Franchise Opportunities in San Jose, CA

CONTACT Jennie Loft, Public Information Manager, Environmental Services 408-250-2974 (cell); [email protected]

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Erica Ray, Public Information Manager, San José Fire Department (SJFD) 408-398-9228; [email protected]

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As the first school year back on campus comes to a close, Covid infection rates in California again are on the rise, but with one distinct difference: Few districts are tightening up masking and other restrictions that were in place at the start of the year, even for large gatherings like graduations and proms.

California schoolchildren were told in mid-March they could officially ditch masks while indoors. The announcement from the California Department of Public Health came after several other states amended their COVID policies.

The San Jose Unified School District fell in line with the state’s policy change, declaring masks would be optional.

Yet year-end celebrations have become hot spots for Covid transmission in some districts. About 90 students at San Mateo High School tested positive for Covid after a prom at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco on April 9. In Sacramento, 21 people who attended the C.K. McClatchy High School junior prom at the city's Masonic Temple on April 23 tested positive for the virus.

This month, outbreaks seem to have become even more common. Last week, at least 65 students at Los Gatos High School tested positive for Covid, and 20 Marin County schools reported new Covid outbreaks. Nationwide, new Covid infections have increased substantially in the past month, with California adding more than 158,000 new cases during that time.

Covid dashboards, available on most school districts' websites, show large increases in the number of infections from March to April. Covid cases in San Diego Unified more than doubled, for example, while cases in Berkeley Public Schools and Dublin Unified increased almost five-fold. Infection rates in all three districts, and others, continue to track upward this month.

Despite the increases, the number of current Covid infections is far lower than the spike in January. And the mask requirements, regular Covid testing and social distancing that students experienced at the beginning of the school year are mostly gone.

“The attitude is we are going to plow through this, whatever increase that could possibly hit us,” said Brett McFadden, superintendent of Nevada Joint Union High School District. “We will push through. We haven't seen the same degree of sickness we saw before.”

The district, which serves 2,668 students in Grass Valley, had five cases of Covid in all of April and 10 in the first 11 days of May.

Nevada Joint Union, which dropped its mask mandate because of protests a few weeks before the state removed the requirement, isn't likely to bring masking back even if the state requires it again, McFadden said.

“With the controversy we went through two months ago concerning masks, I think that horse has left the barn,” he said. “Even if the state would mandate a return to masking, I don't think we would see sufficient compliance with that.”

The increase in recent cases is due, in part, to one of the latest variants of Covid - omicron BA.2 - which is more infectious than previous variants but does not seem to increase disease severity. BA.2 is the dominant variant in most regions of California.

“We are in a much different situation than we were in the beginning of the pandemic,” said Dean Blumberg, a UC Davis Health System pediatrician specializing in infectious diseases. “At the beginning of the pandemic, we had no immunity to Covid. No one had experienced it before. It overwhelmed the health care systems.”

Now, Blumberg says, the virus is much less of a threat because much of the population has partial immunity through immunization or a previous infection. As a result, the vast majority of those who have become ill during this uptick have not been hospitalized.

Although people should continue to wear masks when inside and try to maintain social distance from people outside their family, it isn't feasible to require high school students to wear masks to the prom, he said. Ideally, testing and vaccination would be required to attend the dances, which are often held in large spaces like gyms, where there is more air to diffuse a virus, he said.

“Most kids aren't going to wear a mask,” he said. “They probably won't dance with their masks on. They are going to try to sneak a kiss or something.”

San Mateo Union High School District, which still requires that masks be worn on its campuses, didn't require them for the prom at the art museum, said Kevin Skelly, superintendent. The district also offered, but did not require, testing before the event.

District policies changed after the outbreak, with all subsequent proms requiring students to wear masks indoors and show proof of a negative Covid test. The district also took part in a state pilot program that brought specially trained dogs onto campus to sniff out Covid.

“I just think we have tried to do both things -- be safe and have lots of activities for kids,” Skelly said.

Pacific Grove Unified School District could have a mask mandate again soon. The district’s school board agreed in April that it would reinstate indoor mask mandates if the county's seven-day positivity rate increased to more than 5% and there is a seven-day average of more than 10 cases per 100,000 Monterey County residents. On Thursday, the county had reached 12.4 cases per 100,000 and had a 4.8% positivity rate.

Esther Kim, a junior and student member of the Chino Valley Unified school board, is aware there has been a surge in cases of Covid in the state, but she doesn't think it has impacted her school district much.

“It didn't raise that big of a conversation as it would have if Covid just started,” Kim said. “Everyone is exhausted dealing with Covid and Covid protocols."

The district had 72 cases of Covid on Tuesday, according to its website. About a quarter of the student population continues to wear a mask to school, Kim said.

“We are pushing for just returning to normal,” she said. “Everything in person. Make everyone feel like everyone is back to pre-Covid and make sure all of our students are recovering from the (emotional) damage Covid has caused.”

NOTICE OF AVAILABILITY OF A DRAFT ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT REPORT (EIR) AND PUBLIC COMMENT PERIOD

A Draft Environmental Impact Report (DEIR) for the 550 E Brokaw Development Project is available for public comment.

Project Description: The 19.70 gross acres site is developed with a 293,906-square foot office and electronics superstore building and surface parking lot. The project would demolish the existing building and construct seven new eight-story office towers in a campus design. The office towers would consist of 1,921,215 square feet of office space and be up to 135 feet high with a floor area ratio of 4.16. The towers would be configured around a central pedestrian walkway and open space area and the development would include two parking garages (one nine-story and one ten-story garage) providing 5,385 parking spaces.

Location: 550 East Brokaw Road, San José, CA 95112 (irregular shaped site bounded by East Brokaw Road to the northwest, Junction Avenue to the southwest, Interstate 880 to the east).

