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David Cohen has lived in District 4 in San Jose since 1998, where he has raised his family and worked in high tech. Cohen holds 10 patents and has published several papers and given numerous talks at technical conferences. Prior to moving to Silicon Valley, where he worked at Lam Research, Cohen was process development engineer at Clorox. He is a senior fellow of the American Leadership Forum and a member of San Jose Downtown Rotary. His election to the council was described by local news source San Jose Spotlight as a realignment of the business-labor split on the City Council, but according to Cohen, “While my values align more with the labor-aligned bloc, my expectation is that the entire council will come together and be able to compromise rather than just switch from 5-6 to 6-5 on difficult votes. I plan to work well with all my council colleagues.”
First elected: Nov. 3, 2020
Day job: Engineer and manager
Alma maters: UC Berkeley (PhD in chemical engineering); Cornell University (bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering)
Other offices held: Berryessa Union School Governing Board (2006-2020), San Jose Library Commission
Notable quote: “I think our district is looking for somebody to be an advocate for the neighborhood needs and to be responsive and to have a staff who is empowered to work directly with residents, to actively interact with them and solve their local problems,” Cohen told San Jose Inside. “I think our district has been crying out for that for the last few years.”
San Jose residents want a neighborhood improvement initiative to restart after it sunsetted last June due to lack of funding.
Latino members of the San Jose City Council are calling for more funding for undocumented immigrant protections as the incoming presidential administration threatens to ramp up deportations.
If no candidate receives a majority on April 8, the top two candidates will run against each other in a special runoff election on June 24. The winner will serve the remainder of the term through 2026.
Housing and business developers in San Jose avoid building public improvements by paying fees to the city, but this often leads to infrastructure projects slowing to a crawl.
