The Willow Glen Resident Photograph by Skye Dunlap Focus on the Future: Over his remaining two years on the San Jose City Council, Frank Fiscalini says he'll continue to work on the issues that brought him into politics. Newly appointed Vice-Mayor Fiscalini charts his course for the roads ahead San Jose City Hall, transportation and education top WG rep's priority list By Eric Johnson Mayor Ron Gonzales last week chose Frank Fiscalini, who represents Willow Glen on the San Jose City Council, to serve as the city's vice-mayor. Fiscalini, a former teacher and school administrator, is about to enter his fourth year on the council--term limits will force him out of office at the end of 2000. The Resident spoke with the new Vice Mayor about his tenure so far, and about his short-term and long-term plans for the future. Resident: Even though we think of you as our councilmember from Willow Glen, you have to deal with city-wide issues... Fiscalini: Yes, in fact, District Six itself is a great deal more than Willow Glen. It's a very cosmopolitan district. Often people look at District Six and think of Willow Glen or the Rose Garden, but we have a great deal of other neighborhoods that make up the district. Part of our charge derives from the fact that we do have a great variety in the district. We can go from the depths of poverty to the heights of riches, and not drive too many miles to experience it. Well, what have you done for Willow Glen lately? Good question, "What have you done for me lately?" Well, we have and will continue to provide first-class service to constituents--whether a neighbor has a problem with a barking dog, or a development in a unit next door that has violated the planning regulations. I am proud of the fact that my staff, without equivocation, is the best staff on the sixth floor. And they respond to issues very effectively and efficiently. I made some promises when I came into office. One of them had to do with redoing three streets--Warren, Copenberg and Willow Glen Way. If you knew those streets then, you would have observed that they were among the worst streets in the city. Very unhappy residents, and rightfully so. And we were able in the course of four years to completely redo them. Willow Glen Way was just finished, and I was there last Saturday, and it's hard to recognize it as the old Willow Glen Way. I made commitments--and this certainly affects services in Willow Glen--to make certain that the police department was staffed adequately. And we are the office that ultimately negotiated the staffing decisions that were made. I made commitments to Lincoln Avenue, and we kept those. We have done everything we can to stimulate growth. We've tried to make it easy for people who want to open businesses on the avenue, and there's a much greater variety of businesses on the avenue than when I took office. And probably the most important major accomplishment, if you want to look at it in an economic sense, is the tax growth. It's probably increased four to five times. We've also made some commitments to the neighborhoods. And it's taken a long time to fulfill one of them, but we're finally there, and that is an ordinance that's going to deal with remodeling issues and neighborhoods, where we have homes built in neighborhoods that just don't fit. Some of our readers have expressed concerns about the corner of Willow and Camino Ramon, where a pedestrian was killed last year. When the stop signs were put in, there was some talk of a traffic signal. We always review major thoroughfares like this one, to see if a signal would be justified. In this case, the neighbors were more interested in a four-way stop. We'll see how it works. For me, there was enough justification for that because of the pedestrian death. The [city's] signal policy is about to change, and you'll see that it will allow us to deal with knotty problems--intersections around schools, for instance, or in places where maybe traffic doesn't warrant a signal, but people do. What is your top priority for San Jose in 1999? I have more than one. I chair the Civic Center Task Force. And it's a priority for me to finish our work and move City Hall downtown, because I think it's absolutely critical to the development of a good portion of downtown. Another priority is transportation. I'm fed up with the complaints, and my own personal difficulties, with ingressing and egressing the airport. And I intend to spend the next two years working on that problem. I intend to work very closely with the mayor on his education ventures. They haven't been defined yet, because he's going to rely on a task force. My background just leads me naturally into that. I want to make certain that we finish the Los Gatos Creek Trail into downtown. And I want to make sure that when it comes time for me to leave office, if we haven't finished it yet, we will have appropriated the money to get it done. Everything's a top priority. We still have a lot of work to do on housing. What specifically? City-wide, we have a huge, huge problem: shortages of affordable housing. Places where people can live who work here. And we can't just bury our heads in the sand. And we won't. Do you have a proposal that you're going to offer? Or are you working with other councilmembers on something in particular? No. It's just a philosophical issue with me--that the commitment has to be strong enough that we help develop opportunities in District Six, and help