October 26, 2006

Countdown to Election Day

Chuck Reed: Midwestern values

By Carol Rosen
Staff Writer

Chuck Reed has based his mayoral campaign on the issues he claims are sorely lacking in San Jose politics these days: ethics and honesty.

Born in Garden City, Kan., he attributes those characteristics to Midwestern values and to the U.S. Air Force Academy honor code that includes no lying or cheating. Following his graduation, he served in the Air Force in Thailand during the Vietnam War. An attorney, he was first elected to the City Council in 2000 and again in 2004 for District 4.

He has also worked on and chaired a number of boards and commissions as well as chairing the City Council’s Making Government Work Better Committee. He serves on the Driving a Strong Economy Committee and was a member of the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Ethics. He also represents the city on the San Jose Convention and Visitors Bureau and the Bay Area Water Supply and Conservation Authority.

Reed has been married to Paula Reed for 35 years and the two live in the Berryessa area of San Jose. They have two children.

Chuck Reed

Daughter Kim Campbell is currently a captain in the Air Force and is assigned to Nellis Air Force Base. She has served in Afghanistan. She is on the list to be promoted to major, which Congress must approve. She too graduated from the Air Force Academy a couple of decades after her father, and the two became the first father-daughter combination to graduate as Wing Commanders. Alex Reed, recently graduated from Santa Clara University and works for a non-profit think tank whose purpose is to stop nuclear proliferation.

“One bombs and the other tries to stop the bombing,” quipped Reed in a recent interview.

Q & A
Infrastructure: A recent article in the San Jose Mercury News rated San Jose’s roads among the worst in the state. If elected mayor, what will you do to improve the condition of San Jose’s roadways?

We need $15 million a year to keep the roads in their current condition. The cost backlog is $370 million. [The deterioration] is purely a function of money and unfortunately we haven’t spent the money on the roads over the last few years and they’ve deteriorated.

I plan to have a new initiative and to fund programs to hold study session with the city council. We will talk about all the great ideas we have for spending money on new things, but at the same time look at all the unfunded things that probably add up to a billion dollars that we’re trying to deal with or have to deal with pretty soon.

What I’ve discovered is it’s very easy to spend the money in the abstract, but it’s more difficult when you have to pick and choose among your priorities. I don’t want to do it the way it’s been done, which is the council talks about it for a couple of days and then the mayor decides what the council was thinking and what the council’s priorities are. I’m going to ask more from the city council to ensure a fair discussion of our infrastructure needs, including all the things that aren’t politically appealing.

The money we’re spending on debt service and maintenance for the new city hall would be enough to pay for our annual road paving needs. The $34 million it costs is twice what we were spending before. The extra $15 million would have paid for all the paving.

Safety: Even though San Jose is considered the second safest big city in the country, we still have a problem with gangs and with crime. What can be done to stop this before it gets worse? How will you deal with this issue as mayor?

It has to be stopped before it gets worse, because if we lose control of the gang problem it’s very difficult to regain control. We do have some experience dealing with gangs that we can point to as successful, such as San Jose BEST.

There are two pieces to this.

First, we need more police officers. If you look at our police department staffing over the last decade, the per capita numbers have gone down little by little over the decade. The response time for emergencies has also deteriorated. We need to hire enough police officers every year to expand the force by 30 officers per year. That’s 15 just to keep up with just the population growth.

Then we need another 15 officers to implement the Neighborhood Police Operations Plan, which has been approved. Having more officers is fundamentally important because if you don’t have enough officers you can’t deal with the gangs or any other problems.

How we use the officers specifically toward gangs and with our community-based organizations needs to be managed better by the Mayor’s Gang Task Force. In addition, we can work with the county. We’re not doing as good a job as we could collaborating with the county on programs related to gangs. That goes back to the community centers where we’ve cut back on staffing and hurt ourselves. There are county programs such as the Network for a Hate Free community, the Mediation Program and the Accountability Project where you have neighborhood associations actually getting involved in the discipline of some of the gang wannabes.

Secondly, the county has resources already in place that we could coordinate with. We need to know how many gangs there are and how many members there are, and we need to be able to attack the gang violence better than we do.

We do have proposed substation operations, although costs are going to be bigger than we expected. We’ve got capital dollars to build it, but that’s it for now. It provides some substantial improvements so officers aren’t driving all that way back and forth to answer calls, but their response time is dependent on how many officers we have in the field and where they are.

