The Swarm

A bill to head off a potential big headaches for restaurants and other eateries is finally headed to Gov. Jerry Brown's desk.

And it includes a free pass for county sheriffs.

Senate Bill 303, which was given final legislative approval this week, tries to fix problems in a new state law designed to protect consumers from nasty food-borne illnesses by requiring workers to get training in sanitary food handling.

The requirement that workers get food handler "cards" was creating lots of confusion, especially among mom-and-pop establishments. So county health officials plan to grant an unofficial grace period until Jan. 1 before real enforcement begins.

The law has a long and tortuous history, as detailed in this piece from April.

Influential lobby groups won carve-outs from the bill. Health care facilities, and public and private school cafeterias were exempted. So were farmers markets, most grocery stores and many national chain restaurants. Unionized food facilities were exempted.

SB 303, given final passage by the Senate on Monday, adds county jails and state prisons, as well as elderly feeding programs, to the exempt list. The measure also clarifies that the food handler law only covers those who serve the general public at the retail level.

UC Davis officials talk about taking alcohol out of Picnic Day, the university's annual open house that has been marred by drunkenness and beer-fueled misbehavior.

Tuesday, they announced a licensing agreement with a local brewery to offer "Aggie Lager" at Davis restaurants.

Does anyone else see a mixed message here?

UC Davis officials hope the deal will raise awareness for its 53 years of teaching and research in brewing science. They also hope it raises $25,000 a year - enough to fund one athletic scholarship for an in-state student.

That's all well and good, but this is an area that has been controversial on other campuses and where UC Davis ought to tread very carefully.

Even some university officials seem to acknowledge the possible disconnect. The campus has a Safe Party Initiative with the city of Davis to reduce problems with overdrinking.

"I join the university community in the expectation of safe and responsible consumption of Aggie Lager and all alcohol products," Michelle Famula, executive director of Health and Wellness at UC Davis, said in a news release. "For those who choose to drink, UC Davis advocates that they do so legally and safely."

UPDATE: While university officials had been considering putting Picnic Day on hiatus (The Bee's editorial board supported that idea), a spokeswoman said today that the plan is go ahead with the event in 2012. It's scheduled for April 21.

"Measures taken last year resulted in progress 'rewinding' the atmosphere surrounding the event to its family friendly traditions," spokeswoman Julia Ann Easley said in an email. "The university and student organizers will continue to work with the city and community members to further address safety issues and improve the Picnic Day experience."

Photo: Sudwerk masterbrewer Jay Prahl pours Aggie Lager from the tap. (Karin Higgins/UC Davis photo)

"Are newspaper reporters still necessary?"

That provocative question begins an intriguing piece in the Summer 2011 edition of City Journal, published by the Manhattan Institute, but it turns out to be misleading because the answer is actually yes.

Conor Friedersdorf, an associate editor at The Atlantic magazine, declares that California is "the most fertile ground for innovation" in watchdog journalism to make up for the decline of newspapers.

He cites California Watch, a project of the Center for Investigative Reporting. The Bee has collaborated with the center and published some of its work in the last few years. He also mentions Cal Watchdog, the Voice of San Diego and the startup Spot.us in his article, entitled "The New Watchdogs: Can the Web drive investigative journalism in a post-newspaper era?"

He points out that the first report of corruption in the city of Bell came from a blogger on a citizen website -- not in The Los Angeles Times, which in April won journalism's highest honor, the Pulitzer Prize for public service, for its Bell coverage.

But Friedersdorf ventures onto shakier ground when he suggests that the gap left by downsizing newspapers could be filled by an army of volunteer "civic watchdogs" who "behave more like detectives or auditors than like reporters."

He says an enterprising nonprofit could fund such an operation (including lawyers to sue officials who don't cough up public documents), but he never quite explains who would command it or how to make sure it's not a partisan zealot.

Call me old-fashioned, but what he's talking about is pretty much how the news business has worked for eons. There have always been citizen watchdogs; the Internet just makes it easier for non-journalists to dig up information.

But many times, it still takes the resources and reputation of a newspaper to turn tips into actual stories that have real impact.

The Bell scandal proves that, as Friedersdorf concedes when he writes that the amateur citizen-journalists "couldn't dig as deep or growl as menacingly as newspaper reporters backed by a powerful regional publication."

The media landscape continues to evolve, but the citizen journalist revolution hasn't happened quite yet. Like it or not, it still takes trained, experienced reporters to do the heavy lifting of muckraking.

To see other suggested readings from The Bee's editorial board, check out Reading Rack in California Forum this Sunday.

All indications are that as soon as Thursday, Sacramento will have a new city manager -- John Shirey, now executive director of the California Redevelopment Association.

He has three decades-plus in a series of local government jobs, but he has been the chief administrator only once, in Cincinnati from 1993 to 2001. His tenure there was not always smooth sailing, with controversies over development projects and rocky relations with some council members.

His ultimate undoing came from the April 2001 riots after the fatal police shooting of an unarmed black man. The unrest was the worst since the 55 deaths in 1992 in Los Angeles after the acquittal of four police officers in the videotaped beating of Rodney King.

Less than a month after the riots, Shirey resigned to avoid being fired. "I just felt somebody was going to have to take the fall for the unrest and it was likely going to be me," he told The Bee's Ryan Lillis this week. "I just felt that I had used up my capital and done what I could do, and it was time for me to move on."

He had more to say in an April interview with Cincinnati public radio station WVXU marking the 10th anniversary of the riots.

Shirey said he was saddened by the riots, which he described as the culmination of years of ill feeling between the police department and the city's African-American community. Before the fatal shooting that sparked the riots, 14 other black men were killed in confrontations with police in six years on Shirey's watch.

He said he wished the incidents could have been avoided and that community relations would have been better, but he did everything in his power. Fair or not, he added, someone would have to be blamed for the riots. "As a chief executive, the buck stops with me," he said.

You can listen to the entire interview here.

The Bee's editorial board has posed a series of questions that it believes council members ought to answer before moving forward on hiring a city manager. To read what more the editorial board has to say about Shirey's impending selection, come to sacbee.com/opinion on Thursday.