Date: December 2, 2025
Subject: Agenda Items 6.2 & 6.3: SJCE Pilot Program Options and SJCE Customer Bill Credits
Dear Mayor Mahan, Vice Mayor Foley, and Councilmembers Kamei, Campos, Tordillos, Cohen, Ortiz, Mulcahy, Doan, Candelas, and Casey:
As leaders in the community representing over 2000 Silicon Valley supporters, we’re writing to convey our support for staff’s proposal to develop a contractor incentive pilot program to encourage local contractors to install electric heat pumps. We also support the Memo from the Mayor and Councilmembers Candelas, Cohen, Mulcahy and Tordillos to direct the City Manager to:
• include in the Spring 2026 SJCE Programs Roadmap Status Report recommendations to (a) improve the eco home program and (b) assess the eco home and contractor incentive programs to inform potential Reach Code policy updates for single-family homes, and • conduct an enhanced engagement and education about the eco home rebate programs to homeowners and contractors.
We ask you to accept the staff recommendation along with the additional recommendations in the Memo—and to go beyond them. In Item 6.3, SJCE staff propose to issue bill credits to San José Clean Energy customers of up to $25,000,000–that’s 25 MILLION DOLLARS. But that only amounts to a one-time $40 credit on their January bill for residents (totalling ~$12.5 million) and a one-time “tiered credit” for non-residential accounts adding up to another ~$12.5 million.
We support this bill credit for low- and moderate–income residents, but think that for more resourced residents, $40 would be a drop in the bucket. Rather than giving everyone a credit they may not need, we urge you to ask SJCE staff to give both residential and nonresidential customers the option to either receive this modest one-time credit OR to contribute it to a fund to provide support to residents to get heat pumps for energy-efficient cooling and heating. This would be a significant step toward promoting climate resilience as temperatures rise and toward reaching our carbon neutrality goal, which we’ve fallen behind on.
Please use the power vested in you to protect our children, communities and climate by directing Staff to take these important steps toward making San Jose a more climate-safe city.
Sincerely,
Linda Hutchins-Knowles, Co-founder
Mothers Out Front Silicon Valley