6 best local decisions in 50 years
Never let it be said that this column lacks all balance: Today, a week after examining the worst, I’m covering the half-dozen best decisions by local government leaders over the last 50 years. These come in no particular order:
REBUILDING DOWNTOWN MOUNTAIN VIEW
— When I covered the city of Mountain View in 1978, downtown Castro Street consisted largely of Chinese restaurants, a few old-line businesses and a high-rise patrolled by dogs (known as “Dog City”). But a progressive council was laying the groundwork for a renaissance.
Eventually, the city built a superbly designed City Hall, theater and library, and added the kind of street furniture — benches, crosswalks, sidewalks — that made visitors feel comfortable. It was all helped by a well-run city government guided by longtime City Manager Kevin Duggan.
Aided by the addition of Google north of Bayshore, Mountain View’s downtown now bustles with restaurants and street life. It’s arguably come farther than any other city center in the valley (Campbell has a claim as well). SAN JOSE STATE RESURGENCE — Over the stern objections of San Jose traffic engineers in the mid1980s, SJSU leaders received permission to close San Carlos Street, which once bisected campus between Fourth and 10th streets. It was a key move in creating a more cohesive campus.
With 30,000 students now, San Jose State is finally beginning to shed its image as a commuter school. The old red-brick dorms have almost all come down — replaced by high-rise housing — and the school is adding a $130 million recreation and aquatic complex and 107,000-square-foot science building. A new student union building offers a stunning variety of food.
Heavily dominated by construction, the campus isn’t as pristine as it was under President Don Kassing (2004-08), but it has a brawny momentum. FORSAKING COYOTE — This falls under the category of the road not taken, but it is nonetheless a significant plus. In the first years of the new
century, developers and their allies began pushing hard to develop Coyote Valley for housing. Among those who greeted the development favorably was Mayor Ron Gonzales, who co-chaired the Coyote Valley Task Force.
In 2006, the mayor was hit with an indictment in connection with a city garbage contract. While those charges were eventually dismissed, the political blow to Gonzales was profound. The drive to develop Coyote stalled. Under new Mayor Chuck Reed, it was forsaken altogether. A good thing: It would have stretched city services and added to San Jose’s sprawl.
BABY BULLET — On the day in 2004 that Caltrain opened its speedy Baby Bullet train, I took it and wrote a piece saying it was a winner. Allowing only four or five stops between San Jose and San Francisco — and getting there in an hour — suddenly made the train competitive with the automobile. I might have understated its impact. Though the Bullet has gotten a few minutes slower, Caltrain has increased its ridership to more than 60,000 riders daily, a far better performance than light rail.
The Bullet has been instrumental in San Francisco’s emergence as a home for young people who commute to the valley, upending their parents’ travel patterns. It is the most profound public transit improvement of the last 25 years. And it did not take that much money. Credit then-state Sen. Jackie Speier with convincing then-Gov. Gray Davis to throw in $127 million for the project.
GETTING THE SHARKS — Few things have done more for San Jose, a town famously lacking glue, than the arrival of the Sharks in a new arena downtown in 1993. (They had begun playing at the Cow Palace in 1991.) The story has an element of serendipity: In 1988, then-Mayor Tom McEnery was forced into an election over whether to build the arena on a site formerly occupied by Downtown Datsun.
McEnery narrowly pulled out a victory. But initially, the arena was not planned for an ice hockey team. When the Sharks became a possibility, the $162.5 million building was redesigned for hockey’s larger dimensions, creating the so-called “bulge’’ that gives the boxy metallic building a modicum of flair. Nearly a quarter-century later, the SAP Center is seen as dated in the sports world. But it hosted the Stanley Cup finals in 2016.
DOWNTOWN SAN JOSE CITY HALL — It took political courage, primarily from council members David Pandori and Pat Dando, and later Mayor Ron Gonzales. But moving City Hall from its old digs on Mission Street to downtown Santa Clara Street had benefits that went beyond transferring a city workforce to an urban location.
The $384 million City Hall, which opened in the summer of 2005, has become the center for political rallies and marches. And its design by Richard Meier remains striking, highlighted by a 18-story high-rise and a free-standing dome that elicits comment even though it never quite fulfilled the vision of being a public meeting place.