June 6, 2025
lwvsjsc.org
To: City Clerk
Subject: Fiscal Year 2025-2026 Mayor’s June Budget Message.
Items 3.7 & 3.8. June 10 City Council Meeting
The League of Women Voters of San Jose/Santa Clara strongly urges the City Council to VOTE NO on the proposal to reallocate Measure E revenue to help fund support services and operations at the city’s temporary housing sites.
The League of Women Voters of San Jose/Santa Clara was proud to strongly support the passage of Measure E in 2020. It addressed our long-established position regarding housing and the reduction of homelessness, and we believed that the measure was structured in conformance with good government. It provided for flexibility but also safeguarded the will of the voters by requiring a 2/3 vote of Council to amend the allocation of funds.
In that first year only 15% was to go to homeless support programs and shelter construction and operations. In this year’s budget, 60% goes to them, reducing the affordable housing portion. In fact, the affordable housing for extremely low income families has gone from 40% of the allocation down to 12%.
This year the proposal for affordable housing funding is for “any remaining funds” after allocating 10% for homelessness prevention and “up to 90%” for homeless support programs. This is not what San Jose voters supported when they approved Measure E.
It is tempting to use the $39 million from Measure E to reduce next fiscal year’s deficit to $21 million, but this short term answer will have long-lasting repercussions in our ability to build permanent affordable units and to assure voters that their voting decisions carry weight.
We respectfully ask that the Council make no change to current Council Policy 1-18, Section 22.
Respectfully,
Diane McNutt, President
League of Women Voters of San Jose/Santa Clara
P: 408.961.9895 F: 408.559.9515
E: [email protected]
3180 Newberry Dr, Suite 200, San Jose, CA 95118
DESTINATIONHOMESV.ORG
BOARD OF DIRECTORS
Roger Biscay
Cisco
Jan Bernstein Chargin
Gavilan College
Louis Chicoine
Abode Services
Dontae Lartigue
Razing the Bar
Ky Le
County of Santa Clara
Jennifer Loving
Destination: Home
Janae Pina
LEABsv
Preston Prince
SCC Housing Authority
Joel John Roberts
PATH
Alex Senegal
Enneagram Prison Project
John A. Sobrato
The Sobrato Organization
Erik Solivan
City of San José
Nicole Taylor
Silicon Valley Community
Foundation
Ted Wang
Gary Wipfler
Apple
ENDING HOMELESSNESS IN SILICON VALLEY
June 9, 2025
Mayor & City Council
City of San Jose
200 East Santa Clara Street, 18th Floor
San Jose, CA 95113
Re: Mayor’s June Budget Message & Proposed Changes to Measure E Spending Priorities and Percentage Allocations (Items 3.7 and 3.8 on the June 10th Meeting Agenda)
Dear Mayor Mahan and City Councilmembers,
On behalf of Destination: Home, a public-private partnership dedicated to ending homelessness in Silicon Valley, I write to once again express our concern about the shifting direction the City has charted in response to our region’s homelessness crisis.
We simply cannot and will not solve homelessness without addressing the broader housing affordability crisis that is driving homelessness in our community. Our region’s outrageous rents continually push more people into homelessness and make it almost impossible for unhoused individuals to exit homelessness into stable housing. And we risk seeing the situation become even more severe as the federal government pulls back on critical safety net programs serving the most vulnerable members of our community and pushes our economy closer to recession.
That’s why we remain deeply concerned that the City continues to shift funding away from key affordable housing initiatives - particularly when a mountain of evidence has shown that these are precisely the type of strategies we need to address our homelessness crisis. And while we appreciate the urgency with which the City is working to bring people indoors, a narrow focus on expanding shelter is simply unsustainable and will not produce the long-term results we all want to see.
As a result, we urge the City Council to take the following actions in this year’s budget:
1. Adopt the proposal from Councilmembers Campos, Salas and Doan to increase the Measure E allocation for homelessness prevention programs to 15%.
Over the past eight years, our community has developed a robust Homelessness Prevention System that has proven extremely effective at preventing at-risk families from becoming homeless - all at a fraction of the cost, and with far less trauma, than waiting to re-house a family who’s already become homeless.
However, the current proposed budget for FY 25-26 includes $2.3 million less for homelessness prevention than the current fiscal year - which would translate into 600 fewer people receiving this critical assistance next year.
