Oliverio for Supervisor 2018

Independent - Transparent - Fiscally Responsible

Last Week Stunk

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Last week, I toured the City of San Jose’s sanitary sewer system along with Public Works staff. For those of you who may not be aware, sewers in San Jose stretch out for 2,200 miles and range anywhere from 100 years old to brand new. The “sewer freeway” is at Zanker Road, where four large- diameter lines converge towards Alviso. They run side by side in different sizes and during the dry season we turn two of them off since the flow is slower without rainfall. This gives a rest to the other lines so they can be inspected and also helps move solid materials (grit) through the pipes.

Solid debris is made of mostly sand and organic matter (coffee grounds, egg shells, bones), toiletries, to massive clogs of hair the size of a 4th grader. One method to clear the line is to use the “Pig Launcher.” This is where a neoprene bullet-shaped cleaning plug is shot down the pipe with a blast of water from a pumping station and then retrieved at the next pumping station.

Replacing sewers pipes is important and is ongoing year-round. Since many of the pipes are small, we use technology to travel down the pipe. For example, we have a robot that cruises down the sewer pipe with a bright light and camera that rotates to view the entire circumference of the pipe. The rotating of the robot allows staff to see a break, root intrusion or large objects.

Digging up and replacing the pipe is a big project that impacts anyone connected to that line. One method that used is a process that blows a tube, (like a long tube sock) into a section of pipe that requires fixing. Hot liquid is then pumped through the liner causing the material, a form of epoxy, to expand. With the liquid removed, the material hardens. Next a robot is maneuvered through the new pipe cutting a tap out at each residence allowing the flow from each household to resume. The pipe diameter becomes a bit smaller—however the pipe is completely smooth with all breaks and cracks repaired.

All cities face the challenge of maintaining sewer infrastructure over time.  The items we flush begin to decompose within the sewer mains and can create gases that over time can corrode concrete pipes. Also, trees through root intrusion break the pipes, which is problematic since San Jose loves its tree canopy. So when you see a beautiful tree-lined street it inevitably will create more problems with the sewer lines. It’s a dilemma for tree owners as those roots are thirsty and will break pipes looking for water—not to mention the havoc on sidewalks. Personally I am not prepared to take out my trees, however I will have to budget for future expenses like plumbing and sidewalks because of them.

The largest culprit in blocking of the sewer pipes is “FOG”—fats-oils-grease. Pouring these into your kitchen sink is problematic as it travels from your home to the six inch pipe (typical residential sewer main) on your street where it eventually merges with a larger pipe as it moves north towards Alviso. Homeowners are responsible for the “lateral” pipe from their home to sewer connection. If your pipe clogs up because of “FOG” then the homeowner would have to pay out of pocket to get it fixed.

Personally, I was hoping to get dirty and get down in the sewer and walk around like the people you see on the show “Dirty Jobs” on the Discovery Channel. However, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) rules required that a breathing apparatus be used while the person going down is hooked to a harness. Without the gas mask a person would pass out due to the methane and other gases. Needless to say, the sewer can be stinky, so iron salt is added into a large sewer main near Blossom Hill Road so there is less odor. In addition, a pilot program has been launched allowing hydrogen peroxide to be injected into the sewer mains over by Bay 101 to minimize the smell.

The smell is why we have the buffer lands between the sewage treatment plant and people who live nearby. Over time, we may see development of these buffer lands. For example, this area was where Tesla Motors was proposed to locate in San Jose, however, my mantra is always buyer beware. We also have sheep on the buffer lands so that we don’t have to mow it. As I looked at the buffer lands, it reminded me of something out of an African savanna as many sheep were huddled for shade. I did not observe rats or mice in the sewer as I pictured from movies, but there were lots of cockroaches visible when lifting up a manhole cover.

We observed the sewer flowing through the larger pipes called “interceptors,” moving at about 8-10 feet per minute which seemed pretty fast. I expected the water to be thicker, however it was actually viscous.  San Jose is lucky in the we are fairly flat but we do have a slight decline from South San Jose towards Alviso so fewer pumping stations are needed than in other cities.

Managing sewers for a city our size is a very technical job and one that requires skilled professionals that I would include in the realm of public safety. Finally, visiting the sewers reminds me about the importance of infill development and building within versus building outside of the urban service area.

Just Short of Singapore

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At the Rules Committee last week, there was a proposal to amend the Graffiti Abatement Ordinance for juvenile offenders.

When someone gets arrested for doing graffiti in San Jose or other cities in Santa Clara county they are punished via the County court system. However cities do have a municipal code where offenders may pay a fine. State law does an adequate job of prosecuting adult graffiti offenders, however, some would say not such a good job of dealing with juveniles, since county probation does not want to spend the resources to supervise their community service work.

