Amid the horrors perpetrated by the Russian military upon the Ukrainian people, we should focus on concrete actions that help Ukrainian communities devastated by this brutal war. Through our Sister City leadership, our San José community has expressed our moral outrage directly–via letter–with Lena Novomenskaya and other community leaders in…

The Council and City management has been wrestling with budgetary decisions in recent weeks. As you can read in my March budget message, I’ve prioritized focusing your scarce dollars on addressing homelessness, crime, blight, and resilience, and the Council has approved those priorities as we refine the final budgetary…

Santa Clara County has quietly undergone a pandemic-era experiment of releasing unprecedented numbers of jail inmates. Before the county Board of Supervisors pursues its policy of “depopulating the jail” any further, it should heed the lessons of our recent experience. In November of 2020, San Jose police arrested a 29-year-old…

The Mercury News posted an article yesterday with a click-worthy title (“Liccardo, VTA hid soaring cost, texts reveal”), but unfortunately, a lot of facts got lost in the noise. To protect taxpayer dollars, it was my duty as a public official to avoid publicly discussing competing estimates for increased BART…

This Earth Day, we have plenty of grim reminders about our challenges ahead– such as a recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change detailing the imperative to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 43% by the end of this decade to avoid the disastrous impacts of a planet-warming above…

A week ago, we lost a 25-year-old resident Diego Castanon to another tragic roadway fatality. According to news accounts, Diego rode his Yamaha motorcycle off Story Road near Capitol Expressway and collided with an electrical box and light pole on the curb. Our families have lost loved ones in traffic-related…

I was asked to speak a bit about the future of the state that we love. As I stand here, I am mindful of the irony of a group of business leaders listening to a government official babbling about fixing whatever ails California. It invokes the old saw about the…

I released my March Budget Message, outlining my Proposed Budget for the 2022–23 fiscal year. For the first time in decades, we see declines in the cost for retirement benefits for the next half-decade, as a result of our longstanding efforts to implement sensible pension reform in collaboration with our…

Last month, the Council unanimously voted to apply its longstanding policy on high-rise housing to reduce City fees on a residential high-rise project by nearly $4.4 million. People often ask me why we reduce fees, and what the public gets in return. Two answers: First, fees only get paid…