September 27, 2007

City Council looks at SJPD report, Team San Jose and prevailing wages

By Carol Rosen
Editor

Tuesday’s city council agenda held a number of topics of interest to most in San Jose. Among them was an analysis of the job of Team San Jose, a look at the San Jose Police Department’s efforts to maintain the city’s safest big city status as well as discussions about public/private partnerships and a pilot program for a neighborhoods commission.

One of the more controversial agenda items concerns public/private partnerships and whether private companies should pay volunteer wages to maintain the parks. The council unanimously agreed to allow a staff budget committee pursue the issue.

But first there was nearly two hours of discussion and at least 20 public speakers who were about even in their support or lack of it for the topic. “The city has a prevailing wage in place. I don’t see any need to change. My wife and I go out with trash bags in Sam’s [Liccardo] neighborhood and pickup trash every Saturday. If everyone did this, we wouldn’t be discussing it now,” said one man.

Another cited this as a “terrible precedent.” One speaker said he thought this would result in fewer city jobs in the future. “After the city adopts this what do we do with its current employees. Volunteers are not trained to do this type of work and what happens if they get hurt, they won’t know what to do.”

Former parks commission president Helen Chapman likes the idea, but suggested it might be a good idea to
hire a permanent volunteer coordinator position to keep the program running smoothly.

“This is a delicate situation,” said another speaker. “The city needs to encourage all volunteers whether labor or business. But it should be thoughtfully analyzed until it’s determined how the partnership will work.”

Councilmember Pierluigi Oliverio noted that such collaborations are beneficial by finding something that works for all the parties involved. He said he thought it was a great idea, “harnessing corporate generosity without putting people out of work.”

However, he questioned just how the situation would work with corporations who volunteer their employees and expect to pick up the tab. For example, company A gives one department an afternoon off to help prune the rose bushes in the Rose Garden. But the company is merely asking people to donate their time, but it is still paying them.

Team San Jose
The city council voted unanimously to ask the city manager’s staff to set a special meeting in December to evaluate whether to issue a new contract or to extend the TSJ agreement for five more years.

Questions concerning the job Team San Jose, contracted by the city until July 2009 to run the convention center and other activities, surfaced a couple of years ago and resulted in a civil grand jury investigation, which released a report stating that the city had not held the organization accountable. This followed annual financial and performance audits by Macias Gini & O’Connel LLP and the city auditor.

The city auditor’s investigation determined several performance measures were not met and in other cases there was insufficient data. City staff looking into the matter agreed with some of the findings and disagreed with others.

Five public speakers responded to the concerns. “Team San Jose offers quality customer service with results that speak for themselves,” said Cliff Clark, general manager of the Marriot Hotel. “We have higher hotel taxes, reduction of operating costs and no labor disputes [since TSJ has been in action],” he said.

Others noted more flexibility in workers’ schedules, and that reserves from the transient occupancy task are now positive instead of in the red as they were when TSJ took over.

Police report
The council also unanimously accepted a report presented by Police Chief Rob Davis delineating the efforts the police department is making to keep San Jose as safest big city in America.

Davis listed actions and statistics proving the department continues to improve the city’s safety despite the need to hire and train more officers. In fact, the city maintains lower averages for homicide—2.5 per 100,000 people compared with 5.6 for the state, 12.8 for San Francisco and 23.2 for Oakland. In addition, the FBI, in a recent crime statistics document, showed San Jose has a homicide clearance rate of 96.2 compared with a nationwide average of 62.1.

However, property crimes are up with residential burglaries growing about 7 percent in the last few years, said Davis.

In an effort to forestall these activities, the department will add 15 new officers, although it will take 18 months to train them. The department plans to provide additional staff to auto theft, which Davis called a precursor to identity theft, burglary, fraud and Internet theft. The current auto theft detail of four officers and a sergeant, is buried under 30-40 caseloads eliminating their ability to be proactive, Davis said.

The department used grant funds to purchase license plate readers for a limited number of its patrol cars, which are capable of scanning hundreds of plates to identify stolen cars and vehicles used to commit crimes. These devices are in a training and testing phase.

The department also has adopted an Automatic Vehicle Locater into its 9-1-1 CAD system, which allows the closest patrol to arrive at priority calls quickly and safely reducing response times and allowing more efficient use of limited patrols.

Police departments throughout the country rely on San Jose’s strategic gang program to address gang crime. The use of prevention, intervention and suppression to rid areas of gang crime, which often leads to burglaries and auto thefts, has been working. In addition, Davis cited the involvement of community-based organizations as part of the program’s success.

Davis also described the department’s truancy abatement and burglary suppression program. He noted that many burglaries happen during the day when residents are out and truants are not in school. During 2006-07, officers detained and processed 6,900 juveniles.

Davis described a new police program called IMPACT, which uses data to identify where crime and public safety problems exist so that assignments go to areas that are most impacted.

Neighborhoods Commission
The city council also voted unanimously to develop a Neighborhoods Commission as a two-year pilot project with several caveats. However, the commission will not duplicate the work of any of the existing commissions including the Planning, Library, Parks and Recreation and Historic Landmarks Commissions. It will not be another level of review for land use projects. No decisions will be made about staffing and budget requirements until the two-year pilot program and its annual work plan is approved by the council.

In addition, the council asked the city staff to analyze all the existing boards, commissions and other public bodies and the costs of each, to find redundancies and opportunities for consolidation, efficiency and eliminated.