Three months after city workers covered up Cesar Chavez's name at San Jose's downtown plaza, the city is asking the public to decide what should replace it — and even residents who support the change can't agree on what comes next.

San Jose launched a formal, community-driven process June 24 to permanently rename what has been called Plaza de Cesar Chavez since 1993, following explosive sexual assault and misconduct allegations against the late labor leader that surfaced in March. The city held its first public listening session Wednesday night at the Leininger Community Center, opened an online name-suggestion survey running through July 6, and set a timeline for a final City Council vote this fall.

The plaza at the heart of downtown San Jose has held many identities over more than a century and a half. In the 19th century, the site served as California's first state capitol before the seat of government moved to Sacramento. In 1887, San Jose City Hall rose there. It was known as San Jose Plaza, then Plaza Park, before the city renamed it in honor of the United Farm Workers co-founder in 1993 — a name it carried for 33 years until this spring.

That changed in March, when allegations of sexual assault and misconduct against Chavez surfaced publicly. The San Jose City Council voted unanimously to initiate a renaming process, and city crews covered up Chavez's name at the site. Now, the city is asking residents to fill in the blank.

"This is an important moment for our community to reflect on our history, face the aspects of it that are more disturbing, but also move forward," Mayor Matt Mahan said, according to NBC Bay Area. Mahan, who submitted a memo to fellow council members to kickstart the process, said he wanted the effort to be bottom-up rather than driven by City Hall. "We thought it was important to take action quickly. I immediately submitted a memo and asked my colleagues on the council to begin a process that would not be top-down, not city-driven."

At Wednesday's listening session, community opinion was clearly unsettled. Karl Soltero, a decades-long San Jose resident who attended the meeting, called the renaming "a very contentious issue," noting that competing groups would push for different outcomes. He offered his own pragmatic suggestion to sidestep the conflict: drop Chavez's name from the existing title and call the space La Plaza de San Jose. "For the sake of making it easier for everybody, we should cut off the last part and call it La Plaza de San Jose. Leave it at that," he told KTVU.

City officials emphasized that the goal is broad participation. Ed Bautista, a spokesperson for the San Jose Parks and Recreation Department, said the city plans to use on-site QR codes and email outreach to direct residents to the digital survey. "I think it's going to be a community-wide process," Bautista said. "We hope to get a lot of names in and take a look at what is going to be meaningful going forward."

According to the city, the renaming effort is designed to proceed in a "trauma-informed, inclusive and culturally respectful manner," with a stated priority on centering Latino and farmworker communities in the conversation — the same communities Chavez most prominently championed during his lifetime.

The timeline is tight and specific: the public name-suggestion survey closes July 6. The city will then release a second survey featuring the top submissions, allowing residents to weigh in on the finalists. A formal vote by the City Council is expected this fall.

The debate in San Jose is the furthest-advanced of several Bay Area reckoning with Chavez's legacy. San Francisco's Board of Supervisors convened a working group in May to consider potentially renaming Cesar Chavez Street — but that effort remains in an exploratory phase, with no legislation introduced.

Residents can submit name suggestions at the city's official online survey portal through July 6.