Last week, I attended the Oversight Board for the Successor Redevelopment Agency public meeting. One person who watched the meeting said it was “like viewing the reading of a will.”  That was a fair analogy. In the case of the deceased RDA (56 years old), the deceased had property it owns but comes accompanied with liens from the County and JP Morgan. The meeting also showed that while the deceased was alive, Sacramento poached over $100 million from the estate, which disrupted RDA’s ability to pay planned debt installments over a period of 20 years.

Mayor Susan Hammer is among the best leaders San Jose has ever produced, and I have tremendous empathy for her and those who are frustrated with the decisionsCity Hall has made to shortchange our libraries. But the answer is a change of personnel at City Hall, not a charter amendment which, admittedly, will be popular with voters—especially with her leadership. But the policy puts the city on a slippery slope of percentage-based spending. It may sound good, but it is this same type of policy that got us into trouble on the state level.

Dear Larry: We need to talk. It started a few years back, when Lew Wolff got it in his head that Oakland wasn’t the best home for the ballclub he’d recently purchased. The A’s play in a rundown stadium in a decrepit area of town in front of a dwindling—albeit loud and loyal—fanbase. The organization’s limited revenue stream prevents it from building a consistent winner and essentially makes them a ward of the league. Enter San Jose.

California, we should be embarrassed. Our disinvestment in public education is taking its toll on our state based on new data. We find ourselves in a deepening crisis that screams out for a strategic plan to support a change in course. Approximately 100,000 students fail to graduate high school in this state every year, and more than 50 percent of these people are students of color. But there are strategies we can use to boost graduation rates.

A citizens signature drive is underway to secure a certain percentage of the budget for our libraries. This would replace the library parcel tax set to expire in 2014. If enough signatures are collected, the measure could be placed on the ballot in November. Last month, I proposed examining and collecting data for setting a certain percentage of the budget—higher than today’s percentage—for the police department. Perhaps we could combine the ideas and set a percentage of the budget for police and libraries.

Since the implementation of district elections and term limits, competitive elections for incumbent San Jose City Council members have been previously nonexistent. But this year is different. Scorn and division have replaced civility and respect as the local body politic descends into the kind of morass usually associated with cities such as Sunnyvale and Milpitas.

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

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 Santa Clara County Sheriff Laurie Smith.—Editor

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 District 7 councilwoman Madison Nguyen. She would become the first Vietnamese-American big city mayor in the country and would lead the city with America’s largest Vietnamese-American population — more than 10 percent and and over 100,000 in the 2010 census. Let’s hear what the pundits say about that. —Editor

It is common practice for superintendents in counties with district budgets over $100 million dollars to receive well over $200,000 in salary. The position of superintendent is incredibly complex, especially under the current economic conditions. So, if I am at all responsible for the Santa Clara County school board’s negative grade in “Who’s Up & Down” in Sunday’s Internal Affairs column in the Mercury News, I am deeply sorry. But, my quote in reporter Sharon Noguchi’s article last Thursday, which detailed the salary for new county Superintendent Xavier De La Torre, was taken completely out of the context intended.

Although the City does a good job posting documents on its website regarding proposals and correspondence from both sides, I believe many others would rather see the interaction of union officials and city staff in real time. Thus, on Wednesday, I am asking the Rules Committee to support my recommendation to have the city and unions talk about this issue with the hope that both parties will agree to move forward and allow these meetings to be public.

In a recent civil case, a San Jose police officer was found liable for using excessive force on Danny Piña, who was misidentified as a gang member. Piña was wearing a red shirt and police stopped him for riding a bike with a missing headlamp. The jury found that the officer, Allan De La Cruz, used excessive force when he broke Piña’s nose and dislocated his shoulder. I have a 16-year-old son who had a similar experience of being misidentified by police, based on what he looks like and there being a gang presence in the neighborhood.

Mayor Chuck Reed called an audit requested by local state legislators “politically motivated.” He is correct. But calling a fake “fiscal emergency,” exaggerating the size of the problem and calling on voters to pass a pension reform ballot measure that most attorneys, including myself, believe won’t stand a court challenge is also “politically motivated.”

This new falcon at City Hall has got some nerve. They call him Fernando El Cohete. We here at San Jose Inside call him a home-wrecking lout. El Cohete (“The Rocket” in Spanish) appeared over the weekend, and a Mercury News report suggests that he engaged long-time City Hall falcon stud Esteban Colbert in “aerial combat.” Señor Colbert has been missing since Sunday.

With the filing deadline for the June primary coming up on Friday, I thought we’d take a closer look at the 2011 redistricting process that created the current San José City Council districts. It was the second consecutive redistricting process that saw very few changes to the geography of San Jose’s political map. But you can’t blame them for not taking bolder steps. The City Charter left the commissioners only a few months to finish their work. Meanwhile, they were under siege from residents who’d prefer that nothing ever change. Ever.

Last month, public education in this country continued to slip into the abyss. New York City became the epicenter of school reform and the second major U.S. city—Los Angeles Times published individual teacher scores last school year—to implement a public dissemination of individual teacher value-added scores. Value-added scores are a teacher’s rating predicated on the progress each of their elementary or middle school students makes on standardized tests in one school year.