Tag: don gage

Don Gage—a South County icon of politics and a beloved member of the Gilroy community—died on March 25 at age 79.  Gage’s political career started...

Sig Sanchez—former mayor of Gilroy and loyal advocate for South County throughout his 55-year public service career—died peacefully Jan. 30, according to family members.

TWAS THE MONTH before General Plan hearings, in Olde Gilroy,

Mayor Don Gage shocked a packed city council chambers Monday evening by resigning his office at the beginning of the meeting.

GILROY—In a move that was a “total surprise” to the leadership of the Gilroy Welcome Center, Mayor Don Gage led a push Monday night to slash $200,000 from the organization that promotes tourism, the city and its businesses around the world and redirect the money to the city’s general fund to support activities for at-risk youth.

Sunday Night Lights. That’s what we’re talking about. It will be under typically dour-gray skies when the San Francisco 49ers travel north to clash with their new rivals, the Seattle Seahawks. The lights will come on for the National Football Conference championship. It’s a late afternoon game – 3:30 west coast start – built for prime time TV around the country and it has EPIC written all over it. As a longtime 49ers fan, you have to love it. There’s nothing better to stoke the fan fires than a bitter rivalry, and this new Hatfield-and-McCoys-worthy feud harkens back to the old days when the Los Angeles Rams were all things rotten. This blossoming match-up might even be better since the trash-yakking Seahawks are coached by “Pretty Boy” Pete Carroll who left USC just in time to duck under the trail of rules violations and NCAA sanctions. Former Stanford and now 49ers coach Jim Harbaugh doesn’t like Pete one bit, and that’s the thing he’ll have to overcome to win Sunday. Jim would like nothing better than to run it down Pete’s team’s throat – especially in the Red Zone. But he has to be smarter than that, he has to be creative offensively when it counts, he has to balance smash-mouth football with Bill Walsh genius and he has to pretend that squeaky Pete on the opposite sideline is just a lousy rendition of a Disney character.

Hundreds of new jobs and truckloads of natural and organic foods are coming to Gilroy.

It is gratifying indeed that our community recognizes the value of a community library – so much so that a continuation of the library parcel tax passed with a whopping 81 percent of the vote. Getting the necessary two-thirds majority to continue the $33.66 per year charge for a single family home was not a problem.

Drives me crazy to hear something like I did this morning – that the stands for the fans are uninhabitable at Gilroy High’s Garcia-Elder Stadium – this, just before the start of football season for GHS, Christopher High and Gavilan College. This, after the school district had to move graduation ceremonies – those are in June by the way – because of these same “unsafe” bleachers. What got done in between? This is yet another example of why I strongly believe that school district’s need to hire an on-staff project management director that has a background in construction – someone who can tell b.s. from reality and can come up with solutions. The person would be independent from, but wori with the facilities manager who is in charge of maintaining and operating facilities. What school districts need to do is: 1. Form an advisory facility committee composed of members from the business and construction world; 2. Hire a staff administrative-level project construction management person to oversee all facilities projects. That person would negotiate contracts and have, as clients, the taxpayers and the school district. If districts would make those changes, a lot of money would be saved and a lot of battles avoided. And, really, when you’re talking about spending millions of dollars in bond money and getting the best bang for the buck, doesn’t it make perfect sense?