After none of the four candidates vying to replace Larry Stone as Santa Clara County assessor received a majority of votes in November’s special election, the race comes down to a Dec. 30 runoff between the two highest vote-getters — Neysa Fligor, a Los Altos-based ex-corporate and county lawyer who is currently the assistant assessor, and Rishi Kumar, a Saratoga-based mechanical engineer and tech executive.

County assessors in California have one job: assess the value of taxable property. They don’t set tax rates. They don’t collect property taxes. Their job is to apply state law to their appraisals of real and business properties.

And in Santa Clara County, the job leading the 250 people in the Assessor’s Office is especially complex. It’s not just the most-populous county in northern California, it’s also home to the world’s largest, most sophisticated companies, like Apple, Nvidia, Alphabet and Adobe, whose cutting-edge technologies must be assessed in addition to their headquarters’ land and buildings. All told, there are 500,000 taxable properties in the county with an assessed value of about $750 billion.

We asked the two remaining candidates to articulate why they deserve your vote. Here are their commentaries:

• Neysa Fligor: Ensuring the Assessor’s Office keeps working for taxpayers and residents.

• Rishi Kumar: The Assessor’s Office needs an outsider as leader — a changemaker.

The Mercury News editorial board endorsed Fligor. Here is our recommendation: Fligor is ready to be Santa Clara County assessor. Her opponent is not.

For official voting information about the Dec. 30 runoff, visit the Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters website here.

We urge voters not to be sucked in by some of the campaign diversions amplified during the runoff. Instead, look for a candidate to replace retiring Assessor Larry Stone who will focus on doing the job.

The assessor doesn’t set tax rates nor rules for how properties are taxed. Rather, the assessor only sets the values from which those taxes are calculated for more than 500,000 Santa Clara County properties.

Neysa Fligor, the current assistant assessor, understands this. Her opponent, Rishi Kumar, a former Saratoga City Council member, does not.

Our editorial board endorsed Fligor in the special election. The seriousness of this job and the unseriousness of her opponent compel us to weigh in again for the runoff.

Fligor is well-prepared to lead the assessor’s 250-person office. That’s because she has already been its second-in-command since July. In this position, she has overseen many of the office’s most important responsibilities, including producing its $750 billion assessment roll and managing the multi-million-dollar replacement of its outdated software system.

Fligor, who also serves on the Los Altos City Council, has earned the endorsement of both ex-Assessor Stone and many county unions, with which he often disagrees. However, on Fligor, they are unified. That itself is a testament to her competency for this position.

Being assessor, unlike a county supervisor or a city councilmember, isn’t about politics and policy setting. It’s about strict adherence to the laws governing appraising real and business properties. Fligor, it should be noted, is the only certified tax appraiser in this race.

Perhaps more importantly, though, is her experience as a lawyer. Before working as an attorney for HP between 2015 and 2024, Fligor was deputy counsel for Santa Clara County for nine years, during which time she represented the Assessor’s Office.

That experience in legal battles over appraisal disputes with many of the county’s giant corporations makes her exceptionally qualified to lead the office.

The same cannot be said about Kumar. The mechanical engineer and longtime tech executive has mounted three failed bids for Congress as a Democrat. Now, desperately looking for votes among senior citizens, he has rebranded himself as a Howard Jarvis-style anti-tax crusader by promising to fight to exempt them from property taxes.

In campaign text messages and emails for months, Kumar has made exempting anyone over 60 years old from property taxes his central platform. Now in the final stretch of the campaign, Kumar is going into overdrive telling voters that he’s spearheading a fledgling ballot initiative effort to exempt senior citizens from paying property taxes again.

It’s a red herring.

Completely aside from whether a senior tax exemption is good policy or not, it’s not the assessor’s job to lower or raise taxes or even collect them. In fact, the assessor doesn’t even calculate property taxes.

Kumar either doesn’t know what the assessor does or, worse, he’s deliberately misleading seniors attracted to the idea he’ll be slashing their property taxes to zero. Whether he’s ignorant or deceitful, Rishi Kumar should not be Santa Clara County’s next assessor.

Fortunately, voters have an excellent alternative in Neysa Fligor. We urge them to vote for her.

Vote-by-mail ballots will be sent by next week. The last day to request a vote-by-mail ballot replacement is Dec. 23. Early voting begins on Monday at the Santa Clara County Registrar’s office. Voting ends at 8 pm on Election Day, Dec. 30.

