Lodi Eye
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Rivers, Drought, and the 2026 Growing Season
The 2026 water year has produced the worst spring drought in the modern U.S. record. By mid-May, just over half the country — and more than 60 percent of the Lower 48 — sat in drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. Behind the dryness is a single dominant driver across the West: a mountain snowpack that largely failed to arrive, then melted weeks early. This report follows that thread from the high country to the major rivers, into the drought maps of the states those rivers touch, and out to the farm gate, where the costs are now being counted.
Lodi City Council Agenda - June 3, 2026
The June 3 meeting opens with a 6:30 p.m. closed session on existing litigation (Scott R. Carney v. City of Lodi), then a 7:00 p.m. open session with a heavy policy load. The headline item is the public hearing to adopt the Downtown Specific Plan (DTSP) — a long-range visioning and implementation framework for downtown and the Main Street corridor east of the railroad. Two other public hearings cover the 2026-27 CDBG Annual Action Plan ($665,263 in federal funds) and the annual Military Equipment Use Policy review required under AB 481.
The 13-item Consent Calendar is dominated by professional-services contracts, led by a $2.39 million five-year energy-efficiency administration contract and a $176,268 website-hosting agreement that is actually a renegotiated savings of about $66,000. The Regular Calendar includes a $70,192 funding request from the Downtown Lodi Business Alliance and the FY 2026/27 General Fund and Measure L budget presentation (draft budget ~$96.5 million). The lone ordinance is the second reading of Ordinance No. 2047, a development agreement allowing Rogers Media to install three programmable electronic signs on city property.
The Regional Climate Plan and Lodi's Opportunity
San Joaquin County now has its first coordinated, county-wide climate plan. The Stockton Metropolitan Statistical Area Comprehensive Climate Action and Adaptation Plan, known as the CCAAP, was drafted in March 2026 under the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Climate Pollution Reduction Grants program, with the City of Stockton serving as the grant recipient and lead author. The plan covers the entire MSA, which is the county itself: Escalon, Lathrop, Lodi, Manteca, Mountain House, Ripon, Stockton, Tracy, and the unincorporated areas, spanning roughly 1,392 square miles and more than 780,000 residents.
Who Pays to Run Lodi’s New Access Center?
Lodi’s new Access Center, a shelter and services hub for people experiencing homelessness, is expected to open later this year. Operating it will cost an estimated $2 million a year, and the city has identified about one year of funding to cover those costs. A proposal for San Joaquin County to take over the center is already under discussion.
Who Pays to Keep the Lights On? Data Centers, EVs, and the Grid's New Era in California and Lodi
After two decades of flat electricity demand, the American power grid has hit an inflection point. Artificial-intelligence data centers, a wave of electric vehicles, and a generation mix tilting toward solar and wind are changing both how much power the country needs and the architecture of the system that delivers it. The hardest question is not whether the lights stay on, but who pays to keep them on — and whether ordinary households can still afford the bill. Nowhere is that question sharper than in California, and the answer looks different depending on which side of a city limit you live on.
What the Count Missed: Understanding Lodi’s Homeless Numbers
San Joaquin County's Continuum of Care released topline results from its January 27, 2026 Point-in-Time Count on May 11, 2026, reporting 3,306 people experiencing homelessness countywide — a 30% drop from the 2024 total of 4,732. Unsheltered homelessness fell 47% to 1,838; sheltered homelessness rose 16% to 1,468. Those numbers are newsworthy. But they also need context: even a current, well-run PIT count only captures the most visible and narrowly defined slice of homelessness. This explainer documents what the count says, what it doesn’t say, and what Lodi readers should ask before taking any headline figure at face value.
Lodi Planning Commission - May 27, 2026
The Lodi Planning Commission meets Wednesday, May 27 with a single, consequential public hearing: a top-to-bottom rewrite of Lodi Municipal Code Chapter 9.18, the city's mobile food vending ordinance. Staff is asking commissioners to recommend that City Council eliminate the population-based cap on food trucks (currently roughly 25 citywide), ban mobile food vendors west of the Union Pacific Railroad tracks in the historic downtown core, and add new noise, residential-interface, and operational standards. The packet also asks the Commission to approve the May 13 minutes, which document a unanimous 6–0 recommendation to enter into a Development Agreement with Rogers Media for three city-property electronic message signs.
