Santa Clara County Local News

Closing arguments in Santa Clara Vice Mayor Anthony Becker’s perjury trial have wrapped up, putting the case into the jury’s hands.
Jurors will be deciding on two counts: if Becker is guilty of lying to the Santa Clara County Civil Grand Jury about whether he leaked a 2022 report on the city’s relationship with the San Francisco 49ers to team executive Rahul Chandhok, and whether he violated his duty as a public official to keep the report confidential. Deputy District Attorney Jason Malinsky argued the case was as simple as proving Becker leaked the report and lied about doing so, while Deputy Public Defender Chris Montoya, one of Becker’s lawyers, poked holes in the DA’s investigation.
The month-long trial has been full of stutters and disagreements between Becker’s lawyers and the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office. Becker’s lawyers filed a series of motions Tuesday about problems with the evidence allowed in the trial, including a motion to declare a mistrial. Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Javier Alcala, who has been presiding over the trial, denied that motion on Wednesday.
The prosecution highlighted the five elements of perjury, so the jury could understand on what basis to make a decision. Malinsky emphasized the second element — that Becker intentionally said information was true when he knew it was false — as the main point up for debate, and focused much of his closing argument trying to prove that.
“(Becker) came in, swore an oath to tell the truth and he didn’t just lie about a collateral matter. He lied about the very thing that was the focus of what the civil grand jury was investigating,” Malinsky said.

