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.

The city of San Jose recently completed a scientific poll of 902 residents. This poll cost $50,000. As I mentioned in a prior blog, I took many of the poll questions and posted them on the District 6 website (the district I represent) and here, on San Jose Inside. I entered the questions and three of my own into a web-based survey solution which costs $20 a year. The survey closed yesterday with 839 completing the 15 page survey (973 respondents completed part of the survey). Unlike past surveys where District 6 residents were 90 percent of the respondents, only 43.9 percent of the respondents were from District 6 this time

On San Jose Inside’s weekly open forum, thoughts and opinions on any topic are welcome. What’s on your mind?

Have Americans lost their ability to exchange ideas and discuss politics without the equivalent of a high-school cafeteria food fight breaking out? Over the past few weeks, from San Jose to Washington, some of the language and rhetoric that’s been on display has been quite amazing.

Peyton Manning vs. Drew Brees: Will one of these two quarterbacks end up as MVP of Super Bowl XLIV? Entirely possible. So is eliminating the achievement gap while increasing graduation rates for students in Santa Clara County. And the odds just got significantly better for all children in our public schools.

Photo radar helps augment traffic safety, as well as that of pedestrians and neighborhoods. A tweaking of the current policy to improve safety will not cost the state any money, and in fact will raise money while at the same time lowering emergency room health care costs. Speeding cars in our neighborhoods continue to remain an issue. The City of San Jose does what it can to manage speeding on our streets with the dollars we are able to allocate.

This is the Jan. 30-31 edition of San Jose Inside’s open forum, where comments on any topic are welcome. What’s on your mind?

The parent company for the Mercury News is filing for bankruptcy/reorganization and the Sunday edition of the San Francisco Chronicle now costs $3 at news stands. These two pieces of information speak volumes about the current plight of the newspaper business. Isn’t it only a matter of time before they stop the presses completely and put everything up online? If this happens, will people be more or less informed?

According to Carolyn Bucior, who is writing a memoir about substitute teaching, 5.2 percent of teachers nationwide are absent on any given day, a rate three times as high as that of other professionals and one and a half times higher than teachers in Britain. Regular full-time teachers receive 10 sick days per year, by collective bargaining agreement.

By the time a student completes 12th grade he has had substitute teachers for almost one year of his 13 years of schooling.

As this week brings news of our local unemployment rate just beginning to taper downward, local businesses are peering out from their frozen dens for the first signs of Spring.  That’s of little solace to thousands of our families still losing their homes and jobs, but it does raise a crucial question as we try to get people back to work: how can we best communicate to businesses that they should make San José the place to grow?

Due to the structural budget deficit and the decline of tax revenues coming into the city, the January police academy has been postponed indefinitely. By postponing the academy the city saves money but risks neighborhood safety.