San Jose: Kim Walesh, the city’s longtime economic development director, is retiring.
She spent nearly two decades guiding San Jose’s historic transformation from a sprawling suburban expanse into an urban community, luring some of Silicon Valley’s most prized companies to bring jobs and revenue into the nation’s 10th-largest city and in turn, making San Jose a player on the national stage.
But now Kim Walesh is making room for San Jose’s next generation of movers and shakers.
Walesh, who served as the city’s economic development director for nearly a decade and also as a deputy city manager for the past seven years, announced this week that she is retiring after 18 years with the city. She will leave her post in City Hall at the end of March.
“It’s been the opportunity of a lifetime to grow professionally and to serve the city that I live in and love,” Walesh said in an interview. “... But I’m starting to feel like it’s time to transition to the next stage of my life.”
The 56-year-old said she’s not sure what comes next for her just yet but that she is looking forward to taking the gap year that she never took when she was younger. This spring felt like the right time for her to take that leap both personally and in terms of the projects that she was working on in the city, she said.
“There no greater champion from San Jose than Kim,” Mayor Sam Liccardo said. “We’ve benefitted significantly from both her passion for elevating this city and her vision of the city that rightfully has San Jose batting its weight among other large metros in this country.”
Though Walesh has
played an integral role in helping to persuade many renowned companies and investors to choose San Jose for their next business ventures, one of her biggest accomplishments surely is the progress she has made toward bringing the city’s largest, most complex and transformative development projects in San Jose’s history — the Diridon Station area and Google’s proposed neighboring transit village — to reality.
Google’s village would add 7.3 million square feet of offices, 4,000 homes, shops, restaurants, a hotel, 10 parks, cultural and entertainment hubs, and immersive and interactive educational elements near downtown San Jose’s Diridon train hub. The Diridon Station area surrounding Google’s village and the transit center could see up to an additional 12,900 residential units, 13.7 million square feet of offices and 1 million square feet of active and retail spaces.
Walesh has been involved in the development vision since the early days — from taking community input about the layout of the Diridon Station Area Plan to attending a meeting with Google Vice President Mark Golan and asking him to consider San Jose for future expansions, even before the Mountain
View tech giant truly showed interest in the city.
She then guided the first phase of the planning process for Google’s transit village, which lasted from 2017 to late 2018. That included completing real estate transactions and developing a memorandum of understanding, and the subsequent phase 2, which consists of the review and ultimately the approval of Google’s Downtown West plan and updating the Diridon Station Area Plan to match the increased height limits of Google’s proposal. The second phase, according to Walesh, has been a collaborative effort of about 80 people across 10 different departments in City Hall.
“I like to say that I’ve been the conductor of the orchestra, but its an incredibly large orchestra and they’re just an amazing team to work with,” Walesh said.
The planning and development of both Google’s transit village and the Diridon Station area will last for decades to come.
But initial approvals for the entitlement, the environmental impact reports and the development agreement between Google and the city are expected to take place at the city’s Planning Commission in April and the City Council in May — just weeks after Walesh vacates her position at the city.
Looking back at the past four years, Walesh said it was “remarkable luck” that Google not only took interest in developing offices in the Diridon Station area but on really expanding the city’s downtown core and making reality the community’s dreams of what the area around the Diridon Station might consist of.