Oliverio for Supervisor 2018

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San Jose’s Native Gen X’ers

January 4, 2010 By Pierluigi Oliverio

2009 was a challenging year. San Jose government had its decline in revenue in addition to suffering from an overall structural budget deficit. Many families in San Jose lost their jobs and still continue to struggle in finding another one. All of us have been impacted by the Great Recession of 2008-2009 in some way.

With the eye of the Great Recession’s hurricane ideally behind us, I look to 2010 as a year that government gets back to basics and provides the needs of the community, not the “wants.” For example, government should concentrate on how it will replace retiring police officers,(100 police retiring this year, which is double the normal rate) keep our libraries open and simply pass a budget that takes care of the basic things you would expect the city to provide as stated in the city charter. Basically, the things that you pay for as taxpayers.

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.

My friends income levels vary—some own the homes they live in while others rent. However, they all share similar dreams of San Jose’s future. Although they strive for a better city in many ways, they strongly believe that San Jose is a great city today. They are proud that we continue to have one of the safest big cities in the United States, and of our supportive of our police department. They like the small-town feel throughout the City even though we are a City of a million people, enjoy the great weather and, even with a recession, believe this region is still the best place to be by their standards.

When I spoke to my friends at my birthday and over the holidays in December, there was consensus that building the Arena and bringing in the Sharks were great decisions and because of that both female and male are positive on the chance of major league baseball in Downtown.  They enjoy going to our Downtown for the Children’s Discovery Museum, Tech Museum, Christmas in the Park and look forward to the reopening of Happy Hollow Park and Zoo.

Most importantly, is they said that they have a choice of where they can live which is why they chose San Jose. That is an important point to remember, since if a person really dislikes where they live then they can simply relocate as many people do all the time.

2010 will carry its challenges and there will be many tough decisions for the council and for individual families. However, I hope the worst is behind us. They say flat is the new up and with that we don’t expect big growth next year but maybe over time. The city on the other hand will take 2-3 years to recover as it takes awhile for revenues to return to municipalities.

I wish you and your family happiness and health in 2010.

Saturday, Jan 9 at 9am is the next volunteer day in our San Jose Municipal Rose Garden. 600 bare root roses will be given away to volunteers who arrive before 9am compliments of Star Roses. See you there.

Filed Under: Budget, City Council, Politics

Direct Competition Lowers Costs

December 28, 2009 By Pierluigi Oliverio

On Nov. 3 at the city council meeting, I removed an item from the consent calendar. The agenda item was asking for council approval to spend $286,700 for software. This particular software would help the housing department manage its loan program. Several years ago the Housing Department purchased software to manage this data, however, it never worked and we ended up going through litigation for eight years. (I blogged on this litigation in a June 29 post here.)

During the litigation process, I wanted to understand how we came to purchase something that didn’t work. I sat down with the staff from the Housing Department to become familiar with the current process and its shortcomings in managing the housing loan data in Excel spreadsheets. Other cities, such as Long Beach, Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco, all use Excel to manage this housing loan data.

I understood the efficiency that could be gained by using a different solution over Excel. My question however, was not about efficiency but rather if it was worth the City spending six figures-plus on something during a recession. Basically, is it worth it? We don’t really analyze Return On Investment (ROI) in government as in private sector when it comes to adopting new technology. Efficiency gains by technology usually means you can do more with less people, and thus creates hard dollar savings. But that typically does not happen from what I have seen so far in government.

Personally, I thought Google Apps would have been a better and much more affordable solution then Excel spreadsheets. As you may know, Google provides business applications that allow data to be created, stored and shared via the web for $50 per user per year. These applications can be used by more than one person at different locations at the same time. This technology allows collaboration from anywhere with data security and restriction of who is allowed to view/edit data, and includes automatic email updates when data is changed. I use Google Apps for documents that I create and share.

In November, I recognized the name of the vendor who was selected by the Housing Dept. for this $286,700 purchase. However, I did not see the vendors who directly compete with this company. I wanted to know if these companies had been notified of the Request for Proposals (RFP). That answer was not known on Nov. 3.

My preference was to reject all bids and rebid—but this time include direct competition and ask for a best and final offer. This matter was not time sensitive, since the Housing Dept. has been using Excel for a decade. The Council instead asked that the answer be provided in one week at the next council meeting. Six weeks later, the response came back—and two local direct competitors had never been notified about the RFP. (Six weeks in my view would have been plenty of time to get a bid from the the two local competitors).

