San Jose mayor’s race: Sam Liccardo appears to be slim winner
By Mike Rosenberg, from the Mercury News
SAN JOSE — Councilman Sam Liccardo appeared to be headed for a narrow victory over county Supervisor Dave Cortese in Tuesday’s hotly-contested battle to become the next mayor of San Jose.
In the early hours of Wednesday morning, with all precincts reporting, Liccardo had won 51 percent of the vote and Cortese had secured roughly 49 percent — a gap that had held steady throughout election night. Still, a good chunk of mail ballots turned in at the last minute will be counted over the rest of the week, and it wasn’t clear if Cortese would concede Wednesday.
Liccardo dominated voter results in the western half of the city, while Cortese controlled his native East Side, as they tried to succeed termed-out Mayor Chuck Reed. In all, Liccardo had garnered a lead of 2,176 votes as of 5 a.m.
The race has turned on a simple question: How should San Jose stop the exodus of police officers that has led to a public safety crisis not normally seen in the wealthy capital of Silicon Valley?
Liccardo, who is strongly backed by Reed, wanted to continue fighting for the outgoing mayor’s voter-approved pension reforms and use the savings to slowly-but-surely hire more cops, but this strategy has infuriated officers. The police union is backing Cortese, who has vowed to roll back parts of the pension cuts to quickly hire more than 100 cops, though there are serious questions over whether the city can afford this.
A cheer went up at Liccardo’s party at the Gordon Biersch brewery in Japantown when the first results showed the downtown councilman holding a slim lead.
“We know it’s going to be a long night and a close one,” Liccardo said after the first results came in. “I think San Jose voters are very smart, and at the end of the day they don’t fall prey to scare tactics, and they can do the math. They fundamentally understand, if you want to make San Jose safer and hire more police you’ve got to be able to identify the money to do it.”
Cortese was also holding out hope early Tuesday night.
“It’s exciting to be in the hunt,” Cortese said. “We feel good.”
Special interests on both sides — unions backing Cortese and big businesses benefiting Liccardo — had pumped more than $2 million into the race in one of the most expensive Silicon Valley elections ever, which was fought largely through mail ads.
The winner takes office Jan. 1 and will join several new City Council members.
The mayoral battle, the first for an open seat since 2006, had been anyone’s guess heading into Tuesday. With historically low turnout forecast and little community buzz over the rather tepid campaign, polls in recent weeks had shown huge swaths of voters that couldn’t decide between the two Democrats in the nonpartisan race.
Cortese had held a small lead over Liccardo in the polls after winning a crowded June primary. In that race, three council members aligned with Liccardo were eliminated, and Liccardo had hoped to pick up support from voters who cast ballots for the vanquished candidates to make up the gap with Cortese.
Cortese, 58, had been on the San Jose council last decade. After falling well short in the 2006 mayoral race, he rose to become vice mayor under Reed and then won a seat on the county Board of Supervisors. The son of former Assemblyman Dom Cortese, he grew up on a San Jose ranch and is a lawyer by trade. He had the support of the local Democratic Party, rank-and-file city workers such as cops and firefighters, local teachers and nurses, and five former police chiefs.
Liccardo, 44, has represented downtown San Jose on the council for the past eight years and was a former sex crimes prosecutor. The Harvard Law School graduate is the most vocal voice in City Hall for adding density to the suburban town and pushing for technological solutions to city issues. The preferred successor of Reed and the majority of the current council, he also had endorsements from three former mayors, environmental and business groups, and District Attorney Jeff Rosen.
The key difference between them was how to rebuild a once-proud police department of 1,400 cops that patrolled the nation’s safest big city last decade — before dipping to a force of fewer than 1,000 that is now just trying to keep up with a crime rate that has surpassed the U.S. and California averages.
Cortese, who had served on the council when it approved a host of costly new retirement benefits, wanted to settle a union lawsuit that sought to block tens of millions of dollars’ worth of disputed pension reforms passed by voters in 2012. He argued that the ongoing fight with the police union was driving away cops and that the city has enough money from the current local economic boom to pay for better wages and benefits.
Liccardo, on the other hand, wanted to continue fighting for the reforms in court, saying that without them, the city would run out of money as it did at the end of last decade and be left unable to fund its police department.
The battle echoed similar differences between the challengers — Cortese looking to spend more to increase services more quickly, and Liccardo preferring a more conservative approach to taxpayer funds. Cortese floated ideas for bonds to build new fire stations and plug potholes, wants to keep existing union staffing requirements that load up three firefighters on medical 911 responses, and would add officers to patrol in and around schools. Liccardo wants to charge developers fees to fund affordable housing and homeless programs, spread out manpower by limiting two firefighters per truck on medical calls, and double the tax on pot shops to fund after-school programs.
Voters were split Tuesday.
Robin Burns, a 57-year-old broadcast technician, said he voted for Cortese because police and firefighter unions supported him.
“With the number of police leaving, I see more crime. There’s a lot more fear,” he said. “When Vallejo lost police, it’s like a rodeo there.”
Penelope Williams, 70, a retired computer programmer, however, cast her ballot for Liccardo.
“He’s working to get the budget under control and the pensions under control,” she said.