With America’s 10th largest city set to vote next month on a multi-billion dollar budget, homelessness, crime, and soaring housing costs remain at the forefront for many of San Jose’s one million residents.
Amid economic uncertainty and wrangling at City Hall on how to spend $5.2 billion in the coming year, Mayor Matt Mahan already has debuted his priorities: a shift from permanent housing to interim housing for the city’s homeless residents and hiring more police staff — proposals that the city’s progressive activists and councilmembers are likely to protest.
The mayor — who was elected on a campaign that promised to return “back to basics” and to reign in City Hall’s responsibilities — comes in as San Jose enjoys a $35 million budget surplus. But officials expect those extra bucks to dry up in the coming years as the economic picture darkens.
What’s behind the billions being spent? Here are three ways to visualize San Jose’s FY2023-2024 budget.
In line with the mayor’s concerns surrounding public safety, the city would increase its over half-billion dollar police budget by adding 31 employees, with 20 of those hires set to be sworn police officers — doubling the pace at which the department is currently recruiting.
“That rate was too slow, given how understaffed we are,” said Mahan about previous efforts to bring in new officers. “And I think we should be more ambitious. We’re a big city.”
The search for police officers comes as departments across the Bay Area face issues with staffing, according to a February report by the Public Policy Institute of California. Between 2008 and 2021, San Jose, San Francisco and Oakland all experienced double-digit decreases in the number of patrol officers, researchers found.
With a boost of funding for overtime to help its existing employees as the department builds up its ranks, more than $7 million would be devoted to bolster staffing in San Jose. The additional officers are expected to come aboard starting midway through 2024. The department is currently budgeted for 1,173 sworn positions, with 1,069 of those filled, according to a department spokesperson.
Police staffing challenges also have affected the ability of officers to respond to residents’ 911 calls, according to Mahan.
San Jose police split up those calls into two categories: Priority 1 for life-threatening incidents and Priority 2 for a crime in progress or one that just occurred. The city’s goal is for at least 70% of the time, an initial unit should arrive on the scene for Priority 1 calls within six minutes and Priority 2 calls within 11 minutes.
The police are nowhere near that target — and its response times have been decreasing at a steady rate over the last four years.
Since 2019, officers responding to a Priority 1 call within six minutes has dropped by 8%. The same goes for Priority 2 calls, where police responding to the scene within 11 minutes has dropped by 9%. (Data from 2022 is an estimate from the city.)
But some remain skeptical about the mayor’s solution.
In an interview, Raj Jayadev from Silicon Valley De-Bug called the increase in police funding an “irresponsible” and “dangerous” proposal. While he acknowledges response times are a challenge, the way to fix it isn’t more police, he argues, but by scaling down of what type of calls the department is responding to.
“They have way too sprawling of a level of responsibility,” said Jayadev about SJPD. “More police only invites two things. Police violence and more systemic violence in the form of incarceration.”
In a statement, the San Jose Police Department described Mahan’s proposal as “refreshing and necessary.”
The statement reads: “Working with the Mayor’s Office to increase the number of police officers we hire will assist this department in lowering response times, expanding investigative services, ensuring a diverse workforce and will create greater opportunities for community policing while promoting public safety.”
Aside from police, the department that oversees the city’s non-profit electricity supplier — San Jose Clean Energy — is set to receive a major cash hike, more than $140 million over the previous year due to increased costs to acquire energy and to repay debt, said the manager’s budget director Jim Shannon.
Passed by voters in 2020, Measure E taxes real estate purchases over $2 million, with the goal of providing additional funding to house the city’s low-income and homeless residents. For the last couple of years, a majority of the tens of millions of dollars has funded more permanent affordable housing options, while the rest has gone to prevention efforts like rental assistance and the construction of temporary shelters.
This year, Mahan intends to make a big change in where new Measure E funds are going.
He plans to push for around $25 million to be spent on more emergency interim housing, a type of shelter that he sees as essential in rapidly removing unsheltered residents off the streets and out of encampments. Still, over $50 million of rollover funds will go towards permanent affordable housing. The mayor’s proposal is a one-time allocation.
The city estimates 5,000 unsheltered people live in the city — and the goal is to get 1,000 of them off the street by the end of the year.
Those who view the homelessness crisis as stemming from a dearth of affordable housing vehemently oppose Mahan’s proposal. They claim that voters who approved Measure E are being misled if affordable housing isn’t a priority.
“Because the mayor campaigned on the issue of making homelessness less visible, he’s wedded to this approach,” said Jennifer Loving, Chief Executive Officer of Destination: Home, a San Jose-based homelessness prevention nonprofit. “The worry is, we’re going wholesale down the path that is reminiscent of the 1990s. Where we primarily sheltered people. But not actually housed people.”
This article is a project of Laney College’s Data Journalism course.
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