The Squeeze: Lodi Between Two Growth Engines
Lodi has two big plans on the table. One is meant to grow the local economy. The other is meant to revitalize downtown. Both rest on assumptions about regional growth that the numbers no longer support. Over the last six years, California's official population data show Lathrop growing 42.7% while Lodi grew 3.6%. Lodi's housing stock is growing almost twice as fast as its population — a signal worth paying attention to on its own. Meanwhile, every city around Lodi — Manteca, Lathrop, Tracy, Elk Grove, Galt, and Stockton — has its own plan, and those plans are actively competing for the same residents, employers, and state funding Lodi's plans assume the city can attract.
This report identifies which specific parts of the Economic Development Strategic Plan (EDSP) and the Downtown Specific Plan (DSP) are most exposed to what neighboring cities are doing, points out where the plans' description of the broader economy and Lodi's own business profile does not match the available data, and offers residents and city officials a shared factual basis for the conversation about what Lodi's plans need to address head-on.
What Lodi Can Do About Its Budget Gap
When Lodi's budget shortfall comes up at Council meetings or in conversation around town, the choices usually get framed as just two: cut services and staff, or raise taxes. Both are real options, but they aren't the whole list. California cities have a substantially broader toolkit, and most of those tools sit between "cut" and "tax" rather than alongside them.
This report walks through what's actually available. We cover five categories of tools — plus an important clarification about Lodi's pension reserves, which often get described inaccurately in public discussion. For each tool, we cover what it solves, who has to approve it, and what it costs in the long run. None of these tools fixes Lodi's budget gap by itself, and several that look attractive at first turn out to carry hidden costs. But taken together, the categories describe what the City can actually do — and that's a better starting point for a public conversation than a forced choice between cuts to services or city staff and increasing taxes.
The Lodi Armory: A Chronological History, Architecture, and Primary-Source Record, 1910–2026
The National Guard Armory at 333 N. Washington Street is Lodi's most architecturally and historically layered civic building. Built in 1936 under the Works Progress Administration, it is a board-formed reinforced-concrete structure in the Spanish Revival style — one of roughly ten state-owned California National Guard armories built in that era. It served as the home station of the artillery unit that became Alpha Battery, 1st Battalion, 143rd Field Artillery Regiment, for nearly ninety years, while simultaneously operating as the city's primary indoor public gathering space for recreation, concerts, dances, and community events.
The State of Global Oil Reserves
When Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz in late February 2026 and the broader Middle East conflict followed, the world's oil-buffer infrastructure — the salt caverns, the harbor tanks, the bonded floating storage off Asian ports — stopped being a back-of-the-textbook curiosity and became the thing standing between functioning economies and rationing. This report inventories that buffer as of mid-May 2026 across four jurisdictions: the United States, California (which sits inside the United States but is functionally an island for fuel), Europe, and Asia.
Cannabis Retail in San Joaquin County: A Four-City Review
Nine years after California voted to legalize cannabis, the map of who sells it in San Joaquin County has filled in unevenly. Stockton, Tracy, Manteca, and Lathrop now allow storefront cannabis sales — each doing it differently. Escalon and Ripon don't allow it at all. Lodi has neither permitted retail nor formally banned it. Between them, the four operating programs have nine years of real-world experience: tax dollars collected, illegal stores chased, zoning fights settled, and policies that have proven worth copying — and a few worth avoiding.
Data Centers, Demystified: A Field Guide for Lodi
When you check Instagram with your morning coffee, ask Siri for tomorrow’s forecast, stream a movie on Netflix tonight, or tap your card at the gas station on Cherokee Lane, something invisible happens. Your phone or the payment terminal sends a message to a building you have never seen, often hundreds or thousands of miles away. A few milliseconds later, that building sends an answer back. The building is a data center, and there are now several thousand of them scattered across the United States.
For most of the internet’s history, those buildings were not something the average user thought about. They worked. They stayed in the background. Recently they have started showing up in local news more often, partly because they consume enormous amounts of electricity and water, and partly because a new category of facility, specifically engineered to train artificial intelligence models, did not really exist five years ago and now does. That category is growing faster than any other type of industrial construction in the country.
This is a field guide to what those buildings actually do, who builds them, and how the major operators differ from one another. It is written for people who use the products coming out of them every day but have not had a reason to think about the buildings themselves.
The 60 kV Tax on Lodi
Six miles from downtown Lodi, the Northern California Power Agency operates the Lodi Energy Center — a 311 MW combined-cycle gas plant in which the City of Lodi holds a 30 MW (~10%) stake. For fourteen years that plant has been geographically adjacent to Lodi Electric Utility's customers but electrically distant from them, separated by a constrained PG&E 60 kV system that fails NERC contingency standards.
