Perfect PanAsian WEEKEND | P.16 MAY 14, 2010 VOLUME 18, NO. 19
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INSIDE: MOVIES | PAGE 19
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City gets first glimpse of $100,000 HSR images SKETCHES REVEAL WHAT RAIL CROSSINGS MAY LOOK LIKE AT RENGSTORFF, CASTRO By Daniel DeBolt
T Single mom struggles, but finds help LOCAL FOOD BANK’S HELP IS VITAL, BUT HARD TO SWALLOW by Martin Sanchez
TALES
“M
arie” is worried. She has a diploma from Los Altos High School and a bachelor’s degree in business administration — but no job. She owns a home in Mountain View and does charity work for her church — but she relies on a local food bank to feed herself
RECESSION TALES This story is part of a series exploring ways the recession has affected Mountain View and its residents
and her developmentally disabled daughter.
Every day, she looks for work, cares for her daughter, and runs errands for her ailing parents — and she is struggling to stay afloat, she said. Marie lost her job as an office manager in 2008 when the company moved overseas. She asked to remain anonymous for this story in order to protect her famSee RECESSION, page 11
hanks to some expensive new drawings, visualizing what high speed rail will look like in Mountain View just got easier. A $100,000 contract approved by the City Council on March 23 has already produced six preliminary designs for high speed rail crossings at Rengstorff and Castro streets in Mountain View. The drawings are by Freedman, Tung & Sasaki, a San Francisco design firm that designed much of Castro Street’s redevelopment. Council members were excited to finally see the drawings on Monday and Tuesday, which they said were unusual for a city to have this early in the project. City officials hope that the California High Speed Rail Authority will take note of the community’s preferred option. “I love the trench alternative,” said council member Laura Macias as she pointed to one of the drawings likely to be the favorite, according to input from residents at a May 3 hearing.
Castro Street is raised seven feet to allow the four tracks to go underneath in a trench. Half of the trench is covered, with the downtown’s light rail stop sitting above the trench along with a greenway connecting Castro Street to Rengstorff Park, which Macias happily pointed out. The Caltrain platform is placed underground. “These are conceptual images to try to help the community and the City Council visualize the various high-speed rail track alternatives,” said public works director Mike Fuller. “They are based on very preliminary information from the California High Speed Rail Authority. As we get new information from the Rail Authority, we will adjust our images.” There are three basic design options drawn for the Castro Street and Rengstorff Avenue crossings: the tracks could run on an elevated platform, in a partially covered tunnel underneath the streets, or the streets could be See HSR, page 14
DA’s race is a wild ride INCUMBENT CARR AND PROSECUTOR ROSEN TRADE ALLEGATIONS OVER ETHICS, CAPABILITY By Sue Dremann
T
he fierce re-election battle between Santa Clara County District Attorney Dolores Carr and her employee, prosecutor Jeff Rosen, has become one of the most hotly contested in the June 8 election, splitting powerful supporters between the incumbent official and upstart litigator. Carr’s four-year tenure has been scarred by a series of embarrassing gaffes
INSIDE
that have led detractors to question her judgment and ethics. She was criticized when her husband, a retired police lieutenant, became a paid consultant for a murder victim’s family in a case Carr’s office would eventually prosecute. But her husband consulted on a civil action against the bank where the victim was killed and had nothing to do with the criminal case, Carr said during a recent interview.
In April 2008, she was accused of intervening in a case on behalf of a defense attorney who contributed to her 2006 election campaign — which she has denied. Rosen has seized on those criticisms, once calling her “un-American” during a candidates’ forum because of her rare boycott of a judge whom she said was biased against prosecutors. But Carr isn’t taking the attacks complacently. Rosen was taken to task for
GOINGS ON 21 | MARKETPLACE 22 | MOVIES 19 | REAL ESTATE 25 | VIEWPOINT 15
prosecutorial misconduct in a trial by an appeals court eight years ago, Carr said during a March campaign debate. She recently filed a lawsuit against the wording of Rosen’s ballot statement. And she accused his campaign of taking an illegal in-kind $17,000 campaign donation from the San Jose Mercury News, after Rosen used the paper’s stories on his Web site without authorization. See DA’S RACE, page 8