Children in zip ties. Warrantless raids on homes. Masked men rappelling from a Black Hawk helicopter in the middle of the night onto an apartment building. A disabled Iraq War veteran strip-searched, detained for days, denied an attorney and put in isolation. A 79-year-old body-slammed and pinned to the asphalt. A woman, nine-months pregnant, shoved and arrested. Tear gas. Smoke grenades.

Those aren’t the experiences of immigrants or criminals but rather law-abiding American citizens at the hands of agents working for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the U.S. Border Patrol. These citizens’ only crimes were being in the wrong place at the wrong time or living in a Democratic-run city or being related to a suspect or looking Latino.

Immigrants without proper documentation have it much worse. Men, women and children are taken from streets, farms and factories into unmarked cars by anonymous agents; once in ICE custody, they’re dying at the greatest rates in 20 years. These aren’t all criminals. Far, far from it. The overwhelming majority of the deported this year have never been convicted of anything. Hundreds — some with and some without criminal records — have vanished without due process indefinitely into the prison systems of other countries infamous for torturing inmates.

Welcome to Donald Trump’s America.

Things are not OK, and they are getting worse fast.

But late last month something extraordinary happened: The president blinked.

As Trump threatened to flood San Francisco, Oakland and, likely, the rest of the Bay Area with immigration agents and soldiers, Silicon Valley business leaders, including Salesforce’s Marc Benioff and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, urged him to stand down.

And, at least for the time being, he did.

Since the beginning of this administration, Silicon Valley’s biggest bosses have appeased the president, capitulating to his every whim — agreeing to pay export taxes, giving away equity to the government, defunding schools for Latino students and ending diversity programs.

But the truth is that rich business leaders are, arguably, the only group that our transactional president will listen to. And the Bay Area has many of them, who oversee the world’s largest companies that are driving nearly all the growth of the stock market.

The lesson they need to learn is that when they stand up to the president and speak in unison, they have the power to protect the Bay Area from becoming the next battleground. They have the power to do what’s right.

The war from within

The chronology of the last few months shows a troubling acceleration of aspirational authoritarianism.

In September, the president of the United States told hundreds of generals that he will be using them to fight a “war from within,” pointing to Democratic-run cities which he told them to use as “training grounds” for their troops.

In October, Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act, giving the president power to turn active-duty troops into a civilian law enforcement force. Further stoking fears that he has authoritarian motivations, the president said he would “love to” run for a third term — a patently unconstitutional path that he won’t rule out.

Since June, when he ordered thousands of National Guardsmen and hundreds of active-duty Marines to confront protesters who were incited by the brutality of stepped-up immigration raids in Los Angeles, he has deployed troops to Washington, D.C. — a city White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller called more violent than Baghdad — as well as Memphis, Chicago and Portland, Ore. (Federal courts have, at least temporarily, stalled deployments within the latter two cities.)

And though the Bay Area avoided deployments last month, the threat remains.

“Let’s see how you do,” Trump wrote to San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie on Truth Social.

The fact is the door remains wide open.

And we should in no way expect the president to have taken the hint from Tuesday. Donald Trump was very much on the ballot in California, Virginia, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Georgia and even Mississippi — all states where voters rejected his party by large, even historic, margins.

Americans have seen enough. So have we.

However, let’s be clear: The specter of hundreds, even thousands, more masked ICE and Border Patrol agents bulldozing through the Bay Area still looms. For that matter, so too does the prospect of National Guardsmen, active-duty Marines and 14-ton ambush-proof, mine-resistant armored vehicles made for Afghanistan patrolling our city streets.

The real reason

Trump’s threats to invade the Bay Area and other Democratic-run cities were never about crime, and the president is no crime-fighter.

Trump ended his last term pardoning a cop killer; he began this term pardoning hundreds of people who assaulted police officers on Jan. 6, 2021.

This isn’t about restoring law and order either. This administration is defying court orders at rates unimaginable in any other presidency. And the cities he calls crime-ridden dystopias, including Los Angeles and San Francisco, are anything but. The murder rate in L.A. has been dropping for three years and is on track this year to hit its lowest level since 1968. San Francisco’s murder rate this year is on track to be at its lowest point since 1954.

Not only are L.A. and San Francisco far from failing, they’re also centers of global capitalism and among the wealthiest cities on the planet.

Even in Oakland, murders have fallen 21% year over year. Portland’s murder rate this year has fallen 51%, the steepest drop reported by 68 major city police departments. Chicago had fewer murders this summer than at any point since 1965.

