As a result, we’re seeing some drastic cuts in key services that keep at-risk kids out of gangs and off the streets, or that provide seniors with (in many cases) the one nutritious meal of their day, e.g.:

•    closing some two dozen youth, senior, and community centers throughout San José;
•    cutting library services from six days per week to three;  and
•    eliminating funding for nearly every City pool.

Here’s how I’ve responded in an effort to save many o f these critical services:

1)    Find Community Partners

In times of scarcity, we need to lean more heavily on partners in the non-profit and business communities who can help us run our youth, after-school, gang-prevention, and senior nutrition programs.  Here’s what I’ve been working on to make this happen:

•    In 2008, I led an effort with our neighborhood leaders that crafted and obtained overwhelming voter support for Measure M, which loosened City Charter restrictions on our ability to lease city parks, pools, and community centers to non-profits and other organizations;
•    In March of 2010,  I crafted language that successfully streamlined the City’s  bidding procedures to enable organizations to quickly move into those community centers before they are forced to close their doors in July;
•    This April, upon learning of the proposed closure of our neighborhood pools, I called, emailed, and met with a half-dozen non-profit and for-profit providers of swimming lessons and supervision.
•    We’re also working with Boys and Girls Club and Catholic Charities to keep key youth programs going in other centers serving thousands of at-risk kids.

2)    Preserve the Services in the Communities with the Highest Needs

In June, the Council and Mayor will also consider proposals that I’ve crafted with colleagues to:

•    preserve operations of the handful of  community centers—including Washington, Alma, and Gardner—that serve our poorest and highest-need communities, until longer-term solutions can be found with community centers.   [read the proposal]
•    Find creative budgetary savings to secure the $2.9 million necessary to add an additional day of service each week in our libraries;  [read the proposal]
•    Keep the widely acclaimed ArtExpress program alive, using a variety of small gift and trust funds, enabling thousands of kids to have their first experience with the arts in San Jose within their public school curriculum; [read the proposal]

3)    Get Creative

Families in the Newhall neighborhood have been awaiting a long-promised park for several years, but now that the design has been completed and the developer fees collected, our parks department  reasonably won’t build a park that the City can’t afford  to maintain.   So, I crafted a proposal with Councilmember Oliverio to create a unique agreement with developers to divert their park fees to a fund maintenance, as a means to get park construction underway quickly.  That initiative awaits Council consideration this month, and could provide a model for the rest of the City.

4)    Cut Unsustainable Cost Structures

There may be a hundred ways to leave your lover, but only three ways to close a municipal deficit: cut services, raise taxes and revenue, or operate more efficiently.  Our residents can’t afford a tax increase in these tough times, and we’ll continue to cut needed services as long as we pay retirement benefits that far exceed the City’s capacity to finance them (currently, we’re running a $2.3 billion in unfunded retirement liabilities).  We can do far better with what we have: I have been an outspoken advocate of resizing pension and retiree health benefits to ensure fiscal sustainability.   I have also sought to re-focus scarce neighborhood services in those communities most impacted by crime and poverty, an initiative that found support with the editorial board at the Mercury News .
Some Early Results

Working with the City’s Parks staff, we’re already achieving some positive results, including:

•    We’ve approved having a prominent child care provider, the Santa Clara County Child Care Consortium (CCCC), keep the doors open at TJS Northside Community Center, which had been scheduled to be defunded a year ago.   CCCC will provide scores of families with badly-needed child care services, while allowing existing groups to continue their work there with the many veterans and seniors who make the Center a central part of their lives.
•    Our Parks staff has now secured commitments two organizations to serve our residents at Ryland pool, in the Vendome neighborhood, and Biebrach pool.

I look forward continuing to push for more resourceful ways to better serve our residents in the coming months.

“…Liccardo is a natural leader and the classic moderate: A reliable vote for fiscally responsible and pro-business policies, he’s also a strong advocate for affordable housing and for serving low-income neighborhoods.

He’s creative. For example, he wants to find nonprofits to run some of the city’s larger community centers and use the savings — and the workers — to keep open some smaller but extremely important centers now doomed to close in poor neighborhoods. We hope this idea gets serious consideration…”

Downtown San Jose, May 22nd

“…’We saw in the experience of San Francisco and other cities that a plastic-bag ordinance pushes consumers to use paper,’ explained a San José City Council member, Sam Liccardo, ‘which in many instances is as bad or worse than plastic, when you consider the water, energy and natural resources involved in production, and the transportation costs, and of course, consuming trees.’…”

What is ViaVelo?

It is a car-free, family-oriented, urban street fair in downtown with music, food, dancing, and community booths.  For more on ViaVelo, check out this flyer.

Please visit the website for more info on all bicycling events during the San Jose Cycling Classic week.

• Saturday May 22, 9:30am to Noon – William Street Park, S. 16th at William Street
• Saturday May 29, 9:30am to Noon – Bestor Art Park, S. 6th at Bestor
• Saturday June 5, 9:30am to Noon – Roosevelt Park, behind the community center on E. Santa Clara at N. 21st

Please, sign up as a Volunteer to let Sam know you would like to visit voters. If you have a specific date, please note that in the comment section.

