This is the weekly open forum for anyone who has something to say about anything.
20 Comments
Friday’s Mercury-News announced that San Jose is considering a ban on fast food
restaurants.
Let’s nip this bad idea in the bud immediately. You can argue about the health
risks of hamburgers, but the fact is that we don’t need Big Brother government
telling us what to eat. People need the freedom to make their own dietary
choices. That’s the American way.
At a time when governments at all levels are whining that their expenses exceed
revenues, we don’t need additional government meddling in our lives. The
government needs to stick to basics like police and fire protection, and cut
out the nonsense. Eliminating this proposed burger ban is a good place to
start.
Whenever I go to a different part of the country, I realize how lucky we are here in our eclectic choice of radio listening. While we have our computerized commercial behemoths programmed by marketing consultants, down at the bottom of the dial we have several local stations featuring actual in-studio announcers who select their own music and interview guests.
That list is slated to get a little shorter next month as KUSP in Santa Cruz, until now one of the last of the old-school NPR stations, is planning to emulate cross-bay rival KAZU by replacing local programming with syndicated NPR shows—the same East Coast-centric pablum already supplied by KQED and KAZU.
I’ve lived several different places in the Valley, but I’ve always been able to tune in KUSP. I’ll miss it.
All the more reason to support those stations that are left. Local gem KKUP 91.5 is having their Oldies Marathon this weekend. Unlike those public TV fundraising marathons where they repeat the same Roy Orbison, Wayne Dyer and Andre Rieu shows over and over until the audience is totally alienated, KKUP’s marathons appeal to fans of the featured genre.
Because of the discussion about the fire department training facility at Montgomery and Park, I went to have a look at it today.
It is not exactly as previously described. It occupies the space between Park, Montgomery, the railroad tracks and Los Gatos Creek. It lies totally on the north side of the creek.
I don’t know whether the land on the south side of the creek along San Carlos is included in the proposal for a park. This comprises a carwash on the corner, a nice old house and a strange little triangular lot which currently houses a sheet metal fabricator.
The developer who is building housing on the site of the old Del Monte plant (is that Swenson?) has laid out the Los Gatos Creek Trail through there. In fact, the part south of Auzerais is already open, and there is a sign stating that the old Del Monte parking lot is slated to become a park. (It’s not a very large one.)
This part of the Los Gatos Creek Trail comes out at the end of Dupont Street under the San Carlos bridge. All you need to do is cross the railroad tracks and there you would be in the new park. (You can see it very well on Google Street View.)
This site is ideally situated to become part of the Los Gatos Creek Trail park system. It would be criminal to sell the site for housing.
The decrepit industrial buildings on the north side of Park west of the tracks (nicely photgraphed by Felipe Buitrago in this week’s Metro) are already slated to become high-density housing, according to the posted sign. And more high density housing is going in on the south side of San Carlos.
With the coming influx of new population, this neighborhood has a critical need for a park.
I notice that the buildings on the north side of Park at Montgomery have been vacant for quite a while. Weren’t these intended to be part of the fabled “baseball stadium without a team”? What is the story with them?
The part of the creek between Park and San Fernando is problematic. At the light rail station at San Fernando there is already a little park. Between there and Santa Clara St. there is a parking lot. Given that a new parking lot is replacing the old Westinghouse building on Stockton, part or all of this parking lot could be turned into a park, which would then connect with the existing park by the arena.
Going back to the part about “just crossing the railroad tracks”, there may be something fishy here. The part of the Guadalupe River Park on the west bank connecting Julian to Autumn St. by the shopping center has never been opened across the railroad track. The east bank would blocked too, except for the diversion onto the old hobo trail under the bridge.
Why? There are plenty of other places where pedestrians can cross railroad tracks. Just a few yards from there, those same tracks cross Autumn near Cinnabar, without a gate, just signal lights. How much do signal lights cost?
Let’s make sure that the city follows through on turning the fire training property into a park. I propose that they keep the tower. It would make a nice centerpiece.
