☆ Advice to Mahan: Bring out the scissors

Image by Rene

Anticipating Mayor Mahan's State of the City speech, SF Briones Society's Jay Donde and the Silicon Valley Taxpayers Association advise him to address excessive spending in programs, positions, and pecuniary shortsights. And, more importantly—how's he working to trim it all. An Opp Now exclusive.

Jay Donde, San Francisco Briones Society president: The cities that anchor the Bay Area—San Francisco, San Jose, and Oakland—are all led by new or new-ish mayors. Hopefully, that gets the three leaders' competitive juices flowing.

Here in San Francisco, Mayor Lurie is making many of the same pragmatic, sensible changes to our public safety, homelessness, and mental health policies that Mayor Mahan has in San Jose. So, let's call that a draw.

What I'd like to see is Mahan step up and challenge Lurie to take courageous, necessary steps in dealing with bloated city government and reckless public spending. A bold vision set forth by Mahan to right-size San Jose's finances will echo up the peninsula and get San Francisco residents thinking—and demanding—"Why can't we have that here?"

Go Deeper:

• SF’s deep state undermines calls to economize
• Can San Jose de-risk its pension problem through attrition? (2/4)
• Expert: Mahan's pay-for-results idea is good in principle, but might not go far enough

Silicon Valley Taxpayers Association: We hope the Mayor will discuss adopting technology and financial planning and analysis practices widely used by local corporations. It is important for local government to model "what-if" scenarios early and often so that they may make the best decisions now, rather than be caught flat-footed later—and request further tax and fee increases that could have been avoided.

Corporations are accustomed to variable revenue, and thus are a good example to follow when it comes to being most efficient with existing resources.

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