Monday, April 26, 2010

Morning News Round-Up -- 4.26.10: to Round 2...

Let's start with all things South Bay professional sports related...

Sharks, Sharks, Sharks... onto round two of the playoffs. A choke-free playoffs, perhaps? Tickets go on sale Tuesday at 10 a.m. -- perhaps Councilmember Liccardo can help you score some tickets...

We learn today that 52 percent of folks in Santa Clara are supporting Measure J, the stadium measure, with 36 opposed and 11 percent undecided. Which begs the question, who are these 11 percent of the people. The stadium has been a civic question in Santa Clara for about 2 years, give or take. Have they not picked up the Weekly, the Mercury News, or talked to a neighbor in that period of time? And you know this must be newsworthy because the Chronicle picked up the poll numbers as well...

Lawyers, lawyer, lawyers. Cedar Fair, the folks that own Great America, love their lawyers. They are trying to renegotiate their lease at Great America in Santa Clara to account for the 49ers stadium.

San Jose is pushing forward with buying the land around the proposed A's baseball stadium site near Diridon Station. Tracy Seipel at the Merc has the run-down about which pieces of land need buying and which ones don't... (Note to Michelle McGurk: Please clip and send this story to Bud...)

Speaking of buying land... San Jose Councilmember Nora Campos gets a little piece in Internal Affairs written about her -- and not in a good way. The gossipy piece talks about how she was (perhaps?) shilling for her husband's unions when she made a stink about the sale of the $20 million pair of parking lots in downtown San Jose and if the eventual developers will use "prevailing wages" to pay its workers to build -- which, it is noted in the story, the City of San Jose and the Redevelopment Agency has no ability to demand or enforce...

Internal Affairs finally catches up with the Metro/ San Jose Inside (Chuck and Larry?, San Jose Inside, April 8th) in running a piece about a possible Mayoral endorsement of right winger Larry Pegram in the San Jose City Council District 9 race. The Mayor's spokesperson gives a classic non-answer/answer: "As of today, he has not endorsed anyone." Of course, that was yesterday, who knows about today...

Teresa Alvarado got the nod from the Mercury News Editorial Board for County Supervisor... they call her "a standout"... (Cindy Chavez is going to be really, really pissed about that endorsement... so will Forrest, Mike, Tom, and Peter...)

From the previous Hispanic Foundation chief to the current one... Ron Gonzales, you remember, the former San Jose Mayor, climbed out from under a proverbial rock to pen a piece for a newspaper that he had a pretty big feud with. Bygones, we guess... He writes about the need for companies to come to the aid of schools locally.

Speaking of feuds with the local paper... Here's something that Protect San Jose will actually like that is written in the Mercury News. The words "police tactics" and "widespread praise" are in the same headline... the story is about the downtown San Jose policing, which was (ahem) a bit of an issue for a while...

The San Jose City Council will consider (again) cutting its salary and the salary of high-ranking City officials. But that isn't the part of the story that is striking in any way, this passage is: "...a 10 percent salary cut would bring council members to $84,442 — less than the wage of the average city worker..." The average working in the City of San Jose makes $88,000. $88,000! To quote the head of the Municipal Employees' Federation (who was critical of how much high-ranking City officials make): I'd love to have that kind of accounting in my checkbook...

Interestingly, a similar story (sort of) appears in the Chronicle today, noting that 1 in 3 employees in the City and County of San Francisco government make over $100,000. Perhaps the Merc could re-run their numbers and find the same thing for the City of San Jose (and perhaps even for the County of Santa Clara...)

The Morgan Hill Times does a deep dive into the District Attorney's race... and uses more flattering pictures for both Carr and Rosen. That is something they can probably both agree on, that newspapers ought to use flattering pictures...

Meg Whitman = Big Connections... and she showed it on Friday night when Mitt Romney and John McCain showed up at an event in Redwood City. Of course, both of those guys lost their last election, so perhaps she should invite more folks on a winning streak... just a thought.

We love you too Mission City Lantern... and that is non-negotiable...

Good luck getting your Sharks' tickets everyone...

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