May 4, 2006

ELECTION ‘06

Cortese makes his stand

Ethics, multiculturalism, and fiscal responsibility important to mayoral candidate

Editor’s note:
The Times newspapers editorial board interviewed the five major mayoral candidates. The interviews appear in the order that they took place. The first interview appeared in the April 27 issue with David Pandori, May 4 with Michael Mulcahy, May 11 issue with Cindy Chavez (these may be accessed at www.almadentimes.com) and will conclude with Chuck Reed’s interview appearing next week. The Times endorsement will appear in the June 1 issue.

By Daniel DeBolt
Staff Writer

During the past half of the century, San Jose went from being known for miles after miles of orchards to becoming the center of the computer universe. Mayoral candidate Dave Cortese went from being known as the son of an orchard owner turned politician to being known as businessman, a lawyer, a school board member and now a city council member running for mayor.

Cortese is known as someone who has always fought fervently for ethics on the city council, something that may not have always worked in his favor. When fellow council members Nora Campos and Nancy Pyle recently made accusations about his ethics on the Evergreen Valley Visioning Task Force, they said that he should be held to the same standards other council members have by Cortese himself.

In response to the allegations, 20 public speakers showed up at a recent city council meeting to speak against the accusation, all of whom were in vehement support of Cortese. According to several local media outlets, the public speakers and Cortese himself, it would appear that many suspect the accusations were conveniently timed to coincide with the impending election, as the issue was first brought to light over a year ago and quickly dismissed by the council. Campos has yet to decide whether to pursue the issue further at the next rules committee meeting.

Not surprising in a tight race. In a recent Mercury News poll, Cortese closely trailed fellow council members Cindy Chavez and Chuck Reed in the race for mayor. Chavez garnered 16 percent support of those poled while Reed pulled in 15 percent, and Cortese earned 14 percent according to the poll.

Cortese has a Juris Doctorate in law from Lincoln law school, which he obtained at night while serving on the East Side Union School District board. He worked in financial and real estate firms for a number of years after receiving his bachelor’s degree in political science from UC Davis.

As young man, Cortese said his grandfather handpicked him to run the family business and mentored him on the intricacies of finance and real estate. It was a huge responsibility, but Cortese lived up to the task when the time came to take over the business after one of his uncles passed away.

“’Your job is to work for the next two generations,’” Cortese said he was told. “It’s not about you, you need to set this thing up for your kids and their kids, and essentially that’s what you need to do in life.’ In a sense that became my vocational calling.”

Whether he is elected mayor or not, Cortese said he will return to his family business when he is done with San Jose politics. No longer are the Cortese Brothers’ orchards the sole family business. The family business now includes property management and real estate. One of their more known businesses is Country Club Villa Properties, which operates the shopping center on McKee and White Road.

Cortese and his wife Pattie, live in Evergreen with their two children and Cortese’s two children from a previous marriage.

For more information on Dave Cortese visit www.davecortese.com

Q and A

Cost of living/city budget

Many Silicon Valley workers are leaving the area because of the high cost of living. What can be done to make more affordable housing available in this area?

We need supply, that’s the biggest thing. The other thing we can do is continue to subsidize affordable housing. The city has led the entire region with 6,000 affordable homes over a five-year period. It is a function of us having redevelopment money. Twenty percent of our property tax money is dedicated to affordable housing. That needs to continue. Given the fact that our suburbs are at their limits of growth, high-density housing needs to happen downtown and along transit corridors.

Photos by Jeff Frazee

It’s not just a San Jose issue—the whole Bay Area has a problem. As mayor of San Jose I need to challenge the rest of the Bay Area to build housing at the levels San Jose has. Then we will see some relief.

How can we attract more jobs to San Jose?

Remember 90 percent of the jobs created in this city are created by small businesses. The driving industries are important and get a lot of attention, but thousands of jobs are being created by small businesses.

I believe this city needs to create a global business entrepreneurial center. We need consultants available to struggling businesses that deal with the international high tech scene. If a company built test equipment for a now defunct manufacturing line, where are those people now selling those services? They need to be selling those products or services to China or India. Eventually those connections will happen, but we need a matchmaking service to help that. How does that create jobs here? Those businesses use personnel here. We need to make sure we get our share of local jobs that match up with the jobs moving overseas.

