If you’ve ridden a VTA bus or light rail lately, you may have noticed a “VTA 30th Anniversary” logo displayed across the fleet. It’s a small symbol of how far the agency has come and how much work remains to make our transportation system all it can be. VTA officially became the Santa Clara Valley...
Urbanowski: Public art — accessible for all
Palo Alto’s recent Code:ART, a free, biennial interactive media art festival, reminds us of the breadth, depth and impact of public art in cities across our county. Code:ART transformed downtown Palo Alto into a vibrant playground of light, sound and imagination, reimagining the city’s downtown streets, plazas and alleyways into a luminous landscape. Simply put,...
Paz-Cedillos: The power of place — and the courage to stay the course
Two weeks ago, I joined more than 700 community builders, educators and changemakers in San Diego for the William Julius Wilson Institute’s Power of Place convening — an annual gathering hosted by the Harlem Children’s Zone. What began as a small meeting of 120 practitioners four years ago has grown into a national movement: a...
Chao: Santa Clara County’s next assessor should be a reformer, not an insider
As a fellow minority woman who has served in elected office for nearly a decade — including as mayor of a prominent city today— I found the recent portrayal of the assessor’s race as “a contest between two minority women” to be strikingly off the mark. This framing trivializes the issues at stake and overlooks...
Williams: Protecting our health care is the smartest investment we can make
Fiscal responsibility is about more than balancing a budget, it’s about making smart, strategic investments that protect our community for the long term. Here in Silicon Valley, we know being enterprising means leveraging every resource to its greatest potential. Your county government has embraced that ethos — stewarding limited public dollars to maximize returns, strengthening...
Robell: Don’t fall for old tricks to raise taxes with Measure A
Santa Clara County voters are being asked to approve Measure A, a sales tax hike that would push the rate to a staggering 10% — with the potential to reach 11% when combined with the transit tax that the county opted into for next year’s election. This isn’t just a small bump in your tax...
Zhang: Assessor race looks to be a contest between two minority women
The Santa Clara County assessor position, which was held by the same public official for 30 years prior to his retirement in July, is a showdown between two accomplished minority women. That much became clear during the Oct. 7 candidate forum hosted by the League of Women Voters at Cupertino’s Quinlan Community Center. All four...
Barrow: Stop punishing the poor — even when they work for you
In his recent San José Spotlight op-ed, HomeFirst CEO René Ramirez wrote, “Punishing people for being poor will not make tents disappear.” He’s right. But poverty isn’t only punished by cities or police. It’s punished inside the very systems that claim to be fighting it. I know because I used to work for HomeFirst. During...
Collins: ADUs remain a bright spot in San Jose’s struggling housing market
As San Jose grapples with declining home building permits, one sector remains resilient: accessory dwelling units, also known as ADUs. Thanks to a series of state laws passed several years ago, homeowners now have more control over what they can do with their property, and that includes building ADUs. Once considered a niche housing option,...
Op-ed: Let’s honor Larry Itliong without erasing Ernesto Galarza
We appreciate Joyce Chu’s Oct. 5. article, San Jose path could be renamed for Filipino labor leader, spotlighting the efforts and extraordinary contributions of Larry Itliong. Filipino labor organizers like Itliong played a pivotal, and too often overlooked, role in California’s labor history. Honoring his legacy is long overdue. But the proposed location — the...