APN: 237-08-079.

Council District: 3

File Nos.: H21-005/T21-005/ER21-018

The proposed project will have potentially significant environmental effects with regard to biological, cultural, hazardous materials, noise and vibration, transportation, and tribal cultural resources. The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) requires this notice to disclose whether any listed toxic sites are present at the project location. The project location is not contained in the Cortese List of toxic sites.

The Draft EIR and documents referenced in the Draft EIR are available for review online at the City of San José’s “Active EIRs” website at www.sanjoseca.gov/activeeirs and are also available at the following locations:

Department of Planning, Building, and Code Enforcement 200 East Santa Clara St., 3rd Floor San José, CA 95113 (408) 535-3555

Dr. MLK Jr. Main Library 150 E. San Fernando St., San José, CA 95112 (408) 277-4822

Joyce Ellington Library 491 E. Empire Street San José, CA 95112 (408) 808-3043

The public review period for this Draft EIR begins on May 11, 2022 and ends on June 24, 2022. Written comments must be received at the Planning Department by 5:00 p.m. on June 24, 2022, in order to be addressed as part of the formal EIR review process. Comments and questions should be referred to Cassandra van der Zweep in the Department of Planning, Building and Code Enforcement at 408-535-7659, via e-mail: [email protected], or by regular mail at the mailing address listed for the Department of Planning, Building, and Code Enforcement, above (send to the attention of Cassandra van der Zweep). Written comments are preferred. For the official record, when submitting your written comment letters, please reference File Nos. H21-005/ER21-018.

Following the close of the public review period, the Director of Planning, Building, and Code Enforcement will prepare a Final Environmental Impact Report that will include responses to comments received during the review period. At least ten days prior to the public hearing on the EIR, the City's responses to comments received during the public review period will be available for review and will be sent to those who have commented in writing on the EIR during the public review period.

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SAN JOSE — For the throngs of people who waited in line for up to 10 hours this weekend, California’s only passport fair at a San Jose post office became a frustrating exercise when clerks were overwhelmed and applicants were turned away.

Many who showed up well before the “passport fair” at the Willow Glen Post Office started at 8:30 a.m. Saturday just gave up and left the chaotic scene.

“They had hundreds and hundreds of children in the hot sun with no toilets, no water, no toys and no information about how long we would have to be there,” said Magnolia Segol, an attorney.

“They should have had about 20 people” helping to serve everyone,” said her husband, Jeffrey Segol, 62, a San Jose city analyst.

Evelina Ramirez, a spokesperson for the U.S Postal Service’s Bay Area region, said the office was prepared to handle about 150 people. But far more showed up, some lining up before dawn, and the office had only a handful of passport agents on hand.

“The crowd was overwhelming in terms of the people that actually showed up and got in line for the fair,” Ramirez said. “From what I hear, people drove miles and miles and miles.”

The three passport agents and other staff there “were working very hard and very efficiently” to help as many people as possible, she said.

“It was really a grueling day for everyone. But unfortunately there wasn’t any way to anticipate the real need. They really, truly did their best to expedite and take care of as many customers as possible,” she said.

Ramirez said the post office held the event in part to gauge local demand for passport services. Although the agency didn’t alert the media about the fair, news of it apparently spread far and wide by word of mouth.

After months of pandemic shutdowns, demand for passports among Americans eager to travel again caused a processing backlog. Last year, applications that normally took six to eight weeks to handle were taking three times that long.

Passport seekers started to queue up at midnight, and some people who arrived at 4:30 a.m. Saturday did not even make it through the doors into the passport center inside the post office, Magnolia Segol said.

She and her husband had arrived at 6 a.m. to apply for a passport for their daughter Madeline, 8, so the family can go to Italy for a trip delayed by the pandemic. They never got inside to apply.

“Now we’re at Tomato Thyme eating Italian food,” Segol said by phone Saturday evening. “That is our consolation prize for waiting 10 hours.”

Federal government rules say any adults who are first-time applicants must apply for a passport in person, as well as all children under 16, and they must be accompanied by both parents or guardians. Some attendees said they came to the fair because they couldn’t find open appointments when trying to book online through a government website.

Greg Klein, of Cupertino, his wife and their daughter Breanna arrived around 7 a.m. to apply for a passport for Breanna, 6, because the family plans to fly to Thailand in about three weeks. Klein, 52, a phlebotomy trainer at the Stanford Blood Center, had called the state department passport hotline and was told he should wait until the end of May, then schedule an application appointment for six days before their planned departure. The family went to the fair because that recommendation seemed like cutting things too close.

But when they arrived, there were hundreds of people ahead of them, and they left after 10 hours when office staff said services were over. Now the last-minute application that seemed risky appears to be their only option, other than delaying the Thailand trip, he said.

Attendees of the San Jose fair said a passport office staffer came out occasionally and provided limited information but only to the people at the front of the line, with those farther behind receiving updates passed along from the front.

The event was the only such “fair” in California among 21 scheduled across the nation this month and next. And the fair didn’t allow applicants to make appointments in advance.

“I guess a lot of people are in search of a way to get their passports, and we recognize the need, so hopefully there will be more events scheduled in the future,” post office spokesperson Ramirez said.

The U.S. Department of State said in an emailed statement Monday it encourages people to apply early for their passports, especially during busy summer months, because normal processing can take 8-11 weeks.

The state department said anyone needing “urgent travel” can schedule a counter appointment at one of 26 passport agencies or centers across the country, up to 14 days before their departure, by calling the National Passport Information Center at 1-877-487-2778.

“We are steadily increasing the number of counter appointments available for customers with urgent and emergency travel needs,” the statement said.