Now there is nothing sneaky here. It is actually our fair and transparent process. You see, whenever we want to buy a car, paper products or software we use BIDSYNC out of Utah. BIDSYNC is a vendor community that bids on government projects/services that our city subscribes to annually. It is a quick way to hit a large universe of vendors. However, not every vendor is part of BIDSYNC.

So with that said, the software was selected and it may very well do everything promised.  But I have found not having direct competition causes inflated prices. With the current recession, software companies are discounting as much as 70 percent and the city should get those same discounts. I spoke with a CFO at a company with approximately 100 employees that uses the same software that was selected and found out that they pay half the price we were quoted on the software subscription. A private sector CFO can really work over vendors to get the best price—we do not have that option with government procurement as “shopping of bids” is not allowed.  If we were to do this then government might be accused of playing favorites.

The non-tech analogy I gave at the council meetings was: Let’s say the city wanted to buy an American vehicle for a code enforcement officer and the bid went out to the vendors and we got three replies: Ford, John Deere and Caterpillar. Well certainly they are all American vehicle manufacturers—however, this is not direct competition, as John Deere makes tractors and Caterpillar makes construction equipment. Therefore Ford would win the order. But at this point if we picked up the phone or emailed General Motors and Chrysler to bid, my guess is that the final price from Ford would be lower due to the direct competition.

At the Dec. 15 Council meeting, this item required a vote of the council to approve. So knowing that direct competition lowers the price and another company was paying half of what we were paying I could not support this item.

My larger worry is that if we decide to roll out this software to other departments we have set the price artificially high. I would rather negotiate up front to get the best price or have price tiers already negotiated based on expansion.

I now have a Facebook page for my tenure on the city council. Here is the link.

 

Filed Under: City Council

Punting the RDA Budget

December 21, 2009 By Pierluigi Oliverio

The Council punted the Redevelopment Agency (RDA) budget last week to February 2010. As has already been highlighted in the news, the state is taking $75 million away from San Jose’s RDA. We need to pay the State off in May and identify where the money is coming from in March (no negotiation or payment plans on this matter are allowed by the State). The legislature, recognizing that this payment would be difficult for all RDA agencies, allowed for borrowing from affordable housing money which is 100-percent funded from RDA. Twenty percent of all RDA money goes off the top to the Housing Department in San Jose. The payroll for the housing department alone is $9.7 million a year for 83 employees for an average salary of $117,000.

The Mayor’s Budget message was pragmatic in that it said let’s not spend any money ‘til we work out borrowing the money from the housing department to pay the State; let’s determine whether or not RDA is able to issue bonds to pay for a capital program—which would include matching the hotel owners’ share and expanding the convention center; and let’s continue negotiating with the County of Santa Clara (which by the way in the last decade has been paid $270 million by the RDA).

The Mayor had a very good public meeting with stakeholders from all sides prior to writing the budget message. Everyone who attended realized the choices are difficult and few options exist. Everyone at the meeting got the same information—that San Jose has already built 18,000 units of affordable housing by spending hundreds of millions of RDA dollars making San Jose the number-one provider of affordable housing in the state of California. Everyone left the meeting understanding that there is no pixie dust to magically fix things. A majority at the Mayor’s meeting felt that economic development should be the priority now.

However, when it came to voting on the budget, another option was voted upon at the last minute that asked for a $25 million reduction in how much would be borrowed from the Housing Dept., and instead look at borrowing from other sources. This option was well liked by the audience (which was made up by mostly paid affordable housing lobbyists and people who work for affordable housing entities in some capacity—the Housing Director is campaigning against the Mayor and is ensuring that she has her supporters at the meetings). This “option” would take money by borrowing monies from the following: Commercial Paper backed by the General Fund, Sewage Treatment Plant Connection Fee, Library Parcel Tax, Sewer Service and Use Charge, Integrated Waste Management, Ice Centre Revenue Fund and HNVF-Anti-Tobacco Funds. This “option”—taking from all of these other resources—was approved on a 7-3 vote with Mayor Reed, Pete Constant and myself voting no.

We have borrowed money from some of these funds before, but that was to balance our general fund so we could fund core services like public safety and not more affordable housing. If we borrow this money now to create more affordable housing, then we will have one less arrow in our quiver to balance the general fund budget in June.

My question to you is: Should we use money that is supposed to go towards core services like sewers and water treatment plant so that we can build more affordable housing that does not pay fees for parks or road paving?

How do you feel as a voter that may have supported the library parcel tax to let that money be borrowed for more affordable housing that does not pay property taxes (property taxes is the number one revenue source to pay for city services) versus what you intended that money to be spent on…libraries.

