With a full slate of candidates, The Weekly wanted to give voters insight into each candidate’s position on a slew of issues we believe matter most to Santa Clarans.
Consequently, we asked them seven questions, giving them the flexibility to answer as many as they wanted. We limited their responses to 1,000 words (allowing a bit of flexibility for how disparate word processors count words). Their responses appear verbatim.
The Silicon Valley Voice will roll out each candidate’s answers in the days leading up to the election.
How do you think the city handled the Super Bowl and the FIFA World Cup this year? If you were on the city council, what would you have done differently? How would you balance the desire to have more events like these at Levi’s Stadium with neighborhood impacts?
People were safe and games were generally uneventful. My biggest worry was Santa Clara being in the news for something other than the events at the stadium, so I want to give a big shout out to Public Safety and all of the workers, contractors, and volunteers who made this a peaceful success.
On the revenue side, San Jose had 30,000+ people in their streets at watch parties every game day while the crowds largely avoided Santa Clara. We had our own events and watch parties too, but the only place outside the stadium 30,000+ people were gathered during this timeframe was Great America. In the decade between Super Bowls, Santa Clara did not really do much to create an entertainment district that could retain the hundreds of thousands of people who came to our city and ultimately spent their money elsewhere.
Let us build out the entertainment district and support the stadium with a world class experience that invites people to our city during event days instead of warning people to stay away because of traffic and parking concerns. It will be better for everyone, including neighborhoods.
Over the past ten years, the city has added lots of housing but has floundered with respect to public amenities and infrastructure (the swim center is in disrepair, the convention center is falling apart and the BMX Park is slated to move, just to name a few). What more should the city be doing to prevent the loss of — or add more — public amenities and find a better balance between housing and public amenities, without asking residents to approve another $400 million bond measure?
Santa Clara should never have required a bond measure to maintain our infrastructure. If we had used even single-digit percentages of our >$billion budget for maintenance each year we never would have lost the Swim Center or need to worry about the Convention Center and Triton Museum. We should prioritize maintenance, control spending, and actively manage budgets so that we do not continue to lose public amenities, city activities, and recreational resources. We should develop public-private partnerships so that city programs are not competing with partner programs, like swimming lessons, and enhance our popular – and profitable – offerings so we do not lose benefits like a national BMX program.
We should reduce or remove field and Senior Center fees and treat the costs as investments in our communities. We should be more creative and supportive when thinking about public amenities and take every loss seriously while looking to expand services. Government should not be run like a business; people pay taxes, government provides services at cost. And government certainly should not be a charity.
According to Silicon Valley At Home, while Santa Clara does well to meet its Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA) numbers for Low Income and Above Moderate Income households, it struggles to create housing for low-income households. What should the city do to create PERMANENT spaces for the poorest Santa Clara residents?
Santa Clara lacks basic city programs for people without housing. We need safe parking areas with staffing and services, voucher programs to get families off streets immediately, and public-private partnerships with retail and grocery stores to give unhoused people agency and help re-integrate them into communities. We should remind developers that communities are more than just housing units and they should contribute to community programs and attract synergistic services. Set up navigation centers at libraries with service staff. We have to ensure that people on the edge do not lose the housing they are already in. It is easier to keep people in existing housing than to have to rehome families. Monies should go to rental and mortgage assistance programs, to hire staff to manage official camp sites, in partnership with businesses with empty buildings or lots, where people can stay safely. We need ordinances that create affordable housing for people making minimum wage, not just the current policies that allow affordable housing to target families making over $200,000 and grant developers immediate density bonuses at the same time.
Silicon Valley Power has increased rates six times since January 2022 as the utility continues to expand. Would you like to see this expansion continue? With more data centers than ever, do you think SVP’s trajectory is in the best interest of residents?
Rates are increasing largely because of new infrastructure we need to support industrial users – including data centers that have been approved but not yet built, waiting for more power. Fees for new industrial users should cover costs of bringing additional load; residential rates should mainly be affected by shared infrastructure maintenance. We move $millions from SVP to our General Fund, but some of that should be used to stabilize rates to stay within cost of living increases.
Almost 95% percent of the power SVP provides goes to industrial and commercial uses – mostly data centers. Some perspective: we could double our 130,000-person population and not require any additional power by closing a single mid-sized data center. Unbelievably, we are looking to double the power that SVP sources for more data centers. I would be all for that if I could ignore the impacts to our neighborhoods, drain on natural resources, increased risk of wildfires, and loss of land that should support residents and retail. While residential rates increase.
Name some issues on which you would have voted differently from your predecessor and some that you would have voted the same. Explain why.
I never would have voted to sell Great America. I never would have voted in favor of projects that destroyed the nature of our General Plan and pushed higher densities into existing neighborhoods or created housing without supportive retail in mixed-use zones. I never would have voted to fight the California Voting Rights Act lawsuit denying minorities representation. And I certainly would not have voted to appeal the ruling. No explanation necessary.
How do you plan to balance neighborhood-specific advocacy with citywide budget and policy tradeoffs?
No tradeoffs here: focusing on the nature of neighborhoods should be a citywide policy and the budget priorities should support that. This does not mean that we will not have change, and not everybody will be happy with what happens. But we absolutely should feel how minority voices are represented in what ultimately will be majority decisions. It should be our policy. Santa Clarans should have an idea of what kind of city they want to live in, and their government should represent the people. The state treats cities in similar areas the same, while every city knows how they are different, down to specific neighborhoods, down to specific streets. We should be proud and defend our residents from those outside our city who would tell them otherwise.
What would you do to ensure that the Related project does not see another several years of delay?
I would work with Related to help speed up approvals and keep costs down on the project they are building on city land. I would help find tenants we think would best represent the city to the world, knowing that there is a stadium across the way with a global reputation. I would hire dedicated employees to work with Related to help accelerate and polish the largest project in the city. And I would let Related know that their political shenanigans are not welcome here. Work before play.
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Gary Ferraris
Karen Hardy
David Kertes