from the desk (and phone and computer) of a San Jose Councilmember

The daily carpet-bombing of America with political ads has many pining for a day when…well, when November 7th will come around.  Accordingly, I’ll happily distract you in these final days of the election cycle with something more fun: sports, and sport stadiums.

A refresher, for those of you who don’t care much about sports: sports involve fastballs, footballs, and foosballs.  Stadiums hold all of those things, along with tens of thousands of crazed, screaming fans, overpriced beer, every form of fried and unhealthy food, and a grown person running around in an oversized platypus or armadillo outfit.

Why should we care about such things?  Why should stadiums command the attention of public policymakers who can’t tell the difference between a slider and a slide tackle?

Well, here’s one reason:  It’s not every day that you see 6,256 people toting 6,256 blue shovels, as you can see below –

The brainchild of San José Earthquakes President David Kaval, last Sunday’s groundbreaking of the new Earthquakes’ stadium created a memorable spectacle of all things blue.  A Guiness Book of World’s Records official diligently stood by to verify and record that this seismic lovefest constituted the world’s largest groundbreaking–yes, right here in our very own Downtown district.

Of course, soccer has a storied history in San José, replete with championships, heroes, and heartbreak.  Two years after securing their second MLS Cup in the past three years, the owners of the predecessor franchise packed up San José’s star-studded cast and moved to Houston in 2005, leaving thousands of disappointed fans behind.   A small group of those fans,  led by Don Gagliardi, Colin McCarthy, and the newly-formed Soccer Silicon Valley, beat the drum to resurrect the Quakes in San José.    Now-owners Lew Wolff and John Fisher responded.   Four years after their revival, Quakes fans pack antiquated, diminutive Buck Shaw Stadium to cheer a new generation of heroes, who enter the playoffs this week bearing the league’s best record.  Soccer Silicon Valley, meanwhile, continues to support philanthropic work—particularly with kids– through soccer, and Quakes players spend hundreds of hours volunteering in the community.

Big deal, you say?  Consider that the privately financed, $60 million stadium will create hundreds of construction jobs at a time of stubbornly high unemployment.  The Earthquakes will also manage the multi-field soccer recreational complex adjacent to the stadium, offering thousands of kids and adults access to a public, world-class facility for exercise, competition, and camaraderie.

Consider also the case of another beloved local team, the San José Sharks.  Two decades after the construction of the HP Arena, no building in the city has more success—consistently ranking among the world’s ten highest attended arenas—or brings more benefit to our General Fund (over $4 million a year in direct contributions alone).   With the current National Hockey League lockout, downtown restaurants and entertainment venues suffer mightily.

What’s ahead?  We should feel fortunate to live in a Valley where stadia sprout from the fertile ground all around us.   A billion-dollar 49ers football stadium in nearby Santa Clara attracts its rightful share of “ooohs” and “aahs,” yet it will host games only 10 days a year.   Many experts would agree that a more impactful attraction could be the proposed stadium for the San José A’s, which would draw millions of fans Downtown every year to its 81 major league baseball games.

Why should we hold our collective breath for a favorable announcement from Major League Commissioner Bud Selig, if we don’t care about baseball?  The biggest reason: the transformative effect of baseball stadiums in revitalizing urban cores.  Examples abound, in Denver, Baltimore, San Diego, San Francisco, and elsewhere, where abandoned industrial tracts are supplanted by a vibrant mix of uses: residential lofts, new restaurants, fashionable retail, and trendy entertainment venues.

In 1998, San Diego civic leaders published a consultant’s estimates of the amount of annual sales tax revenue ($1 million), annual property tax revenue ($4 million), and private investment ($300 million) that could be generated by new development surrounding the then- proposed downtown ballpark.  The consultant missed badly.  A 2010 report revealed that Petco Park (during the depths of the Great Recession) incentivized annual sales tax revenue of over $2.1 million, more than $17 million in property taxes, and $1.8 billion in private investment.  Any visitor to the Gaslamp district today sees a streetscape unrecognizable to the resident a decade ago: shops, housing, and hotels abound, and live music pours out from every street corner.

With strong leadership and a supportive community, we can prompt that kind of revitalization here in San José’s urban core, on a set of industrial tracts adjacent to the Diridon Station.  If you see 7,000 green-and-yellow shovels, you’ll know we’re on our way.

For every big city, graffiti too often presents a Sisyphean challenge.  Volunteers and abatement crews diligently work to clean it up—particularly the gang-related tags that most demoralize and threaten residents–only to see the same markings return a couple of days later.

