A MESSAGE FROM THE MAYOR

Good morning Los Gatos – with my apologies for the delayed message this week as we celebrated Memorial Day weekend and the Town Council held a special meeting last night to consider ideas and develop strategies to allow our Town to emerge from the current shutdown with feet on the ground and ready to recover. Once again, I am proud to say that our community and Council came together to meet the challenge. As a result, you can expect to see some changes around town this summer as we do what we can to support our small businesses. Last night, the Council unanimously voted to:

• Allow street parking along North Santa Cruz Avenue and Main Streets to be used by restaurants and retailers to expand their space into “pop-up parklets” to provide the additional square footage needed for safe, socially distanced commercial activity
• Create dedicated pull-in parking for curbside pick-up
• Work with the business community to implement ideas, adapt, and innovate as we work through “what comes next,” by streamlining permit processing to provide opportunities for new retail and dining experiences that will require more space.
• Re-purpose $1.9 million in Town funds previously set aside for downtown infrastructure to support recovery efforts

Of course, before all of these measures can be meaningfully implemented, there must be a corresponding meaningful change to the current Santa Clara County Shelter in Place Order. While the Town cannot lawfully nor responsibly “go it alone,” Town leaders both can, and have, lobbied our County and State representatives to push for reasonable changes to local rules which not only reflect rule changes occurring around the Bay Area and state-wide, but also reflect the results of all that we have done together to flatten the curve, reduce hospitalization rates, and to protect our healthcare workers and vulnerable community members during the COVID-10 pandemic.

As always, thank you to everyone in this extraordinary Town for your ideas, creativity, innovative spirit, and leadership. These are the qualities that continue to make our Town unique, both as we have understood it in the past, and as we will come to understand it as we adapt into the future.

It takes a Town.

Marcia Jensen
Los Gatos Mayor
May 27, 2020