I gotta agree with #1. We are WAY short of police personnel, our city streets are positively Third World in many places, the pension/retirement/lifetime healthcare budgets are about to break the bank, and the mayor and council want to set up yet another bureaucracy to have these same benefits, with food police checking out every McDonalds and Wendy’s in the city limits???!!! Where are their priorities? What union proposed this plan to increase membership by hiring food cops? If this proposal gets off the ground to a hearing before the council, I’d move to fire every councilmember who supports this nonsense. Let’s just add everyone else to the Madison Nguyen recall effort. Leave that nonsense to our neighbor to the north.
Imagine the corporate leadership of a major company—let’s use an airline as an example, faced with potentially catastrophic challenges (think fuel costs, an aging fleet, and a reduction in seats sold), holding a news conference announcing the replacement of its signature desert cookies with apple slices—in the interests of its passengers’ health. Now granted, thinner passengers could potentially make for increased carrier profits, but how impressed do you think the stockholders would be with the company’s focus? Not much, I’ll bet. In fact, not much to the point where they’d probably start canning people from the top down.
JMO’C has it right, it’s time for the stockholders in this city to clean house, starting with Cindy Chavez for demonstrating that political experience isn’t always what it’s trumped up to be. Fat burgers!—that’s what’s on the mind of this would-be mayor? Apparently neither she nor her advisors are familiar with Mark Twain’s admonition that “It is better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and remove all doubt.”
What an absolute embarrassment of a civic leader. Her city is burning and she’s taken up the fiddle.
Keep in mind who the “braintrust” is that proposed this fast-food silliness: Williams, Campos, and Chu. Not exactly the brightest lights on the dais.
Apparently they could get more headlines by proposing this “healthy food through land use planning” nonsense—rather than educating people to make better choices about their food and their health this group decides if we don’t have any more fastfood outlets people won’t eat at the others that are already there.
Is there no level of embarrassment that affects these councilmembers? Do they really enjoy being the laughing stock not only of our city but of others?
Will we ever rise above this legislating by press conference and really deal with significant issues? Probably not, but we can dream, can’t we?
The Governator decides to end the budget stalemate by putting the burden of the inability of our so-called leaders to agree on a budget on the backs/wallets of the rank and file workers. So now, DMV, the poster child for delay and inefficiency, lays off gazillions of part time workers, and everybody EXCEPT the people responsible for this logjam gets bumped down to minimum wage.
Yo! Ahnold. You and the Assembly and the Senate are responsible for this budget logjam, not the state employees.
My proposal—The minute that the budget has not been signed, sealed, and delivered on time as required by law, The State Assemblymembers, the State Senators, and the Governor stop getting paid. And, they don’t get it back once the budget is finally approved. It’s gone FOREVER.
Now this might not affect The Governator, ‘cuz he just don’t need the dough. But it may affect future governors. But even if it doesn’t, it will affect the legislators, who can find the time to give us any number of bullshit feelgood nonsense legislation, but haven’t been able to pass a budget on time for a couple of decades.
And if that proposal is insufficient to get them off their political dead asses, then we start a system of fines for each day the budget is late. I’d start it at $10,000.00 per day per Senator, per Assemblymember, and the Governor. If that isn’t enough, raise the ante until these bojos get down to the business we elected them to do.
Those proposals could be embodied in an initiative I’d gladly sign, and so would 20 million or so other voters, I daresay. It would win by a landslide.
You creatures of poor diet are misunderstanding this fast food issue. They are putting a moratorium on new locations, not raiding Wendy’s like a cannabis club. I find it refreshing that this city is conscious of balance instead of succumbing entirely to the diluted, uniform culture of suburban America. We have enough fast food restaurants for the people that want such materials in their stomachs.
As far as I’m concerned, this is only part of the problem. Fast food restaurants are not only a problem, but a symptom of our poor city planning. Such establishments are ubiquitous in any car-oriented strip mall nightmare. We should have moratoriums on streetfront parking and cul de sacs, too.