Yet our experience with graffiti also demonstrates the “broken windows” theory of crime:  just as one broken window in an abandoned industrial building will yield to far more vandalism if the window isn’t repaired, where we leave graffiti unabated, taggers will become emboldened.  Their work will infect other parts of a neighborhood’s streetscape, and other signs of disorder and crime—drug dealing, vagrancy, gang activity—will soon follow.

Happily, community engagement and innovation have combined to lighten our  burden in recent months—with positive results to prove it.    As revealed in a recent report, the City’s efforts to implement its “SAN JOSE CLEAN” smartphone application has vastly boosted reporting of graffiti tags, and volunteers now report graffiti ten times more often by the mobile phone application—over 1,300 such reports in June alone—than by phone calls.   The software enables users to photograph the vandalism , report its precise GPS location, and send the photo to the graffiti contractor, all with a tap on the device’s screen.  You can easily download this easy-to-use application to your device by searching for the keywords “San Jose Clean”on the on-line iPhone app store or Droid market.  Of course, we continue to respond to more traditional means of reporting graffiti remain as well: anyone can request a clean-up by emailing antigraffiti@sanjoseca.gov, or calling 866-249-0543.

The controversial outsourcing of our graffiti abatement services has overcome its bumpy start to post strong results over the past year.   Nobody relishes the idea of seeing effective and hard-working city employees lose their jobs to outside contractors, but the solid performance of the contractor, Graffiti Protective Coatings Inc. (GPC), softens the blow:  in high-graffiti areas, 98% of the graffiti last year was abated within 24 hours of a report.   Citywide, GPC completed over 33,000 such work orders within 48 hours of the complaint, 91% of the time.   Meanwhile, the City saved over $300,000 in its anti-graffiti efforts, and will likely save even more this year, as GPC’s work has resulted in a steady decline in the volume of graffiti since the spike in 2010-11.

Volunteers have proven critical to this cause, with over 3,600 San José residents participating.  Innovative ideas have sprung from these volunteers as well:   last year, Vendome neighborhood leader Tina Morrill launched an effort that is steadily transforming many streetscapes: the ArtBox Program.    By leveraging donations and micro-grants, Morrill has enlisted professional and amateur artists to beautify dozens of utility boxes throughout San José.    Taggers appear far more reluctant to spray graffiti over artists’ work;  whether or not there is honor among thieves, it apparently exists among taggers.   Volunteers apply a protective spray coating over the art to make subsequent removal of the graffiti easier.

Of course, we have much more work to do, and at last week’s Council meeting,I pushed forward  two initiatives that Council approved.    First, we’ll explore an expansion of our partnership with the Juvenile Court and Probation Department, to put arrested taggers to work cleaning the graffiti.   Currently, those juvenile probationers account for only 0.6% of our cleanup response, and opportunities for expanded partnerships (e.g., with the Downtown Association’s PBID program) in supervising the youngsters could aid our efforts both to suppress graffiti and to put the youth on a better path.

Second, the graffiti along our freeways and railroads remains abominable.   The City of San José lacks the jurisdictional authority (despite our best efforts) to clean graffiti in those locations, and I’ve called for more aggressive efforts against Union Pacific and CalTrans to force them to clean up, or to erect fences and other barriers to prevent access to taggers.  Among the ideas I’m pushing: the installation of signs with CalTrans phone numbers for residents to call ((510) 286-4444, or through their website, at www.dot.ca.gov/hq/maint/msrsubmit/ ) to improve accountability.

We’ll continue pushing forward with better approaches to combat graffiti, but we’ll also continue to depend on your help.   Please report graffiti wherever you see it, and if you have any free time, come join the hundreds of volunteers who help us keep San José beautiful!

As San Jose’s neighborhoods endure a spike of homicides, the calls come from all corners for more patrol officers to restore the police department’s depleted ranks. Last week, Chief Chris Moore appropriately responded to the upsurge of violence by committing additional overtime patrol and shifting officers from investigative units to “all gangs all the time.”

Budgetary shortfalls and overworked officers limit the chief’s ability to offer much more than short-term fixes, however. The Mercury News’ account of the departure of former San Jose Police Sgt. Jincy Pace illustrates the painful choices ahead, as tight budgets afford little room for salary increases to prevent the loss of additional officers.

Longer-term solutions require each of us — on all sides of the debate — to acknowledge what we’d prefer not to hear.

Fiscal reform advocates can start by acknowledging that while our actions have avoided hundreds of police layoffs, they have come at a cost. Dozens of officers have fled SJPD’s ranks for better-paying cities, and dozens more have retired. In the most thinly staffed department of any large U.S. city, we have lost officers at a higher rate than we can hire qualified replacements.