The proposal at Rules is asking that minors who are convicted of doing graffiti perform 24 hours of community service work which might include removing their own graffiti and other activities. The memo also states that the minor could pay a $500 fine in lieu of the community service, and if the juvenile could not pay the parents would be liable. The city of San Jose currently spends $2 million a year removing graffiti.

This might sound like a step in the right direction, but I’m not sure it’s enough.  A couple of downtown residents spoke at the Rules committee and said they want more punitive measures against these vandals of private and public property. I agree with the speakers. We should raise the community service hours and the fine to the highest amount allowed by state law. We may choose collectively to not be as punitive toward graffiti vandals as Singapore—but a higher penalty would help discourage the vandalism that is rampant throughout our city.

As far an inexpensive way of doing community service, we might assign neighborhoods where the juvenile would pick up trash continuously. Or assign them to areas where they have to paint out graffiti. However, this could be problematic if they are removing a gang tag and the gang members might retaliate against them. It is unlikely gang members would retaliate against city employees doing their job painting out graffiti. Therefore maybe the offenders should accompany our city employees and be put to work if possible under Workers Compensation rules.

Another option would be to to have the juvenile report to a park and be instructed by a city gardener to pull out all the weeds out of a large park. Then the gardener would check at the end of the day and if the work was not done the offender would not get signed off. We need to find an inexpensive way of managing juvenile offender community service while managing our risk of lawsuits if they got hurt. So lets minimize our risk and not assign them to freeways and expressways but keep them in the neighborhood. I would imagine the hours of punishment would need to be more like 250 hours, or again whatever is the maximum allowed by state law.

This topic will be addressed in the Mayors Gang Task Force and will come back to Rules and eventually to Council in a few months. There are many legal and jurisdictional questions that must be answered by the city attorney, county court system and state law so thus the delay.

What do you think is the appropriate level of punishment? Or do you think they are artists and should be allowed to express themselves? What type of a punitive community service system would you suggest/design that would be inexpensive to administer and would be an easy option for a judge to assign the offender to this system?

Plastic or Cloth?

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It is well known that the city of San Jose is on its way to banning single-use plastic bags starting in Jan 2011. An ordinance will come back to Council in 2010 for final adoption which will contain different options. The most problematic option I could see is a fee put on single-use bags.

The 25-cent fee would be charged for each bag and would not go towards libraries or police but rather to hire new people to administer the program and regulate retail stores. The store owner would have to collect the fee, record it, give it to the city and then possibly have to undergo audits. This is a painful process that a business does not want to take on. For the resident who pays the fee there is little value in paying for salaries of people to manage this program. It seems to me that most residents would rather have fees or taxes go towards neighborhood services that would enhance their daily lives.

If plastic bags are so bad, then let’s ban plastic bags altogether rather than create a plastic bag fee bureaucracy.
However, I believe the plastic bag debate is the beginning of discussions regarding the environment. Americans use more resources per person than all other countries. American consumers’ choices have an impact on the environment. Banning products that are not environmentally friendly will also have an effect on those who are employed in those industries. But are plastic bags the number one problem for San Jose? No. The City of San Jose needs to avoid bankruptcy and switch to a two-tier pension system for new city employees.

However, staying on topic, the plastic bag issue does speak to the impacts of consumption. Certainly plastic water bottles are menace to society with the plastic bottle island in the Pacific Ocean. (Sidenote: Did you know there is less then one person in the US government regulating bottled water for health and safety?) How about banning Styrofoam? Or all that packaging to protect our consumer electronics that could certainly be done in a more environmentally friendly away.  Or maybe banning beef, as it takes 500 quarts of water to produce one pound of beef while the same amount in grain takes 2-20 quarts. Or banning incandescent light bulbs since new CFL bulbs use 75 percent less energy, produce 75 percent less heat and last 10 times as long.

If we really want to divert waste from our landfills to implement the San Jose Green Vision then perhaps we look at disposable diapers. Disposable diapers take up the most non organic space in land fills. Back before the days of convenience and mass consumption people used cloth diapers that were washable. Having changed a diaper in my life, I can definitely see the value of getting rid of that smelly diaper but it has its impact.

Eighty percent of the diaper changes in this nation are done with disposables. That comes to 18 billion diapers a year which is a $3 billion industry in the USA. Each diaper has an outer layer of waterproof polypropylene and an inner layer of fluff made from wood pulp plus super-slurper sodium polyacrylate that can hold a hundred times its weight in water.

Those 18 billion diapers add up to 82,000 tons of plastic a year and 1.3 million tons of wood pulp—250,000 trees. After a bowel movement these diapers are trucked away to landfills, where they sit as neatly wrapped packages of excrement, it is estimated to take 250-500 years to decompose, long after your children, grandchildren and great, great, grandchildren will be gone.

