Declaring a fiscal and public safety emergency, Mayor Chuck Reed unveiled his fiscal reform proposal Friday afternoon at City Hall. The reforms will focus on pension and health care for current and future employees, and some actions will require changes to the city charter, meaning measures will need to be put on a ballot for voter approval. The proposal being put forward was co-signed by Vice Mayor Madison Nguyen and councilmembers Sam Liccardo and Rose Herrera.

In the 10th year of budget cuts, San Jose City manager Debra Figone has said more than 600 employees could lose their jobs to help tackle a $115 million deficit for the upcoming fiscal year. The process of handing out pink slips began this week, and more than 100 police officers are being notified that they could be out of a job come July.

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 debate over what to do with the city’s 100-plus medical marijuana collectives looks like it will finally result in some action Tuesday, when the City Council will vote on setting up a complete regulatory program.

Mayor Chuck Reed has nominated Madison Nguyen to be vice mayor, three weeks after she won a surprisingly close race to hold onto her District 7 council seat. The move seems to confirm a shift of loyalties for Nguyen, a onetime ally of the South Bay Labor Council. She was the swing vote in the council’s decision to put Measures V and W on the ballot—a move SBLC vehemently opposed.

Like most people paying attention to the District 7 council race, Fly was surprised that the runoff between councilmember Madison Nguyen and Republican furniture-store owner Minh Duong ended up being a squeaker. After the revelations about the Chamber-endorsed Duong’s pile of bad debts and financial screwups, Fly was expecting that District 7 residents would re-elect the increasingly independent Nguyen by a landslide. Not so.

Blue skies and 75-degree temperatures were good news for Democrats, who generally lose a couple of points in bad weather, academic researchers concluded in a recent study.

Still, we have to ask the question, “What were voters smoking?” The state voted not to legalize pot, but in 420-friendly San Jose, we voted to tax it anyway, by a 4-to-1 margin. And we re-elected that crazy ole Jerry Brown over the eBay scold who got confused. “Election?” Meg Whitman must have been saying. “I thought you said auction.” No Meg, high bids don’t win. Maybe someday democracy will come with a blue “Buy It Now” button.

Minh Duong, the pro-business, Chamber of Commerce–endorsed City Council candidate, has made his business experience the central theme of his campaign to oust District 7 Councilmember Madison Nguyen. He believes his knowledge of budgets and finance can help the economically-strapped city better manage its money.

Duong’s own business acumen, however, may not rise to the level his talking points suggest. The 31-year-old furniture store owner has defaulted on his home mortgage, incurred multiple property tax delinquencies, neglected to pay his garbage bills and been threatened with eviction on his business and foreclosure on his house. Last month, he was kicked off the San José Small Business Development Commission.

The robust Vietnamese press in Silicon Valley has always played by its own rules, and a post on the blog Little Saigon Inside provided a particularly salacious example recently.

The author, Vinh Nguyen, points out that the Vietnam Daily Newspaper went after District 7 City Council candidate Minh Duong before the June primary with articles that accused him of being pro-Communist while boosting long-shot candidate Patrick Phu Le with headlines like “Phu Le Has a Very Great Chance of Being in the Run-off” (Le captured 17.11 percent of the vote to Duong’s 24.07 percent).

Fly finds it ironic that many of the local leaders who supported last week’s City Council vote to denounce Arizona’s harsh new illegal-immigration law themselves do business in the Copper State—whether they are aware of it or not.

It turns out that Madison Nguyen, who sponsored the resolution, hosts her re-election website http://www.madisonnguyen.com with the Phoenix-based iPower Inc.

Madison Nguyen’s election-night party wasn’t exactly hard to find. Blue-and-white “Re-elect Madison Nguyen” fliers appeared with increasing regularity as Metro neared M Cafe on Burdette Drive in San Jose, a hip Asian joint that serves coffee while showing sports on TVs.

Apparently, the Nguyen campaign had more posters and fliers than it knew what to do with, because the inside of the large room was stuffed with banners and campaign materials.

The last time Dr. Patrick Phu Le showed up in the news, it was for being arrested after attacking a press photographer he accused of being a communist spy. Now, the longtime Vietnamese community activist and current candidate for the District 7 seat on the San Jose City Council has exactly one week to move to San Jose if he still wants to run.