City Hall Diary

…well, actually, I toured District 2 with Councilmember Forrest Williams. However, sometimes people mistakenly call him by the actor’s name instead. Who could blame them? Councilmember Williams has star power; especially driving his Batmobile Mercedes. Councilmember Williams is very energetic and shared many stories about District 2 with me. He does his morning jog up the local hill and eats oatmeal every morning. I hope to have his energy as my hair grays.

The weekly open forum for saying what you think about anything and everything.

SanJoseInside.com Among Those Blocked By Chinese Gov’t

Angered over the Chinese Government’s decision to limit access to the internet, Metro Newspapers and its affiliates Metroactive, Metro Silicon Valley, SV411, SanJose.com and SanJoseInside.com have decided to vehemently protest the affront to free speech by staging what they are calling “venue-hugging” at certain sites used for Olympic events in and around Beijing.

Coinciding with the 2008 presidential election, Dr. Seuss has posthumously thrown his hat into the ring with a new art show, “Dr. Seuss for President,” at the Peabody Gallery in Los Gatos, featuring never-before-released politically charged prints of Seuss’ work.

Unbeknownst to some, several of Dr. Seuss’ books contain deftly veiled sociopolitical commentary in-between the lines. The Lorax, for example, was a seminal piece of modern-day environmentalist literature, written in 1971 an as argument for corporate responsibility and resource conservation. Years earlier, 1958’s Yertle the Turtle was an argument against fascism—Seuss even once admitted he modeled the Yertle character after Hitler himself.

Well, we are on the cusp of another big decision about the future of our valley and our region. Are we going to commit to the biggest transportation project in our history and vote to approve a one-eighth-cent sales tax to raise billions of dollars in a push for rail transit?

I didn’t know if it could happen, but it turns out it is possible to get people to voluntarily sit through a panel of speakers from the Bureau of Automotive Repair. All you’ve got to do is couch it in a car show featuring some of the cleanest low riders, bombs, hot rods, imports and Harleys in the South Bay. Then surround that with the one place that you know is poppin’ on a Saturday afternoon—the Berryessa Flea Market.

I wanted to keep the discussion going on education—tagging on to last week’s topic—since we all have such differing opinions on what we need to do in this area.  I happened to watch the CNN special Black in America last week, and it had a fascinating piece on an unusual plan to improve student achievement in New York City’s education system.

Some Bay Area school districts are making a stronger effort to identify and remove students who are not eligible to enroll in a particular school.  It seems that a number of parents are trying to enroll their kids into better performing schools despite the fact that they live outside of the district or the designated school boundaries.

City Hall Diary

Vice Mayor Dave Cortese wins the prize for having the most historical knowledge of his district. I had the opportunity to tour District 8 with the vice mayor and get a better understanding of the land we call Evergreen and its agricultural history.

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Seen as a Move to Make Team “WNBA-Tough”

In a bold first move by new San Jose Sharks head coach Todd McLellan, the former player-coach of the Charlestown Chiefs, Reggie Dunlap, was hired as an assistant for what many in the NHL see as a fortitude-toughening measure to steel the men in teal for a run at the Stanley Cup and hockey legitimacy.

Silicon Alleys

THE San Jose Redevelopment Agency has now released preliminary documents related to the relandscaping of St. James Park in downtown San Jose, a project intended to give the much-maligned park a new face-lift while preserving its historic character. Since this park was San Jose’s original town square in the 1880s, I have a few thoughts on the park’s crazed history.

There has been much discussion on this site about BART coming to San Jose from the very beginning. The latest effort to fund the project, a one-eighth-cent sales tax proposal on the November ballot, has brought the issue back into the news and I thought we might take the opportunity to debate the initiative. (There is a very good article by Erin Sherbert in Metro this week that brings the matter up to date.)

As the city embarks on a very ambitious plan in North San Jose for jobs and housing, and a mini-debate is had on the wisdom of the city owning land, it will be instructive to look at the past. While we may not always learn from our history, it never hurts to look at it and glean a bit of knowledge and perhaps even some insight.

Every year studies show that we Americans know very little about history.  We fail to identify many famous figures from our past, like Benedict Arnold, Ben Franklin and even George Washington. But what is the root cause of this? Is it our culture and our complete obsession with movies and video games? Or is there something broken in our education system that doesn’t allow students to retain these facts as adults?

Your City At Work (Sort Of)

QUESTION:  How many San Jose city employees does it take to remove illegal signs?  ANSWER: Zero—they don’t do this sort of thing.