Candidate for
Mayor; City of San Jose

Strong Neighborhoods Initiative

"SNI is a new way for the City to help neighborhoods flourish. The goal is to have neighborhoods set priorities for their own improvement. In return, the City will listen and give a higher priority to those neighborhood improvements. No neighborhood will be left behind."

Vice Mayor Cindy Chavez

Background

Cindy led the work with the Mayor and her City Council colleagues to make this happen.

The Strong Neighborhoods Initiative is designed to build Strong Neighborhoods by developing community leadership and working with residents to achieve the delivery of City services consistent with neighborhood priorities.

The core strategy is to provide meaningful and visible change in each neighborhood through five initiatives.

1. Cleaner Neighborhoods: Through the efforts of the Code Enforcement Driveway Team, SNI increased neighborhood clean ups, anti-graffiti and anti-litter campaigns, and build resident capacity to make their own neighborhoods a more beautiful place.

2. Safer and more attractive residential streets: Through traffic calming, sidewalk replacement and r**epair, street tree planting, improved street lighting, and SNI provided the tools for citizens to take greater responsibility for the safety and attractiveness of their streets.

3. Vital Business Districts: With new facades and streetscapes, and stronger business associations, SNI supports small business owners so they can grow their business and connect with resources, and encouraging entrepreneurship.

4. New Parks and Community Centers: SNI constructs new parks and revitalizes neighborhood centers - each with a cadre of dedicated residents involved in the ongoing operations and maintenance. Already many of these neighborhood priority projects have been completed.

5. Affordable Housing: SNI preserves existing affordable housing stock by working with non-profit groups and neighborhood leaders to implement a wide range of reinvestment strategies. These include rehabilitation through home improvement grants, community paint days and private investments.

San Jose Success Stories

New playground in the Five Wounds/Brookwood Terrace and Little Portugal North neighborhood.

o "The project is a result of the Citys Strong Neighborhood Initiative a successful union between the Citys Redevelopment Agency, Anne Darling Elementary and San Jose Unified. This playground serves as a model of what we can accomplish when we work together to meet community needs."

Vice Mayor Cindy Chavez

Martin Youth and Tot Lot opened (August 2005) in McKinley/Bonita neighborhood

o Newly renovated park with water feature and new playground. Phase II will begin construction later this year and will almost double the size of the park.

National Night Out (August 2005)

o The culmination of five months of planning by the McKinley/Bonita Neighborhood Association and the Five Wounds Brookwood Terrace Strong Neighborhood Initiative.

o The goal is to celebrate the spirit of the neighborhood, new park and promote safety. In addition to the new park amenities, residents will enjoy a potluck, fun jump and family activities.

Plans For Neighborhoods Future

o Build on existing neighborhood strengths and assets.

o Develop clear priorities through collaborative neighborhood planning. It is critical that the community drives the neighborhood plans and that clear, measurable objectives be set through the planning process.

o Establish accountability by creating a system for tracking and evaluating the performance of SNI projects on a regular basis. This is an important tool to ensure that projects proceed on time and on budget.

o Connect priorities to resources by integrating priorities into existing City Service Areas (CSA) business plans and departmental work plans.

o Develop neighborhood and City leadership by continually identifying new leaders, supporting existing leaders, celebrating wins, training, networking, and seeking to create a true partnership.

o In this era of limited resources the focus must be on realigning existing resources and integrating lessons learned into current practice.

Horace Mann Elementary/State-of-the-Art Academy

"Horace Mann School is a monument to what entrepreneurial leadership can do for public education."

--Vice Mayor Cindy Chavez

Background Vice Mayor Chavez carried forward former Mayor Susan Hammers vision to bring the Citys Redevelopment Agency and the School District together to rebuild Horace Mann Elementary School.

The new Horace Mann School, which was a joint project of the city's, is an example of how people and government agencies can work together successfully. Located in the heart of downtown, the school had operated for decades in outdated dilapidated portable schoolrooms. The rebuilt facility has become a center of community activity and a point of pride for the neighborhood. The students at Horace Mann recently achieved one of the highest rates of improvement on test scores of any students in the city.

Horace Mann Successes

• While the school is in a low-income neighborhood, test scores show Horace Mann students do well academically.
• The school has state of the art wireless technology, which allows students and staff to access the school server or the Internet from anywhere on campus. The school site has over 100 laptop computers, housed on mobile carts, available to all classrooms. In addition, each classroom has dedicated desktop computers and individual teacher laptops and projectors.
• The Media Center, which is home to an extensive bi-lingual library collection, also has dedicated computers for student use and research.
• In 2004/2005 Horace Mann School met its AYP Goals and increased API scores by 63 points. This success was 54 points above the state targets for Horace Mann School.

Entrepreneurial collaboration between the City and other public or private entities can work and work well.

The City has a crucial role to play that collaboration to improve education.

Redevelopment funds can be used more creatively than historically deployed. If we build a neighborhood resource that conveys this school is an important enterprise, student, parents, and neighbors will have regard for the enterprise and raise their own levels of success.

People, especially children, perform up to expectations if we encourage them. I will raise the bar in CityHall on education and as Mayor, I will provide the leadership to help schools and communities meet the new standards.

--Vice Mayor Cindy Chavez

The Megans Law Task Force

"Megans Law is one giant step we can take to keep children safe. I am proud to lead a state-of-the-art law enforcement collaborative that works to protect all San Jose families."

--Vice-Mayor Cindy Chavez

Background

• Megans Law was created in 1996 to provide the public with information about the location of dangerous sex offenders. The law was named for Megan Kanka, a seven-year-old girl from New Jersey who was raped and killed by a known child molester. Megans parents were unaware that a violent sexual offender lived across the street.

• San Jose has a high number of registered sex offenders. Of all those living in Santa Clara County, 61%live in the City of San Jose.

• Vice-Mayor Cindy Chavez saw the opportunity to make Megans Law to work better at city level and use the most up-to-date communications technology to create a warning system to better protect our kids.

• The Megans Law Taskforce was recommended by Vice-Mayor Cindy Chavez in September/October 2003 after she discovered that a registered sex offender was living in close proximity to a Boys and Girls Club in San Jose. She reactivated the Taskforce in 2005 to take stock of the progress and institute needed improvements.

• The goal of this taskforce is to improve the ability to monitor sex offenders by strengthening communication between agencies such as California State Parole, local homeless shelters, neighborhood leaders, and leaders in the housing industry (i.e., the Tri-County Apartment Association). This new information will allow the community to make informed decisions relating to sex offenders residing in the city.

• The Task Force consists of both Santa Clara County and California State agencies.

• The Council approved $25,000 for the San Jose Police Departments Megans Law Detail to equip them with the latest communication and surveillance equipment to better monitor offenders.

• The Council approved creating a sensitive sites map, which would identify schools, boys and girls clubs, preschools, and childcare facilities, to be shared with the county agencies in charge of placing sex offenders.

• The Council agreed to support legislation that would reduce the number of sex offenders placed in a given area.

• The Taskforce improved the Citys notification system to alert has successfully alerted school principals, after-school program directors and neighborhood civic associations.