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An affordable housing development in Mountain View is one step closer to getting built, although it is still raising concerns that there is not enough parking for the hundreds of residents who will be living there.
CRP Affordable, an affordable housing developer, is proposing to build an eight-story, 100-unit apartment complex at 334 San Antonio Road, replacing a Valero gas station and auto-repair shop.
Two years ago, the City Council approved a market-rate condo project, submitted by a different applicant, on the same 0.62-acre site. The entitlement expired, and CRP Affordable has since purchased the property, with plans to serve households at or below 80% of the area median income.
The Environmental Planning Commission unanimously supported the project at their meeting last week, praising its affordability and large number of family apartments for low-income tenants. But the commissioners also expressed dismay that very little parking will be provided for the residents.
The San Antonio project is located within half a mile of major transit and not required to include parking, based on state law AB 2097. Capitalizing on this provision, CRP Affordable is planning to build a ground-level garage that will accommodate 16 vehicles and two motorcycles.
Shellan Rodriguez, a consultant for CRP Affordable, cited building costs as the primary reason for keeping parking to a minimum, while noting that the development is in a high-resource area and close to public transit. Low-income tenants tend to own less vehicles too, she said.
“Generally speaking, affordable housing units have less cars because folks tend to want a safe and stable place to live over having multiple cars that are costing them a substantial amount of their income,” Rodriguez said.
But several commissioners pushed back on the characterization that it would be easy for residents to rely on public transit to get around.
“I was actually shocked that you showed bus stops on San Antonio. I drive through there all the time, (and) I cannot think of ever seeing a bus stop on San Antonio,” said Commissioner Bill Cranston. “I’m all in favor of a lower (parking) ratio, but it seems almost unreasonably low,” he added.
For projects of a comparable size, the typical parking ratio is between 0.41 and 0.75, according to Mountain View Housing Director Wayne Chen.
While short on vehicle parking, CRP Affordable is putting in 100 long-term bicycle storage spaces and 14 short-term spaces. It also is planning to offer a three-year $50 transit subsidy for new residents after the building is constructed.
Commissioner José Gutiérrez asked if the developer would be willing to kick in more money for transit passes.
Rodriguez said that they planned to reevaluate the transit program each year but were working within budget constraints. “We want to do something that’s on the right track, but we couldn’t really afford what we thought would be about a $40,000 hit to the annual operating expense for the 100 units,” she said.
CPR Affordable does not plan to apply for city funding to support the construction of the development. It will rely on federal, state and private financing, according to the staff report. If built, it would be the first all-affordable housing development in Mountain View to not receive funding from the city.
This story originally appeared in the Mountain View Voice. Emily Margaretten joined the Mountain View Voice in 2023 as a reporter covering City Hall.
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Palo Alto Police Department’s latest crime-fighting tool is silent, passive and largely invisible unless you know where to look.
The city introduced this tool last spring, when it became just the latest municipality to partner with Flock Safety to mount automated license plate readers on lamp posts, street signs and other fixtures in undisclosed locations. The 20 cameras capture license plate information as well as the make, model and color of passing vehicles and send them to a secure server, where the information gets stored for up to 30 days. The council approved the purchase in April 2023 and the department gradually installed them by November of last year.
Now, bolstered by their experiences with the technology, the department is looking to expand its network of cameras. Next week, the City Council will consider and likely approve a plan to add 10 additional cameras, bringing the total to 30.
The technology has faced persistent criticism from civil rights groups, with ACLU recently criticizing Flock for its refusal to allow independent verification of its system and pointing to instances in which the cameras misread license plate information. In New Mexico, for example, three people have sued the city of Espanola, New Mexico, earlier for errors that resulted from camera mistakes, according to a report from the security-focused company IVPM.
There is even an open-source project known as DeFlock that encourages residents to map the location of the cameras in their communities. While the map doesn’t show every camera, it indicates that several are mounted along El Camino Real and Page Mill Road.
Palo Alto police, for their part, are all in on the new equipment. In a new report, the department cites a host of success stories, including one incident in which a suspect was arrested after a series of retail thefts and investigators used Flock data to confirm that their vehicle was in the area at the time of the thefts. In another incident, a car that was connected to a homicide in another city entered Palo Alto and officers were able to locate it and detain the suspect, who was then transferred to the investigating agency.
Police also reported in August 2023 that they had arrested a group of men at Stanford Shopping Center who were allegedly involved in an armed carjacking in Berkeley. After being tipped off about the stolen vehicle and locating it at the shopping center, police pulled over the vehicle and later found a semi-automatic Glock handgun with a high-capacity magazine on the back seat, according to the department.
When Palo Alto’s police command staff made its case for installing cameras, they touted the technology’s ability to tip off the department when a stolen vehicle arrives from another city. Captain James Reifschneider referred to the Flock technology as a “force multiplier.”
“The advantage that ALPR gives to us is that if they arrive in those known stolen vehicles or known stolen plates, the camera can tip us off to their presence as they’re entering the area and allow us to respond an officer there,” Reifschneider told the council before the April 2023 vote to approve the cameras.
The new report from the department similarly characterizes the technology as a valuable tool.
“Real-time alerts generated by the ALPR cameras have resulted in the recovery of dozens of stolen vehicles and stolen license plates, the apprehension of numerous wanted persons, and the seizure of firearms,” the report states. “In addition, ALPR has been used to safely locate missing persons.
“Data captured by the ALPR cameras has also assisted investigators in identifying and arresting numerous felony suspects after crimes have been committed.”
The department does not release the location of cameras to deter criminals from bypassing them by taking alternate routes. It selects locations based on crime statistics, traffic volume and common ingress and egress points, according to the report. And while the Police Department does not install cameras permanently in residential neighborhoods, it could temporarily locate them to address a particular crime trend, according to the city.
Palo Alto is one of many cities that have adopted the new technology. Since introducing Flock cameras, the city has signed agreements with about 60 other law-enforcement agencies to share data from the cameras. These include police departments in neighboring and nearby jurisdictions (Menlo Park, East Palo Alto, Mountain View and Redwood City), sheriff’s offices in Alameda and San Mateo counties and the California Highway Patrol.
The installation of 10 new cameras will raise the cost of the system to $524,208 between now and December 31, 2029. The cost will be entirely covered by the state’s Organized Retail Theft grant program, according to the Police Department report.
Under the city’s policy, the license plate data that is stored by Flock must be purged after 30 days unless “it has become, or it is reasonable to believe it will become, evidence in a specific criminal investigation or is subject to a discovery request or other lawful action to produce records.” The policy also prohibits the department from selling the data or for using it for any purpose other than “legitimate law enforcement or public safety purposes.”
This story originally appeared in Palo Alto Weekly. Gennady Sheyner covers local and regional politics, housing, transportation and other topics for the Palo Alto Weekly, Palo Alto Online and their sister publications.
The post Palo Alto set to expand its network of license plate cameras appeared first on San José Spotlight.