There is a concern that the process for opening up a small business in San Jose is too arduous. Should this process be streamlined? If so, how?

We need to make sure the climate is welcoming. We’ve been driving ethnic businesses out of the city almost as if we don’t want them. The ethnic businesses should be welcomed and nurtured; then we will be a great international city.

The first thing I want to do is create a permit fee holiday. This was done in Santa Ana. Temporarily it would virtually cut every permit fee required for a small business to open. During that period we could get a really good idea how much our system is bottlenecking things.

These small businesses also should only have to deal with one representative of the city from start to finish of the permitting process.

Franchise templates that franchisors are using to do a regional or national franchise, such as Quizno’s, can cost more to build here compared to other cities—up to two to three times more in permit fees. That permit holiday will help us figure out how much business like this we are losing.

In the face of the city’s current budget problems, how would you allocate funds differently?

While you are trying to pull the city out of budget shortfalls, you can’t spend $4 million on a car race. You can’t put $8 million into a tent downtown for the convention center when the center has $9 million in deferred maintenance. Pay raises to executives making over $200,000 a year symbolically destroys morale among city staff. We need to generate sales tax and property tax. Meanwhile we need to make good common sense business decisions.

What can be done about the loss of our community centers and their staff?

The reuse strategy is to broker these out to nonprofits. I think it’s better to have a 50-50 relationship. The city should have some degree of quality control over the programs and services at the centers. The problem is nonprofits aren’t doing much better than we are right now. The Northside Community Center could need a $120,000 subsidy even if the best non-profits in the city to take it over.

Transportation

Should BART be brought to San Jose? If so, what can be done to prevent it from taking funding from other projects in neighborhoods it won’t serve?

Yes, BART should be brought to San Jose. It’s going to be a huge economic development impetus for the city. But there is a struggle right now between those who would have BART at all costs and those who want to make sure underrepresented neighborhoods are still served by traditional services. An example is the VTA just considered taking the light rail project out to Eastridge and scuttling it to 2019. That’s a proposal backed up by a lot of people. It’s an engineered project originally scheduled for 2005, with earmarked funding from the last sales tax measure. Where do you think those dollars will be going? And do you think it’s any coincidence that the new start date is 2019 which is after the BART completion? We need geographic equity.

What can be done to mitigate the major traffic problems there could be with future developments and an expanding city population?

I think you have to attempt to do what we are trying to do with the Evergreen plan. More and more I think we will have to call on private developers to take on these costs. But if you keep passing these costs onto builders, they just tack that onto the price of homes. At some point the suburbs in the city need to just stop growing. We need to start thinking downtown growth only and transit corridors only.

Development

Recent decisions about Coyote Valley development have led to the project being criticized as another example of urban sprawl. What would constitute acceptable “triggers” before building homes in Coyote Valley? How many jobs should there be first?

I believe that if you say what the task force has said now, as guidelines, that jobs have to be there when housing starts to occur. I’m not sure you have to have an absolute number. Remember those jobs usually don’t come along in small quantities. As long as we say that we are still committed to jobs before housing or “triggers.” You don’t want to have such a rigid approach. The Mercury News has suggested we should stop the planning all together until the general plan is updated. But, what if Apple were to say ‘we want to come to Coyote Valley?’ If someone wants to create the core jobs, we need to let them. Then we can tell the homebuilders to go ahead with development.

What can be done to make sure Coyote Valley development isn’t detrimental to other neighborhoods in San Jose by draining city resources? Should developers be responsible for a percentage of infrastructure improvements?

Yes, developers should be responsible for a significant number of infrastructure improvements. The two-to-one jobs-to-housing ratio needs to be adhered to, because it’s critical to the city’s ability to provide resources. We need Coyote Valley to generate a surplus of revenue. According to recent studies, it will do that in a number of years. The community needs to be sustainable and holistic. If it puts people back and forth on 101 we are going to create a sprawl situation, inadvertently.