Even those recruits may not stay in San Jose for long. Officers who have already seen paychecks shrink by as much as 14 percent will lose the equivalent of another 4 percent with rising retirement contributions next year. Unless we soften the blow in the upcoming contract negotiations, the exodus will continue, leaving San Jose bearing the cost of training officers who will spend their best years serving other cities.

We must continue to curb rising costs for pensions, retiree health care and sick leave payouts to restore hiring and yes, salaries. Yet no matter how successful, those cost reductions will not generate sufficiently immediate savings to restore public safety services to an acceptable level. We will need even more severe cuts in other city services, or else more “revenues” — political code for tax increases.

Yet union leaders must admit that for residents and businesses to support either option, we must put an end to six-figure sick leave payouts, and we must reach final resolution of retirement benefit reforms. No taxpayer wants to pay more without some assurance that their investment will put more officers on the beat.

Union leaders also must acknowledge that we could better utilize the officers we have by implementing changes to which they’ve long objected. By using retired officers to conduct background checks of new hires, 17 sworn officers can return to patrol. Strategically deploying our 100 reserve officers to assist units like traffic enforcement can free officers for more rigorous assignments. Extending patrol shifts beyond the current six-month rotations can enable officers to better develop relationships within neighborhoods and improve responsiveness.

None of us want to hear that we need to ask for help. We do. In the downtown, several partners have stepped forward in response to our pleas. The San Jose Downtown Association has elicited funding from property owners to pay for additional patrol. The Valley Transportation Authority committed to increase the presence of sheriffs’ deputies along the transit mall in September and to use federal funds to install additional cameras. Santa Clara County Sheriff Laurie Smith and Probation Chief Sheila Mitchell have offered to help with “hot spot” sweeps. District Attorney Jeff Rosen has restored the community prosecution office to target owners unwilling to curb drug, gang, and prostitution activity on their properties. We’ll need all these efforts and more — particularly from our community partners in education, gang prevention, and domestic violence — to make real progress.

My years as a criminal prosecutor have taught me we shouldn’t trust any “simple” solutions to crime. But with an honest dialogue about our shared problems and options, I like our chances.

This piece was published as an op-ed in the August 28, 2012 Mercury News, under my name.  

Many have noticed changes in the Downtown streetscape in recent weeks: we’re eliminating traffic lanes, and replacing them with extra-wide, buffered bike lanes, as shown below:

On other streets, we’ll experiment with physical barriers –flexi-pylons on San Fernando, and parked cars on 4th Street—that will create additional separation of the cyclists from the cars.

Why should we care?  A change in lane striping doesn’t send chills down the spine.   Olympic curling gets more emphatic fans, and I don’t typically dedicate much of my column to curling.

Well, there’s more to all of this: these bike lanes comprise part of a larger strategy to persuade reluctant cyclists to get out there and commute to work, school, and recreation.  Construction is already underway to create a bike path extending the Guadalupe trail to key tech employment centers in North San José, and we’ve recently expanded southward to Virginia Street.  This fall, we’ll begin construction on a regional “bike-share” program, enabling commuters, transit users, and students to grab a bike by the mere swipe of a credit card, and deposit the bike at another stall in San Jose, or in any other participating city along the CalTrain corridor.  We’ll see about twenty dozen bike stations distributed throughout the Downtown, including the San Jose State campus.

What’s all the fuss?  We’ve all heard of the many benefits of promoting cycling as a means of commute.  Even with a 1% increase in bike usage in San José (which would double our current number of commuting cyclists), we would see substantial reductions in particulate and greenhouse-gas emissions, auto congestion, and road wear-and-tear.   We would boost transit ridership, by solving the “first mile-last mile” challenge for many who would use light rail or Cal Train, but don’t have a car at both ends of the trip.  Those able to cycle would substantially improve their own health–no small feat at time when we face a looming epidemic of obesity, diabetes and heart disease.    Bikes can also save us money, by reducing our expenditures on transportation, which consumes as much as 30% of the incomes of the working poor.

Cycling also appears a more practical option than we might think.  Fully 40% of urban trips in the U.S. require two miles or less of travel, yet we use the car for 90% of those trips.  Other cities, such as Portland to San Francisco to Minneapolis, feature far worse weather and more hilly terrain, yet boast bike commuting rates that are 7-10 times higher than in San Jose.   In European cities like Amsterdam or Copenhagen, as many as 40% of their residents commute by bike.   We can do better.

