This week I am writing about the importance of maintaining a healthy lifestyle. Most of the time, sadly, we hear these words of good advice but don’t make the conscious effort to apply healthy choices to our usual routines. Perhaps some of you who are reading this may think that writing about the benefits of a healthy lifestyle, one which includes “eating right” and “exercising,” may not have anything to do with city government. I politely disagree.

Rising healthcare costs are a detriment to every employer—public or private. Higher healthcare costs equate to less city services; or, in private sector, it may mean not hiring a new employee.

I recently met with Eric Larsen, President of AFSCME Local 101, regarding wellness programs. Eric shared with me that 15 percent of the employees of the City of San Jose are responsible for 80 percent of the medical costs that the city endures. This percentage shines light on a serious issue.

The issue of wellness and preventative care is not new; however, its implementation is rather slow.  Popping a few pills takes much less time than walking the Guadalupe River Park.  Eating healthy and exercising regularly is called preventative care.

For example, a member of my staff recently suffered a swollen knee which made it difficult for her to walk.  The doctor explained that she had a weak knee and that for her knee to improve she would need to exercise or have surgery.  Her treatment consisted of different exercises specifically for her knees.  Even though it took time, her knee is much better and she is now exercising and avoided costly surgery.

People who maintain a healthy lifestyle pose less of a health risk and thus less of an economic risk to health care providers.  Avoiding extra weight, lowering blood pressure, keeping cholesterol in check, among other things, are positive ways that we can demonstrate that we take our health seriously.  Sadly, many adults do not see a doctor on a regular basis but only when they are already sick or have a problem that needs immediate and more costly attention.

In an effort to bring awareness to the importance of exercise, I am continuing the City Hall Stair Challenge on November 7th at City Hall.  This event was started by Supervisor Ken Yeager.  Ken was a smoker at one point in his life.  He decided to stop smoking and is now an accomplished marathon runner.  Although many people will be participating in the eightee-story Stair Challenge, it is also a symbolic gesture and reminder that any type of physical activity is important.

Recently, the City of San Jose was voted the “8th Best Walking City in the United States.” This great news leads me into an idea that I want to share.  Why not take advantage of San Jose’s “Best Walking” title and incorporate walking tours from City Hall.

I want to challenge you to think about putting together walking routes that start and end at City Hall. They should be different in length and take you to different areas within the downtown.  There are many different options that one could take going in all directions from City Hall that include different neighborhoods, park, landmarks, and retail stores, etc., that are missed by driving in a car.  Let’s get out of the car and start experiencing our surroundings by walking.

The city has over 2,000 employees that work at 200 East Santa Clara Street.  Can you imagine if just half or a quarter walked 3 times a week?

I propose that the City of San Jose take a proactive approach to promoting healthy lifestyles and that we get the insurance carriers involved so that we can attempt to get quality healthcare that costs less.

Something else I learned from Mr. Larsen was that the City of San Jose has been given a $200,000 grant for wellness.  The city has not yet decided how the money should be spent.

I will take this opportunity to share my thoughts about how the money could be spent. For example, I would like to promote web-based tracking that all city employees (including myself) could log into when they walk and/or exercise.  Sharing personal exercising data would not be mandatory; however, the system could be accessed by the healthcare providers and if employees wanted to share their information with others, they could.  The City of San Jose could use this information to attempt to receive lower healthcare rates.  This idea resembles car insurance.  When one has a good driving record, their costs are lower.  Of course, it would be cumulative. However, if the City of San Jose negotiated right, I think it would be pretty hard for the healthcare industry to ignore the nation’s tenth largest city’s proactive approach for promoting healthy lifestyles.

The walking routes (that I mentioned above) could be located on the cities intranet so that city employees could choose to walk different routes during lunch or on their free time. The intranet setup would allow for employees to track their progress.  This set-up could cost well under the $200,000 grant.  Imagine if there were 15 plus walking routes that employees could choose from. The walking routes could be shared with others and possibly used as promotional material for City Hall and the Downtown Association.

And, if there is not the support to spend a portion of the $200,000 for database purposes, there are many FREE websites that allow you to track your fitness goals. Even if we did not create an intranet to store the employees’ fitness information, the city could ask employees if they would like to share their results from the FREE fitness websites so that the city could share this information with the health insurance carriers when it’s time to negotiate, thus showing that San Jose is serious about proactive preventative wellness care.

Do you have a favorite walking route you want to share?  Even though it’s October, the weather still lends itself to walking downtown.

