San Jose Inside

On Saturday morning, I went on my 5th Homeless Encampment “sweep” with the San Jose Police Department’s Metro Unit.  The Metro Unit is in charge of monitoring creeks for encampments.  These clean-ups have taken me to Districts 3,4,6 and 7, alongside the Coyote, Guadalupe and Los Gatos Creeks. When you climb down into the creeks you forget you’re in San Jose, as all you can see is nature.

We have hundreds of people in San Jose who live in the creek areas in temporary shelters. Some structures remind me of developing world shanty towns while other camps have a complete living room set up, with power operated from car batteries.  Some encampments are small and are set up underneath street overpasses, while other encampments are massive with many people.

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I can’t think of any better reason to lurk in the Imperial Ballroom of the Fairmont Hotel in downtown San Jose than to listen to a keynote address titled “Jackhammers, Polymers and Diamonds: New Applications in Explosives.” Given by Dr. Christa Hockensmith, the speech will be one of 10 highlighting ETech, the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, taking place March 9–12 at the Fairmont.

Junior Johnson’s Sigma Chi brothers are mourning his apparent suicide, while his mother says they killed him

On the afternoon of Nov. 22, 2008, 20-year-old Gregory Marcel Johnson Jr. was discovered dead in the basement of the Sigma Chi fraternity house in downtown San Jose. He was found hanging from a ceiling water pipe, a noose fashioned from 14-gauge heavy-duty electrical cord wrapped around his neck twice.

Let’s hope Sen. Abel Maldonado (R-Santa Maria) has reconnected with some old high school friends on Facebook. They might be the only people who will talk to him anymore. Two weeks ago the state senator, whose district runs from Santa Barbara County to the Almaden Valley and Los Gatos, alienated pretty much everybody on both sides of the aisle by refusing to vote for the state budget until he’d extracted a concession on open primaries.

By 8am, Madison Nguyen had already gotten back into City Councilwoman mode after a long night of celebrating her victory in the historic recall election. She said she was “overwhelmed with joy” last night as the election results came pouring in showing that she had successfully retained her seat as the District 7 council rep.

BREAKING NEWS: At 9:15 p.m. with 7 of 25 precincts and the absentee votes counted, it looks like San Jose City Councilwoman Madison Nguyen is headed towards victory in the hard-fought recall election. The San Jose Police Officers Association headquarters on North Fourth Street in San Jose is packed with supporters, and the parking lot is thick with TV trucks with extended antennae. People are speaking loudly in Vietnamese on cell phones.

Now that the City of Fremont has struck out, it’s San Jose’s turn at bat to try and lure the Oakland A’s to town. Or is it? Last week, A’s owner Lew Wolff asked San Jose city officials to essentially calm down, and refrain from contacting Major League Baseball about moving the A’s to San Jose. “Such contacts are not recommended,” Wolff wrote in an e-mail to San Jose’s mayor.

As everyone probably knows, the San Francisco Giants’ territorial rights to Santa Clara County stand in the way of an A’s move to San Jose. But…everyone has their price. How much do you suppose it would take for the Giants to relinquish their claim to Santa Clara County?

Our K-12 public school system continues to wallow in mediocrity at a time when many nations are continuing to create a vastly more educated workforce, especially in mathematics and science. As a citizen of this great nation, I am more than a little scared about what this eventually means for us as we desperately attempt to recover as an economic superpower in this information-based economy.

Lately the City of San Jose’s Falcon Cam is a bust. There’s no sign of Clara and Carlos, the peregrine falcons that have been nesting on the 18th floor of City Hall.  With the nesting box empty, Fly headed over to Guadalupe River Park & Gardens last Saturday and joined twenty birders for an early morning bird walk. The Santa Clara Valley Audubon Society’s Janna Pauser, noting that migrating birds use the river for a flyway,  found us a red tailed hawk, hooded mergansers, black phoebes, yellow rumped warblers, flickers and finches galore, as well as a rare raptor known as a merlin, falco columbarius. Missing were the homeless sedentarius, a species that often can be found encamped on this three-mile ribbon of green running from downtown San Jose to Alviso.  None were seen because of the San Jose Police Department and Santa Clara Valley Water Districts’ Feb. 26 sweep.

In 1976, San Jose city leaders emerged from a retreat at the Asilomar Conference Center and declared that their number-one priority was to fix the jobs and housing imbalance in San Jose.  Since then San Jose has provided the most affordable housing in the state of California, and tens of thousands of market-rate dwellings; however, San Jose has not shared in the job growth. So while other cities have a “jobs surplus,” San Jose still has a “jobs deficit.”

This is the weekly open forum where SJI’c commenters are invited to set the agenda, choose the topics, and opinionate freely. You could look it up.

In the wake of Hearst Corp.’s threat to close the San Francisco Chronicle, some analysts are speculating that the Bay Area’s largest and oldest newspaper might join the ranks of Dean Singleton’s MediaNews empire—which includes the San Jose Mercury News and virtually every other newspaper in the region.

Aside from Taco Bravo, the Recycling Center on McGlincy Lane and that large bear on top of Campbell Automotive, the other primary attraction in Campbell is a curious little bastion of activity called On the Corner Music. Located—you guessed it—on a corner at 530 E. Campbell Avenue, this little record shop offers an eclectic selection of vinyl LPs, and regularly stages art openings, parties and happenings, the latest of which goes down this Friday.

Can Madison Nguyen’s troubles be explained away as a branding battle between two shopping centers, and the powerful men who own them?

Councilwoman Madison Nguyen didn’t receive an invitation to San Jose’s annual Vietnamese Spring Festival, which was held two weeks ago. It was the second time that Nguyen, the first Vietnamese-American elected to the San Jose City Council and one of the highest-ranking Vietnamese elected officials in the nation, was scratched from the list.

The public act of disrespect was not that surprising, given that one of the event’s main organizers was the powerful local landowner Son Nguyen.