The Cupertino Courier

Harris, Statton and James for Council

The campaign trail usually dredges up an issue or two, and the race for Cupertino City Council has been no exception.

It's clear what the voters are concerned about: the number of new homes squeezing into the city's few remaining parcels; the friction generated as Cupertino's diverse population meshes into a community; traffic clogging up our intersections; huge new houses towering over tiny lots--a phenomenon neighbors find so grotesque that they've labeled the structures "pink elephants."

But one of the biggest challenges in town is a pachyderm of another color. Vallco Fashion Park is Cupertino's white elephant--a big, lumbering hulk that seems to lose more value every year.

And Cupertino has suffered other big-name retail casualties of late, among them Any Mountain, A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books, REI and Supercrown bookstore. Most of these have left town for more favorable retail climates.

We think three candidates--Andrea Harris, John Statton and Sandra James--have the best ideas for turning this and other problems around.

Harris, chair of Cupertino's Planning Commission, believes the city should be proactive in reconfiguring Vallco. She wants the city to hire a consultant--out of its whopping $30 million in reserves--to make businesses more visible and to re-create the mall as a regional shopping destination. We agree with Harris that the cost of hiring of a good consultant could be repaid a thousandfold in sales tax revenue.

Like the other candidates, Harris, a property assessor for Santa Clara County, wants to force the city's pink elephants into extinction by adjusting floor-area ratios to more sensible levels. She also wants the city to do more on the diversity front, and suggests widening the applicant pool to get more nonwhites on the city's commissions.

Statton, executive director of the Chamber of Commerce, is another proponent of revamping Vallco--and his ideas extend beyond simply finding an anchor tenant to replace Emporium. He wants the city to take another shot at creating a redevelopment agency in the Vallco area, which would allow the city to redirect sales tax increases--that would normally go to other government agencies--into improving the center.

Statton has labeled Cupertino's cash reserves--which weigh in at 150 percent of the operating budget--as "obscene." We agree. Like the other candidates, he calls for using a portion of the reserves to expand the library--both in size and scope--and to finish the long-awaited addition to the senior center.

Among other reasons, we think Sandra James has earned a place on the council podium because of her excellent track record on the Cupertino Union School District board. She chaired Measure A, a bond measure that passed by more than 80 percent of the vote. And she helped get Sacramento's attention by being one of the important voices convincing the governor to find more money to fund class-size reduction, an issue paramount to the health of the entire city.

On Vallco, she thinks the old three-anchor footprint for the mall is outdated, and she favors the city stepping in to influence the design and tenant mix.

While she applauds city's plan to build a more cohesive community from Cupertino's diverse population, she believes the effort so far has been akin to "preaching to the choir." Like Harris, she advocates actively recruiting more nonwhite faces to sit on city commissions.

Don Burnett has served the city well. He promised to do away with the nonsensical tier plan, which unfairly allotted extra space to Cupertino's biggest companies--and he delivered. But we're bothered by his votes cast in favor of more and denser housing in Cupertino. And we feel his plan for turning Vallco around--basically that the rising tide of a new anchor will lift all boats--lacks vision.

We also feel Steven Haze has made contributions to the community during his 15 years as a neighborhood activist, but find his ideas hard to follow and his vision somewhat confusing. We hope he continues to serve the city through his community work.

Review our election coverage to date at our special archive page.

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