Of course, I’ll be the first to concede that with or without all of these bike improvements, we’re not going to go the way of the Dutch.  For many reasons, we’ll still continue to prefer four wheels to two.    We’ve got kids to drop off, groceries to pick up, or the commute appears too long.   Autos rule our roads for a reason: they’re convenient.   If most of us will remain behind the wheel, then, why should any of these changes matter?

The short answer is that many of these improvements will benefit many people who don’t use bikes.  High-speed one-way couplets—the three lane, one-way roads that slice up our Downtown–have long been the bane of any pedestrian who wants to cross a street like 10^th, 11^th, 3^rd, or 4^th, without engaging in a game of high-speed, full-contact Frogger.   The velocity of traffic on those three-lane thoroughfares scares parents of students at Grant Elementary, greatly restricts the walking routes of elderly residents, and reduces the property values of homes lining those streets.   Converting those speedways to slower two-way streets requires many millions of dollars—converting and installing new traffic signals, altering required sidewalk ramps, and the like–that we won’t have for many years.   Yet with the simple use of paint, we’re reducing a lane on these and other roads throughout San Jose—like Hedding and Almaden– to implement what traffic engineers call a “road diet,” by narrowing the driver’s view frame and reducing lanes.  This tool typically reduces driving speeds by several miles per hour, particularly in areas where the roads are largely “overbuilt” for the existing traffic capacity.

Downtown pedestrians also frequently complain about the cyclists with whom they have many near-collisions on the sidewalks.   We lack the police and traffic personnel to adequately enforce an ordinance banning sidewalk cycling, and many helmet-donning kids reasonably rely on sidewalks because of their parents’ safety concerns.  So,  a  better option lies in making cyclists feel safer out on the street,  by creating wide buffers and physical barriers between bikes and cars, and by slowing the speed of auto traffic.

“All well and nice,” you might say, “but shouldn’t we spending our very scarce dollars on something more critical, like more police officers or keeping libraries open?”   Yes, but in the world of government, dollars aren’t fungible; they’re often restricted for specific purposes, as dictated by state or federal law.  Funding for this program overwhelmingly comes from regional grants – from the Air District, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC), and the Valley Transportation Authority (VTA)—specifically restricted to boost non-auto travel, or for air-quality improvements.

As a Board Member of both the VTA and MTC, I have been pushing for the launch of segregated lanes, road diets, and bike-share programs for four years.   With public dollars running thin, these projects move slowly, but there will be more to come.   Hopefully, they’ll nudge all of us to dust off the ten-speed in the garage.

Next week, Gay Gale is retiring from her work the City of San José.   She served admirably for many years in several managerial positions, most recently overseeing the City’s compliance with federal disabilities laws.  Recent years’ staffing cuts often required her to take on new or additional tasks and supervisorial responsibilities, all while suffering cuts to her own pay.  She also served her community as a neighborhood leader and volunteer, participating in clean-ups, helping to organize the Martha Gardens art festival, and convening community meetings to address needs like crime prevention and mitigating impacts from nearby industrial and housing sites.

Gay publicly spoke up about—and against—the belt-tightening measures that Council has taken in recent years.   In public session, she told the City Council about how the 14 percent cuts in her salary would make it difficult for her to continue to make payments on her modest home.   She testified against the Council’s decision to impose reductions in retiree medical benefits, and against Measure B, the pension reform measure that recently passed on the June ballot.  In every case, Gay spoke with civility and with a heartfelt conviction that comes from someone who reasonably relied upon promises that were made to her when she decided to move to San José to work for the City years ago.

Gay and I disagreed.  I consistently voted for each of those cost-reduction measures, as hard as it was to swallow when seeing the impact of those changes on dedicated employees like Gay.

On June 5, 2012, 69 percent of San Jose’s voters approved Measure B, capturing national attention for its proactive approach to addressing a challenge that vexes local and state governments nationwide.  The following week, Council approved a second-tier pension and modified retiree healthcare plan, ending a chapter in the most divisive political battle in recent memory.  As the battle moves to the legal arena, we need to move beyond this acrimony toward the collaborative approach that has characterized this Valley’s past success.

While I have consistently spoken publicly for more sustainable retirement benefits, I recognize that these changes have come at a steep price.   Morale has flagged, some employees have fled to other cities, other workers retired before the changes could become effective, and interest has declined among top-caliber candidates for our police academy.  Their frustrations have understandably taken a personal turn, against each of us who supported pension and benefit reform.  Two colleagues who recently sought re-election, Rose Herrera and Pierluigi Oliverio, faced a host of malicious and false accusations from union-backed politicians, lobbyists and campaign consultants.

