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Alumni in the News

July 2005

Business Leader Profile Column
Contra Costa Times, Walnut Creek (7/26/05)

CONTRA COSTA COUNCIL LEADERS SEE FAVORABLE TRENDS: The Times recently interviewed Contra Costa Council executive director Linda Best and council president Stanley Taylor '71 about a variety of issues related to the East Bay.

QUESTION: What's the outlook for the economy here in the East Bay?

Taylor: The economy in the region is generally improving. We see the East Bay economy as a sort of microcosm of the whole Bay Area. We have a little bit of everything. We have industry; we have residential. We have a lot of what used to be back-office, and now it's front-office, such as with Chevron's headquarters. The Bay Area went into a deep slump in 2000, but the trend seems to be favorable and moving in the right direction now.

Best: The East Bay has been fortunate because our economy is more diverse than other parts of the Bay Area, so we didn't suffer quite as much. As a result, the East Bay has begun to come back more quickly.

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Former Residents Improve City
Corpus Christi Caller-Times (Texas), 7/25/05

There is a saying in Spanish that warns people from looking into the past.

Siempre pa'lante, nunca pa'tras - Always go forward, never go backward.

The Spanish saying, passed down by parents to children, didn't keep local lawyer Rene Flores and baseball coach Hector Salinas, from returning to their Corpus Christi roots.

Salinas and Flores are examples of people who grew up on the Westside, left and then came back to make it better than how they left it.

"I always felt responsible when called upon to help with what I could," Flores said of his work on the Westside. "I felt that it was my duty to help."

According to the city, West side boundaries are anything south of Agnes Street and anything west of Crosstown Expressway. According to some Westside residents, the area's boundaries are anything south of Interstate 37 and anything west of Crosstown.

"It depends on how you look at it," said Danny Noyola, a longtime Westside advocate.

As a neighborhood's youth move away the structure of a neighborhood changes, and the population begins to age, said Phil Rhoades, professor in the College of Humanities and Arts at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi.

When the population of a neighborhood ages, it typically hurts the neighborhood's economy because there aren't enough people living in the area with disposable income, he said.

Former residents returning to a neighborhood could help reverse some of the effects, Rhoades said.

People such as Flores and Salinas are doing just that.

Flores' story about growing up in the area is reminiscent of others; he is part of a large family that didn't have much financially.

As many people do, he left the neighborhood to pursue a better life, attending Princeton University and then eventually University of California-Berkeley law school.

Flores, 40, said he came back to Corpus Christi in 1994 for a job and because he always wanted to come back and practice law in the area.

Since 1994, Flores has helped out his Molina neighborhood, affectionately called Mo-Town by residents. The West Oso High School graduate was a board member of the Molina Neighborhood Center on Horne Road and he represented, for free, West Oso taxpayers during disputes with a former West Oso superintendent. Flores also worked with the school district and area supporters to help pass the recent $20 million bond to build a new West Oso High School. ...

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Methodical Judge Rules to Beat of a Different Clock
The Recorder, 7/5/05

COURT: Contra Costa County Superior
APPOINTED: Oct. 9, 2002, by Gov. Gray Davis
DATE OF BIRTH: Jan. 30, 1950
LAW SCHOOL: Boalt Hall School of Law, 1975
PREVIOUS JUDICIAL EXPERIENCE: none

It's apparently not enough to tell someone going to Contra Costa County Superior Court Judge John Sugiyama's '75 courtroom in Richmond to be on time.

Whoever that person is needs to check the actual courtroom clock, which Contra Costa County Deputy DA Brian Feinberg swears is at least several minutes fast.

"The clock is kind of an ongoing joke with a lot of attorneys," said Feinberg, who has been in Sugiyama's courtroom dozens of times. "When he was over in Walnut Creek his clock was a little out of schedule there, too ... I don't know if he brought it with him or what."

Coming up on three years on the bench, Sugiyama, 55, has earned a reputation as a soft-spoken, respectful judge whose devotion to the clock could be illustrative of his 30 years working for California taxpayers.

After graduating from Boalt Hall School of Law in 1975, Sugiyama spent 25 years working for the California attorney general's office, making his mark defending some of the state's most controversial ballot propositions in court.

From 1994 to 1999, Sugiyama was lead counsel in two class actions challenging the validity of Proposition 187, which sought to limit state benefits to undocumented immigrants.

The first time he was asked to defend the initiative, however, Sugiyama turned it down. Asked why, he smiles. "I voted against it," he said. "I didn't think I'd be the appropriate person to lead the defense of it." ...

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