my colleagues when they work on their housing projects. I think one of the big changes you have witnessed in District Six, and you'll see it in some of the other districts, is that there are many more amenities going into these projects--open space, play areas for kids, space for adults to recreate. We're not going to be content to see high density housing developed just to develop it. It has to include the amenities that people need. We pride ourselves on the fact that I defy you to drive down the street and pick out the affordable housing. You mentioned transportation: Do you think light rail presents a real solution to problems of traffic and smog? Or is this a "boutique" system? It's part of a solution. It can't be and never will be a total solution--it isn't in the major cities where they have full-blown systems that move millions of people a year. We need it as part of a total system to move people more readily, and hopefully get enough of them out of their cars that this then has a residual effect of better transportation on the surface streets and highways. I see light rail as one piece of a matrix that has to be put together. How well will it serve Willow Glen? The closest stop will be at Fruitdale. We now have the Tamian stop, which a lot of Willow Glen people use. We have a lot of people who will drive to the light rail station and get on to come downtown for events. They won't drive and park downtown because [light rail] is more convenient. What about other transportation alternatives? You have light rail; you have Caltrain; you have our expressway system in the county; the bus system the VTA operates, which needs to be continually upgraded. We just need the systems in place. I'm also an advocate of improving the surface transportation system. I'm not one who buries my head in the sand and believes that people are going to get out of their cars. They're not going to do it. You're not going to force people to do what they don't want to do. And they have a right in this country to drive an automobile. For the life of me, I cannot accept the fact that we have sat here for 30 years and not had another lane put on Highway 17, between San Jose and Fremont. It boggles my mind. There's a mess there every day. And we haven't done a damn thing, pardon my expression. On 101 south, everyone knew when we built it that we'd need a third lane. Yet we built it with two lanes. We killed four people two weeks ago because we didn't plan adequately. And yet we idle away our time, and get delay after delay, because people say we don't have the money to do it. For me, there's no excuse. None. Who do you hold responsible for this? The VTA? The VTA's pretty new. I can't lay it off on the VTA. But we all share it. The city shares it, the state shares it, the county shares it. To a degree, the feds share it. But we have to be much more aggressive in the city. And we haven't been. Are you talking specifically about these highway lanes? I'm talking about this, I'm talking about the airport, I'm talking about surface transportation. These are some things that I'm going to encourage our new mayor to look at. And I know that he's concerned about them, because we've has some brief conversations about them. I'm firmly convinced that if we present a comprehensive solution to the people of the city, they'll be responsive. They don't enjoy the dilemma. Look at the delays that people face on Route 87 right now! And will continue to face until we get the new lanes finished. I'm not a zealot. I'm pretty pragmatic, and I like to look to common sense in effecting improvements. And there's no common sense in delaying the kinds of improvements that have been delayed. We, the city, have ended up having to fund most of these improvements through redevelopment. And that's not right. This [Highway 87] is a state highway, and we should have had the state resources to do it. It should have been done completely when it was first built. And now we've come in and spent millions of dollars. And if we hadn't done it, we wouldn't have the improvements we do have. You've been co-chair of the Redevelopment Agency for the past two years, and as Vice Mayor you will have the opportunity to play a big role on that board again. Do you see any major changes coming in that agency? In what context? Some critics in the past have felt that the Agency has acted as a rubber-stamp for [director] Frank Taylor. Some have called on the agency to play a more critical role. I'm probably not the right person to ask that question, because I've been committed to redevelopment in the city since 1982. I chaired the first Downtown Work Review Committee, which laid out the first wave of improvement to downtown. I co-chaired the second phase with Susan Hammer, and that's the policy that we work under now. When you look at Redevelopment, most people want to focus on downtown, because it is the most glamorous, but it really is a small part of the program. North First Street and the redevelopment areas of north San Jose produce the revenue that allows the program to work. We're now beginning to see the fruits of the Redevelopment investment in the southern part of the city--in Edenvale and ultimately Coyote. Taylor, I think, exercised a stroke of genius when he merged the Redevelopment areas, and made it possible for us then to use the entire Redevelopment resource to help rebuild downtown. So, I can be critical, because not everything goes right when