Nobody’s misunderstanding the fast food issue. There is a nationwide trend to over regulate fast food businesses because some self appointed food nazis have decided that these establishments are “bad” for us. Well, enough is enough. I’m sick and tired of government behaving like an overprotective parent, especially in these tough economic times. If governments would stop overreaching, these continuous budget problems would become a thing of the past.
7. It’s a plan that has some appeal. Certainly state workers shouldn’t be punished for the bumbling of the politicians.
But what it would mean is that independently wealthy legislators would be able to force legislation through by delaying things until the salaries cut off. Then those legislators without independent means would be forced to agree to their demands.
I know that badmouthing about the DMV is a tradition, like postcards of jackelopes. But the last time I had to go to the DMV, I made an appointment on-line, and I was in and out in ten minutes.
First of all, comparing food to tobacco and alcohol is a bogus comparison. And there’s no such thing as “second hand food” unless you eat somebody’s barf.
Second, I have no problems with laws that govern behavior problems from alcohol, like laws against drunken driving.
That said, I oppose regulations that restrict adults over 18 from buying and consuming tobacco and alcohol. Again, that is a disturbing function of the nanny state which thinks it knows what we should and should not be doing in our personal lives yet can’t balance a budget.
As an aside, most of this nanny state garbage comes out of the left. Left wing orthodoxy is to be “pro-choice” regarding a woman’s “right to choose.” Yet many of these same people want to tell us what we can and cannot eat. Let’s have some “pro-choice” behavior regarding food.
Let’s nip the idea of getting rid of FAST FOOD real quick! Good job with POPEYES CHICKEN Downtown! that’s real upscale for us and all our new high rises!
Isn’t downtown San Jose looking slick or what? If you look at what they planned for downtown in the last 30 years, they got everything they wanted. Downtown got residential, office and hotel highrises. Downtown also has arena, city hall and a riverpark. Safeway is going in the Tower 88 condo retail space. Look at all those coffee houses there. I sure like Camera 12 and 3 along with improve. The California theater is awsome. Don’t forget the Tech.
Bad food kills many people just as other addictions do. Treatment saps resources and money. If city workers get fat and keel over, who’s insuring their hospital stay? If a regular citizen does the same, insurance companies are out the money and they raise your premium. Nothing is without a chain of consequence in this world.
Aside from that, my original comparison was mainly in reference to the prevalence of these products and they access to them. People bitch about too many bars and liquor stores as if they’re the downfall of society, but how many more people are depressed and unhealthy because of McDonald’s as opposed to Jack Daniel’s? I’d say a lot.
The fleet of VTA’s Outreach cars stored at the terminal at Zanker Rd and Hiway 237, fuel up at the most expensive Chevron gas station in Milpitas. The one located at the corner of McCarthy Blvd and Bellew Dr. There’s an Arco gas station with lower gas prices across I-880 on Abbott Ave, but hey, saving money takes more effort.
Yea, Council since mid 80’s spent billions taxes dollars downtown to pay for long list of tax subsidized buildings, events, tax giveaways to political insiders developers and corporations that produced little jobs and taxes rather than use tax money to build a strong San Jose downtown and city wide jobs and tax base to pay for city services
Other cities have rebuilt their downtowns and other areas which produce significant jobs and tax revenues
Most San Jose residents will not go downtown but Council still spends millions on downtown rather them other areas of San Jose or helping new or small business which produces 80% of new jobs and millions taxes
When is waste of tax dollars on downtown and giveaways to political insiders going to stop?
Will voters demand accountability, stop tax giveaways and wasted tax spending or will San Jose declare bankruptcy first?
I just read in Roadshow that a 500 foot long bicycle bridge is being built across I280 near Hwy 85 at a projected cost of $10.2 MILLION!!! Extrapolating that out, it comes to about $105 MILLION per mile FOR A BICYCLE BRIDGE!
Friday’s Mercury-News announced that San Jose is considering a ban on fast food
restaurants.
Let’s nip this bad idea in the bud immediately. You can argue about the health
risks of hamburgers, but the fact is that we don’t need Big Brother government
telling us what to eat. People need the freedom to make their own dietary
choices. That’s the American way.
