At its meeting yesterday, the San Jose City Council passed the most stringent ban on plastic bags in the Bay Area. Stores will no longer be allowed to hand out plastic bags in 2012, with the exception of restaurants and second hand shops. With this ban, San Jose will be following the lead of ten other cities in California, including Palo Alto, Oakland and San Francisco.

The City Auditor is at it again, finding ways to save San Jose money while cutting back services only minimally. This week’s target is the SJPD, which has already suffered from severe budget cuts.

Pat Dando announced that she will be leaving the San Jose Silicon Valley Chamber of Commerce after a six-year stint as head of the local group. “It’s time for a new chapter for me, personally and professionally,” she explained. She added that she wanted to wait until the elections were over before announcing her decision.

Mayor Chuck Reed has nominated Madison Nguyen to be vice mayor, three weeks after she won a surprisingly close race to hold onto her District 7 council seat. The move seems to confirm a shift of loyalties for Nguyen, a onetime ally of the South Bay Labor Council. She was the swing vote in the council’s decision to put Measures V and W on the ballot—a move SBLC vehemently opposed.

Last Thursday, the council had a study session for San Jose’s 2010-2011 budget. The public meeting received little media attention. Perhaps, since the holidays are near, we only want to hear the good news…and next years budget is far from good. There is no dispute on the data—just the direction we shall choose to balance the budget. 

Every now and again the Mercury News editorial board hits a home run. Shortly after the election, the Merc issued a strong and thorough editorial about the city’s problems as they relate to city employees and their unions. “It’s time for San Jose city employees and union leaders to drop the ‘scapegoat’ label. It’s wearing thin, and nobody outside of union circles is buying it.”

As city revenues have continued to decline, more money has been allocated to public safety both in real dollars and as a percentage of the general fund budget. Sixty percent of our general fund is allocated to public safety versus 40 percent 20 years ago. That 60 percent includes public safety pension costs and consumes our top four revenue sources combined: property tax, sales tax, utility tax and phone tax revenues.

In real dollars, San Jose spends $115 million more on public safety then we did 10 years ago, yet we have less personnel—while our population has grown from 950,000 to one million.

By Greg Larson

It appears that Democrats won all nine statewide races and retain significant majorities in the California legislative and congressional delegations. But as evidenced below, the statewide ballot measures paint a completely different picture, one that suggests the Democratic Party itself is increasingly out of touch with the policy preferences of the California electorate.

City Redevelopment director Harry Mavrogenes says the embattled Mexican American Community Services Agency (MACSA) has defaulted on a $500,000 grant.

Magrovenes sent a memo to the Redevelopment Agency’s Board of Directors saying that the MACSA’s Youth Center on the East Side has been receiving redevelopment grants for a preschool program that has never been implemented.

Many old-guard members of the San Jose Silicon Valley Chamber of Commerce’s political action committee (ChamberPAC) were disgruntled with the group’s decision to withold an endorsement from evangelical activist Larry Pegram in the race for the District 9 seat on the City Council. So a month ago, Republican Councilman Pete Constant spearheaded the creation of an independent expenditure committee, the “San Jose Taxpayers for Reform 2010: Support Pegram/Oppose Rocha.”

The warrant issued for the Oct. 14 raid on the Mexican American Community Services Agency (MACSA) reveals that investigators believe Xavier Campos had first-hand knowledge of the diversion of employee pension funds at the group’s embattled charter high schools.

Members of the San Jose Fire Department and San Jose Police Department confronted Councilman Pierluigi Oliverio at his Willow Glen home after a political consultant spotted the council member removing signs. Oliverio says the signs were illegally posted and that he removed them consistent with city ordinances.

District 5 San Jose City Council candidate Xavier Campos still refuses to address any details about the two decades he spent working at the embattled Mexican American Community Services Agency (MACSA).

Five days after MACSA’s Youth Center on 660 Sinclair Dr. was raided by armed investigators from the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s office , Campos, the organization’s former chief operating officer (COO) insists through intermediaries that there’s no reason for him to address the issue.

Magdalena Carrasco is calling Xavier Campos to the carpet, publicly demanding that her District 5 city council opponent address whether he had any knowledge of financial wrongdoings at the Mexican American Community Services Agency Youth Center (MACSA), his longtime former employer.

Armed investigators from the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s office raided the Mexican American Community Services Agency (MACSA) Youth Center at 660 Sinclair Dr. in East San Jose Thursday.

The raid began some time this morning. By 5pm, at least five officers with badges around their necks and guns on their belts were loading two unmarked police vehicles from a side door of the community center.

In 2004, Miguel Baldoni was working as a substitute teacher in rural Appalachian Ohio when he heard about a new charter school opening on the East Side of San Jose. He uprooted himself, came to California and got a job teaching chemistry at the Academica Calmecac, which was run by the Mexican American Community Services Agency (MACSA).

He says he was pleased that the position offered him a chance to change the lives of at-risk students who had been left behind by traditional public schools. But he freely admits that the exceptional retirement package promised to all MACSA teachers really cemented his decision to pack his bags and come to Silicon Valley with 10 bucks in his pocket.

“This was the biggest reason why I took this job,” Baldoni says.