Summer vacation is over, and the Red Phone is feeling refreshed
and ready to tackle your problems
– so let’s get started.
Summer vacation is over, and the Red Phone is feeling refreshed and ready to tackle your problems – so let’s get started.
We get this call from time to time here at the Red Phone, and we follow up as often as it seems appropriate. Since it had been awhile, we thought it was time to do so again.
I’m referring to the people who wonder when the signs and posters of the unsuccessful effort to recall D.A. John Sarsfield will be taken down from the organizers’ headquarters at the corner of Fifth and San Benito streets.
Building owner and anti-Sarsfield activist Ignacio Velasquez told the Red Phone that he had intended to take the signs down after the signature gathering effort for the recall fell short some weeks ago. But then, he said, Sarsfield “went on the attack again, so we decided to leave them up a little longer.” It’s his building; he can do more or less what he wants with it.
Now economics are playing a larger role, and Velasquez tells us that he is in the process of doing some construction on the building to prepare it for new tenants and will be covering up the windows in the next week. He reports that he has one tenant arranged for the third floor and is close to an arrangement for a retail tenant on the first floor.
He stressed that he wanted a tenant that would produce sales tax revenue because it would be good for the city. He also mentioned that he had hoped to have a restaurant on the ground floor, but that complications from the sewer moratorium caused that idea to fall through.
Just one more reason to demand, yet again: Build the sewer plant now!
Our next caller asked about a stretch of Southside Road between Highway 25 in Tres Pinos and Thomas Road near the Tres Pinos Creek bridge. He complains that the road is badly patched and pot-holed and needs repaving.
We called Assistant Director of Public Works Peter Corn, whose unofficial title is road supervisor, and asked him what the repair status of that stretch of road is.
Corn told us that, to the best of his recollection, the road was “near the top of the list” for repaving, but even that meant the work might not be done until 2007, as soon as Prop. 42 funds arrived from the state to pay for it. When the work is done, he said, the entire road from Highway 25 to Union Road would be resurfaced.
But, Corn said, politics always plays a role when the public dime is involved, and that work priorities can be changed by the board of supervisors. The repaving of Southside Road could be moved up if the board votes to do so. Squeaky wheel, etc.
If you’ve got a squeak in your wheel or an itch you’ve just got to scratch, give the Red Phone a call and we’ll do what we can to help out. 635-9219.
