San Jose City Council
June 13, 2023

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June 12, 2023

San José City Council
San José City Hall
200 E. Santa Clara St.

San José, CA 95113
Sent via electronic mail
Re: Item 3.1, June 12, and Items 3.4, 3.5, 3.6, June 13 Dear Mayor Mahan and Members of the City Council:

This letter was prepared by members of the Race Equity Action Leadership (REAL) coalition.

Background
The REAL Coalition has been deeply engaged throughout the budget process, discussing our proposals to advance racial justice and economic equity with the Mayor and every councilmember at least once.

We appreciate the inclusion of a pilot program to establish non-police responses to interpersonal violence (as well as several other items we’ll delineate later), and are grateful to Vice Mayor Rosemary Kamei and Councilmembers Pam Foley, David Cohen, and Sergio Jimenez for their thoughtful efforts to preserve money for permanent affordable housing.

However, with the release of the Mayor’s June message we see there are still several shortcomings in the proposed budget and call on Council to make these changes:

Measure E
We have always been supportive of “an all of the above'' approach to end our homelessness crisis. The city needs to invest in emergency interim shelter but it must not shy away from its commitment to affordable and permanent supportive housing by even a single dollar. The REAL Coalition supports the memo from Councilmembers Davis, Ortiz and Torres that preserves Measure E, taps more of the excess fund balances, and outlines a plan to expand emergency interim 2 | P a g e

shelter in collaboration with other partners. This memo should be adopted as-is as part of the FY 23-24 budget.

BEST Programs
We are disappointed to see no additional funding for Bringing Everyone’s Strengths Together (BEST) programs. As we stated in our March letter, council should double down on the city’s investment in prevention and intervention of violence by adding $5 million to the BEST appropriation. Whereas the mayor has acknowledged the importance of prevention and intervention in his message, the budget should express this stated value.

Recovery Task Force
The pandemic may be considered over but the needs identified by the Recovery Task Force persist. We appreciate the use of unspent money to continue progress in workforce development but there should be further allocation to continue the task force’s work in health equity, early childhood education and housing. The city should budget an additional $2 million to further high priority and high impact recommendations. As staff and council committees assess which priorities to move forward, task force members should be consulted as appropriate.

Racial Equity Work
Although the Mayor’s Message spoke to racial equity, we need to put our money where our mouth is. We should advance racial equity work in the City of San José by ensuring that City positions dedicated to this work are filled. In light of failure to hire key positions in Parks, Recreation, and Neighborhood Services; Planning, Building, and Code Enforcement; and Transportation, those positions should be converted to permanent Program Manager positions.

City Manager’s Budget Addenda and Council Budget Documents We are glad to see the following items included in the mayor’s June message:
• Extension of the Eviction Help Center
• Additional staff to raise money for Vision Zero and manage Vision Zero projects
• Tree canopy projects in Calle Willow and Luna Park
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• Investments in digital equity programs
• Investment in pedestrian safety projects
• Enhanced traffic and pedestrian safety through road and intersection design
• Investment in youth education and afterschool programs • Investments to serve our LGBTQ+ residents
• Investing in cultural spaces including the Vietnamese Heritage Garden and African American Community Services Agency
• Enhanced lighting for safety
Further, with the extension of the automated license plate reader program, the City needs to acknowledge that its data management and transparency policy is inadequate and convene relevant stakeholders to write a stronger and more equitable policy.

Lastly, we are interested in the references in the March message to divert calls from 911 and other possibly innovative ways to move away from unnecessary policing and carceral approaches. We call on the City to involve the community at a deep level in these conversations. The REAL Coalition stands ready to participate in these dialogues and to support the City in bringing the voices of community members with relevant lived experiences to the table.

We appreciate the Council offices that engaged in dialogues with Coalition members during this process and all of the offices and staff for their hard work on the budget.

About the REAL Coalition
The REAL community of nonprofit leaders and allies has been meeting since June 2020 to use our positional power to advocate for a more racially-just and equitable society; to establish a peer network of leaders committed to fighting white supremacy and systemic racism in ourselves and our institutions; and to hold each other accountable to the promises we made in the Nonprofit Racial Equity Pledge. The REAL coalition is broadly representative of the nonprofit community including human and community services, behavioral health and health, arts and culture, domestic violence, older adults, food distribution, education, environmental, farming, legal, disability rights, LGTBQ rights, ethnic, immigrant rights, housing and homelessness, criminal justice 4 | P a g e

reform, urban planning, and intermediary organizations, and others. Over 125 organizations have participated in the REAL coalition.

Signed by:

Vaughn Villaverde
AACI

Lavere Foster
African American Community Service
Agency

Steve Eckert
Alum Rock Counseling Center

Jeremy Barousse
Amigos de Guadalupe

Richard Konda
Asian Law Alliance

Josh Selo
Bill Wilson Center

Jahmal Williams
Black Leadership Kitchen Cabinet

Carlos Rosario
Bay Area Community Health

Greg Kepferle
Catholic Charities of Santa Clara
County

Frederick Ferrer
Child Advocates of Silicon Valley

Erin O’Brien
Community Solutions

Jennifer Loving
Destination: Home

Pete Settelmayer
Downtown College Prep

Shawn Gerth
Educare California at Silicon Valley

Beth Leary
Family Supportive Housing

Reymundo C. Espinoza
Gardner Health Services

Veronica Goei
Grail Family Services

Bob Nuñez
La Raza Roundtable

Darcie Green
Latinas Contra Cancer

Gabriel Manrique
Latinos United for a New America
(LUNA)