It’s nearly inevitable that Trump will threaten the Bay Area again. It has too many of the things he hates most: Democrats, immigrants and universities.

Unfortunately, there are few in the Bay Area, or anywhere, whom he will listen to. But, as we learned last month, our valley’s Big Tech leaders can still sway the president. Kudos to them for standing up.

Let’s hope they stand firm — because he will, almost certainly, be back.

Click here for a complete list of our Nov. 4 election recommendations.

Southern Alameda County’s Washington Township Health Care District is coming up short each year and now its leaders want to turn to property owners to make up the difference.

Measure B on the Nov. 4 ballot in Fremont, Newark, Union City and a small part of South Hayward would impose a parcel tax of $5 per 100 square feet of building area. For an average size single-family house in the district, that’s about $90 annually. The tax would last for 12 years.

But the district’s arguments for the measure are misleading, and officials are unwilling to discuss specifics of how they plan to address their financial shortfall, which is more than twice as big as the revenue expected from the new tax. Voters should reject Measure B.

The district, formed in 1948, today operates a 415-bed acute care hospital. For the current and past two fiscal years, the district shows operating losses of about $30 million annually, or about 3.5% of its operating expenses. Measure B would cover about $13 million of that shortfall.

Those taxes would be on top of the district’s bond program, which voters in 2020 agreed to increase to pay for hospital seismic improvements. To cover the cost of the bonds, property owners this fiscal year will pay $21.80 per $100,000 of assessed value, or about $167 for a home with a district-average assessed value.

The bond tax will likely increase as the district borrows more money to finance construction of a new seismically sound hospital tower for patient rooms.

But the issue on the ballot this year is money to cover the shortfall for hospital and other health care operations.

District operating expenses have increased 24% over the past three years. Officials blamed rapidly escalating salary-and-benefit costs and said they had to lay off employees last year. But staffing data shows the total employee count has been increasing steadily and is now 15% above pre-pandemic levels.

Meanwhile, district revenues have increased 26% over the same three-year period. Officials first claimed that revenues were being dragged down because the district had experienced, since before the start of the pandemic, a huge shift to patients under government insurance like Medicare and Medi-Cal. That turned out to be flatly wrong when we pressed for supporting data.

There is no question that health care finances are challenging and are about to become more difficult with the recent federal cuts to Medicaid. And the hospital has taken on more responsibility with its 2022 designation as the trauma center for southern Alameda County.

But it’s not clear how the district plans to eliminate its budget shortfall. Asked about future financial plans, district CEO Kimberly Hartz said, “you can’t save your way out” of this problem. The solution, she said, is greater efficiency and creating new programs to bring in revenue.

Yet she declined to identify those new programs or provide financial forecasts, citing competitive pressures with other hospitals.

In other businesses, we might be sympathetic to arguments of proprietary information. But, in this case, hospital officials are essentially asking taxpayers to invest. And taxpayers deserve to know what they’re investing in.

Without clear answers, voters should reject Measure B.

Fligor is ready to be Santa Clara County assessor. Her opponent is not.

Neysa Fligor is, far and away, the best candidate to lead the office responsible for setting tax values for more than 500,000 properties assessed at more than $750 billion. Currently second in command, Fligor is responsible for the 250-person office’s day-to-day operations. Our editorial board endorsed Fligor in the special election. The seriousness of this job and the unseriousness of her opponent compel us to weigh in again for the runoff.

Kumar vs. Fligor: Santa Clara County assessor candidates make final pitches for Dec. 30 runoff
We asked the two remaining candidates to articulate why they deserve your vote. Here are the commentaries by Rishi Kumar and Neysa Fligor.

Opinion: Current Santa Clara County holiday season election wasteful and avoidable
Ranked choice voting could have saved taxpayers the $13 million cost of the Dec. 30 assessor race runoff

Yes on Proposition 50

California redistricting: Republican legislators in Texas, North Carolina and other states are redrawing their congressional district maps to deliver President Trump more seats. No state has more to lose than California if Trump gets away with manufacturing a House majority.

Borenstein: Proposition 50 provides California’s only hope to rein in Trump. 
Gov. Newsom’s measure on Nov. 4 ballot, responding to Texas redistricting, aims to stop president from stealing an election

No on Santa Clara County Measure A

Sales tax increase: The Medicaid cuts in President Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” will squeeze Santa Clara County health care funding. But raising local taxes is not the solution. County supervisors should first stem their rapidly escalating spending, which has doubled in the past eight years and ranks highest per capita by far of the 10 largest California counties.

