San Jose City Council met on Tuesday for a priority setting session to discuss the committees created by newly inaugurated Mayor Matt Mahan.
The mayor laid out a committee focused on addressing houselessness, community safety and city cleanness.
The five focus reports proposed by Mahan are the Clean Neighborhood Committee, Community Safety Committee, Downtown Vibrancy Committee, Homelessness Committee and Planning & Permit.
The Clean Neighborhood Committee, led by councilmember Peter Ortiz, plans to help keep the city clean. The committee plans on prioritizing their 311 app and adding new city-contracted organizations such as nonprofits and private corporations to better support the project.
The 311 app is a tool that has been implemented by the city, containing access to resources such as eviction prevention.
It also allows residents to report safety hazards such as illegal fireworks, road potholes and illegal dumping.
“Hiring and recruiting for all vacant positions is critical to cleaning up San Jose,” Ortiz said.
The Community Safety Committee plans on getting more officers back on patrol. Councilmember Bien Doan said he wants to increase police department staffing to accommodate the community's needs.
“I would love to see our police department staffing to be back to prior to 2010. Back then we had 1,450 police officers,” Doan said. “At this point we have about 1,100 police officers and our population has risen 20%.”
As well as investing in police, that committee also wants to invest in alternative 911 response groups such as their current Mobile Crisis Assessment Team (MCAT) who deals with those who are having a mental health crisis.
The Community Safety Committee laid out a plan in their report that focuses on providing more funding to roll out new designs for roads on a more expedited timeline.
The project will play a part in the city’s Vision Zero Action Plan, its goal is to eliminate traffic deaths and severe injuries.
Last year, the city had 65 roadway deaths, setting a record high for the city, according to a Jan. 1 San Jose Mercury News article.
The committee also plans to work with the Santa Clara county and non-profit groups to help fight substance abuse issues,including mental health experts to help individuals in crisis.
The Downtown Vibrancy Committee works to revise downtown to draw in more residents and businesses by removing fees and permits for pop-up vendors.
The committee recommends the creation of a team to coordinate non-profit and other groups to make a more cohesive downtown.
The Homelessness Transition Committee’s main priority is on combating houselessness by getting more people in permanent housing solutions while decreasing the number of those who receive housing but return to houselessness.
A San Jose Census study conducted in Feb. 2022 found that there had been a 9% increase in houselessness since 2019.
San Jose has the highest population of homeless young adults in the country, with nearly 85 unhoused young adults for every 100,000 residents, according to a Jan. 25, 2023 study by the United Way of the National Capital Area.
The Committee also set a goal to build 1,000 emergency interim units for the houseless.
They also have their eyes set on increasing the budget for emergency relief and legal assistance to prevent houselessness.
The last committee, the Planning and Permitting Transition Committee, aims to help those get permits faster to help draw more business in a “open for business” technique to compete with other Bay Area Cities.
During the public hearing portion, there was opposition to the mayor's committee's proposal.
Jeffery Buchanan, director of public policy for Working Partnership USA, said the issues the City Council decides to face needs to help all of the city's tennants.
“It’s troubling to see a number of approaches that rather than addressing the root causes of our challenges as a city simply push them out of sight,” Buchanan said.