I remember months back Councilmember Constant and I were criticized because we wanted to use the Healthy Neighborhood Venture Fund (HNVF)/Anti Tobacco money to pay for school crossing guards, a public safety service the City has had in place since the 1940’s. It’s okay to use these funds for affordable housing but not for crossing guards? Hmm…sounds like maybe a vote of the people should be had on how these funds should be spent. With a $75 million deficit just for RDA and another $96-plus million deficit for the City’s General Fund, I am all for the residents sharing their votes via the ballot. If we can ask residents to raise their taxes then we can ask them for direction on spending their money.

I now have a Facebook page for my tenure on the city council. Here is the link.

Filed Under: Budget, City Council, Politics, RDA

Unions, Graffiti and Utility Boxes

December 14, 2009 By Pierluigi Oliverio

Last Tuesday at the council meeting, we spent approximately 90 minutes discussing the Teamsters Union at the Convention Center. Long story-short, this is a labor dispute between two different union locals that will be settled by the National Labor Relations Board. However, in the meantime, the Convention Center (which is the largest source of the City’s hotel tax receipts and drives airport traffic) is getting negative PR which is affecting prospective convention business in San Jose.

Whether it’s one union local or another, the fact is the Teamster jobs are taxpayer subsidized jobs since the City owns and operates the Convention Center where they work. When everyone chooses to fight as we are then we slit our own throats, since the taxpayer is on the hook for the annual subsidy—which will grow if we are unable to book convention business.

* * *

Last Wednesday, at the Neighborhood Services committee, there was an update on the anti-graffiti program. The City painted over 100,000-plus graffiti tags last fiscal year. The City is meeting its goal of removing gang graffiti in 24 hours, although the staff is resource- constrained.

Also related to graffiti was the annual year-in-review by the San Jose Downtown Association last Friday morning. At the meeting, they spoke about the success of the Groundwerx crew that is privately funded by a Property Business Improvement District. Groundwerx spends much of its efforts cleaning Downtown, with an emphasis on graffiti. I think it would be great if a judge (who presides over graffiti taggers) made those offenders do community service with Groundwerx to help clean Downtown for days/weeks/months, rather than the small penalties today.

One particular challenge with graffiti are the utility boxes that are all around our city. These boxes are privately owned by the likes of ATT, Comcast, PG&E., etc. The graffiti bozo’s (with the City lacking Singapore-style punishment) constantly mark up the boxes with their tags or gang tags. The committee discussed the possibility of creating an ordinance that would remove graffiti from those utility boxes asap. Ideally, we would not need an ordinance as the utility companies would clean it up themselves in a timely manner; unfortunately, that does not happen. So one way we could ensure that the companies would understand the importance of taking care of the property in San Jose is to adopt and execute a fine to the utility companies for any graffiti left on a box for more then 72 hours. Or they could contract with the City to pay us each time we clean up the tag.

* * *

The big vote this week in front of the Council is whether or not to give direction to city attorney to make binding arbitration for police and fire open to the public. The arbitrator who does not reside in San Jose makes binding decisions on police and fire contracts but is not accountable to the taxpayers. Yet the arbitrator has the power to force the city to spend unlimited amount of tax dollars. Not even the Mayor or a Councilmember is allowed to hear what is said. I bet you can already predict the votes as the last vote to make union negotiations public was 3-8, with the «no» votes prevailing.

Filed Under: Graffiti Abatement, Politics

Fall 2009 General Plan Hearing

December 7, 2009 By Pierluigi Oliverio

Prior to Mayor Reed, the City of San Jose would amend the General Plan (GP) approximately seven to twelve times a year; which equates to about once every month, give or take. During this time, about 1,200 acres of industrial land were converted to residential housing. As a result, the City lost 1,200 acres of land that could have been home to jobs. A sizable percentage of the 1,200 acres was in my district.

Since 2007, the City hears GP changes twice a year. With the adoption of the conversion policy (which provides a process for land zoning conversion) the council hears far fewer amendments regarding changing industrial zoning to residential.

Last Tuesday, the council had the Fall GP Hearing. This meeting continued past midnight and covered a litany of land use situations, some of which are listed below:

• Transit oriented development on the periphery of Downtown.
This item moved forward with unanimous support.

• Revitalization of two strip malls with the addition of housing in Evergreen and another on Hillsdale Ave.
Both these items moved forward with unanimous support.

• Infill development of 35 executive homes next to Silver Creek.
This item moved forward with unanimous support.

• Church locating in an industrial area.
This issue was approved with a 9-2 vote, with Vice Mayor Chirco and myself voting against it. (I voted against it because it does not conform to our GP and ends up creating a domino effect of converting the adjacent industrial parcels over time.)