PRO/CON: Measure A would increase Santa Clara County sales tax. Is it worth it?
Adding another five-eighths cent levy to purchases would push the rate to at least 9.75% with San Jose higher at 10%.

No on Alameda County Measure B

Parcel tax: In Fremont, Newark, Union City and a small part of South Hayward a tax of $5 per 100 square feet of building area would help fund the Washington Township Health Care District. But the district’s arguments for the measure are misleading, and officials are unwilling to discuss specifics of how they plan to address their financial shortfall.

News coverage of the Nov. 4 election

Click here to read the Mercury News and East Bay Times news coverage of election.

Click here for a complete list of our election recommendations.

The Medicaid cuts in President Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” will squeeze Santa Clara County health care funding. But raising local taxes is not the solution.

Instead, county supervisors should stem their rapidly escalating spending, which has doubled in the past eight years and ranks highest per capita by far of the 10 largest California counties.

And voters should reject Measure A, the five-year sales tax increase on the Nov. 4 special election ballot that has been in the planning stages since long before Trump won reelection.

The measure would add another five-eighths of a cent to each dollar of taxable goods, pushing the total rate to 10% or more in most of the county.

State data indicates that the average person in the county currently pays at least $1,700 a year in sales tax, which is distributed between state and local governments. Measure A would increase that by at least $113 annually.

Raising taxes before imposing long-overdue fiscal discipline puts the cart before the horse. While Measure A would expire in 2031, we expect it would be permanently built into the county budget by then and county officials would be begging for an extension to avoid cuts.

Soaring spending

There’s no question that the county will take a hit from the Trump Medicaid cuts. And there’s no denying the importance of county health services, which treat 40% of county residents and deliver 80% of trauma care. But it’s important to put county spending, the federal funding reductions and Measure A in context.

County spending has increased from $6.4 billion in the 2017-18 fiscal year to $13 billion in 2025-26. The biggest cause of that increase has been health care, which includes public health, mental health and, most significantly, Santa Clara Valley Healthcare’s network of hospitals and clinics.

The county, which already ran Santa Clara Valley Medical Center in San Jose, rescued O’Connor Hospital in San Jose and Saint Louise Regional Hospital in Gilroy from bankruptcy in 2019, and purchased Regional Medical Center in San Jose in 2025. The county now operates a much larger health care system per-capita than any other California county, says County Executive James Williams.

PRO/CON: Measure A would increase Santa Clara County sales tax. Is it worth it?

Suddenly running four hospitals instead of one, the county found losses for its hospitals and clinics increased from about $97 million in 2017-18 to $532 million expected in the current fiscal year. That forecast was before Trump’s budget bill exacerbated the shortfall.

While we supported the 2019 hospital purchases, we never intended that to be a blank check. Clearly a major reorganization to cut costs and find savings through economies of scale has been needed for years. Instead, the county has increased fourfold the subsidies from the general fund — from money that would otherwise go to other county services.

The greatest concern from the federal budget is the cut to Medicaid, known as Medi-Cal in California, which serves primarily low-income and disabled residents. Forty-six percent of patients in the county’s health care system are covered by Medi-Cal, which accounts for about half of the revenue.

Santa Clara County officials forecast the cuts in Trump’s bill will cost the county $223 million in the current fiscal year, escalating to $1.3 billion by 2029-30. That’s significant pain.

But what’s important here is that the proposed sales tax increase would only solve a fraction of the problem. Measure A is expected to raise $330 million annually. There is no plan for how the county would address the rest of the shortfall over the next five years.

Regressive tax

While the ballot wording of Measure A says it could be used for a variety of purposes ­— to “support critical local services such as trauma, emergency room, mental health, and public safety” — Williams says the money would be used solely to shore up the health care system.

Measure A is a “general” tax, meaning that county supervisors have the discretion to spend the money on any legally permissible county services — and that the measure only requires majority approval. Had county supervisors instead sought a “special” tax, restricting the use of the money to a specific purpose, the measure would have required two-thirds approval.

Sales taxes are regressive, meaning they disproportionately impact those who can afford it least. In Santa Clara County, the levy on taxable goods, which excludes prescription medications and most groceries, would increase to at least 9.75%, with higher rates in Los Gatos (9.875%), San Jose (10%), Milpitas (10%) and Campbell (10.5%).

For example, in San Jose, home to about half the county’s residents, the sales tax is currently 9.375%, meaning a consumer pays an additional $9.38 on a $100 purchase. If Measure A passes, the tax would add another 62 cents, making the total sales tax $10 for that same $100 purchase.

