Tom McEnery and Ron James: Liccardo knows what to do and how to pay for it
By Tom McEnery and Ron James
Special to the Mercury News
How are we going to make San Jose safer — and pay for it?
Those are the two questions a responsible mayor must ask and, more important, must answer.
As mayors who you once entrusted to lead San Jose, we — joined by Mayor Susan Hammer — have chosen to support Councilman Sam Liccardo. We do so with confidence that Liccardo will best lead a safer San Jose — and he will find a way to pay for it.
Liccardo’s career as a deputy district attorney gives him a unique insight, among all of the candidates, about public safety. He has demonstrated the independence to consistently stand up to powerful interests — such as the card clubs and marijuana industry — whose activities impact our neighborhoods’ safety.
Liccardo goes beyond the typical campaign slogans and offers a concrete road map for a safer San Jose. We commend the innovative ideas in his book (at www.samliccardo.com) — for restoring community policing, for leveraging technologies like data analytics to better anticipate crime “hot spots,” and the like.
Above all, Sam Liccardo uniquely understands the need to find the money to pay for it. That’s why he led the effort with Mayor Chuck Reed in 2013 to identify more than $30 million in fiscal reforms savings to hire additional police officers. Weeks ago, a third police academy class hit the streets, and with pay restorations, some officers have returned to San Jose. The rebuilding of the department has begun.
We have great respect for our former police chiefs for their service to San Jose, and to the other cities that they’ve served since their retirement here. But our police chiefs never had the job of paying to keep San Jose safe, however dutiful and brave their service. Chiefs advocate for more money for their departments, but they don’t have to find that money.
Following the innovative leadership of Joe McNamara, these now-retired chiefs worked to build a great Police Department. Yet they cannot know how skyrocketing pension costs — driven by some $3 billion in unfunded liabilities in the city’s retirement accounts — have decimated that very department. They haven’t had to grapple with the additional $200 million that the city pays today for retirement costs. They haven’t had to address successive annual budget shortfalls of more than $100 million that forced the layoffs of hundreds of employees in 2010, including 66 police officers — before Measure B’s passage.
If Sam Liccardo, Mayor Chuck Reed, and the San Jose City Council majority merely followed the easier path — to apply “pension reform light,” as Santa Clara County and some cites have done — San Jose would have continued laying off officers. Instead, they crafted Measure B, which the voters overwhelmingly approved, and they’re using its $25 million (and growing) annual savings to hire more cops.
Liccardo has the backbone to make these difficult decisions, because he understands that safety isn’t just about spending more. Indeed, our police expenditures actually increased by 43 percent over the last decade, largely because the cost of retiring an officer, many in their early 50s, has ballooned to an average annual pension of over $104,000.
Mayors must balance all of San Jose’s pressing public safety needs. Yes, the next mayor could unravel Measure B to appease the powerful police union. As mayors, though, we understand the price of such acquiescence to powerful groups. We understand that it would mean cuts to gang prevention programs, reduced spending for emergency medical response, and yes, fewer cops on the streets.
Sam Liccardo gets it. These are demanding times, and we need a mayor who is a leader. Liccardo will make San Jose safer — not by just spending more and talking tough, but by leading smarter.
Tom McEnery was mayor of San Jose from 1983-1991. Ron James was mayor of San Jose from 1967-1971. They wrote this for this newspaper.
You can read the article online here.