Arts bailouts: What is your position on the bail out for the Repertory Theater? Should more time have been taken to study the allocation of funds from the nearly $34 million savings in this year’s budget?

The most important thing in all these groups is to increase their revenue flow by increasing the hotel tax. When the boom went bust our TOT [hotel] taxes dropped by 60 percent as a function of occupancy and rates both dropping dramatically. We’ve set aside a piece of our hotel tax, 10 percent, to go specifically to arts groups.

Well, when it dropped a lot of groups took substantial cuts in their support from the city. At the same time, money dried up in the valley. The TOT has begun to come back as a result of work by the Convention and Visitors Bureau and the businesses and hotels in the city increasing their revenues. That will provide additional funding into the arts.

It’s all interconnected because you’ve got the convention center business and the visitor business, which puts people into the theater. One of the things that you have to have in order to attract businesses is offer things for people to do.

Growing the revenues and the economy is number-one critical, and so there’s a whole jobs and economy part of my program. For me the theater and the other institutions downtown are part of the culture, of course, but also part of the economic engine. They all fit together, and they are part of what’s helped us bring downtown back from the dead in terms of what we’ve done over the last 25 years. They are vital to the future of the city.

In regards to the Rep, the most important part of the loan is the follow up. We’re really good at solving the crisis and then turning to the next crisis and forgetting what people have said they would do. If we don’t keep on top of this then the REP may not have the incentive to follow the business model the way they are supposed to do. It’s really important that we have a team of people to ensure that the business plan gets carried out. The finance staff and the auditor will help out with this. We’re not very good at being bankers.

We’re into the REP way too late. The hole they dug is $3.3 million in debt and $2 million of next year’s subscriptions spent for this year’s productions; it’s a $5 million hole. We should have been engaged with them long before they showed up. The warning signs were clearly there. We need to be looking at them as part of the annual review process back to the funding that we have from the annual TOT tax.

Media access: Mayor Gonzales has had a contentious relationship with the press. How can you avoid this negative relationship and how do you intend to offer more transparency as mayor?

Well there are some things you probably have to learn on the job, and that may well be one of them. I think since I’ve never done it before, the best role is to tell the truth. When people ask me questions, I’ll try to answer their questions and not hide stuff. Maybe I’ll have a weekly meeting. I think it’s important for the mayor to be accessible and speak directly to the media.

Community centers, parks, libraries: Through Measure O and Measure P the city is opening community centers, parks and libraries that it can’t afford to maintain. How do you intend to rectify this problem?

The problem stems from when we approved Measure O and Measure P and another measure for public safety. All were approved in 2000 and 2002 creating a fund of $600 million of voter-authorized bonds for capital expenditures only.

So we have this huge capital fund that we spend, but we don’t have the operating dollars and we’re squeezing the parks’ maintenance. We’re squeezing the old community centers—we’re just about to declare them surplus—as a result of that and if you look at the actual budgets of Parks, Recreation and Neighborhood Services and the library, they’ve taken some pretty substantial hits.

There’s an $8 million reserve [for PRNS] that we created that’s built up over time. They’ll be some maintenance dollars out of that but it always comes back to the operational budget, the maintenance dollars and discretionary expenses like the new city hall and $4 million for the car race. That’s all money that could have been spent for maintenance and operations.

So back to the unfunded measures—those kinds of expenditures have to be part of the budget before you make a call to spend money on something new. Eventually we have to have more money and that goes to growing the revenues and not wasting it on other projects.

What is your plan if elected mayor, for Evergreen and Coyote Valley development? Both you and Cindy Chavez say you prefer to start with business and then develop housing, so how many jobs should be in place before housing begins? What solutions do you propose to eliminate the traffic congestion that already exists in Evergreen?

Let me start with Coyote. I’ve tried to be very clear on Coyote, I helped write the general plan back in 1992. It says that we will not consider changing the triggers except in a citywide general plan task force because it will affect the entire city in a lot of ways.

The Coyote Valley Specific Plan group comes back with recommendations to change the triggers. I would not support that. I think it would be a huge mistake to get the housing down there before the jobs, putting 25,000 units and 50,000 cars headed north on 101 or up through Almaden. It’s just not a good thing.

Housing cannot drive the decision-making. My position is about jobs and industrial reserve; it’s part of our economic future and maintaining Silicon Valley as the innovation center of the world. I don’t just want to give it up to housing. It’s about the phasing [in of jobs] and the timing. That’s why I’ve drawn the line about changing the triggers.