Moffett Boulevard, a busy thoroughfare in Mountain View, is poised to undergo some major changes, possibly on a much larger scale than originally anticipated.
The boundaries of a precise plan that will guide future development along the corridor are being expanded, after the City Council recommended adding three major properties at a study session on Nov. 19. The plan would revise development standards for the properties, including updated densities, with an eye towards revitalizing the corridor.
But it is not the large properties that likely will cause a stir in the community. Rather, it is the last-minute inclusion of a smaller tract of land, composed of single-family homes, duplexes and multifamily residences, that could catch the public by surprise.
When the Mountain View City Council first considered the precise plan boundaries last year, it was largely confined to the length of Moffett Boulevard, from Central Expressway to West Middlefield Road, omitting the Moffett Mobile Home Park and 555 W. Middlefield Road development.
At that time, the council expressed a desire to expand the boundaries to include 555 W. Middlefield Road as well as 500 W. Middlefield Road and 500 Moffett Blvd., a federally-owned site.
The City Council supported the inclusion of all three properties in the precise plan at the Nov. 19 meeting. Many public commenters expressed support for it as well, citing a desire to see an integrated and contiguous plan for the Moffett Boulevard area.
Taking it a step further, Mountain View YIMBY and the Mountain View Coalition for Sustainable Planning advocated for a wider coverage area, especially near the Downtown Transit Center to encourage more transit-oriented development.
Several council members backed the recommendation to extend the precise plan boundaries near the transit center, although stopped short of the full coverage mapped out by the advocacy groups.
Instead, Council member Alison Hicks proposed that the city consider a rectangular plot of land directly across from the transit center, bordered by Willowgate Street and Central Avenue as well as Santa Rosa Avenue and Horizon Avenue. “It’s a mix of small cottages, old apartments and a little commercial. It looks like one of the areas that might benefit the most,” Hicks said.
The proposal, in a 4-2 vote, received support from Mayor Pat Showalter and Council members Lucas Ramirez and Emily Ann Ramos.
But Council members Ellen Kamei and Lisa Matichak pushed back on it, citing concerns that community members living in the area had not been informed about the potential incorporation of their properties into the Moffett Boulevard precise plan.
“I don’t feel comfortable expanding a boundary map area for people who already live there in their single-family homes … those are planned communities, and if you walk in those areas, you will see that,” Kamei said.
The council also has plans to rezone parts of the city for multifamily residences, as part of its R3 updates, Kamei said, adding that she did not want to duplicate that work either.
Matichak expressed similar concerns about adding more properties to the precise plan without first notifying residents of this potential change. “I wouldn’t feel comfortable expanding it without community input. I don’t think that’s fair. I don’t think it’s transparent, and it just doesn’t feel good to me to do that,” she said.
For Showalter, it was preferable to start bigger with land use projects and then winnow down as needed. It can help with timelines, especially when it comes to regulatory clearance issues, she said.
The Mountain View City Council is planning to update its zoning regulations and development standards for multifamily residences in the R3 district. Photo by Magali Gauthier.