The Northern San Joaquin 230 kV Transmission Project, scheduled for energization in December 2029, will close that gap. The visible consequence is more than $8 million per year in eliminated transmission wheeling charges. The structural consequences — resource deliverability, congestion exposure, fast-ramp value capture, and incremental capacity for growth — are larger in aggregate and far less visible. After 2029, NCPA's biggest investment in Lodi and NCPA's biggest load served in Lodi will finally share one electrical system.
Newsom's 2026-27 May Revision: What It Means for San Joaquin County and Lodi
Governor Gavin Newsom released his May Revision to the 2026-27 California state budget on May 14, 2026, proposing $246.6 billion in General Fund spending and claiming a $0 structural deficit through July 2028. For San Joaquin County and the City of Lodi, the picture splits cleanly: meaningful gains for local schools through an upgraded Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) "super COLA" of 4.31% and a record $2.4 billion special education investment, but a deepening healthcare funding crisis as state Medi-Cal policy changes compound federal H.R. 1 cuts already projected to drain $50.9 million to $76.9 million annually from county coffers. The Homeless Housing, Assistance, and Prevention (HHAP) program is held at $500 million — half its prior level — threatening the funding pipeline for Lodi's Access Center. Property tax growth in San Joaquin County is forecast to slow from 7% to 2%, and labor costs are rising by more than $22 million, leaving the County entering FY 2026-27 in a "compression" scenario heading into its June 2 budget presentation.
Lodi City Council Agenda - May 20, 2026
Three public hearings are being set on this consent agenda for June 3, 2026: the CDBG Annual Action Plan, the Downtown Specific Plan, and the Police Department's annual Military Equipment Use Policy review. The Regular Calendar features the FY 2024/25 Annual Comprehensive Financial Report (with a modified audit opinion tied to CalPERS reporting) and Part 2 of the FY 2026/27 budget series covering Enterprise, Special Revenue, and Capital Outlay budgets.
Lodi Brings In Veteran Economic Developer to Jump-Start Strategic Plan
The City of Lodi is hiring retired economic development executive Donald Burrus to help implement its new Economic Development Strategic Plan, a five-to-ten-year framework aimed at expanding jobs, increasing city revenues, broadening local goods and services, and investing in infrastructure and community amenities. The move signals that City Hall is trying to translate a long list of strategic goals into near-term execution at a time when officials say economic development has been underemphasized and higher-paying job growth has become a central civic priority.
Lodi Parks & Recreation Commission - May 14, 2026
The Lodi Parks & Recreation Commission convenes a Special Meeting on May 14, 2026 with a focused agenda built around one action item and two discussion items. The Commission will be asked to adopt a new Sponsorship & Advertisement Opportunities Packet that formalizes how PRCS partners with businesses, nonprofits, and donors — including potential naming-rights and capital-campaign opportunities for Tony Zupo Field and the Lodi Grape Bowl. Discussion items cover a Youth, Family Services, and Camps update from Recreation Manager Rachel Sandoval (ASP, LUSD Bridge, and Safari Camps) and proposed new Lodi Lake Nature Area signage co-developed by Commissioner Bret Erickson and the Friends of Lodi Lake, at an estimated $350 per sign
What Would a 10-Megawatt Data Center Cost Lodi?
LodiEye’s earlier article on the data center question asked what kind of facility Lodi could realistically host. The answer was: roughly 10 megawatts — about the size of the Nautilus operation in Stockton, or NTT’s facility in Sacramento. Big enough to matter to the City budget. Small enough to be plausible.
This follow-up moves from “what’s possible” to “what would it cost, and how long would it take.” If Lodi decided to host a 10-megawatt data center at the White Slough complex on Thornton Road, the City would have to commit between $108 million and $221 million in infrastructure investment over the next five to seven years — before any data center operator turns dirt.
That number is on the order of Lodi’s entire annual general fund budget. It is also separate from — and additional to — the $60 to $150 million it would cost a developer to build the data center itself.
The Three-Sided Squeeze on California Orchards
California's tree-fruit orchard system is taking simultaneous hits from three different directions. The Del Monte bankruptcy has cancelled more than half a billion dollars in long-term cling peach contracts and is forcing growers to bulldoze roughly 420,000 trees. Back-to-back weather disasters have cut San Joaquin County's cherry crop by more than 40 percent in 2024 and roughly 30 percent again in 2026. And input and trade shocks — tariffs on can steel, the Strait of Hormuz fertilizer disruption, and continued cheap imports — are compressing margins across every orchard crop at once.
The federal response to date is $9 million in tree-removal aid targeted at one commodity in one bankruptcy. This piece looks at how the three pressures interact, what the San Joaquin County data shows about the local exposure, and why "just plant something else" is not a real answer.