Sam Liccardo

Mayor of San Jose, California, United States

Mayor Sam Liccardo is currently serving in his second term as Mayor of the 10th largest city in the United States. During his tenure as Mayor, Sam led efforts to fund the construction of thousands of units of affordable housing, launch the nation’s largest community choice clean energy utility, provide jobs to more than 4,000 teens living in gang-impacted neighborhoods, coalesce multi-billion-dollar investments in new transit, and preserve thousands of acres in Coyote Valley for open space and hillsides from development.

Mayor Liccardo also enacted a first-in-the-nation ordinance to reduce gun violence, requiring gun owners to have insurance and pay an annual fee to relieve the public cost of gun violence. Sam launched a Smart City Vision, aiming to make San José America’s most innovative city, in part by bridging the digital divide through the nation’s first Digital Inclusion Fund to provide broadband access, devices and skills to low-income families. By 2022, the City’s efforts will connect more than 300,000 low-income San José residents with free broadband.

Sam also championed the unprecedented private/public agreement between San José and Google for their new transformational project, Downtown West, an investment of $200 million towards community priorities including affordable housing and opportunity pathways for youth in underserved neighborhoods.

During his term, Sam also launched the Resilience Corps in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, employing nearly 500 young residents from the city’s lowest-resource neighborhoods with livable wages to aid in vaccination efforts, food distribution, and improve the city’s ability to withstand the effects of climate change.

In 2021 he served as the Chair of the Big City Mayors, a coalition of mayors from California’s 13 largest cities, advocating for innovative solutions to combat homelessness and improve COVID-19 response, which led to a $1 billion in spending annually for homelessness for two years. 

Prior to his service in elected office, Sam served as a criminal prosecutor at the federal and local level, prosecuting cases of sexual assault and child exploitation. He is a graduate of Georgetown University, Harvard Law School, and Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.