City Council: Lot to do, little time to do it

Four possible measure considered for November ballot; deadline for adding items is Friday

“I don’t believe it’s in any way undemocratic for the democratically elected representatives to be able to place a competing measure on the ballot.” — Mayor Sam Liccardo

After a month-long recess, the San Jose City Council is kicking off August with a bang — or at least a slew of possible ballot measures for voters to consider.

On Tuesday, council members will debate putting four possible measures on the November ballot. If they don’t reach a decision, they will reconvene later this week to finish the discussion. Either way, the deadline for adding items to the ballot is Friday, so the council will have to vote on moving the measures forward this week.

Rather than lumping public safety, road repairs and affordable housing into one mammoth general obligation bond, Mayor Sam Liccardo has proposed a $650 million bond to pay for things like street resurfacing — and suggested using up to $50 million of the funds for buying land in Coyote Valley to protect against floods and preserve water quality — and a separate $450 million affordable housing bond measure to build homes for lowincome workers and others.

The split would allow voters to support one proposal but not the other, although to pass the measures, the city will have to rally two-thirds of voters in support. A July survey showed that around two-thirds of residents would be likely to support one or more measures, with providing housing affordable for working families polling particularly well — in the mid-70s.

Liccardo has set a goal of building 25,000 new homes, 10,000 of them affordable, in San Jose over the next several years. In a new memo, he acknowledged that vot-

ers already passed Measure A two years ago to house homeless people. But Liccardo argued it was not a large enough sum or flexible enough to address broader needs, such as rent-controlled housing for people with jobs. And while voters have passed a number of other bond measures in the last several decades, the city still faces a backlog of repairs and infrastructure improvements of some $1.4 billion.

“After reviewing the polling data,” Liccardo wrote in his memo, “it appears this approach gives the city the best opportunity to win both or either of these measures, and provides voters with the greatest transparency regarding how their votes will affect how their tax dollars are spent.”

The council is also set to consider another ballot measure that would lump two unrelated things together: altering how council member salaries are decided and allowing the council to put an item on the ballot that competes with a voter-sponsored initiative on the same ballot.

Right now, the council votes on its own salary every couple of years. But the council is considering asking voters to authorize a change that would create a baseline for council salaries and automatically increase them every year by no more than 5 percent. A commission would evaluate the salaries and could adjust them every 10 years. In 2019, the council members are expected to make slightly more than $8,000 per month, while the mayor is expected to earn a little more than $11,000 each month.

The issue of allowing the council to put forward a competing measure comes after a bitter fight between the council and wealthy developers looking to build homes in the Evergreen area of San Jose. Those developers bankrolled an ultimately failed ballot measure in June that would have changed the city’s general plan to allow the new homes. The council responded with a carefully worded measure that it says technically didn’t directly compete with the proposal but in effect countered it.

In a memo, the mayor warned such a situation could happen again.

“Not only was that effort a giant distraction to city leadership and a colossal waste of resources, but, given the effort involved, it was not a foregone conclusion that council members and the community would have succeeded — or, that we could repeat that success if necessary,” Liccardo wrote.

Early polling suggests the overall measure would have support from about two-thirds of the city’s voters, far more than the 50 percent plus 1 margin it needs. But it’s not clear the second piece — allowing competing ballot measures — has support from most council members, which it will need to get to the ballot in the first place.

In a memo, Council members Sergio Jimenez and Don Rocha said the current system protects the will of the voters and “establishes balance.”

In a phone interview Monday, Liccardo pushed back at that idea.

“It’s just groups with the most power and the most access to resources that have tended to use this route to get to the voters,” Liccardo said, “and so I don’t believe it’s in any way undemocratic for the democratically elected representatives to be able to place a competing measure on the ballot.”

In a letter to the council, Derecka Mehrens, the executive director of the nonprofit Working Partnerships USA, opposed the proposal, accusing the council of hypocrisy in pairing two unrelated items in a single measure. Unlike councilbacked measures, citizen sponsored initiatives, she pointed out, are only allowed to address a single subject. The council, she pointed out, would have the power to put both a counter measure to a voter-proposed idea and a popular separate issue, such as creating a rainy day reserve, in the same ballot item.

“In fact, this is exactly the nature of the current proposed charter amendment,” Mehrens wrote. “It combines a change in how the mayor’s and City Council’s salaries are set with the provision to allow the City Council to create counter-measures opposing citizen-sponsored initiatives, and forces voters to give a single ‘yes’ or no’ on both questions.”

During a phone interview, Liccardo insisted “there’s no sleight of hand,” saying the decision to pair the two items was in part an attempt to limit the cost to taxpayers of putting measures on the ballot.

The proposal is “one ballot measure with two straight-forward changes to the charter,” Liccardo said.

Finally, the council will consider putting a separate measure on the ballot that would alter the way large public works contracts are handled, moving the city from a “lowest responsible bidder” model to a “best value” model using cost as a priority for selecting contractors but also factoring in work quality and giving small, local and economically disadvantaged companies a better chance to compete for contracts.

Another measure the council had been expected to consider Tuesday — a possible extension of the 15 percent card room tax that gambling businesses pay to third-party businesses acting as “banks” for the card rooms — appears tabled for now.