At a time when governments at all levels are whining that their expenses exceed
revenues, we don’t need additional government meddling in our lives. The
government needs to stick to basics like police and fire protection, and cut
out the nonsense. Eliminating this proposed burger ban is a good place to
start.
Whenever I go to a different part of the country, I realize how lucky we are here in our eclectic choice of radio listening. While we have our computerized commercial behemoths programmed by marketing consultants, down at the bottom of the dial we have several local stations featuring actual in-studio announcers who select their own music and interview guests.
That list is slated to get a little shorter next month as KUSP in Santa Cruz, until now one of the last of the old-school NPR stations, is planning to emulate cross-bay rival KAZU by replacing local programming with syndicated NPR shows—the same East Coast-centric pablum already supplied by KQED and KAZU.
I’ve lived several different places in the Valley, but I’ve always been able to tune in KUSP. I’ll miss it.
All the more reason to support those stations that are left. Local gem KKUP 91.5 is having their Oldies Marathon this weekend. Unlike those public TV fundraising marathons where they repeat the same Roy Orbison, Wayne Dyer and Andre Rieu shows over and over until the audience is totally alienated, KKUP’s marathons appeal to fans of the featured genre.
Because of the discussion about the fire department training facility at Montgomery and Park, I went to have a look at it today.
It is not exactly as previously described. It occupies the space between Park, Montgomery, the railroad tracks and Los Gatos Creek. It lies totally on the north side of the creek.
I don’t know whether the land on the south side of the creek along San Carlos is included in the proposal for a park. This comprises a carwash on the corner, a nice old house and a strange little triangular lot which currently houses a sheet metal fabricator.
The developer who is building housing on the site of the old Del Monte plant (is that Swenson?) has laid out the Los Gatos Creek Trail through there. In fact, the part south of Auzerais is already open, and there is a sign stating that the old Del Monte parking lot is slated to become a park. (It’s not a very large one.)
This part of the Los Gatos Creek Trail comes out at the end of Dupont Street under the San Carlos bridge. All you need to do is cross the railroad tracks and there you would be in the new park. (You can see it very well on Google Street View.)
This site is ideally situated to become part of the Los Gatos Creek Trail park system. It would be criminal to sell the site for housing.
The decrepit industrial buildings on the north side of Park west of the tracks (nicely photgraphed by Felipe Buitrago in this week’s Metro) are already slated to become high-density housing, according to the posted sign. And more high density housing is going in on the south side of San Carlos.
With the coming influx of new population, this neighborhood has a critical need for a park.
I notice that the buildings on the north side of Park at Montgomery have been vacant for quite a while. Weren’t these intended to be part of the fabled “baseball stadium without a team”? What is the story with them?
The part of the creek between Park and San Fernando is problematic. At the light rail station at San Fernando there is already a little park. Between there and Santa Clara St. there is a parking lot. Given that a new parking lot is replacing the old Westinghouse building on Stockton, part or all of this parking lot could be turned into a park, which would then connect with the existing park by the arena.
Going back to the part about “just crossing the railroad tracks”, there may be something fishy here. The part of the Guadalupe River Park on the west bank connecting Julian to Autumn St. by the shopping center has never been opened across the railroad track. The east bank would blocked too, except for the diversion onto the old hobo trail under the bridge.
Why? There are plenty of other places where pedestrians can cross railroad tracks. Just a few yards from there, those same tracks cross Autumn near Cinnabar, without a gate, just signal lights. How much do signal lights cost?
Let’s make sure that the city follows through on turning the fire training property into a park. I propose that they keep the tower. It would make a nice centerpiece.
I gotta agree with #1. We are WAY short of police personnel, our city streets are positively Third World in many places, the pension/retirement/lifetime healthcare budgets are about to break the bank, and the mayor and council want to set up yet another bureaucracy to have these same benefits, with food police checking out every McDonalds and Wendy’s in the city limits???!!! Where are their priorities? What union proposed this plan to increase membership by hiring food cops? If this proposal gets off the ground to a hearing before the council, I’d move to fire every councilmember who supports this nonsense. Let’s just add everyone else to the Madison Nguyen recall effort. Leave that nonsense to our neighbor to the north.
