By Scott Knies and Matthew Mahood

Rather than allow San Jose voters to decide in November, we hear some San Jose City Council members will push on Tuesday to increase the city’s minimum wage 25 percent, from $8 to $10 an hour, to take effect 90 days after passage. For a city that moves at a deliberate pace on major decisions, it’s mind-boggling that the council has held next to zero public outreach and has neither analyzed nor debated the serious citywide impacts from such a law before considering it. What’s the hurry?

Despite the city’s stated commitment to sunshine and open government, city officials and proponents of a proposal to permanently close a block of South First Street concealed critical documents from affected parties for a year—until the eve of a council vote. Promoters of the “pavement to plaza” conversion say a $500,000 grant from ArtPlace requires the street’s full closure. San Jose will contribute $98,000 in park and economic development funds, under the plan, which goes to the City Council at today’s 1:30pm meeting.

The Santa Clara County chapter of Move to Amend will hold a rally at noon Thursday in St. James Park, near the Historic Courthouse. Move to Amend is a nonpartisan organization arguing for a 28th amendment that would overturn corporate personhood and rule that money is not equivalent to free speech. 

Eric Swallow currently owns the city’s oldest card room, Garden City Casino, with partners Peter and Jeanine Lunardi, and they want nothing more than to shut down the aging facility and replace it with a 21st-century gambling establishment. Casino M8trix is a $50-million, 16-story highrise alongside Highway 101 near San Jose’s airport. The casino’s owners are in a standoff with San Jose Police Chief Chris Moore and some members of city staff.

Lupe Nunez, a vice principal for two years at one of two charter schools formerly operated by the Mexican American Community Service Agency (MACSA)  school, says she’s not sure if Xavier Campos was involved in the disappearance of funds from the teachers’ retirement accounts, “but you kind of wonder.” The question weighs on the minds of many teachers who worked for below-market wages at charter schools in Gilroy and San Jose, operated by MACSA, as executives raided $1 million from their pension accounts to pay other expenses, according to the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s office.

The California Public Utilities Commission predicts Santa Clara County’s 52-year-old area code, 408, will run out of numbers at the end of this year. Last October, the CPUC voted to add area code 669 to the same geographic region as the existing 408 area code in what is called an area code overlay. Starting Saturday, customers may dial ten digits for any number within the 408. On Oct. 21, a sure-to-be maddening voice recording will remind callers to dial a 10-digit number.

Nevermind. Just when it looked like Measure B was good to go, an appeals court had to throw a monkey wrench in the city’s plan for pension reform. On Monday, Councilmember Pete Constant’s lawsuit got beat down. On Tuesday, the ballot question was heard, and a judge made revisions that mostly favored the city. On Wednesday, an emergency appeal was turned in by labor attorneys, and on Thursday a three-judge panel for the 6th District Court of Appeals ordered a stay of printing any ballots. The judges also told the city not to submit the ballot question as written, pending further order of the court.

Labor gave two endorsements for the District 10 City Council race, but unions’ preferred option is burning up dollars while their second choice took the lead in campaign fundraising. Campaign finance forms made public Thursday show planning commissioner Edesa Bitbadal, who received an open endorsement from labor, raised $86,765. Meanwhile, Brian O’Neill, who received the primary endorsement from South Bay Labor Council, raised $27,233 in this time period. Most of that money didn’t last, though. O’Neill spent $17,498 during the first 11 weeks of the year.

In the first two months of implementation, the city’s plastic bag ban yielded positive environmental results and few complaints, according to a memo sent out Friday by Kerrie Romanow, acting director of the Environmental Services Department. So far, the ESD has received 25 calls from the public expressing concerns or “an unfavorable comment” about the ordinance between October 2011 and February 2012, Romanow writes.

Metro Silicon Valley’s issue this week looks at possible candidates to succeed Mayor Chuck Reed when he terms out in less than two years. One possible candidate for San Jose mayor in 2014 is San Jose Councilmember Ash Kalra.—Editor

The public relations war we’ve all been waiting for is finally here. In a recent article, New York Daily News columnist Bill Madden suggested that MLB was unlikely to grant the Oakland A’s permission to move to San Jose. Baseball officials responded by saying no decision had been made. Then the A’s and San Francisco Giants sparred with competing statements about who had rights to the South Bay territory.

Putting a pension reform measure on the June ballot is critical to restoring the fiscal well-being of our city. Whether the projection of future annual pension costs are $300 million, $400 million or $650 million, we know for a fact that these costs have more than tripled in just ten years, going from $73 million in Fiscal Year 2001-2002 to $245 million this year. Please join me in supporting the retirement reform measure on today’s council agenda.

San Jose City Hall’s celebrity falcons Clara and Esteban Colbert celebrated the dropping of their second egg of the season around 8:30am Wednesday morning. Clara started her sixth nesting season Saturday with the dropping of her first egg. Glenn Stewart, biologist and coordinator of UC Santa Cruz’s Predatory Bird Research Group, expects each egg to drop in 56-hour intervals until Clara and Esteban have a nest of three or four. Clara has had a series of lovers since she first built her nest on the 18th level of City Hall in 2007.

A four-month manhunt ended Saturday with the arrest of Steve Ruiz, who is suspected of killing fellow Hells Angels motorcycle club member Steve Tausan at a funeral during October of last year. Ruiz will reportedly be charged with homicide Wednesday.

In his outstretched palm, Atul Lall holds a molar, a wisdom tooth and four fragments of teeth that broke free when a tequila bottle encountered his jaw. Three days before last Thanksgiving, the 32-year-old San Jose native was driving away from the Lucky’s grocery store on South White Road in east San Jose. As he pulled his car out of the lot, Lall says that three men, without apparent reason, ripped him from the driver’s seat and beat him while dousing him with liquor. They called him a terrorist. Almost three months since the incident, the second-to-last of San Jose’s 32 hate crimes reported last year has sparked two separate police investigations. The first continues to search for the three men suspected of beating Lall.  The other, sources confirmed, is being conducted by Internal Affairs, the police department’s watchdog, which is looking into claims that investigators bungled the case and blamed the city’s budget problems for their inability to find the culprits.

Prospective Nora Campos challenger Anthony Macias, a 21-year-old student at Chico State, has written that he was impersonated by an individual who posted anti-Jewish comments online. He has not, however, substantiated the claim with specific information.

In a San Jose Inside post on Saturday, Jan. 28, a commenter who identified himself as Anthony Macias wrote “Regarding [Campos’] charges of antisemitism: Those are entirely false. I have never posted anything of the sort on any Yahoo! message board or forum. I think that someone was pretending to be me.”