Oliverio for Supervisor 2018

Independent - Transparent - Fiscally Responsible

Candid Camera

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Photo radar helps augment traffic safety, as well as that of pedestrians and neighborhoods. A tweaking of the current policy to improve safety will not cost the state any money, and in fact will raise money while at the same time lowering emergency room health care costs. Speeding cars in our neighborhoods continue to remain an issue. The City of San Jose does what it can to manage speeding on our streets with the dollars we are able to allocate.

The City deals with speeders cars in two ways. One is enforcement with our Traffic Enforcement Unit (TEU). TEU are police officers on motorcycles that split their time in neighborhood “hot spots” where speeding is reported. You can report speeding in your neighborhood by clicking this link.

The SJPD aggregates the complaints and then tries to prioritize them as a way to identify the hot spots. The other portion of traffic enforcement’s time is spent at intersections with the highest rate of car accidents. Of course, as pointed out last week on my blog, we only have a limited number of police officers covering a city of a million people.

The other City tool is our Department of Transportation (DOT), which has a small but dedicated group committed to traffic calming who work with a limited budget and are mandated to follow state law. The state determines signage, street markings and the actual speed limit on San Jose streets.

San Jose previously had photo radar: a van parked on streets that took pictures of car license plates that were speeding. However, due to issues at the state level, the program was eliminated. Data from the DOT showed that photo radar reduced speeding on neighborhood streets. Gov. Schwarzenegger has recently proposed an expansion of photo radar.

Drivers who speed are dangerous. Time and time again we have a tragedy of some innocent pedestrian getting killed by an irresponsible driver. Currently, red light running cameras are legal in California; the idea is to also allow that same camera to give out speeding tickets. There is also speculation of allowing mid-block radar as well.

If you believe speeding is a problem in your neighborhood please contact your state representative this week and tell them you support the expansion of photo radar.

Police cannot be on every street 24/7, but technology can help fill the gap. We need our limited police resources for actions that only a police officer can do like investigating violent crime, property crime, gangs and community policing.

On to other matters: On Friday, we released the mid-year budget review. We had less revenue than expected so we drained $4.5 million out of our $10 million economic uncertainty reserve. You may remember an October 2009 blog when a Lobbyist came to the council meeting lambasting the City to spend the reserve instead of saving the money. Individuals are told by financial planners to save six months of living expenses in case of unemployment, so our City, having a one percent reserve is the minimum and should be higher. Going forward we will have $5.5 million left out of an approximate billion dollar budget.

Also worth noting from the report was the annual Hayes Mansion subsidy from the city was $5.9 million which is equivalent to approximately 50 police officers or approximately 40 police officers and opening all of our libraries citywide on Sundays. Take your pick.

Finally our Building & Structure Construction Tax decreased 50 percent—from $8 million to $4 million. It’s important to note that affordable housing in San Jose is exempt from paying these fees that go towards the paving roads. As market rate housing is in the tank the only housing going forward are affordable housing projects that sadly do not provide parks either, again an exemption made by the city council.  Think of that next time you buy new shocks or tires for your car.

The City of San Jose Budget Prioritization Survey, available by clicking this link, closes Feb 5.

Budget Prioritization Survey

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The City of San Jose has contracted with a public opinion survey company to poll residents on the city’s budget in a project fondly known as “the City of San Jose Budget Prioritization Survey.” The control group of the survey is 900 residents representing the entire City. They will be contacted by home and cell phones.

In the end, the survey company will try to ensure that the demographic breakdown of survey respondents mirrors the demographics of San Jose, with a certain margin for error. This data will be shared at a public study session at the City Council Feb. 16 at 9am.  This will give the Council scientific polling data on budget priorities from San Jose residents.  In addition to the phone survey we will be holding a Neighborhood Association/Youth Commission Priority Session this Saturday at 10am at City Hall in room 119 to discuss the budget deficit. Both meetings are public.

Since you may be one of the 1,006,000 residents who will not be getting a call, I wanted to share some of the questions via a web survey and then share the results on San Jose Inside on Feb 8.

On another note, the Council passed a citywide inclusionary housing policy which Councilmember Constant and I voted against. Then a few minutes later, the Council made an exemption to the policy for one section of the City. So although a citywide policy passed for every developer, the City made an exception that one development did not have to comply with the inclusionary housing policy. Makes me wonder; if inclusionary housing is such a good idea then why make an exception?

Here is a link to the City of San Jose Budget Prioritization Survey.

Recycled Water: The Next Step

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I am one of the members who sits on the South Bay Recycled Water Committee, representing San Jose. This committee has investigated and is now recommending a partnership with the Santa Clara Valley Water District to move forward with recycled water and jointly build an advanced water treatment plant.

(I blogged on the topic of recycled water and water scarcity in the past.)

Now, after six long public meetings and a visit to the Orange County advanced water treatment facility, we have reached a tentative agreement that will span 40 years. We will be build an advanced water treatment plant on five acres right next to the existing water pollution control plant in San Jose.

The estimated cost will be $42-$47 million and the costs will be shared:  $20-25 million will come from the water district, $11 million from San Jose, $8.25 million from a federal grant and $3 million from the state (Prop 50). The City of San Jose’s portion will not be coming from the General Fund but rather from money set aside from fees for just this purpose. Unfortunately, this is also the money that some would like to borrow so we can build more affordable housing although we have already built 18,000 affordable units in San Jose.

This plant will produce 10 million gallons per day of membrane-filtrated water, eight million gallons per day of reverse osmosis-treated water and 10 millions gallons per day of ultra violet light-treated water. What does all this mean? Well first, we will be able to demonstrate to regulators and the public that we can take wastewater and turn it into drinking water where we are able to remove particles in the parts per trillion level. This facility will allow for public demonstration of how wastewater is transformed into potable water. People will be able to drink the water after it goes through the many steps of advanced treatment, as they do in Orange County. We will also be able to enhance the recycled water quality for existing industrial customers who would like less salinity in the water which is good as it creates more demand for non-potable uses.

This plant is the first step for the facility. There is land adjacent to the facility to expand and produce even more clean water. However, the thought is to build the larger facility over time, as we need acceptance of advanced water treatment from residents. I recall when touring the Orange County facility that we where told that their water has traces of jet fuel left over from the defense industry and they were able to remove it to less then three parts per trillion. That’s amazing when you think about how the technology can get down to cleaning the water at that level.

It is important to remember that almost all the water you and I drink is recycled as only 3 percent of the water on earth is pure.  Interesting thing I learned about San Diego is that 95 percent of their water is imported.  by contrast in San Jose 50 percent of our water is imported. Imported water is always a risk since it may not be there in the future; however, if we have advanced water treatment, then we would have less risk about imported water being diminished.

Oftentimes people ask, «Why not just desalinate the water from the ocean and make that drinking water.» The cost to desalinate ocean water is very expensive. In addition it takes a lot of energy to clean water. The following is how many KWH per hour for one acre foot of water (a year supply of water for two small families):
1,500 KWH for Advanced Water Treatment
3,500 KWH for importing the water from the Delta
4,000 KWH for desalinization

Our water supply is at risk since there is a finite supply. Are you willing to pay a little more for reliable and clean water?

This will be voted on by the water district board in January and city council in February.

San Jose’s Native Gen X’ers

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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.

Direct Competition Lowers Costs

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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.

 

Punting the RDA Budget

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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.