We’ve put the people of Evergreen in a box. We say you have to take more traffic congestion if you want the amenities proposed by the developers. I don’t think that’s a very good planning technique, and we can help somewhat by finding funding for the regional infrastructure.

Most of the people driving on 101 are not the people from Evergreen. They are people from all over, so to burden the people of Evergreen with extra traffic just to get 101 fixed isn’t completely fair. It’s not clear to me what the people think is the right number of unit for unit count—that’s still up in the air. I have a lot of reservations about converting the industrial land to residential land, this goes back to an idea that has been central to our plan for a really long time, which is a reverse commute—to try to get the jobs in the south.

There’s a variation between what the developers want and what the community wants. Most people in the Pleasant Hills Golf Club area want no new housing at all. What changes could bring the developers and the community together?

Often people don’t really understand the implication of it. I think traffic is going to get worse. So I think the impact of it will not improve traffic in Evergreen. It may be a draw on [Highway] 101 with the improvements, or maybe it will get better for a while, but the traffic in the Evergreen area is not going to get better. Very little will get fixed with the Specific Plan.

Building consensus: Most of the city council members support Cindy Chavez. What will you do to build consensus with these members and others on the council?

When Tom McEnery filed for mayor he only had one endorsement from the city council. Tom turned out to be a pretty good mayor; he built consensus. In an election people speak and everybody gets the message. That’s why I try to be clear with what I intend to do and how I intend to do it. That will change council and staff attitudes.

It’s really important to bring it back to what the people say. We will also have several new council members so the dynamics, the personality, of the council as a whole will change. I will have an opportunity to start anew with the moral authority of having been elected citywide.

There are some specific things that I think I want to do. The first is that I intend to share, not collect, power. I will push the council to take more responsibility. I think that will change the attitudes and the perspectives of council members to look at the city as whole rather than specific council districts.

I don’t feel the need to be the dictator; all good ideas don’t have to come from the mayor’s office.

The other element is to try to get the council to focus on the issues we have in common and try to deflect divisive issues. I know that we can keep the council focused on San Jose issues, like fixing the potholes, which is a really boring thing to talk about compared to some other issues. If we keep focused on doing our job, the divisiveness just won’t happen.

The mini mayor system has to go. I don’t think it’s good for the city. That’s part of what happened when the mayor began collecting the power; there’s an unspoken agreement that the mayor will do all this stuff and council members will let him and he will ignore what they want to do in their council districts. I think that’s a mistake.

The mayor has to step in and support the city manager and step in when council members cross the line. The mayor has to be sensitive and attuned. The mayor has to have those conversations with council members to set the rules. And, the mayor has to be willing to admit some things aren’t good for the council or for the city.

Reimbursements: Throughout the primary and the general election, you’ve presented yourself as the ethics candidate. Given the intense scrutiny focused on public figures and the public sensitivity to any missteps by their elected officials, does the public’s reaction to the recent Mercury News article regarding the $39,000 in expense reimbursements surprise you? In hindsight, what would you do differently?

No, I’m not surprised by the public’s reaction. In hindsight I would have held myself to a higher standard.

I followed a long-standing policy. My reimbursement requests were reviewed by the city clerk and the finance department to see that they complied with the city policy. But that’s not a high enough standard. The mayor should set a standard of behavior. Some of the things I got reimbursed for were a little too personal in nature or had the appearance of being somehow connected to a religious or political group. I just would not have done that had I been thinking like a mayor instead of a council member.

Did you talk to other city council members to find out whether they were also reimbursed for such items when you started out as a council member?

I just looked at what everyone else had done. There are many examples and as the city attorney’s memo made clear, the clerk and the finance people, this is the way we’ve done it.

But that doesn’t make it the best practice. It’s not the standard I want to have as the mayor. So what I tried to do is accept the fact that I made a mistake, own up to it and try to do something about it. I wrote a check for many times the amount of anything that anybody criticized, and I repaid every single reimbursement that I made in six years, including office supplies, parking, you name it, everything—just because I wanted to try to do the right thing.

Long term: If you become mayor, what are your ambitions beyond that office?

I aspire to be a former mayor. When I’m a former mayor, I’m going to go back to the practice of law because I’m a lawyer by profession. Politics is not my life. I have zero interest in going to Sacramento or to Washington. Those jobs do not appeal to me at all.

I’m focused on San Jose, and when I’m done I’ll go back to my profession. And, it partly depends on what my children do. If [eventually] I have some grandchildren and they live someplace else after I’m done being mayor, I might get a second house.