Sidewalks. Gilroy Gardens. Raises for city officials. The
possibility of a massive new mall. Public safety. The $14 million
school facilities debt.
Gilroy – Sidewalks. Gilroy Gardens. Raises for city officials. The possibility of a massive new mall. Public safety. The $14 million school facilities debt.
Those were some of the hot-button issues city council and mayoral candidates debated Thursday night at Gavilan College. Planning Commissioners Tim Day and Cat Tucker, former Councilman Bob Dillon, lawyer Perry Woodward, and incumbents Roland Velasco and Russ Valiquette are running for the three available council seats. Councilman Craig Gartman and Mayor Al Pinheiro are vying for the mayor’s seat.
Dispatch editors and writers joined two women from the American Association of University Women to form the panel that posed questions to the candidates.
Sidewalks Dominate discussion
The city is refining the proposed ordinance introduced Aug. 6 that reiterates residents’ responsibility for the sidewalks outside their homes and the liability they could share with the city, which splits repair costs 50-50 with homeowners.
Woodward said he’d spend $2 million a year to repair sidewalks in a triage-like fashion until the “problem’s under control.”
To get the $2 million, Woodward said he’d cut “some of those 42 top-level jobs.” He was referring to the “exempt group” of top-level city employees for which the city council approved a salary structure to ensure they earn about 15 percent more than their subordinates and 10 percent more than similar positions in comparable cities.
Valiquette furrowed his brow when Woodward also said he’d like to spend $20,000 on a citywide survey of residents to see how exactly they’d like their money spent.
“It’s fine for you to sit there and say there’s no $2 million,” Woodward told Valiquette, “but we’re waiting for the city administrator to come forward with the gap closure plan, and that’s the place to start.”
Velasco joined Valiquette in criticizing Woodward’s spending approach and said it demonstrated “a fundamental lack of understanding” of how city finances work.
Residents Phil and Claudia Johnson attended the televised debate with about 25 others and wrote in an e-mail Friday that Velasco and Valiquette “mostly defended the current council and (ran) on their past efforts rather than any future vision.”
Tucker’s vision involved using the $350,000 from the city’s 50-50 coffer to fix about 40 sidewalks a year for roughly 10 years. She also said the city should refund residents who used the 50-50 program “out of fairness.”
Dillon wasn’t having any of it.
“Can we just fix the damn sidewalks with a bond?” he asked.
But Velasco cautioned that the public sidewalk task force concluded bonding was a bad idea since the problem is ongoing.
That’s why the 50-50 program has grown to take care of problem, Valiquette and Day said. But Gartman said presenting the 50-50 program as a reactive tool is misleading since its funding level dropped to zero when Pinheiro came into office and is now back to pre-Pinheiro levels.
Power in City Hall
Long-time serving City Administrator Jay Baksa oversaw all these funding fluctuations, and his name came up multiple times Thursday night since some see him as too powerful.
“Jay wields too much power in that he tries to drive decisions by the council,” Gartman said. He added ….that city “staff is coming to us and saying, ‘By the way, this is what we need to have you do on the council.’ It should be the opposite.”
Valiquette acknowledged “our city administrator is very strong, but he’s good at what he does.” Pinheiro added that Baksa’s alleged influence shouldn’t overshadow the fact that Gartman has “voted with council 96 percent of the time, so maybe he’s rubber-stamping along with us,” a facetious reference to criticism that the council rubber-stamps Baksa’s ideas.
CITY SALARIES
One issue Baksa has defended and that the candidates took up was the exempt group’s salary policy.
Day said the city “may end up paying a higher salary, but in the long run you’ll pay more for average results.” But Dillon said he’d “be happy to hire ordinarily competent people at a reasonable market price,” lest the city’s salaries continually “ping pong” off fluctuating wages in nearby cities. Tucker said the policy was unprecedented in the private sector, and Woodward called it “ridiculous.”
Velasco cautioned that canceling the plan could result in another union the city will have to deal with. Both Valiquette and Pinheiro said the new program deserves patience and can always be tweaked in the future. Pinheiro declined to answer a question from the Dispatch panel that asked whether the mayor checks nearby insurance agencies to adjust his employees’ salaries (he owns Pinheiro Insurance), but said he does make exceptions “to bring quality individuals into the office”
TRANSPARENCY
Tucker said the city should embrace transparency by holding quarterly review of the budget to avoid surprises.
Gilroy also needs a “sunshine” policy, Woodward said, to elucidate government happenings beyond what’s called for in the Brown Act, California’s open-government law.
“Perry’s a little Johnny-come-lately on this subject because in closed session I had already started talking to the council about this topic,” Velasco said, adding that he wants to see how San Jose deals with the issue before he decides anything.
LAND AND JOBS
The council has struggled to mimic San Jose’s high-paying jobs by reserving 660 acres of land east of Gilroy for high-paying technology-oriented jobs, but the Westfield Corporation wants to build a mega-mall on 120 of those acres instead.
While Tucker was the only one who opposed the project, Day said he wouldn’t decide on the Westfield project until all the facts were in, but the retail site “may be a major source of funding to take care of infrastructure on east side of 101.”
The mall would also bring in more money than the empty land that’s there now, Gartman said, but Valiquette said a vibrant, livable area is the key to luring high-paying jobs.
The downtown could be this area, and nearly all the candidates acknowledged that the open space naturally draws more attention to downtown, which the council has spent millions on to improve.
One open space the city plans to acquire for $13 to $25 million is Gilroy Gardens.
“Buying Gilroy gardens is probably going to have to be done in self defense if you don’t want to see Hecker Pass tire and brake out there,” Dillon said.
School Facility Funding
The issue of pacing growth with school capacity came up briefly, with Day saying the city can’t restrict development based on over-crowded schools because developers pay impact fees to accommodate more students, and the city can’t control how, when or where the district builds.