This past Tuesday, the City of San Jose discussed its midyear point, which is where we consider how we should spend or not spend any “extra” money that was not part of the regular budget proposal.  This year approximately $13 million is up for discussion.

Cities have some accuracy in forecasting budgets, but there is always an unpredictable deficit or overage. The final budget dollars are predicated (as best as they can be) on economic actions outside of City Hall. For example, San Jose’s coffers are fed when consumers buy “stuff” at Santana Row, Eastridge, Valley Fair, Oakridge, etc., by creating sales tax.  In addition, developers building a housing development will generate construction and conveyance tax. However, a slowdown in the housing market will affect real estate transactions and a slowdown in our spending habits will limit the amount of tax the city receives.

This midyear money ($13 million) could be spent on anything, including police, parks, etc. Having extra money at a midyear point is positive, since there is always the risk that it could be the other way around.  The city’s economic uncertainty reserve fund has shrunk from $15 million to $4 million over the last few years.

The reason we have $13 million extra is due to the spending cuts which closed the gap on the $16 million deficit for 2007-2008. Also, the city has kept most of its open positions frozen by not hiring anyone.

Unfortunately, San Jose is forecasted to have an even larger $25 million deficit for its next fiscal year (2008-2009), so the need to watch our spending is still a major concern.  In June 2007, we passed a balanced budget and also made a policy to use any extra funds we had midyear in a limited manner to correct errors and reflect updated cost information, and then split the funds 50-50 between street maintenance and future deficit reserve.

Many neighborhood roads are in disrepair and saving money is a wise thing to do; therefore, I support the 50-50 split between roads and reserve funds. Street maintenance and saving money may not deliver a new capital project, but we have to make choices that serve the long-term goals that are best for the whole city, not just individual districts.

I believe our personal upbringing can influence the way we decide to spend or save money. My parents (who grew up during the depression, own their home outright and have paid over $100, 000 for personal medical bills, all on teachers’ salaries) taught me to save money, live below my means and to try to make more money overall. As an adult, I saved to buy a home, drive used cars and have kept weekend employment, even though I was fully employed during the regular work week.

I think the city should do the same by putting money aside in reserves, being prudent in money spent (which includes community-based budget reviews) and allowing land use policies for new retail opportunities in San Jose to capture more sales tax.

Related to this, the city council last week also passed the San Jose Retail Strategy to allow for more areas to construct retail shopping. San Jose as a city has sales tax leakage of 24 percent, based on a Bay Area Economics (BAE) study in 2004. If San Jose were able to cut that leakage in half, where San Jose residents purchased products in San Jose versus neighboring cities, we would add approximately $12 million to city coffers or roughly half of next year’s budget deficit.

Also, based upon the methodology developed by BAE, if our city grows in population as per the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) 2005 Report, and assuming our sales grow at the rate they have over that last five years, our leakage would increase to 41 percent by 2015.

As San Jose continues to grow, we must be fiscally prudent and prepared. Saving money and balancing budgets should be commonplace. We all know that there is “that one project” that just needs “a couple million.” However, if we don’t commit to saving and spending money on prudent citywide necessities (like public safety officers), then our city will never get out of the rut it’s in.

A few months ago I wrote about the chronic problem of speeding in San Jose. My concern about this problem peaked when two parents were killed recently by a speeding driver while walking on Graystone Lane in Almaden Valley. At that time, I proposed that the City of San Jose review its traffic calming policy in an effort to update it so that it reflects the needs of residents today.  For example, the current policy refers to using NASCOP (a photo radar device) that would take pictures of drivers in their cars as they sped by. Recently, NASCOP was ruled illegal by state courts, leaving a hole in our current policy.

Although I am concerned about speeding that occurs on expressways and freeways, my main concern is speeding on our neighborhood streets. Eighty percent of our streets in San Jose have a speed limit of 25 mile per hour. These 25 mph streets are where people live, kids play, and seniors walk. Speeding is a serious issue that does not discriminate against any neighborhood. Streets in Almaden, Willow Glen, Berryessa, Alum Rock, Northside and others echo the same sentiments: Stop speeding cars on our neighborhood streets.

Speeders affect our quality of life in San Jose and limit our outdoor activities—for example, not being able to allow our children to play in the front yard. In addition, another limitation speeding causes is that many people will not walk in their neighborhood for fear of crossing the street—and I am not referring to Almaden or Capitol Expressways, but 25 mph neighborhood streets which drivers continue to speed on, even where there are crosswalks.

