area at 78 sq ft sits inside a 79.2 sq ft administrative ceiling before counting a 12-inch stainless steel skirt. The pole-width deviation is unquantified in the record. Location 3 sits inside multiple future public reservations, and the mounting type is expressly undecided. Two sites front State Route 12 and no Caltrans approval is discussed. And the January 14, 2026 minutes listed for adoption are not in the packet.
Lodi Planning Commission - August 26, 2026
A short agenda with two public hearings, both quasi-judicial and both requiring ex parte disclosure under Resolution No. 2006-31, plus Government Code §84308 campaign-contribution disclosure, since both items are discretionary land use permits.
Item 4a splits a City-origin parcel on South Stockton Street so each phase of the 110-unit Lodi Commons at Salas Park affordable senior housing project gets its own building site. Item 4b would let Rogers Media install three programmable LED signs on City land — a program whose staff justification is City revenue that the draft Development Agreement never actually quantifies.
Before the Storms: Where Flood Protection Stands in Lodi, Stockton, and the North Delta
NOAA now puts the odds of a very strong El Niño at greater than 90% for fall and winter 2026-27, and gives a 69% chance the October–December 2026 season sets a record for its three-month tropical Pacific temperature index dating back to 1950. The August 2026 Copernicus/ECMWF seasonal outlook calls wetter-than-average conditions likely across southern North America. A companion Lodi411 forecast report covers the atmospheric signal. This brief asks the next question: is the region's flood protection ready?
The answer sorts by clock. One project — the Tenmile Slough levee in west Stockton, described by San Joaquin County as the most critically deficient among those to be improved in the Central Valley system — is racing to finish by late October, weeks before the wet signal arrives. One asset — the Smith Canal Gate — is built, tested once in real weather, and about to face the busiest closure season of its short life. The rest of Stockton's $1.95 billion levee program runs on a design-and-construction schedule stretching into the late 2030s, and no comparable capital project exists on the Mokelumne corridor that runs past Lodi. For every reach that concrete cannot cover by December, this winter's protection is operational: reservoir flood space, district maintenance, levee patrols, and pre-positioned flood-fight supplies. Knowing which category each piece of the map falls into — and what to watch for each — is the point of this report.
From Very Strong to Historic: The August El Niño Forecast and What It Means for Lodi
In April, El Niño was a forecast NOAA handicapped at 61%. By early July it was a fact, with an 81% chance of a very strong peak. The August 13 diagnostic discussion moved the goalposts again — twice. NOAA now puts the chance of a very strong El Niño this fall and winter above 90%, and for the first time assigns a probability to something it calls a historic event: a 69% chance that the October–December peak exceeds every El Niño in the record back to 1950. The mid-August IRI/Columbia model ensemble goes further still, with 15 of its models forecasting peak anomalies at or beyond +3.0°C — past the top of the IRI's own intensity scale.
The California translation arrived the same week. Citing the August ECMWF ensemble, UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain reports 70–100% odds of above-average winter precipitation statewide — and the same odds that December–February lands among the top 20% of California's wettest winters on record. For Lodi, the preparation questions the April report framed as contingencies — Mokelumne flood-control releases, harvest-season rain, flood insurance — are now the base-case planning scenario. The core caveat survives: probability is not destiny, and 2015–16 proved a monster label can deliver an ordinary winter. But every forecast revision since April has moved one direction.
Lodi City Council Agenda - August 19, 2026
This is a governance-heavy agenda dressed up as a routine August meeting. There are no public hearings. Five threads run through the 291-page packet: a twice-deferred, formally protested $616,700 citywide tree maintenance award (G.3) that will determine who operates Lodi's street-tree inventory for the next two to four years; a no-bid $115,000 consulting contract (G.2) to CityWise Strategies, LLC — the firm of Aaron Busch, Lodi's Interim City Manager through June 22, 2026; a first-reading ordinance moving City Clerk appointment and removal authority from the Council to the City Manager (G.6), introduced two days after the incumbent Clerk's last day; a single consent vote clearing a two-year backlog of 18 sets of minutes (C.1), ten of which record canceled meetings; and continued fiscal strain visible in a boiler award 57% over the Engineer's Estimate funded by draining two other capital accounts (C.6) alongside the elimination of executive CalPERS employee cost-sharing (G.5).
Also on the agenda: ratification of David Hanham as Community Development Director at $201,619.47, filling a vacancy open since February 24, 2026 (G.4); an informational report restoring Friday library service and ending Sunday hours for a net gain of four weekly public service hours at no added cost (G.1); a countywide free bus transfer pilot including Lodi GrapeLine (C.7); and recognition of Lodi as America's Favorite Small Town 2026.
