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Santa Clara councilmembers have a new battle on their hands: Whether officials should have their video cameras on during online public meetings. The argument stemmed from a petition by San Jose resident and Santa Clara business owner Kirk Vartan, who asked the council to discuss adopting an on-screen requirement at the next City Council meeting....
Santa Clara County to redistribute COVID-19 fines to small businesses
Santa Clara County will begin the process of returning thousands of dollars in COVID-19 safety violation fines back to small businesses. Supervisors voted unanimously Tuesday to create a grant program that redistributes money collected from pandemic-related health and safety violations back to local businesses. Once developed, the county is expected to partner with local financial...
San Jose business group may have violated rules in CEO hiring
Silicon Valley’s powerful chamber of commerce announced its new CEO a week before its Board of Directors could vote to approve it—an apparent violation of its bylaws. And now some of the group’s top leaders are questioning the hiring process and calling it flawed. The Silicon Valley Organization, plagued by months of scandal over a...
Will South Bay students need COVID shots to return to school?
Now that anyone over age 16 can get a COVID-19 vaccine, will South Bay school districts require them for students returning to the classroom? Not exactly. In California, state law requires that public school students receive vaccinations for certain transmissible diseases, including polio, Diphtheria, Tetanus, Pertussis, Measles, Mumps, Rubella, Hepatitis B and chickenpox. COVID-19 is not...
Silicon Valley unemployment rate drops during slow recovery
A new jobs analysis from a regional nonprofit think tank suggests Silicon Valley is slowly recovering from the economy’s tumble last year. But the region has a long way to go before getting to pre-pandemic levels. The data analysis comes from Joint Venture Silicon Valley’s Institute for Regional Studies, the nonprofit’s research arm that publishes the Silicon...
San Jose’s micro-retail center could shape future public spaces
A downtown San Jose business incubator and shopping center could be a blueprint for local lawmakers to develop future successful public spaces. A recent Knight Foundation study found widely applicable lessons learned from Moment, a micro-retail space in San Pedro Square, including how to build community engagement around public spaces, reimagining old and neglected spaces...
Californians 16+ eligible for COVID vaccines, here’s what South Bay residents should know
All California residents 16 years and older can start signing up for COVID-19 vaccine appointments today. So what does that mean for the more than two million residents of Santa Clara County? County health officials said Tuesday to expect the first few days of eligibility to result in overwhelmed appointment systems. Not everyone will be...
San Jose trash rates expected to increase due to household waste, improper recycling
San Jose residents will likely pay more to get their garbage and recycling picked up from the curb next year. Thanks to increased single-family household waste and contaminated recyclables during the pandemic, the San Jose City Council accepted a report Monday that higher garbage rates are likely unavoidable, despite the financial strains residents are feeling....
Santa Clara County receives large COVID vaccine allocation, halts Johnson & Johnson administration
Santa Clara County public health officials announced Tuesday they are receiving tens of thousands of additional COVID-19 vaccine doses from the federal government. That allocation comes as the county halts administering doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine due to extremely rare cases of blood clotting. The recent allocation will allow Santa Clara County to...
Proposal to build housing on San Jose ranch property sparks controversy
The owners of a large horse ranch property in south San Jose want to start building houses on their land—and neighbors are livid. Hero Ranch owner Angelo Heropoulos asked county supervisors last week to change the land’s open space designation to residential, allowing up to eight homes to be built on the property. The ranch...