According to a very good and informative article by Vrinda Normand in the Metro last week, San Jose is the only city in Santa Clara County that allows developers to contract directly with consultants to write environmental impact reports for their proposed projects. The problem with this policy was made evident recently in the Draft Environmental Impact Report (DEIR) for the Coyote Valley Specific Plan.

Happy Thanksgiving to you all.

Single Gal started the holiday season off this week by posting the items she felt thankful for. Now I would like to ask you this: What would you like to see happen this coming year that you will be thankful for next Thanksgiving?

I’ll start. Naturally, I turn to politics first.

Nothing makes our petty human problems seem less important than contemplating the enormity and endless wonders of the universe. This is certainly the case with me this week with the recent news that another planet has been discovered outside our solar system by astronomers working at Lick Observatory on Mt. Hamilton. This new planet is similar in size, composition and appearance to Saturn and is the fifth planet discovered to be orbiting around the star 55 Cancri, 41 light years away from us.

This week’s moderate earthquake and last week’s devastating fires in Southern Californian are a wakeup call for all of us. Are we prepared for a large-scale natural or other disaster here in San Jose? Is there a plan? How do we minimize our risk?

It has been a year since our good friend, fellow columnist and in-house San Jose historian Leonard McKay passed away suddenly. There isn’t a day that goes by that we don’t think of him and his preservation work for our community. I certainly miss the almost-daily chats I had with him the last couple of years of his life. I don’t think I ever learned so much from one person in such a short period of time. I would like to take this opportunity to remember my friend Leonard and his efforts to preserve our history—buildings, artifacts, documents and stories—for future generations of San Jose citizens. I am reprinting one of his last columns below as a tribute.

I was going to write about something completely different this week but my attention was caught by the incident this past weekend where two teenaged boys (16 and 17) were arrested for attacking a high school dance and a young woman’s sixteenth birthday party with homemade chemical bombs. Fortunately, it appears that there were no injuries or damage at the high school, but there easily could have been. However, the bomb tossed into the birthday party exploded in the birthday girl’s face, burning her skin and eyes. She and two of her friends were briefly hospitalized.  I can’t get the image of the peaceful and fun once-in-a-lifetime birthday party celebration disrupted by fright and injury out of my mind. What compelled these boys to do such a horrible thing?

On Saturday morning, a public workshop will be held at City Hall to help determine what revisions need to be made to the city’s general plan for growth. An Envision San Jose 2040 Task Force has been assembled to review the plan and they are seeking public input to assist them in setting the agenda. Since many of us will find it difficult to attend the meeting on Saturday, I thought we might give our bloggers an opportunity to express their views on the matter here on San Jose Inside where they can be seen by the denizens of City Hall.

After my last column on the Mexican Heritage Plaza (MHP) a few months ago, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had missed something and things didn’t add up to some of the conclusions I reached at the time. I spent what time I could spare over the summer searching and researching the matter over the Internet and my hunches were confirmed by what I found.

When Kansen Chu left the Berryessa school board in June to take up his new position as the new San Jose City Council member for District 6, the school board went through a perfectly reasonable and open process to fill the vacancy. A list of 17 candidates was whittled down to five semifinalists and finally down to two very qualified people, Alkesh Desai and David Neighbors, that were considered by the four sitting members of the board. When the vote split two for each, rather than opting for a very expensive by-election to fill the spot which is up for regular election next year in November anyway, the board rightly agreed to abide by a coin toss to decide the winner—a completely legal and common method of settling the matter. The coin toss favored Desai who was considered duly elected and installed as the fifth member of the board. The board and Mr. Neighbors accepted the outcome, and there were no complaints from the public. Case closed? Not quite.

Police officers are entrusted by the public with an awesome responsibility: the power of life and death. In a city of one million it is inevitable that officers will use weapons in the course of their duties. It’s part of the job and something that is accepted by the citizens whose laws are enforced by the police in their name. Any time an individual officer decides to use any weapon—whether gun, baton, Taser, fists, boots, or karate—that results in death, the act must be just and justified. It seems to me that the best way to assure the public that their law enforcement representatives are making correct decisions in applying lethal force according to the circumstances, and are operating within the law in doing so, is an automatic oversight enquiry by an independent auditor who reports to our elected representatives.

Much to nobody’s surprise, the San Jose Grand Prix is dead. Apparently, it committed suicide. The laughably dubious reason given by the organizers for its demise is that downtown development is happening at such a scorching pace that the property where one of the main grandstands is located is going to be built on and there isn’t another location for the race’s premium seating structure. The Grand Prix directors say that they have always been aware that the construction on the property would happen. If they had done their homework, then they must have also known that it would mean the end of the race. Did they keep this fact to themselves? 

The report in the Mercury News yesterday that mandatory water rationing in Silicon Valley may soon be a reality is not unexpected. The decision of the judge to limit the flow of water through the Sacramento River Delta—which supplies 50 percent of our needs—to protect an endangered smelt is largely due to inadequate rainfall this past year and the crumbling delta infrastructure that desperately needs attention. There is only so much water available even at the best of times, but we are in a drought year and there could be many more to follow. It isn’t unheard of and the situation could get a lot worse.

The latest report from the U.S. Census Bureau places San Jose at the top of the list of the nation’s richest cities with a population greater than 500,000 with our median income of $73,804. Santa Clara County was second (to Marin County) in the nation in its category, showing a median income of $80,838. (Since there are a lot of gazillionaires in the city and county it means that in order to achieve the median, there must be a hell of a lot of people living on much less than the winning figures.) The average rise in income over the past year was around $1,300.

While I was glad to see the back of the last mayor and council, I am beginning to worry about the effects of the old guard members on the new council. Why is it that decisions that seem obvious to the rest of us require months of delays and hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on consultants? And while, like the rest of the country, our infrastructure is crumbling, why does the Redevelopment Agency want to spend nearly a million bucks to bring a circus downtown? To top it all off, why has the council voted unanimously to unreasonably abridge the public’s freedom to speak in public meetings and limit the citizens’ ability to “petition the government for a redress of grievances” as per the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution?

The turmoil in the economy caused by the subprime lending debacle is far from over. The stock markets may be somewhat stabilized temporarily by the intervention of European and Japanese central banks along with the U.S. Federal Reserve pumping in billions of dollars borrowed from the Chinese, but the overvalued real estate markets will most certainly take a tumble as a result of bad loans and a tighter fist in the banking industry as a whole. There is still a subprime lender shakeout to come as many are in deep trouble due to “lack of liquidity,” i.e., there are no buyers funneling cash through their complicated systems. To add to their problems, it was reported yesterday that the big banks have stopped institutional lending against subprime portfolios.

California Secretary of State Debra Bowen’s decision to decertify electronic voting machines manufactured by Sequoia and Diebold is a welcome one. There are serious security concerns associated with these machines that the manufacturers have not addressed, forcing Bowen to take this action. Among other things, it has been demonstrated that the machines can easily be hacked, employees of the manufacturers can gain access to the machines, and they provide no paper trail for each voter for a hand count in case of breakdown.