For homeowners in the county, that would come on top of property tax levies that are based on assessed value. For example, for a home assessed at $1.5 million, the county collects $2,700 annually as its share of the 1% base tax, plus special levies for county employee pensions ($570) and to pay off voter-approved county bonds for affordable housing ($84) and hospital seismic improvements ($78).

Tax history

The only reason Santa Clara County leaders were able so quickly to place the sales tax measure on the same ballot as Proposition 50, the statewide redistricting measure, is that they had been working on the tax increase for two years, long before Trump’s return to office.

In 2023, at the urging of county officials, Sen. Dave Cortese, D-San Jose, pushed through state legislation enabling Santa Clara County supervisors to seek voter approval for the sales tax increase. At the time, Cortese argued the tax was needed to address significant and growing budget challenges.

The legislation limited the increase to five-eighths of a cent. If not for that limit, Williams told us, he would have recommended the board place a larger sales tax increase on the ballot.

Which is exactly the sort of thinking that concerns us. In 2023, according to data from the state Controller’s Office, Santa Clara County spent $5,046 per resident, at least 19% more than any of the nine other California counties with at least 1 million residents, and more than double San Diego, Orange, Alameda and Fresno counties.

Before asking residents for more tax money, county officials should find a way to spend what they have more efficiently.

Click here for a complete list of our election recommendations.

After 30 years as Santa Clara County’s assessor, Larry Stone retired in July, triggering a Nov. 4 special election to select his replacement.

Neysa Fligor is, far and away, the most qualified of the four candidates vying to lead the office responsible for setting tax values for more than 500,000 properties assessed at more than $750 billion.

Fligor, a former attorney for Santa Clara County, has represented the assessor’s office in contentious appeals over property values. Last year, after nine years in the private sector as a senior attorney for HP, she went to work for Stone serving as special assistant to the assessor and, since he retired, assistant assessor.

Currently second in command, Fligor is responsible for the 250-person office’s day-to-day operations. including its annual assessment roll process and the office’s multi-million-dollar replacement of its 40-year-old software system. Fligor — currently also vice mayor of Los Altos and president of the Cities Association of Santa Clara County — is ready to lead. Her performance in the office has earned her the endorsement of both Stone and local unions — who often sharply disagreed.

The office of the assessor is not a typical elected position. Determining the values of properties isn’t about politics. Instead, this job requires pure adherence to the strict calculus of property assessment and the letter of state laws, including Proposition 13, California’s 1978 voter-approved tax-cutting initiative.

Moreover, Santa Clara County is not your typical county. It is home not only to the most valuable companies on the planet but also its most technologically sophisticated. Alphabet, HP, NVIDIA, Intel, Apple and Cisco, among other corporate giants, are based here. Adding to the challenge, those companies have deep pockets to appeal their assessed valuations — and many do.

Right now, $142 billion of assessed value is currently in dispute in Santa Clara County. That figure has doubled since 2019 and is now at its highest-ever level, largely a function of declining office values tied to remote work trends that have persisted since the COVID pandemic.

With 20% of the total assessed value now in dispute, nearly all of which is from businesses, the next assessor must understand litigation and be prepared to counter large corporate property owners’ armies of lawyers.

Unlike Fligor, none of her opponents have legal experience or have handled assessment appeal cases.

Yan Zhao is Fligor’s most serious opponent. The Saratoga City Council member is an electrical engineer and computer scientist with an extensive background designing and marketing chips in the semiconductor industry. She says her strong technical expertise could help her modernize the office’s assessment software and customer service system. But that software modernization is already underway; meanwhile, Zhao lacks a legal background and commercial appraisal experience.

Candidate Bryan Do is a board member of East Side Union High School District. Do says the assessor’s office’s rising values under appeal necessitate technological modernization and a startup mentality, which he claims his history as an investor and startup founder qualify him to implement. However, Do was not willing to share a resume with our editorial board and his LinkedIn profile mentions companies that have no discernible online presence.

Unlike Do, Rishi Kumar has a long history in the valley’s tech industry as a mechanical engineer and senior executive. Kumar, who refused to meet with our editorial board, has served on Saratoga’s City Council, where he did not develop a good working relationship with other council members.

Kumar has mounted three failed bids for Congress as a Democrat. Now, he is campaigning like a Howard Jarvis-style anti-tax crusader, shamelessly pandering to seniors by promising to work toward exempting them from property taxes — something far beyond the authority of the assessor’s office.