So, where do we go from here?  Gay’s example provides some insight, in my view.

Despite her public disagreement with my positions on the very issues that so severely impacted her own financial situation, Gay has not stopped volunteering for her Spartan Keyes community.  She also did not stop working with my office on issues of mutual concern.  With the advocacy of Gay and several other community leaders through our Council’s budget process, we were able to obtain additional funding for a youth worker in her community, to address rising concerns about gang activity, and to fund the rehabilitation of long-neglected alleyways there.   She led a recent meeting to address concerns by neighbors about an expanding industrial site.  In every case, Gay continued to be the collaborative, dedicated community leader she had always been.

Undoubtedly, we could point to many other city employees who have risen above the political battles, and have found ways to do more with less.   San José police officers worked diligently to reduce San José’s violent crime rate in 2011 (contrary to some media reports), despite steep cuts in police staffing and salaries.  Our library and city planning staff each earned national awards for their recent accomplishments. Although our Economic Development staff lacks the 80-employee Redevelopment Agency we had three years ago, they’ve scored big successes in recent months, luring such employers as Polycom, Advantest, LSI, and Netflix to San José.

As revenues to the City return, I hope that we can restore salaries to ensure that employees receive pay commensurate with their private-sector peers.   In the meantime, I hope that the examples of many of our hard-working employees serve as beacons for all of us to find a way to rise above our skirmishes.  None of those battles, it appears, matter much to the one million San José residents who still depend on their City to respond to a 911 call, or to provide a safe place for their child to read after school.

In response to a recent effort by several colleagues to urge Mayor Reed to sign a pledge of support of marriage equality, I filed the following memorandum to the Rules Commitee today, urging the Council to adopt a  resolution reaffirming our support for marriage equality, but without directing the Mayor to sign any document purporting to reflect beliefs that he does not hold.   I further urged that we direct the City Attorney to file an amicus curiae brief with the U.S. Supreme Court to support the Ninth Circuit’s decision in Perry v. Brown that Proposition 8 violates the 14^th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.     I believe a more balanced approach will ensure that we can support marriage equality without urging the Mayor or anyone else to publicly purport to support positions contrary to their own conscience.   The rationale for my action can be viewed with this excerpt from my memorandum:

“It is hardly remarkable that San Jose’s City council should take a stand in support of marriage equality; we’ve done so repeatedly in the past.   In 2007, I led a motion—supported by eight of my colleagues–to sign an amicus curiae brief to support San Francisco’s challenge to Proposition 22, The Defense of Marriage Act, then before the California Supreme Court.   In 2004, the Council voted overwhelmingly to recognize same-sex marriages of City employees performed in other jurisdictions.   The Council has remained committed to ensuring that LGBT couples have access to the equal employee benefits as heterosexual couples.   

Certainly, we can re-affirm our commitment to making this next stride in the long march of American civil rights. The proposed resolution attached to the memorandum of Councilmembers Chu, Kalra, and Rocha certainly does that.  

More troubling, however, is the final paragraph of the proposed resolution, which calls for the Mayor “to stand with more than 216 otherU.S.mayors and with the U.S. Conference of Mayors by signing the Mayors for the Freedom to Marry statement in support of the freedom of same sex couples to marry.”  

It would be the right thing for Mayor Reed to sign the pledge.  Nonetheless, that decision remains Mayor Reed’s—and nobody else’s—to make.     I will leave it to the City Attorney to address whether the Council has the legal authority under the City Charter to direct the Mayor to say anything. 

My concern, rather, lies in the moral realm.  The idea of Mayor Reed signing something in which he doesn’t believe–as T.S. Eliott reminds us–amounts to “commit[ting] the right deed for the wrong reason,” for which there is “no greater treason.” 

Last Memorial Day weekend, we remembered those who sacrificed their lives to protect our Constitutionally-granted freedoms.  The right to marry the person of one’s choosing should stand among those freedoms.   Yet it stands among other freedoms—such as the right to speak freely, and without any form of legal mandate to speak contrary to one’s own beliefs.   None of us lose those First Amendment rights by our election to public office.

Of course, it is not lost on most observers that this is a highly divisive issue, and one raised amid the simmer of several political battles over this City’s fiscal and political future.  In the last three years, I have yet to see any Council memorandum calling on President Obama to make a declaration similar to that articulated in the proposed resolution; indeed, he was unwilling to make such pronouncements until only weeks ago.  

