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South Bay Accent - Jun/Jul 2015

June/July 2015 57 the common good.” Liccardo later became a prosecutor for sexual assault and child exploitation crimes in the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office, as well as a federal prosecutor. He then decided to run for San Jose City Council and was elected in 2006. And it certainly wasn’t for the money. “Seriously, on more than one occasion, it was clear my mom thought I was nuts,” he says, adding lightheartedly that she expressed her concern a few times. “I took a big pay cut to be a DA, then took a 50 percent pay cut going from DA to councilman. And then we voted ourselves pay cuts again during the recession. So the question did come up. ‘Why don’t you just do what all your classmates are doing?’” During his time on the City Council, Liccardo didn’t plan on running for mayor. In fact, he made the decision to run just two months before entering the race. “I actually never really saw myself in this seat, and through most of my term, never really believed I was going to run,” he says. The choice was made, he explained, for a few reasons. For starters, San Jose was going through some dark times, characterized by the city cutting pay, laying off workers and reducing services. “Everything was bad news,” he recalls. “We had three consecutive years where the general fund was running a $100 million deficit. It was just brutal.” Liccardo was fairly convinced he was going to move on. He had enjoyed being a private lawyer and some of his other pursuits, like teaching government and political science at San Jose State University. But then he discovered ideas that made sense to him. “I learned that, even in a time of scarcity, we can make creative things happen,” he says. “It really was about reaching out to the private sector, nonprofits and to the schools and finding ways we could partner and do great things without needing the city bureaucracy and city dollars that we didn’t have.” Upon realizing this, he decided being mayor might not be so bad. A CLOSE RACE Last November’s nonpartisan mayoral race was a tight one. Then-Councilman Liccardo was backed by termed-out Mayor Chuck Reed along with many large businesses and community leaders. Former Councilman and Vice Mayor Dave Cortese, now a county supervisor, drew support from police and other public safety unions unhappy with Reed’s cuts to city pension plans (and expecting more of the same from Liccardo). One of the key questions of the race was how to stop the exodus of San Jose police officers, which was causing safety concerns for city residents. Liccardo, a fiscal conservative, believed the pension reforms would deliver the money needed to hire more cops, a position that angered the police unions. Cortese, by contrast, wanted to roll back the pension reforms and also hire more police. In the end, Liccardo won on a 51 to 49 percent vote. Now the task for Liccardo was to rebuild the trust of the unions and “WE WANT TO MAKE SAN JOSE A CITY THAT RESIDENTS FALL IN LOVE WITH.’ Liccardo and his wife Jessica Garcia-Kohl have long been active in the San Jose community.


South Bay Accent - Jun/Jul 2015
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