Campaigning against Measures V&W last November, police union leader George Beattie issued numerous thinly-veiled warnings: If San Jose voters allowed the city to renegotiate contracts with cops and firefighters, he said, people might die. That strategy failed—V&W passed with an almost 80 percent majority—but Beattie is sticking to his guns.

District 8 Councilmember Rose Herrera, whose seat comes up for renewal in 2012, has suddenly gotten popular with the union leaders representing the city’s public employees. Her sudden popularity might be due to the fact that Herrera could be fighting for her political life in next year’s election.

More than a few eyebrows lifted last week when Councilmember Sam Liccardo proposed raising the city’s sales tax to help fund police and firefighter jobs. With 73 officers expected to lose their jobs on July 1, according to police union VP Jim Unland, Liccardo showed the kind of political savvy that was conspicuously absent this spring, when he voted against approving union concessions because he said they didn’t go far enough

The 18th edition of the political comedy show Monday Night Live promised to be “kinder and gentler,” which became abundantly clear when no one dared to joke about councilmember Ash Kalra’s DUI or Pierluigi Oliverio’s sign-stealing.

Redevelopment Agency director Harry Mavrogenes might be quitting the broke-ass agency—hey, four decades is enough to ask of anybody in this town—but he’s not planning to fade into the sunset and paint water colors. That’s what his one-time boss Frank Taylor did. Or live on a boat in the Caribbean on the San Jose tax money she escaped with, as predecessor Susan Schick did. Maybe he’s a glutton for punishment, but the Mavster will be staying involved in local public affairs.

After asking the city’s workforce to accept 10 percent cuts in compensation to help avoid a fiscal disaster, councilmembers Kansen Chu, Xavier Campos and Nancy Pyle voted Tuesday against docking their own pay.

It’s not that Debra Figone doesn’t trust the city council to spend money—it’s just that she doesn’t trust the city council to spend money wisely. Rather than let the council decide whether San Jose should accept a federal grant that could have saved 53 police officer jobs—and potentially put the city on the hook for millions it doesn’t have—the city manager chose to protect the council from itself.

After Mayor Chuck Reed and most of the San Jose City Council took a two-hour tongue lashing Tuesday from city employees, retirees, union representatives and even staffers of several state legislators, the council voted 8-3 to push forward with Reed’s declaration of “fiscal and public safety emergency.” That word—”emergency”—allows the city to significantly toughen its stance in pension negotiations with public employees.

When politicians have bad news to deliver, news they don’t really want anyone to hear, they’ll often deliver it at a Friday afternoon press conference—nobody watches the TV news on Friday night and nobody reads the paper on Saturday. But Mayor Chuck Reed’s announcement last Friday that San Jose is in a “fiscal and public safety emergency” was like a big squirt of gasoline on the smoldering heap of embers that is the city’s relationship with its public-employee unions. And the resulting flare-up did not go unnoticed.

Before word leaked out through the usual channels that councilman Ash Kalra had been arrested and charged with a DUI early Saturday morning, Kalra and his chief of staff, Joseph Okpaku, were already in damage-control mode. They beat the CHiPs to the punch by holding a casual press conference at Kalra’s home.

A protocol put together a few weeks ago by deputy DA Jim Sibley tried to clarify his office’s stance on medical marijuana with a simple explanation: Collectives are legal under California law if they are clearly nonprofit and follow land-use codes. That didn’t stop Police Chief Chris Moore from telling the San Jose City Council that he’d heard directly from the DA’s office that not one of the 100-plus dispensaries in San Jose is legal.

In another example that this truly is the city of “Man Jose,” three of the four offspring of San Jose City Hall’s celebrity falcons, Clara and Esteban Colbert, were found to be male while being banded this morning. Glenn Stewart, coordinator of UC Santa Cruz’s Predatory Bird Research Group, rappelled down the side of the building and banded the chicks’ legs so that scientists can track them and collect data. He said all four chicks appear to be healthy and “look great.”

The falcon chicks were born earlier this month on a City Hall ledge 18 stories above the street.

Emmett Carson, CEO of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, says it is “hard to understand” why the San Jose City Council chose to delay action on accepting a $50,000 grant to look into anti-predatory lending policies, what with so many people falling deeper into debt. He should ask Manny Diaz, a former city councilmember and state assemblymember who is now a registered lobbyist for Community Financial Services Association of America, a trade group that represents the payday loan industry

San Jose city councilmembers hope to be able to count the number of marijuana dispensaries on their fingers. The compromise measure authored by Vice Mayor Madison Nguyen and approved Tuesday by a split council hopes to reduce the number of city collectives, which currently number more than 100, to no more than 10

The San Jose City Council once again fell short on Tuesday in its efforts to craft a plan to deal with the popularity of medical marijuana clubs in the city. Many of the ideas being proffered by city staff, Mayor Chuck Reed and councilmembers Rose Herrera, Sam Liccardo and Pete Constant, were wildly ambitious, including things that no other municipality has tried in the 14 years since the passage of Prop 215.

Updated with correction: Apr. 14.

The civil case against former DeAnza baseball players for a 2007 group sex incident appears to be unraveling. Of the nine original defendants, only two defendants are left and one intends to fight back in court regardless of whether or not he is exonerated in the case. San Jose attorney Bruce Funk, who represents defendant Kenneth Chadwick, would not confirm or deny if the plaintiff’s attorneys have attempted to settle out of court, though we hear that an offer was made and rejected. But Funk did say “we will go back after that plaintiff’s attorneys for financial compensation.”