Kathleen King ran the county's $450 million sales tax campaign, and she also happens to be CEO of the organization most likely to get leftover money from Measure A. So, coincidence or kickback?

Environmentalists clash with private landowners who want to develop a greenbelt property in San Jose's southeastern hillsides.

While George Shirakawa Jr. bides his time behind bars after admitting to filching public money, the price of defending him in court keeps ticking up as a second criminal case moves forward.

Though it boasts some of the highest median incomes in the nation, Silicon Valley also claims one of the greatest disparities between men and women’s earnings.

Santa Clara County mental health doctors say they’ll strike next month unless they get a pay raise and a promise for more consistent schedules.

An independent expenditure committee supporting Kevin Jensen's bid for sheriff wrote a $2,500 check to Crime Victims United, an organization that subsequently endorsed Jensen just days after the latest filing period.

Santa Clara County supervisors want to bring electronic cigarettes and vapes under the purview of existing anti-smoking laws.

More than a year after San Jose upped its minimum wage to $10 an hour and as the conversation around pay increases for low-paid workers ramps up on a national scale, Santa Clara County is starting to look at enacting a similar measure for unincorporated parts of the region. Supervisor Dave Cortese, who’s also running for mayor of San Jose, will lead the discussion when the Board of Supervisors meets on Tuesday. A county ordinance comes with many more challenges than a citywide measure, Cortese notes.

Last week, Santa Clara County Judge Patricia Lucas issued a final Measure B verdict. A reader wondered in an email why we didn’t write about it. Fair point, which brings us to this update. The final decision in the landmark pension reform case that forced employees to contribute 16 percent more of their pay to retirement costs is similar to the tentative ruling trotted out in December, except for a couple details.

Santa Clara County jails have seen a sharp uptick in assaults over the past few years, partly because of state prison reforms that pushed more dangerous inmates to local correctional facilities.

So many of the higher paying jobs in our valley involve some aspect of computing and programming. A story in the Mercury News this past weekend highlighted the issue of access to technology by gender.

A federal ruling will dramatically cut the cost of out-of-state phone calls for Santa Clara County inmates, making it actually cheaper to dial long distance than local. The Federal Communications Commission handed down a directive this month that drops the price for inmates calling to another state by 85 percent, though it’s been met with legal opposition from the phone companies that have a monopoly on jail and prison telecommunications. Global Tel-Link, the service provider for the 700 phones at both Elmwood Jail in Milpitas and the main jail in San Jose, is asking a judge to delay the ruling.

The first political firefight of the San Jose mayor’s race has adopted the adage “everything old is new again.” Two weeks ago, the county Board of Supervisors took a bold vote to withhold $700,000 from the city of San Jose due to its fire department’s slow—and in some cases absent—emergency response times. Contracted by the county to arrive first on the scene for high-priority “lights and sirens” emergencies within eight minutes, 90 percent of the time, SJFD has routinely showed up late and misreported its response times in the last four years.

After a rocky year-and-a-half on the job, it appears Santa Clara County Office of Education Superintendent Xavier De La Torre will be heading back to Texas for a job as superintendent of a smaller school district. San Jose Inside reported more than three months ago that De La Torre was on the brink of being fired or resigning after a series of dustups with staff, a dissatisfactory performance review and concerns about a cheating scandal.

E-books used to focus on niche topics geared toward small, zany readerships, which made for riveting titles such as Abraham Lincoln in the Kitchen or The Hidden Power of Adjustment Layers in Adobe Photoshop. Now e-books cover the gamut, and the Santa Clara County Library District announced this week that it has 46,000 digital titles in its collection, including pop culture favorites like Wolf of Wall Street and 50 Shades of Grey—you know, if you’re into corporate barbarism or Penthouse letters.

Valley Health Plan has managed to capture about 3 percent of the Santa Clara County market under Covered California, which is slightly below state levels. Though this figure pales in comparison to enrollment figures reported by the top four major healthcare providers, and it’s not as strong a figure as county officials expected two months away from the end-of-March enrollment deadline, it does represent a comparable market share to other small, local health plans, according to county officials.