With plans for continued housing growth in the Evergreen area, how will you, as mayor, ensure that any negative impacts on traffic, schools and city services will be minimized for Evergreen residents? How will you balance the interests of the local residents versus the interests of developers?

We are doing that by the very nature of the process itself. As you know I originally set up the task force with council approval—it’s well documented. Thirty neighborhood associations were represented on the task force. That’s been gutted and cut down to 15 neighborhood associations and 15 other people, a couple of whom are lobbyists. The mayor actually appointed lobbyists in exchange for our representative from the Meadowlands Association so that a representative from Summerhill Homes could be represented on the task force.

Even with that we have the ability to make balanced recommendations. The real test is going to come when it comes to the city council. Are they going to weigh on the community’s side or the developer’s side?

Crime/police

Although San Jose has a low crime rate compared to other cities, it still has a gang problem. What do you intend to do regarding gangs?

I want to restore the city’s relationship with our schools around school safety and gang prevention to what it was when Susan Hammer was mayor and I want to take it beyond that. As you know I spent eight years on the East Side Union School District and spent a lot of my time on those issues.

There are three elements to it: prevention, intervention and enforcement. If you can stay out of the enforcement business that means you’ve done your job well. There are transformational programs in this city where they turn gang members around—where you take a gang member and a year-and-a-half later, he’s at the University of California. This is happening. If we want to have a great city, we need to focus more attention on that.

The city paid $1.8 million for the police shooting of Bich Cau Thi Tran. Can expensive tragedies like these be prevented? If so, how?

It mostly comes down to training and cultural understanding. By all accounts she had mental health problems. The police haven’t handled mental health problems well. I think that is reflected in Taser use. We never had 600 police shootings a year—why are we having 600 Taser uses a year?

Sports

Citizens throughout the city complain they don’t have enough sports fields, especially in Almaden where citizens have spent years trying to build fields for their kids. How would you address this issue?

We’ve got to finish rolling out the Measure P parks bond of 2000. It’s not a lack of money but a lack of leadership. I have a 25-year background as a softball player. I supported the McKean Road fields (in Almaden). I know it’s desperately needed as it is in other parts of the community. No more development without more sports fields, addressing traffic impacts and other services also.

If elected mayor, will you continue the city’s pursuit of bringing Major League Baseball, namely the Oakland A’s, to San Jose? If so, how will you go about doing this, considering that the San Francisco Giants have territorial rights to San Jose? Should the city spend money to buy land for a park before the territorial rights issue is resolved?

Yes, I think it’s an opportunity worth pursuing still. The only land worth acquiring is land the city can use for affordable high density housing in the downtown area because the high probability is it won’t be used for a baseball field, but for affordable housing.

I happen to know Lew Wolffe (of the A’s) and Peter McGowan (of the Giants) have started negotiations. If they are able to negotiate away the territorial rights as a business action and we haven’t done our homework we will be as flatfooted as we ever were. We missed the opportunity to get the Warriors and to keep the Earthquakes because no one was thinking ahead. The Giants would have moved here if we had a stadium proposal ready to go.

If elected mayor, will one of your goals be to bring Major League Soccer back to San Jose? If so, will the city of San Jose be able to provide the new team with a new soccer-specific stadium, as previously asked for by the owners of the San Jose Earthquakes?

The big problem right now is unless there is a stadium here, you can’t operate at anything less than a $5 million loss. The Earthquakes wanted the city to pick up the $5 million loss until a stadium could be built. How do you take $5 million out of the general fund to pay professional soccer salaries? No matter how much you love the sport you just can’t do it.

The only way for it to work is to get the voters to approve a new stadium and have it operate at little or no cost to the city.

City Hall

There seems to be an anti-city hall feeling brewing during this election following events such as the Nor Cal garbage deal scandal and the late notice given before subsidizing the Grand Prix. What, specifically, must be done to get the community to trust city hall again?

We need new leadership. The first thing we need is a new mayor. A mayor that is persuasive and honest and strong enough to lead the city in a completely different direction than the current mayor. We need a city manager who pushes back and a mayor that doesn’t interfere in the management of the city.