you're running a multi-million dollar agency, but I have to look at where the city is on balance. And we probably have the most exciting technological explosion in the valley in North San Jose right now. And the next exciting explosion is in the southern part of the city--all made possible by infrastructure improvement provided by redevelopment. If we hadn't done it, we wouldn't have it. It's just that simple. It's made possible the improvements we've made on 87, improvements of the Guadalupe River Park, of Cesar Chavez Park, and a litany of other improvements. Are there problems? Sure. But again I look at where we were, and where we are. How is working with Mayor Gonzales going to be different from working Mayor Hammer? I worked well with Mayor Hammer. We were able to accomplish a lot over the course of her tenure. And I expect to work well with Mayor Gonzales, and to accomplish as much as anybody can accomplish in my remaining two years in office. Will there be changes? Certainly; changes in methodology and philosophy. And change is always exhilarating. Part of that exhilaration comes from not knowing what may unfold. I think everybody gets a charge of adrenaline looking forward to new ideas. I think when Ron lays out his State of the City message in the next hundred days, we'll all be in a better position to see where he intends to move, at least on the three issues he's going to be looking at--education, redevelopment and--whatever this means--quality of life. I told him yesterday, 'Define that for me, quality of life.' He just laughed. He said, 'Well, that's something the committee's going to define,' and I said 'Fine.'" That's a theme of Ron's style. It seems to be something you see in a lot of local governments now, where people come in, not so much with a vision or a specific plan, but rather a plan to bring people together... You know, this whole business of vision sometimes makes me chuckle. He could come in and lay out a plan, and be criticized to no end because he missed something, or he wasn't "visionary" enough, whatever that means. I think he's going about it in the right way. He's going about it very thoughtfully. He's going to bring together undoubtedly a very large group of people on three committees. He circulated a memo yesterday laying out his charge to these committees. And out of that process will come ideas and suggestions. Some of them undoubtedly will get translated into policy. And I think that's a better way than coming into office riding on a horse and saying 'Here's where I'm going to go." This way, I think he's being consistent in what he said when he told us he wants inclusivity. You get that through a process like this. I think one of the strengths he brings into office is there'll be much more of this kind of approach. One more question: Do you think San Jose does a good enough job of offering opportunities for young people, especially teenagers? Well that's a difficult question to answer, because I don't know when enough is enough, and I don't think you ever reach enough, when you deal with the complexity of issues that face us, and the variety of skills and talents that young people bring. Am I satisfied? No. Can we do more? Sure. Will we? Yes. The issues young people face today are far more complicated than they were when I started my career in education, more years ago than I want to think about sometimes. Because kids have different kinds of choices to make today, and the choices they make have much more dire consequences than their counterparts in the past. The city's more complex. The demands are much greater on kids today. Society is more complex. The ways kids are reared have changed. Just look at the number of children in single-parent households. But you know, when you scrape it all away, I'm still a very nuts-and-bolts kind of person that views the problems of young people in the context of what I believe is always the most important thing: number one, they have to feel good about who they are. And they have to feel good about what they can do. If those two things are in sync, you're not gonna have to worry much about kids. It's when they get out of sync, when kids begin to look at themselves as not worthwhile, "I can't do very much, I can't learn very well," that things begin to go awry and they start making bad decisions. So as long as the educational system keeps that in focus, kids can be motivated. Far too many kids today don't believe they can do as well as somebody else, which is a lot of poppycock. And I think the drift to other elements of society, gangs being one of them. Because they can find security and acceptance there. And we have to stop that. And we're doing a better job today, the city is doing a much better job today, to offset some of these other issues. You're getting a chapter of my book. You're writing a book? Well, I've been thinking about it for a long time. What's your working title? Oh I don't know, something about my observations about education. Where we are and where we need to go. I care deeply and I feel deeply about what happens to kids. It's not trite to say they are our future because they are. Whatever legacy we leave, that's the one they're gonna live with. And it damn well better be the right one. [ Back to Contents Page | Willow Glen Resident Home Page | Archives ] This article appeared in the Willow Glen Resident, January 20, 1999. ©1999 Metro Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.