From time to time I have talked about outsourcing certain city services to save money—so the city can use the money saved on core services we provide to the community. When I first introduced a pilot program for outsourcing park maintenance at the Rose Garden Park in 2007, the council (except for Mayor Reed) shrugged off my idea.  Now, the topic of how to provide services to San Jose residents with limited revenue is being discussed. For example, the city was able to open some of the pools that were due to be closed because the city outsourced to private organizations which are less costly.

The robust Vietnamese press in Silicon Valley has always played by its own rules, and a post on the blog Little Saigon Inside provided a particularly salacious example recently.

The author, Vinh Nguyen, points out that the Vietnam Daily Newspaper went after District 7 City Council candidate Minh Duong before the June primary with articles that accused him of being pro-Communist while boosting long-shot candidate Patrick Phu Le with headlines like “Phu Le Has a Very Great Chance of Being in the Run-off” (Le captured 17.11 percent of the vote to Duong’s 24.07 percent).

Judy Glickman, wife of former Los Gatos Councilman Steve Glickman, may be mounting a run of her own this November.  She has been hitting up local political consultants, shopping for somebody to help her in a race for her husband’s old seat on the clubby Los Gatos Town Council.

Her hubby was often a lone-wolf on the council, battling an otherwise unanimous body on topics ranging from a skatepark (which he favored) to a new public library (which he opposed). After deciding to step down rather than seek a third term last summer, Glickman circulated two 11th-hour initiatives—one to halt the new library project and another to institute term limits on his former colleagues. Both failed

Many times in this weekly post I have opined that the education of all our children is our most important nationally priority. I frequently get chastised on SJI for supporting a system of public education that is perceived as weak and inadequate. There is no doubt in my mind that our public education system is our best path to the ideals that our Founding Fathers dreamed and that we commemorated on Sunday.

Hope your Fourth of July holiday was fantastic. On June 29, prior to the holiday the Council made the final vote for a balanced budget. More than 20 people spoke at the Council meeting and all but one advocated that the Council not outsource janitorial services but rather keep the janitorial staff employed, since they provide an incredibly valuable service. You would have thought janitorial was listed in the city charter by the speakers’ comments.

LaDoris Cordell, San Jose’s Independent Police Auditor, says a study has concluded that there is no spy inside her office.

“I am greatly relieved that the investigation has determined that there are no leaks of confidential information by any member of my staff,” Cordell said at a press conference outside her downtown office this afternoon.

Cordell announced her conclusions in response to a June 9, 2010 article in the San Jose Mercury News. The newspaper claimed that confidential information from inside the IPA’s office had been leaked to SJPD Sgt. Bobby Lopez, the former president of the San Jose Police Officers Association, during his tenure.

Fly noticed a familiar, comely face in the corner of MercuryNews.com last week but was slightly confused to see a blue and orange PG&E logo where Evan Low’s dimple should be.

The trail-blazing, openly gay mayor of Campbell, shilling for PG&E? It turns out to be an ad for the much-maligned SmartMeter Program, the PG&E initiative to replace all old power meters with digital ones supposedly designed to provide more accurate readouts and give customers a better way to monitor their gas and electricity usage.

Fresh off the heels of Spy-PA Gate 2010, Bobby Lopez is throwing his hat in for another run at San Jose Police Officers’ Association president next fall.

Apparently, there is a great deal of dissatisfaction with the cop union’s current leadership—and Police Sgt. Lopez’s media-shy predecessor, George Beattie, in particular. There’s been a sense among the POA’s rank and file for awhile now that everything has gone to pot since the never-afraid-to-speak-his-mind Lopez stepped down.

Lately, San Jose’s political rhetoric has been hotter than its weather. Here are a few samples of comments by San Jose residents that were published by the Mercury News in recent days:

“With the resulting layoffs of 230 police and fire personnel looming, their (the unions’) motto needs to be revisited. Perhaps it should be modified to read, ‘To protect and preserve union power at the expense of public safety.’”

“Public and private workers increasingly live in separate economies…public employee unions have had a stranglehold on state and local elected officials for decades.  This has to end, as the taxpayers are fed up and tapped out.”

The final-final vote for the budget is tomorrow, to enact appropriations. Much work goes on behind the scenes with our budget office. Each time a change is made it is an arduous effort to balance the books and calculate the impact on the budget.

If there is a compensation cut in a private sector, it is simply a reduction off the top of base pay — that is easy to calculate. However, when we have unique requests from labor unions that require municipal code changes or legal interpretations of the city charter, it gets complicated.

One of the shockers to come out of the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors’ budget hearings last week was the decision to return control of the county jails to the Sheriff’s Department. The two were separated like bad children back in 1987, after then-Sheriff Robert E. Winter was brought to court by inmates and accused of overcrowding in the jails while the jails hemorrhaged money. In a deal orchestrated by the then-Supes’ chairwoman, now-Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren, the county wrested control from the sheriff and created the Department of Corrections.

As has been the case with several local elections, the final results of the June 22 Senate District 15 special election are on hold while registrar workers sift through the remaining ballots, estimated Wednesday to be at about 17,000. At the moment, it appears that Republican Assembly member Sam Blakeslee and Democratic former-Assembly member John Laird will be heading to an August run-off. However, should the provisional and mail-in ballots fall heavily into the Blakeslee column, he could bump up to over 50 percent and avoid the hassle altogether. As of Thursday morning, Blakeslee held 49.7 percent of the vote and Laird had 41.34 percent in an election that, in Santa Clara County, brought out a measly 25 percent turnout. Updated

There were cheers and hugs in the District Attorney’s office on the Friday that Jeff Rosen’s victory over Dolores Carr was announced.

Rosen spent Monday and Tuesday walking from desk to desk shaking hands with everyone in the office, and leaving handwritten notes for those who were out. Since he’d been on leave for the campaign, Rosen wasn’t carrying his entry badge, so the DA-elect had to go to the office’s information desk and be issued a visitor’s badge.

When he returned on Tuesday, he didn’t have a county-issued parking spot, so he went in to get a placard and returned to a ticket on the dash. Rosen says he wants to talk to the officer who issued the ticket, not to ask for a break but because the timekeeper wasted no time in writing the summons.

Perhaps you’ve seen the advertisements that have appeared in the newspapers inviting San Jose residents to attend the “Community Open House” at the “new” Mineta San Jose Airport.  If you have seen the ads, perhaps you noticed that several words and letters were highlighted in the text of the headline to spell out the words, “NEW ICON.”  Is the new airport really an icon?

Although a worker at the Santa Clara County Registrar’s Office said this afternoon that there are still a few ballots straggling in, Teresa Alvarado has thrown in the towel in her bid for the District 1 Supervisor’s seat. “I finished just 62 votes short of a second-place finish. Clearly, every vote counts,” she wrote in a statement. Although the gap between Alvarado and former City Council member Forrest Williams was just a few dozen votes, former Los Gatos mayor Mike Wasserman trounced both candidates in the primary by over 14,000 votes.

Pierluigi Oliverio was the first person in San Jose to see the green tidal wave coming.

Last October, the number of local pot clubs could be counted on one hand. Now, medical marijuana collectives have sprung up in every part of the city—some more legit than others. One web directory currently lists almost 70 San Jose–based medical marijuana dispensaries.

With the San Jose City council finally taking a serious look at regulating medical marijuana this week, the District 6 councilmember could not be blamed for saying, “I told you so.”

“I hate to keep going back, but if we would have done this a little earlier, everything would have been fine,” Oliverio says.