Alison Brunner
Law Foundation of Silicon Valley

Dr. Angelica Cortez
LEAD Filipino

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Gisela Bushey
Loaves & Fishes Family Kitchen

Anjee Helstrup-Alvarez
MACLA/Movimiento de Arte y Cultura
Latino Americana

David K. Mineta
Momentum for Health

Héctor Sanchez-Flores
National Compadres Network

Colsaria Henderson
Next Door Solutions to Domestic
Violence

Rhonda Berry
Our City Forest

Pamela Campos
Parent Voices Santa Clara County

Heather Cleary
Peninsula Family Service

Sharon Winston
Project HIRED

Nathan Svoboda
Project MORE

Dontae Lartigue
Razing The Bar

Kathy Cordova
Recovery Café San Jose

Poncho Guevara
Sacred Heart Community Service

Wisa Uemura
San Jose Taiko

Vanessa Shieh
School of Arts and Culture at Mexican
Heritage Plaza

Gabriel Hernandez
Sí Se Puede Collective

Deanna Chevas
Silicon Valley Bicycle Coalition

Kyra Kazantzis
Silicon Valley Council of Nonprofits

Sheri Burns
Silicon Valley Independent Living
Center

Saul Ramos
SOMOS Mayfair

David Cox
St. Joseph’s Family Center

Regina Celestin Williams
SV@Home

Yvonne Maxwell
Ujima Adult and Family Services

Michael Elliott
Valley Health Foundation

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Cayce Hill
Veggielution

Sujatha Venkatraman
West Valley Community Services

Shelene Huey-Booker
Youth Utilizing Power and Praise
Organization

Adriana Caldera
YWCA Golden Gate Silicon Valley

[External Email]
FW: Re Item 3.4, 3.5 & 3.6: Labor and Community FY23-24 Budget Recommendations City Clerk <[email protected]>
Tue 6/13/2023 11:20 AM
To:Agendadesk <[email protected]>

From: Jeffrey Buchanan
Sent: Tuesday, June 13, 2023 10:52 AM
To: The Office of Mayor Ma Mahan <[email protected]>; Kamei, Rosemary <[email protected]>; Jimenez, Sergio <[email protected]>; Torres, Omar <[email protected]>; Cohen, David <[email protected]>; Orz, Peter <Peter.Or[email protected]>; Davis, Dev <[email protected]>; Doan, Bien <[email protected]>; Candelas, Domingo <[email protected]>; Foley, Pam <[email protected]>; Batra, Arjun <[email protected]>; City Clerk <[email protected]>
Cc: Maria Fernandez >; david ; jean
Subject: Re Item 3.4, 3.5 & 3.6: Labor and Community FY23-24 Budget Recommendaons

Greengs Mayor and Council:

On behalf of the South Bay AFL-CIO Labor Council, the Santa Clara and San Benito County Building Trades Council and Working Partnerships USA, I would like to share the below recommendaons on the Mayor’s June Message, the Measure E Allocaon, and the FY23-24 Operang Budget. Please let me know if you have any quesons.

Best, Jeffrey

Jeffrey Buchanan
Director of Public Policy
Working Partner
ships USA

Dear Mayor and Councilmembers:

Thank you all for the incredible amount of work and thoughulness that each of you have put into the Fiscal Year 2023-2024 Budget process and for your willingness to engage the community and working families on these important quesons. As representaves of over 100,000 workers and their families across Santa Clara County we know the enormous needs facing San Jose and believe we need a budget that takes a comprehensive approach to solving our biggest problems: housing, homelessness and public safety.

Aer reviewing the memos submied by Councilmembers we would encourage the Council to pass a June Budget Message and FY23- 24 Operang Budget which:

Adopts the 6/8 memo by Councilmembers Davis, Orz and Torres to keep the current allocaon of Measure E dollars, which already balances funding interim shelter spending and permanent housing, and using addional funds from the General Fund Excess Fund Balance to support the funds needed for construcon and operaons of all of the City’s FY23-24’s planned interim shelter sites.

Directs staff to find addional resources to fund the addional staffing and/or interim shelter needs idenfied in Councilmembers Cohen and Jimenez’s 6/9 memo.

Adopts the 6/9 memo from Councilmembers Davis, Orz, Torres, Batra and Doan to not accept the reducon in Med 30 recommended by staff, and to fund poron of MBA #21 idenfied in their memo through a reducon in the future deficit reserve.

This message is from outside the City email system. Do not open links or attachments from untrusted sources.

Addionally, we encourage the City Council to vote no on the 6/9 memo from Mayor Ma Mahan to break with the City’s promise to voters who passed Measure E in 2020, and to a broad coalion of labor, faith, community and developers who came together working with Mayor Liccardo and City Council to reach a difficult agreement to require any changes to the spending allocaon of those funds to require super majority support by future Councils. We believe unraveling this requirement would be a major blow to our community’s faith in this Council and future ballot measures.

Thank you for your consideraon.

Sincerely,

Jean Cohen, Execuve Officer, South Bay AFL-CIO Labor Council David Bini, Execuve Director, Santa Clara & San Benito Counes Building & Construcon Trades Council Maria Noel Fernandez, Execuve Director, Working Partnerships USA