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The mayor went to dinner?
By JON HOORNSTRA
Richard Lowenthal may turn out to be one of those mayors who will make you wish the term limit law had exempted him. If he has any luck at all with his style and agenda, the door may be blocked when the political clock runs out and he has to leave city hall.
The first public clue to Lowenthal-the-leader came in one of those snooze-and-snore sessions most people avoid, the State of the City addressr. This year it was Lowenthal's turn to deliver "the vision thing." It was high noon at the Quinlan Center on Jan. 30 when Cupertino's official community sipped and nibbled while Lowenthal spoke. He identified the issue of ethnic cooperation, or lack thereof, as a community problem that needs work. Yup, he actually said that and, no, there were no riots or gasps from the audience.
"As we all know," the mayor said, "Cupertino has had and continues to have a lot of immigration. This has led at times to a split in our community." Noting that Cupertino is 24 percent Chinese, the mayor became more specific.
"Pretty much the old issues of foreign language signs, the right blending of celebrations and festivals, and problems in vocabulary, have been addressed," he continued. "I'd say we are now largely in what is called in child psychology a parallel play mode. We still have a lot of people that are only comfortable with people that look like them or talk like them."
Bingo. Parallel play is described by one child psychology textbook as a characteristic of toddlers in the 2- to 3-year-old age group.
"It's two or more children playing side by side," say psychologists Stone and Church, "but without any real exchange, unless it be a grim, silent tug-of-war for some coveted plaything." Regrettably, that seems to describe Cupertino all too frequently.
The mayor is calling on us to grow up, to move beyond the level of children whose interactions are confined to vain disputes over place and stuff.
Just words? No, the mayor is more than words. What made this speech different from so many other political presentations is that the mayor had already taken steps to put words into action. He and Vice Mayor Michael Chang organized a fundraising event for Measure M at the Cuisineer Six, a restaurant identified until now almost exclusively as a place for Chinese political interests to meet and raise money. To put action to his words, the mayor went to dinner at the Chinese restaurant and he took a lot of good ideas and non-Chinese people with him to work on common interests.
There's more. The mayor reported that city hall now subscribes to a translation service for news from Chinese-language newspapers that pertain to Cupertino. And the city now publishes its notices in the Chinese press, as well.
Finally, the mayor identified what many believe to be everyone's pet peeve--the stresses on our community from increased population, density, construction and traffic.
"It isn't fair to our existing residents," the mayor declared, "to build new homes or offices without regard to their concerns regarding traffic, schools, and height."
Amen. So, mayor, here's an idea that will make life more fair to those of us already here. Present law requires that the city notify only those neighbors within 300 to 500 feet of a site of proposed construction, and then only in certain cases. The idea that the quality of life in a neighborhood is altered only within 300 to 500 feet from a construction site is absurd on the face of it. The law should be revised so that all residents within a city block of a proposed construction site are notified of all proposed construction, and afforded an opportunity to object. That would much closer to fair.
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Cupertino, California Since 1947