Cultural wars are not merely the province of the religious right.  Let’s step back from divisive political battles by merely affirming our strong, unequivocal support of marriage equality, and allow the Mayor and the Council’s dissenters to do what our Constitution marvelously enables each of us to do, without fear or legal consequence: to dissent.”

On Tuesday, the San José City Council faces a decision mandated by our City Charter:  either we enact, without modification, a proposed increase of the minimum wage within the City of San José from $8 to $10 per hour, or we submit the question to our voters on the November ballot.    As we consider this measure, we should applaud the industry, initiative, and idealism of several San Jose State University students, working with Professor Scott Myers-Lipton, to seek to lift the standard of living of San José’s working poor through this proposed ballot initiative.

That does not mean we should enact it, however.

That is not to minimize the monumental obstacles faced by thousands of our neighbors who toil long hours at low wages.  Through the Great Recession, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported a surge in workers making only a minimum wage salary—an annual income of less than $17,000 at California’s $8/hour rate–from 1.7 million in 2007 to 4.3 million in 2010.   Although this halting recovery appears to have modestly mitigated that trend , thousands of San José residents continue to work multiple jobs without a salary that can provide their families with even basic levels of housing, food, transportation, and health care.

The public appears amply aware of the problem–many live it every day.  Not so, this proposed solution.   If you haven’t heard anything about this proposed ballot measure, you’re not alone; most employers in the City of San José haven’t heard anything about it either.

Therein lies the problem.  Even the best-intended proposals create unintended consequences.   Understanding the potential range of those consequences requires sitting down with employers, and listening to how and whether a wage increase will affect their ability to make payroll.  The proposal appears to have been crafted and submitted without any advance engagement of the business community.

Why does engaging with employers matter?    One owner of a popular Downtown restaurant told me that he pays all of his dishwashers and other non-wait staff a wage well above the $8 minimum, earning both employee loyalty and low turnover.   He only pays his waiters the minimum, however, because they typically make between $100 and $200 a night in tips.  Increasing the minimum wage will increase his payroll costs for that group by 25%, and he insists he’ll have to lay off several staff who would have earned $25 per hour or more.    I heard a similar account from an auto shop proprietor whose mechanics earn wages contractually based on a fixed margin above the prevailing minimum.

If we had the time to talk with stakeholders like these, we’d more likely enact a nuanced policy that creates exemptions for enlightened employers like these.   Rather than imposing an overnight “cost shock” on some small businesses, we might also consider phasing the wage increase in as we see the economy improve in the coming two to three years.  Unfortunately, the current proposal takes an “all-or-nothing” approach, with no room for negotiation.

Even if we support—as I do—an increase in the national or state-wide minimum wage, imposing a city-specific mandate raises different questions.  San José has always been job-poor.  Our unemployment rate consistently exceeds that of its wealthier suburbs to the North and West, and it is only major city in the U.S. with fewer daytime occupants than nighttime residents.   Employers who face decisions about where to hire, expand, or move can readily do so—and routinely do—by locating a mile or two in any direction, beyond San José’s borders, to reduce their costs.

Those few cities that have successfully implemented higher minimum wage increases within their borders—San Francisco, Santa Fe, and Washington D.C.—present unique cases as tourist destinations and regional job centers, better able to weather cost increases.  People pay $40 to park in San Francisco for a night on the town.  If we increase parking rates by $2 in San José’s parking garages, they’ll burn down City Hall.   As cost structures differ, so do the ability of businesses—taquerias, laundromats, and the like—to pass along cost increases to their customers.  If their customers won’t pay for an employer’s rising costs, then we may see a loss of jobs.

Clearly, we need time to study the issue, and to engage with all of our stakeholders.   We must better understand the impacts of a wage increase on the job prospects of the thousands of young adults—particularly those lacking skills and higher education– who have seen the door to employment shut to them in recent years.    We need to find middle ground with our employers.  With a more thoughtful approach, we can emerge with a solution that lifts the boats of those who have struggled the most through this economic storm, rather than leaving them—and many small business owners—navigating even more perilous seas.

Many of us who live and toil near St. James Park witness its daily display of the grittiest challenges of modern urban life: drug use, crime, homelessness, and all forms of despair.  Paradoxically, these scenes transpire against a backdrop of stately, neoclassical buildings that evoke images of a grander age.  Those structures—the Scottish Rite Temple, the post office, the state courthouse, and the St. Claire Club, among others– remind us of St. James’ unique place in history, surrounding the oldest urban park in California’s oldest civil settlement.  They whisper of the Park’s regal design by America’s foremost landscape architect, Frederick Law Olmstead.  They tell of the extraordinary events—the marches and rallies, Bobby Kennedy’s 1968 speech, the grisly lynchings of of the Hart baby kidnappers, and various performances by Presidents, poets, and musicians.