The proposal from Councilmembers Campos, Salas and Doan will allow the Homelessness Prevention System to maintain our current capacity over the next two years, and provide the fiscal stability needed to explore opportunities to expand the program further in the years that follow.
2. Direct staff to immediately begin pursuing options to restore or replace the Measure E funding for affordable housing that has been diverted to other uses.
Measure E represented the City’s only significant and sustainable source of funding for affordable housing - and without a strategy for restoring or replacing this funding, we risk seeing the local pipeline of affordable housing projects fall apart.
June 9, 2025
Mayor Mahan and City Councilmembers,
Responsibility to Shelter Will Lead to Police Violence, Arrests and Incarceration Beyond the Charge Named in the Policy, and Immigration Consequences
Based on how policing, prosecution, and incarceration has operated in San Jose and Santa Clara County, this is what we expect to occur if Matt Mahan’s proposal to create a new police unit to arrest houseless people is passed. Even with the recent clarification on the policy by the mayor, in any city offered service to people in need in San Jose there should not be any room to call police and further exacerbate their situation by incarceration, let alone losing the trust of those you are trying to serve.
The first, and most significant feature of the policy, is not in the specific use of the trespassing charge that the policy says is the arresting action if someone does not comply. Rather, it is in the escalation of police contact in the first place. The policy funds and orders more police interaction with houseless people, and more specifically, those who they claim have the most severe mental health and substance use issues. It is precisely these community members who have experienced the most violence and at times lethal use of force by San Jose police.
A study on San Jose police use of force conducted by the California Reporting Project and published by the Bay Area New Group, found conclusively that those with mental health needs and intoxication were overwhelmingly the majority of who suffers from police violence. For example, from 2014 to 2021, they found 108 individuals who were seriously injured and killed by San Jose police - 73% of whom had mental health issues or were intoxicated. Of the 25 people killed over the same period, 80% had mental health needs or were intoxicated.
So based on the data, and who the police will be targeting, the Responsibility to Shelter policy will lead to high likelihood of serious, dangerous, and perhaps lethal use of force.
The other likelihood is an expansion of arrests even beyond the scope of “trespassing” - the arrest the policy says will be applied if someone refuses to follow the command to go to the designated place.
Police interaction invites a multitude of other arrests - some based on a response to a behavior to the interaction itself. The most common is resisting arrest, and sometimes an elevated “assault on a police officer” even if no assault occurred. Indeed, most of the police use of force incidents are accompanied with arresting the recipient of the violence with these charges. That is why they have been called “cover charges” - meaning arrests to cover or justify the use of force applied. Couple this reality with who the policy is having police approach - those who they say have mental health issues - the scenarios are rife for
use of force and cover charges. So an interaction could lead to not only the identified charge of the police - trespassing - but could other charges caused solely by the police interaction itself. The interaction also can lead to arrests based on old warrants, things found on the person, any number of things alleged that can lead to someone being arrested. Based on these realities, despite claims by the mayor, this policy will absolutely lead to expansion of arrests.
And while the Sheriff and the District Attorney have stated that if someone is brought into the jail, they will not be held or charged - that is still based on the limited assumption of the person coming in for that singular charge - not the multitude of charges that an officer can claim, even if charges are dropped later.
And with the passage of Proposition 36, if for example, someone is alleged to have an illegal substance on them when confronted by police, they can now be charged with a felony - which means a much higher likelihood of pretrial jail time, and possibly a future prison commitment.
But even if someone is only arrested and brought into the jail to be booked and released on a stand alone trespassing charge (which seems unlikely given that police will be looking for other charges to place on a person) that still creates irreversible harm. That person is now in the system, even if they are not physically held in jail. That record can impact qualification for services, employment, and ironically even housing.
For immigrant community members who may get caught into the criminal court system due to Responsibility to Shelter - the outcomes can ultimately lead to deportation. There is an undeniable ratcheting up of ICE detention and deportation. The most targeted immigrants, as declared by ICE spokespeople themselves, are those who have contact with the criminal court system. Even what may seem like a less significant misdemeanor charge can be a deportable offense down the line.
It is through observing the history of how policing, prosecution, incarceration has worked in San Jose, coupled with the current political context that we can project out the tremendous pain the Responsibility to Shelter policy will result in if passed.
