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Editorials
Minimum days seem long for merchants
There's something about hordes of 12-, 13- and 14-year-olds descending on a shopping center that makes merchants want to batten down the hatches and inspires prospective shoppers to take their business elsewhere.
With regularly scheduled minimum days at Fisher Middle School, that scenario has been playing itself out with regularity. Management of the King's Court Shopping Center resorted to increased security and video cameras to discourage negative behavior ranging from smoking and food fights to shoplifting.
It would be easy to blame parents for not ensuring that their children are in a supervised situation on minimum days, and, in fact, that is where the responsibility lies.
For working parents, however, a minimum day is just one more problem to worry about in a frantic schedule. It may not be admirable, but it is understandable that many parents have been leaving their children to fend for themselves on minimum days.
That's why the school administration's decision to eliminate early-afternoon dismissals in favor of later starting times on "minimum days" is a good one. Not only will the move keep merchants from having to play babysitter with large groups of middle-school students, it will also remove the young people from a situation many of them are not mature enough to handle.
Broken Rules
Councilmembers came down hard on Campo di Bocce last week when the popular recreation and restaurant establishment made its final appeal for a conditional-use permit to operate a 120-seat restaurant that was originally pitched as a snack shack, but which, in fact, has operated as a full-fledged restaurant since it opened in early 1997.
When it came time to vote, however, only Joe Pirzynski was willing to vote in a way that, as he put it, maintains the rule of law.
Councilmembers were in a no-win situation. Now that Campo di Bocce has become part of the community--staging events for local organizations and serving as a popular dining spot--it would have seemed heartless to cut the club back to its original 70 seats.
Still it's another example of business owners circumventing rules and then begging forgiveness.
Unfortunately what people are starting to say is that it doesn't matter what the rules are in Los Gatos; what matters is who you know and how well you're able to become a community fixture before you go asking for forgiveness.
This is not the kind of reputation a town ought to have. Everyone seemed to know from the day Campo di Bocce opened that its restaurant was no snack shack. The next time town officials have this much advance notice that rules are being violated, they need to step in and deal with the situation immediately.
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Los Gatos, California Since 1881