Some have romanticized the decline of St. James Park, but the fall from Eden appears far from recent.  Historian Clyde Arbuckle recounts that even 80 years ago, the proximity of homeless in St. James Park supported the workings of justice in the facing courthouse, as “court bailiffs collared park loafers and bums for immediate jury duty across the street.”   I can still recall my own 5-year-old eyes seeing the horror on my mom’s face when she found me and my sister talking to strangers at St. James Park in the 1970’s, after we escaped from her view on the courthouse lawn.  Last month’s Downtown Dimensionrecites a familiar complaint, by Dennis Hickey, asserting that the Park had been “abandoned” in the prior decade to San Jose’s “street people”—except that Dennis uttered the statement 15 years ago, in 1997.

Nonetheless, given the Park’s prominence in our both Downtown consciousness and our own conscience, it must become our priority for urban revitalization.  In recent months, we’ve worked with the community to see how we can revive the park by suppressing criminality, addressing homelessness, and injecting more family-friendly activity into the park.  Many folks are pitching in, facilitated by Fred Buzo and Ragan Henninger on our team, and by the San José Downtown Association:

·         With the District Attorney’s Office, our police are implementing a program to ensure that all drug arrestees receive a “stay away” condition in their term of probation, making them subject to arrest for  returning to the park;

·         This summer, Ky Le will spearhead a pilot project with the Santa Clara County’s Mental Health Services Agency and our own Housing Department this summer to move 15 chronically homeless from the park into alcohol and drug rehab and stable housing;

·         the Very Rev. David Bird provided office space at the Trinity Cathedral for homeless outreach through the Downtown Streets Team, while Destination:Home works with several partners to identify the high-risk homeless for services targeted to facilitate a transition to self-sufficiency;

Beyond these efforts, we need to make the Park a place of activity again.  Many members of the community have rolled up their sleeves to plan and host events designed to re-introduce residents to St. James Park, e.g.:

·         on a sunny Easter Sunday, Ginny Thomas, Tina Morrill and Janis Gemignani expanded on the great tradition ofFirstUnitarianChurch’s Easter Egg Hunt, welcoming hundreds of kids and parents;

·         Dana and Barbara Grover suggested that neighbors join them for a walk in the park on a Saturday morning; three dozen of us joined in, armed with coffee, garbage bags, and graffiti kits;

·         Mauricio Astacio applied for CAP grant funding to support some of the neighborhood events described below.

These are just a few examples.   Now, how can you get involved?  Join us!  

·         The next meeting of the Friends of St. James Park will occur on May 17th @ 6:30pm.

·         Bring your neighbors and friends to support I Am San José as they launch the Park’s first Food Truck Fiesta on Sunday, May 27th,  from 12pm to 5 pm;

·         The St. James Neighborhood Association will host a free ice cream social at the park in May, please check back for more details.

·         KidSportzUSA will host a 5k run/walk to prevent obesity at the San Jose Athletic Club/St. James Park on Saturday, June 9th at 9 a.m.

·         Bring your pillow and jammies, and join us at the Movie Night in the Park on Thursday, June 14, 2012 at 9 p.m. co-hosted by the St. James Neighborhood Association, San Jose Downtown Association and my office.

·         Put on your shades and welcome the return of the successful Mountain Blues Festival on July 14th , co-hosted by the San José Downtown Association;

·         Volunteer in service of the kids at the Third Street Community Center, which offers adult-supervised play in St. James Park for kids in its educational programs.

·         When you see groups feeding large numbers of homeless people in the park, please provide the well-intentioned organizers of those events with the ATTACHED DOCUMENT which describes the illegality of feeding people in San José parks, and identifies partner agencies nearby, like the Salvation Army or Innvision, that will gladly accept their assistance in serving the poor.

·         Email Ragan.Henninger@sanjoseca.gov and let her know you want to be included in future planning and activities!

Resuscitating St. James Park won’t happen overnight.  We all need to work together in the coming months and years, through what may be only halting progress.  Urban revival is the work of a generation, but work worthy of the future of San José.

We’ve received many calls and emails from residents living near the Airport, expressing understandable concern about the proposed West Side development.

What’s the fuss about?  On April 3, 2012, the Council voted to accept bids from various private-sector applicants to develop on the 44 acres on the Airport’sWest Side.    In the weeks leading up to and since that vote, rumors and conspiracy theories multiplied.   For those less interested in rumors than facts, a thorough description of the issues can be found in a very readable powerpoint presentation (or in a less readable report and supplemental report that Airport staff presented to Council).  I encourage anyone with an interest in the issue to review these and other publicly-available documents, and to come to their own conclusions.

