San Jose Inside

Our vision for the future of San Jose should be nothing less than assuring that the city we leave for future generations provides the quality of life and opportunities that were provided for those of us who were born and raised here.

My son, who is seventeen, is already concerned that he may not stay in San Jose. He talks about how he’s tired of the traffic and how congested this area has become.  He’s not sure if he will be able to find a job and be able to afford to live here. And he is just like thousands of others.

SF Mayor Admits To Wearing Diapers During Staff Meetings

After several embarrassing revelations this week, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom saved the best for last with an admission that he wears diapers during long staff meetings and “some cross country air travel.”

When I read that the San Francisco Symphony plans to come to San Jose on October 5 and play a free concert in Chavez Plaza, I jumped for joy. They are also increasing their number of performances at the Flint Center next season by adding three family concerts, and the symphony’s Youth Orchestra will present Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf” in the California Theater on December 15. This is exactly the type of regional approach that we need to take here in Bay Area. How lucky we are to have our neighboring world-class orchestra coming here to play an absolutely free concert for our community and picking up the $100,000 tab themselves.

Rarely in recent San Jose history has such a tiny tempest been stirred up in this diminutive a teacup. When Mayor Chuck Reed announced that he was going to charge a modest $20 fee for attending this year’s State of the City address—instead of having Jerry Strangis and the assorted lobbyists and other hangers on that populate the corridors of City Hall pay the fare—there was a hushed silence.

When we think about our city, we often think about the big-ticket items that make a huge impact.  We are always talking about ways to enrich San Jose with more, more, and more! This includes building BART, baseball stadiums, funding large scale developments and adding retail shopping.  But it seems that when we do that—which is important—smaller projects that are also important to some citizens fall through the cracks.

What did city officials not know, and when did they not know it?

The 1996 Measure I Initiative called for the “relocation and consolidation of civic offices in the downtown.”  But the new City Hall complex at Fourth and E. Santa Clara St. was not built large enough to provide the consolidation of city offices called for in the ballot measure.

Vacant High-Rise Proves Perfect Bearing for Emergency Routes

An agreement was reached early Thursday morning when airport officials met with several downtown representatives to hammer out a deal to protect building heights while allowing for the safest emergency route over the city’s center; their solution: aim at the Sobrato building.

The San Jose Water Co. supplies 1 million residents in San Jose and nearby communities from the Lexington Reservoir in the Santa Cruz Mountains. They own more than 1,000 acres of the watershed between the reservoir and Summit Road where they have stated it is their intention to start a vigorous logging operation. Their plan is to divide the area into nine sections and log one section per year on a rotating basis, removing 40 percent of all trees with a circumference of more than 24 inches. They equate this with “brush clearing” and assert that it is being done to cut down on fire danger. A one-hundred-foot-tall redwood is pretty big brush!

He appeared at City Hall the other day. He came like an avenging developmental angel, spewing bile and insults in his wake. He referenced a Broadway play, “Wicked,” and said “no good deed goes unpunished.” He rocked ‘em and he socked ‘em in a singularly awesome performance. All in the room were transfixed.

Meet Carl Berg.

Pierluigi Oliverio has come under fire recently for his campaign fliers that show him posing with kids and what some people believe is his “pseudo family.” I just have to come to the defense of Oliverio. Being single is tough no matter where you are or where you live, and even tougher, apparently, if you are running for a council seat in the ultra family-oriented Rose Garden and Willow Glen neighborhoods.

How City Officials Made an 18-Story Building Disappear

In November 2001, the City of San Jose Finance Department presented a Measure I legal recertification study to the city council. (The Measure I initiative, approved by San Jose voters in 1996, required that a new civic center could only be built if it were cost effective.) The city’s recertification analysis concluded that if commercial lease rates dipped to a level of $28.11 per square foot, building a new complex would not be cost effective, and the city would be obliged not to pursue the construction of the new center planned for Santa Clara Street.

Claim Lieber’s “Thinly-Veiled” Legislation Targets Recreational Flogging

Just hours after Assembly Member Sally Lieber went public with her no-spanking legislation, the pornography industry responded in kind with their anti-no-spanking campaign to try and defeat a law that they claim will eventually lead to a total ban of all kinds of flogging.

We seem to spend a lot of time on this site bemoaning the fact that San Jose is perceived as a second-class member of the “ten largest cities in the U.S.” club (we don’t get the big convention or we don’t get the big team). Why? In a blog earlier this week, some cynic even compared San Jose to Toledo and Omaha. The comparison might be apt if we were surrounded by the vacuum of the prairie, but we aren’t.

Few of us have given much thought to Joyce Kilmer, fine “woman” that he was, since we were forced to memorize his poems in grammar school, forever immortalizing the basic “tree.”  I think we would have agreed then that very few poems we were forced to learn by rote are as beautiful as the green, wavy creatures that we see every day around us.  When we found out later that Kilmer died in the muddy fields of France in 1918, it made him a bit more interesting—the tragic poet. Yet, that damn poem rang out in our minds, at least one line anyway. 

A few weeks ago, I attended MacWorld for my company.  As I was driving to San Francisco, fighting traffic every step of the way, I had a thought: Why am I driving to San Francisco for this show? 

After I paid my $23 for parking (and we think we have issues here) near the Moscone Center and got inside the convention center, I was awed by the size and scale of this show and the sheer volume of people attending.  I know, our rinky-dink convention center does not have the capability of hosting a show anywhere near that size; but why should that be?  Why can’t we get it together as a city to make our convention center a place where these world-class shows can come?