Bloomberg Campaign Press Release - San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo Endorses Mike Bloomberg, Is Named California Co-Chair of 2020 Campaign

Mayor Liccardo Will Provide Strategic and Policy Counsel to Campaign

NEW YORK, NEW YORK – Today, Mike Bloomberg 2020 announced that San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo will serve as California co-chair of the campaign. Liccardo will advise the Bloomberg campaign on strategy, policy, and serve as a surrogate. Additional California co-chairs will be announced in the coming weeks.

Mayor Liccardo has been an important leader nationally in battling climate change, an issue that Bloomberg has made one of the cornerstones of his campaign, and that will be one of his top priorities as President. Under Liccardo's focused leadership, San Jose became the largest US city to launch a community choice energy program that has boosted the share of clean energy sources for San Jose's electricity to 80%. Under Mayor Liccardo's visionary leadership, San Jose became the largest US city to require all-electric construction of all new residential and municipal buildings. Amid the greatest economic expansion in San Jose history, Liccardo led historic efforts to preserve thousands of acres of open space and hillsides against development. He's spearheaded bold efforts to expand economic opportunity in San Jose, in 2016 leading a regional increase of the minimum wage to $15 per hour. He launched programs to eliminate financial barriers to college for 1,600 low-income students, to engage more than 4,000 teenagers in gang-impacted neighborhoods in summer jobs, to open coding camps to more than 7,000 public school students, and to bridge the digital divide for thousands of low-income families with the nation's first privately financed digital inclusion initiative. He's become a trusted voice among his peers, recently galvanizing dozens of California mayors in a proposal for a customer buyout of the bankrupt Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) utility.

"Mayor Liccardo has been a leader on a number of critical issues, especially climate, which Mike has made one of his top priorities for this campaign," said Kevin Sheekey, Campaign Manager for Mike 2020. "We're playing to win and California will be an important part of our success. We're thrilled to have Mayor Liccardo as part of the team."

"Mayors don't have the luxury of hyperpartisan tongue-wagging," said Mayor Liccardo, "they have to solve problems and get things done. I'm supporting Mike Bloomberg because as mayor of the nation's largest, most diverse, and most complex city, Mike solved problems  — to reduce poverty, expand jobs, cut gun violence, improve public health, and build affordable housing. As President, Mike Bloomberg will bring his courageous, innovative, and pragmatic leadership to our nation's great challenges, to do what's right and make tough decisions regardless of what he might hear from the powerful, the pundits, or the polls."

Mayor Sam Liccardo took office in 2015, and was reelected in 2018 with 76% of the vote.  Prior to Liccardo's time as an elected official, he prosecuted sexual assaults and other felony cases as a criminal prosecutor.

Liccardo serves on a number of boards, including the Metropolitan Transportation Commission and the Valley Transit Authority, where he has led efforts to fund and construct a "ring of rail" around the Bay Area, by connecting the BART and CalTrain transit systems in Downtown San Jose. He serves as co-chair for Joint Venture Silicon Valley, is a senior fellow for the American Leadership Forum-Silicon Valley, and is a Rodel Fellow at the Aspen Institute.

Liccardo graduated from Georgetown University, received a law degree from Harvard Law School, and a master's degree from Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government.