Volume 8
How financially secure is San Jose's redevelopment effort, which during a protracted recession finds itself built atop a debt in excess of half a billion dollars?
On Monday, Standard & Poor's Creditweek gave the agency an outstanding credit rating based on San Jose's "moderate debt burden" and "diverse economic base."
But Redevelopment Agency Executive Director Frank Taylor issued a telling confession in a recent memo to the city auditor: "Bonding capacity ... is determined by economic factors which cannot be predicted," he wrote. Apparently, the agency's ability to issue bonds and then pay off debts is contingent on a fickle economy.
--John Whalen, "Slow Ride," March 19, 1992
The Redevelopment Agency's financial bubble burst in May of 1995 when the RDA admitted that they were off in their revenue projections by about $150 million, derailing many of the agency's pet projects. This projected revenue shortfall was caused by a variety of factors, such as IBM moving a manufacturing plant to Asia and a sharp decrease in tax increments. Despite the revenue shortfall, the RDA has maintained its bond rating, which is among the highest of any redevelopment agency in the state. But Moody's, the firm charged with rating the agency's bonding capacity, said that if the revenue stream continues to deteriorate, the bond rating still could take a dive.
Race Against Time
In what may be the first case of its kind in San Jose history (if not the nation), an office seeker with AIDS is running for Congress. Amani Kuumba has filed as the Peace and Freedom Party's candidate for District 16, taking on Democratic incumbent Don Edwards.
--Public Eye, March 26, 1992
Kuumba lost the race. He died of AIDS on Aug. 11, 1993.
Stilled Waters
City officials are notorious for having short memories, but the San Jose Redevelopment Agency is so forgetful it could almost be termed amnesiac. Like a communist politburo where last year's esteemed leader is this year's reviled counterrevoluntionary, it is an institution that doesn't remember what it was doing the day before yesterday--and certainly nothing that transpired before Frank Taylor assumed leadership in 1980. ... One need only recall the fate of Cascade Fountain--the multilevel concrete waterworks which once stood between Second and Third streets, next to the State Building. The jewel in the crown of '70s San Jose, "the answer to a lot of dreams" (as Mayor Norman Mineta put it in July 1974), herald of a "renaissance for downtown San Jose" (as Mayor Janet Gray Hayes put it in October 1975)--it disappeared under the agency's own bulldozers in April of this year.
--Louis Theroux, "Fountain of Dreams," July 2, 1992
Through That Door
Judges have become understandably "paranoid" (as one judge--who didn't want to be named--put it) about courthouse security after a heavily armed man, Paul Salisbury, barged into the Courts Annex on Aug. 12 and shot three deputies. He was quoted as saying he wanted to shoot a judge. Salisbury was stopped at the entrance security station. But at the Hall of Justice, with a small amount of ingenuity and an accomplice, anyone can get into the building without going anywhere near a metal detector. All it takes is the nerve to walk through a door marked "Authorized Personnel Only." These doors lead to the judge's chambers, but take a turn down the stairs before entering the judges' office; the stairs, at least from one chamber on the second floor where I explored, lead directly to an unguarded back door.
--Jonathan Vankin, "Don't Shoot the Judge," Aug. 27, 1992
Earl Lu Warning
Earl Lu ... a cantankerous tycoon who flooded Bay Area publications with letters so robustly right-wing they made you smile just to read them. ... For a while he was a minor celebrity, and local papers' letters pages were dominated by feuds between his partisans and his opponents, as well as by spin-off engagements. ... But whose imagination could have stretched the truth: that not only was Earl Lu a fiction, not only were a number of other personalities in the controversy also invented, but the Lu affair was just one strand in a web of similar hoax over at least six years, involving eight papers and spawning seven personalities? ... Preliminary examination of Lu's letters turned up something odd: they bore an uncanny resemblance to other missives in the Metro archives purporting to be from different people. ... Their letters, along with Earl Lu's, all appeared to have been composed on the same typewriter.
--Louis Theroux, "Lu Slips," Aug. 27, 1992
Earl Lu still occasionally writes us--but he signs his real name, John Lillpop.
Well Taylored
For the second time in three months, San Jose's Redevelopment Agency got caught promising public money for hotel accouterments without approval from the City Council. And for the second time, the council unanimously authorized the unauthorized expenditures--albeit with a smattering of scolding from the council dais directed at agency chief Frank Taylor.