Airport Traffic and Noise, and the Curfew

It’s important to recognize what the Council did not do on April 3^rd: the Council did not take any action to increase levels of air traffic or noise, nor to weaken the curfew.    Rather, the Council approved a minimum set of development minimum standards for any potential business seeking to lease a portion of the Airport’s West Side.   Prior to the Council’s decision, I drafted a specific set of directions to require that any new lessees comply by the same rules under the curfew, that the Airport staff increase their reporting of curfew intrusions and violations to the public, and that the City work with BAAQMD to explore better air quality monitoring in nearby neighborhoods.   The Council approved every one of my proposed requirements.

The Council did consider various options for development on the West Side, and chose to adopt an open-ended approach: accepting proposals from any qualifying bidder, regardless of their business or operation, with a goal of maximizing private-sector jobs and City revenue.  The ultimate decision about who or what will occupy those 44 acres will await the completion of the bidding process.

Long-Planned Expansion at the Airport

Whatever the Council decides to do, it’s critical that we view it within its historic context.  Over the last two decades, our councils have repeatedly voted to support expansion of aviation operations to maximize the economic and fiscal value of underutilized land near the Airport.  In 1997, the Council approved an Airport Master Plan and its accompanying Environmental Impact Report (EIR) that contemplated large increases in commercial air traffic along with the attendant changes in noise and emissions.

That Master Plan has undergone repeated revision, and in the most recent addendum, approved by the Council in 2010, reflects a substantially less ambitious Plan.  As you can see from pp. 13-14 of that document,  planned operations for 2027 reflected 20% less air traffic than had been previously planned for a date (2010) seventeen (17)  years earlier.    The number of general aviation (GA) flights in the current Plan at full build-out of theWest Side property would result in 42% less air traffic than the level that was environmentally cleared by the 1997 EIR.  In other words, the scale of the Airport’s planned growth has shrunken dramatically, and the law does not require any additional environmental clearance if we reduce the proposed impacts.   Here, the anticipated noise impacts (discussed at pp. 14-19 of the report)  and particulate emissions appear greatly diminished by the smaller Plan, as well as the airlines’ decisions to supplant their loudest and oldest commercial jets (e.g., the Boeing 727, MD-80’s) with newer models.

What and Who Will Operate on Those 44 Acres?

As the Council considers the potential uses of 44 acres of land on theWest Sideof the Airport, it remains subject to Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) restrictions that the parcels support an aviation purpose.  In other words, the FAA won’t allow a shopping mall or a park at that location.

The City has explored the installation of an additional fixed base operator (FBO), a term used to describe a business that provides aviation-related services such as fueling, tie-down and hangar services, aircraft rental, maintenance, and flight instruction.  There is already one full-service FBO at the Airport operating on an approximately 22 acre land lease, two limited service FBOs, and one corporate hangar facility.   The addition of another FBO can enable the Airport to utilize vacant land to generate millions in revenue for both the Airport and the City, as well as jobs.   The only existing full-service FBO, Atlantic Aviation, understandably opposes the idea of adding competition to the airfield, but it’s certainly not the City’s job to shield businesses from competition.

“Plan First”?

A dispute has arisen over whether the City should await any development plans until the FAA’s determination over whether it may shut down one of its antiquated General Aviation runways.  Some have urged that the Airport should “plan first,” before considering potential bidders on the 44 acres, in the hope that we’ll have a clearer picture of development opportunities with the resolution of the runway’s uncertain status.

Yet the  FAA’s decision will likely take several years, and the Airport has done nothing except “plan” for the last two decades.  Financial concerns, and the need for more Airport revenues, have become increasingly urgent.   Bond agencies recently reduced their ratings for Airport debt, expressing concern about the impact of the faltering airline industry on the Airport’s ability to pay its bills.  Potential bidders have clearly told us that they need not await the FAA’s multi-year  decision-making to resolve.    The Airport staff, moreover, insist that they can readily incorporate any additional acreage resulting from a shuttered runway in any future expansion plans.  We have studied the options on this site for over three years—it’s clearly time to act.

As we so so in the coming months, the public will have an opportunity to weigh in, and any decision by the Council will occur at an advertised and public hearing of Council.  We’ll let you know as more information as that date approaches, but in  the meantime, please email me, at sam.liccardo@sanjoseca.gov, or call (408) 535-4903 if you have any questions or concerns.