The San Jose City Council is feeling generous… maybe. Team San Jose is doing such a good job managing the convention center and related issues that it wants that bonus… although, they did miss one benchmark in order to make the bonus automatic. Our folks inside City Hall are hinting that the City Council might just be feeling generous anyway…
Apparently, someone is out there polling for the 2014 Mayor’s race… and
More apparently, the South Bay Labor Council doesn’t like Mayor Reed, his State of the City address last week, or really anything else about the Mayor. But they have a hard time proving businesses are moving elsewhere because of Chuck…
In other political news, if you are looking for proof that politicians shouldn’t set themselves up to have silly pictures taken, look no further than San Jose Inside and Chuck Reed posing with the Earthquakes mascot…
How’s this for a weird story: Sand Hill Property Company is giving a massive facelift to the Edgewood Plaza in Palo Alto. As part of that facelift and new development, they were supposed to revamp two ‘historic’ buildings. But they knocked one of the buildings down without getting the go ahead from the City. The Council in Palo Alto will talk about it today…
The San Jose-hating Giants take the field tonight… so expect every single one of your employees to have a meeting “outside the office” at about 4:15 (so they can get home for the 5 p.m. start time)…
County Supervisors will starting thinking about what to do with the only building in San Jose uglier than their own: the old City Hall. Hold on to your hats, the County’s record in dealing with big projects (like the ambulance contract) and small projects (bodyguards) is not great…
Team San Jose is losing its fearless leader (and so is the airport) next year… but the City Council in San Jose renewed the contract for Team San Jose for another 5 years. Time to bring back Dan Fenton?
In case you missed it, there was a debate last night… and one of the top Tweeters of the event was not Bill Maher (although he’s pretty great) it was none other than the Mercury News’ @barbmarshman. Pretty cool… Here’s a snapshot (click for larger image):
You probably didn’t know it, but today is apparently a big day for charter schools in the County. That’s because the (always exciting/entertaining) County Board of Education is set to vote on 20 Rocketship schools at once… If the Merc Editorial Board were sitting inside the fancy building down the street from the Merc’s (empty) World Headquarters, they’d vote yes…
Over the weekend, we learned that San Jose City Councilmember Pete Constant has a problem with some San Jose Police Officers using Facebook to bash him. He has filed a complaint against two officers who let their feelings be known on Facebook. Interesting times…
Firefighters went first in San Jose, then five more unions followed suit on Friday agreeing to big concessions. We dubbed it Concession Friday on Twitter. Who’s next? Police Officers?
Another possible 2014 Mayoral candidate, Pete Constant, was the spotlight of an Internal Affairs’ piece in the Merc on Sunday. He apparently doesn’t want to hire an Administrative Assistant, but the union that represents Administrative Assistants thinks he is required to. It is now in arbitration, which will probably cost everyone more than the $70,000 it would cost to actually hire an Administrative Assistant…
Any of you that follow The Daily Fetch@thedailyfetch on Twitter, may have noticed that we have a thing going with @baycitizen. First, they hate San Jose and the fact that San Jose might get the A’s. Aside from that, they got the story wrong on Twitter about the two casinos got busted last week, putting the casinos in Emeryville and San Jose rather than Emeryville and San Bruno. (Because we all know that San Jose’s casinos are upstanding citizens…) Then, they made a pretty serious grammatical error ending a sentence in a preposition… We’ll see if they respond to my @Tweet…
Last night, Mayor Chuck Reed gave his State of the City speech. To paraphrase, “Hello. Green Vision, Pensions, pensions, pensions, budget… budget, budget, budget, pensions. Redevelopment, good night.” Those in the room noted how much fun it was to watch some Councilmembers squirm when they heard the Mayor’s plan for pension reform… Full speech here, for those that couldn’t get enough last night… Did anyone else notice that the TelePrompter went down?
Protect San Jose gave the official response (sort of). They have a response to the Mayor’s speech online and they don’t pull many punches. Some choice quotes from the post titled: The Mayor’s Fuzzy Math (we’re not sure using George Bush’s phrase ‘fuzzy math’ is a great start, but whatever):
When Mayor Reed began suggesting massive layoffs at SJPD, headhunters from other parts of the state and other parts of the country began contacting us to let us know that they are hiring. In fact, recruiters from one state will be flying out next week to meet with our officers. San Jose’s loss will be that community’s gain.
Did you know that in the history of the City of San Jose not one police officer has been laid off? Even at the height of the Great Depression, city leaders were able to find solutions that kept cops on the streets.
Remember the good old days when Mayor Reed would respond to the SJPOA right on their blog?
San Jose Inside/Metro has a very interesting piece about how a PR flack can change the tide of some local coverage. Inside’s PR flack example: David Satterfield, the former Merc Managing Editor. The topic: Team San Jose. Remember a few days ago when Team San Jose got some good news in the Merc and even a positive Editorial… Inside says it was Satterfield.
Recently, there has been a serious effort, by the Silicon Valley Leadership Group and others, to Save Caltrain. Last week there was news that one of the cost-saving measures was to close half of the Peninsula stations on top of other cuts that have already been implemented… But then there is this: Despite historic financial woes, Caltrain CEO’s $400,000 paycheck is state’s highest… That will not sit well with anyone… While everyone can debate that salary, VTA might have a plan to actually Save Caltrain… May we suggest cutting the CEO’s salary? John Horgan at the County Times is also sharing an idea: BART-only north of Millbrae…
Tracy Seipel takes a look at what the San Jose and Oakland Redevelopment Agencies are doing to assembly parcels (and cash) to build a Major League Baseball stadium. Do you think the folks at Major League Baseball’s headquarters are sifting through Redevelopment Agency spreadsheets on one computer screen while they monitor reGovernor Brown’s press conferences on the other?
Team San Jose gets some rare props from the Mercury News Editorial Board for the (delayed) changes it has made, including last week’s disclosure about former CEO Dan Fenton’s compensation/settlement package.
This story came online yesterday morning and it isn’t good news for a local community college district. It seems San Jose/Evergreen Community College District is in real danger of losing its accreditation. According to the Merc story, the District “…has been warned to fix financial, planning, evaluation and governance issues…” Perhaps you’d like to know who the folks on the Governing Board are? We were interested too…
There will be a giant pillow fight in downtown San Jose on Sunday… (You read that correctly.) Metblogs has the details…
From SanJose.com... Remember way back when when Tesla gave San Jose the shaft? Well, they are coming back, sort of… they are opening a show room at Santana Row, which isn’t really the same thing at building a manufacturing facility in North San Jose, but we assume the City of San Jose will take the sales tax. What is 9 percent on $100,000?
HuffPo got sold for a huge sum of money. If there is a buyer out there for The Daily Fetch, we are all ears…
If you weren’t interested in buying a downtown condo in San Jose, perhaps you’d like a rental instead? That’s the hope of the owners (and the lenders and the Redevelopment Agency) of the Three Sixty Residences…
Speaking of San Jose’s (beleaguered) Redevelopment Agency: Could San Jose’s Mayor and Council lose their salaries when Redevelopment goes bye-bye? San Jose Inside takes a look…
We end on a funny Twitter note. Yesterday @spartandaily (the Tweets that come from the Daily Spartan) shared with us this important news update: Unprotected sex can lead to catching sexually transmitted diseases such as HIV and AIDS or unwanted pregnancies.