Palo Alto added its voice this week to a growing coalition of cities and environmental groups that are rallying to prevent a proposed quarry from taking over a grassy expanse in the hills south of Gilroy that is sacred to the Amah Mutsun tribe.
Known as Juristac or Sargent Ranch, this area has been used for generations of Amah Mutsun, descendants of the Ohlone people whose ancestral lands include Palo Alto and other swaths of Santa Clara County. Valentin Lopez, chair of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, said that people have been coming to Juristac for thousands of years for sacred ceremonies and healing. The tribe’s ancestors are also accustomed to coming to the mountain tops to pray, Lopez told the council at the Dec. 3 meeting.
“Juristac is our most sacred site, without a doubt,” Lopez said.
Now, this sacred site is in jeopardy. Under a proposal from the San Diego-based investment group Debt Acquisition Company of America, the land would be converted into a 298-acre sand and gravel mining operation and a 105-acre buffer zone that would separate the excavation activities from neighboring lands.
The project would unfold in three phases and consist of three pits, dug up in each phase to facilitate mining, a processing plant and a 1.6-mile conveyor belt. Over its 30-year life span, the mine operation would remove about 35 million cubic yards from Sargent Ranch, creating about 25.3 million cubic yards of saleable sand and gravel aggregate, a product used in construction. Once the mining is done, the area would be “reclaimed.” Pits would get filled up and topography would be adjusted so that the land can be retained as open space or used for cattle grazing, according to the environmental documents for the quarry.
The goal of the project is to create a high-quality aggregate needed for various uses in the county and other local markets, according to the applicant. The operation would, however, come at a cost. The environmental analysis concluded that the quarry would “interfere substantially with wildlife movement”; that it would cause a “substantial adverse change in the significance of the Juristac Tribal Cultural Landscape”; and that it would cause “a substantial adverse change in the significance of tribal cultural resources.”
For these reasons, as well as others, civic leaders and environmental groups have joined the Amah Mutsun people in urging Santa Clara County officials to reject the quarry proposal, which is currently under review. County staff are now putting together the final Environmental Impact Report for the quarry project. Once that’s done, the county Planning Commission will consider the permit application.
Alice Kaufman, policy and advocacy director for the conservation nonprofit Green Foothills, is among those who hope the commission will reject the quarry plan. Her group is part of a coalition of environmental and religious organizations that submitted a letter to the Palo Alto council, urging it to follow in the footsteps of the cities of Gilroy, Morgan Hill, Mountain View, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz, Sunnyvale and Santa Cruz County and adopt a resolution opposing the project.
The letter cites Juristac’s significance to both the Amah Mutsun people and to area wildlife. The California condor forages in the area and Juristac’s creeks and ponds provide habitats for red-legged frogs, California tiger salamanders and western pond turtles. The letter calls Juristac a “critical habitat for a wide variety of species, including threatened and endangered species.” Kaufman noted at the Dec. 2 meeting that mountain lions use this Juristac area as a migration route.
“Being able to migrate in and out is incredibly important, particularly for large animals like mountain lions, which are now a candidate for listing as a threatened or endangered species by the state of California,” Kaufman said.
In Palo Alto, the cause of protecting Juristac was taken up by Council member Lydia Kou and Mayor Greer Stone, who co-authored a memo urging their council colleagues to formally adopt a resolution opposing the quarry. The memo notes the recent effort by the Amah Mutsun tribe to revive the California condor, a species that, according to the memo, serves as messengers between tribal members and their deceased relatives.
“It is shortsighted to try to recover a species only to turn around to destroy their habitat,” the memo states. “Juristac is not only a biodiversity hotspot but an important wildlife connectivity area that links the Santa Cruz Mountains to the Diablo and Gabilan mountain ranges.
“Developing a quarry, a processing plant and all the associated roads and infrastructure here would severely degrade one of the last remaining wildlife connectivity areas in the region.”
Stone likened the proposed quarry to the recently shuttered Lehigh quarry in the hills outside Cupertino, an operation that formally shut down last year after about a century of operations and more than 2,135 violations between Jan.1, 2012, and Dec. 31, 2022, according to the list that the county compiled at the request of County Supervisor Joe Simitian. This included 37 violations involving the Bay Area Quality Management District, 809 violations involving the California Air Resources Board and 761 citations from the U.S. Mining Safety and Health Administration, according to the county.
“We should let Lehigh be the example that once these quarries are approved, reclaiming that land is incredibly challenging. It’s an expensive legal battle,” Stone said. “Here we have the opportunity to stand up for the environment, to stand up for the Amah Mutsun tribe, to stand up for future generations who will likely look back and go, ‘I wish we had a chance to prevent that before it opened.'”
Kou, who is concluding her council term this month, linked the proposed resolution to the council’s broader goals of protecting the natural environment. She urged her colleagues to stand with the Amah Mutsun tribe and suggested that the quarry plan is being driven by “Build, baby, build” ideology.
“Protecting diversity in the region is directly connected to the health and well-being of our own community here in Palo Alto as the cumulative impacts of the destruction of this sensitive habitat impacts us all,” Kou said.
This story originally appeared in Palo Alto Weekly. Gennady Sheyner covers local and regional politics, housing, transportation and other topics for the Palo Alto Weekly, Palo Alto Online and their sister publications.
The post Palo Alto joins effort to stop quarry at Juristac appeared first on San José Spotlight.

