Metro Silicon Valley’s issue this week looks at possible candidates to succeed Mayor Chuck Reed when he terms out in less than two years. One possible candidate for San Jose mayor in 2014 is San Jose Councilmember Ash Kalra.—Editor

The public relations war we’ve all been waiting for is finally here. In a recent article, New York Daily News columnist Bill Madden suggested that MLB was unlikely to grant the Oakland A’s permission to move to San Jose. Baseball officials responded by saying no decision had been made. Then the A’s and San Francisco Giants sparred with competing statements about who had rights to the South Bay territory.

Putting a pension reform measure on the June ballot is critical to restoring the fiscal well-being of our city. Whether the projection of future annual pension costs are $300 million, $400 million or $650 million, we know for a fact that these costs have more than tripled in just ten years, going from $73 million in Fiscal Year 2001-2002 to $245 million this year. Please join me in supporting the retirement reform measure on today’s council agenda.

San Jose City Hall’s celebrity falcons Clara and Esteban Colbert celebrated the dropping of their second egg of the season around 8:30am Wednesday morning. Clara started her sixth nesting season Saturday with the dropping of her first egg. Glenn Stewart, biologist and coordinator of UC Santa Cruz’s Predatory Bird Research Group, expects each egg to drop in 56-hour intervals until Clara and Esteban have a nest of three or four. Clara has had a series of lovers since she first built her nest on the 18th level of City Hall in 2007.

A four-month manhunt ended Saturday with the arrest of Steve Ruiz, who is suspected of killing fellow Hells Angels motorcycle club member Steve Tausan at a funeral during October of last year. Ruiz will reportedly be charged with homicide Wednesday.

In his outstretched palm, Atul Lall holds a molar, a wisdom tooth and four fragments of teeth that broke free when a tequila bottle encountered his jaw. Three days before last Thanksgiving, the 32-year-old San Jose native was driving away from the Lucky’s grocery store on South White Road in east San Jose. As he pulled his car out of the lot, Lall says that three men, without apparent reason, ripped him from the driver’s seat and beat him while dousing him with liquor. They called him a terrorist. Almost three months since the incident, the second-to-last of San Jose’s 32 hate crimes reported last year has sparked two separate police investigations. The first continues to search for the three men suspected of beating Lall.  The other, sources confirmed, is being conducted by Internal Affairs, the police department’s watchdog, which is looking into claims that investigators bungled the case and blamed the city’s budget problems for their inability to find the culprits.

Prospective Nora Campos challenger Anthony Macias, a 21-year-old student at Chico State, has written that he was impersonated by an individual who posted anti-Jewish comments online. He has not, however, substantiated the claim with specific information.

In a San Jose Inside post on Saturday, Jan. 28, a commenter who identified himself as Anthony Macias wrote “Regarding [Campos’] charges of antisemitism: Those are entirely false. I have never posted anything of the sort on any Yahoo! message board or forum. I think that someone was pretending to be me.”

A day before the two-year anniversary of the Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission Supreme Court ruling, more than 200 protesters gathered Friday at St. James Park in San Jose. The rally was held in support of the Move to Amend demonstration, a proposed constitutional amendment that would reverse Citizen’s United, which paved the way for corporations and unions to spend an unlimited amount of money on political campaigns.

San Jose’s plastic bag ordinance will save local creek bed ecosystems, bankrupt mom-and-pop shops, drastically alter consumer habits, spark grocery store riots on Thanksgiving, bring down the plastics industry and destabilize the global economy—all at the same time. Or it could just force shoppers to bring their own bags to avoid a 10-cent fee per paper sack. The reality is the bag ban was designed to nudge other cities into action. San Jose wants to set a local trend that already is spreading across the country.

San Jose Inside would like to wish you and yours a Happy Holidays. We will pick back up next week with a special Year in Review.

In response to the ongoing Occupy San Jose protest at City Hall, the city is once again changing its stance on where protesters are allowed to camp and asking the public to stop donating food to occupiers. A memo sent Thursday by the city manager’s office to Mayor Chuck Reed and the San Jose City Council says the city has stepped up its effort to remove Occupy San Jose, which is now nearing its 50th day.

On Tuesday, the City Council is expected to receive an update on labor negotiations from City Manager Debra Figone, decide the fate of Family Camp and consider a 15-mph pilot program around three school zones.

After a day-long “general strike” in Oakland, which lasted well into early Thursday morning, Occupy Oakland protestors have removed barricades at the port of Oakland entrance. On Wednesday afternoon, a crowd of more than 3,000 people marched to the port of Oakland.

San Jose’s roads are the worst in the county and among the bottom third for cities in the Bay Area. And it appears they’re only going to get worse. A report given to the City Council from Transportation Director Hans Larsen says San Jose is currently able to fund just 15 percent of the nearly billion dollars it will take to maintain roads over the next decade. That will result in an $860 million backlog.

San Jose cannabis activists hoping to repeal the city’s new dispensary regulations say they have almost 50,000 petition signatures before today’s deadline. The Citizens Coalition for Patient Care, a group running the petition drive, calls the City Council’s ordinance “unworkable.” The group says it needs 29,653 valid signatures to qualify for a referendum to overturn San Jose’s ordinance.

The first member of the Occupy San Jose protests to be cited at City Hall climbed a large wall in the plaza and was still there as of Monday morning. The man, identified by another protester as Shaun O’Kelly, reportedly climbed the wall in protest of other members of the movement being removed from city property.