San Jose Inside

Size of Council Doesn’t Matter

A new study conducted by the League of California Cities (LoCC) put to bed the myth that citizens were only satisfied by the length of council meetings and not by the quality. They recommended an optimal session should last just three to thirteen minutes tops.

Although not rising to the epic proportions of Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce in Dickens’s Bleak House, the long legal battle between Sunnyvale neighbors over a private property rights issue with an environmental twist that was concluded last week has important repercussions for the principles that govern California urban life and may bring a change in state law.

Watergate started as a simple burglary when a night watchman spotted a taped doorjamb at the Watergate apartment complex. The discovery led to a trail of dirty tricks that tracked to the Nixon White House. Was Eric Hernandez’s break-in of email accounts at City Hall the tape on the door, linked to a Nixonian effort to dredge dirt about the personal lives of politicians, journalists and business leaders critical of SBLC’s political initiatives and post it to the Web?

For the first time in many years, I attended a Democratic State Convention last Sunday.  The fact that it was being held at our own Convention Center made it easy, but the real hook was the fact that an Irish parliamentarian friend of mine wanted to hear Bill Clinton’s speech and say hello to him. We did both as we listened to the 45-minute speech (pretty good) and then spoke to the former president for a few minutes.

One Last Fight Left for Silicon Valley’s Environmental Activists

If the Silicon Valley region has been a laboratory for high tech innovation, East Palo Alto has been its trash bin. But now, in a hallmark victory for the environmental movement, those days are over. After a more than twenty-year struggle, East Palo Alto residents have managed to force the Department of Toxic Substances to shut down Romic Environmental Technologies Corp., the toxic waste company that processed much of the hidden hazardous material of our valley.

The news that four men (including a former Bellarmine student and current freshman football coach) have been arrested for the murder of Los Gatos businessman Mark Achilli shows that though we live in a safe area, something pulled right out of a Hollywood movie can and did happen in our backyard.

Anybody who rides Silicon Valley public transportation knows the eclectic experience of traveling via the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA).  From tardy buses to drunken fights, graffiti to sleeping transients, and unidentifiable stains to vomit, you never know what you’re going to get when you step aboard one of the VTA’s fine vehicles. However, what I didn’t expect on my ride home the night of March 21 was a train wreck.

A month ago I drafted a memo that would expand the city’s ordinance to allow Community Benefit Improvement Districts (CBID). This is not an original idea, nor is it cutting edge. In fact, it’s embarrassing that the City of San Jose didn’t jump on this opportunity sooner.

We spent the weekend converting San Jose Inside over to a new server. Thanks Edgar, Adrian, Joel and Ivan for your hard work in getting the new site up.

Astute San Jose Inside readers will notice a few subtle changes. A wider screen, a cleaner interface, larger headlines, more contributors and a cartoon on the front page. Otherwise, it’s pretty much the same San Jose Inside, moved over to a faster, more robust server that can accommodate our future growth.

If any comments posted over the weekend were lost in the transition, please repost them, and if you catch any errors or have any feedback on the new look, please feel free to post your thoughts or email me.

When I tell people that I’m running for Director of District 2 of the Santa Clara Valley Water District, the two reactions I get are “Huh?” and “Didn’t we just have an election?” The first is the more common. The water district is a countywide agency responsible for wholesale water supply, flood control and watershed stewardship. It has a budget of over $360 million a year, and voters don’t know that they have any say over how it’s run.

Illegally Taught Children Served Up As Beef Substitute

As the U.S. Department of Agriculture was busy trying to replace 143 million pounds of tainted meat reserved for Northern California school districts, the State Legislature was busy trying to figure out what to do with millions of idle California homeschooled children.

Faced with a $220 million deficit, the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors is on the hunt for easy revenue to buoy the sinking ship. Consequently, Supervisor Pete McHugh is targeting east San Jose’s Reid-Hillview Airport for destruction so the 179 acres it occupies can be developed. (He uses the area around Elmwood Correctional Facility as a model for his proposal.) The problem is that the airport is home to 600 small planes and several aviation businesses, and the county has received millions of dollars in grants from the federal government (the FAA) to keep it open for another 20 years.