Despite an uptick in crime and a top brass changing of the guard, fewer people logged complaints against the San Jose Police Department in 2012 compared to previous years. There was a 7-percent drop in citizen complaints last year, according to an annual report by the Independent Police Auditor’s office, which is on the agenda for Tuesday’s City Council meeting. Other items on the agenda include additional expenses for the Environmental Innovation Center project.

County supervisor candidate Cindy Chavez has confirmed that she raised concerns about prosecuting George Shirakawa Jr. during a luncheon with Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen at P.F. Chang’s in January. Despite the intervention by Chavez and others, Shirakawa was charged five weeks later with five felonies and seven misdemeanors and immediately resigned from office. He subsequently pled guilty to all of the charges.

A fake crime lab report that already cost the city of San Jose years of court battles and lost time will now take $150,000 to settle. San Jose will likely use cash from its liability claims reserve fund to pay off Michael Kerkeles, who in 2005 was accused of raping a mentally disabled woman with the cognitive capacity of an 8-year-old.

UPDATE: The city of San Jose came to an agreement on tier-2 retirement benefits with the POlice Officers Association on Thursday afternoon, avoiding Friday’s arbitration hearing.

San Jose faces a $2.9 billion unfunded liability in pension and retiree healthcare costs. The figure is mind-boggling. The city still has to figure out how to afford those unfunded obligations. But that’s another story for another time. On Friday morning, the public—for the first time—will have a chance to sit in on arbitration hearings that have been held previously behind closed doors, when the city negotiators sits across the table from San Jose’s police union.

Ever since Chuck Reed was elected mayor of San Jose in 2006, he has held quarterly meetings with the president of the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors. The goal of these meetings is to allow city and county officials to discuss legal disputes without lawyers present. But that all changed last week, when current Board president Ken Yeager snubbed Reed’s request for a meeting.

Last Saturday, a modest group of runners, bicyclists and community leaders gathered on a trail near San Jose’s airport for a quietly auspicious occasion—the completion of the Guadalupe River Trail from San Jose to Alviso.

It is time downtown San Jose residents took back Saint James Park. Unlike the glory days of almost a century ago, when presidents and unions held massive rallies in the square, neighbors and downtown workers now describe the park as an unfortunate eyesore.

San Jose’s top casino cop has had enough. In his first interview since Casino M8trix filed lawsuits in February against the city of San Jose, Richard Teng, the San Jose Police Department’s gaming administrator, called accusations against him “a political nightmare.” There is history in this dispute.

Enough people have complained to the city about drop-off containers for used clothing, mostly in grocery story parking lots, as being magnets for graffiti and trash, that San Jose’s Planning Commission agreed earlier this year to do something. But some people suspect this is part of a larger strategy by Goodwill Industries, Inc. to put up a little more red tape for companies that own the scattered-about donation boxes. A proposed ordinance is criticized in a letter submitted to the public record for Wednesday’s Rules and Open Government Committee.

Independent actuarial firm Harvey Rose sent a disturbing report to county Supervisor Joe Simitian this month, detailing how Santa Clara County now finds itself with a $1.68 billion unfunded liability to cover its retirees’ health care benefits.

At least five mentally ill patients from a Nevada psychiatric hospital took a one-way ticket to San Jose, arriving homeless and un-medicated at the Greyhound Bus Station in downtown. That’s according to a series of disturbing reports this week by the Sacramento Bee, which investigated Rawson-Neal Psychiatric Hospital’s apparent practice of “patient dumping.” The state-run mental health hospital in Nevada reportedly bused out more than 1,500 patients to various major cities across the country during the past five years, according to records of Greyhound bus ticket purchases reviewed by the newspaper.

On January 22, five weeks before former Supervisor George Shirakawa Jr. was charged with 12 criminal counts, Cindy Chavez met District Attorney Jeff Rosen for lunch at P.F. Chang’s in downtown San Jose.  Not only did Chavez throw down the race card and lobby Rosen “not to do anything,” South Bay Labor Council’s new executive Ben Field also lunched with Rosen and echoed the message.

The fierce battle for our nation’s schoolchildren is entering a new stage of conflict, and the National School Board Association (NSBA) is reforming itself to take up the fight. Diane Ravitich, a nationally renowned author and keynote speaker at the NSBA’s recent conference in San Diego, delivered a blistering attack against federal education policies and “entrepreneurs” that hurt public education.

City officials admit that San Jose’s IT department tails behind other Silicon Valley municipalities, and to change that they want a new department head. In questions geared toward candidates applying for the role of chief information officer, the City Council asks how the applicants plan to make San Jose more competitive and how to improve data access to the public. Other items on Tuesday’s San Jose City Council agenda include a $10 million airport taxiway proposal, a resolution supporting a ban of flavored tobacco sales in San Jose and a possible bump in fees for developers.

Last month, I wrote about West San Carlos Street as one of the major boulevards in San Jose. West San Carlos is the strategic link between our city’s downtown and the Santana Row/Valley Fair area. A major parcel on West San Carlos is the site of the former Fiesta Lanes bowling alley and retail/auto center. The City Council voted this month to remove the final hurdle in the transformation of this strategic parcel by funding the construction of a housing complex that would be exempt from property tax. The vote was 10-1 in favor of approval, with my vote as the only one against this proposal.

The number of sexual abuse cases involving kids behind bars nearly doubled last year when compared to 2011. The disturbing increase occurred in spite of declining populations at Santa Clara County Juvenile Hall and William F. James Ranch. A report on sexual assaults involving incarcerated youth will go before the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday. Also on the agenda are a number of health and public safety contracts up for renewal.