Mayor Chuck Reed sent a letter to the California High Speed Rail Authority (CHSRA) today, asking that the group reconsider a decision regarding the route of the Sacramento/San Francisco/Los Angeles line, which may pass through San Jose’s Diridon station.
*UPDATED 3:40pm.

Chuck Reed is expected to announce today that he plans to run for a second term as mayor of San Jose. In a prepared statement Reed will announce that he plans to continue focusing on developing the city’s economy and promoting it as a center for clean tech development. He also intends to bring greater transparency to City Hall and overcome the achievement gap in the city’s schools.

The expansion of the McEnery Convention Center has long been the crown jewel of the San Jose Redevelopment Agency’s list of projects. Then came the budget crisis—city and state—which clobbered potential funding for the project, and caused the proposal to be scaled down by more than half, from $300 million to $140 million. Now Mayor Chuck Reed is asking the most fundamental question of all: Can we really afford to go ahead with the expansion?

Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge James Emerson ruled yesterday that limits on campaign contributions by independent political committees violate those committees’ freedom of speech. According to City Attorney Rick Doyle, the ruling effectively invalidates the city’s existing soft-money contribution limits, capping individual contributions to campaigns at $250. In August, the City Council voted to maintain the cap.

Mayor Chuck Reed is in Washington to tell the Administration what he thinks of the stimulus package. The feds probably wish he hadn’t come at all. When asked at a meeting at the Brookings Institute how $79 million in federal stimulus funding has helped San Jose deal with the recession, Reed answered, “It’s been a very minimal impact.”

“The money you give us to put people to work is not creating long-term jobs,” Reed complained

In an interview broadcast on the Fox Business Channel’s “Mayor Monday” segment earlier this week, San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed called California “ungovernable,” and called for a constitutional convention to set matters right. “We fight and fight and fight and fight, and never get anything accomplished,” he said, adding that the state hasn’t really had a balanced budget for over a decade.

Critics of the SJPD claim that the recent arrest of Vietnamese student Phuong Ho, which happened to be captured on camera by his roommate, is indicative of a larger problem concerning the amount of force being used by the police. Even Mayor Chuck Reed has expressed “significant concerns about how and when force is used” by the police.

Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the greenest of them all? San Francisco claims it is, but so do Seattle, Portland, and even Detroit, home of the Big Three automakers. Since he came into office, Mayor Chuck Reed has been pitching San Jose is as the nation’s green capital, and he will prove it to anyone who doubts him.