Imagine the corporate leadership of a major company—let’s use an airline as an example, faced with potentially catastrophic challenges (think fuel costs, an aging fleet, and a reduction in seats sold), holding a news conference announcing the replacement of its signature desert cookies with apple slices—in the interests of its passengers’ health. Now granted, thinner passengers could potentially make for increased carrier profits, but how impressed do you think the stockholders would be with the company’s focus? Not much, I’ll bet. In fact, not much to the point where they’d probably start canning people from the top down.
JMO’C has it right, it’s time for the stockholders in this city to clean house, starting with Cindy Chavez for demonstrating that political experience isn’t always what it’s trumped up to be. Fat burgers!—that’s what’s on the mind of this would-be mayor? Apparently neither she nor her advisors are familiar with Mark Twain’s admonition that “It is better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and remove all doubt.”
What an absolute embarrassment of a civic leader. Her city is burning and she’s taken up the fiddle.
Keep in mind who the “braintrust” is that proposed this fast-food silliness: Williams, Campos, and Chu. Not exactly the brightest lights on the dais.
Apparently they could get more headlines by proposing this “healthy food through land use planning” nonsense—rather than educating people to make better choices about their food and their health this group decides if we don’t have any more fastfood outlets people won’t eat at the others that are already there.
Is there no level of embarrassment that affects these councilmembers? Do they really enjoy being the laughing stock not only of our city but of others?
Will we ever rise above this legislating by press conference and really deal with significant issues? Probably not, but we can dream, can’t we?
The Governator decides to end the budget stalemate by putting the burden of the inability of our so-called leaders to agree on a budget on the backs/wallets of the rank and file workers. So now, DMV, the poster child for delay and inefficiency, lays off gazillions of part time workers, and everybody EXCEPT the people responsible for this logjam gets bumped down to minimum wage.
Yo! Ahnold. You and the Assembly and the Senate are responsible for this budget logjam, not the state employees.
My proposal—The minute that the budget has not been signed, sealed, and delivered on time as required by law, The State Assemblymembers, the State Senators, and the Governor stop getting paid. And, they don’t get it back once the budget is finally approved. It’s gone FOREVER.
Now this might not affect The Governator, ‘cuz he just don’t need the dough. But it may affect future governors. But even if it doesn’t, it will affect the legislators, who can find the time to give us any number of bullshit feelgood nonsense legislation, but haven’t been able to pass a budget on time for a couple of decades.
And if that proposal is insufficient to get them off their political dead asses, then we start a system of fines for each day the budget is late. I’d start it at $10,000.00 per day per Senator, per Assemblymember, and the Governor. If that isn’t enough, raise the ante until these bojos get down to the business we elected them to do.
Those proposals could be embodied in an initiative I’d gladly sign, and so would 20 million or so other voters, I daresay. It would win by a landslide.
You creatures of poor diet are misunderstanding this fast food issue. They are putting a moratorium on new locations, not raiding Wendy’s like a cannabis club. I find it refreshing that this city is conscious of balance instead of succumbing entirely to the diluted, uniform culture of suburban America. We have enough fast food restaurants for the people that want such materials in their stomachs.
As far as I’m concerned, this is only part of the problem. Fast food restaurants are not only a problem, but a symptom of our poor city planning. Such establishments are ubiquitous in any car-oriented strip mall nightmare. We should have moratoriums on streetfront parking and cul de sacs, too.
Nobody’s misunderstanding the fast food issue. There is a nationwide trend to over regulate fast food businesses because some self appointed food nazis have decided that these establishments are “bad” for us. Well, enough is enough. I’m sick and tired of government behaving like an overprotective parent, especially in these tough economic times. If governments would stop overreaching, these continuous budget problems would become a thing of the past.