Citing surging demand in emergency room visits, Stanford Health Care is asking the city of Palo Alto for permission to add 70 beds in its hospital buildings, raising the maximum total to 670, according to an application that the hospital system submitted last month.
The proposal, which is now being reviewed by the city’s Department of Planning and Development Services, comes at what has already been a period of rapid growth and transformation for the university’s hospital system. In 2011, Stanford signed a development agreement with the city of Palo Alto for an expansion plan known as Project Renewal. The $5 billion project entailed adding 1.3 million square feet of development, which included construction of a new hospital, an expansion of Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital and renovations to existing hospitals and clinics. The City Council approved the plan after four years of negotiations with Stanford, a process that included 97 public hearings.
The expansion plan continues to unfold. In November 2019, Stanford opened its new 824,000-square-foot hospital at 500 Pasteur Drive, which includes 368 single-patient rooms, 20 operating rooms, a trauma center, five gardens and a meditation room. The following year, it launched a major remodel and expansion of its existing hospital at 300 Pasteur Drive, a project that includes seismic upgrades, two four-story additions, the doubling of post-surgery bays from 36 to 72, the renovation of nursing towers and creation of an inpatient psychiatric unit.
The university emphasized at the time that outside the in-patient psychiatry unit, all patient rooms would be single occupancy. But the demand for emergency services spiked during the Covid-19 pandemic and Stanford reacted by bringing back the hospital spaces that it had just decommissioned for renovation, according to the application. Stanford also brought back the beds that were taken out from rooms that were previously classified as “doubles” but that became private as part of the project, wrote Molly Swenson, Stanford’s land use director, in a letter accompanying the plans.
Over the past four years, the university has seen a growing share of its patients come in through the Emergency Department. Before, admissions from the Emergency Department made up 47% of total admissions. Today it’s more than 60%, Swenson wrote.
“At times, due to the increased demand coming from the ED, SHC must deny transfer requests—including strokes, tumors, and medical emergencies—that have few other options in this area,” Swenson wrote. “This also reduces the capacity available for treating local high acuity patients in such areas as cardiac surgery, cancer, and transplants—services that SHC is uniquely positioned to provide.”
Visits to the emergency department have increased substantially beyond the volumes that Stanford had anticipated at the time that it was getting its expansion project approved. The number of annual visits went up from 48,744 in 2009 to 75,391 in 2023, she wrote. She attributes this to numerous factors outside Stanford’s control, including the downgrading of the Regional Medical Center in San Jose, financial struggles of community hospitals, labor actions and staffing shortages at nearby hospitals, and a lack of post-acute facilities in the Bay Area, which results in longer hospital stays.
Since the onset of the pandemic, the university has been relying on waivers from the state to expand its capacity and bring back decommissioned beds. When the public health emergency formally ended, the hospitals obtained approval from the state Department of Public Health to continue to use these provisions and retain its beds, according to Swenson.
Now, Stanford is asking the city for a permit to add 70 beds to its various hospital buildings so that it would no longer have to rely on state provisions. The change would raise the maximum number of beds at Stanford hospital facilities from 600 to 670. This will be done by recommissioning the “semi-private” beds to its hospital license, turning private rooms at 300 Pasteur Drive into shared rooms, project plans show.
Swenson wrote that Stanford’s request to increase its licensed bed count is intended to “enable a continuation of the same level of care at the same capacity level available today” as the hospitals work to achieve a state deadline to make its facilities seismically safe by Jan. 1, 2030. She wrote that the hospitals have also boosted incremental capacity by creating a program for transferring patients to its community hospital in Pleasanton, scheduling more outpatient surgeries in network locations and operating an inpatient unit at Sequoia Hospital in Redwood City.
Meghan Horrigan-Taylor, the city’s chief communication officer, said that city staff is now evaluating the project and the existing adopted Stanford Hospital environmental impact report to confirm next steps, including project review and process for approval.
This story originally appeared in Palo Alto Weekly. Gennady Sheyner covers local and regional politics, housing, transportation and other topics for the Palo Alto Weekly, Palo Alto Online and their sister publications.
The post Palo Alto to review Stanford's plans to add more hospital beds appeared first on San José Spotlight.

