This is SJI’s weekly open forum, where any topic is fair game. What’s on your mind?

“Those who don’t understand history are condemned to repeat it.”  When it comes to the San Jose Airport expansion and renovation project, it’s looking more and more like city officials failed to learn from the costly experience of the Taj Mahal city hall.

“RTTP” is part of the new parlance of school and government employees. In a few days we will be told by U.S. Secretary of Education Duncan which Race To The Top state applications are considered finalists for funding in the first round of competition.

Forty states applied for the S4.25 billion in total funding. The prize, financed by the economic American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, will range from $350 million to $700 million per state and be awarded in April. Will California be on the list in this first round?

Professor Donald Shoup of UCLA visited City Hall last week. He was in San Jose to present a lecture titled, “Why free parking is a bad idea.”  The information he shared is based on his book and research.

There are approximately 700 million parking spaces for 230 million cars in this country and 99 percent of cars trips have free parking.  Prof. Shoup showed an aerial picture of the Cisco Systems campus with its empty asphalt parking lots. He felt that these empty parking lots are not a good use of land and that it creates higher-than-needed vehicle miles traveled (VMT). He then continued to share what he thought would be a way to better utilize the land, which was to allow Cisco to build housing on their parking lots and waive all parking requirements.

SJI’s weekly Rants & Raves is a forum where the site’s regulars and visitors set the agenda. Any topic is fair game. What’s on your mind?

Have you noticed, there’s been more than a few angry letters to the editor submitted to the Mercury News by San Jose residents over the past few weeks?  It seems that folks are a bit ticked-off by the present condition of their city, and are placing the blame on the city council and the unions that run them.  (Yes, that’s right…the unions run the council.)

Too many of our children are overweight and out of shape. According to the 2005-06 Santa Clara County Civil Grand Jury report, 22 to 31 percent of children are overweight and 30 to 41 percent are physically unfit. We’ve got a problem, but the good news is we are moving in the right direction.

Mayor Reed shared a candid and honest view of city revenues and expenses at the State of the City Breakfast last week. (Personally, I miss the State of the City speeches in the evening as it led to dinner after the speech and spending money Downtown.) As we already know the City is walking the plank, with the sharks swimming below in the ocean (sharks = bankruptcy) and a sword wielding pirate (pirate = hard choices) is forcing us to walk down the plank off the ship. Walking back up the plank in not an option unless tough decisions are made now. However it seems that another alternative being heard more and more at city hall is borrowing.

While we slash services like park maintenance, the City has millions of dollars in park fees, sitting in reserves.  Under state law, we charge developers fees to enable us to build parks, pools and community centers whenever they build a new housing project. For over a decade, we have been building community-serving amenities that we cannot pay to maintain or operate. It would be irresponsible to continue on this course.

It’s SJI’s open forum, where comments on any topic are welcome. What’s on your mind?

Past San Jose mayors have used the annual State of the City speech to announce big projects or initiatives.  Commandeering a broke city, however, limits Chuck Reed to talking about already dry cement like the swoopy new airport terminal or trumpeting minor capital spending projects, such as fixing the convention center’s leaky roof or reopening the Happy Hollow Zoo with a renovated Guinea Pig Island.  When it comes to mayoral speeches in San Jose, no detail is too small.

People in San Jose are happy. In fact, they’re happier than the residents of any other major city in the U.S. That was the finding of the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, which was released yesterday. To be fair, there are other, happier places, like Honolulu, Hawaii, or Holland, Michigan (huh?), but when it comes to the country’s biggest cities—the ones with populations of 1 million-plus, San Jose was at the top, beating out D.C., Raleigh and Minneapolis.

Last Friday a thousand notables from high tech companies, public utilities, hospitals, local governments and NGO’s filled 96 tables at the McEnery Convention Center to hear about the State of the Valley according to the 2010 Silicon Valley Index, released by Joint Venture: Silicon Valley Network and the Silicon Valley Community Foundation.  “The Index has a lot of bad news this year,” said Russell Hancock, Joint Venture’s president.

Last week the Council tackled two agenda items related to parks. One was to apply for a state grant. There is $184 million up for grabs for the entire state of California to be spent on city parks. California has 36 million people and San Jose has one million. If San Jose were to get 1/36th of those state funds, that would be $5 million. The other item was the city postponing the opening of 11 parks city- wide because there is no money to fund operations and maintenance.

On SJI’s weekly open forum, comments on any topic are welcome. What’s on your mind?

One Charter Summit conference participant wrote “John Deasy rocked” on her conference evaluation form.  Who is John Deasy anyway? Dr. Deasy is the recently hired deputy director of education for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and former superintendent of Prince George’s County Public Schools in Maryland. He was an afternoon speaker at Santa Clara County Office of Education’s Charter School Summit.