Guest View

With my support, the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority held two community meetings in Gilroy to introduce the possibility of and receive feedback on an affordable housing project at the Gilroy Transit Center. However, the project described in their request for approval to authorize...

Whenever I think of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, two things come to mind: sales and whitewashing. As a capitalist nation, we will frequently throw any social and moral awareness behind a paywall regardless of the original person’s message. The irony of an MLK sale...

Since Gov. Gavin Newsom’s first State of the State address six years ago, California has stopped pursuing a high-speed rail system that actually connects the Bay Area to Southern California, as was promised to voters in 2008. And in that void, politicians, pundits and...

I rise today to adjourn in the memory of Marty Cheek—a beautiful soul, the publisher of Morgan Hill and Gilroy Life, an arts and science advocate, a man who loved his community, and his community loved him.  Marty was born in Hollister and was a...

What would make Gilroy an even better place to live? It’s not billboards, especially not huge electronic ones. But the City is considering changes in our ordinance which would allow them. The Mitigated Negative Declaration should be denied because it claims that our environment won’t...

As we draw nearer to Thanksgiving, I am reminded of this holiday’s origins and significance. There are some interesting and noteworthy parallels with today’s world, two years after Covid-19 began. While Thanksgiving has only been a national holiday since it was established in 1863 by...

For years, I have been railing against the so-called jobs/housing imbalance, believing that the underlying construction of the logic that forms this seemingly simple premise is fundamentally flawed. While there are several flaws in the jobs/housing imbalance premise, this discussion will be limited to...

There’s an old adage that one must first acknowledge a problem exists before it can be addressed. It bears repeating because of a huge disagreement over the size of California’s state budget deficit. In December, the Legislature’s independent budget analyst said the state faces a...

On Nov. 12, my wife Lucy and I attended the most powerful and impactful panel discussion ever. The constant theme was the importance of continuing the fight and struggle for social justice, equal rights, dignity and respect for all. The venue was Wheeler Auditorium...

At a recent city function, a guest speaker said Anderson Dam was built in 18 months but the retrofit would take 8-10 years. It was his next comment that resonated with me: “That’s just the way it is.” I sat there thinking, nothing is...