2024 Board of Trustees

The Board of Trustees is responsible for the upkeep and maintenance of all property belonging to Wesley United Methodist Church to support its ministries. Wesley’s properties include:

• Main church campus consisting of the Sanctuary, Chapel, Administrative Building, Fellowship Hall, Education Building and parking lot located at 566 North 5th Street, San Jose;
• Commercial building (aka Soko Annex) and Storage Building located at 565 N. 6th Street, San Jose. There are two commercial tenants on the first floor of the commercial building (Okayama Japanese Restaurant & new yakitori restaurant which is still under construction);
• Two parking lots on either side of the Soko Annex.  Part of the North lot, referred to as the “Dobashi” lot, is being converted and landscaped into a courtyard & garden area; and
• Church parsonage, moving from 2758 Valley Heights Drive, San Jose (4 bedroom, 2 bath, approximately 1,590 Sq Ft) to 545 North 5th Street, San Jose (3 bedroom, 2 bath, appx. 1,500 Sq Ft).

Our duties include:

• Upkeep and maintenance of all church properties
• Oversee church’s budget for repair & maintenance, upgrades, insurance, property taxes, utilities, janitorial services, landscaping, etc.
• Also responsible for leases for tenants of Soko Annex property and for dispositioning requests from outside non-profit groups who request use of Wesley properties.

Committee Members:
David Brown (Chair), Tomoko Tanaka, DeeDee Azuma, Jim Higuchi, Rob Hikido, Cynthia Fukuda, Brian Hamilton

Highlights for 2024 include the following:

Main Church Campus
Several new projects were initiated this year including:

• Courtyard & Garden: After several years of planning, we finally broke ground for building a garden area behind out Fellowship Hall.  Groundbreaking was held on May 20, 2024 with a forecast completion in November 2024.  The project is within its budget of approximately $600,000.
• New signage, with UMC cross and fire, was installed at the front (5th Street) entrance of our church.
• We entered into an an annual HVAC maintenance contract for the many furnace and air conditioning unit across our church campus.
• Church phones migrated from an obsolete hardware phone switch in the basement to virtual services in “the cloud”.
• We continued to be blessed with scouts from Troop 201 helping to keep our campus looking good.  This year a Troop 201 scout chose as his Eagle project to design and paint a mural on a storage bin staged in 6th street parking lot.

565 N. 6th Street (Wesley Annex, aka old Soko building)
Soko building: The remodeling and lease project for a new yakitori restaurant continues to experience major delays.  During the remodeling, we discovered two unexpected plumbing issues that needed correcting and a major flaw in the new restaurant’s electric power design that will require PG&E to install a new building transformer.  The project is on-hold until PG&E can provide an installation date for the upgraded transformer.

Parsonage
In March 2024, and on very short notice, the Mineta house across the street from the church was offered for sale.  Norm Mineta had a long history with this church, San Jose, and our nation that our congregation wanted to honor and preserve. With full support of the congregation and church conference, we successfully purchased the property with the intent to relocate our parsonage from 2758 Valley Heights in San Jose to 545 N. 5th Street.  The Valley Heights property was sold to finance the purchase of the Mineta property and renovation of the Mineta house is budgeted at $400,000 with a forecast completion date of March 2025.  We are renting the Valley Heights property until March 2025 to minimize the number of moves our pastor will need to make.

Serving the community
The Japantown Business Association (JBA) which consists of local Japan town businesses, continues to use 17 parking spaces in the 6th Street South lot during the work week.
Two non-profit groups continue to “rent” space in the Soko Annex for a minimal contributions: the Japantown Business Association (JBA) maintains a small office and the Chidori Band stores their equipment.
We occasionally allow other community groups such as the Japanese American Museum of San Jose, Japanese American Citizen’s League (JACL) of Silicon Valley, Chidori Band rehearsals and the DYKK Gabriel EOTC (Ethiopian Church) which is our next-door neighbor on 6th Street, to use our facilities.

Looking forward…
We believe that we will need to update the kitchen, which has not been through a renovation since it was originally built in 1973, within the next few years.

Respectfully submitted, October, 15. 2024.
David Brown