Lodi Committee on Homelessness - August 13, 2026
The August 13 packet carries July 2026 activity from nine reporting bodies, the summary tables the Data Enhancement subcommittee is building, and the July 9 minutes awaiting approval. Committee-wide, July recorded 10 employment placements, 20 transitions to programs, and 21 transitions to housing.
Volume across the system held steady, but throughput did not. The Lodi Access Center's emergency shelter exit rate fell to 8.9%, below the 9.2% countywide figure and down from 14.3% in April. Chronic homelessness among LAC outreach clients continued a three-month decline to 54%. The Lodi Police Department liaison logged 50 outreach contacts and 50 resource offers with zero acceptances, and changed its RV approach from abatement to California Vehicle Code towing. Salvation Army reports every family bed full and families turned away; Lodi House reports five of ten transitional apartments vacant.
Lodi Planning Commission - August 12, 2026
The Lodi Planning Commission meets Wednesday, August 12, 2026 at 7:00 p.m. at the Carnegie Forum, with Zoom and YouTube participation available and written comment accepted at pccomments@lodi.gov until 3:00 p.m. that day. The agenda is short but consequential: two linked public hearings that together set up Lodi’s next major westward expansion — a Phase 4 Development Code overhaul governing annexation, and the 95.3-acre Westside “F” Annexation itself.
This is the Commission’s first meeting since June 10, 2026. June minutes are up for approval. Staff had previously indicated that this meeting would cover an annexation, related code amendments, a car wash, and electronic signs on city property. The car wash and electronic sign items do not appear on the posted agenda.
Lodi Improvement Committee - August 11, 2026
The Lodi Improvement Committee meets Tuesday, August 11, 2026 at 6:00 p.m. at the Carnegie Forum, with Zoom and YouTube access. The posted agenda is procedurally light - no minutes to approve and no action items carrying a fiscal vote - but the packet includes a three-page Community Development Block Grant staff report and the full 2026 goals matrix. Staff contact is Kari Chadwick, CDD Program Specialist, (209) 333-6711; the agenda was signed by Interim Community Development Director Cynthia Marsh.
Heath Flora's Decade in the Assembly, and the Two Ethics Cases That Cost Him the Leadership
Assemblyman Heath Flora, the Ripon Republican who has represented Lodi and the surrounding communities in Sacramento for nearly a decade, was removed as leader of the Assembly Republican Caucus on Monday, August 3 — eleven months after he took the job and one day after national reporting revealed that he is the subject of two open enforcement cases at the Fair Political Practices Commission, the state's political ethics watchdog. Flora remains a member of the Assembly and remains on the November ballot, where he faces Woodbridge Democrat Matthew Adams in the race for the 9th Assembly District. This report lays out Flora's full history in the Legislature, his legislative record, the documented facts of both FPPC cases — including the case numbers and filing records behind them — and the leadership transition now underway. Throughout, it distinguishes between what is established in official records, what has been reported and attributed, and what remains unproven allegation.
The Delivery Decade: How Food Delivery Apps Reshaped Lodi Restaurants, Wages, and Tasting Rooms
Between 2020 and 2025, third-party delivery apps went from a pandemic stopgap to permanent plumbing in the Lodi restaurant economy. Sales rose. Margins did not. Payroll hours moved off the books and onto gig platforms, and the tipped-wage model that supported front-of-house workers lost most of its base.
Five findings drive this report:
Off-premise is the default. Roughly 75 percent of US restaurant traffic now leaves the building — three of every four orders.
Only 30 to 50 cents of each delivery dollar is new demand. The rest converts higher-margin dine-in spending into lower-margin delivery.
San Joaquin County's 15 percent fee cap is the strongest local protection. It is worth about $4.50 per $30 order against uncapped 30 percent commissions.
Real wages barely moved. Stockton–Lodi food-service pay rose about 51 percent in nominal terms from 2020 to 2025. Inflation took nearly all of it.
Lodi tasting rooms split from the state in 2025 — up 12 percent while Napa fell 18 percent — on walk-in access and low tasting fees.
Projected to 2030: delivery reaches about 30 percent of Lodi restaurant volume, median pre-tax margin drifts from 2.8 percent toward roughly 1.35 percent, and the mean food-service wage hits $23.66 nominal but only $20.61 in constant 2025 dollars.