Introduction
It’s Your City
It’s Your City. And it should work for you.
You vote for it, pay for it, you use it — this is your city government.
A lot of politicians talk in vague generalities about how they’ll improve safety, jobs or roads — but you deserve more than rhetoric from your elected leaders. Before you cast your ballot, you deserve to know exactly how each candidate will make San José safer and stronger — and how they’ll pay for it.
To be sure, San José has plenty of challenges ahead. We face $3 billion in unfunded retirement liabilities and over $1 billion in backlogged infrastructure and street maintenance work. Budgets will remain thin for years to come.
Nonetheless, we can do better. Even in times of scarcity, we can restore safety and services if we are willing to do things differently. As a city councilmember and former criminal prosecutor, I’ve served our community during very challenging fiscal times, but I’ve seen how we can accomplish more by being resourceful, efficient, and above all, more innovative.
As mayor I will lead the most innovative City Hall in the nation. From the heart of Silicon Valley, San José should show the world how government can do more without always spending more.
The first three-quarters of this book focus on the three most basic, immediate challenges confronting San José: public safety, the budget and jobs. The final quarter focuses on how we move forward together towards our shared future.
In addition to ensuring that we fully implement my own Council-approved strategy to hire more officers with savings from pension reform and other sources, our next mayor must focus on ways to make San José safer while we’re rebuilding our police department. I’ve focused on restoring community policing, leveraging technological tools like data analytics and online video registries, emphasizing gang prevention and other cost-effective and proven approaches.
We can make government more cost-effective and fiscally responsible by cutting red tape, promoting public-private partnerships and implementing “Fresh Start” budgeting. We must begin, however, by paying our own bills — rather than passing them along to future generations.
We can expand economic opportunities for all our residents by helping small businesses with faster permitting and support, using low-cost incentives to spur manufacturing growth in San José, implementing congestion pricing to increase flights at our airport, and leveraging our libraries as skill-building centers for job seekers.
I’m issuing a second edition of this book because I’ve had the benefit of having time to add an important element that the first edition lacked: a view to the future. This last chapter lays out my vision for San José’s future. We start with the most important ingredient of our future: our children. Among other key initiatives, I discuss a proposal for funding educational after-school programs that could engage thousands of kids from low-income families. I also address better ways to serve our rapidly aging population. I focus on our most important non-human natural resource: water, and urge that we combat chronic drought by accelerating plans to recharge our underground aquifers with recycled water. Finally, I discuss the critical role San José will have in Silicon Valley’s future, if we can create a vibrant urban center increasingly demanded by our rapidly changing economy.
After reading this book, some readers will complain that the book “left this issue out” or “ignored that issue.” The response, of course, is “yes, I did.” Certainly, I’ve taken a leading role on a wide variety of initiatives in my career, including the environment, the arts, education, transportation, parks and housing. But I’ve intentionally focused this discussion because San José will fail at everything else if we cannot get the basics right. If San José will thrive in the coming decade, we must restore safety, improve our fiscal capacity to provide services and expand job opportunities in many of our struggling communities. With good leadership, the rest will follow.
Why This Book Is Different
This book is different from the books written by most elected officials in two ways.
First, I wrote it. Many politicians employ ghostwriters. Don’t get me wrong; I’d employ a ghostwriter if I could afford one. I’d probably employ someone to repair my back porch first, but after that, I’d employ a ghostwriter. But I wrote this.
Second, it’s not about me. It’s about San José — and San José’s future.
Many elected officials tend to write a lot about themselves. Since we’re typically surrounded by lots of people who commend us for our allegedly wonderful intellects, gasp at our purportedly insightful opinions and laugh at our less-than-humorous anecdotes, over time, we tend to believe them. So, we talk a lot about ourselves, and we write a lot about ourselves. The problem, of course, is that many politicians are not terribly interesting people.
Cities — and specifically, San José — are far more interesting. Cities remain the last bastion for creative, effective solutions to the world’s most intractable problems — poverty, crime, environmental degradation and more. Congress appears mired in partisan politics, and California in debt and dysfunction. As a result, the great innovations in governance — whether it’s bus-rapid-transit in Bogotá, bike infrastructure in Copenhagen, Compstat in New York City, or bolsa familia in México City — happen in cities.
San José possesses unique opportunities to provide exemplary problem-solving, innovation and far-sighted leadership for the rest of our nation. We are the largest city in the world’s most innovative region. As America’s most diverse, most dynamic and most talented collection of human beings, the time is far past due for San José to lead the world.
In short, San José’s future seems well worth a read, since it poses both interesting questions for the mind and inspiring fodder for the heart. I hope you’ll join me in leading San José to its extraordinary future.