Fortunately, Santa Clara County voters have a solid choice to replace Stone. Without reservation, we endorse Fligor.

Lately, it’s looking like the latter.

In June, the council unanimously rejected two critical tools that the city’s independent police auditor requested: increased access to the sites and records of police shootings; and expanded authority to review all use-of-force incidents.

The changes auditor Eddie Aubrey sought were in keeping with the promise made to city voters in 2020 when they approved a ballot measure to beef up police oversight. In fact, watchdogs in San Francisco, Oakland, Richmond and Sacramento already have similar access.

The council’s denial of Aubrey’s requests was troubling, but then things got weird.

On July 13, San Jose police oversight took a dramatic step backward, when — just hours after the second fatal police shooting in a week — the chief announced that his own Internal Affairs investigators would no longer have access to sites of police shootings. Considering that the external police auditor’s investigators have relied on the department’s internal investigators for on-scene police shooting briefings, the department’s policy would reduce both internal and external oversight.

Fortunately — but also confusingly and inexplicably — the chief 10 days later reversed his decision blocking Internal Affairs investigators from police shooting scenes. But Aubrey’s independent investigators still lack that access.

Troubled past, present

San Jose police history provides plenty of reasons to warrant robust oversight.

This news organization’s 2023 investigation found that nearly three-quarters of those seriously injured by San Jose officers between 2014-21 were either mentally ill or intoxicated, as were the 80% of people killed by officers. In about a quarter of the 108 cases where individuals were seriously hurt or killed, officers initiated contact with the subjects, often over minor infractions that spiraled out of control.

The good news is that the total number of people who have suffered great bodily injury at the hands of San Jose police has decreased consistently since 2021. However, there has been an uptick in police shootings. And over the last five years, the number of community members accusing San Jose police officers of misconduct has risen by 38%.

Meanwhile, the city’s independent police oversight has evolved slowly. In 2020, 78% of city voters approved Measure G, which expanded the auditor’s powers.

Backers of the measure, including then-Mayor Sam Liccardo, touted in ballot arguments that it also enabled the City Council to expand the duties and authority of the independent police auditor “to address the changing landscape of police accountability in the future.”

The auditor’s requests

In April 2024, the council hired Aubrey, an experienced police auditor, former cop and former prosecutor, to lead the city’s independent oversight of law enforcement.

The question now is whether they’ll give him the tools to perform his job — ensuring the department’s internal investigations are unbiased, thorough and complete; and recommending new departmental policies.

In June, the council granted smaller requests from Aubrey, all of which will marginally help. But Police Chief Paul Joseph has objected to Aubrey’s two most important requests. And the council has sided with the chief.

More than any other issue, police oversight pivots on this question: Are officers justified in using force? It’s the role of Internal Affairs to answer that question. It’s the role of Aubrey’s office to ensure that question is being answered fairly. To do their jobs, both offices need access to crime scenes and complete information from internal reports.

Which is why Aubrey is, first, seeking the same access to police shooting scenes and to investigatory records as San Jose’s Internal Affairs unit.

Currently, Aubrey’s investigators are relegated to the outer perimeter of police-shooting scenes, where they can glean little understanding of the complete context in which an officer pulled the trigger. (Was the sun shining in the officer’s eyes and blocking their vision? Was the victim really a threat holding a knife from behind the kitchen counter?)

The police chief argues that the presence of non-sworn law enforcement personnel on the sites of police shootings would hurt the integrity of investigations; and that the police auditor already gets access, by law, to “relevant reports, evidence and recordings as quickly as possible.”

But the chief doesn’t explain how the integrity of investigations would be harmed, especially given that Aubrey and his assistant are both highly trained investigators with extensive police oversight experience. Indeed, comprehensive independent police auditing would help ensure, not harm, the rectitude of police investigations.

As for the chief’s claims about access to police-shooting records, the independent auditor currently receives neither post-incident briefings from the Police Department nor timely access to body-worn camera footage and officer interviews. It can take up to three months before Aubrey’s office receives useful investigatory records, which are often highly curated by the department and the district attorney’s office. For investigators, that extra time means memories fade and evidence degrades.

Second, Aubrey is seeking access to records on officer use-of-force incidents.

Today, Aubrey’s office can see only records about incidents involving death or great bodily injury, which comprise a fraction of police officers’ violent encounters. The auditors get some high-level summaries of the department’s use-of-force incidents, but they do not receive enough access to find important patterns.