The instructions on a disposable diaper package advise that all fecal matter should be deposited in the toilet before discarding, yet less than one half of one percent of all waste from single-use diapers goes into the sewage system. Cloth diapers are reused 50 to 200 times before being turned into rags. Disposable diapers generate sixty times more solid waste and use twenty times more raw materials, like crude oil and wood pulp then cloth diapers. In 1991, an attempt towards recycling disposable diapers was made in the city of Seattle, involving 800 families, 30 day care centers, a hospital and a Seattle-based recycle for a period of one year. The conclusion was that recycling disposable diapers was not economically feasible on any scale.

I believe consumers and different levels of government will be dealing with these choices in perpetuity and there will be many debates and long council meetings across the country.

Thank you to the more than 100 people that turned out to City Hall last Monday to watch the film about water scarcity called FLOW.
The next event is discussion with the San Jose Redevelopment Agency at the Willow Glen Library on Saturday Oct 3 at 10:30am.

Land Banking Without Public Money

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Last week, at the Council meeting, there was a contentious land use item. A housing developer is asking the council to approve a rezoning of land to allow a 117-unit affordable Shared Room Occupancy (SRO).

Currently, there are business owners, adjacent property owners, and residents who do not support this project. I have been a councilmember for more than two years and I have never seen each of these groups on the same page. Ninety-five percent of the adjacent property owners are against the rezoning. They took the time to file and get their signatures notarized for a zoning protest application and therefore it requires eight council votes to approve the project instead of six.

Ninety-five percent is unheard of—thus showing a high level of opposition. One of the adjacent industrial property owners said, “where will people work in San Jose if the Council continues to change land for jobs to land for housing?”  Industrial uses are becoming harder to locate in this City since residents do not want noise or truck traffic.

All of the speakers spoke against the rezoning at the council meeting. I had already heard these comments, because I attended the community meeting in my district for this project and watched the entire planning commission discussion. Furthermore, they have e-mailed the council and mayor regarding their concerns. For many of the residents, this was their first experience with the City of San Jose since their neighborhood is being annexed.

I am a member of the General Plan 2040 Task force (GP2040). This makes me think of the best long-term uses of land citywide. In the past the council has made decisions based on the short-term rather then the long-term view. GP2040 is about learning from historical mistakes, being strategic with land use and planning our future.

The council spent over $100 million being strategic by «land banking» to provide development sites which have led to economic development. However, we also have the power to land bank without spending a dime … by simply voting no on projects that do not have the best long term interest for the City.

I believe that saying “just say no” to conversion of commercial/industrial land equals more land for jobs and a tax base to pay for neighborhood services.

The location is a gateway parcel on San Carlos between Sunol and McEvoy linking Downtown to Santana Row. The current proposal divides two other parcels (Sam’s Downtown Feed & Pizza Jacks) which does not allow for a development that is more focused on economic development. This odd shaped parcel does not allow for proper parking to be built out underneath since it divides two other properties. Otherwise the proposed parking is problematic for the neighborhood since it only provides 65 parking spaces for maximum occupancy of 234 people.

Shasta-Hanchett neighborhood board members have said, “If we are going to get a baseball stadium, wouldn’t this land would become more valuable?” I agree with them. This parcel should have an economic development aspect that could also have housing (affordable or market rate) on the top of significant retail by developing the entire parcel and not a divided one.

The current affordable housing proposal does not pay park fees or construction tax fees in a neighborhood that is identified as park deficient. We spoke about this deficiency Sept. 8 at the council study session for the Greenprint, and this rezoning would exacerbate the problem. San Jose has lost out on as much $60-90 million in park fees alone.

There is some concern about the concentration of affordable housing in this area. There is an affordable housing project right down street at the old Fiesta Lanes Bowl (another commercial-to-residential land conversion). 1,000 feet away we have eight stories of affordable housing on Bird and San Carlos and 300 feet from that another affordable project called Esperanza. A 100-percent affordable project on Lenzen, affordable senior housing next to MidTown Safeway. 400 feet the other direction 777 Park Ave. will be another 100 percent affordable project of 200 units.  The Council just approved 42 affordable units on San Carlos and Meridian this Spring.

In December of this year, the Council will get another proposal on a mixed use project of 160 affordable units right across the street however that parcel is already zoned residential. Unlike the 1,500 additional housing units where housing was not planned, like DelMonte Cannery (600 units), Lou’s Village (100 units) and Sobrato office park (800 units).

Based on annexation zoning rules we can look at this parcel in two years when we know if there will be a future ballpark or not. Construction on this development was not going to occur for 2-3 years anyway so now is not the time to rezone. Due to the 2-3 year out construction schedule, there is no viable argument that this will spur construction jobs.