Sincerely on behalf of Silicon Valley De-Bug,
Raj Jayadev
Dear San Jose City Council,
The population of Black people in Santa Clara County has been on a steep decline as our community is being forced into homelessness, jails, or cities outside the region due to unaffordability and a lack of resources supporting the Black community.
Black people are disproportionately represented in the unhoused population, representing 2.35% of SCC but 19% among those unhoused, according to the 2024 SV Pain Index authored by the SJSU Human Rights Institute. Black people are also disproportionately represented in Jails and Prisons across the State and Nation.
Many of you might have seen the Mayor’s March Budget Message, and we hope that you found it to be alarming and preposterous and vehemently rebuke it as undemocratic as we do. Without question, the Mayor’s actions are par for the course with what Trump is doing.Cleaning the city, the country of Black and Brown people, incarcerating them, deporting them and hoping the residents of San Jose, the American people will support this racism banking on a system that deems Black and Brown people as having inherent criminality. Pinning problems on people striving to survive this broken system that has only ever been unjust to them. The current Mass Incarceration Mayor of San Jose, Matt Mahan, proposes an initiative to arrest survivors of the trauma of being unhoused if they refuse shelter 3 times. It is based on language used in an era of Tough on Crime policies and the 3 Strikes Law in California. By proposing this initiative, the Mayor dog whistles or alludes to an era of policing called Law and Order, which did not make the community safer; instead, it resulted in members of the Black community being disproportionately criminalized, brutalized, and represented in the carceral legal system which has caused tremendous disruptions on an individual, family, and community level.
Additionally, Black people are overrepresented in the carceral system in juvenile detention, county jails, state and federal prisons, despite our population across the United States being 14.4%. See infographics below for a visual representation of this disparity. Black people are overpoliced and also sentenced more harshly than their White counterparts. The median income for the Black community is $54,000. We are overrepresented in poverty and often lack access to a qualified, committed, and available attorney who is not bogged down with a heavy caseload and therefore can dedicate the proper amount of time and resources needed to thoroughly learn about a person’s case and the circumstances leading up to a person’s arrest. Black people are also vastly disproportionately represented in police brutality, including harassment, assault, and murder. According to Mapping Police Violence, in 2023:
“95% of America’s major city police departments kill Black people at higher rates than White people.
Most killings by police begin with traffic stops, mental health checks, and non-violent offenses — times where no crime was alleged.”
The Mayor inflated the percentage of unhoused residents who refused shelter by 20%, as was uncovered at the end of the Tuesday, 3/18/25 City Council meeting.
The Mass Incarceration Mayor, insidiously made up a problem, unhoused residents refusing shelter, that only he can solve, and boasts and promises to do something to “fix it.” This strategy is straight out of the republican playbook.
We ask that you sign this letter and join our efforts demanding an end to the “Responsibility to Shelter” program. The Mayor and City Councilmembers: Foley 9, Mulcahy 6, Casey 10, Doan 7, Salas 3, and Kamei 1 want to introduce into our city.
The Democratic Party has staunchly opposed Trump’s utter destruction of democracy and blatant racism. Can we do so, in our own backyard? By refusing to accept the
policies of an elected official who is a Democrat by Name Only (DINO). Will you decide to be in solidarity with us in rejecting the criminalization of our community?
Thank you!
Santa Clara County Democratic Party
St. Paul’s United Methodist Church
LEAC, URG, Destination Home, Poor People's Campaign, Freedom Fighters, SFBF4A Global Majority Consulting
Half the Sky
Fremont for Everyone
SURJ-Showing Up for Racial Justice
SVYD-Silicon Valley Young Dems
Notre Dame High School
LEAC - West Valley Community Services;
VTA CBOWG
Unhoused Response Group, San Jose
LEAC - West Valley Community Services; URG - San Jose; VTA CBO Working Group Batman of San José
Agape Silicon Valley/Grupo De Solidaridad
Martha Street Art Night
PATH
Showing Up for Racial Justice Santa Clara County
Afro UPRIS
RECS (Racial Equity and Community Safety)
Afro UPRIS Black Democratic Club of Santa Clara County
St Paul's UMC member
Sacred Heart Community Service
Youth Action Committee