In an effort to address the neighborhood speeding problem, the San Jose City Council unanimously supported Mayor Reed’s memo to update our traffic calming policy (on September 18) which would allow the City of San Jose to have a series of traffic calming meetings throughout the city—one meeting in each district.  I am proud that the mayor recommended that I chair the Neighborhood Traffic Calming Hearings because this issue is important to me.

The meetings will begin on October 18 and run through November 29 (see link below). Jim Helmer, Director of Transportation (DOT); Laura Wells, DOT Division Manager; and Captain Diane Urban and Lieutenant Jeff Smith from the San Jose Police Department are members of the traffic calming meetings. Our group is required to attend the meetings and then from the input received, write a report that will be presented to the city council in December.

The purpose of the meetings is to gather input from all residents in San Jose on what they would like to see us do. Residents can share any ideas, suggestion and concerns. From what has been shared with me thus far it seems that many residents would like to see more enforcement, the appeals process for traffic calming expanded and funding allocated to traffic calming efforts.

In 2001 our city had $5 million budgeted for traffic calming; this last year we had zero.  Our budget should echo the priorities of our residents and I believe after the traffic calming meetings are completed, money to slow cars down on the neighborhood streets will be validated as a priority.

The City of San Jose has not stopped collecting taxes; therefore, we need to prioritize the funds we do have on items and issues that are important to residents. Erik Larsen, President of AFSCME, MEF Local 101, shared with me at a meeting recently that he is looking forward to the traffic calming meetings because they represent a democratic process which encompasses the needs of San Jose residents directly. I agree.

The Neighborhood Traffic Calming Meeting Schedule.

At the evening meeting last Tuesday night (Sept. 25), the San Jose City Council discussed prevailing wage and volunteers and how this relates to city jobs for parks.

I am sure most of you have volunteered your time at some point, whether in your children’s school, as a coach or to pick up trash, etc. Most of you did so because it made you feel good to do something that benefits something larger than yourself.

For example, two weeks ago Terry Reilly and Beverly Rose-Hopper, community leaders and longtime residents of the Rose Garden neighborhood, coordinated a “deadheading” for Rose Garden Park. “Deadheading” is another name for “shearing” which is when you cut a rosebud so that another can emerge while the weather is still warm.

Over 140 volunteers came to shear roses at the San Jose Municipal Rose Garden. Folks came from Los Altos and Morgan Hill, but the majority of volunteers were San Jose residents from Rose Garden, Willow Glen and Almaden.

Deadheading was an annual event; however, because of the lack of volunteerism to help maintain the roses, the Rose Garden Park was put on “probation” from the All American Rose Society due to the lack of maintenance.

I am happy that this year community members organized volunteers and came out to help. I support volunteer events like this and hope to see more in the future. I also support corporations who promote volunteerism for their employees.

At the council meeting, the memo regarding prevailing wage and volunteerism included groups like Our City Forest, Habitat for Humanity and KaBoom as examples of organizations that do good volunteer work. The city also funds some of the groups who provide this volunteer work.

Although I supported the memo as it was written, I noticed that one of our greatest local volunteer resources was left out: corporations. The memo lacked the clarity that I was looking for that would allow a corporation to have its employees spend a day volunteering for something that belonged to the city, like a park for example.  Therefore, I asked for an amendment that would allow people who work for corporations who wanted to volunteer their time be allowed to do so. My amendment was unanimously accepted.

It appears that we want companies to be philanthropists, but the way the memo was written, we would not allow them to donate their human capital for volunteer services. I found this to be unfair.

Large corporations often have team building and/or volunteer days which allow teams or divisions from a company to take a day or half a day off from working at their “regular job” and clean up a park. Companies will pay their employees for a regular work day, but the employees get to lend their time to a volunteer effort. Many Silicon Valley companies are known for lending their time to cleaning and pruning the Guadalupe River Park and Gardens.

There was concern that if large corporations paid their employees for spending one day cleaning up a park, they would somehow take over all the park maintenance. I understand the concern, but it is invalid.

As I shared at the meeting, folks who volunteer their time for a day are not looking to go into the park maintenance business. For example, Junior Achievement sends business people into high school classrooms to supplement curriculum. They reach over 7 million students a year. They do not put teachers out of work. Volunteers do not take away jobs; they supplement much needed park maintenance.

The acreage in parks keeps growing and, because of the structural deficit, we may not have enough gardeners for many years. We should not pass up the opportunity for volunteers, paid or unpaid, to lend a helping hand. City workers and volunteers go together and can accomplish much more by working collaboratively.