The proposed SRO would be in the vicinity of a proposed light rail station that other developers have given money towards; however, the VTA has not given a firm commitment to fund the station. (By the way, a light rail station does not need to be art, just give me an ADA compliant concrete slab and then in the future if we have the money we can do something fancy.)

I made a motion to deny the rezoning and was seconded by the mayor. The developer asked for another week to try and work with the adjacent property owners to make the project better. The council gave the developer a week to make it work. It’s not about the project; its about the loss of employment land and the loss of infrastructure fees for the City.

Saying no to bad proposals is cheaper then land banking with public funds.

San Jose Greenprint in the Red

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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. (It is not a legal binding document.)

Study sessions are sort of like the “News Hour” program on PBS. We spend extra time on one topic where we get a presentation from city staff, and then we ask questions and make statements. Public comment is encouraged; the usual rule of two minutes; however, some community groups write letters in advance to be part of the public record.

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.

I brought this issue up a year ago at the Rules Committee. However I have been waiting for over a year now for the Housing Department to come back with some options for the Council. By my back-of-the-envelope calculations, San Jose has lost out on approximately $60-90 million in park fees from housing developers. Actually, this is another question I asked city staff: What is the amount of money the City of San Jose has lost on exempting fees/taxes for affordable housing? But I never heard back—probably since it is a big number.

With the passage of Measure P in the year 2000 with 78 percent voting yes, the city was able to build new community centers, remodel existing community centers and build out park amenities. For example Happy Hollow will open up next year brand new because of Measure P.

Measure P is financed by general obligation bonds. Without Measure P these improvements would be typically funded through the construction and conveyance tax, or if the park/community center was located in a redevelopment area, then possibly diverting RDA money meant for economic development. But without Measure P it is unlikely that much of what has been accomplished would have occurred.

The primary funding of new parks comes through building new housing, since market-rate housing (not affordable) pays park fees or donates land for a new park. So if you do not want any housing then you do not get new parks.

The question is: Would you be willing to vote yes on another Measure P to buy land and possibly construct new trails and parks?

A new Measure P may for example fund the entire completion of our proposed trail system and two new medium-sized parks. It would also provide money to be held in reserve to buy one or two school sites if and when a school district decides to close a school as has been done in the past. Actually we have two great facilities in the Willows Community Center and Kirk Community Center that used to be elementary schools.

Cities get the “first right of refusal” to buy other public-agency owned land. However, if one of these schools was for sale today, San Jose could not buy it because we don’t have the money, and it would likely become more housing.

One could counter and say that the way the city delivers park maintenance is too expensive and therefore we cannot provide the ongoing maintenance for existing facilities so lets not add new park acreage. Should a new Measure P be changed to a parcel tax so it provides money for ongoing maintenance that keeps up with the rate of wage-medical-pension inflation? Change the maintenance model? Or would you rather pay more in taxes for police or street paving than parks?

Here is a link to the Greenprint.

There is a public meeting to discuss this topic Wednesday, Sept. 16 at 6:30pm at City Hall in room W-120.

Water Today. Water Tomorrow?

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San Jose’s population is officially 1,006,892!

1,006,892—confirmed by the State Department of Finance on April 30th of this year. I thought it would be interesting to share how San Jose has grown since 1950. Take a look:

1950   95,000 residents
1955   112,000 residents
1960   204,000 residents
1965   328,000 residents
1970   459,000 residents
1980   629,000 residents
1985   782,000 residents
1990   894,000 residents
2000   950,000 residents

The General Plan 2040 Task Force is discussing land use and how that plays a part with San Jose’s growth through 2040. There are members of the task force and interest groups that would like to see San Jose grow to a population of 1,500,000 by 2040. I do not share this opinion and feel 1,200,000 is a more sensible number. I blogged about this in the past, advocating for “stage gates” and/or triggers so that we get more jobs and not just more housing.

The General Plan Task Force Meetings are public. We generally meet the last Monday evening of the month through 2011. I encourage you to attend.
This link to the Planning Department’s General Plan update provides more information.

On Sept. 28, the General Plan Task force will be taking up the topic of water supply. In past blogs I have written about the importance of recycled water to our city.
This discussion on future water supply coincides with a documentary film that I am showing at the City Hall Council Chambers in partnership with the Sierra Club and the Santa Clara Valley Water District. The film is called FLOW, and I am showing it on Monday, Sept. 21 at 6:45pm. FLOW was also an Official Selection for the Sundance Film Festival, and Wired Magazine called it “the scariest film in the festival.”

Please RSVP with me if you would like to attend since seating is limited. Cost is free. Pierluigi.Oliverio@SanJoseCA.gov.

This is a link to FLOW’s two minute video trailer.