Most of these items will be back before the Council one more time during the zoning process for the final details like architecture, lot sizes, height, parking, etc…

If you are interested in viewing past council meetings and/or other committee and commission meetings, you can do so at the City of San Jose’s website.

Scroll down and select the meeting to view. The agenda for that specific meeting will come up and you can jump to that particular agenda item to hear what was said.

Filed Under: General Plan, Politics, Uncategorized

Feedback From RDA Survey is Beneficial

November 30, 2009 By Pierluigi Oliverio

A couple of weeks ago I put together my own web based Redevelopment Budget survey. I shared financial information in bullet point form in the introduction and then gave information throughout the survey. In some cases I would state the dollar amount given to a particular program and then ask a question. More than 600 people completed the survey, which required that each question be answered. The survey could not be taken twice.

As with most issues that involve money, the feedback to my survey was mixed.  I had a person who refused to even participate because they didn’t like how I set up the survey. Others lauded my courage to share data and seek their input. They felt I was taking a risk to allow residents to share their concerns.

Web surveys are not necessarily scientific surveys, since web surveys allow anyone to participate. As we know, a true scientific survey controls and limits who is surveyed by gender, age, race, income level, voter registration and geographic location of the respondent.  Scientific surveys can cost about $40,000 for 1,000 people.

Viewpoints are subjective. Whereas one person may view a question as biased another may view it as objective. However, the most important part of a survey question is that the data be factual. In my survey, there were approximately 10 comments out of over 600 people who completed the survey who felt that particular survey questions were biased.  For example, one person told me that I was “leading” the survey because I said that San Jose RDA has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on 18,000 units of affordable housing. I shared that this is information is factual and not leading.

My survey shared, in synopsis form, how much money has been spent on various issues.  Many people did not realize that San Jose is the leader in affordable housing.  Some respondents shared that they are very pleased with the Strong Neighborhood Initiative (SNI).  While others, agreeing with affordable housing and SNI, felt that that we should spend money on economic development this next fiscal year. My survey allowed those who chose to participate an outlet to share concerns, recommendations and rank their priorities for RDA monies.

As I have said, there were a few participants who felt the survey was biased; however, when I did a cross tabulation all but one of them chose Affordable Housing or SNI as more important then Economic Development. Cross tabulation also showed most of these specific participants felt that we should not borrow money from the Housing Department to spend on Economic Development this year. In addition, most of these participants shared that it was okay to spend money on a small fraction of neighborhoods in San Jose even though there are neighborhood infrastructure needs citywide.

After reading comments and speaking with survey respondents, I would add more choices to future surveys. For example, when it comes to ranking priorities I would add two more options; “Save Money”—since some people would rather not spend—and “None of the Above.”

The survey required that beach question to be answered, identical to how a councilmember “must” vote. Many times the Council votes on an ordinance or budget that individual councilmembers may not agree with 100 percent, so sometimes council votes for a package of things that are a bit uncomfortable. It’s the same feeling that some of the respondents felt when asked to make decisions regarding the survey.

Another item I would add in the future is a web link if available for additional information. For example, respondents did not necessarily know what specific improvements were proposed at St. James Park, Japantown, Civic Auditorium, etc. The RDA budget is available online, however specific information on the proposed improvements is not easily found.

Thank you to those of you who participated in the survey.  I know it was not easy and may have caused you to feel conflicted.  I appreciate your time to engage and share your viewpoints with me.

Some of the results:

• 69.5% out of 787 respondents felt that borrowing from the Housing Dept. this year for Economic Development was okay.

• 70.8% out of 763 respondents disagreed with spending RDA money for a small fraction of neighborhoods in San Jose versus overall.

• 79.4% out of 709 respondents felt that Economic Development should be number one priority of RDA money.

• 59.7% out of 709 respondents approved of the Convention Center expansion.

• 52.8% out of 709 respondents did not approve of RDA land banking for a Downtown Baseball stadium.

• Here is a link to all the results, including 268 comments.

Finally here is a table from Mayor Reed’s RDA Budget message that shows how economic development is better for city tax revenues and ongoing jobs then affordable housing.

Filed Under: Budget, Politics, RDA

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Vicious Attack of Pierluigi Oliverio Unwarranted

Ones’ good name and reputation is a most prized possession. It is unconscionable for any person or entity to maliciously endeavor to destroy another persons reputation The lack of integrity the public special interest groups showed recently when they maliciously sought to destroy the reputation of Pierluigi Oliverio, candidate for Santa Clara County Supervisor, is […]

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Merc News condemns Unions

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Councilmember Davis Supports Pierluigi

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Mayor Reed Supports Pierluigi

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