Today is President’s Day, which means no one is working at City Hall. And because the national holiday falls on a Monday, as usual, this means the City Council won’t be meeting until next week. After taking a quick look at the committee agendas, it doesn’t seem like much of anything important will happen this week. But there was one item about a newcomer to the District 6 City Council race that garnered some attention.

It has been a tough week for Mayor Chuck Reed. An enterprising investigative reporter, Jenna Susko, from KNTV News challenged the mayor’s veracity of the “fiscal crisis” and exposed his administration’s exaggeration of the unfunded liability facing San Jose. The mayor’s opponents were quick to jump on the news and quickly filed an ethics complaint. A complaint which, ironically, is justified under Reed’s own ethic reforms, which state that public officials shouldn’t lie. But the regulation—like many Reed Reforms—is unenforceable. A lawyer for the ethics commission advised the body not to investigate as they have no jurisdiction over the matter. That is lawyer-speak for you can’t do anything even if he did lie.

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.

Electing a judge for the Santa Clara County Superior Court is usually more about comfort level than name recognition. To put it bluntly: People prefer female judges. That might be why an unknown attorney named Alex Cerul listed his first name as Alexis on the ballot for the June 5 primary. Cerul, a staff attorney for the county, faces the battle-tested Paul Colin out of the District Attorney’s office. With more than 35 judges endorsing Colin in the race, one would think the deputy DA is a shoo-in to replace the retiring Jerome Brock on the bench (he got Brock’s endorsement). But insiders think Cerul has a shot based on “The Ritchie Effect,” named after the shocking 2008 upset scored by Superior Court judge Diane Ritchie.

The bi-weekly meeting of the Santa Clara County Office of Education (SCCOE) board convenes Wednesday evening this week at Anne Darling School, 1550 Marburg Way. At the meeting, the county board of education will be presented with an oral report on special education services the office provides to approximately 2,150 special needs students from ages 3 to 22. The services—albeit very costly due to the enormous physical, emotional, and educational needs of the students—are a moral imperative.

Last Friday, Joint Venture Silicon Valley (JVSV) hosted its annual State of the Valley. I was one of the 1,000 people in attendance at the convention center. JVSV started in 1993, during a recession, to promote economic growth through public-private partnerships. Several interesting demographic statistics were pointed out during the presentation.

If recommendations from the Rules and Open Government Committee are accepted, the City Council will repeal its medical marijuana ordinance at Tuesday’s meeting. If not, the council will prepare the matter to go before voters on June 5. Other matters include an audit of Team San Jose and a list of the city’s top priorities for the fiscal year.

Sounding an optimistic note that 2012 would be a year of “hope, optimism and recovery,” San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed delivered his State of the City address at the San Jose Civic Auditorium Thursday night. Hours after being pummeled in the media over an actuary’s claim of inflated pension projections, Reed sounded confident and statesmanlike, saying that he wanted “ to thank the leaders of our employee unions who have remained engaged and stayed at the table for many hours, days and months of difficult discussions.“

The $250 million question: Did Mayor Chuck Reed and other city officials knowingly lie about the worst-case scenario for San Jose’s pension crisis? An ethics complaint that included almost 800 city employee signatures was turned into the Elections Commission Thursday. The complaint, filed on the heels of an NBC Bay Area report, states that Reed, Director of Retirement Services Russell Crosby and former city actuary Michale Moehle knowingly used false information to bolster the mayor’s push to declare a fiscal emergency, which may have also had an adverse effect on pension reform negotiations. In an interview Thursday, Mayor Reed defended the worst-case scenario projection.

The recent incendiary headlines regarding the California High Speed Rail Authority (CHSRA) employing “lobbyists” was another attempt by opponents to avoid substance and attack the process of building our nation’s first high speed rail system. Make no mistake, this isn’t an abuse of taxpayer money and the holier than thou statements of some pundits are simply cowardly political attacks on very good people.

As someone who embraces public service as an integral part of the American social contract, it dismays me when government moves to minimize the voice of the people it represents. Case in point: The recent flirtation with folding 20 volunteer City Commissions into five. Yes, that’s five.

San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed makes no secret of his distaste for the union-aligned sentiments of some City Council members. And while he may or may not have beat the bushes for challengers in the upcoming election, rumors suggesting just that may have something to them. This weekend Reed will open his home to host a campaign kick-off fundraiser for Tam Truong, the San Jose police detective who favors pension overhaul like the mayor and is challenging Kansen Chu in District 4.

I hope we can agree to stipulate that American jobs will require more cognitive ability today and in the ensuing decades than ever before in American history. Therefore, the push for higher academic standards for all public schools logically follows. Yet when I try to connect the dots among the issues on the American agenda for education, to increase cognitive skills for its system of public schools, I get these Whiskey, Tango and Foxtrot (WTF) moments. 

The list many public employees dread every year—annual salaries—posted to the city’s website. No one came close to matching last year’s top earner, retired police chief Rob Davis, but there were some interesting numbers pertaining to high-profile executives and their subordinates.

For this weeks blog, I am continuing the discussion about providing a fixed percentage of the budget towards police. A nickname for this might be, “We Get, You Get.” The name refers to when the aggregate budget grows, then funding for the most critical service a city can provide—police—would grow. (Providing a sewer system is a close second for the most critical service).

The City Council’s agenda has few items to discuss Tuesday, but there is an item pertaining to an annual Greek flag raising ceremony, which could always spiral out of control. Other issues on the agenda include a labor negotiations update, an application for strategic growth grants and the likely approval of streamlining the process to sell the city’s surplus real estate properties.