By Robert Haugh
City Staff received the second-highest level of blame in Santa Clara News Online’s reader survey on Downtown revitalization.
In the survey, 21 percent of respondents said City Staff was the biggest detriment to revitalizing Downtown.
Several comments specifically pointed to City Manager Jovan Grogan.
An active downtown resident said staff, “under the direction of the City Manager, Jovan Grogan,” bears “significant responsibility for the lack of execution.”
The resident said the City has continued to produce studies and long-term plans but has failed to turn them into “real, on-the-ground improvements.”
Residents are not saying Santa Clara lacks planning documents. They are saying Santa Clara lacks results.
The Downtown Precise Plan was supposed to help guide the rebirth of Santa Clara’s historic Downtown. But respondents said the process has become too slow, too bureaucratic, and too distracted.
Several comments also criticized Grogan’s interest in relocating City Hall.
A Santa Clara resident said the City’s focus on ideas like moving City Hall has “diverted time, energy, and resources away from immediate revitalization.”
A resident who requested anonymity was more direct, saying Grogan “put up roadblocks” and “wants to move City Hall somewhere else and waste $20M of resident’s money.”
The same respondent called Grogan “useless on this downtown effort.”
Ouch. That’s harsh language.
But it reflects a sentiment that has grown more common among Downtown advocates and residents: City Staff is managing the process, but not moving the project.
A Mission City resident said the City Manager is responsible for “delaying the process” and bringing forward “distractions that have impeded progress.”
But that respondent also said Grogan does not act alone.
“The City Manager takes direction from the Mayor and Council,” the respondent wrote, adding that elected officials “must bear the responsibility for this matter.”
For Downtown, the message from respondents was clear: fewer studies, fewer distractions, more execution.
As one District Five resident put it, “When staff prioritize process over results, the outcome is delay, and Downtown has paid the price.”
And Jovan is the same guy who was practically pleading with the council to approve the ENA last night for the Civic Center/Agnews Hospital deal and no transparency with community. This is disconcerting.
I stayed up until midnight last night to watch the discussion and vote of moving the Civic Center to Agnews. Here is a fine example—we have a very highly paid city manager, and highly paid city staff and they could not present this in a way that would get community support. In fact it seemed to rub the residents the wrong way. City Manager had trouble answering questions, instead he used a lot of word salad and had to be reminded several times to answer the questions. If staff had put this much effort into downtown it would already be under construction. Keeping the possible move of the Civic Center secret for 7 months was a huge public relations blunder. It appeared that the City Manager did not have a clue that this would be a controversial subject. And again we left without any action by the council or the city manager to move downtown forward. All we got was another Citizens Advisory Committee.