Years of Service
 On Friday, January 14, the City Council presented Santa Clara County Sheriff's Captain Neil Valenzuela with a Certificate of Appreciation for his many years of service to the Cupertino community. Neil had been a detective and--most recently--a lieutenant with the West Valley Substation, which serves Cupertino among other jurisdictions. He was recently promoted to captain and will now oversee Sheriff's Office activities at Stanford.
Mayor's Corner with Darcy Paul
Happy New Year to Everyone!
As we start 2022, I am pleased to report that the Cupertino City Council has been working on a number of projects of considerable benefit to the public and community. In effect, the composition of our Council based upon our regular elections stays the same for two-year periods of time, and we find ourselves at this moment in the middle of the current two-year period. I would state that, based on my seven years on our Council, our current group of Councilmembers has gelled well. We have gone through a number of discussions together, expressed at times quite disparate viewpoints, and in the end especially of late arrive at direction and decisions that take into account the disparity of such viewpoints in a manner that presents the public with the benefit of well thought-out solutions to the various issues raised in our discussions.
When I reflect back upon the year 2021, I have to say that administratively the most important work done by Council related to hiring decisions. In a typical year, City Council doesn’t hire anybody. That’s because the City Council only hires for two positions, albeit key ones. Those positions are for the City Manager and for the City Attorney. I believe that the year 2021 marked for the City of Cupertino, much like many other places, a period of significant activity combined with uncertainty. Cupertino tends to draw a lot of attention on the front of development, but if looking at objective metrics reflective of perceived opportunity, it is clear that our City is viewed as a place where people and entities from all over the world would like to engage. As a result, a fair bit of our activity over the years, be it reflected by the market demand for housing and the correlating home prices, or the desire to put in more office space, or the pressures placed upon the retail sector, has been driven by various iterations of attempting to capitalize upon those opportunities.
Those attempts are not in and of themselves negative. However, my opinion is that the past several years in Cupertino have demonstrated that we can have a rigorous discussion and not just preserve but also enhance those opportunities. And, frankly, we need to have these discussions in order to ensure safety, efficacy and success. People from everywhere do not just look to our tech sector and our schools when considering our area. They also view the quality of the public discourse. While I can provide some examples of places where that discourse has in my view been inaccurate insofar as underlying motivations driving various insinuations go, I can also look upon the totality of our efforts and state with confidence that the result overall has been quite positive. Issues that give rise to exemplary results on a community-based level are much like technological breakthroughs. A good deal of effort and disagreement are often belied by the optics of the results.
Hence, as a matter of reflection upon the past year, I would say that Council’s most significant work has been in hiring, first, an excellent City Attorney in Chris Jensen, and bringing that position back in-house to Cupertino, and second in time, more recently hiring Jim Throop as our City Manager, and from what I’ve evaluated and seen thus far, our Council made an equally successful hire in the City Manager position. Chris started mid-year in 2021, and Jim just started at the beginning of this calendar year. From my observations, our City Council, in completing its only hiring duties, managed to set Cupertino on a track administratively that will become evident in its high degree of efficacy as this year unfolds and well into the future.
I’ll mention a couple of general categories here, although of course they don’t nearly comprise the corpus of work and subject-matter being considered in our public sphere. From the perspective of development and our public spaces, in this month of January alone City Council has entitled two housing developments, both in the western side of the City. The discussions by Council and the public resulted in several improvements to the projects, including those related to environmental stewardship and affordability of housing. As we proceed into this year, my expectation is that we will continue the work of considering proposals fairly and intelligently, and maintaining both the standards of our community and the flexibility needed to deliver successful solutions. Conditions of course are never static, and this is by nature an endeavor comprised of enfranchising people and viewpoints. I reiterate here the sentiment that a Council that has delivered excellent results does so probably more due to challenges faced and work performed together in response to those challenges than anything else. In that sense, I have much cause for optimism in this upcoming year.
Another example, and I will do my best in these monthly messages this year to include a reasonably representative array of our activities, relates to our community spaces. My hope by way of preface is that we all continue our exemplary and safe practices. Council since the beginning of the pandemic has led the way in ensuring that proper protective equipment is provisioned and that our community responses are grounded in what is both logical and protective of our health. Similarly, the work of delivering community spaces has followed community needs and preferences while keeping an eye on interactions, health, and healthy interactions throughout our community. We as a Council are keeping our eye on the public spaces that we have, from those that are part of the Stevens Creek Corridor to the upcoming Library Expansion to the annexation and development of the Lawrence-Mitty park and corridor, all in different geographic areas of our City, but also each part of a collective and cohesive administration of community spaces to be enjoyed by everyone.
I suppose it would not be traveling too far afield to write to one of the specifics of a space that I’ve worked on during my tenure on Council, which is the Library Expansion space, which will turn our City’s Library from the facility with the least amount of meeting space in the County to the most amount of meeting space which, given the fact that Cupertino’s Library is the most frequented in the County’s library system, does make quite a bit of sense. The project delivery has been organized and managed well by our City staff. At this point, we are waiting on the delivery of a large wall that will face the Library courtyard, complete with a tall sliding door that will create an interactive space between the courtyard and the first floor of the Library Expansion space. Visualizing it creates a real sense of community interactive possibilities. Well, good management and positive anticipation having been stated, we are also at the mercy of current supply-chain requirements in this aspect of things. This component of the project is “on its way” as the expression goes, and while we are not looking at a long delay in opening the space, we might have a modest wait before ribbon-cutting occurs.
Still, however, my message in this aspect of it is still an optimistic one grounded in what we have done well in achieving what we in Cupertino have managed to deliver to our community and the world over the years. We are maintaining flexibility while at the same time keeping an eye on the plethora of opportunities which present themselves when challenges arise, and if we work with the right approach, which uniquely present themselves when those challenges arise. I look forward to our problems and endeavors of 2022, and our work together to deliver optimistic and honest solutions in the pursuit of expanding opportunities this year.
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