Small businesses increasingly have become the employers of many San Jose residents—including self-employed entrepreneurs—left behind in the tech boom. One way to address the yawning opportunity gap would focus our municipal energies on lightening the burdens of those small businesses. As we all know, City Hall can get in the way.

With an A-Team of lobbyists and legislators on the offensive against net metering and the startup solar industry, it would seem to be a case of David vs. Goliath. The good news for those of us on the side of sustainability is that David, or Steve Blank, has a game plan for how solar companies can fight back, claim their share of the market, and secure our energy future.

In the height of the Great Recession, the Los Angeles Recreation & Parks Department started a new program that proves progress can be made despite heavy budget cuts. San Jose would be wise to follow a similar path.

In what may turn out to be one of the most expensive races ever for a local county office, Cindy Chavez has captured the District 2 Supervisor seat held by her disgraced former ally, George Shirakawa, Jr. The victory places the largest county government in the global home of leading edge technology—from Teslas to Google Glass—firmly in the hands of an old-fashioned political machine; a classic one that delivers votes, wins elections, rewards its followers and dispenses benefits. Over the next two years, the board will vote on billions of dollars in employee compensation contracts—the county spends $3 billion a year on salaries, benefits and pensions—for the members of the unions who returned the former San Jose city official to public office.

I applaud Congressman Michael Honda’s recent convening of the STEM Advisory Council, which I attended last Friday at Applied Materials with 60-plus engineers, educators, policy makers and non-profit leaders. We must act now, as more and more firms in the U.S., like Applied Materials, require science, technology, engineering or math degrees to satisfy their employment mandates.

Judge Arthur Weisbrodt asked about corruption, dishonesty and backroom deals in a candidate’s debate two weeks ago. Oddly, he posed the question to Teresa Alvarado for not “taking on Cindy Chavez aggressively,” rather than ask Chavez directly. Debates with timed answers are too superficial to probe questions about complex financial relationships. So with one newspaper with its head in the sand, the other unable to get answers and an election opponent who avoided confrontation, the public has remained in the dark. Here are just a few of the questions that should have been asked.

On Tuesday night, the pundits will come out in force, as a small group of voters will decide who represents District 2 on the Board of Supervisors. The chattering class will flock to praise the victor, while the defeated candidate will be accused of doing everything wrong. Some pundits will opine that the losing candidate’s career is over. They will posture that the “loser” will never be able to run for elected office again. They will say that the losing candidate will have lost two elections, noting it is some kind of bar to future public service. That is horse manure.

Thanks to the work of the staff of Parks, Recreation and Neighborhood Services, and under the recent leadership of trails manager Yves Zsutty, San Jose’s entire trail system has undergone an amazing transformation.

In order to move on from partisan gridlock on education reform, we must deal with the facts of what works to increase performance for all students. Looking at two new bills coming out of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate, that isn’t happening right now.

Two years ago, I approached the talented group Shady Shakespeare Theatre Company and asked staff to walk through Willow Glen’s Bramhall Park with me to see if they would consider performing at the venue. At first glance, it was viewed as less desirable, due to the fact that the grass was dead in the summer, and the amphitheater had electrical connections that no longer functioned and sub-optimal lighting. Despite these less than ideal circumstances, we agreed to keep in touch.

I had high hopes for the new ABC Family cable show The Fosters when I saw the first promo. Produced by Jennifer Lopez, the new summer series highlights a new “non-traditional” family with foster children, and I was anxious to see how a foster family and the child welfare system would be portrayed on TV. But, after watching a few episodes, and speaking with a couple of foster kids about it, I have mixed feelings.

The cases of Emmett Till and Trayvon Martin, two African American boys who were killed while on trips to visit family, have another common link: Their deaths occurred because of a dark cultural mentality that still exists in many places in this country, especially the Deep South.

In the spring of 2012, I received notice of a conference in New York City called “Greater & Greener” that was to take place in July. The conference, which is wrapping up this year’s annual event today, covered a wide variety of topics all related to urban parks and trails.

Two bullets have the potential to change the world. One pierced the heart of Trayvon Martin on a rainy night in Florida early last year; the other penetrated the head of Malala Yousafzai on Oct.9, 2012. Trayvon died the night he was shot, while Yousafzai recovered from critical condition to triumphantly address the United Nations last week. It is my hope that Ms. Yousafzai’s passionate speech can help transform the conversation about equality, justice and education. Let me explain.

Why wait for “Anchorman 2” to hit theaters when we can just tune in to KTVU’s coverage of the Asiana flight 214 crash? Proving some newscasters will literally say anything put on a teleprompter, Channel 2’s afternoon anchor Tori Campbell read four obviously fake—and blatantly racist— names that supposedly belonged to the pilots of the Boeing 777 that crashed while attempting to land at San Francisco’s airport on July 6.

We hear talk from time to time about partnerships between the public sector and private sector, essentially merging the mutual interests of governments, which serve communities, and private companies, which exist to make profits for shareholders or their private owners. But there is another entrant in the private sector that is often a partner but seems to get left out of the public/private partnership discussion: nonprofits. When it comes to parks, these organizations can make critical contributions.