Hire Power: Some City Hall Vets Shift to New Jobs, as Team Mahan Takes Shape

The 18th floor at City Hall is coming back to life after election season and the holidays but has yet to publish a staff directory as jobs are shuffled about amongst departing and newly elected officials. Sam Liccardo’s chief of staff Jim Reed doesn’t appear to be going anywhere and was spotted ducking in and out of the mayor’s office.

Either he was there to grab a Spandex bicycling outfit Liccardo left behind or he’s new mayor Matt Mahan’s chief of staff. Reed spent so much time engineering Mahan’s victory he forgot to walk precincts in Scotts Valley and lost his council seat.

Also a sure bet for Team Mahan is Matthew Quevedo, the new mayor’s campaign manager and former council office chief of staff, whose online profile says he’s deputy chief of staff. And Rachel Davis already posted her new job as Mahan’s communications chief, just in time for floods and rains.

Newly elected District 7 San Jose councilmember Bien Doan is hiring Jonathan Fleming, a conservative former San Jose District 2 city council candidate, as a policy aide. Fleming has been an outspoken critic of San Jose’s new gun insurance law. Who will be Doan’s chief of staff? “We’re working on that,” Doan said while stepping into a City Hall elevator.

No word yet on who will head Peter Ortiz’s team. Former San Jose District 5 council member Magdelena Carrasco isn’t leaving the 18th floor even though she’s termed out. She’ll go to work for her former employee, new District 3 councilmember Omar Torres. Carrasco’s former chief of staff, Kiara Arreola, hasn’t updated her LinkedIn yet, but it’s a good bet that she’ll lateral over to the same job in D3.

 

Send a tip to The Fly

The Fly is the valley’s longest running political column, written by Metro Silicon Valley staff, to provide a behind-the-scenes look at local politics. Fly accepts anonymous tips.

13 Comments

  1. Just an Observation,

    Comments like above are not constructive. In fact they are actually obscene. The fact it is still here amazes me, and that this commenter has been allowed to behave in this way for years as well.

    This article is very concise and simply addresses what is happening. It has no SPIN in it and that is refeshing.

  2. Just an Observation,

    I have no problem with Carl helping, but I think he is already working on a big project he serves as the Executive Vice President of Global Government Affairs and Policy for Bloom Energy, who’s mission is to “make clean, reliable energy available to everyone in the world.”

    That means he may not be able to help us. But I think this was not an actually serious idea given that Carl has supported Licardo in the past. But to address his support, gas heating and usage in homes is especially dangerous in a seismic unstable area like this. The cost of maintenance of this kind of equipment is high, and it is not very energy efficient, and is very dangerous regarding CO poisoning risk.

    This comment was because the state is starting to ban natural gas heating and appliances in residential construction, and will likely expand it. Given that Electricity can be generated using renewable energy resources, solar and wind.

    In the end we are confronted with an unheard of situation that history hasn’t seen in 100 years, a Covid KRAKEN strain as defined by the WHO, the increasing problems with inflation, the systemic drop in tech workers in the area, originally 740,000 in 2016 and 400,000 now and Salesforce just announced a major lay off.

    Unfortunately, the old models of economics and all the formulas used to determine the status and trajectory are failing due to the situation we are in. Now we lost about 10 million workers from Covid, which was a 6.5% decrease in the labor inventory of the U.S. Add on the 1million dead. This is a drastic status change that will take 20 years to rectify.

    Please understand that this shift is so big, it is very unlikely ANY City, County, State or National politics can do anything about it.

  3. Carl G is the real City Manager in San Jose. Always has been.

    And thanks Omar for bringing the entire low performing D5 team over to D3. What a joke! Can’t wait to hear all of the uninformed virtue signaling and identity politics, as major priorities continue to go unaddressed in downtown.

  4. But is that gem Michele Dexter staying in Mahan’s office? That’s what we really need to know.

  5. Mahan hired Jim Reed as his COS weeks ago.

    Bien Doan couldn’t have picked a better person than Jonathan Fleming. **clapping**

  6. So I’ve been trying to keep a positive spin on D3 but it’s already 1/6/23 so where’s the Council Member? Nothing written anywhere anywhere as far as I can tell. This is such a critical district with many outstanding issues so let’s get it together and show us your 100 day plan team. Go team!

  7. Fleming ran and lost in District 7, then moved to District 2 and ran & lost. I am very concerned that he really does not care about D7 or the issues we face. He seems to be another careerist.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *