Liccardo to skip speech, focus on issues S.J. faces with community

The State of the Union became a political pingpong ball this year between Congress and the President. Pundits are still deciphering Gov. Gavin Newsom‘s State of the State speech — what are his plans for high-speed rail, anyway? And Cupertino Mayor Steven Scharf is still explaining himself after the poorly considered “wall joke” about housing he made during his State of the City address.

And San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo? He’s ditching the State of the City speech all together.

“There’s a lot of speechifying going on in the country right now,” Liccardo said Tuesday. “I can provide the community with the benefit of one less speech. It’s an alternative to the cacophony with an opportunity to take a breath, roll up our sleeves and do something productive.”

Instead of talking, Liccardo plans to lead four community activities starting March 13. Each will highlight an issue or challenge that faces San Jose like homelessness, the environment, public safety and youth education. Specifics are still being worked out, but Liccardo said the last activity on March 16 is planned to be a creek cleanup that everyone’s invited to take part in.

Of course, the mayor is still a politician, so the events won’t be entirely speech free. Liccardo will make short remarks at each on the issue’s relevance to San Jose that will be distributed through social media.

At last year’s State of the City speech at San Jose City College, people protesting Google’s plans to expand to San Jose heckled Liccardo and disrupted the speech three times and were escorted out each time. You can bet more protesters would have shown up this year, too, but Liccardo said the new format isn’t an attempt to silence his critics.

“I give lots of public speeches around this city, so there are plenty of more opportunities for someone who wants to heckle me,” he said. “We just wanted to try something different.”

Former Mayor Tom McEnery began the tradition with the “Mayor’s Unity Breakfast” starting in 1983, and successive mayors often fiddled with the format of what became known as the State of the City. In the 1990s, Susan Hammer moved it to the evening to open it up to more residents and accommodate a TV broadcast. Ron Gonzales continued that format, which included the frightening moment when he suffered a minor stroke during his 2004 address. Budget-conscious Chuck Reed made it a breakfast event again and eliminated the practice of having corporate sponsors underwrite the mid-five-figure price tag, instead charging $20 (and later $25) a head to cover costs. For Reed’s second term starting in 2011, though, the speech went back to being a free, evening event. Liccardo has taken a nomadic approach to the State of the City, staging the event at venues outside downtown including high schools in East San Jose and South San Jose.

Another part of previous State of the City events has been an awards ceremony for community honorees and employees. That portion will still happen, repackaged as the “San Jose Champions” honors on April 25. A CLASSIC ‘CAT’ » San Jose Stage is midway through its run of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” Tennessee Williams’ sultry, Southern dive into the layer of lies that simmers beneath the veneer of “polite society.” And if you’ve only seen the 1958 movie starring Paul Newman and Elizabeth Taylor, the stage version delves deeper into topics the sanitized film only hinted at and is just as compelling as ever.

San Jose Stage Artistic Director Randall King says in the program notes that the company first thought about bringing back the play, with its themes of truth and “mendacity,” around the 2016 election. “At that time we didn’t know the unprecedented level of mendacity we would experience, or the level of divisions in society that would surface, making this work just as relevant today as it was some 60 years ago,” said King, who, as family patriarch Big Daddy, leads a stellar cast that includes San Jose Stage regulars Allison F. Rich and Will Springhorn Jr.

On a lighter note, this is one of two productions in downtown San Jose this month with a lead actor who hobbles around on one leg, following Ahab in Opera San Jose’s “Moby-Dick.” Rob August plays Brick — the Newman role in the movie — and has his foot in a cast for the whole show and takes a couple of convincing stage falls. “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” runs through March 3, and tickets are available at www.thestage.org.