With a record budget deficit approaching $100 million and the limited sources of income dwindling in the recession, San Jose’s City Council is looking for creative ways to raise income. According to City Councilmember Nora Campos, “the only one of the items that even polled fair and that we may have an opportunity to receive some revenues” is the expansion of San Jose’s licensed card tables. According to Mayor Chuck Reed, the resulting tax revenues could be as much as $2-3 million per year.
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District 7 Council Candidate: Carpetbagger?
The last time Dr. Patrick Phu Le showed up in the news, it was for being arrested after attacking a press photographer he accused of being a communist spy. Now, the longtime Vietnamese community activist and current candidate for the District 7 seat on the San Jose City Council has exactly one week to move to San Jose if he still wants to run.
Downtown to City: Wake Up and Smell the Caffeine
This week’s Metro Silicon Valley cover story, excerpted here, discusses a stimulus plan authored by Councilmember Sam Liccardo and three colleagues, and the reaction of downtown businesses to the city’s efforts to reawaken a downtown economy that went off-track.
Council Courts Olympic Trials
The San Jose City Council weighed the possibility of hosting the U.S. Gymnastics Team’s Olympic Trials at today’s city council meeting. The Council went over a memorandum Mayor Chuck Reed issued on Jan. 15, outlining the city’s bidding effort for the event.
Planting the Seeds of San Jose’s Economic Resurgence
As this week brings news of our local unemployment rate just beginning to taper downward, local businesses are peering out from their frozen dens for the first signs of Spring. That’s of little solace to thousands of our families still losing their homes and jobs, but it does raise a crucial question as we try to get people back to work: how can we best communicate to businesses that they should make San José the place to grow?
Constantin Says Goodbye to San Jose
Chris Constantin, a performance auditor for the City of San Jose and local political figure, announced today that he is leaving the area. In a letter to colleagues, he said he is taking a job as Deputy City Auditor in San Diego.
Constantin made news last year when he was appointed by the City Council to serve as the Independent Police Auditor. He resigned the post a week later, after it was revealed that his brother is an SJPD officer.
Academy of Art University Eyes San Jose
San Francisco pedestrians always know when they are walking by an Academy of Art University branch. Oone finds young, eclectically dressed hipsters, all loaded down with easels and tool boxes, many smoking American Spirits: art students. This modish scene may soon be re-created on the streets of downtown San Jose as the San Francisco-based AAU, the largest art design school in the country, is looking for a home in Silicon Valley.
City Threatens to Shutter Pot Clubs
The city of San Jose issued a memo today threatening to shut down three pot clubs within the city limits if they refuse to stop selling medical cannabis for a fee.
The memo, released this afternoon by Joseph Horwedel, director of the Department of Planning, Building and Code Enforcement, stated that the department has received complaints and is in the process of investigating Pharmers Health Center Cooperative, Inc., San Jose Cannabis Buyer’s Collective and Medileaf Collective. UPDATED 5:27
San Jose 2010
This is a big year for the City of San Jose and its future. The City faces a $100 million budget deficit. Mayor Reed and the rest of the council will have to pull the proverbial rabbit out of a hat. Unfortunately, things may get worse before they get any better. Truth is, there’s no rabbit…there may not even be a hat!
Giants vs. A’s in San Jose
Councilman Sam Liccardo tells Fly that political consultants working for the San Francisco Giants have been “push-polling” to turn the San Jose public against the idea of the Oakland A’s franchise coming to the South Bay. A push-poll (for anyone who missed the 2000 Republican primary, in which the George Bush campaign famously used the tactic against Sen. John McCain) is an attack masquerading as a telephone poll. Liccardo says the Giants have been calling people in his district asking if they agree or disagree that city resources should be spent on police, fire fighters, parks, trails…or “land giveaways.”
San Jose’s Native Gen X’ers
I turned 40 in December. I spent my birthday with family and long-time friends. Many of my friends I have known since age five, from kindergarten in San Jose Unified School District, which equates to knowing most of my friends for more than 30 years. The majority of my friends are not political in their occupations and nearly all of them have never been to a San Jose Council meeting. Instead, they are teachers, nurses, Realtors, attorneys, tech folks, blue-collar skilled tradesmen, stay-at-home parents and—as my Mom likes to point out— most are married with children.
Many of my native San Jose friends have a very positive outlook towards San Jose. Their views are somewhat different than what I hear in my council office, where, typically, I hear alot about what is wrong with our city or questions as to why things aren’t done differently.
San Jose Faces Two Big Decisions
San Jose’s movers and shakers are wrestling with two important questions. First, should the San Jose convention center expansion project move forward? And second, where should the new federal courthouse be built?
As reported on San Jose Inside last week, the city and state budget crisis has forced the city and its redevelopment agency to scale back the project from $300 million to $140 million. And, the state’s plan to pull $75 million from the San Jose RDA creates an additional hurdle. Councilmember Sam Liccardo has indicated that he is, “...not willing to do anything that puts the RDA’s future viability in peril.”
Implementing Proposition 215 in San Jose
I support an ordinance in San Jose that allows for the cultivation and sale of medical marijuana dispensaries/collectives.
Proposition 215, which was passed with voter approval in 1996, called for the legalization of Medicinal Marijuana with 56 percent of the voters in favor. Santa Clara County supported this proposition by 64 percent. Since then, the legislature has passed SB420 which dealt with the actual implementation of Medical Marijuana.
Council Welcomes Ballpark Report
The San Jose City Council continued its overwhelming support of bringing major league baseball to San Jose at Tuesday’s council meeting, voting unanimously to approve the findings of an economic impact report on the potential ballpark.
San Jose Greenprint in the Red
Since Sept. 7 was the Labor Day holiday, the City did not have a regular city council meeting. So, instead the Council had a “study session” on the Greenprint, which is a vision for our parks and community centers.
The city has grown in square footage both in parks and community centers. However San Jose still ranks lower then many cities in its ratio of parks to people, even when you include school property (which is where I used to play as a kid). By 2020 we will be 1,124 acres short of our goal/vision. In fact, we exacerbate this ratio every week by approving affordable housing that is exempt from park fees or land dedication.
Reed Says City Is ‘Ready to Play Ball’
A report commissioned by San Jose’s Office of Economic Development claims that relocating the Oakland A’s to San Jose would add $130 million to the local economy and create as many 2,100 jobs, almost 1,000 of them new jobs. The anticipated economic benefit to the city is expected to approach $3 billion over the next thirty years. Beneficiaries of the move would include local schools, which can expect to see as much as $842,000 per year from it, and Santa Clara County, which would get $948,000 because of a profit sharing agreement with the city in redevelopment areas.