6:00pm to 8:00pm
Please Join Hosts Yosh Uchida, Tamon Norimoto, David Brody, Roy Hirabayashi, 
Jerry Hiura, Joyce Iwasaki and Roy’s Station
For an Evening in Support of
Sam Liccardo’s Re-Election Campaign
at Roy’s Station, Japantown’s Premiere Coffeehouse
suggested contribution levels:
$20, $50, $100, $250
Please feel free to support the campaign with a financial contribution in any amount with which you are comfortable. RSVP  at rsvp@SamLiccardo.com

Saturday May 15, 2010

6:00pm to 8:00pm
Please Join
Dr. Maile & Barry Del Buono and Friends
John A. Sobrato, Joe McCarthy, Mayor Chuck Reed, Carl Guardino, Les White, Hermelinda Sapien, Barry Swenson, Georgiana & John Flaherty, Mike Fox Sr., Ted Biagini, and Fil Maresca
for a fundraiser to celebrate
Sam Liccardo, Council District 3
Please RSVP at rsvp@SamLiccardo for location

Suzy Brooks & Jonathan Miller * Khanh Bui & David Russo * Lorena Castaneda * Pilar & Chris Esparza * Don Gagliardi * Paul Higgins * Lisa Jensen * Rudy Martinez * Tina Morrill *  Tamon Norimoto * Joan Rivas-Cosby * Imelda Rodriguez * Beth Shafran-Mukai * Erik & Lisa Gonzales Schoennauer * Sandra & Walter Soellner *  Kathy & Craig Sutherland

to

Celebrate Sam’s Campaign Kick-Off

Commiserate over his 40^th birthday

Commend him for not looking a day over 50

Join Sam after work for food, libations, music, and neighborhood conversation in the sunshine on the patio of downtown’s Oaxacan mecca, Mezcal and Billy Berk’s.

Friday, April 16

5 p.m. to 7 p.m.

Mezcal & Billy Berk’s patio – 25 W. San Fernando

Downtown San Jose

RSVP to rsvp@samliccardo.com

Please – no gifts

Sam’s campaign will happily accept contributions, but no contribution is required to attend.

To contribute, please visit my Donate page.

I wrote this for today’s Mercury News:

We’ve heard no reports of locusts, boils, frogs, fiery hail or any other biblical plagues. Despite that boon, the Valley Transportation Authority must close a $98 million shortfall over two years. Like nearly every transportation agency in California, the VTA has endured the jarring impacts of the state’s repeated raids of local dollars and a whiplash-inducing plunge of sales tax revenue.

Recent articles proclaim this the moment of transit’s Great Demise. Some rush to abandon local transit altogether; the governor’s budget proposes to eliminate the entire Public Transportation Account, upon which VTA annually relies for tens of millions of operating dollars.

Confronting deficits of this magnitude, elected officials face a simple, though repugnant, decision: We cut. We have trimmed more than $70 million with a combination of wage concessions by VTA’s dedicated employees, service and spending cuts, and fare increases. These blows appear harshest to those least able to bear them: seniors, persons with disabilities, and the working poor.

News of transit’s death is premature, however. Everything we know about the future — as our population ages, cities grow in density and size, traffic congestion increases, fossil fuels become scarcer, and greenhouse gas concentrations rise — tells us that demand for transit will only grow.

Merely cutting will relegate our children to a future of crisis-plagued inadequacy.

Draining the chronic fiscal swamp requires much more than swiping at the alligators; it demands innovation.

Local transportation agencies — and particularly the VTA, under General Manager Michael Burns’ recent stewardship — have demonstrated an ability to innovate, to boost cost-efficiency and improve service. A few examples:

In three years, residents will see Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) — a system using hybrid buses in physically segregated lanes — every five minutes along the Santa Clara Street and Alum Rock, supplanting the costlier light-rail line planned for that corridor. Transit systems like the Transmilenio in Bogota show that BRT carries more passengers than light rail at a comparable speed and at a lower capital cost. In future years, BRT will expand along West San Carlos and El Camino Real.

A regional grant will help us launch a pilot bike share program this summer to enable transit riders to borrow bicycles from a docking station with the swipe of a credit card. This will enable CalTrain patrons to avoid being bumped from boarding when the bike cars become full and provide commuters an easy way to get to and from the transit stations without having to scramble for parking.

Over the next 18 months, we’ll roll out express lanes on southbound Interstate 680 from Alameda County and at the 237-880 connector, enabling commuters with FasTrak transponders to bypass congested lanes by paying a fee — which will vary with traffic levels — to use the lanes. We’ll use those funds to improve roadway maintenance and expand transit options in the corridor.

Although cuts in bus service will take a toll, they would have wrought more severe impacts had VTA staff not used sophisticated computer models to redesign bus routes in 2008 to focus service to corridors with the highest demand. As a result, we’ll cut 8 percent of our spending on service this year, but lose only 2.4 percent of our ridership.

When cost estimates for a people-mover to the Mineta San Jose International Airport ballooned to $660 million, city transportation officials sought private sector partners. Nineteen companies have expressed interest in building and operating an automated “personal rapid transit” system, an innovative concept that will debut at London’s Heathrow Airport this spring.

Even in times of scarcity, we best serve our transit-dependent residents through innovation, not elimination.