Meeting just bi-weekly, and not at all in the month of July, the life of a Santa Clara County supervisor can be a punt-pass-and-kick competition when it comes to making tough calls. It’s no surprise then that supervisors decided to defer any decision on the fate of County Executive Jeff Smith, whose contract expired at the end of June.

Most election observers thought Teresa Alvarado’s second-place finish in the June 4 primary exceeded expectations. Coming within 10 percentage points of Cindy Chavez for the District 2 county supervisor seat was seen as a momentum-builder, considering Alvarado’s campaign didn’t really get its act together until the final two weeks. But not everyone agreed—namely, Alvarado. Shortly after election night, Alvarado dismissed her entire campaign staff.

Will Xavier Campos ever break free of George Shirakawa Jr.’s shadow? Last week, District Attorney Jeff Rosen announced a new felony charge against Shirakawa after the former county supervisor’s DNA was found on a stamp affixed to a 2010 political hit piece against Magdalena Carrasco, Campos’ San Jose council opponent that year. Campos released a statement that failed to deny involvement. A look back at some of his 2010 campaign disclosure forms has now created some intriguing new questions.

The Fair Political Practices Commission awarded a cookie last week to Cindy Chavez, champ of Tuesday’s county supervisor primary. FPPC Chief Enforcement Officer Gary Winuk ruled that mass mailers shared between Chavez, the county Democratic party and the South Bay Labor Council followed the Political Reform Act to the letter, which must mean it was written in some kind of Cyrillic and Arabic scramble. Part of the ruling stated that anyone who registers with a party is considered a member, even if they don’t pay dues, which means a party’s candidate of choice basically has an unlimited amount of coordinated funds at their disposal.

Joe Simitian takes exception with the notion that he isn’t transparent. On Tuesday, the recidivist county supervisor waxed pedantic, crashing the Finance and Government Operations Committee meeting to argue that the county could get sunburned by a new policy of publishing county officials’ calendars. But could this all have something to do with Simitian’s perpetual fundraising?

The Santa Clara Family Health Foundation, a local nonprofit that helped bump up the county’s sales tax last fall, doesn’t want the public to know about its secret political activities. And now it’s lawyering up to quash Metro/San Jose Inside’s public records act requests.

Stacey Hendler Ross used to be KNTV’s late night anchor, and later worked as a globetrotting KGO journalist, covering everything from the Columbine massacre to Princess Diana’s funeral. But now her life is less exciting and she’s on the other side of the First Amendment, plying her trade as the spin manager for the South Bay Labor Council. Apparently since she no longer has a captive TV audience—her March 2012 Democratic TV video got a whopping 131 views on YouTube in the past 13 months—she doesn’t think others should be able to inform the public either. At least if it involves sullying the pristine reputation of former SBLC head Cindy Chavez, who’s running for her good buddy George Shirakawa Jr.’s supervisor seat.

Cindy Chavez is a people-uniter. How else could one explain why so many incongruous political actors of varying stripes are singing Kumbaya as they work to defeat her in the county supervisor race to replace George Shirakawa Jr. Progressives and conservatives in Silicon Valley are teaming up to battle the Chavistas, and it’s causing some friction for top opponent Teresa Alvarado as she stitches together a coalition.

On January 22, five weeks before former Supervisor George Shirakawa Jr. was charged with 12 criminal counts, Cindy Chavez met District Attorney Jeff Rosen for lunch at P.F. Chang’s in downtown San Jose.  Not only did Chavez throw down the race card and lobby Rosen “not to do anything,” South Bay Labor Council’s new executive Ben Field also lunched with Rosen and echoed the message.

To the delight of hungry volunteers throughout Silicon Valley, San Jose Councilman Kansen Chu is back on the campaign trail. Chu, known for generously feeding his election workers—who at times double as his council staff—hopes to fill the seat of State Assemblyman Bob Wieckowski, who is running for a State Senate seat. One of Chu’s likely opponents is Teresa D. Cox, a trustee on the Ohlone Community College Board who previously worked as a White House community coordinator during the Bubba administration back in the ’90s.

Two years ago, District Attorney Jeff Rosen cleverly cushioned the effects of county-mandated pay cuts for some of his senior prosecutors through an accounting loophole. After his top supervisors were disproportionately affected by the cuts, he started giving them “admin leave” so they could collect vacation time for a payout down the road to replace lost wages. The slick move, legal under county policies, got the attention of County Executive Jeff Smith, who’s now asking Attorney General Kamala Harris to investigate. The question is: What’s really happening here?

When Teresa Alvarado announced that she was running for George Shirakawa Jr.’s vacated county supervisor seat, County Executive Jeff Smith helpfully forwarded the email to Working Partnership USA’s executive team: Bob Brownstein and Cindy Chavez. The forwarding of memos by Smith highlights the cozy relationship between the County of Santa Clara and Working Partnerships USA (WPUSA), the organization led by longtime labor union executive and current supervisor candidate Cindy Chavez. WPUSA is joined at the hip to the powerful South Bay Labor Council (SBLC), with whom it has historically shared offices, facilities, equipment, political objectives and allocated employees. Last year, SBLC led the effort to raise county sales taxes by $500 million over the next ten years and to increase San Jose’s minimum wage by 25 percent. It also endorsed 70 candidates for political office. Working Partnerships has been the recipient of at least $518,163 from the cash-challenged county in the past two years, performing a grab bag of services. Newly released documents obtained via a San Jose Inside public records request show the county’s contracts represented about 15 percent of Working Partnerships’ revenues for those years.

The 2014 mayor’s race in San Jose won’t officially start until later this year, but a new contender has emerged in what’s expected to be a massive field. Pierluigi Oliverio, a councilman for the Willow Glen/Rose Garden districts (and SJI columnist), tells Fly that he will indeed join the race to replace Mr. Burns—ahem, we mean Mayor Chuck Reed.

Madison Nguyen has ended her soul-search over a run for George Shirakawa Jr.‘s vacant county supervisor seat, deciding she’ll focus on the 2014 mayoral race in San Jose—despite some of her colleagues prodding her to get into the special election. That leaves a field that will likely soon include Cindy Chavez.

Xavier Campos is a public servant who doesn’t like to talk to the media. For this reason, and maybe a few others, the San Jose councilman refused to answer Fly’s questions about his former campaign treasurer, Linda Delgado, who handled accounting duties for his council race in 2010. Treasurers aren’t usually a hot topic of conversation, but Delgado also happens to be one of the absentee accountants who facilitated George Shirakawa’s embezzlement of more than $100K in campaign contributions.

The county’s four remaining supervisors voted Tuesday to hold a million dollar special election on June 4 to fill the seat of soon-to-be-jailbird George Shirakawa Jr. If only there was an app for that. Considering the job pays six figures, provides a CalPERS pension, comes with all kinds of perks—assuming you don’t exceed a $3,000-a-year local meal allowance with your P-Card (really?!)—and could last 12 years if all three terms are completed, there should be no shortage of entrants.