Non Meeting Notes
May 26, 2020
Hi Everyone. Hope you are all doing okay and keeping busy. Thank you to everyone who is sharing your stories and I hope to hear from everyone in the weeks to come.
Here’s our news for this week:
Rotary News
Our third virtual Zoom meeting took place earlier today featuring Mountain View Mayor Margaret Abe-Koga as our speaker. Her presentation was excellent with a great deal of very enlightening information.
Mayor Abe-Koga spoke about the City’s response to the pandemic. All of the Council Meetings are now occurring using Zoom. The City’s first action was to provide $500,000 for rent relief. And many people throughout the City have helped through volunteer work and donations to the #TogetherMV RELIEF effort. To date, the Relief Effort has included:
Funds From the City $3,472,000
Corporate Funds $500,000
#TogetherMV RELIF Funds $121,529.91
Total $4,093,529.91
Actions taken by the City during the pandemic include:
Two 24/7 safe parking lots for RV dwellers with one more parking lot in the works
1950 packets of food
8700 masks and 97 face shields
320 gift cards
425 hygiene kits
City staff has been redeployed to deliver food to seniors
Reopened Hope’s Corner
14 outdoor portable restrooms; 16 hygiene stations
Two pop up diagnostic testing stations
What’s next?
Workforce is ramping up for COVID tracking
More diagnostic sites with the next planned on May 27th from 9 am to 1 pm at Rengstorff
Budget
Pandemic has led to $8 million revenue loss
The FY 20-21 budget will be status quo
Depending on the continuing financial situation, future budgets are uncertain
Four Council Goals
Housing
Transportation
Sustainability
Community For All
Housing
36,727 current housing units in the City
2,272 are under construction
4,000 are in planning stages
Transportation
Staff working on a pilot program to close Castro Street
Don’t forget to complete the census!
President Tom thanked Jack for setting up today’s meeting and reminded us that our next virtual Zoom meeting will be in two weeks.
If anyone knows of any of our members in distress or that need anything, please let President Tom or one of the Board Members know. We want to make sure everyone knows that we are here to take care of each other.
Personal News
This is an opportunity for us to share whatever information we would like so we can keep up with what everyone is doing these days.
M.A.T. Caparas – Hellooooo! I thank you for sending me almost regularly this notice of activities of the club although I have not been able to attend any because of my age and infirmity.
I am a Filipino, from a small island across the vast Pacific that is much affected even by small tremors anywhere in the world. After WWII, which was not a small tremor, I found myself in Boston when the Yankees were basically murdering the Red Sox. A bit later, I started to settle here in the west coast before football made San Francisco famous. In the process I found it impossible to support five children while laughably trying to practice law in two opposite sides of the globe. It also meant saying goodbye to a doctorate.
No matter. I had in the meantime inclined towards a basically charitable and notoriously ill-paid activity to mitigate the occasional excessive hardship and sometimes downright injustice laid on some decent Joes by government set up and operated by ordinary lawyers. I joined Rotary, an international organization of more than 32,000 clubs with more than 1.2 million members all over the world seeking to make friends and secure world peace by rendering Service Above Self.
Elected international director, and later World President of Rotary, I had the joy of leading its mission to stop poliomyelitis, or polio, the former summer terror that almost killed FDR before his time, and which the World Health Organization, for lack of equipment, did not include among its five target enemies -- diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus, measles, and tuberculosis.-Rotary quickly ended polio in the Philippines, where we started, and did the same in the rest of the world where it can now be found in just three countries – Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Nigeria – in which less than 30 cases a year can be identified. We, Rotary, saved the lives of more than half a billion children in that time!
When my children were growing up, they used to swim together with the children of one of my senior law partners. One day, my partner’s children came down with polio, but mine did not. There was only one iron lung available in the whole country, and the girl got it. Both survived, showing the usual effects of their illness. The boy often goes around riding a four-wheel cycle he finds convenient for transportation. One sees them and wonders how many times every night they cry and wish their parents just let them die. But life has its joys and ecstasies no matter the trials, and we cannot just let people die. So, I continue to hunt for one full meal for every child every day, a system of literacy based on the conversational method to identify letters and put them together to express intelligent thought, and – most important of all – to stop children from killing one another.
The current pandemic shouts at all of us to find love and affection, and learn to love one another. Not one of us is an ordinary lawyer.
SALAMAT po.
matc
Other Stuff
Just to bring a few smiles:
One Liners
David Brenner – "Misers aren't fun to live with, but they make wonderful ancestors."
Jay Leno – "How many are worried about a government shutdown? How many are worried about it starting back up?"
Billy Crystal – "By the time a man is wise enough to watch his step, he's too old to go anywhere."
Joan Rivers – "Don't talk to me about Valentine's Day. At my age, an affair of the heart is a bypass."
Retro Photo of the Week – So how many of you were able to figure out who last week’s tractor driver was?
And if you guessed Double Past President Alan, you would be 100% correct.
Unfortunately, we didn’t get any retro photos this week, but I’m hopeful that some brave members will send me an older or interesting photo to add to this section next week.
Remember, send me some stuff so we can make this interesting and keep it going. And don’t forget the photos. Send it to bbarsi@msn.com. And take good care of yourselves.