Perhaps it’s just another diversionary move to take our minds of the fact that our so-called leaders can’t give us decent roads, parks, pools; etc.
They can waste time on this nonsense but can’t do their real jobs. This in loco parentis form of government needs to stop.
So do you hate regulation of tobacco and alcohol? Shitty food is quite damaging to health, but we are free to make decisions, right?
7. It’s a plan that has some appeal. Certainly state workers shouldn’t be punished for the bumbling of the politicians.
But what it would mean is that independently wealthy legislators would be able to force legislation through by delaying things until the salaries cut off. Then those legislators without independent means would be forced to agree to their demands.
I know that badmouthing about the DMV is a tradition, like postcards of jackelopes. But the last time I had to go to the DMV, I made an appointment on-line, and I was in and out in ten minutes.
First of all, comparing food to tobacco and alcohol is a bogus comparison. And there’s no such thing as “second hand food” unless you eat somebody’s barf.
Second, I have no problems with laws that govern behavior problems from alcohol, like laws against drunken driving.
That said, I oppose regulations that restrict adults over 18 from buying and consuming tobacco and alcohol. Again, that is a disturbing function of the nanny state which thinks it knows what we should and should not be doing in our personal lives yet can’t balance a budget.
As an aside, most of this nanny state garbage comes out of the left. Left wing orthodoxy is to be “pro-choice” regarding a woman’s “right to choose.” Yet many of these same people want to tell us what we can and cannot eat. Let’s have some “pro-choice” behavior regarding food.
Let’s nip the idea of getting rid of FAST FOOD real quick! Good job with POPEYES CHICKEN Downtown! that’s real upscale for us and all our new high rises!
Isn’t downtown San Jose looking slick or what? If you look at what they planned for downtown in the last 30 years, they got everything they wanted. Downtown got residential, office and hotel highrises. Downtown also has arena, city hall and a riverpark. Safeway is going in the Tower 88 condo retail space. Look at all those coffee houses there. I sure like Camera 12 and 3 along with improve. The California theater is awsome. Don’t forget the Tech.
Bad food kills many people just as other addictions do. Treatment saps resources and money. If city workers get fat and keel over, who’s insuring their hospital stay? If a regular citizen does the same, insurance companies are out the money and they raise your premium. Nothing is without a chain of consequence in this world.
Aside from that, my original comparison was mainly in reference to the prevalence of these products and they access to them. People bitch about too many bars and liquor stores as if they’re the downfall of society, but how many more people are depressed and unhealthy because of McDonald’s as opposed to Jack Daniel’s? I’d say a lot.
The fleet of VTA’s Outreach cars stored at the terminal at Zanker Rd and Hiway 237, fuel up at the most expensive Chevron gas station in Milpitas. The one located at the corner of McCarthy Blvd and Bellew Dr. There’s an Arco gas station with lower gas prices across I-880 on Abbott Ave, but hey, saving money takes more effort.
Yea, Council since mid 80’s spent billions taxes dollars downtown to pay for long list of tax subsidized buildings, events, tax giveaways to political insiders developers and corporations that produced little jobs and taxes rather than use tax money to build a strong San Jose downtown and city wide jobs and tax base to pay for city services
Other cities have rebuilt their downtowns and other areas which produce significant jobs and tax revenues
Most San Jose residents will not go downtown but Council still spends millions on downtown rather them other areas of San Jose or helping new or small business which produces 80% of new jobs and millions taxes
When is waste of tax dollars on downtown and giveaways to political insiders going to stop?
Will voters demand accountability, stop tax giveaways and wasted tax spending or will San Jose declare bankruptcy first?
I just read in Roadshow that a 500 foot long bicycle bridge is being built across I280 near Hwy 85 at a projected cost of $10.2 MILLION!!! Extrapolating that out, it comes to about $105 MILLION per mile FOR A BICYCLE BRIDGE!
No wonder we can’t balance the state budget.
Keep that bike bridge in mind the next time someone asks you for a tax increase to pay for a transportation project.