Davis City Councilman Don Saylor methodically chops up green and red bell peppers, onion, garlic and celery.

Saylor, 54, has been busy lately between running for re-election to a second term in June, trying to help the school district out of a financial hole and attending to all his normal duties. But that doesn t mean he doesn't have time to make a pot of Wheat Berry Chili for a sick friend.

Saylor, a former two-term school board member and president, said his mind has been on the school district a lot lately, as it tries to cut $4 million from its budget. The schools, he said, are "the heart of our community" and a "canary in a coal mine."

"It's a community out of balance that doesn't have room for its kids."

Saylor, who is not only a former school board member and a current City Councilman but a member of several committees, boards, groups and clubs, spends some days offering help and solutions. The City Council can't offer direct help to the school district, Saylor said, but through volunteer and organization efforts, he feels he can contribute.

"The thing that s most important in Davis right now is school funding," he said.

But although he's meeting with the Davis School Foundation and the Blue & White Foundation to hammer out ways to raise money and save school programs, Saylor is also focused on his duties as a councilman and a candidate.

He admits he enjoys hiking and listening to his daughter, Kate, play the fiddle, but those revelations come only after much prodding.

"This is really who I am," he said at one of his weekly "office hours" events, held at coffee shops and restaurants around Davis.

Quality of life

Saylor, who retired from his job as an educational administrator for the California Youth Authority shortly before beginning his first council term, is able to spend his days volunteering with Meals on Wheels, meeting with constituents or cooking for sick friends, as well as digesting huge council packets and attending lengthy council meetings.

His goals in all his volunteerism are to keep Davis' quality of life as high as it is now and when he and his family moved here in 1987. He also wants to improve the level of discourse at the City Council, both between council members who quarrel frequently (though less lately) and between community members, whose political passion sometimes stops meetings or necessitates police presence.

Saylor ran on a similar platform in 2004, and last April he wrote in a Davis Enterprise op-ed piece, "I have personally witnessed shoving, hissing, spitting and shouting in Davis public meetings. People who speak in public have been heckled, booed and taunted by others.

"This has had a chilling effect on the practice of community," he continued. "Many residents have told me they no longer feel they can 'safely' participate in public discourse; they are reluctant to write a letter or speak in public for fear of vilification. Others say they have just withdrawn in disgust."

Saylor's platform of civility has drawn scorn from The People's Vanguard of Davis, a blog written by David Greenwald, husband of Cecilia Escamilla-Greenwald, who is also running for City Council.

Greenwald contends that Saylor has shown himself to be the most uncivil of candidates, but a recent blog post drew criticism from some readers who called the post unnecessary and unfounded.

Saylor uses direct language when disagreeing with another council member, occasionally straying into beratement, as in the meeting where he called a motion made by Councilman Lamar Heystek an "abusive waste of time." Even in that incident, Saylor didn't raise his voice. In fact, he never does. Most of his comments are delivered in an exceedingly even tone.

When issues of growth or development are on the council's agenda, chances are meetings will be heated, and Saylor said that's a good thing.

"It's good to be passionate about the issues, it's good to be engaged," he said. "One of the things I want to do it reclaim the joy, engage more people in the process."

Growth is a tool

Saylor, who vocally supported Covell Village -- a 1,864-unit development on agricultural land in North Davis that ultimately was voted down by the community -- has been criticized for his position, along with other council members who supported the project. But he maintains that Davis must grow to continue to offer the highest quality of life.

"I'm not for growth for growth's sake," he said. "I'm for keeping Davis the same place I came to raise my children. We cannot achieve that if we don't look at the needs of families with children and seniors and people who work here and students."

Saylor, who spent a morning delivering Meals on Wheels to seniors last month, said visiting elderly people living alone in multiple-bedroom houses gets him thinking about growth, too.

Howard Ross, 96 -- who said he occasionally watches council meetings on television "for amusement" -- is able-bodied enough to live on his own. But Saylor wondered if Ross and others like him stay in their large houses because there aren't many other options. Between rising rates at Atria Covell Gardens and hints that the property owners of Covell Village might develop a senior village on the property, senior housing has been on a lot of people's minds lately.

If older folks could move into senior housing in Davis, their homes would open up for families with children who would go to local public schools and possibly help the district out of its funding crisis, Saylor said. More people in neighborhoods might also enliven local shopping centers, two of which have lost their grocery stores over the past several years, Saylor said.

"When it comes down to it, growth is a tool," he said. "How do we achieve and maintain the community we live in? That s the goal of so-called no-growth people, too."

