Feb 12, 2004

Job growth and new business focus of City Council candidates’ forum

By Lorraine Gabbert
Staff Writer

Business growth and the economy featured prominently in the District 10 city council candidates forum last Thursday, hosted at Chevy’s by the Almaden Business Association. The four candidates, Ron Siporen, Nancy Pyle, William Garbett, and Rich De La Rosa, shared their concerns over the need to create jobs in San Jose and make the city more business-friendly.

Ron Siporen
Candidate Ron Siporen is the director of the Almaden Country School and has a background in banking and as a business owner. Siporen intends to make residents first on city matters, to improve communication, and to promote job growth in San Jose. Siporen believes that if the state, county, and city budgets are out of balance, it means more taxes and more layoffs for local residents, and feels that the budget has been mismanaged by the current city council.

“The budget is in disarray,” declared Siporen. “The city has been deficit-spending for three years and has not told us. I want to bring fiscal management to the city. I’d like to see the city council act like senior management, and they’re barely acting like middle management, and that has to change.”

For fiscal year ending June 2002, Siporen said that the city of San Jose missed its budget by $1.8 million, yet ran a deficit of $60 million. The following year, he said, the revenue was down by $17 million, but the deficit went to $77 million, and they are predicting a $80 million deficit for next year.

“The revenues are not the source of the problem,” Siporen stated, “it is the expenses going out of control, and we have to address that.”

Siporen is also concerned that the city is not business-friendly and that a moratorium on regulations is just a start. “What we really need is a full reassessment of every regulation on the books,” he stressed. “We need to clean house on regulations.”

Siporen also called for an overhaul on how business operations are carried out, including speeding up the process involved in opening up new businesses. “A friend of mine operates Baja Fresh on Blossom Hill Road,” he said. “He opened one in Fresno, and got his building permit in three days. In Santa Clara he went to the building department and received his permit over the counter. In San Jose, where he lives, it took him four months to get a building permit.” Siporen sees this delay as being unacceptable. “It’s not that Fresno and Santa Clara are just other cities,” he noted, “they are our competitors. It is so much easier to open businesses elsewhere. We have to change.”

Nancy Pyle
Candidate Nancy Pyle was a teacher in the San Jose Unified School District for 25 years, has overseen a $100 million budget serving on the San Jose Evergreen Community College District Board for the past seven years, is chairperson for the San Jose Small Business Commission, and an executive board member of the YWCA. She asserts that the key to improving the business climate in San Jose is to assess the types of businesses that currently exist and what kinds of jobs were lost, reach out for new business, and provide tax incentives. She is also in favor of simplifying permit and zoning applications, revitalizing retail centers, and connecting professional business organizations with city Web sites. Pyle pointed out that 43 percent of new small businesses (which comprise 80 percent to 85 percent of businesses in San Jose) work out of their homes, and half their founders are women.

“What we need to do is to help increase their survival rate,” said Pyle, mentioning mentoring programs such as SCORE, which includes retired CEOs willing to assist new businesses. “The city needs to treat small businesses with the respect they deserve in order to make sure that they are viable, working and successful. Today’s small business could be tomorrow’s franchise.”

Pyle would like to see the city assist businesses by providing loans and space for companies looking to expand. She also believes in keeping an eye toward future trends, and reaching out for businesses that will be needed, such as nano-technology, biomedical advances, solar energy, green housing, and pollution reduction.

“We need to work with colleges and universities in a partnership to provide information to develop these programs, and provide incentives to actively recruit businesses,” she said.

William Garbett
Candidate William Garbett is an advocate at city council meetings for ‘The Public,’ and has operated a number of small businesses over the years. He believes that he is well-versed in the issues affecting the district as well as the history behind them. Garbett said that he brought Pacific Bell telephone service to Almaden in 1971, as well as touch-tone service, and later started his own telephone service called ‘Cal-tel.’

“In San Jose we need to find out where the money is going. The city hall rotunda is a sink-hole and needs to go [in order] to bring things back on track financially.” The high ($45 million) cost of pursuing the latest communications technology is also an unneeded city hall expenditure, he said. “They need to get a handle on expenses,” Garbett noted. He suggested creating a market for vacant office space by lowering their cost and leveling the business playing field by making the same building codes regular businesses face also apply to city buildings. Garbett is especially concerned that private industry can not compete with the city due to the hardship of obtaining permits.

“What is the cost of doing business in San Jose?” Garbett queried. “Businesses are so fragile in this city under the administration we have; people are leaving in droves.”

Rich De La Rosa
Candidate Rich De La Rosa, president of De La Rosa Latin American Imports, Inc., and owner of Rich De La Rosa Insurance Services, is on the steering committee for the Almaden Business Association, and an associate member of the San Jose Downtown Association. Job loss in San Jose is a major concern of De La Rosa’s. “We’re losing jobs,” he said. “We’re still trying to recover from this bad economy with negative job growth. We’ve got to invite business to start here in San Jose, stay here in San Jose, and expand here in San Jose.”

De La Rosa observed that the current business climate in San Jose is not conducive to helping companies grow. “The CEO of Intel actually said that San Jose was absolutely out of their plans for any kind of future growth,” he noted, “because we are not business friendly.” De La Rosa illustrated the point by sharing an anecdote about the hurdles faced by a local dentist who experienced a four-month delay while trying to open his business. “When an inspector came by, he would tell him what to do,” he said, “then they sent out another inspector with new plans of what had to be done, and then they sent out a third inspector—and that is the common practice in San Jose. We make it hard for businesses to do business here.”

De La Rosa cited that in Silicon Valley, about 200,000 jobs were lost over the past three years, and 90,000 jobs were lost in San Jose over the last two years; 60,000 of those high-paying tech jobs. “It’s going to be very difficult to get those jobs back without making serious changes to our city government,” he commented. “The job of council members in the immediate future is to try to change the way San Jose thinks...to be the city of ‘How can we help you?’ instead of at every turn saying ‘no.’”

De La Rosa drew a parallel to his relationship with customers as an insurance agent to that of how the city deals with business owners. “If I make it difficult for my customer to do business with me, I don’t have a customer,” he said. “The city of San Jose has the same problem—they’re losing their customers.” De La Rosa vowed to change that. “We have to grow companies because we have to grow jobs,” he asserted. “Number-one priority citywide should be three things: jobs, jobs, jobs. And if they’re not working to get more jobs for us, then the city is not doing their job.”

The casual setting of Chevy’s provided the perfect venue for the candidates to communicate with business ownersand residents in an informal way, and enabled personal interaction following the question-and-answer period of the forum.

The District 10 city council candidates will meet again at a community forum on Wednesday, Feb. 18 at 7:30 p.m. at South Hills Community Church, 6601 Camden Avenue.