Campbell council picks new vice mayor after restaurant incident

Campbell has a new vice mayor after the City Council removed the title from one councilmember in the wake of alleged inappropriate behavior at a local restaurant.

The City Council on Tuesday unanimously voted to appoint Councilmember Anne Bybee as vice mayor after Elliot Scozzola, who represents District 4, was removed from the position at a March 3 meeting. The Campbell Police Department has been involved in several incidents with Scozzola since he joined the council in December 2022. The most recent incident happened at The Garret bar and restaurant near The Pruneyard shopping center on Feb. 2.

According to an employee of The Garret who asked not to be identified, Scozzola, 44, was seated at the bar across from a table of women and was staring at one of them so intently she asked him to stop. The employee said Scozzola later wrote an apology note to the woman on a napkin.

Chris Giangreco, a San Jose resident who was in The Garret at the time, spoke about what he’d seen at the Feb. 3 council meeting the next day.

“There was leering going on to the degree that the object of this man’s attention basically said in front of the whole bar, ‘Hey, knock it off. Stop it,'” Giangreco told the council. “And it kind of stopped, but it did continue. And it wound up being kind of a running joke at the bar.”

Scozzola did not respond to requests for comment. He is up for reelection in November, should he choose to seek a second term.

After The Garret incident, the council scheduled a March 3 vote to consider stripping Scozzola of his vice mayor position. Councilmembers voted 3-2 to do so, with Anne Bybee, Terry Hines and Sergio Lopez voting to take away his title, and Mayor Dan Furtado and Scozzola voting no. Scozzola had started his one-year appointment as vice mayor in December 2025.

Furtado said he didn’t want to excuse any inappropriate behavior, but felt the action was premature. He told San José Spotlight he has not seen any problems with Scozzola’s performance of his council duties or received any complaints from residents.

But Bybee saw it differently.

“I do not condone the behavior that was alleged, and I believe that the vice mayor has failed to address the allegations at our council retreat and at our meeting tonight,” Bybee said at the meeting. “So it’s unfortunate that our vice mayor is not willing to explain his actions.”

Campbell Police Chief Gary Berg appeared briefly at the March 3 meeting. He said officers reviewed security video from The Garret showing Scozzola at the restaurant for more than three hours drinking numerous alcoholic beverages.

“I let you know absolutely everything and my perspective and all of that during our council retreat and I don’t see any reason to discuss it further,” Scozzola said at the meeting when other councilmembers asked for his response.

He added people can interpret behavior in “wildly” different ways when it comes to what is and isn’t appropriate.

“Some people are hyper-conservative or hyper-liberal and most are somewhere in between,” Scozzola said later in the meeting. “So I don’t think it’s fair to try and use some kind of metric when it ultimately just boils down to everyone’s personal opinion.”

Hines said Scozzola acknowledged several actions of great concern during a city staff and council retreat after The Garret incident came to light. But that wasn’t enough to make it right.

“This is a huge black mark on our city and is an embarrassment to our wonderful town,” Hines added at the March 3 meeting. “As a city councilmember, we are held to an even higher standard, and we must be accountable for all of our actions and perceptions of our actions. The pattern of actions by Mr. Scozzola is not a one-time event.”

Campbell police have previously interacted with Scozzola.

In March 2025, police arrested Scozzola for disorderly conduct outside an unnamed bar on Orchard City Drive. The police report said Scozzola “was refusing to leave the bar . . . and (was) determined to be too intoxicated to care for his safety.”

In April 2024, an acquaintance of Scozzola contacted Campbell police to say Scozzola had threatened to shoot another acquaintance. Officers obtained a gun violence restraining order and searched Scozzola’s apartment, according to a police statement, and found 13 firearms and “approximately 15,000 ammunition rounds.”

A November 2024 filing in Santa Clara County Superior Court extended the restraining order to November 2028, stating that Scozzola “poses a significant danger of causing personal injury to themselves or another person by having … firearms.”

Councilmember Lopez said he’ll let his prior public comments speak for themselves and is ready to move on.

“It’s my sincere hope and expectation that we can and will get back to the business of the city and serving our residents,” Lopez told San José Spotlight.

Contact Mike Langberg at [email protected].