Adam Gray, a former state Assembly member, defeated Rep. John Duarte, a Republican, in a reversal of their 2022 13th Congressional District race, to set the final GOP margin in the House of Representatives at five votes.

The exterior of Fumie Ito’s Kitchen Therapy café is hard to distinguish from the other businesses housed in the same strip mall. On a routine tour of San Bruno, it looks like any other anonymous front door.

The exterior of Fumie Ito’s Kitchen Therapy café is hard to distinguish from the other businesses housed in the same strip mall. On a routine tour of San Bruno, it looks like any other anonymous front door.

I went into this past weekend fully intending to see Red One, that new movie in which The Rock, Chris Evans and a polar bear have to rescue a kidnapped (and completely jacked) Santa Claus.

Most documentaries about the 1960s are content to dwell on hippies, rock music festivals and antiwar protests—news highlights from the lifestyle file. Johan Grimonprez’s immensely entertaining, powerfully informative doc Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat takes a different approach, a provocative view of social and political ferment at a crucial moment in world history.

If you’re ChatGPTing your holiday movie recommendations this year, the list will likely include popular items like Home Alone (1990), Elf (2003), How the Grinch Stole Christmas (1966 & 2000), A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965), Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964), Frosty the Snowman (1969), National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989) and The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992).

Every fall brings a big ol’ bagful of Christmas albums. This year seems to have a slightly lower number of holiday releases, but with more than a fair share of worthy and unique music. Here are some albums Christmas music fans will want to put on their “nice” list.

Now based in San Jose, the drag queen known as No One hails from a town near Sacramento, where she proudly became the first openly queer student at her high school.

A thick layer of dust covers the Chinook salmon. Sheets of cobwebs stretch from the hummingbird to the horses and on to the shark. Ankle-high piles of leaves cover the ground. Even the camel is covered in dirt.

With federal legalization now (perhaps) a far-off pipe dream as Republicans descend into the White House and Congress to assume full control of the government, one of the chief hopes for California’s badly ailing pot industry has (perhaps) been dashed.

ARIES (March 21-April 19)

Outdoor fun meets citizen science in the annual birdwatching festival under California’s Pacific Flyway.

Police said the suspect stole over $18,000 worth of Lego sets and other merchandise from various Target stores in San José.

Six former Apple employees defrauded both the State of California and Apple’s Matching Gifts Program, obtaining approximately $152,000 for a cultural exchange program, then overreporting around $100,000 in charitable contributions as tax deductions, according to prosecutors.