Before rubber stamping a $1.3 million cost overrun on the agency's contract with developers of the newly renovated Hotel Sainte Claire, a couple of councilmembers expressed displeasure after learning that at least $373,000 of the requested budget increase had been spent before it ever got to their desks.
--Lisa Stone-Norman, "Stealth Spending," Sept. 10, 1992
Phoning Baloney
Having trouble getting ex-San Jose Mayor Tom McEnery to return your calls? Try leaving an Arkansas phone number. That's what we did on Monday, to see if there was any truth to the rumor that McEnery wants to be named ambassador to Ireland if Gov. Bill Clinton becomes president. So we had an Eye operative (yes, Eye has operatives everywhere) call Mac and ask him a few questions about his future plans. McEnery typically blows off such phone calls, but amazingly, he returned this one in 11 minutes.
--Public Eye, Oct. 1, 1992
McEnery talked to our operative for 16 minutes, apparently thinking he was talking to a member of the soon-to-be President's transition team, which was based in Little Rock, Ark. He dropped hints about which jobs he'd consider, and brought up many of his accomplishments as mayor.
He didn't get the job.
Sects Scandal
Until this spring, local Catholic priests have been relatively unscathed by charges of sexual misconduct. On June 19, however, a 27-year-old Vietnamese-American nurse filed a civil suit seeking more than $1 million in damages from Father Peter Luc The Pan, a priest at St. Joseph of Cupertino Parish .... The woman charged that Luc used the power of the cloth to seduce her into a sexual liaison that lasted for five years. When she finally refused his advances, the suit alleges, Luc raped her at a Sunnyvale motel. ... Over the past three months, Metro has discovered several other cases of sexual misconduct in the San Jose diocese.
--Geoffrey Dunn, "Lead Us Not Into Temptation," Nov. 12, 1992
This lengthy and controversial three-part series profiling the Catholic Church as a valley institution won Metro awards for investigative journalism with both the California Newspaper Publishers Association and the National Newspaper Association.
Follow the Beat
Sometimes fate is so perfectly balanced and magnanimous and clever that the heavens smile down on us and the tragic American night of faded dreams melts into a morning of warm honey. So it was for Al and Helen Hinkle. Little could they have known that as they piled into a brand-new maroon-and-silver Hudson Hornet the day after their wedding in December 1948 that they were riding off into the immortal pages of American literature. The driver of their car that day was a boyhood-chum of Al's named Neal Cassady, and their month-long honeymoon odyssey across the continent would later serve as the central journey of Jack Kerouac's classic Beat novel On the Road. ...
--Geoffrey Dunn, "A Couple for the Road," Dec. 17, 1992
Dunn interviewed the couple at their San Jose home. Helen Hinkle passed away in summer 1994.
Pillow Talk
So there was a tepee, and a lithe young farmer who espoused revolutionary tidbits about growing carrots for world peace.
And there we were at the crucial moment at which such surreal, serene sensuality is interrupted with something so eloquently phrased as, "Um. Ah ... a condom?" My words, to be exact.
Why wasn't I surprised when he merely gurgled and grunted? Oh, maybe I'd been prepared by the video activist I'd known shortly before who spent his days taking footage for a documentary of the abuse of immigrant farm workers and assured me he'd had a vasectomy. I discovered he meant he'd imagined that vasectomy one morning when I came upon his other girlfriend's cervical cap in the shower.
--Elizabeth Kadetsky, "Condoms I Might Have Known," Jan. 7, 1993
Travel Bill
San Jose's high-flying Office of Economic Development had its wings clipped Tuesday by a city council that wants less flash, more results. The office will now be held accountable for meeting performance targets set by a recession-battered city that's eager to restore itself to solid financial footing. That likely means fewer trips to Europe for the OED's dapper, jet-setting director, William Claggett, who will have to concentrate on generating jobs and tax revenues rather than on improving San Jose's national and international image through television shows and business magazine supplements and international junkets. ... If the office doesn't produce some tangible accomplishments in short order, insiders hint that even more changes could be in store.
--Lise Ström, "Bill of Sales," Jan. 14, 1993
More changes definitely were in store. By March, Claggett lost his job as part of then-City Manager Les White's cost-cutting reorganization efforts.
On to March 1993-February 1994
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March 1992-February 1993
Are We Broke Yet?
From the October 5-11, 1995 issue of Metro