San Jose Inside (https://www.sanjoseinside.com)
San Jose Inside found out the hard way to be wary of press releases when they are dated April 1.
An email sent out by public relations firm owner Darlene Tenes announced that San Jose Parks and Recreation commissioner Mary Ann Ruiz had launched a last minute write-in campaign for the San Jose City Council District 7 seat currently occupied by Madison Nguyen.
And a credible-looking website on the social network Ning encouraged sign-ups and promised endorsements soon.
Elsie Aranda has not decided which San Jose City Council candidate she will endorse. Stopwatch in hand, she sits in the front row of the second District 5 candidates forum at the Mayfair Community Center, acting as moderator.
Aranda makes sure that the four people currently battling to represent San Jose’s East Side don’t go beyond their allotted speech times. It is her job to holler at candidates Xavier Campos, Aaron Resendez, J. Manuel Herrera and Magdalena Carrasco if they take too long to make their points.
Larry Pegram, president and co-founder of evangelical group Values Advocacy Council, today declared his candidacy for the District 9 seat on the San Jose City Council, which is being vacated by termed-out Judy Chirco. Pegram was a member of the City Council from 1974 to 1980. His most recent political venture was a short-lived run for the GOP nomination in the 11th Congressional District.
An affable former security guard, bartender and doorman at the popular downtown bar Johnny V’s is eyeing a run for a seat on the San Jose City Council. Tim Hennessey has generated backing from a number of angry downtown club owners, and this December, with no political experience, he’ll start officially vying for a position representing the most high profile council district of the nation’s tenth largest city.
Sitting at a café table outside Original Joe’s in downtown San Jose, Forrest Williams unzips his binder and starts flipping through the pages within, searching for a document. He finds what he is looking for: a slightly wrinkled, stapled packet of paper with a large amount of handwriting in the margins. This packet contains a long list of city council members, county supervisors, assembly members, senators and water board members—everyone the former San Jose City Councilman has ever worked with in his two decades as an elected official.
The San Jose City Council is moving forward with its efforts to reduce the volume of plastic bags being used (and discarded) in the city. By now, everyone’s heard, that an estimated one million plastic bags end up in San Francisco Bay every year.
Perhaps bringing re-useable bags to the grocery store will soon become a common practice and habit that requires very little thinking. And, perhaps the new requirements will generate measurable results. But I do think that there are a couple of questions surrounding this issues that have received very little attention so far.
The San Jose City Council signed off Tuesday on a Grand Jury Report detailing how two municipal golf courses have ended up in a $1.9 million sand trap. Los Lagos and Rancho del Pueblo, two of the three public courses owned by the City of San Jose, have been draining $800,000 per year out of the General Fund because of extensive debt.
The Caravan Lounge has poured strong drinks on South Almaden Avenue in downtown San Jose for at least 45 years, but ever since current property owners Jan Chargin and Lynn M. Bohnen asked the Redevelopment Agency in 2007 to buy the building, rumors have run rampant about what would finally happen to the classic dive bar. The San Jose City Council was scheduled to vote today on whether the RDA should fork over $1,120,000 for the property, plus an extra $187,000 in “relocation” costs to current Caravan operator, George Rich.
However, the meeting adjourned 15 minutes ago with no mention of the Caravan.
Pam Foley dropped out of the San Jose City Council District 9 race this morning, saying she had decided that cannot balance being a mother, a school board member and a businesswoman while running a campaign. “I’m really, really sad about it,” Foley told Fly—somehow managing to sound extremely confident in resignation: “It was tough because I know I was going to win this race,” she said. “I had everything I needed to win.”
A watershed moment in an acrimonious battle between local labor and business occured Tuesday when the San Jose City Council reversed its vote to rebid the construction of the Educational Park Library and awarded the contract to low bidder Barry Swenson Builder.
The vote was 6 to 5, with union-aligned councilmembers Nora Campos, Kansen Chu, Ash Kalra, Madison Nguyen and Nancy Pyle opposed.
So Fly was browsing YouTube.com, looking for more videos of Keyboard Cat, when up popped an interesting little video posted by the San Jose Police Officers Association. On it, Raj Jayadev, founder of Silicon Valley De-Bug (and a regular SJI contributor), is seen addressing a San Jose City Council meeting, talking about the distrust brewing between some city residents and the police department.
The religious right may have won the gay marriage debate, but they just lost the war on porn…in the library. After a long meeting Tuesday night, the San Jose City Council put an end to Councilman Pete Constant’s 19-month-long campaign to install porn filters on library computers throughout the city.
San Jose’s newly named police auditor resigned this evening following community reaction to the disclosure that his brother is a San Jose police officer.
Chris Constantin was appointed to the $169,000-a-year post last week in a closed session meeting of the San Jose City Council.
He succeeded Barbara Attard, whose contract was not renewed after she sought expanded powers to review investigations into complaints of police misconduct.
It seems that Pam Foley doesn’t have to try to hard to get her name out there as a candidate for San Jose City Council. Even though the San Jose Unified school trustee has no history at City Hall, she seems to be getting attention from San Jose’s political insiders.
San Jose City Councilmember Sam Liccardo sent this letter in response to last week’s Metro cover story about SJPD Chief Rob Davis, which was excerpted on SJI.
Perhaps due to space constraints, last week’s story about San Jose Police Chief Rob Davis (“Can Davis Survive?”) incorporated only one aspect—the most negative—of the views that I expressed about the chief’s performance.
“City officials…are allowed free use of a special box at Sharks games.” (Mercury News, April 7). Why? And, why do members of the San Jose City Council get a car allowance? Do you get a car allowance from your employer? I don’t.