A better life

Saylor puts a high premium on stability, for his own family and his community. He and his wife, Julie, moved to Davis with the intention of providing their two children Aaron and Kate, now 27 and 25, a stable upbringing in one home with a strong family.

"One of our life goals was to have our kids grow up in one place," he said.

The couple always meant for at least one of them to work in Davis while their children were in school, and during Kate's senior year, Julie took a job at UC Davis.

"You do the best you can," Saylor laughed.

Saylor himself was not so lucky. Raised in Casper, Wyo., he was often left to care for his two younger sisters with few provisions.

With his difficult childhood far behind him, Saylor makes sure he always has plenty of food in the house. He has a flat of broth in the cupboard, a big bin of onions and jars and jars of dried beans, grains and spices.

Everything he needed for Wheat Berry Chili was already there, and wheat berries, garbanzo and black beans had been soaked since the night before. Saylor dumped a couple cups of raisins into a bowl of Dos XX beer and made sure he had chipotle powder and oregano at hand.

Soon, he will have fresh herbs and home-grown vegetables to add to his dishes (he does most of the family's cooking, he said) when he gets around to planting a garden in the back yard where the black-bottomed pool used to be. The Saylors decided to fill it in when the kids moved out, saving energy, cleaning and chemical costs.

"Our intention is to have a mixture of vegetables and natural plants coupled with a meditation walk," he said. "It gives us a sense of individual action."

Planning expertise

Saylor attended the University of Wyoming with the intention of becoming a teacher, but when a planning position came open in Gilette, Saylor took it, starting him on the path of community service.

"It was absolute gunslinger time," he said. "I was all of 25. I was the guy who had some interaction with the locals. The place was just hopping. It was a coal town and we figured it would go from 7,000 (people) to 35,000 in five years. It did."

Saylor was put in charge of the land use inventory and the landscaping plan for the 5,000-square-mile county, driving up and down roads and cataloguing all of the land uses he saw.

In a county without a General Plan, building codes or zoning ordinances, people were resistant, to say the least.

"They were not that happy to see me," he said. "I was not their best friend."

Nonetheless, Saylor and his colleagues were responsible for involving the community, conducting workshops and small group conversations.

Soon, the Saylors moved on to Austin, Texas, where both received masters' degrees, Saylor's in public policy. Jobs with the state of California brought the Saylors to Davis. In a 24-year career with the state, Saylor was a fiscal analyst for the Legislative Analyst's Office, a construction project director for the Department of Corrections and an administrator for the California Youth Authority, for which he managed $500 million construction projects, an annual budget of up to $50 million and staff groups of up to 300.

He also managed education programs in six Northern California schools and was honored as the 2003 Education Administrator of the Year.

"I basically wanted to be involved in making people's lives better," Saylor said.

This will continue with another council term, he said.

Saylor waved away an opportunity to list the issues that are important to him.

"I don't want to make things my own," he said. "I want to work together with the city and council. It's not focused on a single issue, it's focused on solving problems and making Davis sustainable for the long term.

"Bottom line is, I'm a member of this community," he said. "My intent in serving on the council is to keep Davis a great place to live."

When the chili is done, Saylor tastes it and decides the chipotle added enough spice and a chopped jalapeno wasn't necessary. The raisins offered a sweet counterpoint to the spice.

"This is a pretty simple recipe," he said. "It's low-impact food."

A field of six candidates is vying for three seats in the June 3 election. They are incumbents Sue Greenwald, Saylor and Stephen Souza; Cecilia Escamilla-Greenwald, a labor relations representative; Rob Roy, a Ben & Jerry's manager and substitute teacher and Sydney Vergis, a Sutter County planner.

-- For Saylor's chili recipe or to comment on this story, go to www.davisenterprise.com. Reach Claire St. John at cstjohn@davisenterprise.net or (530) 747-8057.

Don Saylor

Occupation: Davis City Council member

Personal/professional: Age 54. Moved with wife, Julie, to Davis in 1987 so children could attend Davis schools. Son and daughter, now young adults, benefited greatly from growing up in this community, Saylor said. Davis City Council, 2004-2008; Davis Board of Education, 1995-2003, League of California Cities, Sacramento Valley Division president, 2007; state administrator, 1984-2003; fiscal analyst for nonpartisan California Legislative Analyst Office, 1979-1984; Research assistant to Rep. Barbara Jordan, 1979; Planner in Gillette, Wyo., 1976-1977 and Boston, 1978; extensive volunteer and community service.

Endorsements: State Assemblywoman Lois Wolk, Yolo County Supervisor Helen Thomson, Yolo County Sheriff Ed Prieto, Yolo County Public Guardian Cass Sylvia and Jim Sochor.