Being named Morgan Hill City Employee of the Year, Jay Jaso
claims, is all the fault of his high school English and literature
teacher, Dorothea Safford.
Being named Morgan Hill City Employee of the Year, Jay Jaso claims, is all the fault of his high school English and literature teacher, Dorothea Safford.
Jaso was born in Nebraska but grew up in a small town in Colorado with a population of only 300, where the 100- student high school was so small they played 8-man football.
“We were the poorest family in town,” Jaso said. But Safford saw something different in him and pushed him to the limit to excel.
“She graded me ‘on the curve’,” Jaso said. “My book reports and reading and writing assignments had to be of a much higher standard than everyone else in the class, so I had to do A work to get a B. She wouldn’t let me do book reports on the books everyone else in class was reading – my book reports had to be – he stressed those words – from her list of authors. But she was convinced that I was capable of doing better.”
Jaso said an A+ he earned in Safford’s class makes him beam with pride even today, decades later.
“It’s because of her that I have always been confident of my reading and writing,” he said.
Jaso, a management analyst in the Public Works Department since 1991, received glowing words from his supervisors along with the award, for accepting new challenges eagerly, being innovative and embracing the city’s vision with enthusiasm. He was even nominated for the teamwork award as a single-person team.
Jaso was also a shining light and ground floor organizer of the first annual Poppy Jasper Film Festival, now in the planning stages for November 2004.
Kim Bush, another film festival fanatic, refers to Jaso as a “one-person marketing agency.”
“Jay is a community treasure,” said Rosemary Rideout, a contract employee who has worked with Jaso for 10 years. “He’s always looking for a way to streamline work.
“Several years ago, Jay turned the laborious process of assembling the city’s 5-year capital improvements document into a streamlined spreadsheet program, linking together several dozen project sheets into a comprehensive document so that what used to take seven or eight people working together now could be done by two people.”
She said Jaso tweaked the process even more last year customizing software.
“With this software, the department’s new receptionist (who’d only been on the job about three months) put together the entire document from notes and material provided by the department’s engineers.”
Rideout said the receptionist, using the new system, almost beat an experienced person using the old system getting the entire draft document completed.
Jaso is Public Works’ public relations expert, Rideout said. He’s always out talking to the maintenance guys, pumping them for information and details about what they’re doing so that he can turn it into interesting articles in city publications and press releases. He continually compliments the guys on the importance of their work, and encourages them to interact with the public.
Jaso has also led the city’s team at the Taste of Morgan Hill, turning a one-table display with a few easels into a half-block extravaganza of color, pictures, exhibits, and displays that truly tell the “city story.”
Through this approach, Rideout claims, an exhibit that drew maybe a couple of thousand people now regularly draws three or four times that number each year.
Jaso is active in the community, helping the YMCA with its live fundraising telethon and was a member of an early Leadership Morgan Hill class in 1996-97.
“He led the Leadership MH group in creating a regular community television news magazine type program called “Morgan Hill LIVE” (LIVE standing for “local information, views and events”),” Rideout said.
Jaso has taken the community television idea to whole new innovative level.
With a strong core group, its mission is to develop a national network of community television channels that would create a new way for everyday people (including young people and minorities) across the country to interact with newsmakers in media, community, government and business.
Jaso has already demonstrated that this is possible since the current group has interviewed Tiger Woods, Kristi Yamaguchi, marketing guru Regis McKenna, computer mouse inventor Doug Engelbart, former Applied Materials CEO/Board Chair Jim Morgan, Pulitzer Prize-winner David Halberstam, former 49-er Steve Young and many, many others.
“If Jay’s involved in a project, you know you are in good and capable hands,” Rideout said.
Jaso attended a junior college in Sterling, Colo., because it was nearby and larger, he said. He used his hard-won writing skills as editor of the school newspaper.
“I decided to get out of there,” he said, and joined the Navy, emerging as a Petty Officer Second Class.
“I volunteered to go to Vietnam,” Jaso said. “I wanted to see what was happening and have a bit of adventure.” He was attached to a naval advisory group and worked directly with the Vietnamese people as a liaison.
“I felt bad for all the bad press we got,” he said, “because there were little pockets of good.” He reupped for another tour.
“Vietnam was a life-changing experience for me, “he said. Because he mostly was stationed in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City), he wasn’t in danger as much as soldiers out in the field.
“Though we did get rocketed a few times,” he said. Jaso was impressed with the Vietnamese people who continued to celebrate life’s events and birthdays and festivals – even though they knew the war would not turn out well for them, he said.
Jaso and his wife have a daughter 21, majoring in biology at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, and a 14-year-old son at St. Catherine’s School.
“I was attracted to the community after my wife mentioned it,” Jaso said. “The first thing I saw was the downtown and Vineyard Town Center. I said it looks like there is an RDA (Redevelopment Agency) here.”
The family has lived in town since 1985.
“Being proud of what you do, sharing that pride with other people,” Jaso said, is important. “We have so much of a story to tell within the city itself.” And he does.
— Rosemary Rideout contributed to this story