The Mercury News requested information on the San Jose Grand Prix after the council voted for the $4 million subsidy. The information given to the Mercury News had pages with information blacked out. When is the city right in keeping information confidential?

There are times during attorney client privilege or when you are right in the middle of a real estate deal that information shouldn’t be public.

The idea that long after people have discussed and voted on something that you can black out information is absurd. I asked the city council to immediately direct the staff not to ever invoke that privilege again once a decision has been made. What interest could that possibly serve except to save someone from embarrassment?

The Sunshine law proposals currently don’t have any provisions for enforcement. Should a Sunshine law to be enforced through fines or censure or dismissal of those who violate it?

Yes. The city has the right to create criminal penalties the district attorney would enforce. I was the first council member to call for the censure of Terry Gregory. The task force waffled for four months. I finally said censure him now or at least open the investigation. I was also the first council member to call for Ron Gonzales’ censure. I strongly believe in those kinds of remedies for those kinds of wrongs.

Mayor Gonzales has proposed that city elections be publicly funded, a policy some other cities have adopted. Do you think this would be an appropriate policy for San Jose?

I am glad I voted for the elections commission to investigate it. It is an unbelievable task, almost obscene, to raise $700,000 for a campaign. With a $500 cap on each check, that’s 1,600 to 2,000 checks a candidate has to obtain in a 165-day period. That’s what your councilman is doing now. It’s not a good system and creates way too much dialogue between special interests and the city than is healthy.

How would you go about selecting and working with a new city manager?

Susan Hammer did an excellent job in selecting her city manager. She brought people from all over the city in to help figure out who the city manager should be. Hopefully we can get somebody home grown and someone who understands what the 10th largest city needs—someone who isn’t afraid to hold his ground. Someone who at the end of the year, if they don’t meet their targets, can say it was their own fault. But give me the targets and get out of the way.

Your Campaign

What political party do you affiliate with?

Democrat.

Who is endorsing your campaign and of those endorsements which is the most important to you?

The San Jose Firefighters are very significant. I felt La Raza Roundtable was extremely significant as well. They are oldest Latino civil rights organization here in San Jose. There is a Latina candidate in the race, but they chose to split their endorsement between us. That meant a lot to me on a personal level. Assemblyman Simon Salinas endorsed me, a Democrat. Don Gage, a Republican, endorsed me—he’s known for being a fiscal conservative as a
county supervisor.

In the past have you proven you have the management skills necessary to lead a group and the skills necessary to convince other council members to vote with you to get things done in city hall?

I think my election to president of the Association of Bay Area Governments and the Santa Clara County Cities Association are evidence of that. They don’t elect you if you’re not a consensus builder and someone who can work with people. I’ve brought people at polarized ends of the spectrum, almost at war with each other, together. The city was taking a 22 percent return on water rates. I convinced the council to cap that at 9 percent. The return was going to street repaving in west San Jose and parks in Willow Glen. That’s a tax—that’s not right. I was able to go and convince my colleagues that were benefiting from that money to come in and do the right thing.

How does your campaign deal with lobbyist contributions?

We don’t accept them. Inadvertently we found we had 12 checks from lobbyists, but we returned those checks. A lobbyist recruited a check from someone who I have respected for years and that was returned also.

San Jose is the largest city in the Bay Area, though most people still refer to the area as the San Francisco Bay Area. What specifically needs to be done to “put us on the map” so to speak? What big projects would you pursue? What is your vision for San Jose?

We need a massive effort or push to increase our arts and museum visibility downtown. I’ve called for a Smithsonian West. The Smithsonian is interested in that; I’ve talked to them. This city is ready to support an international marketplace downtown with multicultural business. We need to keep focused on big league sports opportunities. I think the car race is a great opportunity; I just think the city shouldn’t be a sponsor. I think the major corporations should be the sponsors and the city should be paving the streets.

And finally … Why do you want to be mayor?

It’s a great opportunity to help people. I’m not interested in higher office. I just want to be the best mayor San Jose can possibly have. I will finish that job, know that I did my best, know that I helped people in the process and helped the city continue its legacy. Then I will go back to the private sector and do what I was doing before and help with my fourth- going on fifth-generation family business. That’s all I’m interested in at this point.