SAN JOSE — After eight years with Mayor Sam Liccardo at the helm, the nation’s 10th largest city will be electing a new leader in November as San Jose grapples with complex issues like homelessness, housing and overseeing a massive budget.
Voters will choose between Santa Clara County Supervisor Cindy Chavez, a longtime South Bay politician and labor leader, and San Jose Councilmember Matt Mahan, a freshman council member largely backed by business interests, to lead the city over the next crucial years and oversee a population just north of 1 million and an operating budget of roughly $5 billion.
Chavez boasts years of experience serving on both the county’s board of supervisors and the San Jose City Council.
“These institutions just like businesses, just like nonprofits, just like any other organization are institutions that need to be understood in order to have achievements come out of them because they’re big and they’re bulky and when you need to make change you need to be able to push them to do it,” Chavez said.
Mahan, with a background in tech and two years as a school teacher on the east side, is looking to ignite a “revolution for common sense” by focusing on measurable goals and accountability.
“I think the work that I did in tech around increasing government transparency and accountability through civic engagement is particularly suited to local government and some of the challenges we face in San Jose,” Mahan said. “And I’ve been on the council long enough to understand how city hall works, see where some of the gaps are and have a serious case for what we can do differently.”
Both campaigns have amassed large campaign chests. Mahan is leading the fundraising, bringing in $672,914 between July 1 and Sept. 24. His campaign has raised more than $1.4 million this year. Chavez follows closely behind having raised $557,679.79 in the latest reporting period and roughly $1.3 million in total.
Mahan has earned the endorsement of Liccardo, as well as former mayors Chuck Reed, Tom McEnery and Ron James, while Chavez has scooped up the endorsements from the entire San Jose council — minus Liccardo and Mahan.
Q&A
Q: San Jose is planning for 62,200 units of housing for the next eight years. What’s your key strategy in ensuring San Jose reaches its housing goals?
Chavez: One of the first things that needs to happen is we need to make sure we’re robustly hiring in [the planning] department and that we create career ladders within that department that both attracts the best and the brightest and keeps the best and the brightest throughout their careers because that department changes over so often that you don’t have people who have all the tools you need to move projects through quickly.
The second thing is we need to address the changes in the general plan that have made it more difficult for us to build housing. The last time there was a major general plan update, when they created the urban village strategy, it dropped the percentage of housing permits by 25%. And so what that tells me is that the rules that were intended to enhance housing did the opposite.
Mahan: As mayor I will spend a lot of time with our planning department ensuring that we are doing whatever is necessary to close the 26% vacancy rate in that department right now, to overhaul our technology systems, to learn from staff to identify ways to streamline the process and to work with the external parties, the investors and the developers who build housing to make sure that we’re implementing policies that are attracting investment in housing where we want it in places like downtown and near transit.
Q: San Jose saw its homeless population grow 11% over the course of the pandemic. How do you ensure that number stops growing?
Chavez: Homelessness is a complex problem that is going to take multiple pathways to resolve, but we can do it. First thing is we need to keep people from becoming homeless in the first place. During COVID, we worked really hard with the private sector to make resources available for folks to pay rent or mortgage or other kinds of needs so that we would not have even more people becoming homeless during this pandemic. Prevention is critical and it’s the most cost effective. It’s cost effective for a couple of reasons, but one of them is by preventing or rapidly rehousing someone. It means that we’re able to give them housing and many of them won’t need any services, but if they do the services are minimal.
Two, we need to build housing at all affordability levels as quickly as possible.
Third, we need to make sure that we’re not only building out and maintaining shelter capacity, but that we’re also building out interim housing.
Mahan: I think we have to shift resources away from a model that is too slow and expensive and toward building very basic cost effective but of course still safe and dignified individual housing units for those who need them. We can’t solve this problem with a build time of 5 years and a cost per door of $850,000. If we can get the build time down to 18 months and cut the cost to $100,000 per door we have a real shot at putting ourselves on a path to ending street homelessness. And that’s really what we’ve started to do at the city through the prefabricated modular quick build apartments that we’ve been building.
Q: One of the mayor’s biggest powers is shaping the budget process. How will you use that process to ensure everything is funded?
Chavez: I think it’s really important to do a forensic audit of the city so that the new mayor comes in with a clean sheet of paper that says: here’s where all of our resources are, here’s where we have flexibility and spending, here’s where we don’t. I think we need to move to a zero based budgeting strategy and the reason for that is it’s a way to make sure any nickels in the cushion are pulled out before you look at any kind of new funding.
Mahan: The budget is a strategic planning document in a way. It’s the mayor’s opportunity to lay out a vision for where we should go and I plan to fully leverage that opportunity to identify and rank order our priorities to baseline where we are today in terms of outcomes, to set improvement targets and to focus the attention of the city from the council to the city staff to residents on the key outcomes that are most important to our community so that there’s greater transparency and we are held accountable for moving the needle on a small number of strategic goals.
That’s really why I’ve been running on an accountability plan that is all about setting goals, publishing those goals, tracking progress against those goals and being accountable for delivering results.
