Making San Jose "Open for Business"

By Sam T. Liccardo

Many neighbors tell me they want grocery stores, and more retail and other resident-friendly businesses downtown and throughout our neighborhood business districts. But the City seems to have lost sight of what we must do to fill our empty storefronts.

• Let Consumers, Not the Redevelopment Agency, Decide Which Businesses Survive

  In recent years, we've seen the Redevelopment Agency use subsidies, eminent domain, and other means to benefit newer and larger enterprises, often at the expense of already successful, homegrown, smaller businesses. For example, the RDA did little for the "homegrown and successful" Casa Castillo, and gave a big subsidy to the "newer and flashier" Zyng Noodle to supplant it. Zyng failed after a few months. The building now sits vacant. We must allow consumers to decide which businesses should prosper, rather than wasting taxpayers' money on huge subsidies to corporations that lack a commitment to our community. Let's give our current group of surviving downtown businesses a chance to thrive.

• Streamline Planning and Permitting

  Too many small business owners have a horror story to tell about months of delays and headaches, while the City escorts large projects through the process on a red carpet.We must implement time-based performance measures for city staff so that small business owners can make investment and hiring decisions without the uncertainty of delay. We should also expand our Small Business Ambassador program so that every business owner need only communicate with one city employee, rather than groping through the labyrinth of city bureaucracies.

• Communicate the Programs Available to Small Businesses

  Enterprise zones, parking subsidies, and other programs can save small businesses thousands of dollars in state taxes, operating costs, and development expenses. Yet many business owners don't know about these programs. I will serve as a small business advocate on the City Council, and my office will provide this service for our entrepreneurs.

• Eliminate Suburban-Style Restrictions on Downtown Businesses

  The City's burdensome signage regulations and parking requirements don't make sense for downtown businesses. The City needs to proceed with plans to modernize the parking requirements in our neighborhood business districts, and to allow businesses to create distinctive signs that uniquely (yet tastefully) identify their services and theme.

• Facilitate Immigrant-Led Small Businesses

  Many of our best and most exciting business concepts have come from our vibrant and diverse immigrant communities, but several small business owners have told me that linguistic barriers make City government inaccessible to them, and they need the City's assistance with seed financing to get off the ground.

• Promote Commercial Condominiums

Commercial condominiums allow small business owners to build equity in their business space, giving them capital for growth while strengthening their connection to the community. Business owners within our immigrant communities, whose success breeds a more diverse and stable commercial sector, have demonstrated a particular interest in such opportunities.

• Incubators

  The development of budding businesses through public-private partnerships+such as the biotechnology incubator in Edenvale, and the Software and Environmental Business Clusters downtown+enables entrepreneurs to realize the dreams which have long driven the creation of Silicon Valley. Let's continue to facilitate their development.

• Market San Jose's New "Open For Business" Attitude

  Let's show business owners throughout the state that San Jose means business: waive the small ($150) business license fee for new and small businesses for two years, and actively participate in the Chamber of Commerce's efforts to aggressively recruit new businesses.