A Mayoral Hopeful Who Doesn’t Trust His Own Constituents

Today at City Council:  Mayoral Candidate Sam Liccardo doesn’t trust residents to make the right choices to protect themselves.  Okay, not a quote, but that’s the bottom line after he rejected a perfectly sensible plan to spend excess city funds on public safety measures for neighborhoods.

The San Jose City Council voted 7 to 4 (Rocha, Campos, Chu, Kalra dissenting) to sock away another $3.8 million on a reserve fund that’s already got $10 million they can’t give away to hire police officers,  rather than put the money toward something San Jose residents can do on their own to help make this city safer.  Go figure.

Councilmember Ash Kalra came up with a few creative ways to spend some of the excess funds San Jose has because the city has so many openings in the police department.  He suggested:

  • Providing funds to help San Jose libraries open a couple more days per week
  • paying off some of the double overtime the current understaffed police department is working
  •  provide grants to residents for safety measures like alarm systems, surveillance cameras,  and paying for damages to their homes after break-ins

Alas, the games continued as Councilmember Rose Herrera basically agreed with  Kalra’s plan, but voted against it anyway – wait, what?  And Councilmember  Johnny Khamis wanted to know why the City spends  money on golf courses…uh okay let’s get back to the subject at hand.   Mayor Reed said it all comes back to Measure B.  That’s the issue that’s at the heart of a lawsuit for which a judge recently ruled the City must pay their opponents attorney’s fees.  Side note: City Attorney Rick Doyle estimates opponents attorneys fees could be $2 million.

City Council shenanigans continue.  C’mon November 4th!

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2 Comments

  • mikey7312 Oct 8, 2014 at 11:50 am

    I believe the actual quote by Doyle was something to the effect that they have set aside 2 million dollars. He really has o idea how much it will be. I would only guess that if the city has already spent 5 million that the POA and fire unions have spent about the same. What a disaster Measure B has been for all.

  • The Engineer Oct 8, 2014 at 6:19 am

    Discussions about employee pension costs cannot exclude the impact made by the State when it shut down the RDA, leaving its over $3 billion portfolio to be absorbed by the City’s general fund. The fact that it has never been acknowledged by this Council is proof that they are trying to use employee costs as the reason for on-going budget problems.

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