America’s tenth-largest city has a new driver at the wheel — and he’s trying to avoid any distractions along the way.
Forty-year-old Matt Mahan became San Jose’s 66th mayor after his November defeat of Santa Clara County Supervisor Cindy Chavez. A former schoolteacher and tech entrepreneur, Mahan says the city has too much on its plate and wants to focus on four key issues during his two-year term: homelessness, public safety, blight and economic development.
“I think we have to acknowledge that our current strategies are not delivering the outcomes that we want,” he said during a wide-ranging interview with the Bay Area News Group. “The environment has changed. We need to change up our strategies and our approaches.”
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Q As you begin your term, how do you think your style and focus will be similar to your predecessor Sam Liccardo? How will you be different?
A (Liccardo) was deep on the policy details, was very thoughtful in all of our council and committee conversations and had clearly spent a lot of time with our professional staff to understand the issues. I want to try to emulate that. Sam also hired a great staff, many of whom we’ll be keeping on. What I think I will likely do differently is focus on fewer things. I think the council has at times done our professional staff a disservice by asking them to try to tackle too many things and issuing a lot of memos with a lot of recommendations to go off and explore this and study that and come back with this. Sometimes I think the council veers into micromanaging the implementation. So I’m bringing more of a CEO mindset, I suppose. I think the cultural shift has to be we’re going to do fewer things. We’re going to measure performance. And we’re going to acknowledge that what we’re doing needs to change because we’re not getting the outcomes we need.
Q You’ve said we urgently need more housing in the city. What are the three things preventing that right now?
A One is not having enough skilled workers in the building trades. There are real bottlenecks around staffing. And there are very high labor costs, which makes fewer projects pencil out. (Second is) the regulatory burden, (which) leads to very slow entitlement and permit processing times. The layers of process we’ve created at the city, county and state level lead to very slow turnarounds. And, of course, in business, time is money. In San Jose specifically, it’s gonna take 24 months to get entitlement. Whereas in Texas, it might be six. The third I would offer is restrictive zoning. That’s starting to change. The state has stepped in to ensure we no longer have any parcels that are single-family. The city, for our part, has raised height limits in downtown. We’ve tried to become more flexible and less restrictive.
Q Homelessness and mental health issues are also a priority for you. In New York City, the mayor recently came out with a plan to push for stricter rules around when the city can intervene in the case of a mentally ill individual. California counties will be setting up new court systems with the power to order the severely mentally ill into treatment, now that Gov. Newsom has signed the Community Assistance, Recovery, and Empowerment (CARE) Act into law What are your thoughts on these policies?
A I’m very supportive of CARE courts. And the reason that I think CARE courts are probably a better approach for California than even what New York is doing is that even if we ask our police officers or our outreach workers to lower the threshold for what it takes to bring somebody to Santa Clara Valley Medical Center, for example, the bigger problem is what happens after the 72-hour hold. And that’s where I see the bigger gap. Certainly, it’s unacceptable to have people suffering from severe mental health issues be left on the street. I think that’s wrong, it needs to change. But we have a bigger challenge around this sort of medium to longer-term care and the lack of inpatient beds where you effectively have a revolving door of the same people being picked up and dropped off. Even if we ask more of our street outreach teams, or we change that dynamic, I don’t think that gets us very far.
Q The application deadline has now passed for the District 8 and 10 San Jose council vacancies. Who will you support?
A I need to read through the applications. I haven’t had a chance to do that yet. At first glance, there’s quite a few active community members whose names I recognize. I want to let the process play out.
Q Did any names you saw on the list jump out at you?
A I don’t have a pick or a bias toward anyone at this point. I also am very interested in hearing from the community on who they’re interested in.
Q Rank-choice voting is becoming increasingly popular in this state, and Santa Clara County is currently exploring it as an option. Is it something you could see coming to San Jose?
A The appeal of rank-choice voting is that it does a better job of capturing the true preferences of the electorate — if it’s administered well, and the electorate understands the process. (But) that’s a big if. I have a couple of concerns with it. And to me, they’re not insurmountable. One is the complexity of the process around both the electorate not fully understanding how it works, because it’s much more complicated than picking one (candidate). The other is implementation. It’s less straightforward. And election integrity is incredibly important, especially these days. I see trade-offs. There’s no perfect system, and it’s just kind of trying to weigh which trade-offs matter.