For example, if one officer uses force much more often than the department average or if the narcotics unit uses force against, say, Black people twice as often as Asians, the auditor wouldn’t know about it. More-granular data gives auditors greater insight into how well officers are trained and allows them to discern biases in use of force.

The police chief argues that current city law doesn’t explicitly give the independent auditor a right to that information. But Measure G gave the council flexibility to expand the scope of its independent police auditor as circumstances warrant.

Joseph also argues that providing the independent auditor access to use-of-force records would be costly, though he provided no estimates. If the chief’s reluctance to share use-of-force records sounds familiar, that’s because this Police Department used the same cost rationale to resist complying with state law mandating public disclosure of dozens of files on officer misconduct. It took the Bay Area News Group filing suit in 2020 to compel San Jose police to follow the law.

It comes down to this: The independent auditor cannot provide recommendations to make the department better without access to fundamental information about officers’ patterns of using force.

It’s time for the council to give Aubrey the tools to effectively do his job and to help build San Jose’s trust in its police.

Click here for a complete list of our election recommendations.

President Donald Trump believes he is “entitled to five more seats” – his words – in the U.S. House of Representatives. And he’s acting like it.

Reportedly pushed by his aides to prevent losing his House majority to Democrats in November 2026, Texas’ Republican leaders are working hard to deliver the president more congressional seats to ensure Republicans retain control of the House.

Considering that chamber has the most power over the U.S. Treasury’s $7 trillion purse and more than a third of the California state government’s budget is funded by federal spending, what happens in Texas will have tremendous repercussions for California taxpayers who already send more to D.C. than they get back.

Borenstein: Proposition 50 provides California’s only hope to rein in Trump
Gov. Newsom’s measure on Nov. 4 ballot, responding to Texas redistricting, aims to stop president from stealing an election.

Today, Lone Star state legislators are thumbing their noses at the longstanding political norm, followed by every other state, of waiting until the next census before redrawing their congressional districts. Instead, halfway through this decade, they’re changing the rules of the game. Poll after poll this summer shows congressional Republicans losing in the midterms; fearing a wipeout, they’re trying to cheat the old-fashioned way, by gerrymandering.

The draft congressional map Texas GOP leaders unveiled late last month would freeze at least five Democrats out of Congress and help Republicans maintain their majority.

Will their ploy work? Too early to say.

Texas Democrats had left the state, denying temporarily the state Legislature a quorum needed to pass the plan. In fact, they’ve been on the run, hiding from state (and apparently federal) authorities, who threatened to drag them back to Austin and ram through Trump’s plan.

Paying more for less

Amid the uncertainty, California can’t be caught unprepared if the Texas scheme works.

After all, no state has more to lose than California if Trump gets away with manufacturing a House majority. That’s a mathematical reality.

Consider that California taxpayers gave $83.1 billion more to the federal treasury than they took from it in 2022, the most recent annual figures available. By contrast, that year, Texans took $71.1 billion more than they gave.

No state pays more and gets less than California.

The imbalance of payments is bad enough when Democrats control all three branches of the federal government, like they did in 2022. But Trump and his Republican Congress are doing everything in their power to make that ledger even less friendly to the Golden State, against which they have a clear vendetta.

It’s the House where federal spending bills originate. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which just emerged from the Republican-controlled chamber, reveals in stark terms why California needs Democrats to reclaim the House in 2026.

California can expect to lose more than $200 billion in federal funds over the next decade as a result of House Republicans’ new tax-and-spending plan, according to projections by the California Budget and Policy Center. (The state’s Legislative Analyst Office has not yet released its official projection.)

And the loss of federal dollars set in motion by that bill is already wreaking havoc across the state, jeopardizing nearly every sector of California — spanning transportation, education, scientific research and energy infrastructure, just for starters. In fact, the state projects that up to 3.4 million Californians will lose their health insurance as a result of that one bill alone, not to say anything about all the other legislation in House Republicans’ pipeline.

Across the Bay Area, county governments are scrambling to protect what’s left of their safety nets. Federal funding here helps support delivery of food assistance, child welfare services, housing, public safety, medical and behavioral health care. That’s all being dramatically cut.

Santa Clara and Alameda counties, which receive a majority of their health care budgets from the federal government, are bracing for impact. Santa Clara, which operates the second largest public health system in California, projects to lose more than $4 billion over the next five years. That’s the largest revenue loss the county has experienced since Prop. 13 passed in the 1970s and that now threatens its entire system’s viability as a reliable safety net.

To avert disaster, Santa Clara County– one of the wealthiest anywhere in the country — is now counting on passing a sales tax in November to raise about a third in local revenues of what it’s losing in federal benefits. In other words, Santa Clara has to tax itself locally to pay for services its federal taxes were paying for until House Republicans took them away.

Responding in kind

California leaders need to be prepared to meet force with force.

That means pausing California’s high-minded independent commission that has, admirably, drawn congressional boundaries in a non-partisan way since 2010.

While we would normally oppose gerrymandering of any kind, we believe California must act to protect its financial interests.

Will there be a chain reaction? Probably. By all accounts, it’s already starting.

Following Texas earlier this month, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker both said they’re considering redrawing their state’s congressional districts. On Monday, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said he wants to redraw his state’s. Ohio Republicans might be next and on and on.

In addition to these tit-for-tat threats, Trump is now deploying Vice President JD Vance to make the case for a new federal census that would, undoubtedly, reduce the number of safe Democratic congressional seats long before the 2030 census.

Simply put, there are no good options, including inaction.

Critics of California reacting to Texas’ provocation have focused on what this does or doesn’t mean for Gov. Gavin Newsom’s potential run for president. Those are red herrings.

Newsom is rightly building support for a plan that will need voter buy-in; and he’s making clear that whatever plan the Legislature approves has to have an end date.

When the California Legislature returns from summer recess on Monday, they’ll have four days (though possibly more depending on the legal interpretation) to pass an official plan that will get on the Nov. 4 special-election ballot.

We can expect legal fights, well-funded opposition campaigns and a long, messy process to rewrite our rules. The campaigning will be nonstop.

But while the details of the plan are still being worked out, this much must be clear:

Californians can’t sit idly by and take the moral high ground while Trump and his allies in Texas create Machiavellian schemes to manufacture a House majority hellbent on using the federal government to extract more wealth from California taxpayers while delivering their communities less.

Democratic state Sens. Jesse Arreguin, the former mayor of Berkeley, and Maria Elena Durazo of Los Angeles are leading this year’s attack, which backers are championing as a modernization of the open-meeting rules.

In fact, Senate Bill 707 is a confusing mess that, most significantly, would allow key local government advisory committees to meet completely virtually.

These are important boards whose recommendations are often sent to the final decision-makers — a city council, school board or county board of supervisors — for quick and perfunctory ratification.

It’s at these advisory boards that important policy is debated, which is why the meetings should be exposed to full sunshine. This is the very sort of debate that the original drafters of the state’s open-meeting law, the Ralph M. Brown Act, wanted subjected to public scrutiny.

The pending bill, which is similar to unsuccessful efforts in 2024 and 2023, would be a step toward government solely by teleconference, in which members of the public and press might never see meetings in person, never be able to approach board members with questions or suggestions, and never be able to observe the body language between them.

Opponents of this year’s assault on the open-meeting law include groups as disparate as the First Amendment Coalition, Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, California News Publishers Association, California Broadcasters Association and the California arms of ACLU, Common Cause and the League of Women Voters.

The goal of the Brown Act — originally passed in 1953 and updated and strengthened since — was to sunshine not just the final decision-making, but also the process that led up to it. In the Brown Act, the Legislature declared its intent that local government boards’ “actions be taken openly and that their deliberations be conducted openly.”

To be sure, there is an important role today for virtual access. Which is why the portions of SB 707 designed to make it easier for members of the public to watch and offer comment remotely are laudable.

And there are legitimate reasons for remote participation by board members. People might have health issues or family emergencies that require videoconferencing. But, for board members, that should be the exception, not the rule.

In 2022, a coalition of open-government advocates and state lawmakers hammered out legislation, Assembly Bill 2449, that Gov. Gavin Newsom signed, balancing the need for transparency with legitimate situations where remote participation is understandable.

Currently, participation by members of most boards is limited to a set number of meetings — for example, five times a year for a legislative body that meets twice a month. At least a quorum of members of the legislative body must participate from a single public location, such as a city council chamber, where the public can be present. That’s a reasonable compromise, one that SB 707 would unravel for advisory boards.

Backers of SB 707 claim the bill is needed “to promote the recruitment and retention” of board members. If recruitment hinges on the ability of board members to hide from interaction with the public and press, they are seeking the wrong positions.

Public service and sound policymaking require public accountability, public dialog and public interaction. That’s what the Legislature envisioned in 1953 and what the public should demand in 2025.